August 2004

From Slavoj Zizek’s review of Timothy Garton Ash’s Free World.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is [...]

It’s a rhetorical question.

I just can’t get enough of Grant McCracken. Today he blogs his refrigerator. Awesome.

I liked this summary of the debate on desert from Lindsay Beyerstein.
Wilkinson claims to have found a conflict between common sense morality and Rawlsian theory. If so, this undercuts Rawls’ claim to have codified common sense justice. Wilkinson argues that instrumentalism doesn’t really explain our intuition that a hard worker deserves her reward, though it [...]

Chris Betram replied to my reply to his reply to my TCS piece (scroll down in comments). And I’d like to, well, reply. I’d also like to reply to Brad DeLong, who I don’t think understands what he’s talking about. Economists are usually like that — confused — when they dabble in moral philosophy, with [...]

I see that I’m the Adam Smith Institute blog of the week. Cool. Thanks Alex!

Wednesday’s TCS piece on the desert seems to be getting around and eliciting some useful discussion. Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Betram takes me to task for (1) writing for TCS and (2) misrepresenting Rawls. There’s good debate in the comments.
Let me say that I’m very flattered that Chris thinks I am a mind [...]

I believe this is what happened to 17th St.

Irfan Khawaja calmly points out the dumbfounding contradictions in the reviews of Michael Moore’s latest tour de sophisme. For example:
Todd Gitlin’s review in Open Democracy calls Fahrenheit 9/11 a “shoddy work”: the film’s “sloppy insinuations, emotional blackmail and all–around demagoguery,” he argues, are an affront to one’s “conscience,” and make it the moral equivalent of [...]

Over at TCS I try to parry the thrust of this Matt Yglesias blog post. I argue that it is in fact possible to deserve what once has worked for, and that there are in fact self-made men who deserve credit for their achievements. I don’t believe these are controversial propositions, aside from a few [...]