The Trolley Problem, Reimagined: Self-Driving Cars
| by Chris Rampolla | Suppose that you’re driving your car in the right hand lane of a one-way street on a winter evening. As you approach a red light at an intersection, you tap the brakes and begin to skid. Ahead of you the left lane is closed and is blocked by a concrete […]
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Charles Murray at Middlebury — Asking Forbidden Questions While Leaving the Road to Bigotry
| by Lucas Lynch | In part thanks to the recent dust up at Middlebury, there seems to be a lot of talk once again about Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, and whether or not there is a correlation between race and IQ. And as usual, whenever people venture towards this third rail, tensions and […]
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I Am a Minority and I Prohibit You
| by Malhar Mali | I am a minority and I prohibit you from culturally appropriating my native culture. I was born in India, hence, I prohibit you from stealing my culture, eating any foods that are representative of that region and engaging in my practices. But wait I have a reason. I have several: Since […]
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Story Animals: Do We Need to Refine Our Discourse?
| by Christopher Kiely | Why do we believe what we believe? Do we believe our eyes, our ears, our nose? Our senses are limited by our meat puppet exteriors. Optical illusions fool our eyes. Scents deaden our olfactory senses. Ultra low and high frequencies go unheard but affect us nonetheless. This is how we interpret […]
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Geert Wilders: Enemy of Liberal Values, Symptom of Liberal Acquiescence to Religious Extremism
| by AR Devine | Common sense has prevailed in Holland. The Dutch people have returned Mark Rutte of the center-Right People’s Party to power. Whatever the legitimate criticisms Wilders and his Freedom Party have with regards to Islamic extremism their supposed solutions are illiberal, divisive, and likely to lead to persecution of genuine moderate […]
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Political Correctness vs Trumpism: Why Trump is the Bigger Threat to Liberal Values
| by Mitch Blatt | There is a group of people who are constantly offended. They detest objective reality. Instead, they make their judgments on the basis of feelings, not facts. Their unhinged behavior is destroying civic discourse in America. I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump and the Republican establishment. While many conservative […]
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The Hijab Needs Informed Reporting — Not Glorification or Fear-Mongering
| by V.R. Kahn | So far this year the hijab has continued to be the focus of many news reports. In February, there was considerable coverage of the fifth annual World Hijab Day when non-Muslim women donned the headscarf in solidarity with their Muslim counterparts. The same week Nike released its “Pro Hijab” to […]
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Against Empathy? What Paul Bloom Missed
When I was five or six years old, my father somehow managed to get our two-wheel-drive rental car stuck in the middle of a remote Canadian beach. I’m actually not quite sure why it happened, but I can recall the sudden lurch I felt as we abruptly stopped moving and the shrill squeals of the […]
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The Beat Generation, Hippies, and Hunter S. Thompson: From Progressive to Regressive
| by Christopher Kiely | I grew up Left. My father was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He and my pregnant mother fled St. Louis Missouri in 1969 in their VW bus packed with their belongings and headed for the Canadian border. They eventually settled in a small city in southern Ontario and […]
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