-
All Boundaries Are Conventions
An oldie but a goodie. I wrote this in 2015 or 2016. I wrote it in the Hispanic House at the College of William & Mary, where I lived my senior year. I vaguely remember being at one of the desks in one of the Casa Hispana’s shared spaces in the evening, perhaps after an evening class, gym session, or club meeting, and certainly with other pending deadlines. It was dark outside and the lights turned a little low as we had codified for nights in mutual respect of each others’ bedtimes. Se me ocurrió escribir esto, what else can I say. All boundaries are conventions. All boundaries are conventions.that’s…
-
Is violence ever justice? Is coercion better than violence? Israel, Palestine, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Christianity, and the question of violence
What if there were no more physical violence but we agreed to argue, fight, or address conflict by other means? Would we not resort to espionage and trickery? Is that really any better than physical violence? But that is in the nebulous realm of international or interstate conflict. Imagine you stand face to face with your captor. He has not physically trapped you anywhere. Instead, he has coerced you through laws, rules, finances, relationships, and so forth. Shoot, maybe he’s plain smarter than you. So you’re trapped doing his will. Any little thing you do is at once what he asked—and then some—but not good enough. You sweep the floor,…
-
On Climate Justice
I will discuss herein my beliefs about climate justice without thoroughly justifying them. I will justify them in future posts. Justice is a synchronic condition that society either meets or doesn’t at a given moment in time. That is to say: either society synchronizes in the correct way or it is not a just society. The correct way is simply the society’s being the way it ought to be. The definition of a just society, then, is a society that is the way it ought to be. That sounds vague but it shows us a surprising lot about what a just society would be like and what we ought to…
