The Sooty Empiric

 A Satire upon the Recent "Resolution" of Conflict by Tena Thau It is often argued that reparations should be provided to the victims of past injustices. Reparations can take many forms, but they are typically thought to include some form of financial compensation, and an acknowledgement and apology for harm that has been done. But there may be an even better response to historical injustice than reparations—reparsanctions: imposing economic sanctions on the group of people to whom reparations are owed. This is the US government’s current policy vis-à-vis the people of Afghanistan, and in this essay, I’ll offer an elucidation and defence of the idea. But let’s start with a little background first. After the 9-11 attacks, the Bush administration chose to respond, not by going after the individual perpetrators and bringing them to justice (Evangelista, 2011), but by launching a global “War on Terror”, which has killed an estimated 897,000-929,000 people to date (Brown Costs of ...

This is one of those posts I write because I so often find myself making the point that I should like to be able to just have it all written out and available to point to. It concerns a genre of article, tweet, opinion, argument… I often encounter in many different spheres. As ever, I won’t give negative examples, so if this doesn’t resonate with you presumably we have just had different experiences and you may go on your way in the peace of the Lord.  The genre I am concerned with is: people imploring leftists to speak and act in a fashion that is less off putting to the uninitiated. It’s sort of a genre of respectability politics, but lacks the full connotations of that. It’s more just that, say, abolition of the nuclear family is a very unpopular position, so if you lead with a bunch of harsh condemnations of nuclear families as a mode of child rearing you are certainly going to code yourself as non serious or even scary to many listeners. Likewise the left is much more likely t...

Today's post is about a thing that frequently makes me angry. This particular blog post is sparked by this  piece on the breakdown of a dispute resolution process in a chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's worth reading the write up and reflecting on it. But that was just the catalyst for posting, and the thoughts stand or fall entirely independently of what one thinks of that case. Finally, as ever, I have a policy of not linking to negative exemplars. (In fact I think I will just moderate away comments on this post since I don't really want discussion of instances.) If you don't think I am picking up on real dynamics in this post so be it, we'll just have to pin it down to different life experiences. I have often witnessed the following combination of characteristics in a person or organisation on the left, specifically those from (or drawing heavily from) the professional middle classes. First, re the justice system a commitment to restorative jus...

  Those of us in the contemporary academy who are not liberals ought given an account of why not. This asymmetric burden falls on us because the presumption is so strongly that one does fit within the broad confines of liberalism that if one does not explicitly identify out, and explain why one has done so, then two things are may occur. First, people may reasonably presume on statistical grounds that your politics are as such and engage with you with this in mind. This will make intellectual back and forth, the lifeblood of our profession, frustratingly congealed — always having to go back and check unstated presuppositions half way through a conversation, never getting to the meat of things. Second, one allows whatever thinking one does to accrue to the greater glory of an ideology you reject. Since the natural presupposition is that whatever insights you achieve have been achieved through the lens of liberal ideology, it will seem that whatever is good in your work is evidence t...

Hegel famously said that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought. Now in the context of his particular system this actually has quite a specific meaning, concerning the relationship between conceptual and social development. But let's riff off it a bit, and consider it more just as a sort of slogan to undergird what was once called "philosophy of culture". Today's blog post is my ode to philosophy of culture, musings on the plausibility of its central presupposition and what it might look like today. I'm not really going to do any philosophy of culture in this blog post, just point to examples, summarise what I take to be an emerging overall picture therefrom, and suggest a line of future inquiry. We live in a society. What I mean by philosophy of culture is the attempt to draw out, clearly express, and expose to critique, the ideas underlying a given culture or mode of life. The core presupposition is that such a set of ideas exists. It is not after al...

 Guest post by Rose Novick Since a wariness of meritocracy is an ongoing concern here at The Sooty Empiric I was excited to hear that my friend Rose had written a short essay on the problem of merit in the Aeneid . I hadn't yet had a classics take on the matter, I was intrigued! And indeed it did not disappoint - the pagan rationalisation of cruel chance, the arbitrary anarchy of events that decides the course of our lives, is a wonderful expression of just that which makes achieving meritocracy so difficult. Since Rose graciously allowed me to post her essay here, without further ado here's her piece The Frailty of Merit . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It is in Vergil’s world of incessant divine interference that the problem of induction becomes most acute. Here, even the most securely established regularity may ...