Let’s do some conceptual housecleaning. Having a purpose and having a reason are two different things. The terrorist has a purpose in mind. He’s trying to change a government’s behaviour, whereas the reason someone goes postal is that he’s angry…. Read More ›
terrorism
HOW TO GIVE PEACE A CHANCE
Try as it might, no constitution can include a mechanism for its own suspension, since if that mechanism were invoked it would have been constitutional to do so. That’s just a matter of logic. By contrast it’s not strictly speaking… Read More ›
“YES, BUT WHERE ARE YOU REALLY FROM?”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, arguably the most insightful philosopher of the 20th Century, made the following seemingly paradoxical (but now considered banal) observation. Pretty much everything makes sense until we try to make sense of it. So we’d have been just fine… Read More ›
UVALDE
At the risk of trivialising the death of those kids and their teachers in the latest spate of school shootings, I guess I am going to trivialise the death of those kids and their teachers in the latest spate of… Read More ›
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, IS WRONG WITH GENOCIDE?
— for presentation on October 7, 2009, and again on October 4, 2012, for the Liberal Education Capstone course on genocide —
HOW TO BE A MORE EFFECTIVE TERRORIST – LESSON SIX
PICKING THE RIGHT TARGET I’m on record of having suggested that the targeting of the Twin Towers, though not bad, could have been better. This is because much if not most of Main Street sheds only crocodile tears when Wall… Read More ›
HOW TO BE A MORE EFFECTIVE TERRORIST – LESSON FIVE
THE DIRECT APPROACH In Lesson One we asked under what conditions terrorism might be justified, and we concluded that there are no conditions under which it’s not. This is because justification in a state of war is what, were he… Read More ›
HOW TO BE A MORE EFFECTIVE TERRORIST – LESSONS ONE THRU THREE
LESSON ONE: THE DEFENCE OF TERRORISM The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. I’m just as clever. I titled this paper so that whatever censors might be out there would think it’s obviously… Read More ›
TRUTHS THAT DON’T BEAR SAYING
When I die, and if I’m remembered at all, it’ll probably be as that misanthropic bastard who authored that scurrilous piece of shite entitled “A Defense of Terrorism.” Sound as it is, I won’t be remembered for the argument. Rather… Read More ›
DOMESTIC TERRORISM
From the beaches of Normandy to the German surrender ten months later, my father’s job was to align the turrets of hundreds of artillery pieces for the saturation shelling of the stretch about a kilometer to about three kilometers still… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 