Libertarians
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however,
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Contempt for the Liberal Class
Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.” That phrase,
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Silicon Valley Progressivism
"And when you walk thru Uber’s HQ in San Francisco, the place is pulsating with young, brilliant and dedicated employees who believe they are part of doing something historic and meaningful and won’t take no for an answer. It’s a feeling I’ve been fortunate to experience previously and feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by
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Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?
In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes: But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American
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The Logic behind Vouchers, Charters, and Privatization in General
Today’s American right is an uneasy coalition among libertarian plutocrats and working-class and middle-class whites who depend on Social Security and Medicare and can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools. The need to win white middle American votes means that the right can’t simply promise to abolish public services, leaving the mass
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Rawls v. Nozick
I am by no means a Rawlsian, but I can find some common ground with those who claim to be. I cannot fathom the mind of the Nozickian when it claims as it does to be "moral", and this piece in the NYT Stone lays out why. Closing graf: Rejecting the Nozickian worldview requires us
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Does it Matter What People Think or Believe? (Updated)
Or only what they do? I think that ultimately what most matters is what they do, the choices they make, but the scope of what they can do–the scope for their freedom–is expanded or limited by what one thinks or believes. And how one thinks is shaped by the underlying story he tells himself about
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Verax: Loners Telling Truths
My two cents on the Snowden leak: Of course, I'm among those who admire his courage, and I am temperamentally inclined to side with whoever takes it upon himself to subvert the technocracy. But it seems a quixotic gesture, and one that is not likely to change anything. It's too bad that the Tea Party