Category Archives: Politics

Curse Your Sudden and Inevitable Betrayal

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on November 4, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Mucking Out Mead

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on June 27, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Timothy Burke

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

Harvest Time on the Whirlwind Farm

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Timothy Burke

To some extent, people turn to omnicompetent forms of conspiracy theory when they cannot believe that anybody could be THAT incompetent. People who are always and invariably against conspiracy theories tend to be that way first and foremost because omnicompetent … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Politics | Comments Off

Dershowitz Matters (Unfortunately)

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Timothy Burke

The terrible thing about what has happened in the Senate is this: the intellectual and institutional infrastructure of legal and political systems can confer a kind of revenant legitimacy even on claims and verdicts that destroy those systems. You can … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics | Comments Off