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1 week ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
This may strike you as naive, but then again it’s hard to imagine other ways to make it through: we’re going to have to find a way to repudiate violence, or we’ll be consumed and annihilated by it. That’s a call familiar from great pacifists, particularly those who emerged during the Cold War, with its nuclear standoffs, brushfire conflagrations, and threats of global destruction.
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2 weeks ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
That there’s a riot, uprisings, or insurrection in Los Angeles is unsurprising, as the place has a history thereof, including famous examples in 1943, 1965, and 1992. In those cases, as in the most recent, they were responses to ethnic and class oppression.
Nevertheless,I'm surprised by how immediate, elaborate, and definite the response has been to the latest spate of mass round-ups, detentions, and deportations performed by the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security.
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3 weeks ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died May 21 at 96, was among the most eminent living intellectuals.
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1 month ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
I'm late (I was distracted from Joe Biden's aging by my mother's 100th birthday), but I want to drop back and talk about the book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and in general the blame-Biden movement. A typical take was provided by EzraKlein on his podcast, in an episode titled How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-Elected Trump.
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1 month ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
There are two basic ideas about the relation of a name to what it names, both of which have some intuitive sway. On the first, a name is purely conventional and could be changed at will. We all know this is true. We pluck the names of children off lists, often before they’re born, based on tradition or euphony. We don't look into the baby's eyes and see her true name.
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1 month ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
American prisons are great institutions, detaining millions and beefing up regional economies. We’re justly proud of them. As we lost factories to China and Vietnam, we gained prisons, our new industrial system. At this point we hold about 1.8 people in domestic prisons and jails. That's a lot, but I'm sure you'll agree with Pam Bondi and me that jailing people is desirable for its own sake, no matter what process, if any, leads to that outcome.
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2 months ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
Almost from the first day of the second Trump administration, one of the primary goals has been to dismantle or entirely remake the Kennedy Center, the very impressive if (I speculate) unbeloved block of marble across the street from the Watergate, on the shores of the Potomac about a mile from the White House. I grew up near there, and I remember when it was built. My mom thought it was hideous.
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2 months ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from removing migrants to prisons in El Salvador without due process. The justification for sudden deportations into nightmare conditions was cooked up by appealing to the Alien Enemies Act, a vestige of a late-18th-century political conflict between President John Adams and his rival Thomas Jefferson. More widely, it was a conflict between their political parties, the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans.
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2 months ago | 
everydayanalysis.co.uk | Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Sartwell2 hours ago6 min readSocrates is Not Who Agnes Callard Wishes He WasCrispin Sartwell18 April 2025There is no doubting the centrality of the figure of Socrates, as depicted in Plato's dialogues, to the history of Western philosophy. We might think of it as analogous to the role of Confucius in Chinese thought combined with the role of Jesus in Christianity: a great thinker, a charismatic teacher and model, and a martyr to the truth.
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2 months ago | 
splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell
As a teenager in the 1970s, at the tail end of the 60s liberation movements, I regarded myself as a revolutionary and capable of violence in the service of social transformation. In particular, I called myself a “militant ecologist” and destroyed some construction equipment that was tearing up the woods near my house to put in some houses. A small cohort of the like-minded and I made threats toward my school (Alice Deal Junior High in DC), demanding an end to compulsory attendance and grading.
