The Great Awokening There’s a theory about the sins and shortcomings of society: they are all due to our failures of consciousness. If people were purer, given to understanding and following the true path, the problems of this world would cease to exist. According to this view, poverty and inequality are the result of greed, […]
Flynn Bails, but Don’t Get Your Hopes Up I haven’t seen anything yet to convince me that the Putin-Trump collaboration was a big deal. Ugly and unprincipled, sure, but politically consequential, probably not. A contrary view, expressed by Harry Litman in today’s New York Times, is that this is the beginning of the end for the […]
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Freedom of Speech for Fascists? I just finished reading the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s profile of Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. I don’t know how accurate it is as a portrayal of Bray and his ideas, but it seems like a sober, fair-minded overview of the debate over anti-fascist tactics and freedom of speech. […]
A Serious Misreading of Coase Corey Robin is very insightful about a lot of things. I think his take on conservatism, that the thread running through it is opposition to attempts to demolish pre-existing hierarchies, explains ideological twists and turns that would otherwise remain mysterious. Don’t take this post as an expression of anti-Robinism. But […]
Enslaved to an Individualist View of Social Change I note with some interest the debate over whether it is ethically necessary to refer to slaveholders as “enslavers” in order to convey our disapproval over their actions. The obsessive use of the enslaving terminology in The Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist) bothered me at the […]
by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Social Justice: Debt, Solidarity or Care? Mozi: scholar and activist How do we think about the obligation of social justice? The dominant American political culture is based on individualist values: you have a right to do whatever you want, and the main problem is how to prevent […]