Cure-alls and Remedies
In the comments to a post on Republican obstructionism, my old colleague Will Roberts proposes the following historical counterfactual : if the American left had been willing to fight harder and dirtier, they could have prevented or arrested the war in Iraq. He goes on to propose a variety of actions that might have achieved…
I’ve linked to Warren before , but my favorite public policy theorist/practioner has a new lecture on regulating consumer financial markets, which is only ten minutes long and very persuasive: Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo . Also, from this recent interview : The consumer credit market is broken. While…
So after my last Tea Party post , I’ve been trying to track down more information about the movement. One interview does not an investigation make. Here’s what I’ve dug up: Evan pointed me to The Next Right. Not the Tea Party, but a similar attempt to reconstitute the conservative party around less jingoistic and racist…
What would you do with $100 and a case of altruism ? How about giving away umbrellas during a rainstorm: David Ibnale had no idea how tough it would be to give away umbrellas on Market Street the other day. He figured that he and his free umbrellas were going to change the world. The world…
The New York Times’ article on Tea Party ‘founder’ Keli Carender, struck me as an interesting corrective to much of the treatment of the movement as either a Fox News ‘stunt’ or a wing of the Republican Party run by the same old white men with a few token non-males and non-whites. Carendar is apparently…
Infinite Th0ught offers this op-ed by Alain Badiou : The living proof that our societies are obviously in-human is today the foreign undocumented worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation, that there is only one world. To treat the foreign proletarian as though he came from another world, that is indeed the specific…
We are commonly understood to have a right to procreate. For instance, it is a clear violation of that right to coercively sterilize those judged unfit . However, there is some question whether this right includes the right to assistive reproductive technologies, and whether it is defeasible in any circumstances, i.e. whether we have a…
Generally, I respect Harvey C. Mansfield’s work on classical political theory , and think his attempts at contemporary cultural and political criticism are absurdly small-minded. His piece in The Weekly Standard on Obama’s non-partisanship is a mixture of the good Mansfield and the bad Mansfield, so I recommend it to fans of ambivalence. Here are…
I’ve just returned from the Understanding Humans through Neuroscience conference at the American Enterprise Institute , where I heard papers by Roger Scruton, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Stephen Morse. What struck me was how mired the three papers were in defending against a certain kind of agency-undermining determinism that few people take seriously any more. All…