A Thinking Reed

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

Politics

  • “Leaning no” on Syria

    I had been somewhat on the fence about a potential (likely?) U.S. military intervention in Syria, partly because I hadn’t been following it that closely. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been doing a bit of catch-up reading, and this post at Lawyers, Guns & Money helpfully summarizes my basic unease with what the Read more

  • Gay marriage for some, tiny American flags for others

    Well this is pretty much unqualifiedly good news: Married gay and lesbian couples are entitled to federal benefits, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday in a major victory for the gay rights movement. In a second decision, the court declined to say whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Instead, the justices said Read more

  • Obama’s counter-terrorism speech: return to (a semblance of) normalcy?

    The counter-terrorism policy outlined in the president’s speech today hardly describes my ideal approach, but most, if not all, of the changes he’s made or is proposing are steps in the right direction. These include –continuing the reduction in the number of combat troops in Afghanistan, –declassifying information on Americans killed in drone strikes, –reviewing Read more

  • Barbara Lee, hero

    Glenn Greenwald has an astute piece today on the 2001 authorization to use force that Congress passed in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As he notes, the AUMF is currently being revisited, but largely for the purposes of expanding the executive’s authority to wage war. Greenwald goes on to recount the, well, “criticism” Read more

  • Boston

    The “what” and the “how” are awful, and no one seems to know much about the “who” and “why” at this point. Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from speculating. I recommend this post from Jesse Walker at Reason as an antidote to some of that. I lived in the Boston area (Somerville to be Read more

  • “Sexual complementarity”–important but not essential

    The main “philosophical” argument against same-sex marriage/marriage equality seems to be that it denies that “sexual complementarity” is at the core of what marriage is. Some versions of this argument take what I think is an implausible view of the metaphysical status of what they call the “conjugal union” of a man and woman, but Read more

  • Everybody please stop focusing on “drones”

    Whatever you think of Senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the C.I.A., one thing it doesn’t seem to have accomplished is to get people to focus on the president’s authority to kill people he designates as threats. This, rather than the use of “drones” per se, is the real Read more

  • Four more years

    I didn’t even watch the inaugural festivities live on TV, much less attend them in person. But I did catch the president’s speech in re-runs, and like many others I thought it provided a persuasive articulation of his brand of pragmatic progressivism. It’s not a creed I fully share, but in terms of current American Read more

  • Negative liberty, positive liberty, and the second American revolution

    In the afterword to his magisterial Battle Cry of Freedom (which I finished reading over Christmas), historian James McPherson says that the Civil War was a turning point between two different understandings of liberty. He distinguishes them using the terms made famous by Isaiah Berlin: “negative” liberty and “positive” liberty. Roughly, negative liberty is freedom Read more

  • The incoherence of conservative economics

    First Things‘ R.R. Reno and The American Conservative‘s Scott Galupo both have recent posts that grapple intelligently with the problems of the G.O.P’s economic message. They’re responding in part to Mitt Romney’s post-election diagnosis that President Obama won because he offered “gifts” to voters. Here’s Reno: What today’s Republican Party can’t seem to get its Read more