URLs du Jour — 2013-03-25

  • The Culture of Safety Even a cat may look at a king, and even a lowly editor of Reason magazine can dare to challenge an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. Specifically, Nick Gillespie can take on Sarah Conly, author of the recent book Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism and a recent NYT op-ed "Three Cheers for the Nanny State". Her thesis is that "public benefit" can justify the subtitled "coercive paternalism". Something that Mayor Bloomberg, President Obama and a host of other nanny-statists would applaud.

    Nick is appropriately merciless:

    But there are so many holes in Conly's case, you've got to wonder if she's gonna make it past the assistant prof level. For starters, she invokes a "public benefit" without even bothering to specify what that might be, even as she assents to a cost-benefit analysis for public policy (go ahead, she says, "where the costs are small and the benefit is large").

    I like Kurt Schlicter's idea: build a "Bite Me" coalition.

  • Update on the Jesus-stompin' activity in which a Deep Thinking instructor at Florida Atlantic University recently engaged his class: the University has apologized to the public for assigning this particular exercise. But (at least according to this report) the student who complained most vociferously remains suspended.

    ("We can confirm that no student has been expelled, suspended or disciplined by the university as a result of any activity that took place during this class" is their Clintonian wording. So the student is in trouble for what he said afterward.)

    As near as I can tell, Florida Atlantic University did not apologize for running an academically-bereft course at their bad joke of a college.


Last Modified 2022-10-05 9:43 AM EDT