Category: Uncategorized
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Notes on an Auden Poem, “The More Loving One”
I’ve been an Auden fan probably since I first heard his mourning poem in 4 Weddings and a Funeral. (Recall my doggerel.) That he corresponded with Arendt mattered a great deal to my dissertation work; I also quite like the thematic connections between his “The Unknown Citizen” and another favorite poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” by…
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What do Cuba and China tell us about Communism and Infant Mortality Reductions?
I started out to write a neoliberal theo-politics; rough and ready and trying to show where matters of relatively unchallenged beliefs about the world have led me. Challenges and data now force me to revise those beliefs. What could be more neoliberal and technocratic than that?
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The Problem of Natural Evil, Charity, and Free Trade
The standard response to the problem of evil is that evil is the result of human willing: thus the Holocaust or American racism cannot be laid at the feet of an omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly benevolent God. But I think this seriously ignores the problem of natural evil.
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Civic Death and the Afterlife of Imprisonment
The fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.
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The Progressive Case for the Welfare State: A Refresher
Many of my own fellow-travelers police progressivism in a way I sometimes find frustrating. It is de rigeur to chastise neoliberals and technocratic moderates for their lack of radicality. My work tends towards the technocratic/participatory divide around how policies should be made, and so I often don’t have strong policy preferences unless I’ve researched a…
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What kind of right is the right to film police?
It is pretty clear to me that there ought to be some kind of right to photograph and film police, especially arrests. And yet, at least one US District Judge Finds no First Amendment Right to Film or Photograph Police: We find there is no First Amendment right under our governing law to observe and record…
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Self-Esteem and the Death of the Subject
I have written here repeatedly about the problems with person-oriented reactive attitudes and character skepticism. But recently I came across the work of the psychologist Albert Ellis, whose work is at the intersection of therapeutic psychology and philosophy. His work on self-esteem and person-oriented assessment suggests an interesting new direction for the general insight that we…
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The Two Endings of Brison’s Aftermath
Susan Brison’s Aftermath ends twice: the final chapter discusses her various efforts to retell the story of her brutal rape and attempted murder (she calls it “attempted sexual murder.”) And ends with her final, planned retelling to her son when he is older: “Tragedy,” Wittgenstein wrote, “is when the tree, instead of bending, breaks.” What I wish…
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Three Thoughts on Iowa
Even mildly deliberative moments like the Iowa caucuses can lead to surprising outcomes because a very different public (no longer hypothetical) is constituted by the caucus form.
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The Symmetry of Rival and Anti-Rival Goods
A shoveled sidewalk is a strange sort of common pool resource: it’s not like fisheries or irrigation where the more one person uses the resource, the less there is for others. That is, it’s not precisely “rivalrous,” one of two conditions required for a common-pool resource to flourish. In fact, the more people shovel their…