Shutdown: Don’t Hate the Players, Hate the Game

Today I’ve been reading around the internet the myriad reactions to the US government shutdown. Seemingly universally, these reactions all assign blame for the shutdown to someone. Most are blaming congressional republicans, but some are blaming senate democrats and the administration, while others are blaming both at once. I wish to challenge this entire way of talking about the government shutdown by arguing that the shutdown is the result of structural forces outside the control of any of the participating factions. I will argue that instead of blaming republicans, democrats, or both, we should blame none of the above. Instead of hating the players, we should hate the game–the political institutions that have failed us.

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Bill O’Reilly Agrees with Reza Aslan

Bill O’Reilly appears to have written a book called Killing Jesus in which O’Reilly argues that Jesus was killed because he opposed the Roman occupation of Judea (I say “Judea” because that is what the Romans called it at the time) on the grounds that the Romans were redistributing wealth away away from the people of that province, shipping it back across the Mediterranean to Italy. In sum, O’Reilly portrays Jesus as an anti-tax hero, in the mold of the Tea Party. The left has, of course, jumped all over this, emphasizing that O’Reilly neglects the various parts of the Bible in which Jesus defends the poor. What I find so interesting about this is that while O’Reilly has placed the emphasis on specific, narrow parts of the Bible, he is expressing a view that is more or less consistent with the one expressed by Reza Aslan, the man who was the subject of that famous interview with FOX in which they malign him for being a Muslim yet nonetheless writing about Jesus. I wrote about him here. Continue reading “Bill O’Reilly Agrees with Reza Aslan” →

How to Deal with Hate Speech

Now that I’m once again at a university doing university work, I have the pleasure of having my mind pointed at different subjects and writings that I otherwise might not get around to investigating. I’ve been looking at a book by Corey Brettschneider entitled When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? In this book, Brettschneider seeks to resolve an interesting dilemma in liberal political theory–namely, how liberal states, which are committed to liberty and equality, should deal with citizens who have illiberal opinions. Here, Brettschneider calls these illiberal opinions “hateful views”, and argues that a view is hateful if it seeks to undermine the liberty or equality of groups of people on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, and so on. I’d like to discuss Brettschneider’s view with you a bit today.

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A Critique of Independence Movements

Lately I’ve been thinking about national independence movements, like those in Catalonia, Scotland, Kurdistan, and other such places. I’ve also been hearing about separatist movements in some US states—in these cases, subsets of individual US state populations are petitioning the government for the right to carve out smaller states out of the currently existent bigger ones, in order to move their state governments’ policies to the right. These US state petitions will go nowhere, however, because federal law requires that separatist states get approval from the states they are seeking to leave in order to become independent. This got me thinking. Continue reading “A Critique of Independence Movements” →

Internet Interruption

I’ve been moving to a new apartment in Chicago to facilitate the MA I’m doing at the University of Chicago. I was unable to acquire internet at that apartment until just a few minutes ago, and because I never bought a smart phone, this meant I was more or less cut off from the blog. Over the course of the rest of the day, I hope to update myself on all the comments recently received on “Why are Young People Unhappy” which, by the relative standards of this website, has gone viral. I also managed to write a post while offline, which I will post subsequently. I thank my readers for their patience during my transition to the new living situation and academic program.