Syntactically, Black Lives Matter is a complete sentence in English, but it’s only (what Rudolf Carnap has called) a pseudo-sentence. It’s not a real sentence because mattering is a two-place relation. If something is to matter, it has to matter… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
WHY PHILOSOPHY MATTERS
When people say, “The time has come to …”, what they’re implying is that until now it hadn’t. Come, that is. So apparently sexual violence was okay until this morning. The rote politician response to a tragedy is, “Our hearts… Read More ›
MY RACIST BONA FIDES
If I’m going to be a racist – and yer damn rights I am! – I want to establish my bona fides. This is going to take some work. So bear with me. To start, full disclosure: Back in the… Read More ›
MY WIFE IS SCARY
My wife is an inveterate researcher. She hears about something and then can’t stop herself from heading head down down the rabbit hole. This morning it was broody hens. Huh? Why? Because she immediately had a suspicion that the phenomenon… Read More ›
UKRAINE AND IRAN
The offensive with which the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, would have ended the matter had the attack not petered out within days. Was it poor planning by the Russian command, or pure brilliance by the… Read More ›
FROM THE MINDLESS MANTRA FILES: DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH
Diversity is our strength. Well yeah, if we’re talking about an evolutionary strategy for the perdurance of a species. And yeah, to some extent if we’re talking about the perdurance of a polity. We need some people who are good… Read More ›
WHITE SUPREMACY REINTERPRETED
Hate speech and hate crime have nothing to do with hate. So since words no longer have to mean what they intuitively do, let’s take a look at white supremacy. Does a white supremacist have to believe that whites are… Read More ›
REPLY TO BOGHOSSIAN
See, Why I’m a Progressive, Peter Boghossian, Substack, Sep 17, 2026. Millions of people in Africa and South Asia want a better life – in some cases even just a slightly safer one – and so they do what they… Read More ›
OF MIGRANTS AND CELL PHONES
In the so-called First World we went from letter writing to land lines and thence to cell phones. In the so-called Third World they skipped the land lines. So on the news we see desperate young men from North Africa… Read More ›
TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE
If it were true that “There are only two kinds of people in the world,” then everyone of the one kind would be qualitatively identical to everyone else of the same kind. Well, apart from identical newborn twins and everyone… Read More ›
