politics

Sixth Amendment, Unfunded

This is just a short post motivated by my #BlackLivesMatter Reading Group session yesterday, where we discussed Albert Samaha‘s excellent essay “Indefensible: The Story of New Orleans’ Public Defenders.”  I thought I was long past being shocked by anything

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The Wired Election, Part 3: “A Man Got To Have A Code.”

[This is the third installment of my series The Wired Election, employing insights gained from HBO television series The Wire to interpret 2016 Presidential election campaign events, persons and states of affair. The cheese stands alone.]

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Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

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Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

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The Academy Doesn’t Need a Civility Code. It Needs a Hostility Code.

Fair warning: what follows will assume the arguments I’ve already made against the advisability of “civility/collegiality” codes in academia here and here. Read those first.  Second fair warning:  there’s a lot to read herein before you get to my advocacy of a “hostility code.” Be patient, grasshoppers. My general blogging habit inclines me toward what…

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Three Non-Softball Questions for Charles Mills: Marxism, Racial Liberalism and Being “Lost in Rawlsland”

I want to state for the record, right here at the start, that there is quite simply no other LIVING philosopher who has been more influential on my own work or thinking than Charles Mills.  (I emphasize “living” as a perfunctory caveat, only because both Derrida and Rawls died during my lifetime as a professional Philosopher.)  Over the last decade, I’ve…

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Trolleys, Fat Men and Drones

Just a random”Philosophy pedagogy” insight today: I’m teaching three sections of a course entitled “Contemporary Moral Problems” at Christian Brothers University this term, which is more or less CBU’s version of  “Intro to Ethics.”  As I’ve done in all of my past Ethics courses, I spend the second day of class leading students through a…

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Dr. J’s 2013 Year in Politics

It’s time for the next installment of my 2013 Year in Review Lists: the 2013 Year in Politics. Each December that I do this, it gets increasingly difficult to distinguish between the stories that properly belong on this list and those that fit more comfortably on the Year in Pop Culture list, which says something…

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The Problem With Echo Chambers

Here’s one thing I will presume that we can all agree upon: every single one of us likes to have our views, positions, arguments and preferences confirmed by others.  (If you don’t, then those aren’t your views, positions, arguments or preferences in any really defensible sense, are they?)  Of course, because we live in a…

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Female Brains Are Prettier, More Fun At Parties, Less Tasty

I almost titled this “Once More Into The Breach, Part Deux” in reference to my Once More Into The Breach, Dear Friends post from last week, which criticized the way in which conversations about gender disparity in professional Philosophy continue to be framed by concept-distorting and argument-disfiguring gender essentialism.  My targets today are not “philosophers”…

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