Category: philosophy
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College Admissions Hunger Games
Today the NY Times published an Upshot op-ed called “For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems“. It’s one of those article that seems to say more than it does. It doesn’t actually support the conclusion it asserts. Saying that roughly the same percentage of “top students” still get admission to…
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What is a library?
I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique. But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down. The proximate cause of our discussion was…
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The persistence of “factory”-style schools
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?” There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it. It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until…
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Pat Buchanan is an idiot
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet. Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just…
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Happy Tax Day!
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have…
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Lunacon 2014 (2e): Magic and Religion
Saturday 3 PM. Panelists: Carole Ann Moleti; Michael F. Flynn, Raymond Feist, Jane Sibley Interesting tidbit: religion = re+ligio = a rebinding of society (to join again). Religion has always had a social purpose, to increase community and tie society together. The panelists offered a definition of magic as “a belief that mundane objects have…
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Art and Design, Fail
I’ve been doing a little reading on the art of design and the failure of art as design. (For example, see this piece about how objects for human use should be designed for, you know, humans.) That led me to the International Push/Pull Pictogram Design Competition, tasked with designing exactly what it says: a non-verbal…
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This is important: What we know about what happened in Boston
Nothing. We know nothing of import yet, and won’t for several hours, if not an entire day. That is the way of these things, and the truth of them. Nonetheless, the circus has begun. Each network has already offered its own (or its several own) opinions on who caused the bombing, who planted the bombs,…
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The defining feature of modern Republicanism
It’s not small-government. It’s not anti-tax screeds or culture war crusades. It’s not being pro-big business or pro-gun. It’s not being anti-choice or anti-gay. It’s not suport of “traditional marriages” or of non-traditional “special interrogation”. It’s not being pro-Gitmo or anti-drone or pro-Keystone or anti-FEMA. It’s not even being sexist or being racist. It’s a…
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Time to put away childish things
Update (2013 Feb 4): Noah Smith has an awesome response to the attack on Prof. Krugman, too. Paul Krugman today discusses a post on “How to Debate Paul Krugman”, which by all appearances is a serious piece. The answer can be boiled down to “Ask questions like a child”: This seems to me to be…