I’m an NBA fan–I love pro basketball. Like most NBA fans, I have a favorite team, my local Chicago Bulls. And like most talented teams, my favorite team has a nemesis, the Miami Heat. And while my Bulls have been knocked out of the playoffs, said Heat are still playing, and I watch every one of their playoff games so I can cheer for the opposing team. First it was Indiana in the conference finals, now it’s San Antonio in the NBA Finals. None of this sounds especially political, to this point, I expect, but I would like to explore a larger philosophical question stemming from this example–why do I dislike the Miami Heat so much, and is my dislike justifiable?
Category: Politics
Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
Search and Seizure
In the United States, we often get very upset about violations of privacy on the basis that they are thought to violate the 4th amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures”. But what is it about search and seizure that is objectionable in the first place, and to what extent do the modern privacy violations we often argue about conform to that?
The Moral Irrelevance of the God Question
A while back, I wrote about the separation of moral philosophy and metaphysics. I argued in agreement with Dworkin that whether or not a moral claim is true does not rely on objective metaphysical blunt facts about the nature of the universe. It occurred to me today that this makes the entire debate between the new atheism of Dawkins, Hitchens, and the like and traditional religion irrelevant to questions of moral philosophy–the metaphysical debate about whether or not there is a deity and what that deity’s nature might be can have no bearing whatsoever on our moral theory.
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The Biasing Effects of Personal Experience
One of the most common assumptions around is the notion that the only way to truly understand something is to be part of it. It is said that the best way to learn about life is to live it. This idea has tremendous influence–it causes method actors to attempt to directly experience what their characters experience, it causes people to go on trips or to do things purely for “the experience”, and most importantly, it has tremendous influence over how people think about politics, both for the left and for the right. The left scolds well-off politicians, who are assumed to have no conception of what it means to be poor and to suffer. The right scolds young people and ivory tower academics for not directly experiencing the welfare systems they praise, or the private systems they denigrate. There is a kernel of truth in both criticisms, but that’s about it.
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Our Not-So-Secret Spying Program
If you’re in the United States and you haven’t been living under a rock, the big story right now is how the government has been secretly gathering information about your phone and internet activity! You have no privacy! The media has whipped up a hysteria–I’ve heard it openly referred to as a “secret phone-tapping program”. The trouble is, this version of the story is extremely misleading. The government has been open about this since the mid-2000’s. Information about it has been widely available, so much so that I can construct a timeline of how this program came about with relative ease.
