Why Was Anyone Ever Impressed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
One interesting feature of recent debates about God’s existence is the use of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to deride the rationality of theistic belief (a colorful spin on Russell’s teapot case). What I’m interested in is why anyone was ever impressed with it. Lately I’ve been studying the history of the Byzantine Empire: its military […]
Must Politics Be War? on the Political Theory Review Podcast
Jeffrey Church, host of The Political Theory Review podcast, interviewed me yesterday about Must Politics Be War? If you haven’t read the book yet, but want to explore its main ideas and arguments, listen to this podcast.
Black Hole Theories of Social Power
A black hole theory of social power holds that when an institution gets too much power, that power will snowball, making institution ever harder to stop. Left unchecked, the institution will control most or all of society and use various forms of coercion and violence to cement its power for good. There are two big […]
Integralism as Christian Default
The new Catholic integralists have caught fire on the internet and to some extent outside of it Their proposal is simple. What should the state do? Promote the full authentic human good. For the integralist, the full authentic good is as Catholicism describes. What distinguishes integralist states from other kinds of political order is that […]
Absolving the Six Deadly Sins of the Trust Literature: Reply to Nowrasteh and Forrester
Last week, Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester published a Cato working paper arguing that the empirical trust literature is so rife with weaknesses that we can’t learn much from it. Their central finding is that sub-regional trust levels in the United States don’t correlate with economic output, despite trust theorists arguing that trust promotes economic […]
Why Democrats Should Try to Restore Political Trust
The final question at the Democratic debate last night concerned the Ellen-W friendship and invited candidates to talk about a surprising friendship they have with someone across the political isle. Many viewers complained about the question, but I thought is it was appropriate and informative. A number of the candidates talked about the importance of […]
Joker’s Portrayal of Poverty and Mental Health [minor spoilers]
Perhaps the most important, yet understated event in Joker is that Arthur Fleck lost his medications and social worker. Due to budget cuts, publicly-funded social workers simply abandoned their cases, leaving Arthur with no easy way to refill his medication and no professional to talk to. These events, especially going off of one’s medications, can […]
Beto Makes Politics War
Last night, Beto O’Rourke said that religious institutions that refuse to accept same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status. That’s a sure fire way to make politics war: use the federal government to stigmatize half the country. Every conservative mosque, synagogue, and church in the country would be tarred by their own government as bigoted […]
Operationalizing the French-Ahmari Debate by Measuring Trustworthiness
I think the recent intra-conservative French-Ahmari debate can be partially resolved by determining the extent to which secular progressives can be trusted to protect robust freedom of religion for religious traditionalists with conservative views about human sexuality. If secular progressives are trustworthy, at least by and large, then French’s strategy of working within liberal democratic […]
Six Reasons Why Ellen is Right to Remain Friends with George W. Bush
There’s been a bit of a Twitterstorm over Ellen DeGeneres’s friendship with George W. Bush, which became clear when they were seen at a football game together. Some complained on the grounds that a good person like Ellen shouldn’t be friends with an ex-president with problematic views and who did terrible things in office. The […]