Under the Canadian political system, party leaders are free to unilaterally block candidates, no matter the views of voters or the rank-and-file.
The last lesson of Gelernter’s piece is that while we shouldn’t judge someone’s arguments by their credentials alone, neither should we give unwarranted credence to those who have impressive credentials, particularly when they pronounce on a field in which they lack expertise.
A basic principle of Western societies – in addition to the fact that all people are born free and equal – is openness to criticism.
Ironically, what is really needed is the restoration of the entire college campus as a safe space for people of all perspectives.
Whether it is because we got things wrong or because we got them right, the past is our servant, the key to a richer future and higher states of consciousness.
If some faction of philosophers are able to declare an issue decided—over screams of dissent from other philosophers—then we can expect others to follow the same playbook.
The trend towards post-familialism, a society in which the family and marriage are no longer central to society, will reshape our politics, economy, and society in the decades ahead.
For Fromm, Horkheimer, and Adorno, this project could only end in a desire for mass death. This is because, in a nihilistic sense, death is the ultimate form of order, stripped of all the anxieties and challenges which come with life.
The unhinged reasoning in Fairbanks’s essay invites an overcorrection. It would be easy—and tendentious—to reverse her argument. The Left are the real heirs of the proslavery tradition—intolerant aggression disguised as aggrieved fragility, etc.
The myths of the obedient Hong Kong child, of the disciplined dronelike worker, of the person who puts money above everything else, are shattered for ever.
The unambiguous conclusion seems to be that people are better off believing in either libertarian free will (which grants us complete agency) or the intuitive compatibilism (which grants us compromised agency) that they tend to favour.
Virtue signalling includes the best of human instincts, and the worst of human instincts.
Callaghan’s speech, a paean to the virtues of austerity economics several decades before the 2008 financial crisis, was a watershed moment in British politics.
Now, of course, letter-writing is dead, replaced by emails, texts, and social media. But we have lost something along the way—our social media feeds are often filled with drivel and do not provide an appropriate forum for long-form, constructive conversation and disagreement.