From philosopher Sidney Hook’s autobiographical Out of Step, on his authoritarian schooling in early 20th-century New York: “Although the public schools were religiously attended (children feared the wrath of their parents much more than the threats of the truant officer), the classroom experience was far more enjoyable. First of all, the discipline was exacting. Our […]
Sidney Hook’s school days in old New York Read More »
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
Should politicians force diversity at universities? Read More »
[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
True Believers against Leftist Responsibility — Kolakowski versus Thompson Read More »
The latest in cognition research: Accordion to several studies, replacing words with the names of musical instruments in a sentence often goes undetected.
Speed Reading — a joke Read More »
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
The Moral of Two Scandals — Enron and Ontario Read More »
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
Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany Read More »
In 2016, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of topics, including the pronoun wars. At that point, Professor Jordan Peterson had recently taken a strong public stand against being required to use some newly proposed pronouns, and that refusal had generated controversy. Here is the transcript of my four-minute opinion on Peterson and
Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript Read More »
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
Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs Read More »