Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. I was off last week, but you can read the first five here, here, here, here, and here.
Sam Badger is a philosophy professor, a committed socialist, and one of my very favorite Substackers. He writes about several of my favorite subjects, like Marxist theory, normative political philosophy, ethics, and the intersection of all of the above, but I’m also a big fan of a lot of his punchier current-events writing.
I’m cheating a little bit with this selection because I actually didn’t read it this week. I read it when he first wrote it. But it’s a little too perfect not to plug this week. Something that’s been driving me crazy since Trump started America’s most recent and insane war of aggression in the Middle East last week is the war cheerleading of neocon Never Trump types like David Frum, David French, and Bret Stephens who somehow simultaneously think that (a) Trump is a fascist tyrant who can’t be trusted not to abuse his power on the streets of Minneapolis but (b) it’s totally fine for him to wield the most lethal military machine in human history over the skies of Tehran to Bring Freedom.
A few months ago, when Bret Stephens was writing in the New York Times about how Trump should topple Maduro, Sam illustrated the absurdity with a historical analogy I think about all the time:
I, Bretanos Stefanos, am one of Italy’s most famous newspaper columnists. It’s hard being an author of opinion columns in Mussolini’s Italy, but I get by. I’m writing an article right now decrying the loss of democratic freedoms in Italy. Mussolini is destroying our democracy one step at a time, and it’s so sad to see him leverage the traditional values of Italian conservatism to justify his autocratic policies. It’s a far cry from the noble traditions laid down when Piedmont-Sardinia began the project of unifying our glorious nation. We’ve been a Constitutional Monarchy with strong democratic traditions our whole history, but now we’re headed down the road of increased censorship, tyranny, and corruption. Opposition is being demonized, even arrested, by government authorities.
He is even hollowing out and politicizing our military! Fascists are undermining the rule of law in the armed forces, and needless to say, this is very dangerous indeed. Imagine if our soldiers receive illegal orders from their fascist officers. What are they to do? Or imagine what happens when soldiers are deployed to our streets. Will they respect the human rights of Italian citizens? I doubt it.
So begins Sam’s essay.
A couple paragraphs later, it continues:
The other article I’m working on is a defense of the proposed Italian intervention in the Empire of Ethiopia.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
If you want to check out my own writing outside of this Substack in the last week, I wrote two articles for Jacobin on the war in Iran:
Also, while I’ve got your attention, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best. Consider chipping in!
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