My Uber driver this morning was a 78-year-old Baptist preacher. We spent the ride comparing near-death car wreck experiences, led there by a conversation about Smokey Robinson.
My story involved a flood, his a fire. Mine took place after a day of revenue cycle management, his after a bout of drinking. My wreck put me in a hotel for the night, his in the hospital. My wreck ultimately led to a life on mass transit, his to a life with Jesus Christ.
Continue readingOn this day, 249 years ago, Americans declared war on Britain, or at least on the British Army. To declare war on an army is to wish death upon it, and to act on that wish.
About a week ago, punk rocker Bob Vylan led a chant at Glastonbury Festival in Britain, wishing death on the Israeli military: “Death to the IDF.” I agree with him. The IDF should be defeated, destroyed, and if necessary, annihilated. It’s an army of aggression, conquest, occupation, torture, and genocide. It has no right to exist, and no right of self-defense. If any organization on the planet deserves death, it’s the IDF. Continue reading
A little over a month ago, I wrote a post here called “Against Trespass,” intended mostly for campus activists for Palestine. It’s tempting, I argued, to want to engage in forms of direct action that involve trespass, and morally speaking–abstracting entirely from considerations of cost or consequence–it can be justified to do so. But once we re-introduce matters of cost and consequence into the equation, as we have to, trespass strikes me now as mostly pointless and self-defeating. For one thing, more often than not, it puts the activists who engage in it out of commission. For another, it doesn’t effectively do what most needs doing: generate widespread public support for Palestine. So on the whole, it can’t accomplish the good that activists want or need. It’s more likely to subvert it. Continue reading
(I’m happy to report that in less than a week, we’ve collected more than $10K, exceeding our initial goal.)
A migrant defense group I work with, Resistencia en Acción, is organizing a fundraiser via GoFundMe for one of our members who’s been detained by ICE.
We write to you with heavy hearts and a deep sense of urgency.
One of the worker leaders of the Day Laborer Committee in Princeton at Resistencia en Accion NJ has been detained by ICE and is currently being transferred to an immigration detention center here in New Jersey. He has been organizing alongside fellow day laborers at his corner and leading with courage, and showing up for our community in every moment of need.
Please consider making a donation. There’s more information at the GoFundMe link above. Continue reading
I was aimlessly surfing online when I happened on that now-famous clip of the New York City mayoral candidates being asked what foreign country they would visit first on being elected to office. It’s amusing to me that, put in that situation, I would truthfully have answered Israel. It’s even more amusing how uninformative that answer turns out to be. Funnier still is the number of people who, on hearing it, would confabulate their way to an explanation and get it wrong. But I would not have prefaced or explained what I said. Ask a stupid question? Get a cryptic answer. Under the circumstances, they should be grateful to get an answer at all. Continue reading
Dialectical relevance and defects of omission
Band: “We are The Answer!”
Crowd: “What’s the question?”
Philosophers have a robust lexicon of technical terms for the evaluation of arguments, so many that one hesitates to call attention to a lacuna. But there are some important lacunae out there, places where we see recurrent defects in arguments but have no name for them. Lacking a name, we sometimes miss the thing. Nullem nomen, nullem nominandum may be a fallacy, but it’s also a very strong and hard-to-avoid temptation. So it helps to have a name. Continue reading
PoT’s own John Davenport has a piece in The Defense Post attacking the idea of regime change in Iran. John argues, reasonably enough, that a war with Iran is ill-conceived, partly because it’s based on Israeli deceptions, and partly because it’s likely to lead to terrible, even catastrophic consequences. Continue reading
I read a few days ago that Alfred Brendel had died at the age of 94. To be honest, I was shocked that he was so recently alive. What was a guy like that doing alive at a time like this? I can’t so much confess to any personal sense of loss as a vague sense of bewilderment that Brendel and I ever inhabited the same world. It takes effort to convince oneself that Alfred Brendel and say, Ted Cruz were members of the same biological species and historical milieu. But it turns out they were.
Continue readingPeople like to say that Near East politics is complex, but the war on Iran is blindingly simple. Aggression is immoral, as is participation in it. Israel’s war on Iran is a blatantly obvious, incontestable act of aggression, as is US participation in the war so far, along with any further participation. No one has bothered to provide even a semi-plausible justification for this war, no one can, and no one will. The whole thing is insane.
Continue readingBetween January and March of 2020, I wrote a 24-part series condemning the idea of war with Iran. I then reluctantly added a 25th part last April. I’m not going to repeat any part of that performance now. If you want to read it, click the “War with Iran” tag. Suffice it to say that I knew this day was coming, did my inept share of tilting at windmills about it, and now it’s here.
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Policy of Truth 