On Making by Calling and the Need for Conversation
On Twitter, Bari Weiss of the New York Times has written: “[F]ailing to draw distinctions between people like Sam Harris and people like Richard Spencer strips the designation ‘alt-right’ of…
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Oliver Traldi
12 posts
Campus Speech Debate: The Nightmare of the Nineties is Alive
On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to attend a very engaging debate at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Organized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and…
Rhextortion: Misinterpretation by Proxy
The other day a friend linked me to a tweet from one journalist to another: “i think you want to be really careful,” it said, “about using language that sounds…
Mad Online; Or, The Enemy of My Enemy
In The Fragile Absolute Slavoj Zizek wrote of the Balkans that they’re “always somewhere else, a little bit more towards the southeast. . . .” Pundits seem part of a parallel…
Are Campus and Media Conservatives Asking For It?
Recent interruptions of Christina Hoff Sommers at Lewis & Clark College (and reactions to Bari Weiss’s New York Times editorial about them), and the Atlantic’s quick hiring and firing of Kevin…
A Liberal Who Remembers
Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to…
Humanitarianism, Collectivism, and the Model of Impossible Responsibility
One class of claim made by social justice activists and academics goes like this: Because person A benefits from the history of some unjust system, structure, or social construction S,…
The Matthew Sears Cower: Getting it Wrong on Free Speech and Social Justice
Last week in the Washington Post Canadian classics professor Matthew A. Sears argued that “‘social justice warriors’ are the true defenders of free speech and open debate.” His argument for…
Postmodernism Isn’t Playing Around Anymore
Recently, classical liberals’ understanding of the phenomenon of postmodernism has come under heavy fire, with Jordan Peterson in particular facing criticism for coining the phrase “postmodern neo-Marxist.” Though it’s fairly…
The Nightmare From Which Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Trying Not to Awake
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power is challenging and troubling, but the trouble does not derive mostly from the challenge. In the introduction Coates sets…
What Happened? Hillary Clinton Still Doesn’t Know
Fittingly, Hillary Clinton tells us two contradictory things about the purpose of her confusing, tedious new tome What Happened?. First page: it’s “the story of what [she] saw, felt, and thought”…
The Philosophy of Group Differences
Two controversies about the extent and cause of group differences have erupted in the past six months. The first emerged from a Vox article about Charles Murray, race, and IQ.…
