A #Resistance of Manners

The other night, I was out with a friend, and we got into an argument. What got us started was that this friend, someone with a background in philosophy and with an activist bent, came out praising James Comey for standing up to the President. I know that Comey has been doing his “rehabilitation tour,” and that he’s become a darling of the mainstream pundit class as well as many members of the self-styled #resistance, but I was surprised to hear this from someone who I know to be a radical intellectual and who is no stranger activism. In fact, just to paint an accurate picture, this is someone who makes any intellectual or political critiques that I make pale by comparison. So, you can probably imagine why I was so surprised, and why this led to a really long argument (in good spirit, but still, a pretty intense argument).

My friend’s point was that despite what Comey might have done prior to standing up to the President, the act of standing up to him was one that took moral courage. But to me, it’s quite likely that Comey’s act wasn’t a moral act at all. Instead, I suspect that Comey has an idea of himself as a deeply moral person, and that in order to maintain this self-image, he felt compelled to stand up to the president. So, it wasn’t truly a moral act, but instead, it was a self-interested act by a man who wanted to retain his self-image.

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Jamie AroosiFascism, James Comey, George W. Bush, Donald J. Trump, Michael Flynn, Maher ArarComment
Becoming an American

I recently became an American citizen, I thought I’d do my patriotic duty to try and cheer up my fellow citizens.

On Friday, at the oath ceremony, about 250 people became new citizens. Those 250 people came from 64 different countries, which means that more than a third of the world was represented. As we were informed, ceremonies like this take place 4 days a week, so that this Brooklyn courtroom swears in tens of thousands of new citizens a year. And nationally, this means that about three quarters of a million people become new citizens every year. And we all registered to vote. But what was most striking wasn’t that we became voters, it was that we became Americans.

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Jamie AroosiCitizenship, Canada, United States, Identity, ImmigrationComment
The Art of War

I just saw Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You. Midway through it, I was reminded of something that Marshall Berman once mentioned about Friedrich Nietzsche's generation of intellectuals. This generation was living at the tail end of one of the most peaceful centuries in European history (if you focus on European rather than international wars). With the exception of relatively minor wars like the Crimean and the Franco-Prussian wars, Europe hadn't seen continent wide conflict since the Napoleonic wars. And this made many intellectuals hungry for conflict - they were bored. So, as much as the will-to-power might explain the world war to come, it wasn't the product of war but of peace, expressing the hunger of a generation. And then, when the shit finally did hit the fan, the interwar years were anything but boring, as they gave us some of the most exciting cultural products of the past few centuries.

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Jamie AroosiMarshall Berman, Friedrich Niezsche, Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother YouComment
Happy 200th Birthday, Karl Marx!!!

With a book on Marx coming out soon, as well as on that other rebel who shares today as his birthday, Søren Kierkegaard, I thought I'd share some personal reflections on my own discovery of Marx. I never much liked him. Other philosophers I did, and often quite immediately. I loved Plato and Nietzsche from the very start, and I still do. I fell for Hobbes, and was thrilled by Rousseau. Freud, Arendt, Foucault, all struck a chord, not to mention my enduring love of Camus. And I could go on and on. Even Aristotle, who never much excited me, really got me going when I visited his logic a bit later in life. But Marx? Nothing. I didn't dislike him, and I even wanted to like him, as I generally want to like everyone I read. But he never got much of a response from me.

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Jamie AroosiSøren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Marshall Berman, Working-Class, Faculty, Academia, Walter Benn MichaelsComment
Oh! Canada, You Missed the Point

I keep seeing posts about Bernie Sanders’ trip to Toronto in my Facebook feed. First, they came through the University of Toronto page, then, through Canadian media, and now, from Sanders' own page. And the message has been the same throughout - Bernie travels to Canada to tell Canada how wonderful Canada is. Don't get me wrong, Canadian healthcare is far and away superior to the disaster of US healthcare, and the purpose of Bernie’s trip was to learn about the Canadian system. And I've written a little about this superiority, and I’d also argue that in a few other really important areas, America would be wise to learn from Canada too.

However, these headlines also point to one of the things that really drives me nuts about Canada. We're too self-congratulatory

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Jamie AroosiCanada, United States, Bernie Sanders, HealthcareComment
Healthcare and Extra Legroom

The healthcare debate is a good example of the way that neoliberalism uses "choice" to hide its absence. The choice that's always offered is a choice between different insurance plans, where having more choice is somehow meant to be a good in itself. And this is an argument often deployed against a single payer/universal systems, i.e., that it eliminates choice. However, in Canada, I have no choice about my insurance plan, but I have unlimited choice in the doctors I get to see, i.e., I can go to any doctor without any out-of-pocket expense. That's the choice that matters. But this type of choice is antithetical to the other type of choice.

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Jamie AroosiHealthcare, Neoliberalism, Airlines, ChoiceComment