Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Trump

  • What are Words For?

    By Daniel A. Kaufman __ Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. –George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” Our public discourse today has disintegrated into a wretched cant, in which words are…

  • An Ethical Response to Fascism

    by E. John Winner ___ There can be a profound difference between confrontation and conflict. Confrontation simply involves facing the world as it is, and facing others as they are. Doing so can bring out the most creative of our resources; the most charitable toward others. Conflict can establish unbreachable barriers between ourselves and others,…

  • New Year Musings

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ 2021 was dominated by Covid. But, competing for our attention has been the deepening and hardening of our political divisions, with Trumpers on one fringe, Social Justice lunatics on the other, and the bewildered, seemingly impotent majority of the country in between, wondering what the hell is going on and…

  • TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AT THE US NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

    by Robert Gressis ____ In this episode of Everyday Philosophers, I talked with Yvonne Chiu (US Naval War College) about what it’s like to teach at a military institution (no, you can’t make your students do push-ups) and her research on the unsustainability of soft authoritarianism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eSouHxnkqg&feature=youtu.be 0:03:29​ The US Naval War College: “where is…

  • Compassion and Resentment in the Age of #MeToo

    by Mikhail Valdman The Walking Wounded People’s physical wounds are sometimes visible.  Their emotional wounds are hidden from view, sometimes buried so deep that not even their bearer can spot them.  But imagine that it was all visible.  Imagine that you had a pair of magic glasses with which you could see people’s physical and…

  • The Underground Man

    by Bharath Vallabha ___ Why did Donald Trump win in 2016? Many on the Left have settled on two answers: white anxiety and economic anxiety. No doubt poor whites, especially in middle America, are a big part of Trump’s base. Still, this explanation doesn’t ring true to me. For a simple reason. I was tempted…

  • Representation in Politics and Art

    by Daniel A. Kaufman My discussion with Crispin Sartwell of Dickinson College, on Representation in Politics and Art. https://youtu.be/2Ee0YmDFNGw  

  • Provocations

    by Daniel A. Kaufman __ American politics is dead, or at least, it’s so completely fucked that it would be better off dead.  What we call “politics” today, when compared to the genuine article, is a little bit like UFC when compared to boxing.  At some level, everyone knows that beating to a bloody pulp…

  • Mindful of the Republic

    by David Ottlinger ___ Resistance. It is a concept many people now use to describe their politics. It is regrettable more people have not thought on what it means. It is worth noting, for instance, that the concept is inherently reactive. By declaring themselves part of “The Resistance,” the Resistors implicitly state that they feel…

  • There are Four Lights: Trump and Postmodernism

    by David Ottlinger We should have known something was seriously wrong when Oxford dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ the word of the year for 2016. (1) It was a sign that a deep confusion had taken root in the fertile soil of our public’s widespread philosophical illiteracy.  “The nature of reality is an open question in the…