Cure-alls and Remedies
Consider the collective horror, shame, and disgust we philosophers have at the abusive behavior of our fellow philosophers: think of what it means to be compared to Colin McGinn or Thomas Pogge. Why isn’t there that kind of horror, shame, and disgust among police officers at the drumbeat of police shootings?
Civic engagement folks need to talk about nationalist populism.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing drug markets, or even beating up your food truck competitors. But I find it strange when ordinary human behavior–often the laudatory kind that is responding to a larger abuse of power with small-scale violence–is pathologized by my fellow liberals who recognize the small-scale violence but ignore the larger abuses.
Whenever I teach an advanced class of thoughtful students, I like to offer a short retrospective at the end of the semester. I sit down without my notes or texts and try to makes sense of what we have done. Below, you’ll find the retrospective I shared on our last day. (As background, we read…
After the families of the victims of the Emanuel AME church shooting unilaterally forgave the shooter , I’ve been thinking again about forgiveness. (Some previous posts here .) In particular, I am wondering again about the relationship between theological and political forgiveness. The classic Enlightenment description of the duty to forgive is derived from the…
The New York Times has a story on the new CCRB report that includes data on the rise of proveable police deception: In New York, the number of false statements noted by the agency, while small, has grown in an age of easy and widespread video and audio recording by civilians. In 2014, the agency found…
Recently I’ve been thinking about a book by Erin McKenna which I read as an undergraduate: The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist and Feminist Perspective . I read it then because it promised to bridge the divide between my favorite genre, science-fiction, and my interest in philosophy. But the book profoundly changed me, and I’m…
It looks like I’ll be co-teaching a course on violence with Daniel Levine in the spring, and I have some questions: Is it just me, or do philosophers rarely talk about violence? We talk a lot about killing, and war, and punishment, and even torture. We talk about peace and non-violence. But “violence” doesn’t come…
I love policy discussions, but the demands for policy discussion on gun control after the shootings in Newtown today are terribly wrong-headed. The problem is that demanding a policy discussion is not the same thing as having a policy discussion. At this point, we’re just talking about talking about gun control. It’s all “mention” and…
Keith Humphreys shares this interview with Vanda Felbab-Brown . There are no dull moments, but here’s one I think should give us lefties pause: what will replace the underground marijuana economy? Felbab-Brown explains: Most of the time governments tend to fight illicit economies and not think about what will replace them. Policies are often premised…
[caption id=”attachment_3029″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] by Seany2000[/caption] Via Metafilter’s kliuless (who definitely has a kliu): The Conservative War on Prisons: “Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?” Raise The Crime Rate: “Statistics are…
Let me start with a correction. Anarchy isn’t really as interesting as you think it is. In fact, Anarchy is Boring : Figuring out how to run a sustainable anarchist household (that values time spent washing the dishes and time spent making money as a computer programmer equally) isn’t as headline-grabbing as a downtown smashup….
I tried to get tickets after I saw this New York Times piece , but no luck. “I am not throwing away my shot” is just an awesomely perfect refrain: it refers to ‘reserving and throwing away’ the shot in a pistol duel: deliberately firing into the ground in order to make a merely symbolic gesture…
What role does the critic play? Why do we need someone to stand between us and the art, analyzing, recommending, and denouncing? Why can’t we just have our own experience, unmediated by someone elses taste? In my last post , I managed to grab the attention of some folks in the sci-fi publishing world who…
I’ve been struggling to complete a blog entry on the recent trend towards experimental philosophy (X-Phi) for more than a week now. ( What’s X-Phi? , The New New Philosophy , Dr. J’s Take ) However, I’ve been trying to push some other writing out the door, and so it keeps taking a back seat….
In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio , the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States , where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained…
I’ve not seen much mention of one of the most important complaints about the FISA reauthorization: the claim made by Joseph P. Nacchio and Qwest Communication International that the Bush administration sought the power to engage in warrantless wiretapping in February of 2001 , seven months before the events of Semptember 11th and the Authorization…
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s…
“Quoting Madison or Tocqueville about how contemporary instituitions operate in 2006 has little more merit than reading sheep’s entrails.” There’s a quote that makes a civic republican like me sit up and take notice. While Madison and Toqueville could never have imagined today’s society, they pretty much told us what would go wrong with institutions…
The argument for a separate status for the mental extends ultimately to the claim that there is something it is like to hope, believe, or experience redly, and that this likeness is irreducible to any other form of explanation that depends only on third-person arguments. In one form, this can be seen in Frank Jackson’s…
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…
What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer , the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean…
A fellow PSU alumnus, Dom Eggert over at Sentiments of Rationality , has been worrying about those crazy South Dakotans’ test-ban on abortions. He cites the reluctance of conservatives to actually criminalize abortion in the way that seems consistent with their views, i.e. by charging mothers who seek abortions with murder. The upshot of the…
So, if the last post was all vitriol and false hope, today I want to focus on options. Specifically, what’s possible today that was unimaginable a century ago? 1. Communes without communal bathrooms. Look, the real problem with communism is that half of the population are slobs. Yet the appeal of the commune is the…