Academia
I’m publishing an email I just sent to Ireland’s Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, on a truly hideous and anti-democratic European law that Ireland is strenuously supporting. It’s looking like Germany, which was strong on data protection, may crack and support this law, too. This week is make or break week for ‘chat control’, a […]
A European justice minister who does have principles! The EU “chat control” proposal I wrote about the other day has been scuppered by Germany’s justice ministry saying forcefully that it will never support this particular form of mass surveillance. Here’s what their minister, Dr. Stefanie Hubig, had to say: “Chat control without cause must be […]
I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each. Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of […]
(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions) The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that […]
I’m working on a first draft of a book arguing against pro-natalism (more precisely, that we shouldn’t be concerned about below-replacement fertility). That entails digging into lots of literature with which I’m not very familiar and I’ve started using OpenAI’s Deep Research as a tool. A typical interaction starts with me asking a question like […]
This weekend has been dedicated to the “reconstitution historique” of 1653 in Pézenas, when the États generaux of Languedoc met in what is now a small town but was then the seat of the Prince de Conti. So, a capital city back then and also a place where Molière used to hang out. There have […]
You’ve probably heard of the “Peter principle”: that employees get promoted until they reach a job they are no longer good at. And in political philosophy, there is a famous dispute between (the camps of) John Rawls and Jerry Cohen about the appropriateness of people in a just society being motivated by money. Last week, […]
A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 1) Trolley time. Let’s start with the trolley problem. People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts. First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer: A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five […]