"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
John Philpot Curran

"The behaviors attributed to me go fundamentally against what I believe, teach and write about.” Thomas Pogge

The academy is built on a collaborative model of intellectual life. Even the "discovery" of our self-interest is seen as the product of the practice of its opposite. Pogge is whining narcissist, in a culture of whining narcissists.

There is no aspect of scientific knowledge that mandates institutionalized instrumental reason in all aspects of life. There is no telos to the world beyond entropy, and even that puts too much of a glow on physical events. The 18th century was the age of enchantment with science, an enchantment morphing over time into various forms of a philosophy along a line also described in the arts, which themselves describe (again) not the world but our perceptions of it. Equality in the language of philosophy originates in the discovery or construction, by members of an elite, of the idea of equality, rather than in the recognition of the practice of it by the people, and has ended in the study of people by that same elite not as equal but alike: the study of each of us only in terms of the aggregate. And in this the logic of individualism becomes its opposite, except that the elite observers have quietly removed themselves from the game. The greatest heroes of technocracy are those who can predict the behavior of the middling and in this they have become middling themselves. But it’s these heroes who are left to make the decisions for the rest of us. [also here]

Repeats: A lecture on feminism and the rule of law from Jian Ghomeshi's lawyer. I have more respect for her than the plaintiffs in these cases. I have pity for them, and pity isn't respect.  Marie Henein isn't a scientist or a pseudoscientist; she's an advocate playing her part in a game that she takes very seriously.

Adversarialism is predicted on the existence and equal authority of the other. We are all each others' others; the only question left is how to extend that understanding to our relations with outsiders, for whom the category of the other was imagined by scholastic philosophers who had no interest in adversarialism.

The philosophy of science—philosophy as science—is the philosophy of metaphysical plumbing and race car engines, the philosophy of intellectual mechanics. With goals assumed, utility defined, the politics is authoritarian. Democracy sees goals as open. It requires tougher people: adults. It's not for rubes or Hollies Golightly.  It's much more interesting. And it's sexier.

Lawyers, not judges, not philosophers are at the center of our legal system.

It's Rashomon, you idiots