I’ve been beating up on philosophy a lot here over the past few months, but if there’s one thing studying philosophy has taught me, it’s the importance of quantifiers. Consider an example sentence from Lester Hunt (a former philosophy professor of mine, incidentally): “Why do environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly [...]
Category Archives: politics
The frightening cowardice of US corporations on Wikileaks (also: when Torrenting becomes a political act)
Posted by Chris Hallquist on December 7, 2010
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Under pressure from the US government, a growing number of US Corporations are refusing to have anything to do with WikiLeaks on the dubious rationale that it is a criminal organization. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, this is nonsense unless you also think that the New York Times, which has also been publishing the [...]
On Anwar al-Awlaki
Posted by Chris Hallquist on November 8, 2010
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Note: I was initially keeping this semi-secret, but I’m currently applying to law schools. Or just got done applying, last week was my big push to get all my applications in, and I didn’t accomplish much else, including a regular blog post. I did, however, write the below in response to Yale’s request for, basically, [...]
“But what are you for?” Answering a stupid question
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 6, 2010
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I’m really not at all impressed with the Tea Party movement, for reasons Ed Brayton has explained at length. But I’m happy to defend them from a stupid criticism that’s been lobbed by Andrew Sullivan, especially since this is something atheists have to deal with a lot: I like their broad philosophy: “We’ve been running [...]
How many people actually think socialism is a good idea?
Posted by Chris Hallquist on July 1, 2010
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I’m scratching my head over a libertarian-bashing post by PZ Myers. The current political environment in the U.S. is so strange to me: when I think about the recently health-care reform, I mostly think about how no one opposed publicly funded education and how Europeans and Canadians seem pretty happy with their system, even if [...]