Against Unity: A Response to Mayor Michael Venezia (Bloomfield, New Jersey)

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This is a comment I wrote on the Citizens of Bloomfield Facebook page, responding to Michael Venezia, Mayor of Bloomfield (Nov. 11 at 2:10 pm). Venezia had called in his post for a “united Bloomfield” behind Trump. I reject the idea. My comment was deleted from the comments section of the post without explanation, as apparently violating the site’s policies. Evidently, the mayor has free rein to say whatever he wants, but firm criticism is impermissible.

I’m not interested in any form of unity with anyone who voted for Trump. The whole idea of “uniting” with such people is presumptuous and ridiculous. No, we shouldn’t violate their rights (or anyone else’s). We should keep our hands off others’ property and persons, regardless of their politics. And yes, those in power should facilitate a peaceful transition of power.

But that has nothing to do with making common cause with Trump supporters. I have nothing in common with them, and they have nothing in common with me. We have to stop engaging in wishful thinking and amnesia about these people and their intentions. We can’t make America great by uniting with people who unapologetically believe in and promulgate lies. We can only keep our distance from them and demand that they do the same from us.

It’s cheap for Venezia to preach to us about “unity.” No one’s ever accused him of dancing in the streets after 9/11. Let that accusation sink in and then, as it does, try to “unify” with the people who spread it. I didn’t see Michael Venezia’s wanting to “unify” with Mark Denbeaux after the Seton Hall racial profiling report came out. And I don’t imagine Bloomfield is going to “unify” with Denbeaux now. Fair enough–but then don’t expect people like me to unify with Trump supporters. They are our enemies, not our fellow citizens.

The election is over. We don’t need any more cheap political rhetoric from our mayor or anyone else. We need Democratic leaders to tell it like it is–as Trump supposedly does, but more truthfully. We need them to face the fact that the Republic is in danger. It’s time to face that danger and call it by its proper name–rather than appeasing it with baby talk. I voted for Venezia and the entire Democratic line. They owe us more than this.

Worth reading, very much on target, and of broader scope than my post: Masha Gessen’s “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” and David Cole’s “The Way to Stop Trump,” both from The New York Review of Books.

Donald Trump’s Muslim Registry: A Demand for Clarity and a Call for Pre-Emptive Civil Disobedience (Updated)

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Nobody seems to know precisely what Donald Trump has said or wants in the way of compulsory registration of “Muslims” in the United States. This is what he said last year. This is where he is on the issue now. (Fixed a link that previously went to the wrong place. For an update, see below.*)

It’s all mud, and it’s all insane. It doesn’t much matter whether he intends to put all Muslim refugees on the list, or all committed Muslims on the list, or or all nominal or committed Muslims on the list, or everyone on the list who could be Muslim, or everyone who looks like a Muslim, or everyone who looks like he could be a Muslim, or everyone who was born a Muslim, or was born and raised a Muslim, or looks like he could have been born a Muslim, or is currently a declared atheist but could legitimately be suspected of undue nostalgia for having once been a Muslim…etc. The list can be extended ad nauseum. The problem is, it might well be extended ad nauseum. Trump’s explanations are incoherent and meaningless enough to require registration by anyone somehow problematically “linked” to Islam (to use a favorite piece of jargon), no matter what they actually believe. In other words, what we have on our hands is an incipient witch hunt. Continue reading →

“Police Stops” Event Tonight

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Just a reminder for PoT readers: “Police Stops: What Are Your Rights? What Should You Do?” is tonight, @7-8:15 pm, Education Commons Auditorium, Felician University’s Rutherford campus, 227 Montross Ave, Rutherford, New Jersey 07070. The event is the second (of five) in the University’s year-long series on Race and Criminal Justice in America. It’s sponsored by the Felician University Committee on Leadership & Social Justice, the Department of Criminal Justice, the UN Fellows Program, and the Pre-Law Program.

I happened to have conversations with both speakers over the last week or so, and am confident that we’ll have an informative, enlightening, productive conversation tonight. They agree on enough to share common ground, but disagree on enough to bring out some important unresolved issues. Continue reading →

Character-Based Voting, 9/11 Celebrations: Some Election Day Re-Runs (Updated)

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I thought I’d re-run my post on character-based voting from two years ago, in case anyone finds it of interest. I’m inclined to think it has clear application to the candidacy of Donald Trump. The thesis of the post plus the facts that have emerged about Trump over the past year or so rule out voting for him. Whatever you do tomorrow, there is no justification for voting for Trump.

I updated the post to include some facts about Trump, but stopped after December 2015. That was enough. I really don’t think you can justifiably vote for someone who lies about whether thousands of his fellow-citizens have been celebrating in the streets over a mass-murder terrorist attack on the country.

As I said the first time around, a year ago, Trump  lied about those “celebrations.” He didn’t just mis-state the facts. He didn’t just get the facts wrong. He didn’t just mis-remember this or that detail. He didn’t just exaggerate. He lied. Then he doubled down on the lies. He hasn’t disavowed his lies, he hasn’t stopped lying, he shows no sign of ever stopping, and he shows no consideration for the foreseeable consequences of this particular lie–that those who believe the lie will regard people of Muslim or even apparently or nominally Muslim or Arab background as traitors and enemies of the state who, in virtue of that fact, deserve mass deportation, mass incarceration, or for that matter, mass death.    Continue reading →

CFP: Eleventh Annual Conference, Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs

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Speaking of events I’m organizing, here’s one worth keeping in mind: the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, taking place on Saturday (9 am – 6 pm), April 22 on the Rutherford campus of Felician University (227 Montross Ave., Rutherford, New Jersey, 07070). Here’s the official CFP itself:

The Institute invites submissions on any topic in moral or political philosophy, broadly construed, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3000 words). Please send submissions in format suitable for blind review to felicianethicsconference at gmail dot com by February 1, 2017. Acceptances will be announced by March 1, 2017.

Here’s last year’s program. Here’s 2015. You can look at the rest, going back to 2007, by going to the Institute’s web page, clicking the “Spring Conference” tab, and scrolling down a bit.  Continue reading →

Cato Unbound Debate: Immanuel Kant and Classical Liberalism

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In case you haven’t had your fill of Kant via David Potts’s post below, check out the debate on Kant and classical liberalism at Cato Unbound: Mark White (College of Staten Island), Gregory Salmieri (Rutgers), Stephen Hicks (Rockford), and Roderick Long (Auburn). I haven’t read it carefully enough to come to a verdict, just carefully enough to know that it ought to be read more carefully than I so far have. Continue reading →

What Mary Never Did Know; or, How Kant Was Right

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A well-known argument, due to Frank Jackson, goes as follows. (You can read the short version here.) The brilliant genius Mary has complete knowledge of physical reality. All the sciences, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, etc., have been completed—there is nothing more to add—so that the fundamental physical constituents and causes of all phenomena are known, together with everything that supervenes on them, and Mary has mastered all of this. But although Mary thus knows everything about the physical world there is to know, she does not know everything there is to know. For, a peculiarity about Mary is that she has lived her entire life in a black and white room and has never been permitted to view anything except in black and white. Thus, on the day when she finally leaves her room and sees, say, a red object, she will learn something she didn’t know before. She will say, “Ha! So that is what seeing red is like.” If this is correct, then, apparently, red, or the experience of seeing red, is not part of physical reality.

The “Mary” argument is just one of several ways to bring out what is really an old, classic problem with any sort of reductionistic physicalism. It is this. Continue reading →

God, Poetry, Universities: A Selective Recounting of a Faculty Meeting

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My institution, Felician University, is a Franciscan-Catholic institution–in fact, it’s The Franciscan University of New Jersey (pre-eminent among all of the others here). In deference to that fact, our faculty meetings usually begin with a prayer, euphemistically called a “reflection,” but almost always oriented toward worship of the Judeo-Christian God. Having heard eight years of God talk, I decided to do something different for yesterday’s meeting of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. I decided to subject my colleagues to some good old-fashioned paganism, opening the meeting with the straightforwardly idolatrous seventh stanza of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” (The Dean was away.)  Continue reading →

Felician University Event: “Police Stops: What Are Your Rights? What Should You Do?”

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I’m pleased to announce the second event in Felician University’s ongoing series on Race and Criminal Justice in America, “Police Stops: What Are Your Rights? What Should You Do?”

The event features two speakers, Maria Lopez-Delgado and John E. Link. Maria is a 2013 graduate of Felician University (a philosophy major, by the way) and 2016 graduate of UNC School of Law; she currently works for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender. John is an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice at Felician, where he teaches Criminology and Criminal Law; he was until recently Chief of Police in Clifton, New Jersey. I’ll be serving as moderator.  Continue reading →

The Fourth Amendment, Policing, and Pedagogy

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I’m in the middle of working through Akhil Reed Amar’s The Constitution and Criminal Procedure in my Phil/Crim 380 class (“Philosophical Issues in Criminal Justice”), and am also in the middle of planning the second event in Felician University’s “Race and Criminal Justice in America” series. The event is tentatively called “Search, Seizure, Stop, and Frisk: Two Perspectives,” and the idea is to invite a defense attorney and a police officer to share the stage while answering questions on Fourth Amendment rights and contemporary police work. More on that as I firm up the details.

In any case, I’ve got the Fourth Amendment and policing on my mind. To that end, I thought I’d post and invite comments on a paper that I presented back in 2012 at a conference for the Association for Core Texts and Courses, “The Fourth Amendment as a Core Text: A Pedagogy for the Citizen-Philosopher.” The more I think about it, the more I agree with what I wrote in the paper–always the right time to ask whether I’ve gotten anything wrong. Which is where you come in, reader. Feel free to search, seize, stop, and/or frisk the text. Hope you find it arresting.  Continue reading →