/pragmatica/
slouching towards Bethnal Green
Posts I Like
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“[A]usterity-loving pundits and policy makers really are like medieval doctors who believed in treating illness by bleeding their patients, making the...”
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“Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of...”
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“[I]t is not particularly difficuly to move towards a solution the problem raised by Hume, which Kant believed he had solved. The belief in the...”
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Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
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“
I am twenty-nine, pocket flap folded
”
And I am smiling I am looking out at a world that
I significantly re-created from inside
Out of...
On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact what liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life… This critique of liberalism should not be interpreted as a sign of any sympathy on my part for contemporary conservatism. That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism. And, where liberalism by permissive legal enactments has tried to use the power of the modern state to transform social relationships, conservatism by prohibitive legal enactments now tries to use that same power for its own coercive purposes.
Alastair Macintyre, Prologue to After Virtue, 3rd ed.
