Just a quick announcement for anyone inclined to attend the APA Eastern Division meeting this year. The Molinari Society is organizing a session, care of Roderick Long (Auburn University), on “False Alternatives in the Politics of Knowledge.” The session is G3A, on Wednesday, January 8, 2025, 4-5:50 pm (room TBA) with presentations by Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society) and myself. The meeting is being held at the Sheraton New York Times Square, 811 7th Ave at 53rd St. Attendance, as usual, requires registration and payment of the registration fee. Cory’s presentation is called “Between Convergence and Conspiracy.” Mine is “Between Indoctrination and False Neutrality: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” a now unrecognizable version of this post from nine years ago. Roderick will be commenting. Continue reading
Niccolò’s Smile
My barber is a twenty-something Jersey girl from “down the shore.” A conversation:
Her: So you doin’ anything fun this weekend?
Me: Well, I’m finishing up a presentation I’m giving this week.
Her (pause): Oh. (pause). That should be fun. (pause). What’s it about?
Me: Machiavelli.
Her: What’s that?
Fajr Scientific Banned from Gaza
Two weeks ago, I posted here on Fajr Scientific’s Gaza Medical Evacuation Initiative. I’ve just learned that the initiative has been canceled, as the Israeli government has now banned Fajr from operating in Gaza. This decision comes a few weeks after the release, by 99 physicians associated with Fajr and similar medical organizations, of an Open Letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, providing medical testimony and forensic evidence that the Israeli military had, among other things, been executing Gazan children by shooting them directly in the head and chest.
From the letter (bold type in original):
Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.
Here is the appendix to the letter. This article contains images of X-rays showing bullets lodged in children’s heads and throat (the trajectory in the latter case being through the forehead). Here’s a link to The New York Times essay discussing the evidence (may be paywalled). Continue reading
Mishra and Rhodes on the Anti-War Movement
I attended a webinar the other night with the journalists Pankaj Mishra and Ben Rhodes on “Gaza, Israel, and the American Left,” organized by The New York Review of Books. Since the anti-war movement came up during the talk, I asked Mishra and Rhodes if they had any advice to offer the movement. To my surprise, both claimed not to, on the grounds that it would be “presumptuous” of them to do so. It struck me as a pretty odd thing to say. Here were two world-class journalists who’d just spent the previous hour offering up advice to the world’s most powerful governments. Rhodes, in fact, isn’t just a journalist, but was Deputy National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. And here they were, for all that worldly wisdom, expressing timidity about the prospect of giving advice to a bunch of college students and faculty. Continue reading
“Titanic Malice” Revisited
In a post I wrote here back on July 18, 2023, I argued that the Titan submersible accident was “diagnostic of the delusions of our society.” Here’s the first paragraph of the post, emphasis added:
The response to the Titan submersible event has, in my view, been both remarkable and bizarre. Some people have found it an occasion for gallows humor; others have tried to suggest that the crew/passengers felt no suffering as they died. Still others tell us that we should celebrate the heroism of people who take risks to explore the unknown, and point out that civilization itself depends on its bold risk takers. I find all three of these reactions delusional, and diagnostic of the delusions of our society.
It turns out that I was wrong (or likely wrong) about the italicized clause, and that David Potts, who commented on the post, was right. Continue reading
No One is to Advocate Anything Until I Blow This Whistle
The New York Times has a click-baitish headline about Hamas on the front page, except that unlike most click-bait headlines, this one happens both to be click-bait and true.
“Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas”
It’s true. They do. Of course, at this point, a headline like that is a bit like one ca. 1943 that said:
“Pro-Jewish Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Stalin’s Red Army”
Or, how about, ca. 1944: Continue reading
“Sick of the Bullshit”
It’s ordinarily a violation of the ethics of discourse to use the question-and-answer period of a talk to make a speech rather than ask a bona fide question. A question is a request for information. A request can, as a condition of its intelligibility, require a brief clarification or bit of context-setting, but there’s a difference between that and a speech.
However, most norms, no matter how stringent, have exceptions. What if, day after day–hundreds or thousands of times across a solid year–the spokesperson for a person in authority engages questioners in egregious, obvious bad faith? What if, day after day, he tells smirking lies about life and death matters, makes up random bullshit at will, and evades the meaning of obvious questions in order to serve up whole stinking, decaying schools of red herrings? What if his bosses are concealing complicity in mass murder, and are about to lead the country into an insane, ill-conceived war (the second one in the last few years), not just on behalf of their own country, but on behalf of a foreign country? Continue reading
Every Life, A Universe
Firestone Plaza, Princeton University
Vote Like It Matters
It’s become a cliché of philosophical commentary on the ethics of voting that voting is prima facie irrational. If you vote as an individual, your vote represents a mere 1/n of the totality of the election, where n represents the total number of voters in the election. If we consider, say, national elections in the United States, then n will be a very large number. Since it is, 1/n represents a tiny number. The tiny number represents a given individual’s contribution to the overall electoral result, the implication being that each individual’s contribution is, qua individual, de minimis. It’s so small that it seems irrational to bother with it. The effort you put in is not worth the result that comes out. Continue reading
Arrested Princeton Students’ Statement on Court Appearance
Princeton, New Jersey
5 months ago, 15 of us were arrested for protesting the University’s complicity in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. 2 of us—both graduate students—were arrested on the 25th of April minutes after the launch of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 13 of us—Princeton students, researchers, and affiliates—were arrested on the 29th of April for participating in a peaceful protest in a University administrative building. At the time of our arrests, the university barred us from campus and evicted us from university housing, all without formal disciplinary charges. Weeks later, the university conducted a “disciplinary investigation” and sanctioned us with four years of disciplinary probation. One of us, postdoctoral researcher Sam Nastaste, remains barred from campus. These measures are far harsher than Princeton’s response to previous campus protests.
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 