Lamenting Grandstanding and Stopping It
I’ve just finished reading Grandstanding by my friends Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi. It’s a marvelous little book and is both well-written and well-argued. I did find myself a bit saddened by the book because I tend to think I ought to do all I can to attribute good motives to others, even if I […]
Avoid Cancel Culture Because You Don’t Know Why People Disagree With You
One of the important features of cancel norms is that cancelation is a punishment. The “cancelers” aren’t in the business of simply shutting down a line of argument, or silencing a publicized view. The goal is to make the person less influential by penalizing them for violating some kind of norm (often a new and […]
Suppose I Wrote a Book on Integralism: What Should I Cover?
As I finish copyediting and page proofing for my next book, Trust in a Polarized Age, I’ve been thinking about my next big book project. I’ve become increasingly interested in exploring illiberal political perfectionism, the view that the ultimate duty of the state is to promote the good and the good life for citizens, but […]
Important Religious Liberty Victories at the Supreme Court
Important victories for religious liberty today, but the Little Sisters decision far from settles their “legal odyssey” (as Alito puts it). All that happened is that the Court let the Trump Administration broaden the exemption from what the Obama Administration offered. From what I can tell, you’d need new litigation to stop a future Democratic […]
Should Pro-Lifers Support TRAP Laws?
TRAP laws (Targeted Regulations of Abortion) have become an important policy tool for the pro-life movement at the state level. They’ve used these laws to effectively close many abortion clinics, based on the dubious claim that the regulations that led the clinics to close were necessary to protect women’s health. The Supreme Court just struck […]
The Goal of Police Reform Must Be To Restore Trust Between Police and Citizens
One of the only promising political developments as of late is the possibility of policing reform, in some way to change the incentives that the police face in order to reduce police brutality. I will say, however, that I worry that people aren’t thinking far enough in advance of what a desirable new institutional equilibrium […]
The Simplest Argument Against Integralism – The Mortara Argument
In this post, I offer the simplest compelling argument against Catholic Integralism that I know of. It is based on the Mortara Case, where Pope Pius IX, sovereign of the papal states, removed Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy, from his Jewish family. Pius IX did so because he discovered that the boy had been illicitly […]
Tribal Reasoning and Public Reasoning – Reply to Brennan and My Take on Achen and Bartels
Now that Bleeding Heart Libertarians has closed up shop, the BHL diaspora has begun. Jason Brennan, Chris Frieman, and Jess Flanigan – all friends – have started up a new blog with a different approach – 200-proof liberals. I recommend subscribing to it, though it is meant to have a very different rhetorical style than […]
Protesting > Public Health > Jobs and Funerals?
It is now common on the right to condemn those like the health official in this article saying that attending a protest is “really the worst thing they can do from the pandemic standpoint” while simultaneously saying that “protesting racism and injustice is important [my emphasis], and much of the risk of a protest can […]
Low Trust America – Cops and Protestors in a Low Trust Equilibrium
What happened in Minneapolis is a trust disaster. Due to the legacy of racism, black Americans don’t trust legal officials. Indeed, only 17% of black Americans say *most people* can be trusted, in contrast with 46% of whites. I would also bet that white cops trust black Americans relatively little, though getting good survey data […]