A Thinking Reed

  • Rights-talk and some distinctions

    I think I unhelpfully ran a few ideas together in the post on libertarianism that should be more clearly distinguished. First, there is the distinction between “negative” and “positive” rights. That is, I asserted that, in practical political terms, this distinction is fuzzier than often imagined because the protection of any right–positive or negative–requires dedicated…

  • In praise of diminished expectations

    Paul Krugman makes the case for passing the Senate version of health-care reform: With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail. At its…

  • Baillie on the problem of the historical Jesus

    In light of some of the reading I’ve doing lately on the historical Jesus, I decided to re-visit D.M. Baillie’s God Was In Christ, which was published around the middle of the last century and addressed the then-current controversy about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. It holds up…

  • Sustainable food and the importance of class

    Interesting article from Tom Philpott at Grist on the connections between cheap food and cheap labor, and the need for the sustainable food movement to address issues of class. Key paragraph: In short, an economy hinged on cheap labor needs cheap food. And that’s the structural problem faced by Slow Food and other would-be reformers…

  • Needed: better friends

    Salon has an article this morning written by a “closeted” Christian in New York who’s afraid that her liberal, atheist Brooklynite friends will look down on her if they find out she’s a church-goer (which, presumably they now will unless she’s writing pseudonymously). I can sympathize with not wanting to be identifiedid with conservative strands…

  • “The very groundwork of our existence”: Mill on rights

    Relevant to the post below; from Utilitarianism, chapter five: To have a right, then, is, I conceive to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not…

  • Breaking it down

    Nation Washington editor and friend of ATR Chris Hayes has launched a cool new podcast feature–“The Breakdown”–aimed at explaining, in understandable terms, convoluted or technical political and policy issues. The first edition is on the differences between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax. Check it out.

  • Libertarianism re-visited

    William Bradford has a good write-up of Robert Nozick’s classic Anarchy, State & Utopia, which William just finished reading for the first time. I’ll admit that reading Nozick (and following it up with Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard, etc.) turned me into a libertarian for a while. But the problem with Nozick’s view, as nearly every…

  • Friday Metal: Dimebag, R.I.P. (5 years on)

    It was five years ago this month that Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was shot and killed onstage while performing with his post-Pantera band Damageplan. It’s no exaggeration to say that Pantera was probably, Metallica excepted, the biggest metal band of the ’90s. Their third album, Far Beyond Driven, debuted at number one on the…

  • Marcus Borg’s non-eschatological Jesus

    I found Dale Allison’s book on the historical Jesus stimulating enough that I thought I should get another perspective. I had read Marcus Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision several years ago, but didn’t really remember much of it. So I thought it might be worth re-visiting. Though he comes to different conclusions than Allison (Borg…