Tag Archives: crime

UHC, Denials, and Wrongful Death Revisited

Posted on by under EVS Journal, Health Care Series, moralism

The questions you ask determine the answers you get. If you ask the right questions, you have some hope of reaching the right answers. If you ask the wrong ones, you’ll likely reach the wrong answers. If you give up on asking, you get nothing but what you started with, so that if you begin in ignorance, you end there.

The debate about the killing of Brian Thompson threatens to begin and end either in misdirection or reinforced ignorance or both. Stuck between two competing brands of outrage–one exulting in Thompson’s death, the other outraged at the exultation–we’re in danger of losing the denials/reimbursement plot altogether. I know I’ve posted on this issue already, but think I’ve found a better way of saying what I was trying to say in that post, one that does a better job of asking the right questions than my last post did.* So here is UHC, Denials, and Death, Take 2. Continue reading →

No Tears for Zvi Kogan

Posted on by under Palestine

If you look at virtually any mainstream media outlet this morning (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Forward, Fox News, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, etc.), you’re likely to encounter a story about the “murder” of one Rabbi Zvi Kogan in Dubai. Apparently, Kogan was abducted on Thursday and killed sometime between then and now. His body was found early this morning, Dubai time. Every “Western” outlet I’ve looked at his played this story in an identical way, one that essentially follows the PR line of the Israeli government: Kogan was a rabbi, a man of religion and peace. He was in Dubai to do outreach work on behalf of Israel–hence The Jewish People–to the Arab world. For this the good man was slain. His murder was a vile act of anti-Semitic terrorism, and that’s all it was. Let us all condemn the act, and let us all weep for the loss of the deceased, an innocent civilian lost to the murderous Jew haters of the Arab world. Continue reading →

Force and Fraud on Campus

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

So much falsehood has been offered up in the last seven months that it seems futile to single out a discrete claim as a particularly egregious example that absolutely demands rebuttal. But one claim happens to combine egregiousness, absurdity, and in my case, proximity in space and time, in a way that really does demand a response. 

I’m sure most readers are aware of the recent demonstrations on college campuses in defense of Palestinian rights. I happen to live in Princeton, New Jersey, not far from Princeton University, and have visited Princeton’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment a dozen times in the last six days. Two students were arrested on campus on Thursday, April 25th, and thirteen were arrested on Monday, April 29th, for a total of fifteen arrests. Continue reading →

“First They Came for the Professors…”

Posted on by under cancel culture, moralism, Palestine

“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.”

Ironically, Emory University’s Caroline Fohlin specializes in the political economy of early twentieth century Germany. You can’t make shit like that up, but her arrest does starkly raise the question posed by Jason Brennan’s valuable book, When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice (Princeton, 2018): when, exactly, does it become legitimate to fight back? And how? Those aren’t rhetorical questions, and the answers don’t involve an infinite regress. Individual human beings have a right of self-defense, after all. Believe it or not, that right isn’t just the monopoly of Jewish States.

Continue reading →

From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza

Posted on by under Palestine

Blood on all our hands
We cannot hope to wash them clean
History is mystery
Do you know what it means?
Motorhead, “Brotherhood of Man“

In an earlier post, I wrote:

Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next full year, from now until the beginning of November 2024.

That “extraordinary event” is here. Israel’s open, unapologetic attacks on the medical system of both Gaza and the West Bank are a conclusive indication that we’ve reached a macabre turning point in this “war.” Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (6): Awaiting a Verdict

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

Over a decade ago, I was given a ticket for a moving violation. I thought I was innocent, so I demanded a trial. I showed up in court on the relevant day, and went out of my way to construct what I regarded as a cogent defense based on the law. Most of it was disallowed as “irrelevant” by a judge who insisted that I was guilty because most people accused of my infraction were: why think I was any different? Having made my presentation, the judge asked whether I had any more to say. No, I replied, but I had some visuals–some photographs–to support my case. The introduction of the photos was disallowed on the grounds that I had failed to “introduce them into evidence” at the outset. And that was that. Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (3): The Hayden Report

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

In two previous posts (here and here), I’ve made reference to the report by police tactical expert Philip Hayden as the best written account of the events relevant to Scot Peterson’s actions at the Parkland Shooting. In the just previous-post, I raised some provisos and reservations about Hayden’s report, but (apart from Appendix A) those are all matters of omission and incompleteness, not of disagreement with anything Hayden says in the report. In fact, I fully agree with the contents of the report. I received the report in the form of two PDFs. Here is the first one, which I’ve called “Hayden 1,” about 53 pages long, and here is the second, which I’ve called “Hayden 2,” about 17 pages long.*

I highly suggest that anyone interested in this topic read the whole report in its entirety, from beginning to end. It’s somewhat long, about 41 single-spaced pages of text, and another five pages of appendices. But every sentence is worth reading. Continue reading →

The Parkland Trial (1): In Defense of Scot Peterson

Posted on by under The Parkland Shooting

Since 2018, I’ve written ten posts here questioning the mainstream narrative on the so-called Parkland shooting–that is, the shooting, by Nikolas Cruz, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018.* The shooting left seventeen dead and seventeen injured. Cruz was arrested on the day of the shooting, charged with the murders, then tried and convicted, and eventually sentenced to life in prison. The shooting gave rise to a widely-publicized student movement in favor of gun control. Continue reading →

Me and Bobby Anzilotti

Posted on by under slices of life

About six years ago, in the fall of 2017, someone at Felician University called the local police to report that a member of the faculty, one Irfan Khawaja, had threatened to bring firearms to a faculty meeting later that day, with the intention of shooting it up and killing everyone there.

Soon after teaching my first class that morning, I was detained on campus by the police and taken to the police station, where I was questioned by Vincent “Vinnie” Quattrone, then the Chief of Police. Having gotten nowhere with me–I doggedly remained silent under questioning–Quattrone brought in the “big guns,” detectives from the Bergen County Prosecutors Office (BCPO) in nearby Hackensack, New Jersey. Continue reading →

Davenport on Guns: The “Endless Arms Race”

Posted on by under Uncategorized

John Davenport has a piece on gun violence and gun regulation in Salon, “An endless arms race: How to fight the NRA’s absurd solution to mass shootings.”

As we celebrated Independence Day, there was no independence from the scourge of gun violence and the toll it is taking on the American psyche. The shooter who attacked a parade in Highland Park, Illinois, killing six people and wounding at least 38 others, used a “high-powered rifle,” according to authorities. Survivors report a rain of bullets at the height of the attack.

This attack is bound to renew calls for more “red flag” laws that would help identify and disarm emotionally or mentally unstable persons who are making threats of gun violence or praising mass murderers. But would the Highland Park shooter’s online record of participating in “death fetish” culture sites and making art featuring mass killing have been enough for a judge to order seizure of his guns?