“How to Tame Religious Terrorists” [CHURCH and STATE]

Leave a Comment / Philosophy /

My “How to Tame Religious Terrorists” is now republished at Britain’s Church and State site: “Any fight is triggered by short-term, local disagreements. But long-term, generalized conflicts are always about abstract principles in collision. As with neo-Nazis, Communist revolutionaries, violent environmentalists, bomb-the-government anarchists and others – our conflicts with them are intellectual in origin. “Terrorism […]

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Sidney Hook’s school days in old New York

Leave a Comment / Education /

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

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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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