More protest. More confrontation. #Not1More #EndDeportation #BordersAreStupid

O.K., arrangements are made, lodgings in Chiado more or less secured. The flight is now booked. I’ll be arriving in Lisboa on June 25, and staying there up until we depart for the States on July 12.

Auburn Philosophy folks:

So when are all y’all Norman kids going to start getting the “vXe 4 LIFE” tattoos on your hands? I’m actually pretty jagged myself, in terms of what I think virtue-ethical considerations ought to substansively entail, but the first one to post pics is still going to be my hero.

Of course, if you or I went up to a party we weren’t invited to, grabbed a drunk college student in order to punish them for being drunk, handcuffed them, and then, while holding them captive, grabbed them around the throat and choked them out until they collapsed onto their knees and passed out — well, I’ll bet you or I would also just get a private administrative hearing and then lose our jobs. Right? #PoliceAreUnaccountable #ByDefinition #AbolishThePolice

A lot of psychological situationists* like to push social-psychology experiments as proof that most people don’t have, or perhaps even couldn’t have, robust character traits. So, for example, they’ll cite the Milgram experiment, supposedly to show how people mostly do not stick to traits of compassion or kindness towards the “learner” when the lab-coat authority tells them that they have to hurt him. And maybe this does show that a lot of middle-class Americans aren’t as reliably compassionate and as kind as you might hope. But hell man, I already knew that. But if you’re trying to push the idea that the study undermines the idea that people have, or could form, robust character traits, that seems like a non sequitur. One of the obvious results that Milgram himself took from his study is that a lot of people (including a lot of middle-class Americans) have a really robust, situationally-insensitive character trait of *obedience*, which is so robust that for a large minority it persisted even up to the point where they honestly believed they were torturing or killing a person in the other room. The fact that this character trait is a *vice* doesn’t mean it’s not a robust and stable character trait. It looks like a hella robust and stable character trait. The question is whether it’s possible to make that trait less robust, and whether it’s possible to cultivate different traits, which might look more like decency and virtues. If it’s possible to be so hella committed to obedience at all costs, then maybe it’s possible to become committed to other things which are you know not genocidally awful.

“Officer Safety.” For the crime of peeing in public. #AbolishThePolice

Yessss…

S4SS/App State “Ask an Anarchist” day report back. Because they are awesome.

OK everyone, important question, how far back do you need to go to find the best small-government Roman Emperor?