I have to admit to being a little perplexed by the outrage at Rush Limbaugh’s bid to be part of the new ownership group for the Saint Louis Rams.  I mean, I understand that people do not like Rush Limbaugh.  I myself do not like him or his show at all.
I don’t think his job [...]

Week two of the school year is upon me, and so I have finally wedged in enough time to post again.  I’ve been reading up on pragmatism, particularly as explained by Charles Sanders Peirce in “The Fixation of Belief.”  Key to Peirce’s view on belief is that we come to hold beliefs as true primarily [...]

I’m trying to get my head around the Obama school address protests.  I am mystified by the following elements.

Why the administration would think it would be in any way convenient to disrupt the school schedule so early in the new year for most public schools.  This is for some schools, a very serious burden on [...]

It has become quite popular to push the work of John Rawls aside on the claim that it is not “real politics.”  I am not surprised that an old teacher of mine, William Galston, has a similar view. 
Even at its best, politics cannot be a branch of moral philosophy, or a kind of rational choice, [...]

Ms. Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post has an article today on Senator Voinovich’s comments about the GOP having “too many Southerners.”  While the Senator defends himself by saying the comment was “off the record” ( I never understand this defense.  It doesn’t mean, “I didn’t mean what I said,” and it doesn’t mean, “I’m sorry,” [...]

Via Julian Sanchez (via Doug Bandow), Congressman John Conyers has pledged to make “the right to health care” a “Constitutional right.”  One can consult many sources as to why this is a bad idea, that’s not what I’m interested in.  What I am interested in noting is the utter breakdown in understanding about our government [...]

The news of IBM’s acquisition of SPSS is a business move, but it is indicative of the importance of understanding complex information in the modern world.  Imagine telling someone in 1985 that IBM would be largely a consulting company and that it would make headlines in acquiring a statistical analysis software company.  I grew up in [...]

I’m co-authoring a paper write now that takes a critical look at the implications of David Estlund’s Democratic Authority (and related papers) on what he calls Fair Epistemic Proceduralism.  There are a number of places when it comes to governance, where FEP is possibly not the most appropriate avenue of decision-making (and I think Estlund [...]

Well I’m not sure what terrorists would do in my back yard, but if they were willing to scare off the dog who freely wanders through my yard and the people who use the heated smoking porch in back of the bar/restaurant that backs onto the end of my lot… I could see the upside.

There is no more perniciously undemocratic notion than the claim, “If I am losing a democratic argument, it is because of unfairness.”  Yet, we see electoral losers float this argument in the face of losses all the time.  The absolute immodesty the claim entails utterly reeks of stupidity.  If there are no conditions under which one would [...]