Academics sometimes use words in ways that may not correspond to how they’re used among the hoi polloi. For example, I’d have thought that to discriminate means to ascertain a difference and act accordingly. But among the unwashed it means… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
THE UNIVERSITY’S SEXUAL VIOLENCE POLICY
I’ve just had the opportunity to read the University of Lethbridge’s recently adopted Revised Sexual Violence Policy. On the one hand I’m bound, by what I’m supposed to do for a living, to point out in what respects it’s a… Read More ›
RAPE CULTURE
Apparently there’s something called ‘rape culture’. I wouldn’t have guessed that. Having specialized in the Philosophy of War, I’d have thought rape was pretty much endemic to the human species. In fact isn’t there a biologist, Randy Thornhill, and an… Read More ›
AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING TRANSPHOBIC …
Apart from the half dozen things I do care about – and for aught I know I’m the only one who does – I pretty much live in my own little world. My wife, by contrast, researches everything. She even… Read More ›
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO AGW DENIAL
ABSTRACT: Of the things I care least about, AGW is in a dead heat with what really happened on 9/11. But because, as George W. Bush put it, either you’re with the terrorists or you’re against them, I think I’d rather… Read More ›
AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING RACIST …
Let’s not quibble about whether they came across the Bering Strait or miraculously burst into being sui generis. Let’s just say that those who descended from those who could be found in the Western Hemisphere prior to 1492 shall be… Read More ›
SARAH BRAASCH AND THE BURQA BAN
Sarah Braasch, bless her cotton socks, is the self-styled social justice warrior who recently got herself driven out of a doctoral program at Yale by her pitchfork-wielding fellow students, and brutally pummeled in social media, for having called the cops… Read More ›
THE MONUMENTAL CRISIS
The recent spate of monument toppling in America – which has just recently made its way up into Canada – has rendered a long-standing question in social and political philosophy just a tad more urgent. What are we to do… Read More ›
OF CRIMES BY ASSOCIATION WITH CRIMES
Definitive of the Millian liberalism to which most of us purport to subscribe is the view that a) all is permitted save what is prohibited, and that b) a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition of some behavior being justifiably prohibited is… Read More ›
FAKE NEWS
What Donald Trump means by fake news is not the reporting of what’s materially false. It’s the reporting as true what only could be true. It could be true – because it would be perfectly understandable if it were –… Read More ›