Category: Uncategorized
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Friendly Fire and Fiery Friendship: Noma Arpaly, Joseph Trullinger, and the Tenor of Philosophy Conversation
Too often in praise for “agonism” we tend to treat the conflicts as if they are self-justifying. Trullinger’s view is that we ought to endorse the spirit of “glad to be wrong” by being particularly welcoming to those who are unlike us, those who are most likely to find the space of rough play unwelcoming,…
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Nationalistic Dissent: Trump, the Tea Party, and the “Bowling for Fascism” Study
Civic engagement folks need to talk about nationalist populism.
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Ice Cream Trucks and other Drug Dealers
To be clear, I’m not endorsing drug markets, or even beating up your food truck competitors. But I find it strange when ordinary human behavior–often the laudatory kind that is responding to a larger abuse of power with small-scale violence–is pathologized by my fellow liberals who recognize the small-scale violence but ignore the larger abuses.
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Civic Variations on the Fact, Value, Strategy Distinction
When civic studies scholars write about civics and citizens, as Peter Levine does today, we will usually mention the following trinity: facts, values, and strategies. Here’s Levine: The citizen is committed to affecting the world. Some important phenomena may be beyond her grasp, so that she sees them but sees no way of changing them. But…
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Diversity, Equality, and Realignment
As the political participation of disaffected, unrepresented voters drops, this reserve army of the unallied gets bigger. It’s especially potent in primaries, which are very low turnout events. My suspicion is that if disaffected voters could be reliably re-engaged, the parties would likely find wedge issues to divvy them up over a relatively short set…
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Diversify or Die
There’s an interesting piece in the Stone today on the consequences of philosophy’s Anglo-European blinders: If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is. Garfield and Van Norden suggest that the systematic failure to address non-Western sources impoverishes the discipline and belies any claim to universality. And what a wonderfully provocative list of addenda…
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Forgiveness and Revenge Seminar Retrospective
Whenever I teach an advanced class of thoughtful students, I like to offer a short retrospective at the end of the semester. I sit down without my notes or texts and try to makes sense of what we have done. Below, you’ll find the retrospective I shared on our last day. (As background, we read…
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Should Public Civic Education Be Descriptive or Normative?
What should schools do about the fact that politicians are frequently both wrong and immoral in ways that violate educational norms? How can civics education be civil if civic engagement rarely is?
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Clarence Thomas’s Black Nationalist Jurisprudence
Thomas seems to me to be saying that as a matter of policy we should remember that we live in a white supremacist society, that Blacks are in the minority and the political institutions will usually be controlled by white politicians and white voters. So always be careful of the tools and remedies you make…
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Rachel Maddow: “Activism is a very specific and technocratic thing.”
On a lot of the activist issues I worked on it was very important that we get no press. And I think, from the outside, one of the things people assume about activism is that you’re trying to consciousness-raise around an issue, and get public discussion and raise public awareness and raise the profile of…