Hang ‘Em High: Abortion, Gaza, and the Gallows

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This has now become the standard conservative line on the Kevin Williamson affair, care of Bret Stephens of The New York Times. The “you” refers to Kevin Williamson.

The case against you, as best as I can tell, rests on three charges. You think abortion is murder and tweeted — appallingly in my view — that doctors and women should perhaps be hanged for it. You believe “sex is a biological reality” and that gender should not be a choice. And you once boorishly described an African-American boy in East St. Louis, Ill., “raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.” …

Weighed against these charges are hundreds of thousands of words of smart, stylish and often hilarious commentary, criticism and reportage. …

Shouldn’t great prose and independent judgment count for something? Not according to your critics. We live in the age of guilt by pull-quote, abetted by a combination of lazy journalism, gullible readership, missing context, and technologies that make our every ill-considered utterance instantly accessible and utterly indelible. I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry.

We also live in an age — another one — of excommunication. This is ugly because its spirit is illiberal, and odd, because its consequences are negligible. Should The Atlantic foolishly succumb to pressure to rescind your job offer, you’ll still be widely read, presumably at National Review. If you’re really the barbarian your critics claim, you’re already through the gates.

The Atlantic did eventually rescind Williamson’s job offer, so I guess the barbarian has been ejected from the gates. Question in passing: if the consequences of the current spirit of excommunication are “negligible,” why the fuss? Continue reading →

Somebody Get Me a Shot: Further Adventures at CVS Pharmacy

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This article in The New York Times–“Why You Should Get the New Shingles Vaccine“–reminded me of  yet another frustrating conversation I recently had at a pharmacy. Here’s the last one. Before that, I had a pharmacist tell me that Ambien wasn’t habit-producing, and that I could stay on it indefinitely, for years (!). What the fuck are they teaching in the pharmacy schools nowadays?

Now that I’m freely divulging my personal health information, I may as well tell you that on my last visit to Planned Parenthood, I discovered that for all the crap they sling about the importance of getting tested for the full panel of STDs, the average Planned Parenthood center often doesn’t test for any of them on site except gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV–whether you pay out of pocket or not. If you ask why, they’ll just shrug their shoulders and look blankly at you, as though they hadn’t the foggiest idea as to the answer. In other words, I can attest from personal experience that most of the information on this page is bullshit: it lists a series of STD tests, claims to offer them, but doesn’t. I know better than to think that being tested for gonorrhea, syphilis, and HIV is “safe enough” or “good enough” for safe sex. I also have health insurance and a primary care physician. But that isn’t true of everyone. Any guesses as to the results? Continue reading →

Ain’t that America?

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This just in: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, just fired Kevin Williamson, the Javert wanna-be of America’s Pro-Life movement.

In other words, a guy who believes women should be hanged for having abortions just got fired by a guy who made his name volunteering as a prison guard in the prison camps of a foreign army.

The controversy raging in American intellectual circles: should Jeffrey Goldberg have fired Kevin Williamson?

The controversy not raging in American intellectual circles: should The Atlantic be edited by Jeffrey Goldberg?

But don’t worry: Goldberg promises to do a better job vetting the people who write for him. Because The Atlantic has a reputation to uphold.

What a country.

The “Borders” of Gaza

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The violence in Gaza is too recent and sparsely reported to permit substantive comment. Having traveled to that “border” last July, however, and spent some time exploring the region around “it,” I would offer the following bit of advice to anyone who wants to follow the news about “it.” First get clear on what “it” is. Then figure out whether the reporting you’re following is as clear as it ought to be on what “the border” is, where “it” is, who is allowed to do what “there,” and how “it” works in practice.

This is the relevant point, as described by B’Tselem:

Israel treats an area inside the Gaza Strip, near the border fence, as its own territory, using it to create a “buffer zone” inside the already narrow Strip. After the second intifada broke out, the military declared a vast area near the Gaza-Israel border, much of it farmland, off-limits to Palestinians. It never officially announced this policy or clarified to the residents which areas exactly were off limits to them, which increases the danger they face.

I highly recommend reading the whole B’Tselem page on Gaza (the source of that excerpt), and indeed, reading as much of their material as possible.  Continue reading →

Character-Based Voting: The Case of Joseph P. Ganim

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This story, about the current gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut, offers a near-perfect exemplification of the criticism that I’ve made in the past of Jason Brennan’s critique (in The Ethics of Voting) of character-based voting. “Character-based voting” is a vote for or against a candidate based primarily on considerations concerning the candidate’s moral character, as contrasted with considerations concerning the policy positions he promises (or can reliably be predicted) to make. Brennan argues (or more precisely, asserts without argument) that character-based voting is only legitimate insofar as it functions as a proxy for predictions about policy, adding (or half-adding) that it usually doesn’t.

One of my objections to Brennan’s claim is that it assumes without argument that future-oriented considerations are the only ones that matter to deliberations about how to vote for political candidates. But (I suggest) elected office comes with rewards, and it’s plausible to think that considerations of moral desert are relevant to the distribution of rewards. Moral desert is a past-oriented consideration. Absent an explicit discussion of the role of moral desert in voting, and an argument that it’s somehow outweighed, defeated, or made irrelevant by future-oriented considerations, the role of moral desert can’t be dismissed. Since moral desert can’t be dismissed, a candidate’s past can’t be dismissed, insofar as it reveals relevant considerations of moral character. But if that’s right, the case for character-based voting is stronger than Brennan makes it out to be.    Continue reading →

Author-Meets-Critics Session: Vicente Medina’s “Terrorism Unjustified”

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The Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs will be holding an Author-Meets-Critics session on Vicente Medina’s Terrorism Unjustified: The Use and Misuse of Political Violence (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). The event takes place on Saturday, April 21, 2018, 1-4:30 pm, in the Main Auditorium (“Ray’s Place”) of the Education Commons Building on Felician University’s Rutherford campus (231 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey 07070). Light refreshments will be served.

Presenters include Theresa Fanelli (Criminal Justice, Felician; previously, FBI Counterterrorism Division), Graham Parsons (Philosophy, West Point), and Irfan Khawaja (Philosophy, Felician), with a response by Vicente Medina (Philosophy, Seton Hall University).

The event is free and open to the public. Parking is available onsite, and the Rutherford campus is easily accessible by mass transit from New York City (New Jersey Transit Bus #190 from Port Authority, at 42nd St). Continue reading →

Documenting a Police Detention (2): The Long and Short of It

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All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. –George Orwell, 1984

As readers of this blog know, on November 29, 2017, I was detained and interrogated for several hours by members of the Lodi Police Department and Bergen County Prosecutors Office on suspicion of being an “active shooter.” Though I was not formally charged with a crime, my detention was arguably tantamount to a full arrest: I was involuntarily transported from the original place of detention to a nearby police station, involuntarily held there for a few hours, and involuntarily questioned, despite repeated invocations of my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Eventually, I was released without further incident.

A few weeks ago, I sent Open Public Records Act requests to both agencies for documentation of my detention. The Lodi Police Department responded to my request with a 21 page document. The Bergen County Prosecutors Office responded with a one page letter. Both sets of documents are instructive, both for what they say and for what they omit.  Continue reading →

Disruptions on Campus: There’s Always an Excuse for Israel

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A passage from a blog post by Steve Horwitz at BHL:

Here are a few thoughts for college libertarians who are able to invite speakers to campus and how they might do so in the most productive ways.

Let me start by saying that the sort of interruptions we’ve seen this week with Yaron Brook and Christina Hoff Sommers are utterly unacceptable. Those who disrupt planned presentations with official permission to use space and students expecting a talk should be forcibly removed from the room and subject to the relevant disciplinary consequences. There should be no negotiating with anti-intellectual terrorists. They should feel free to ask questions when the time comes or protest outside the building in ways that do not prevent those who wish to attend from attending. No excuses.

A question for Horwitz et al: what if “those who disrupt planned presentations with official permission to use space” on campus call themselves “the Israel Defense Forces” (IDF) and are sent by something that calls itself the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria? Should they be “forcibly removed”? Forcibly removing them is what a policy of “no excuses” would really entail. Continue reading →

Questions About the Parkland Shooting (4): Lockdowns and Legalities

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Here’s the fourth and final set of posts from my series on (generally) unasked questions about school shootings (here’s the first installment, the second, and the third):

In the wake of the Parkland shootings, we’ve heard lots of demands that this or that be done by this or that party. Of particular interest to me are two sets of demands–one concerning the alleged duty of care that educators are widely assumed to have for “their” students, the second concerning the supposed duty we have to comply with widely-accepted “lockdown” protocols. I’m skeptical on both counts. Continue reading →

on moral grandstanding (the fruits of some reading and discussion)

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In “Moral Grandstanding,” Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke defend the following account of moral grandstanding (MG):

(1) to MG is to participate in moral discourse out of the desire to be regarded by others as moral (with the desire for moral recognition or recognition desire (RD) being strong enough that, if one were not to be recognized as moral, one would be disappointed; and one acts from this desire via the proper conventionally-determined sort of “grandstanding expression”).   Continue reading →