Imagine dropping Joe Biden right now in the middle of Gaza, and telling him to find his way to the nearest cancer treatment center. It’d be a long, arduous, circuitous trip, because there isn’t one. Thousands of people don’t have to imagine that. They’ve lived it for the duration of Joe Biden’s presidency, and have lived a version of it ever since the Israelis imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007, with Joe Biden’s eager acquiescence. In other words, they’ve lived, at Joe’s behest, the Hell that it would universally be thought tasteless to wish on him.
Continue readingAgainst Trespass
“The conflict over Palestine is unusual in many different ways, principally of course because Palestine is not an ordinary place.”
–Edward Said, “Introduction,” Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, p. 1.
“Direct action,” in activist parlance, is a form of public protest to induce some party to meet one’s demands–a demonstration, a sit-in, a disruption. Some direct actions (not all, obviously) involve trespass of some kind. What counts as trespass in any given context, particularly a university campus, can often be a confused and confusing affair. So I’m restricting attention in this post to the cases in which it’s clear that a given action commits trespass (is “trespassory”). Given all that, I want to make a case that pro-Palestine activists should stop engaging in direct actions that involve trespass. But first, a few clarifications. Continue reading
Who Was Killed at Pahalgam (2)?
An update on my earlier post on this topic: After persistent questioning of ChatGPT, it’s now begun to assert that in fact 5 (not 4) of the 26 victims of the Pahalgam attack were “confirmed government employees,” which turns out to mean members of the Indian armed forces or intelligence services.
- Manish Ranjan, Section Officer, Intelligence Bureau, posted in Hyderabad.
- Tage Hailyang, Corporal, Indian Air Force, from Arunachel Pradesh. The Indian Air Force mourned his loss and the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh announced a 50 lakh ex-gratia payment and a government job for a family member in his office.
- Vinay Narwal, Lieutenant, Indian Navy, from Haryana. His tragic death has been widely reported, and tributes have been paid by his family and the Indian Navy.
- Manish Raman Mishra, an officer in the Indian Navy. “Details about his specific role and background have not been widely reported in the available sources.”
- Manju Nath, an officer in the Intelligence Bureau. Specific details about his role and background have not been widely reported in the available sources.
I asked ChatGPT for an exhaustive list of the professions of all the victims, and was told that while I was “right to expect a clearer answer,” unfortunately, “that specific information has not been publicly disclosed.”
Continue readingCOMING TO SEE YOU
Rumbling through the New England wood
Hand on the wheel, machine on the asphalt
Feeling the road
I squint to see the tracks and traces
Among the obscuring brambles of time
This curve, that jagged boulder, this once-stately homestead
Do I remember the way?
Tricks and illusions throw me off
A watery road (like a fountain)
A maze of impossible rock-wall twists and turns
And yet there you are
Arguing, explaining, expounding
Success on the first several points!
More trouble on the last two
A matter of public concern – and your physical chemistry fix
An academic in another life for sure
So comforting to find you
Such joy – you in your element
How can old friend and flesh be yet so fresh?
But vexing distance…
I want your unencumbered embrace
Your eyes twinkling for me
Too abruptly, the thread unravels
Feeling left to stand unsteadily as object falls away
No
I will coax the elements back to their assigned places
Neither my inertia nor your beloved entropy
Will have this day
Oblivion denied, I must here bottle this quicksilver of you
To keep so very close
With all the dearest of things
For this is all that remains
Who Was Killed at Pahalgam?
With no provision but an open face
Along the straits of fear
–Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir”
There’s a phenomenon in journalism that I call iterated small-scale error. Take any well-known event. Look carefully at the journalistic consensus that’s formed around it. Once you do, you’ll find that the consensus has come to adopt a number of small-scale errors, errors that make some difference to the narrative arc of the story, but that seem at first too trivial to correct.
Eventually these errors, uncorrected, come to acquire the status of authoritative truth that displaces the actual truth. Iterated over months or years, they come to be widely accepted. Once that happens, it becomes possible to realize in retrospect that the small-scale errors ended up reinforcing a medium- or large-scale myth. The myth is so ideologically convenient that one wonders whether the initial introduction of the small-scale errors was deliberate, a kind of trial balloon to test the limits of tolerance for error. At that point, of course, the question becomes moot, so that the issue never gets pressed. Those who do press it are dismissed as unhinged conspiracy theorists. Then, everyone moves on. Continue reading
Resistance in Action
I’ve previously mentioned my work with Resistencia en Acción, a migrant defense group based in Princeton and Trenton, New Jersey. Much of what Resistencia does is to face down ICE whenever the need arises. And to put it bluntly: ICE has to be faced down. It’s less a law enforcement agency than a glorified group of thugs–an American Gestapo–intent on solving, by brute force, problems that they themselves have confabulated. Continue reading
The Kids Are Alright
No, you really don’t “have to” take sides in the war (if that’s what it ends up being) between India and Pakistan. I’m an ethnic Kashmiri, and have no shortage of things to say about recent events, but ultimately, I think this kid Kaif not only gets things right, but deserves a Moral Equanimity award for what he says here.
Continue readingMass Death by Starvation
I once had to go a week without food. It weakened me and made me ill, but didn’t kill me or come close. It actually takes a long time to die of starvation, at least if you have water and shelter, as I did. If hundreds or thousands of people begin to starve to death, it’s because people are bent on killing them that way.
That’s what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has been for months, or years, or decades, depending on how you look at it. Most proximately, it has intentionally violated a ceasefire to which it agreed in order intentionally to starve the population of Gaza to death.
Continue readingGorilla Warfare
The entire Internet is debating whether 100 unarmed men could defeat and kill a single silverback gorilla. The “pro-man” crowd keeps insisting that the 100 men would defeat the gorilla by “outsmarting” it. Find me one gorilla wasting his time on this stupid debate, or anything like it, and I’ll concede the point. I highly doubt you will. Unlike humans, gorillas know better than to waste their time on shit like this. So don’t tell me we’re smarter than them. If victory is achieved through intelligence, they’ve already won.
Karl Ameriks, RIP
I wanted to note the passing of Karl Ameriks (1947-2025), the Emeritus McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame. He died yesterday in South Bend, Indiana at the age of 77.
I didn’t know Ameriks particularly well. My first memory was a conversation I had with him in 1991 about what little I knew about Kant’s first Critique. I’d taken an undergraduate course on Kant with Wolfgang Carl, the eminent Kant scholar, and was flattered to learn that Ameriks was interested in my lecture notes. He read them, thanked me for them, but never commented on them. I think he found them more amusing than anything else. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 