Had Rudolf Carnap been around today, he’d have pointed out that “x lives matter” is not a well-formed formula. Well-formedness requires that “x lives matter to some y”. And at that, perhaps only at some time t, and only under… Read More ›
Everything You Wanted to Know About What’s Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask
POLICING 101
Poor people don’t have a lot. If they did, they wouldn’t be poor. As a result, their need to protect what little they have is greater than the need of those who have more to protect what they have. This… Read More ›
THE BOUNTY STORY
During the 1980s, the U.S. financed, armed, and trained the Mujahideen in what proved to be their successful campaign to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. In other words, they paid the Mujahideen to kill Soviet soldiers. The Taliban, which… Read More ›
THE NO PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE MANTRA
I wouldn’t have thought it necessary to weigh in on the civil unrest sweeping across the U.S., and now across the entire western world. I’d have thought it almost analytic that people who are pissed off, and are taking their… Read More ›
GENDER DYSPHORIA
A few years back the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia published a paper by Rebecca Tuvel in which she wondered, if one can be trans-gendered, why not trans-racial? So one has to either deny one can be trans-gendered, or else deny that… Read More ›
DOGWHISTLING
If I ask whether the blind date you’re setting me up with is good looking, and you answer that she has a wonderful personality, you’re not just saying something about her personality. Likewise, then, no one denies that all lives… Read More ›
HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE
Let me give you a heads up. Whatever you’re most sensitive about, I’m probably going to be insensitive to it. This is regrettable, by which is meant it’s able to be regretted, but apparently not by me. Here I offer just… Read More ›
WHY I’M AN ANTI-ANTI-RACIST
Look, people, it’s not rocket science. Just as we humans know that dogs come in different shapes and sizes and colours, dogs know that humans come in different shapes and sizes and colours. But they don’t think to sort us… Read More ›
INDIGENOUS EXCEPTIONALISM
In early May of 1463, a full twenty-nine years before Columbus ‘discovered’ what was to the Europeans the ‘new world’, a boatload of Mi’kmaq from what is now Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, set sail – actually they rowed… Read More ›
DEFUNDING THE POLICE
There’s a movement afoot in America, one that predates the current fuss over the George Floyd killing, to defund the police, if not entirely then certainly by some amount in excess of just a little. If we want to reduce… Read More ›