stanley cavell
The fact that the English word mad means both angry and insane has repeatedly seemed to me wonderfully perceptive of it. –Stanley Cavell, from his most recent book, Little Did I Know. The Chronicle of...
View Articleculture / evidence
On the right, there’s something of a cultural underlay to the worldview: We are the real Americans, and they are not. Liberals want to say, We are correct on the evidence, and they are not. –Ezra...
View Articlereason as a blunt instrument
Did the human capacity to reason evolve as a mechanism to acquire truth? Or was it only in the service of winning arguments? This is the question at the center of an article by Hugo Mercier and Dan...
View Articleobama, innovation, and the race against mistaken conclusions
The president calls this a structural issue—we usually call it progress. –Russell Roberts, George Mason University and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writing in an op-ed in today’s...
View Articlethe vigorous competition of ideas
This court is the strongest First Amendment court in history. The current majority uses the First Amendment as a powerful tool of deregulation that eliminates virtually all government efforts to...
View Articlechavs – the moral externalities to a meritocracy
It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents? –Owen Jones, quoting a tittering dinner-party participant in his recent book, CHAVS The Demonization of the...
View Articleblast from the past
I do not believe that this distinction between the market for goods and the market for ideas is valid….producers who are found to be so unscrupulous in their behavior in other markets can be trusted to...
View Articlecitizens united leads to more transparency
The decision in Citizens United v. FEC incited much debate and hand-wringing. Are companies people? Is corporate speech protected? Does the metaphor of the market apply to freedom of speech and, if so,...
View Articlethe new nationalism
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains….Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations,...
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