Fifty or sixty years from now, this is how they’ll be rehabilitating the reputations of the assholes running our current genocide in Gaza. Oh, the private doubts they had! The anguish they suffered! Poor, poor things! Judge not, lest it be discovered that you figured out on Day 1 what these “experts” were too cowardly to admit or act on for the duration.
The “war hawk who wasn’t,” except that he was.
Apropos of my last post, Montgomery Township has just issued an official proclamation in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. A proclamation has a somewhat lower official status than a resolution; unlike a resolution, it’s issued collectively by the mayor and Council, and doesn’t require individualized votes by Council members. So it’s not exactly what we wanted, but it’s still a win.
Whether coincidentally or not, two Council members who were present last time were absent today, notably Dennis Ahn and Vincent Barragan.
Continue readingJust a quick update on the progress of the mini-campaign here in New Jersey for municipal resolutions in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. About a dozen or so resolutions passed between December 2024 and March 2025. After about two months of Council appearances, Resistencia en Acción and allies won a resolution here in Princeton on August 11th. My impression is that the Princeton win has generated the press coverage that’s breathed new life into the campaign. Continue reading
Institutional neutrality is the doctrine that institutions like universities should refrain from issuing public comment on matters of public controversy. As I’ve argued here at PoT (and elsewhere), one canonical exception to neutrality is institutional self-defense: a university is obliged to speak up when the university itself comes under attack. Predictably, we now have yet another exception to add to the list: the Charlie Kirk Exception. This exception asserts that when a famous right-wing loudmouth is shot on a university campus, all institutions hitherto bound by solemn pledges of institutional neutrality are obliged to carve out a special dispensation to condemn the act. Continue reading
You’ve likely encountered Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s suggestion that we deal with the problem of homelessness by killing mentally ill homeless people. The remark has widely been treated as an isolated, one-off, a kind of non-sequitur that Kilmeade dreamed up out of the blue, and for which he has now apologized. So, case closed.
In fact, Kilmeade’s comment is no one-off non-sequitur at all. If you read through the relevant part of transcript of the show, and work through a few minor interpretive puzzles, you come to realize that what Kilmeade did was to draw a logically valid inference from an argument that Lawrence Jones, his co-host, had set up. Far from being a one-off, Kilmeade’s claim only makes sense as an inference from Jones’s argument, implicating both of them in the same set of claims. And far from being a non-sequitur, what the two of them offered up to the public was a well-structured argument. In a very real sense, they’ve done us the service of laying out the logical structure of genocide. Continue reading
The migrant defense group that I work with, Resistencia en Acción, held a rummage sale the other day, raising $3,700 for migrants detained in a recent set of raids here in Princeton. That, by any measure, is a success. Think about what was involved in making it happen.
Someone had to conceive the idea, then convey it to others willing to help make it happen. Tasks had to be divided up, and people had to be held to keeping whatever promises of assistance they made. The organizers had to find a space within which to hold the event. They had to acquire several roomfuls of items to sell, then go to the space they’d acquired and arrange the items there. The space in question was a set of rooms in a church, not presently set up for a rummage sale. So that had to be set up. “That had to be set up” is elliptical for hours of work too tedious to describe: the space in question was the size of small house; anyone who’s moved homes, even from one apartment to another, knows what’s involved. Continue reading
Most years, on 9/11, I’ve brought this post back up to the top and re-posted it. I want to do something different this time. I want to give a brief (or semi-brief) answer to one of the most pressing questions that arises on 9/11: why do Americans not learn from history? Or to narrow it a bit: why do Americans learn nothing from the military history of their own country? Continue reading
I’m sitting here eating a nice vegan meal, reading Livy. I just heard that somebody killed Charlie Kirk, another fascist nobody in this rapidly disintegrating country. We can’t keep track of how many fucking wars or proxy wars we’re in, or how many innocent people we’ve killed or sent to concentration camps in a week, but here come the hand-wringers and cry-babies on command, from Trump to Newsom to Obama, gnashing their teeth and virtue signaling over the least consequential death in America today.
Continue readingI wrote this in May, but forgot to post it. I happened to notice it today while cleaning out old files. It seems a fitting start to the academic year.
In Princeton, where I live, there are two kiosks on Nassau Street, the main drag, on which people put up up flyers of various sorts, sometimes announcements of cultural events, sometimes flyers of a more political nature. Most but not all of the political flyers tend to the left of the political spectrum, and some of these target either the municipality or the University. The kiosks are deeply resented by elites at both institutions, who regard them, with predictable hauteur, as “eyesores.” Despite determined public opposition, the local town council has voted to demolish the kiosks and replace them with something that it can (in the words of one proponent) “control.”
They’re still there for now. The stated rule governing them is that flyers are taken down on the first of every month. Today is the 22nd of May. And yet, as I walked through town this morning and then this evening, I found all of the flyers systematically taken down on both kiosks. Continue reading
Current status: paying $70 to take an Uber to work, care of a well-dressed driver named Roberto who’s blaring Sinatra in my ear. Feel like I’m en route to another meeting with Batista over the Castro/Che problem, but no, just another day of DRG Downgrade appeals with assorted hospital clients, paying top dollar to get paid.
“I’m gonna make a brand new start of it—Metropark, Metropark.”
Somebody kill me.
Policy of Truth 