The New Culture War
Over at the Washington Examiner, I have a three–part–series on the new culture wars. In Part One I talk about the breakdown of the modern conservative movement and the Three-Legged Stool. Now, thirty years...
Monthly Archive: September 2010
Intellectual honesty & obligation
Noah Millman attempts to define intellectual honesty: “Intellectually honest” means you make arguments you think are true, as opposed to making the arguments you are “supposed” to make and/or avoiding making arguments that you...
The Costs of Empire
One interesting footnote from our recent debate over war and material self-interest is the question of the British Empire. Namely, did the Brits actually benefit from conquering all those foreign territories?
J-E-T-S!
It’s official – every male who’s ever tossed a football is guilty of sexual harrasment: It was also claimed that players were deliberately overthrowing passes to allow them to retrieve the ball from near...
Make Them Pay
Hey there Christian conservatives! Are you sad because courts are scrapping second-class citizenship for gays and lesbians? Do you just want to put them all back in the closet? Or at least marginalize them?...
Great Silence
Question: Was Albert Einstein really the first person to say, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”? Did he say it at all? We expect every great man to be a veritable squirrel stash...
Kain’s wars.
I’ve been watching this debate about different kinds of wars (Erik, Erik, Will, Erik, Erik, Will) get muddier and muddier, and I want to try to clear things up if I can, but without...
Quote of the Day
Via commenter Gilbert, who manages to tweak two League contributors in one fell swoop: The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy...
Most of the world’s countries are undereducated
Tyler Cowen has an excellent response up to this bit from Bryan Caplan on education. Here’s Bryan: The other day, Tyler Cowen challenged me to name any country that I consider under-educated. None came...
How to get rich quick in Medieval Europe
Note: I hope I’m not boring everyone with these digressions into the history of the Crusades, but I’ll stick with this example because Erik brought it up originally and because it aptly demonstrates that...
One last thought on War
Look, I don’t think all wars or even all the players involved in brewing up our wars are necessarily working with some nefarious plot in mind. But I think that war inevitably ends up...
Wars of Folly
[updated] So the pushback against my war posts is interesting and has me thinking. I suppose that if you peel back the ‘defense’ and ‘plunder’ binary you can see some other variations of war....
Melville and American Foreign Policy
I’d highly recommend Walter Russell Meade on Melville’s Benito Cereno, a novella I remember slogging through in English class. Who knew high school reading lists could prove so useful?
What White People Really Like
Striking, hilarious results from OkCupid (an online dating site) reveal what different ethnic groups are really into.
Wars of plunder?
In an uncharacteristically silly post, Erik asserts that all wars are either defensive or driven by “plunder.” He also suggests that the United States’ invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were somehow motivated by a...
Capitalism, Anarchy & War Part II
A few things to follow up on my last post with, briefly. First, I agree with the larger critique of IOZ’s post that in fact the “system” has no intent – no grand conspiracy...
Capitalism, Anarchy & War
IOZ devotes a bit of time to snarking at that Karl Smith post everyone’s been linking to and talking about: When people say that the job, purpose, goal, intent, etc. of something is to...
O rule of law, where art thou?
The ursine and passionate Andrew Sullivan emerges from his recent hibernation today with a must-read post about yesterday’s “State Secrets” ruling. Sullivan: “Yes war requires some secrecy. But Obama has gone much further than...
“This, then, is the essence of being a hipster. Pretending you aren’t one.”
Psychology Today takes on the sad science of hipsterism.
