When my run of posting starts to become rather thin, I think I owe readers an explanation as to what is going on and when they can expect things to return to normal. In this case, I am presently working on a draft of the MA thesis I am writing at University of Chicago, provisionally titled The Return of Depression Politics and the Coming Cataclysm for Democracy. This draft needs to be completed by Friday, April 18, and so I have had to give it precedence over my other projects. Sometime during this week the draft will be finished, at which point the blogging pace should begin to pick up. However, a full return to the very-nearly-daily pace I maintained for much of 2013 is not in the cards, at least not until I finish my MA, which I expect will happen de jure in June, de facto in late May. I thank you, the reader, for your patience as I complete these urgent projects.
Author: Benjamin Studebaker
Minimum Wage: Rational Employers are Not Job Creators
There is a huge, gaping hole in the response right-wing politicians are giving to demands that the minimum wage be raised in the United States–they are assuming that employers generally behave in an irrational, inefficient way. Here’s how.
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Gaslighting Philosophers
Perhaps you remember last year when American football player Manti Te’o was catfished. An acquaintance of Te’o pretended to be a girl named Lennay Kekua, and Te’o became convinced that he was in an online long-distance relationship with this individual. When Kekua “died of cancer”, Te’o was devastated, and his devastation grew larger still when he discovered that the entire relationship was a lie, that Kekua was not a real person at all. Catfishing happens when the perpetrator manipulates over the course of an extended period of time a victim’s sense of reality to make the victim believe he is in a relationship with a non-existent person. It is a form of gaslighting, a devious strategy by which perpetrators systematically undermine victims’ notions of reality by systematically manipulating them into mistrusting their own senses and experience. My claim today is that there are philosophers who are engaged in gaslighting on a grand scale–those who believe that truth is a social construct.
Mitt Romney is No Captain Hindsight on Ukraine
Since I last wrote about Ukraine, the Russians have occupied and annexed Crimea, a region that has a 70% majority ethnic Russian population and a major Russian naval base. The United States and the European Union have done even less than I anticipated in response–sanctions have been confined to a few figures in Putin’s administration. At this point, the armchair generals are beginning to come out of the woodwork, with Mitt Romney going so far as to tell us what he believes he would have done had he been elected in 2012. Unfortunately, Romney is no Captain Hindsight, and his proposals only serve to illustrate what a poor choice the American people had in 2012.
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Fred Phelps: Is It Okay to Express Joy When Other People Die?
Fred Phelps, the leader of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, died the other day at the age of 84. Phelps was near-universally despised. His church taught that when soldiers died in war, it was because god was angry at America for tolerating homosexuality. He believed that the best way to spread this message was to picket the funerals of dead soldiers with “God Hates Fags” signs. It’s not my purpose today to get into why this is repugnant (I assume the reader agrees with me on that), but to instead take Fred Phelps and use him as a case study to investigate the curious moral question of whether or not it’s okay to express the happiness we feel when repugnant people die.
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Benjamin Studebaker 
