All Thoughts Being Equal

This post is in response to Danny Canham's post, "The Naked Truth: Continuing a Discussion on Anger." Go read that first , and then come back here. I. Anger is a powerful emotion, but the use of anger in discussion, especially ones as fraught as the discussions around social-justice issues like race and gender and sexuality, can be seen as a sign of rhetorical weakness. At least, when it's the Wrong People who are getting angry. Consider the enthusiasm heaped upon Nevada rancher and sovereign citizen Cliven Bundy (pre-"one more thing I know about the Negro") by the right-wing news media, pundits, and blogosphere. Consider the Tea Party and all its derivatives. It's okay if it's an old white guy getting angry. Somehow anger at a Lost Cause is slightly more normalized than, say, the anger at a Utopia Denied from something like the Occupy movement. That is, the narrative that "we lost something, and we're trying to get it back"...

Earlier this month, Jordan Weissmann at Slate 's Moneybox column wrote two interesting—and highly disturbing—pieces on the material nature of poverty in the United States. The first details why poverty is still miserable , and the second includes graphs on how the poor spend their income . Both are well worth the time to read in full. And they're important, because it's not hard at all to hear a curious sort of reasoning in favor of this status quo from the likes of FOX News . On the July 19, 2011 edition of Your World With Neil Cavuto , guest host Stuart Varney and guest Robert Rector discussed the following statistics about America's poor families, and how the "definition of poor families [isn't] what it used to be":

I. Once, a long time from now, there was a village. The people who lived in this village were mostly happy. Everyone generally had enough to eat, comfortable clothes and shoes, a nice place to sleep, and plenty of ways to enjoy their lives. But theirs was not a perfect life. Occasionally there would befall the village some mysterious tragedy. A person might go missing, or an otherwise healthy child might suddenly become ill and die. These events were sad, but they were rare and mysterious. The villagers mourned the loss of their kin, but everyone said that sometimes these Mysterious Evils happened and that was the way of the world. Then, one day, a stranger appeared at the village gates. He wore a very strange mask, and his hands and feet were tightly wrapped, but otherwise spoke the local language and was exceedingly polite. Nervous, but never one to turn away visitors, the village admitted the stranger. He immediately went to the public square and began speaking, seemingly to the...

It's time again for some musings on social justice, culture, and the culture wars. Where did we leave off...

Reason magazine has a great piece by Sheldon Richman on the theme of 'thick' versus 'thin' libertarianism. It's worth the whole read, but this comment on the article grabbed my attention in particular: Because there are two ways to arrive at libertarianism - two distinct methods. One method is to arrive at libertarianism by way of doubt . You can say, "I don't think anyone can overcome the Hayekian information problem in economic policy. I also don't think anyone can ever conclusively devise an exhaustive set of moral norms. Further, I think that the people who occupy government positions are incredibly fallible, and we need to diminish their ability to impose their fallibility on others, by procedural and other means." But the other way is to arrive at something that looks a lot like libertarianism by way of certainty . (The Objectivists are the best known example of this.) You say, "I know exactly what is right and wrong, and among t...

In many discussions that swirled around the Internet in the wake of Brendan Eich's resignation from Mozilla Corp. , someone invariably invoked the concept of the "marketplace of ideas"—just as in the market for physical goods or services, ideas themselves are brought to the "marketplace" of discussion, weighed on their merits, and adopted or discarded as this "market" dictates. If you hang positive traits like "freedom," "openness," and "meritocracy" on the market-metaphor, that's all the more reason to apply it to many different spheres. But it's worth noting some possibly uncomfortable implications.

Okay, I (sort of) understand the rationale that drives so many conservatives to harp on "one man, one woman" marriage as the "bedrock of civilization" ( for often poor reasons ) and to position themselves as so-brave champions of the pure in a "war on marriage." For the highly religious it really does seem to stem from a bedrock-level worldview, something like the Great Chain of Being where there's a truly universal law that places God, husband/man, wife/woman, children, and everything else in a vertical hierarchy (in that order). I think that's bizarre and rather repugnant, but at least it does explain why we see such otherwise insane statements about how gay marriage will lead to a hermaphroditic universe . When gender-essentialism enters the picture, homosexuality truly is a Blue Screen of Death. But for the red-blooded conservative who wants to uphold strong family values but isn't that committed to the Great Chain of Being, here's ...