Posts by tag
Politics
40 posts
The Amorality of the Mob: Personal Reflections on the Evergreen Incident One Year On
It’s the one-year anniversary of the day on which mild-mannered leftist Jewish professor Bret Weinstein was confronted in his classroom by a mob of angry students. By a strange twist…
Who’s Afraid of the “Intellectual Dark Web”?
I have been meaning to comment on the sound and fury about Bari Weiss’ New York Times piece on the “Intellectual Dark Web,” an informal network of “heretics” and “renegades” who dissent…
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…
The Democratic Fundamentalist: A Response to Nathan J. Robinson’s “Socialism as a Set of Principles”
Three cheers for socialism! What’s not to like?
Understanding Human Nature Is the Best Way of Fixing Our Political Culture
Many factors contribute to political divisiveness and rancor. Some of them are natural and nearly inevitable aspects of fundamental human nature, but others are not. Of those that are not,…
The Philosophy of Nonviolence: The Lost Legacy of Martin Luther King
The 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. has come and gone. MLK Day is behind us. Yet there is no reason for us to stop talking…
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…
Sure, The Left Keeps Eating Itself — Who Can We Draft to Bite Back?
The protest faced by Jordan Peterson at Queen’s University was one of the latest in a series of events that continue to stir the tempest in a teapot that embodies…
Activism and the Conflict of Visions
I recently read Thomas Sowell’s classic work A Conflict of Visions. In it, he attempts to describe two different foundational worldviews, or visions, which are implicit in the thinking of…
Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, and the Politicization of Science
The year long feud between cognitive neuroscientist Sam Harris and Editor-at-Large of Vox Ezra Klein is one that has pitted advocates for a group identity based approach to politics against…
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…
The Reality of the Rise of an Intolerant and Radical Left on Campus
The darkest part is not the rise of radicalism, but the passive acquiescence of the vast majority of faculty and students.
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…
Protagoras on the Google Memo
In a recent piece for Quillette, Bo Winegard talks about what he calls “cosmic egalitarianism,” a thoroughgoing sort of egalitarianism that reacts strongly to arguments that some groups of people…
Understanding the U.S. Political Divide, One Word Cloud at a Time
America’s political divide goes by many names – rural-urban, blue-red, metro-non-metro and left-right. We are told it is bad and that it is only getting worse, thanks to phenomena like…
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,…
