From time to time I am asked what I am going to do with my summers. Am I going to get a job? An internship? What productive, respectable use will I make of my time? The answer is no such use at all–I spend my summers enjoying myself. Why? Because time is valuable.
Category: Politics
Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
Evaluating Erdogan
Recently there have been demonstrations against Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The demonstrations began because the government was intending to demolish a park in Istanbul (not Constantinople) and replace it with a shopping mall. This relatively pedestrian protest escalated when the Turkish government removed the protesters in a violent police raid. The target of the protests has now expanded from the park to the policies of Erdogan more broadly, specifically the social conservatism of his government and its tendency to give preference to Islam in its legislation. A lot of people in the media in developed states have begun referring to this as a “Turkish Spring”, and the default reaction has been to support the protesters, assuming that they are under governments similar to those that prevailed in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other such places. The instinct is to view Turkey as just another Middle Eastern country protesting a generically malevolent government. A poor job has been done of evaluating the Turkish situation specifically, of giving the Erdogan government a fair evaluation. Today, I’d like to contribute to rectifying that.
The Wall Street Journal v. Bicycles
New York City has recently started up a bicycle program, similar to the ones that already exist in many European cities like Paris or London. However, the Wall Street Journal is none too pleased. They made a video, which you can find here. The video makes some rather odd claims.
Erick Erickson and Women
Erick Erickson is editor-in-chief of Redstate.com, a conservative blogging website. The other day, Erickson went on FOX, where had a rather controversial reaction to the recent statistic that shows that 40% of mothers are now the highest earners in their respective households in the United States. He said this:
When you look at biology–when you look at the natural world–the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.
Europeans and Americans
Now that my undergraduate degree in England is over, I’ve started to collate my thoughts regarding the essential distinctions between the European and American variants of civilization. Why do Europeans support universal health care while Americans do not? Why are Europeans more communal? Why are they more supportive of interventionist government policies? These are the sort of things I wish to ponder about today.
