A Thinking Reed

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

Politics

  • Updated thoughts on Christianity and capitalism

    A while back I wrote a post called “What’s a Christian to do with capitalism?” in which I tried to outline some principles for a Christian approach to economics. I’ve since thought that those principles weren’t stated as clearly or exactly as they should have been, and I’ve updated the post to try and reflect Read more

  • Foreign policy and the Golden Rule

    Even though I argued in my previous post that liberals are under no particular obligation to support Ron Paul (e.g., vote for him), I do agree with those who say that he is raising important issues and has a perspective that needs to be heard, particularly with respect to foreign policy. In a recent post 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

  • American “multarchy”

    Philosopher Gary Gutting writes that America doesn’t have a democracy, but a “mutlarchy”–a system that includes elements of the five types of government delineated by Plato in The Republic. These are —aristocracy: “rule by the ‘best’, that is, by experts specially trained at governance” —timarchy: “rule by those guided by their courage and sense of Read more

  • The “stupidity” of closing libraries

    If you really want complete freedom of choice, complete openness of information, where nobody is spying on you, no one is selling your presence to advertisers, the only place to find it is a library, where they keep books. –Author Philip Pullman, “declaring war” against library closures in the UK (Via Alan Jacobs) 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 Christian politics of Mark O. Hatfield

    Former senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon passed away this week at the age of 89. He was one of the last of the liberal Republicans–someone who bucked his party on many issues. But Hatfield wasn’t simply a liberal Republican in the Nelson Rockefeller mold. He was a devout evangelical Christian, a virtual pacifist, and a Read more

  • We’ve all got issues

    I can get behind the idea that the long-term debt is an issue we need to address. What I don’t get is the urgency it’s attracted in our current political debate. Just off the top of my head, I can think of any number of more pressing issues: –Global warming –Unemployment –Global poverty –Nuclear proliferation Read more