“While both of Ngo’s claims are technically true, the proper context paints a widely different picture.”
Tag: Essay
Understanding the Great Divide in Our Politics
“How could a movement predicated on free expression and identity-blind principles come to be associated with the Right and described as reactionary by smart progressive critics like Vox’s Ezra Klein?”
How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place (Part II)
“Rapid innovations in communications technology and new media have made it so that any individual can access more knowledge at their fingertips than prior generations could have by traveling to the world’s most esteemed centers of learning.”
Why Karl Marx Is Wrong
“Running a profitable enterprise is not the same thing as Smaug guarding a pile of gold.”
Why the Left Should Take Hayek Seriously, Too
“As a student pointed out during a lecture on this subject, this Hayekian market is probably closer to the Open Source movement in software development than to what is commonly invoked with the words ‘free market.'”
Why Everyone Is Talking about Josh Hawley
“Hawley talks again and again about the importance of community and criticizes those on both sides of the political aisle who pay fealty to an individualism that puts the self-creating individual at the summit of what constitutes the good.“
Actually, Bernie Sanders, Billionaires Should Exist
“To deny the billionaires of today the aspiration to earn as much as they do (let alone the right), we deny the possibility for everyone else to earn it tomorrow.”
In Reply to Geoffrey Miller: Polyamory Becomes Polygyny
“Miller is a bit naïve here. He does not seem to notice that, as a general rule, polyamory eventually becomes polygyny.”
How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place
“What it means is that when we begin to coordinate our lives according to an ideological worldview, it begins to generate a social world that can look a lot like the image presented by the ideology.”
Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound”: Where Is Meaning to be Found?
“Aeschylus’ tragedy represents the most elemental aspects of our human condition: all human flourishing comes with a cost.”
Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and the Utilitarian Road to Nowhere
“American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind has determined six fundamental human values: fairness, liberty, hierarchy, care, loyalty, and sanctity. But utilitarian thinkers have reduced people’s values to just care and equality.”
What Share of Socialists Want to Abolish Families?
“John Rawls, surely the most relevant philosopher of justice in the 20th Century, was aware of this problem and notoriously asked if the family should be abolished, with no clear answers.”
Developing a Progressive Theory of Rights: A Preview of Liberalism and Liberal Rights
“Finally, even a thinker as cynical and sharp as Michel Foucault invoked the language of rights to discuss the ‘right to intervene’ to liberate suffering individuals from the imposition of tyrannical sovereignty.”
The Particular Discomfort Neurodivergents Have with Speech Codes
“The patterns of behavior that characterize a broad part of the autistic spectrum are indirectly viewed as a hindrance towards the 21st-century diversity and inclusion goals.”
A Chapter from Our Forthcoming Book Critiquing Jordan Peterson
“Peterson consistently invokes the Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean trope that the most important thing is to strengthen the self against the suffering of the world. The stronger one becomes, the greater and more worthy of respect and emulation by those around him.”