The way to test your argument for validity is what we might call the that’s-like-saying test. You give me your argument, I provide an analogous argument – analogous in the sense of sharing what we call your argument’s argument form… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
HOW TO MAKE WHITE LIVES MATTER
Now that Asian Lives Matter has eclipsed the Black Lives Matter movement, if only for a week or two, I wonder what it’ll take to get a White Lives Matter movement off the ground. Probably some black man walking into… Read More ›
ONE DAY IN AN ESL CLASS
Teacher: Okay class, that’s it for today. Oh, and one last thing. Never use the n-word.Student: What’s the n-word?Teacher: I’m not allowed to say.Student: Huh?! Uh, can you at least tell us how it’s used?Teacher: Sure. It’s the offensive word… Read More ›
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
Okay, Ms Snowflake, we could go back to arranged marriages, but I’m guessing you don’t want to do that. So in the post-patriarchal world, how exactly are men and women – or men and men, or women and women –… Read More ›
TAKING THE REVERSE OUT OF REVERSE DISCRIMINATION
Suppose I’m a black woman who’s just been denied a job, or accommodation, or whatever, because I’m a black woman, notwithstanding that most of my black brothers and sisters are not being denied these things, at least in the community… Read More ›
REQUIEM FOR THE UNIVERSITY
Universities are like any other institution. They evolve, they devolve. Sometimes they rise out of the ashes, and sometimes they go the way of the dodo bird. But they always morph. So though I’ve recently come to co-awfulise with my… Read More ›
ADMINSPEAK
Had we been able to complete the tower we’d have been up there to take Him on face to face. And so to prevent this – He’s a jealous god, remember – He broke us up into different languages, so… Read More ›
PREEMPTIVE INSURGENCY
I’ve made no secret elsewhere – but so far not on this blog – of what I take to be the driver of both our moral dispositions and our political arrangements. It is, as Thomas Hobbes argued, the wherewithal to… Read More ›
HOMEWARD BOUND
If someone had told us we were crossing from one continent to another, we wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. We were just following the Antlers, as we’d done for as long as I or anyone else could… Read More ›
A DEFENCE OF RAPE AND SLAVERY
Each of us has two parents. Each of them has two. So we have four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great great grandparents, and so on. So we’d only have to go back ten generations to meet our thousand ancestors… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 