Cure-alls and Remedies
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’ve been thinking a lot about the new evidence that partisan distrust and even hatred now trumps racial hatred. Consider the now-famous Iyengar/Westwood study, ” Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization .” Iyengar and Westwood showed that partisan identification has ceased to be a wholly ideological or instrumental self-description. It’s…
I can think of at least six kinds of inequality: [caption id=”attachment_3117″ align=”alignright” width=”300″] Hefei, Anhui province in China (Photo by Jianan Lu.)[/caption] Inequality of income: different people receive different wages, either for different jobs or for the same job, as profits from capital investments, or as government subsidies, transfer payments, or private charity. Inequality…
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics In The Human Condition Arendt staked out a position that action’s novel self-disclosure…
On July 8, 2004, in my new home state of Tennessee, five Campbell County Sheriff’s deputies used torture and intimidation to try to get a warrantless search form signed. For more than two hours, they beat and threatened Eugene Siler with, among other things, genital electrocution: “…until you sign that form, its fixin to get…