(Excerpt of a comment at Crooked Timber, from that extended Schmitt discussion of a few months ago, dug up now for purposes of continued discussion with Faheem Hussain, because helpful on a point I frequently return to – in short:…
#Liberalism
OBL’s Argument (5): Shapes of Justice
The de-construction of rules for the resolution of serious political disagreements, politics of the end of politics, is the drawing near of danger: War is or occurs for us, and escalates, as that de-construction, in search of a foundation of…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
OBL’s Argument (4): Retributions
Then the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — from the Lord out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
Israel at the Extremes
Blog version of Storified dialogue.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Carl Schmitt, illiberalism, Israel, liberal democracy, Liberalism, Nationalism
OBL’s Argument (3): Leviathan
Freedom from second thought is also provided by the morally supremely convenient notion (or version of the same notion) that government accountability works in one direction only, or, even better, that we can choose which actions of our government or…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
OBL’s Argument (2): Gomorrah
On my Twitter feed recently, among commemorations of the Austro-Hungarian declarations of July 28, 1914, now recognized as the beginning of World War I, another anniversary was also briefly noted: Of Operation Gomorrah, on July 28, 1943, an aerial bombardment…
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
Osama Bin Laden’s Interesting Argument (1)
Only one thing, apparently, is more natural than to be appalled by violence against someone else’s child: to embrace one’s own child all the more tightly.
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, War Tagged with: Bin Laden, Hamas, Hobbes, Israel, Liberalism, sovereignty, terrorism
The De-Civilization of Gaza
“Terrorism” is a term not just for a set of tactics that instil fear, but for defiance of “civil”-ized norms. The latter do not deny the moral calculus of an Osama Bin Laden: They seek to limit and move beyond its inexorable and inexorcisable normalcy or naturalness – in wartime at least second nature, if not human nature itself. That the logic of war is a collectivizing, anonymous logic explains why liberalism-individualism seeks to criminalize it, why liberalist-individualist polities have such difficulty orienting themselves morally within it, and why they are, finally, prone to overcompensating in response to it.
McCarthy’s unusually actually reasonably conservative conservative foreign policy
Posted in International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, notes, Twitterei Tagged with: Americanism, Conservatism, Hegel, Isolationism, Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism, neo-imperialism, realism, Schmitt, Strauss, Twitter
Liberals against Liberalism (Chait’s Insanity)
Posted in Featured, History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Chait, Conservatism, Liberalism, presumption of innocence, Racism