Political Philosophy
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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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As California Goes . . .
So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now: In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws
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Conservative Anti-Capitalism
The contemporary GOP has been able until recently to unite both traditional, family-values, 2nd Amendment conservatives with laissez-faire capitalists because the former don't seem to realize that the latter are the main cause of undermining everything they hold dear. The latter of course don't agree with the former on issues like abortion and gay rights,
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Liberal Christianity
Two pieces popped up today. One, "A Religious Legacy with a Leftward Tilt" in the NYT today, which talks about recent scholarship that is trying to show how liberal Protestant Christianity has shaped the mainstream American ethos. Key grafs: In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr.
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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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It Is Futile to Reason with Them
From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT: That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything
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Sirota v. Brooks on Egypt’s Mental Capacity
“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response. After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end. “Didn’t we do what they
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Cultural Hegemony
There was a time way back when–in the seventies–when I made an attempt to grapple with the kind of neo-Marxist thought for which the Frankfurt School was typical. I didn't get far, because while parts of it interested me, particularly its critique, it didn't deliver enough value for me to justify the time and effort
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Seductive Neoliberalism
For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be