I keep seeing people online complaining that superhero movies and tv shows are now completely dominated by women and minorities.
So let’s take a peek at what domination looks like. Here are the stats from the past 20 years. (In some cases assigning a show to a particular category was a judgment call, open to reasonable challenge; but the overall shape of the info seems clear enough.)
From an article in this morning’s New York Times, “As U.S. Leaves Allies in Syria, Kurdish Commander Struggles with Fallout.”
Mr. Trump’s decision to pull United States troops out of the way of a Turkish advance and to begin withdrawing them from Syria deprived Mr. Kobani of his strongest backer and left him scrambling to reach new accommodations with the region’s other powers. This has put him in touch with a surprising number of powerful people for a man who heads a relatively unknown militia in an obscure corner of Syria.
Since the violence started, he has met with senior aides to President al-Assad of Syria, whom the United States considers a war criminal; spoken with top brass from the Russian military, which backs Mr. al-Assad; and had phone calls with prominent Americans like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who opposes Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria. On Saturday he talked to Mr. Pence, and he spoke with Mr. Trump last week.
“The issues are very complicated,” Mr. Kobani said. “I meet with everyone, and I will make any decision that is in our people’s interest.”
In other words, by Hillary Clinton’s standards, Mazlum Kobani is now an “apologist for Assad” who’s being “groomed” as a Russian asset. Borrowing Clinton’s conspiracy-theoretic assumptions, why is that a strike against Tulsi Gabbard but not against Mazlum Kobani? If those are such terrible things, why should we be supporting the Kurds at all?
Granted, given HRC’s latest venture into geostrategy, it’s doubtful anyone can refer with a straight face to her “standards,” but I think you know what I mean.
I’m sure I can’t be the first to notice the ways in which Plato’s Protagoras is framed as a response to Aristophanes’ Clouds, but I’m not aware of any previous discussion of the connections I have in mind.
It’s old news, of course, that many of Plato’s dialogues, including the Protagoras (along with, e.g., the Euthydemus, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, and Sophist) are devoted to distinguishing Socrates’ approach to inquiry and debate from that of the Sophists, and to that extent may be viewed as responding to what Plato saw as a Socrates/Sophist conflation in the Clouds. Continue reading
The New York Times, covering Hillary Clinton’s reputation-destroying claim that Tulsi Gabbard is being “groomed” by the Russian government to undermine the Democrats in the 2020 election.
Headline:
Why not “Hillary Clinton Floats Unverified Conspiracy Theory About Tulsi Gabbard?” Never mind that she did it while criticizing Donald Trump’s reliance on unverified conspiracy theories (the relevant segment is about 35 minutes into the interview). Continue reading
[cross-posted from Austro-Athenian Empire]
The aforementioned punishment panel has been held.
Here are some photos from the event.
Here’s the paper I presented.
And for a more detailed presentation of some of the arguments from my paper, see my 1999 responsibility article (which depends in turn on some of the machinery in my 1993 abortion article), as well as the powerpoints from my 2015 prisons talk.
Talk of reparations has come back into common currency in American political discourse–meaning reparations to African Americans for the wrongs done to them since the beginnings of slavery. I don’t have a fully considered view on reparations (many of the arguments both for and against strike me as one-eyed), but I’ve both been surprised (and in another sense, not surprised) to hear libertarians insist so adamantly that libertarianism rules out reparations. Anyone who thinks this owes it to himself to read or re-read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, if not cover to cover, then through the end of Part I, as I did on a recent plane ride. Continue reading
I’m teaching a class on the landmark Supreme Court case, Terry vs. Ohio (1968). A group of students in the back of the room has started giggling.
Khawaja: Excuse me–why are you laughing?
Female student (giggling): Somebody just sent me a dick pic.
Khawaja:
Student: Unsolicited.
Khawaja:
Student: I guess I should put my phone away?
Khawaja (musing, as if to himself): So people actually do this. It’s not a myth. They…just…send…intimate pictures of themselves to random people…
Student: Yeah, I get lots of them. [shrugs] It’s mostly unwanted.
If there’s anything you might have thought “we’d” learned from the Trump presidency, it’s that well poisoning, guilt-by-association, and reputation-destruction-by-innuendo were all thoroughly bad ideas. Evidently, this isn’t what the leaders of the Democratic Party or the Democratic Party establishment have learned. What they’ve learned is that well poisoning, guilt-by-association, and reputation-destruction by innuendo are useful instruments for the conduct of internecine warfare against ideological positions they don’t like or don’t understand. Continue reading
Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general whose 2017 memo about Mr. Comey was cited to rationalize the firing of the F.B.I. director that May, has been particularly cutting. At a speech last spring, Mr. Rosenstein taunted the former director for “selling books and earning speaking fees while speculating about the strength of my character and the fate of my immortal soul.”
“I kid you not,” Mr. Rosenstein said. “And that is disappointing. Speculating about souls is not a job for police and prosecutors.”
I guess I’m disappointed that Rod Rosenstein seems never to have heard of mens rea, forensic psychology, or Cicero. The FBI famously has a Behavioral Analysis Unit. What is it that Rod Rosenstein thinks they do there?
I am grateful to my friend and professional colleague Irfan Khawaja for his incisive critique of my short piece, Terrorism as a Toxic Term: Why Definition Matters, and for generously allowing me to post my reply on his website. As Irfan underscores, our main difference regarding the definition of the term “terrorism” is a difference in “focus,” but perhaps there is also a difference in kind. That is, the kind of definition that one might find morally adequate for describing terrorist violence. I argue that the disposition of the perpetrators and the objective innocence of the victims should be the focus of an adequate and fair definition of terrorism.
Irfan, however, argues that one “should focus on the reasons that terrorists cite to justify their actions.” He contests “the idea that a definition of terrorism should describe it merely as a use of violence rather than an “initiatory” [my italics] use of violence and a response to one.” Irfan’s suggestion is well taken. I agree with him that there is a relevant distinction “between purely initiatory aggression on the one hand, and disproportionality or indiscriminateness in an otherwise justified response to aggression on the other.” Continue reading
Policy of Truth 