There are no Italian restaurants in Italy. They’re just restaurants. Similarly, until the late Sixties there was no ‘conservative’ radio. There was just radio. The conservative media became ‘conservative’ only when the mainstream turned to the left. As a result,… Read More ›
Anti-Semitism
THE HARMS RACE
According to John Stuart Mill, in a liberal democracy all is permitted save what is prohibited. And what can be prohibited must be demonstrably harmful. But what’s meant by harm? It can’t be just a setback of interests. Your opening… Read More ›
THE PLIGHT OF THE ANTI-SEMITIC SEMITE
Down the hall in the English Department, we have an otherwise highly respected colleague who believes, and I quote, that “Any criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitism.” I take this to mean that if the Israelis decided to… Read More ›
TRAVIS PATRON AND BERNIE FARBER
The application of Travis Patron’s newly minted Canadian National Party for tax-deductibility status, and the opposition to that status from Bernie Farber’s Canadian Anti-Hate Network, is the perfect test-case for just how far the rest of us are prepared to… Read More ›
AN OPEN LETTER TO MY AS-YET-UNINITIATED STUDENTS
Some university administrators, and a few of my colleagues, want to offer you a babysitting service, not for your children but for yourselves. And some of you got so used to it in high school that you want to be… Read More ›
CAUSE FOR CANONIZATION – PIUS XII AND THE CURA
Let’s start with a little Hohfeldian housekeeping. Arguably there’s no such thing as a duty to defend oneself from injury. But no one, save the most bone-headed pacifist, would deny one has a right to defend himself, to defend himself… 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 ›
DON QUIXOTE’S BLESSING
Why is it that some truths have to be learned over and over and over again? I suppose it’s because they’re just too hard to believe. I learned about fifteen years ago that many of the people I work with… Read More ›
THE HAIDT HYPOTHESIS
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, quite convincingly, that a university can dedicate itself to the search for truth, or to the promotion of social justice, but not both. Truth and justice are seldom about the same thing. But when… Read More ›
THE TONY HALL CASE REVISITED
I made a stab at this in my blog in an earlier post entitled “Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism”. Since that post, an internal investigation of an internal complaint against Tony Hall has exonerated him, and the Administration’s complaint against him… Read More ›
