Just to state the painfully obvious: The “Signalgate” controversy broke this past Monday, March 24th. It’s now Friday, so five full days have gone by since it began. In five days, I think it’s safe to say that 99.44% of mainstream discussion on this controversy has focused on the Trump Administration’s inappropriately having used Signal to discuss war plans, stupidly having mistakenly put Jeffrey Goldberg on the chat, and then immorally having lied about it. Not even 1% of the remainder has focused on any deeper question of moral substance: Why are we bombing Yemen? Is it justifiable to do so? Continue reading
Tag Archives: genocide
Character-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
Thy Kingdom’s Will Be Done
I had a conversation the other day with a woman associated with a very liberal Protestant church who’d been organizing a charitable event for Gaza. The event was a dinner intended to raise money for a well-known medical relief organization. The event was a success, but she told me with chagrin that she had to be careful to advertise it in such a way as to avoid mentioning it to those members of the congregation who might have objected.
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Policy of Truth 