Weekend Question Ending in a Preposition and Open Thread
So… where’s your head at? Consider this an open thread.
Monthly Archive: September 2011
A conversation for the times
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper:...
Something to Go Galt About
So we all agree that it’s precipitous, or maybe something more pejorative, to withdraw from society over the dire threat of a tax increase that puts us back to the levels in place during...
A Lemon Of An Idea In Alabama
If you are convicted of a misdemeanor in Baldwin County, Alabama (that’s on the east side of Mobile Bay, bordering Florida, with a county seat in the I’m-sure-it’s-lovely city of Bay Minette), the judges...
The Scooby-Doo Ending
Writes Will Oremus at Slate: Unemployment is high and wages stagnant, but that hasn’t stopped health insurance companies from hiking premiums by 9 percent this year, a new survey shows. The poll by the...
Occasional Notes: Revisionism
Leitmotif: History has no meaning, I contend. But this contention does not imply that all we can do about it is to look aghast at the history of political power, or that we must...
Ralph Nader and left-libertarian convergence
Michael Tracy has an article up at The American Conservative on Ralph Nader’s quest to get progressives to align with libertarians like Ron Paul. For those with a longstanding interest in left-libertarian coalition-building, there’s...
Affirmative Action and Equality, Cont’d
I would be remiss to leave the recent discussions on affirmative action and equality without citing Frederick Douglass’s moral argument against affirmative action made in 1865 to a group of abolitionists: “[I]n regard to...
A Man for No Season in Particular
“Every so often,” said the Capitalist, “I have the sense that you all don’t hate me quite as much as you should.” The Humanitarian shrugged. “I’m lousy at hating anyone. Even you.” Undaunted, the...
Salvaging Grammar Instruction
By Kyle Cupp I begin with a confession: reading Freddie deBoer’s post on the poor outcomes of teaching grammar initially left me feeling despondent and ready to join the narrator of Melville’s Moby-Dick in...
The Indentured Servitude of the Big-Time College Athlete
It is perhaps a little late in the day to be writing about this, given the amount of ink (both real and digital) that has already been spilled discussing it, but you should definitely...
Affirmative Action and Philosophy vs. Reality
In a post I did on religion a while back, I talked about the various reasons I tend to distrust using Philosophy as a tool to solve disagreements about public policy. While I appreciate...
Neo-Liberalism Again
Henry Farrell summarizes neoliberalism as defined by Colin Crouch in The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism: Crouch depicts classical liberalism and social democracy as mirror images of each other. Both are intensely suspicious of the...
No more please
I admit, when I saw my first Buck the Fuckeyes, I chuckled but I quickly realized there’s little value in shirts like those. Swift makes the case that shirts like those really don’t belong...
California Legislature Proposes Racial Discrimination in University Admissions Policy
Via Pacific Legal Foundation, the California Legislature recently passed a bill, SB 185, that would require the state’s public universities to discriminate on the basis of race and gender in their admissions policies. Here’s...
The Antipodean Political Style
A little taste of how politics can differ between the US and New Zealand. John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand was visiting Canterbury University in earthquake-stricken Christchurch. He sees a sign posted up...
Mothers are all the same in A Song of Ice and Fire
Does anybody else find the entire Iron Islands storyline tiresome and disconnected? I do. I just can’t find myself at all interested by Euron Crow’s Eye or Victarion or Asha. I also sort of...
Because it’s important to make it so that you can’t root for either side.
Hard to say which side I root for getting a comeuppance more. The NYPD for defending this action:
