Twenty years ago, on January 11, 2002, the prison at Guantánamo Bay (GITMO) admitted its first round of post-9/11 terrorist suspects. Two recent films, The Mauritanian (2021) and The Forever Prisoner (2021), chart parts of the ugly history of the facility, during which acts of torture were rebranded by officials as “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) and inflicted on at least 119 of the 780 men held at GITMO over the course of the Global War on Terror. The story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was cleared for release in 2010 but remained incarcerated for another seven years as the Obama...
Is Virtue Signaling Vicious?
Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues...
The Gaslighting Government
The film Gaslight (1944), directed by George Cukor and starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, relays the story of a con artist, Sergis Bauer, who under the assumed name of Gregory Anton seduces and marries a young woman, Paula Alquist. The smitten bride has no idea that her charming husband murdered her aunt, Alice Alquist, who left behind a home in London where a cache of priceless jewels is stashed somewhere in the attic. The newlyweds move into the home, which Paula has inherited, and the husband proceeds to dig through the contents of the attic in an impassioned effort to locate the...
U.S. 5th Circuit Court sides with liberty, reaffirming stay against OSHA’s ETS
Hot off the press, here's some light legal reading from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court for everyone to enjoy this weekend. The clear concern with liberty expressed in this finding offers hope that sanity will eventually prevail against the Covid-19 hysterics and medical tyrants attempting to strip people of their bodily autonomy. https://dl.airtable.com/.attachments/db446ada300c17b1c8e3a6530561a46f/e7ff5065/BSTHoldingsvOSHAOrder.pdf
The Frances Haugen Insurgency
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen has taken the world by storm by stealing and sharing reams of company communications in which the social media giant’s cavalier attitudes toward a range of behaviors among its users are revealed. She compares what she regards as “the Facebook problem” with earlier corporate revelations in history which led to legislation regulating tobacco and automobile use, and she emphasizes that children are specifically at risk from the company’s policies. The disgruntled former employee also alleges that Facebook products—in particular, Instagram—harm young women...
The Meaning of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’
By now everyone is aware that “Let’s Go Brandon!” is code for “F*ck Joe Biden!” This linguistic innovation came about when a hapless NBC reporter told her audience that the members of a crowd shouting in unison were exuberantly expressing their enthusiasm for Brandon Brown upon his first career NASCAR Xfinity series victory at Talladega Superspeedway on October 2, 2021. In fact, the crowd was yelling “F*ck Joe Biden!” just as other crowds, at other sporting events, had been doing regularly over the summer of 2021. From the clip it is unclear whether the reporter is actually mishearing the...
RIP Colin Powell
Should Generals be Diplomats? "Retired General Colin Powell was appointed US Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, and you may recall his colorful powerpoint presentation before the UN General Assembly in the run-up to the 2003 war on Iraq—yellow cake, aluminium tubes, mobile chemical laboratories (think: Breaking Bad). Powell did not convince very many of his colleagues at the UN that Iraq needed to be invaded in order to thwart Saddam Hussein’s allegedly imminent transfer of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to Al Qaeda, but the US government went to war anyway. Why? Because...
RIP Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
RIP Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a sixteen-year-old U.S. citizen killed in Yemen on this day in 2011 by a missile launched from a U.S. drone. "We murdered some folks." https://thedroneage.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/we-murdered-some-folks-how-self-styled-drone-warrior-us-president-barack-obama-normalized-war-crimes-part-3/