Tag: Beings and Doings
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Marginal Revolutions on Democracy: The Game Show
I asked Tyler Cowen what he thought of the public policy game show idea. He posted my request for comments, and there has been some helpful stuff from his readers: Sandeep notes that Scott Adams already thought of it: As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show where…
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Hacking the Social: Can the Profession’s Misogyny be Shamed and Tamed?
John Protevi, Mark Lance, and Eric Schliesser have created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with their call to shun sexually harrassing philosophy professors: We believe there are informal sanctions that could make a difference. The Feminist Philosophers blog recently suggested not inviting serial harassers to conferences. One could easily extend this to not inviting…
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Square Foot Gardening
Square Foot Gardening is a small-scale intensive agricultural method popularized in a book and PBS show starring Mel Bartholomew. It uses raised beds, crop rotation, and a special mix of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite to make urban gardening easier. In retirement, Mel has passed the square foot gardening torch to Patti Moreno, and Youtube has the…
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Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…
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Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution
It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful protesters, whose only defense is the military standing by. To ask for the…
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Psychologizing Politics
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence: I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a couple of months after the Kent State shootings, which is, in some ways, a similar moment to this pause and this…
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Three Thoughts on the Tuscon Shootings
The immediate response to tragedy ought to be a cautious silence and a quiet search for understanding. Yet when I attended a vigil on Sunday at the US Capitol building, a reporter from WAMU spent a half hour gathering quotes (none of which he used, thankfully) and in the process goaded a few vocal participants into…
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Links to depress and enrage
Bill Zeller’s eloquent and reasonable suicide note. Down and Out on $250,000 a Year How Luxury Changes People, an interview based on this article: “The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making.” There’s a simple reason why the Family Research Council is a hate group: they lie. Sherif Girgis, Robert…
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Google evaluates our reading level
Check out the results here. How to take the news? Should I be pleased that I blog in an accessible style or worried that the blog is only 18% advanced? I think this is a good “first principles” question for philosophers to ask themselves, especially since Google seems to be using sentence length and jargon-laden…
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Hard Choices
Steven Maloney asked his students to stabilize the budget using the CRFB’s simulator. Some couldn’t do it without making draconian choices that were particularly painful for seniors, or undoing the President’s decisions to preserve troop levels in Afghanistan and extending the Bush-era tax cuts. Some wouldn’t do it: That students would hand in deficits of…