Author Archives: Timothy Burke

Still Distracted, But Not Here

My online writing goes back to Usenet, early bulletin-boards and the pay service GEnie, but my public identity as an online writer really began a few years after “weblogs” began to appear on the early World Wide Web. I began … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Curse Your Sudden and Inevitable Betrayal

The question on my mind this morning is why anybody is loyal to Trump. We are reading today of how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump forced the Secret Service to undertake an expensive rent in order to have a place … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

There’s Got to Be a Morning After

The major things on my mind this morning do not change regardless of what happens as the votes get counted in the United States. The liberal-left coalition is not just weak in the United States, it is weak globally (in … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

The Deeper Struggle

I’ve been grappling with the problem of what we now call “the Trump base” for the entire lifetime of this weblog, now 17 years going back to its original hand-rolled HTML version. I started this weblog during the administration of … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | 26 Comments

Values Before Risk Assessment

Why is it a problem to place consideration of risk at the forefront of collective or institutional decision-making processes? Imagine that you had an array of specialized individual consultants that you could involve, one at a time, in your personal … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | Tagged | 2 Comments

Mucking Out Mead

Via Mohamad Bazzi of New York University, I learned last week about several articles published in the last few years by Lawrence Mead, also of NYU. I had a vague awareness of Mead as a kind of post-Moynihan “pathology of … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Cleaning Out the Augean Stables, Politics | 4 Comments

Masking and the Self-Inflicted Wounds of Expertise

A broken clock tells the time accurately twice a day, but Donald Trump tells the truth even less often than that. Never on purpose and rarely even by accident. And yet he told an accidental truth recently, one that doesn’t … Continue reading

Posted in Oath for Experts, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System, Politics | 4 Comments

Knowing Better

I’m struggling to process my own discomfort at the thought of either cancelling a fall semester or doing it only online with the primary intention of protecting the health of faculty and staff. Assuming that the still-fragmentary data about the … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

An Actual Trolley Problem

I’ve always seen a certain style of thought experiment in analytic philosophy and psychology as having limited value–say for example the famous “trolley problem” that asks participants to make an ethical choice about whose life to save in a situation … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Grasping the Nettle, Politics, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

Free College: Not So Extreme

I’ve complained that for the most part, self-identified centrists and moderates prefer not to engage in direct arguments about their policy preferences in this election, but instead to argue about “electability”–essentially laundering their preferences through mute off-stage proxies, some other … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Politics | 2 Comments