A friend of mine was unceremoniously fired from Felician University in 2023–one of sixteen people fired on a single day–after 23 unrelenting years as an English comp instructor to students with an average SAT verbal score well below 500. I described her in a letter of recommendation, without exaggeration, as “the most dedicated college instructor I had ever encountered” in two+ decades in the profession. Her office was across the hall from mine, and every now and then I’d eavesdrop on her efforts. I couldn’t imagine putting even half the effort into teaching that she did. Continue reading
Advice for the Democrats
Been dazed and confused for so long, it’s not true…
Wanted a president, never bargained for you
–Led Zeppelin, “Dazed and Confused” (more or less)
Oh, the poor Democrats. Here’s The New York Times lamenting their fate.
Come on Dems, you can do this. Just pretend that Donald Trump is a Palestinian ER physician, and that the White House is a pediatric trauma center in Gaza. How hard could it be?
Nowhere to Hide
About a month ago, I described an unwelcome encounter I’d had at work with the Department of Homeland Security (ICE). Today I had one with the Israeli authorities–while sitting at a desk in Iselin, New Jersey.
A friend of mine, along with his wife and several small children, is literally going hungry in the West Bank, has had nothing to eat for days. They’ve been fully locked down since 2023: no work, no money, nowhere to go. The army is in their village every day, smashes into their house every now and then. The world a mile outside of their village is a shooting gallery where violent death lurks around every corner. The IDF told them flat out to leave now or die later. They’ve opted for “die later.” Continue reading
The “Ceasefire” Fraud
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 readingCharacter-Based Voting and Genocide
It’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
Engels on Social Murder
“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
From LA to Gaza and Back
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.
Continue readingAka “Poetic Justice”
No tears.
Let the Boomerang Speak
“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 Agitated Moslem
An 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?
Policy of Truth 