It Tolls for Thee, You Idiot
Election Night, 2024
Princeton, New Jersey
9 pm
As we watch the US election results shamble their way onto our screens, it’s amusing to think that we’ve spent a year or more fixated on the spectacle of two pieces of moral trash engaged in a long, unsavory job interview. Ironically, the result will be a hire and possibly a termination that blurs the distinction between at-will and for-cause. Whoever wins or loses this thing, can anyone really say why? Continue reading
Whether, How, and Why I Plan to Vote
To the best of my recollection, I haven’t voted since 2004. I’d been a reliable LP voter since 1988, but the LP’s nomination of Bob Barr and Wayne Allyn Root in 2008 soured me on the LP; and though the LP has had better candidates since (particularly in 2020 with Jo Jorgensen), by the time those campaigns came around I was no longer enamoured of electoral politics and was committed to non-electoral strategies for political and social change. (I even have a video on my YouTube channel from 2020 that blathers on for a mind-numbing 45 minutes about my non-voting policy; I’m not sure why I needed more than ten.) I expect I’ll most likely continue to be a non-voter in future elections. But I’m planning to vote in this one – though perhaps not for the reasons you may imagine.
A Vote for Harris is a Vote for Genocide
For the last year, Kamala Harris’s more aggressive defenders have wielded a particular rhetorical weapon against Jill Stein voters like me: A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump. I’m a little late to the party in saying this, but there’s an obvious retort to them worth repeating ad nauseam: A vote for Harris is a vote for genocide. Call it Stein’s Maxim.
Stein’s Maxim retort has two advantages over theirs. For one, it hits a lot harder. For another, unlike theirs, it’s true.
Taken at face value, “A vote for Stein is a vote for Trump” is flat-out nonsense. A vote for X is a vote for X, not for someone else on the ballot. If I vote for X, and you accuse me of voting for Y, the obvious objection arises: if I had wanted Y to win, I could have voted directly for Y, yet I didn’t. So how could my voting for X be a vote for Y? It obviously can’t be an intended vote for Y. The only intended vote for Y is an actual vote for Y. Continue reading
The Soft Domination of Everyday Life
Consider this post an unplanned addendum to my earlier series on domination and at-will employment.
A friend of mine just got “fired”–you’ll see in a minute why the word is in scare quotes–and we’re disagreeing about what it all means. Naturally, I thought I’d share tidbits of our discussion here. My friend blames himself; I blame his employer. Which of us is right? I’ll give you an impeccably impartial account below; you decide. Then feel free to chime in either way.
Let’s call my friend “Claude.” Claude was caught vaping on the job. There’s no explicit rule in his company’s handbook against vaping on the job. It’s simply understood that “one does not vape on the job.” It’s not clear why this is so. “It is what it is.” Argument is not invited, and evidence is not required. We all know evil when we see it. Continue reading
Biggest Goofball in Gaza
From the “shit that sounds made up but isn’t” file:
Full article for those desiring context:
Another life cut tragically short while striving to bring a genocide to full fruition.
ht: Kim Jensen, Community College of Baltimore County
Bad Company
“A man is known by the company he keeps.” Which makes you wonder what Bill Ayers was thinking here.
Me and Bill Ayers, Niagara Falls, New York.
He said he “loved” my paper–on Machiavelli, on conquest. Mission accomplished!
Identity Politics and the Twilight of the Idols
Though I’ve never voted for Trump and never will, the Trump campaign can be “credited,” if that’s the right word, with a pair of useful things, both related to the same underlying thing. The underlying thing is ethnic identity politics, and the two things are the taboos regarding what you can say about it.
Taboo #1 is that you’re not allowed to attribute dual loyalties to members of an ethnic identity. Every ethnicity is axiomatically assumed to be loyal to Uncle Sam and the Stars and Stripes.
Taboo #2 is that you’re not allowed to wonder whether there there are any non-accidental connections between certain ethnic identities and, say, reactionary politics. The axiom here is that whatever the other differences between them, every ethnicity–or, every ethnicity in America–fundamentally pledges allegiance to freedom, equality, and the happy, smiling ideal of being a good neighbor. We may eat different foods, or attend different houses of worship, or wear different clothes, or make sure to marry within different demographics, but at the end of the day, we’re all the same.
The upside of watching Muslims line up to endorse and vote for Trump is that we can say good-bye and good riddance to both of these delusions. Continue reading
صُمٌّ بُكْمٌ عُمْيٌ فَهُمْ لَا يَرْجِعُونَ
It’s sad that it takes a murtad to detect a kaffir, but here we are. Consider this post a fatwa for takfir–my second one aimed at this ludicrous individual. Any faith community that would own such a person deserves him. But a faith community that fails to repudiate him comes close to owning him by default.
Bad enough to be a homophobe, but this is a person who prioritizes gay bashing over Gaza. There’s a separate post to be written on the problem of homophobia in the Islamic world, but I’ll save that for another day. Not much needs to be said here. Either you get it, or you don’t.
Continue readingA World of Tears
Back in August, I posted a message here from a friend in the southern West Bank about an Israeli ultimatum to the inhabitants of his village to flee their village or be killed. Though the noose is slowly but surely tightening around their village, and around the West Bank itself, the threatened expulsion has yet to take place, at least within that particular village. Hundreds of people have been expelled from their homes in the West Bank in various discrete expulsions over the last few months, but so far, there’s been no mass expulsion. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 