Yesterday, US President Barack Obama came out in favor of net neutrality, urging the FCC to classify the internet as a utility for regulatory purposes:
Immediately thereafter, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) came out against net neutrality, tweeting:
“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
This analogy between net neutrality and Obamacare does not work on any level and is deeply misleading. Here’s why.
A while back, I wrote a piece called “A Critique of Peter Singer“, one of my more popular pieces on moral theory. Since I wrote that piece, I’ve spent more time reading and thinking about Singer, and I am now prepared to offer an additional critique that in some places supersedes and in other places adds to that one. Continue reading “A New Critique of Peter Singer”
I subscribe to a weekly news magazine called The Week. It’s an excellent magazine highlighting the various things commentators have been saying in the popular press over the past week. In the most recent issue, however, I saw something strange. In the banner, there was a picture of Karl Marx, and the question “Is Marxism Back in Fashion?” This struck me as quite bizarre–I hadn’t seen any mention of Marx or Marxism in the last week. I turned to the relevant article and discovered that the controversy being highlighted was over Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Many commentators, particularly those writing in right-leaning publications, were referring to Piketty and his work as Marxist (for an example, see Kyle Smith’s piece in the New York Post) This apparently is so uncontroversial that The Week felt comfortable guiding people to the story with a Marx reference. I found this extremely troubling, both because Piketty is most certainly not a Marxist and because the practice of calling all those with radical left-wing views “Marxist” is an attempt to straw man those leftists and prevent people from thinking seriously about their views. I’d like to elaborate on both themes today.
It is often argued by feminists that women are exploited in traditional relationships. Economically dependent and doing many hours of unpaid childcare, it’s argued that women do not, in the traditional structure, receive the full value of their labour in exchange for their services, and that the traditional marriage in which the woman does not work strips her of her freedom and independence and raises the cost to any move on her part toward autonomy. However, is it possible to also perceive the traditional relationship as exploitative of the male role? I propose it is. Here’s how.
Benjamin Studebaker 