Stephen Hicks

Should politicians force diversity at universities?

1 Comment / Education, Politics /

By diversity I mean the intellectual kind. Numerous surveys (e.g., here and here) show that university faculties lean left, often far left in humanities departments. A purely democratic argument says Yes, politicians should force diversity. Government-funded universities are paid for with tax monies, and in a democracy politicians are responsible to their constituents to ensure […]

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True Believers against Leftist Responsibility — Kolakowski versus Thompson

1 Comment / Philosophy /

[Revised from this earlier post.] When the great Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009) published “My Correct Views on Everything,” he was responding to Edward Thompson’s attack in “Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski.” Kolakowski is best known for Main Currents of Marxism, his huge survey of Marxism from its neo-Platonic and Hegelian roots, on through Marx

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The Moral of Two Scandals — Enron and Ontario

1 Comment / Business Ethics, Economics, Politics /

Ontario’s financial debts, as of 2018: “Ontario’s debt has ballooned to $312 billion, the biggest debt held by a subnational government anywhere in the world. Ontario owes twice as much as California, which has a population bigger than all of Canada.”[1] Enron’s debts as determined by its bankruptcy proceedings: “The company paid its creditors more

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Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany

Leave a Comment / History, Politics /

I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (​Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From

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Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs

Leave a Comment / Philosophy /

Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions (below or at YouTube): 1. What’s your intellectual evolution? 2. Why do you say that postmodernism is the evolution of Marxism? 3. What values define Western Civilization? 4. Why does the New Left fight nihilistically against individual rights and capitalism? 5. Does philosophy matter to

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