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
Why Princeton students disrupted Naftali Bennett
This post was written by Princeton Alumni for Palestine, of which I’m a member. The piece was rejected for publication in both The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Alumni Weekly. I’ll be posting a separate post on this topic, in my own name, in the near future.–IK
To understand why students had to disrupt Naftali Bennett’s visit to Princeton on April 7th, it’s important to recenter ourselves on the ongoing events abroad. Hamas and Israel at last reached a ceasefire earlier this year which was recently unilaterally broken by Israel, which resumed its genocidal campaign. Full stop. Well over 50,000 deaths have been recorded, of whom 15,000 are children. These figures are a “clean” report. Yet according to the Lancet, the death toll is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone who does a cursory search of the images from Gaza will find evidence of the deeply horrid violence that Israel has been enacting on innocent civilians, journalists, medics, UN aid workers and children. And let us not forget that these weapons are supplied with our tax dollars. Continue reading
May Day in Princeton
One of the activist groups I work with, Resistencia en Acción, is putting on a May Day march and celebration this Thursday, May 1st, in Princeton, New Jersey, starting at 6 pm. The event begins at the “Fountain of Freedom” at Washington Rd and Prospect St on the Princeton University campus. We’ll march through town, circle back, and hear from local activists and members of the community in both English and Spanish. This is a march in solidarity with and defense of all migrants, documented or not, “legal” or not, and against the arbitrary harassment, detentions, and deportations engaged in by the “Department of Homeland Security,” among others. We’re expecting some 800 participants, from Newark to Trenton and points in between. Join us if you want to stand up for justice, and have a good time doing it. And click the Instagram below to listen to Princeton’s own Chris Hedges while you’re at it: Continue reading
Thierry Rides Again
With Mark Weinburg’s kind permission, I have posted on the Molinari site his hard-to-find 1977-78 translation of Augustin Thierry’s 1818 review of Destutt de Tracy’s 1806 commentary on Montesquieu’s 1748 Spirit of the Laws.
Tracy was a philosopher and free-market economist, and a friend of Thomas Jefferson (who translated and published several of Tracy’s writings, including the one Thierry is discussing here). Thierry, primarily a historian, was one of the radical liberal triumvirate who (along with Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer) developed an important version of liberal class theory in their journal Le Censeur Européen; Karl Marx would later refer to Thierry as “the father of the ‘class struggle’ in French historiography.” Montesquieu was a massively influential social and legal theorist, broadly liberal but not quite radical enough for Tracy and Thierry. Like many of Thierry’s book reviews, this one is in large part a springboard for Thierry to talk (particularly in the second half – which Weinburg makes the first half) about his own developing views in ways that don’t necessarily have all that much to do with either Tracy or Montesquieu.
This piece is especially famous for Thierry’s inspiring (but, in the event, unduly optimistic) prediction of what the coming century would bring:
“Federations will replace states. The despotism of men and of the law will be replaced by the loose but indissoluble bonds of interest. The inclination towards government, the first passion of the human race, will yield to the free community, the real need of civilized men. The era of empires has ended. The era of association is beginning.”
I am working on my own translation of Thierry’s article (as part of an exciting larger project about which you will learn more later), but in the meantime, enjoy!
Heterodox Academy 2025
Though I’m totally unsympathetic to the organization, I thought I’d announce that I’ll be giving a paper at the 2025 Heterodox Academy conference this June in Brooklyn. The conference runs June 23-25, and will be held at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. My talk is part of a three-person session at 8:30 am on the 24th called “The Skeptics’ Panel,” and is titled “Kalven’s Complicit Executioners: A Critique of the Kalven Committee Report.” There’s nothing particularly “skeptical” about my argument; it’s a straightforward rejection and critique of so-called “institutional neutrality.” I’ve laid out a version of the argument here, and will be blogging on related themes in the near future. Continue reading
PFS on Yechiel Leiter: A Response
I subscribe to an email list owned by a group called Princetonians for Free Speech (PFS), which just today put out an open letter to Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton University, in advance of tomorrow’s speech by Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. I don’t ordinarily feel the need to respond to statements by PFS, but in this case, a brief comment is in order. Continue reading
We Won’t Stop
The New York Times has yet another article on the Trump Administration’s attacks on higher education. As a former academic, I feel bad for higher education, but as an activist right now, I feel fine. Here’s my unapologetic comment in the comments section of the article:
When campus activists called for divestment, we were mocked. Now, as Defense Dept contracts are being canceled at those very universities, invoking our activism as a pretext, it’s our turn to mock. Don’t expect sympathy. It’s not forthcoming. You wanted us in jail. We want you broke. May the antagonist with the greatest moral endurance win.
My comment elicited a rejoinder from someone named Al Orin from New York City: Continue reading
Meir Kahane at Princeton: April 1984
Princeton in the Service of Ethnic Cleansing
Here is the first installment of the supplementary posts to my April 5 post, “Princeton’s Genocide.” This one consists of screenshots from the Daily Princetonian (April 27, 1984) of Meir Kahane’s first visit to Princeton in April 1984, at the invitation of Yoram Hazony. As you’ll see from the last screenshot, Kahane explicitly advocates the apartheid and ethnic cleansing likewise defended in his book, They Must Go. “If necessary to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel, Arabs might need to be deported.” Since Kahane regarded Israel as encompassing everything it held in 1984, that meant that “Arabs” would have to be deported from the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Golan, and Israel proper. Continue reading
Not a Rhetorical Question
How is it that a foreigner, Naftali Bennett, can come to the United States and suggest that Americans be blown up—yet no American has the legal right to suggest that we do the same to Naftali Bennett? I can guarantee that there would be volunteers. At least one.
