José Azel 161 posts 0 comments

In a now classic experiment, political scientist Philip E. Tetlock showed that the predictions made by political experts are only slightly better than a random guess, and worse than the predictions made by a statistical model. The…
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Social justice looks at how a society chooses to distribute the things that we value, among them income, wealth, powers, and more. Social justice asks: What is the right thing to do? Nearly 2,500 years ago, Plato got…
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Waging war is a very serious matter. Commendably, U. S. Presidents and Congress are very reluctant to authorize the use of the Armed Forces of the United States. And yet, the U.S. has enemies, and often the national interest requires the…
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As individuals, we know little about the world and its people. Yet, we hold strong opinions about what should be done to solve most problems. We "know" what should be done in Iraq, without being able to locate Iraq on a map. Also, many…
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Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has coined the term “Left Pole” to describe a mythical place where the political Left resides intellectually. Whereas, from the North Pole all directions are south, from the Left Pole, all opinion that…
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Liberal democracy is a political system distinguished not only by free and fair elections, but also by the rule of law, separation of powers, and the safeguard of our fundamental liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.…
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Do we have a right to think whatever we want, or do we have an intellectual duty to follow the evidence? Philosophers have long struggled with this question, particularly in dealing with the existence of God. In American jurisprudence the…
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What the French then wanted was the stability that Napoleon offered. France would not know republican government for another 72 years. This vote for a “strongman” took place after only ten years of the French Revolution. As of this writing,…
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Is some form of authoritarianism superior to democracy as a political model to hasten economic development and stability? The question derives from the economic successes of authoritarian regimes in China, Singapore among others. More…
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For the historians of the American Civil War, the "lost cause" is an ideological movement that fantasizes the Confederate cause as a heroic struggle against very great difficulties. The doctrine of this lost cause highlights alleged virtues…
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Capitalism may be defined, as Karl Marx did, by its labor system, where the workers do not own their own means of production. It may also be defined by the metaphorical ‘market’ where the buying and selling takes place, or by private…
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The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1997) offers a conservative estimate of one hundred million innocent individuals murdered by Marxist socialists in the 20th century. To this, we can add the approximate twenty million…
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