“Some, maybe even many, Trump voters acknowledged all these negative things and justify their vote by saying that Trump was the lesser evil–I actually think that is more honest even if I think they are wrong about which evil was lesser. At least they admit to there being something wrong with their candidate.
But many single issue abortion voters began to argue that Trump is not a racist (or a sexist) and that his election has not emboldened racists and sexists in the face of much evidence to the contrary. This move is worrisome to me and I think it says something about how our limited voting options keep us from being capable of reflective criticism even of those candidates we might have others reasons to support.”
Liberalism emerged historically as a means of enabling fruitful cooperation among people of divergent backgrounds and belief systems.
Liberal norms were discovered, not invented, through a process of social evolution. Forgetting this can lead one to overestimate our ability to redesign society, even along more libertarian dimensions.
Nonetheless, once liberal ideas are abstracted from their pragmatic origins, they become free standing values which can inform and motivate institutional reform. This is the core of liberal social justice.
Reason plays an essential role in supporting liberal norms, as seeing their mutually advantageous character requires suppressing our non-cognitive, tribal urges. We do this in part through perspective taking, and in part through dialogue and persuasion, as these engage our reasoning faculty.
Liberal social justice is about much more than just protecting negative rights. It’s also about insisting our institutions show neutrality to conflicting worldviews and ways of life, that our law be non-discriminatory, and our civil rights non-exclusive.
Experts play a vital role in liberal democracy, not just qua experts, but as mutually agreeable third-party decision makers.
Nationalism is not inherently in tension with liberalism, especially if one’s national identity is founded on encompassing values like efficiency, liberty, or multiculturalism.
Yet nationalism can be a hindrance to liberalism if it pits groups against each other, and comes at the expense of forging international peace and cooperation.
International treaties and multilateralism are not to be conceded as automatic encroachments on sovereignty. Like liberal constitutions, they exist to enable positive-sum relationships.
“‘When you wake up, that is your morning.’ She continues: ‘You know Igbo is full of proverbs, right? It’s how we say it is never too late to do your own work, or achieve what you have to achieve. Everybody’s timing is different.’”
“Like children and adults, infants appear to rely on two key features to detect funniness. First, humour nearly always requires a social component. Using naturalistic observations, the psychologists Robert Kraut and Robert Johnston at Cornell, and later the neuroscientist Robert Provine at the University of Maryland, discovered that smiling is more strongly associated with the presence of other people, and only erratically associated with feelings of happiness. That is, smiling is more likely to be socially rather than emotionally motivated. Thus, the presence of a social partner is one key component of finding something funny. Recall that the point of laughter is to be shared.
But humour has a cognitive element too: that of incongruity. Humorous events are absurd iterations of ordinary experiences that violate our expectations.”
“When Trump dismissed Lewis as ‘all talk, talk, talk,’ he dismissed the value of moral politics in general, and in particular the basic conversation about right and wrong in which Lewis is engaging. In supporting Lewis, it’s important to recognize not only his personal history but the rhetorical history of his protest: Lewis, like Sakharov, Alexievich, and others before him, is reaching for a higher note.”
“Just in case its intentions weren’t apparent, the government reaffirmed that the “primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment.” As far as Centre was concerned, there was no reason to include low-earning adults already working or adults out of the labor force for reasons other than unemployment.
In December, the government’s UBI experiment was enacted into law. By early January — after Kela randomly selected two thousand people from its unemployment rolls and informed them of their mandatory participation in the experiment — the government had made its first monthly UBI payment.
And just like that, what started as the dream proposal of left-leaning wonks everywhere had, once filtered through the political process, mutated into the UBI-as-workhouse nightmare.”
“…he has the whole strict-father thing, moral hierarchy. If you have strict-father morality what that says is it’s your concern alone that matters, reteaching individual responsibility. That means responsibility for yourself, not social responsibility. Not caring about other citizens; that’s weak. You should care about yourself; that’s strong. That is how he sees that the world naturally works. There is a hierarchy of morality because the strict father in a family gets his position of strength because he supposedly knows right from wrong, and in that there is an assumption that those who are most moral should rule.
So how do you tell who’s most moral? You look at who has come out on top. You have God above man, man above nature, conquering nature, so nature is there for us to use. Then you would have the rich above the poor — they deserve it, because they are disciplined. And the powerful above the non-powerful — they deserve it, they’ve become powerful. And you have adults above children. So in 21 states children in classes and on teams can be beaten by the teachers and coaches if they don’t show proper respect and obedience.”
“Every movement…has a smart version and a stupid version, I try to (almost) always consider the smart version. The stupid version is always wrong for just about anything.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that.
[…]
Almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
[…]
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Ideas need to have skin in the game. You know that the idea will fail if it is not useful, and can be therefore subjected to the falsification of time. The more an idea has been around without being falsified, the longer its future life expectancy. Note that I am here modifying Popper’s idea, replacing “true” (rather, not false) with “useful”. For if you read Feyerabend’s account of the history of science, you can clearly see that anything goes in the process –but not with the test of time.
[…]
While our knowledge of physics has not been available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that hold in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment.”
“He claims all of presidential history follows a distinct pattern: “Reconstructive” presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan (to take only the last two cycles) transform American politics in their own image, clearing the field of viable competition and setting the terms of political debate. They are followed by hand-picked successors (Harry S. Truman and George H.W. Bush) who continue their predecessors’ policies and do little more than articulate an updated version of their ideas. They are usually succeeded in turn by presidents whom Skowronek calls “pre-emptive”—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton—who represent the opposite party but adopt the basic framework of the reigning orthodoxy. Next comes another faithful servant of that orthodoxy (John F. Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson; George W. Bush), followed by another preemptive opposition leader (Richard Nixon, Barack Obama) who again fails to overturn it. The final step in the sequence is a “disjunctive” president—usually somebody with little allegiance to the orthodoxy who is unable to hold it together in the face of the escalating crises it created and to which it has no response. The last disjunctive president, in Skowronek’s schema, was Jimmy Carter.”
Safi has compared reading Rumi without the Koran to reading Milton without the Bible: even if Rumi was heterodox, it’s important to recognize that he was heterodox in a Muslim context—and that Islamic culture, centuries ago, had room for such heterodoxy. Rumi’s works are not just layered with religion; they represent the historical dynamism within Islamic scholarship.