Category: philosophy
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Subverting Stereotypes on the Fury Road
I just finished rewatching Mad Max: Fury Road. I have to say, I can understand why the film earned the online ire of the so-called men’s rights activists (MRAs). It takes all the high-octane testosterone-drenched tropes of the typical action flick, ramps them up to 11 and, in so doing, exposes the madness that lies at…
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Regarding “Huckabee: The Supreme Court ‘Cannot Overrule God’ On Gay Marriage”
Gov. Huckabee is entirely correct: SCOTUS cannot overrule God. The justices can’t make a gay marriage sanctified. But then, they can’t make a straight marriage sanctified either. It’s really quite simple: To the extend that marriage is a sacrament, the government cannot have an opinion, and the marriage-equality suits do not speak to this. To…
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One sentence can pull you out of an entirely fine essay
I actually agree with most of what Fareed Zakaria writes in his Washington Post op-ed “Why America’s Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous“. We need balanced, robust, well-rounded education, not narrow business-driven training. It will take many different vantages points to see solutions to the problems we face in this hardest century of human history. Students…
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College Admissions Hunger Games
Today the NY Times published an Upshot op-ed called “For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems“. It’s one of those article that seems to say more than it does. It doesn’t actually support the conclusion it asserts. Saying that roughly the same percentage of “top students” still get admission to…
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What is a library?
I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique. But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down. The proximate cause of our discussion was…
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The persistence of “factory”-style schools
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?” There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it. It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until…
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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…