Category: Uncategorized
-
Law Enforcement in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff’s deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution: “…until you sign that form, its fixin to get…
-
Refugee Life
“We must… build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” (Giorgio Agamben) If the nation-state is in decline, it is principally because the nation-form, that coalition of fellow natives born of common blood and soil has given way to the denizen-foreigner: the resident-alien who through dint of illegal…
-
Sex and Judgment
So in the last post, I showed how the initial versions of Christian judgment were remarkably modest and fallibilist with regard to other people. This makes a certain amount of sense, since Augustine was attached to a fairly rationalist theology, and always gave both doctrinal and basically ethical reasons for his judgments. (For instance, with…
-
After Phronesis
In the Confessions, Augustine argues that the capacity to judge is a capacity only available to those who have come to know God: “… we become new men in the image of our Creator. We gain spiritual gifts and can scrutinize everything—everything, that is, which is right for us to judge—without being subject, ourselves, to…
-
Law and War: Denouement
This guy has summarized the legal case against the war. So I don’t have to. I tend to be more partial to the second half of the argument, which shows that we continue to wage the war illegally, than any claims about legal declarations (or non-declarations that involve the inception of active hostilities) of war.…
-
Law and War
In the wake of Kendall-Smith’s conviction, it seems as if the question of legality will again go underground. We can reasonably ask, as Antoinette does, “Why should we worry about legality when there’s a political solution available?” Protest politics need not trouble itself with the weak fictions of international law, we might argue, since the…
-
Kendall-Smith and Kant: Can the Critique of Practical Reason make you ethical?
Ever since Adolf Eichmann pretended that Kant’s theory of ethics could be used to defend his actions, I’ve wondered whether moral philosophers really have any tendency to be better people, or to live better lives. As Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “He did his duty… he not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed…
-
News in Review
Silly of me to post without checking out the breaking Sunday stories. WaPo has the US planning airstrikes on Iran. If this was Martin Sheen’s White House, I’d know the story was coming while Stealth bombers flew towards their targets, and that Monday’s news wouldn’t be about planning the strikes, but about their effects. I…
-
White Men and Victimhood
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a number of people about the supposed ‘plight’ of the well-educated white male. We’ve been searching for the non-existential root causes to the alienation that many left-leaning white men experience in US culture, especially the academy. The idea is that, while we are all human and troubled by…
-
Dom and I drop some more “science” on crime
Sentiments of Rationality is at it again. Dom seems to have convinced himself that conservatives are actually right about criminal justice, since they care about victims and safety more than liberals, and trust their authority figures. He goes on to suggest electric shocks in order to speed punishment and reduce incarceration time. Here’s the gist:…