Just Leisure?

Last summer I was asked by for The Forum (the LSE’s public philosophy website) to write up a shorter—and hopefully more readable—version of the argument from my recent Philosophical Studies article, ‘“The Kids are Alright”: political liberalism, leisure time, and childhood’. That essay—‘Just Leisure?’—was published a couple of months ago and is available to read here. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and am grateful to The Forum’s editor, Elizabeth Hannon, for all her help with it.

I also quite like the picture that she used for the essay:

Libertarianism = feudalism

Existential comics helpfully explains why libertarianism (of the sort endorsed by Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia) leads to (a kind of) feudalism...

[For a more academic explanation, read Samuel Freeman’s article “Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View” (Philosophy and Public Affairs 30(2):105-151 (2001)).]

Ted Cruz: Master Debater

This post, “Owning the Peanut Gallery,” by Maria Farrell at the ‘Crooked Timber’ blog is well worth reading—especially by anyone who ever participated in university-level debating in North America. It is hilarious and does a great job in capturing what it was like to take part in university tournaments in the early 1990s, especially from the perspective of Canadian teams visiting the U.S. And of course any post that further illuminates the comprehensive awfulness of Ted Cruz is worthy of praise.

The post brought back my own memories of debating in Canada around the same time (I represented University College at University of Toronto). I recall going to tournaments at Yale and Harvard, and encountering Cruz (and Austan Goolsbee, and others), although—thankfully—I don’t recall ever debating Cruz myself.

(Nitpick: A friend points out that this claim in the post is incorrect: “We’re the highest ranked Canadian team at a US tournament, ever, at that point [1993].” A team from the University of Toronto made it to the finals at Harvard in 1992.)