Today and tomorrow, student-workers are going on strike to protest unfair labor practices (ULPs) by the University of California after its administrators refused to meet their (very reasonable) bargaining demands and threatened union members who might participate in a strike. The UC Student-Workers Union, UAW Local 2865, represents over 12,000 graduate and undergraduate Academic Student Employees– all…
Read MoreI had the very good fortune to attend my first Spillit event last night in (local photographer/visual anthropologist, Jamie Harmon‘s) Amurica studio space. Spillit is one of the newer additions to what has become, over the last several years, an incredibly rich, astoundingly diverse, mostly DIY and impressively self-sustaining (for lack of a better descriptor)…
Read MoreThe news has just been released that Rev. Fred Phelps, founder and lifelong shepherd of the Westboro Baptist Church (in Topeka, Kansas) has died at the age of 84. I find it difficult, I confess, to summon the normal human compassion that usually accompanies news of another’s death in this case, largely because Phelps dedicated…
Read MoreLet’s face it: exercising solidarity is tricky business, not the least of which is because “solidarity” itself is a tricky concept, which requires the subordination of real differences (across a whole host of important categorical domains) for the sake of some particular common interest that might prioritize similitude– often for prudentially strategic reasons– over, across…
Read MoreAs some of you already know, I am also one of the bloggers at NewAPPS. I’m re-posting here a piece co-authored by Edward Kazaian and I that appeared this past Tuesday on NewAPPS. It’s generated a lot of conversation so far, and I’ll have a post forthcoming soon on my take on that conversation. What…
Read MoreToday, I begin my annual Year in Review lists for 2013. (If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can check out my past lists for the 2010 Year in Review, 2011 Year in Review and 2012 Year in Review.) I make several lists every December, but almost every year, the Music list is my favorite to compose. …
Read MoreI was recently asked by a colleague, Dr. Lisa Guenther (Philosophy, Vanderbilt University), to add my signature to an open letter to Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, petitioning him to suspend the scheduled execution of 10 inmates beginning in January. I agreed to lend my name to the petition alongside several others in a coalition named…
Read More[Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of the books in Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy, though I did see the first movie version of that trilogy (The Hunger Games) last year and I just saw the second film, currently out in theaters, Catching Fire. I’ll go ahead and stipulate that the books are probably…
Read MorePrompted by a recent piece on newAPPS, I’m (somewhat reluctantly) forced to acknowledge the renewed attention to a not-at-all-new phenomenon in the world of Philosophy over the last couple of years, namely, the dramatic under-representation of women in our profession. Here’s what you need to know up front, assuming that some of you readers are…
Read MoreLet me be clear at the outset: when I say that tolerance is not a virtue, I’m saying that as a philosopher for whom virtue has a conceptually substantive meaning. I do not mean to imply that tolerance is a vice, a claim to which I think no reasonable moral agent, and no philosopher worth…
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