Krugman vs. Sanders

Scarcely a day goes by without Paul Krugman hammering away at Bernie Sanders. And the message is always clear. Change is difficult. It requires compromise. You can’t try to do too much. People like Sanders are ridiculous. They think all a President needs to do is snap her fingers and ...
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In Defense of Gravitas

  “I raise no objection to television's junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television ...
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Was Wittgenstein a Realist or an Antirealist?

(A while back, in my post “The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer”, promised a series of philosophically oriented posts that would explore “whether Rorty, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Dewey successfully evaded the dualisms they struggled with, or how well they manage to avoid the extremes of nihilism and ...
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Mr. Clinton’s Lament

In 2014, when the editorial staff of The New Republic resigned en masse to protest its looming corporatization by a publisher aiming to convert it to “a vertically integrated digital media company,” I was a bit smug in my surprise. Ironic, I thought: the magazine, which lurched from “popular front” ...
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Prisoners of the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Here is the problem. In my humble opinion, Bernie Sanders is clearly the best candidate running for the office of President of the United States of America. His policies are sound, his integrity unimpeachable, his intelligence undeniable. He is also attracting tremendous crowds, and raising significant funds while bypassing (as ...
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Orbán’s Politics of Fear and Hatred in Hungary

On a European nation’s far-right response to the refugee crisis

Although the position on the migrant issue put forward by the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, is morally hard to digest, many people think it is nevertheless the only way to save Europe from the flood of masses that threatens to destabilize the continent. I dispute this ...

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Zuckerberg & Chan Are Us

Philanthrocapitalism and the public good

Almost forty-eight years to the day before Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced the creation of their limited liability company and pledged to give away 99% of their Facebook shares within their lifetimes, a lawyer lectured a roomful of stockbrokers on “How to Obtain Maximum Tax Advantages by Using Securities ...

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ISIS Slaughters, Iranians Get Punished

A threat to democratic efforts in Iran

Last Tuesday, December 8, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill, supported by the White House, which, if signed into law this week, would punish Iranians for crimes they have never committed. Moreover, it would provoke the hardliners in Iran, only a few months after ...

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Shakespeare and Trump: What’s in a Name?

Thoughts on headless bodies in tombless graves

One seeks in vain for references to Shakespeare in Carly Fiorina’s Tough Choices: A Memoir (2007) and Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey (2015). There are no lessons from Shakespeare in Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach ...

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