Thoughts on Politics
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Politics and the English Language
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
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The Righteous Mind
Morality is more than just right and wrong: its the evolutionary result of a range of competing moral intuitions. The failure to appreciate this is a major cause of political partisanship and deadlock.
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The Three Languages of Politics
The language we use to talk about politics works unconsciously to make up our minds for us.
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The Politics of Worry
In debates over whether or not we should have the freedom to choose something, we suffer from forgetting that there's a third option: the freedom from having to choose.
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The House I Live In
When a system persists despite repeated failure at its stated purpose, look at what it actually succeeds in doing to understand why it's allowed to endure.
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The Outlaw Sea
In a world that's never before been so civilized, there remains something deeply wild about the sea.
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Idiot America
America has always had a healthy anti-intellectual streak, but making that fringe mainstream is proving disastrous.