This is what the vaunted “ceasefire” actually looks like in the West Bank: disarm the population, box them in, round them up, incarcerate them en masse. The occupation has quietly swept dozens into jail, and settlers have set fire to the village of Sinjil. Not a shot fired, though.
Continue readingIt’s been a while since I’ve beaten up on Jason Brennan’s “argument” against character-based voting, but I’m feeling the urge again, so here I am, hot to go.(1) The crux of Brennan’s argument is that it’s wrong to vote for political candidates on the basis of their traits of character, except when character is a predictive proxy for the policies they can be expected to enact once in office. In a formula (Brennan’s formula, made in discussion here on PoT): “policy > character.” Taken literally, the argument proscribes voting against any candidate, no matter how evil, if the evil he exemplifies is policy-irrelevant. My aim here is to add yet another counter-example to my ever-growing list of counter-examples to Brennan’s thesis, partly for the understanding it affords, and partly for the fun of it. Continue reading
“Social murder” is a form of homicide that takes place through relatively invisible social processes involving collective rather than individual responsibility. The concept is controversial because it attributes murder to “society” while relying on an unconventional conception of murder: society intends murder, and society kills, where society is identified with a ruling class that controls the political system. What’s controversial here is that social murder kills mostly by omission rather than commission, and is perpetrated by a class rather than by individuals. Both assumptions flout the conventional understanding of the intentionality and causality of murder. Continue reading
Imagine that LA had been blockaded since 2007, and had repeatedly been bombed since then. Now imagine that the current fires took place, and that the response was to bomb, maim, and starve the survivors for the next fourteen months, on the premise that doing so was a favor to them, and proof of the superiority of our civilization. That’s what we’ve done to Gaza and Lebanon. The enormity of that crime—series of crimes—can barely be imagined. Neither can the scale of the retribution that its survivors will have in mind for us for the foreseeable future.
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No tears.
“Could Better Security Have Stopped the New Orleans Terror Attack?” asks The New York Times with furrowed brow. Yes, if you turn the country into a gigantic fortress, you can probably stave off another a “terror attack.” But then, you can achieve even greater assurance of safety against “terror attacks” if you take a cyanide tablet right now and sleep off the fear. How’s that for a remedy?
Continue readingAn irony no one could have made up: just a few days after the death of Jimmy Carter, the grandfather of our Afghan wars, a veteran of one of those wars launches a terrorist attack on the United States.
Asked about the possibility of blowback from the proxy war he had devised in Afghanistan, Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi had dismissively asked his (French) interviewer what was more important in the grand scheme of things—a bunch of “agitated Moslems” or the “liberation of Central Europe”?
The lesson here, I take it, is that as long as we keep the proxy war in Ukraine going, New Orleans is a trifle. What’s one agitated Moslem in the French Quarter to the liberation of Central Europe?
A couple of days ago, I predicted here that a “terrorist” attack on the United States would take place. Now one has, in New Orleans. Did I have foreknowledge of this attack? I sure did. In fact, I told you what the foreknowledge was in the post itself: You can’t spend decades supporting apartheid, conquest, occupation, and genocide, then take pride in shutting down the anti-war movement, and not expect to be attacked in retaliation. That’s what Americans and Israelis did, and that’s what happened to them. What did you think was going to happen? The victims of your psychopathic depredations were going to roll over and play dead forever? Continue reading
It’s amusing how many obituaries of Jimmy Carter mention ruefully that it was Carter’s idea, inspired by Zbigniew Brzezinski, to support the Afghan mujahidin against the Soviets. It seemed like such a great idea at the time, but look at Afghanistan today. Brzezinski was widely hailed as a strategic genius and moral prophet for devising that jihad, like Robert McNamara before him, and Paul Wolfowitz after. Three wizards. Three catastrophes.
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About two weeks ago, I wrote a long post here on the killing of UnitedHealthCare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson. Here’s a follow up. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 