Tag: Friendly Fire
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Václav Havel: To the Castle and Back
Peter Levine’s post on Havel’s 1992 speech in Poland reminded me that I had planned to do some writing about Havel before he died. The New York Times titled his obituary “A Melding of the Artist’s Politics and the Politician’s Art,” and yet it focuses only on his writing career and offers not a single observation…
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Philosophy and Occupation
Today Dr. J encourages her readers to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement through the lens of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Occupy Movement is like our sense of sight. It’s not (instrumentally) valuable for what it allows us to see, but rather it’s (intrinsically) valuable in that it allows us to see. Like sight, it “brings to light many differences…
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Democracy Means Asking the Right Questions
Whenever I talk to students about democracy, I like to emphasize that the original term for democratic rule was isonomy. Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History: “[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating…
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Unions versus Women
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment: As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased earning…
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Ideology and Self-Sealing Arguments
From Understanding Arguments by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin, which I use in my critical thinking course: Ideologies and worldviews tend to be self-sealing. The Marxist ideology sometimes has this quality. If you fail to see the truth of the Marxist ideology, that just shows that your social consciousness has not been raised. The very…
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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…