Everywhere one looks, commentators are aghast at Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. But as usual when it comes to defense matters, everyone is wasting their energies on the wrong questions. Hegseth has become notorious for his view that women should not play combat roles in the US military. This pointless red herring has now become the centerpiece of opposition to him. How could he believe such a thing? How could he say it? What kind of cretin rejects the universal belief that women should serve in combat roles in the US military? Continue reading
Tag Archives: politics
No Tears for Zvi Kogan
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
No Questions, No Justice
I have no interest in professional sports, much less boxing, much less the life and times of Mike Tyson. So I have nothing of substance to say about his recent bout with Jake Paul or much of anything else about him, but I was stopped short by a sleeper of a Mike Tyson story, his interview with Jazlyn “Jazzy” Guerra, a thirteen-year-old online journalist (scroll all the way down for it). Continue reading
El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido
I encountered this rally purely by chance tonight at Hinds Plaza in Princeton, focused primarily on migrant rights. Short speeches in English and Spanish, then a quick march from Hinds Plaza to Palmer Square and back. Ran into a handful of Trump supporters who tried to drown us out with an infantile chant, but ignored them, yelled louder, and walked past.
Continue readingIt 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
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
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
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
Policy of Truth 