A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Liberalism

  • Silly season

    I haven’t been following the Republican primaries all that closely–partly because it’s too depressing, but also in part because I’ve been convinced virtually from the get-go that Mitt Romney will ultimately be the nominee. Nevertheless, what’s apparent even to the casual observer is that the G.O.P. intends to rerun the playbook they used in the Read more

  • What would it mean for progressives to “support” Ron Paul?

    There’s been a bit of back and forth recently in the left/progressive blogosphere about whether people who meet that particular description should “support” libertarian Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul’s candidacy for president. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others have expressed varying degrees of support for Paul’s candidacy, noting that his stances on civil liberties and Read more

  • “In the struggle between ‘labor’ and ‘capital,’ capital has basically won.”

    I haven’t blogged about the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” (and other) protests, but I did want to share a couple of recent pieces that I found helpful for putting them in context. Using a plethora of charts, this post at Business Insider lays out about as clearly as you could ask the problems with how Read more

  • Libertarianism and the politics of human frailty

    Jim Henley, who’s long been one of my favorite bloggers, has been writing a really interesting series of posts touching on aspects of his defection from libertarianism toward a more liberal/social-democratic politics. In his most recent post, Jim wonders if libertarianism is “an inevitably temporary political outlook.” He notes that many people seem to “outgrow” Read more

  • What you see is what you get

    Parts of the Internet are abuzz with some dumb comments made by filmmaker and lefty gadfly Michael Moore about Presdient Obama “governing like a white guy.” The racist nature of these comments aside, what continues to surprise me is how many people apparently thought they were electing a wild-eyed liberal when they voted for Obama. Read more

  • The varieties of leftism and the social democracy of fear

    I linked below to this great post by Russell Arben Fox, which is in turn a riff on this post from Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram. The original post identified four streams of left-wing politics and mused about what direction the European left should go in. Russell takes Bertram’s typology and applies it to the U.S. Read more

  • Friday Links

    –Marvin on the Presbyterian Church’s decision to allow congregations to call non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors. –Libraries are part of the social safety net. –“I hated vegans too, but now I am one.” –On anti-Semites and philo-Semites. –Mark Bittman asks, “Why bother with meat?” –Jesus and eco-theology. –Jeremy discusses Herbert McCabe and Gerhard Forde on Read more

  • Friday links

    –Ta-Nehisi Coates on Moby-Dick. –Amy-Jill Levine: “A Critique of Recent Christian Statements on Israel” –From Jeremy at Don’t Be Hasty: Why the church can’t take the place of the welfare state. –A discussion of “summer spirituality” with Fr. James Martin, S.J., author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. –A review of Keith Ward’s recent Read more

  • Friday Links

    –With the death of bin Laden, the U.S. has accomplished the aims that justified the war in Afghanistan. Time to leave. –An interview with “eco-economist” Herman Daly: Rethinking growth. –A primer on Christian nonviolence. –The collapse of the “progressive Christian” big tent? –The Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to allow non-celibate gay and lesbians to serve Read more

  • Friday Links

    –A challenge to libertarians on the coecivene power of private entities. –A.O. Scott on superhero movies as a Ponzi scheme. –Richard Beck of Experimental Theology on why he blogs. –A political typology quiz from the Pew Research Center. (I scored as a “solid libera.l” Although I’d take issue with the way some of the choices Read more