I post this every year around 9/11, so here it is again. Highly recommended supplementary reading: Steven Brill’s “Is America Any Safer?” The Atlantic (Sept 2016). Though it isn’t up yet, Chris Sciabarra’s annual 9/11 series is always worth reading and should be up soon.

Given Donald Trump’s recent “plan for Afghanistan,” I thought it might be appropriate at least to link to my 2008 review in Democratiya of Sarah Chayes’s The Punishment Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban—a liberal imperialist’s advocacy of perpetual warfare as the self-evident response to 9/11. Here, in confirmation of what I said in the review, is the latest news from Afghanistan. As a bonus, I’ve cut and pasted  the “response” I got from Sarah Chayes when I sent her the review in 2008, inviting her to respond to it. Draw your own conclusions about the quality of her response, or for that matter, the quality of the recommendations she made in the first place. But hey–the experts know best, right?

We’re just a few days away from the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from the last decade and a half of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples to illustrate what I’m saying. But I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own. Continue reading →

Seen on Facebook:

Wasn’t John Brown ‘antifa’? Who today would object to his actions?

Here’s the reasoning as I understand it. Obviously, John Brown was cool. But John Brown was like antifas, and antifas are like John Brown. Therefore antifas are cool. QED. It’s obvious. Obviously obvious. Who would even think of denying it? Except racists, I mean?

Here is Wikipedia on the Pottawatomie massacre, one of John Brown’s ‘actions’:

Some time after dark, the party left their place of hiding and proceeded on their “secret expedition”. Late in the evening, they called at the house of James P. Doyle and ordered him and his two adult sons, William and Drury to go with them as prisoners. (Doyle’s 16-year-old son, John, who was not a member of the pro-slavery Law and Order Party, was spared after his mother pleaded for his life.) The three men were escorted by their captors out into the darkness, where Owen Brown and one of his brothers killed them with broadswords. John Brown, Sr. did not participate in the stabbing but fired a shot into the head of the fallen James Doyle to ensure he was dead.

Brown and his band then went to the house of Allen Wilkinson and ordered him out. He was slashed and stabbed to death by Henry Thompson and Theodore Winer, possibly with help from Brown’s sons.[6] From there, they crossed the Pottawatomie, and some time after midnight, forced their way into the cabin of James Harris at swordpoint. Harris had three house guests: John S. Wightman, Jerome Glanville, and William Sherman, the brother of Henry Sherman (“Dutch Henry”), a militant pro-slavery activist. Glanville and Harris were taken outside for interrogation and asked whether they had threatened Free State settlers, aided Border Ruffians from Missouri, or participated in the sack of Lawrence. Satisfied with their answers, Brown’s men let Glanville and Harris return to the cabin. William Sherman was led to the edge of the creek and hacked to death with the swords by Winer, Thompson, and Brown’s sons.

Who today would object to those actions? Except a racist, I mean? C’mon, people, let’s go punch some nazis.

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(Warning: Irony)

David and I seem to agree that, for at least certain sorts of normative beliefs or judgments, a kind of moderate internalism is true.  For example, Bri’s judgment that she ought to tie her shoe (her belief that this is what she has most reason to do presently or what she has compelling reason to do presently) tends, as a non-accidental matter, to produce in her the intention to tie her shoe. Continue reading →

 
Antonio: Behold, this is an interesting work of philosophy entitled Foundationalism and the Foundations of Ethics, by one Irfan A. Khawaja. I have been reading this work carefully; it issues a formidable challenge to certain dominant assumptions in contemporary analytic philosophy and offers an intriguing meta-ethical view of its own; I have numerous objections to its positive view, and I believe that its critique of several of the prominent alternatives is unsuccessful at points, but I also think that its criticisms can be strengthened and at least certain elements of its positive view more fully defended. I would like to discuss this work with you fine gentlemen.

Bartolo: Ahh, yes, I have studied this work of which you speak. ‘Tis merely an effort to legitimate an especially noxious breed of selfishness and individualism. Its teems with a neurotic desire for certainty, with a fear of contingency and a childish longing for an external validation for our beliefs and particularly our values, and with adolescent fantasies of independence. It aims to join the comforting belief in moral absolutes eternally grounded in and guaranteed by nature with the narcissistic flatteries of self-indulgence and the belief that one controls one’s own destiny. Most of all it panders to the delusion that morality and self-interest conveniently coincide, that the most moral thing of all is, after all, to pursue one’s ‘true’ self-interest, and that this will work out marvelously for everyone. It is a horrible work, but not without interest; few manage, after all, to combine these ideological fictions in quite the way Khawaja has done.

Antonio: Uh-huh. Have you actually read it?

Continue reading →