I have a piece over at Salon about the silly way we have these shell arguments about procedural things (like speech rights) that are actually motivated by substantive things (like whether we agree or disagree with what is being said). It’s solid.
Author: Matt Bruenig
Duck Dynasty, Jim Crow, and poor whites
Phil Robertson said this about life in the Jim Crow south: I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field….… Continue reading Duck Dynasty, Jim Crow, and poor whites
Three Levels of Politics
I think of politics on three levels: 1) abstract normative level, 2) ideal institutions level, 3) non-ideal, “second best” level. In day-to-day analysis, people, myself included, move between these levels without making note of it, which can lead to considerable confusion when trying to figure out what label to attach to someone politically. So for… Continue reading Three Levels of Politics
Another intuition pump on the ‘defining issue of our time’
So people really are serious about trying to figure out what the truth value of the sentence “inequality is the defining issue of our time” is. Because the idea of the “defining issue of our time” is empty and meaningless, there is no serious way to debate about it. Normally if you want to debate… Continue reading Another intuition pump on the ‘defining issue of our time’
Liberals and class
I want to shortly clarify one of my points from the prior post about what I called “liberal cultural space.” So the identitarian swing among liberals (and left of liberals) has been pretty successful in disciplining people from privileged identities from arguing against the seriousness of oppression that does not affect them. A man that… Continue reading Liberals and class