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Entries by Lester Hunt

Monday, September 22, 2008

The Case of "The Jewel of Medina"

[This is cross-posted at my own blog, E Pur Si Muove! For links to other stories on these events, please go there.]

The Case of The Jewel of Medina
Philosopher Carlin Romano has an interesting and very sensible discussion of the case of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, which is gaining notoriety even before it is published. (Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily.) British philosophy blogger Stephen Law has weighed in on it as well.

Briefly, the facts, as they have been reported above and in the opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that originally broke the story, are these...

Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 5:10 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Monday, September 15, 2008

Liberal versus Conservative

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has an interesting new answer to a rather tired old question. (Tip of the hat to Arts and Letters Daily.) Why, a generation of academic researchers have wondered, do so many relatively low-income Americans, especially in rural areas, keep voting for Republicans, even though their class interests requires them to vote for our boys? Why don't they recognize that we are the ones who can look after them? What's the matter with Kansas, anyway?

Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 at 10:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, September 7, 2008

The Fraying of America: An Explanation

I know this sounds obsessive, but I am still thinking about the flood of invective recently aimed at Sarah Palin and members of her family in the left-leaning parts of the internet and mainstream media. It was rather startling to those of us who were not taking part in it.

Public discourse in this country, whether it involves an election campaign or a Supreme Court nomination, is often a festival of invective, character-assassination, and incivility.

Posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 9:48 PM | Comments (5) | Top

Monday, August 25, 2008

Character is Relevant!

This country has gone through some deep changes about this issue: is a politician's sex life "private" in the sense that it is irrelevant to what we should think about the things he or she does or will do as a "public" official?

Posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 at 1:49 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Saturday, March 1, 2008

American Conservatism, RIP?

I took the recent passing of Bill Buckley as the occasion to tell an anecdote about the conservative meltdown here. It's a sort of worm's eye view.

Posted on Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 2:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

"Islamofascism": More Sloppyspeak

Last week, David Horowitz brought his "Islamofascism Awareness Week" campaign here, speaking on campus on Monday. I wasn't there, but I hear that the always-entertaining Kevin Barret created a disturbance and was removed from the hall.

Posted on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 2:39 PM | Comments (5) | Top

Monday, August 27, 2007

I Finally See "300"

A slightly longer version of this post, with photos and links to cited articles, is on my own blog,
E Pur Si Muove!

Our son, Nat, is about to go away to college, so yesterday I thought it would be a good time to view his favorite movie with him. It's out on DVD. (Later that evening, his buddy Matt came over to help him upgrade the memory on his laptop -- and watch the same movie ... again!)

One thing that makes this movie, about King Leonidas and 3oo Spartans holding off many thousands of Persians at Thermopylae, interesting to watch is the amount of hatred - "hatred" is surely not too strong a word - that was directed toward it when it first came out. It was hated by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, the President of Iran. Even Norman-Lear-type liberals begin to shake all over and holler when they think about this movie.

Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 at 11:44 AM | Comments (7) | Top

Monday, June 11, 2007

Not that Kind of Zoo

I've posted a comment here about the movie, "Zoo," a documentary about the incident that resulted in human-animal sex being made illegal in the state of Washington. Since it focuses on the should-it-be-illegal question, I think it would be of interest to visitors to this site. Also, this may be of interest to whom it is interesting.

Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007 at 1:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Virginia Tech Murders: The Debate Begins

I've blogged on the above subject here:

http://lesterhhunt.blogspot.com/

Though it will not contain much that will be news to my colleagues at L & P, what I say there might be of some interest.

Posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 2:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Oops!

I tried to insert a link for the post I described below, but it didn't work. Here is another try:

http://lesterhhunt.blogspot.com/2007/04/more-on-rude-surly-teenagers.html

Posted on Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 12:40 PM | Comments (3) | Top

More on Rude, Surly Teenagers

I've posted a sort of sequel to my original comments on this subject here. I don't think the new post assumes you have read the original one. I've thought about our "public" education system a lot while our son was an inmate, and now that he is almost out of it (last semester senior year, touch wood!) all this anger is coming out! (Out of me, that is. He didn't mind it too much.)

Posted on Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, April 6, 2007

"Rude, Surly Teenagers: A Defense"

Over at my blog I have a post (see title above) that touches on issues about liberty in parenting. It occurs to me that it might be of some interest to those here:

http://lesterhhunt.blogspot.com/2007/04/rude-surly-teenagers-defense.html

Posted on Friday, April 6, 2007 at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, March 24, 2007

The Virtues of Capitalism

If you’re interested in exploring the moral foundations of market institutions, I recommend The Bourgeois Virtues by Deirdre McCloskey (University of Chicago Press, 2006). One thing that makes the book unique is that it’s a defense of markets based on the virtue-ethical tradition (the author calls herself "an Aristotelian libertarian"). She discusses the influence of institutions on moral character, and vice versa. The book is full of little-known (at least to me) historical, cultural, and literary facts. Another unique feature is that it is a non-individualist defense of the market. This of course could be either a strength or a weakness of her account, depending on your point of view. She characterizes her position as “two and a half cheers for capitalism,” thus going a half-cheer further than the neo-con Irving Kristol, but not as far as I would go. I’ll be on an author-meets-critics panel on the book at the Chicago APA on Saturday, April 21. You can read my prepared comments for the panel here:
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/hunt/McCloskey.htm

Posted on Saturday, March 24, 2007 at 12:22 PM | Comments (4) | Top

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