Category: philosophy
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Pat Buchanan is an idiot
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet. Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just…
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Happy Tax Day!
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have…
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Lunacon 2014 (2e): Magic and Religion
Saturday 3 PM. Panelists: Carole Ann Moleti; Michael F. Flynn, Raymond Feist, Jane Sibley Interesting tidbit: religion = re+ligio = a rebinding of society (to join again). Religion has always had a social purpose, to increase community and tie society together. The panelists offered a definition of magic as “a belief that mundane objects have…
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Art and Design, Fail
I’ve been doing a little reading on the art of design and the failure of art as design. (For example, see this piece about how objects for human use should be designed for, you know, humans.) That led me to the International Push/Pull Pictogram Design Competition, tasked with designing exactly what it says: a non-verbal…
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This is important: What we know about what happened in Boston
Nothing. We know nothing of import yet, and won’t for several hours, if not an entire day. That is the way of these things, and the truth of them. Nonetheless, the circus has begun. Each network has already offered its own (or its several own) opinions on who caused the bombing, who planted the bombs,…
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The defining feature of modern Republicanism
It’s not small-government. It’s not anti-tax screeds or culture war crusades. It’s not being pro-big business or pro-gun. It’s not being anti-choice or anti-gay. It’s not suport of “traditional marriages” or of non-traditional “special interrogation”. It’s not being pro-Gitmo or anti-drone or pro-Keystone or anti-FEMA. It’s not even being sexist or being racist. It’s a…
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Time to put away childish things
Update (2013 Feb 4): Noah Smith has an awesome response to the attack on Prof. Krugman, too. Paul Krugman today discusses a post on “How to Debate Paul Krugman”, which by all appearances is a serious piece. The answer can be boiled down to “Ask questions like a child”: This seems to me to be…
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The Better Nation We’ve Become
In his post today (“Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall“), Paul Krugman links to a graph showing growing acceptance, over time, of interracial marriage in the United States: I like this for the chart that indicates that 86% of the country agrees that it was OK that I married my wife. That trendline — and all the…
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De-tuned
I wrote this nearly five years ago. I was mad then; now I’m more or less just resigned. The intellectual commons is being fenced off, now more than ever. I think we’re losing more than outlets for creativity or profit; we’re losing the shared language to remember who we were, who we are. ============== De-Tuned…
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My philosophy of education
Edited to correct some grammatical mistakes. The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize. But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in. Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher…