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WOW! Plato’s ‘Tyranny’ Sounds EXACTLY LIKE America Today!0
- September 27, 2016
Philosopher George Santayana’s line has become cliché, but it’s so damn true: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Well, perhaps if more Americans today read Plato (like they used to), then our country wouldn’t be repeating the same mistakes he warned us about 2,400 years ago. In Book VIII
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Serious Debate Isn’t Possible on Television0
- Culture
- September 27, 2016
I’ll be honest. I didn’t watch the debate last night. And I didn’t watch any of the primary debates earlier this year. And I don’t think I watched any of the debates during the last presidential election. It’s not that I’m uninterested in serious discourse about serious issues. It’s simply that I don’t believe it
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How the Internet Fuels America’s Underground Sex Trade0
- Culture
- September 27, 2016
America has always had an underground sex trade, and for decades most pimps followed the same general script: they’d recruit sex workers on the street, in bars and in strip clubs. But over the past 20 years, the internet has become the major marketplace for the sex trade, with online advertisements and recruitment through social
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How Summer Camps and Scout Groups Turn Kids into Citizens0
- Education
- September 27, 2016
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) has both proud supporters and critics of its policies on religious beliefs and sexuality. But for more than a century, the organisation has performed a distinct and vital social function. The BSA and other youth-camping associations developed in the early 20th century. They came to exist primarily as a
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How Last Night’s Debate Proved the Dumbing Down of America is Real0
- Culture
- September 27, 2016
Like many Americans, I tuned in last night to catch part of the first presidential debate. Part way through, I had a horrifying “the emperor has nothing on” moment when I realized that neither candidate seemed to know what he/she was talking about. The content was so low on substance, that I decided to check
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How Emotionalism is Slowly Replacing Rationalism1
- Culture
- September 27, 2016
My hometown has recently been hit with a barrage of ads for the local high-end theatre’s production of Sense and Sensibility. Like all of Jane Austen’s works, the novel manages to marry everyone off, but only after bringing the characters through the harrowing ups and downs of uncertain romantic relationships. As I was reflecting on
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5 Things Your Kids Will Remember About You0
- Family
- September 27, 2016
Parenting is hard work. It calls on mothers and fathers to really forget themselves and put their kids first. So it’s no wonder that sometimes, we take shortcuts. We buy them a toy rather than spend more time with them; we lose our temper rather than practice patience; we put on the TV at dinnertime
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Why Do So Many People Lack Compassion?1
- Literature
- September 26, 2016
Milan Kundera, in his beautiful novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, said that compassion was preeminent of all human sentiments. In languages derived from Latin, the word “compassion” is formed by combining the prefix “com” (with) and the noun “passio” (suffering). Other languages use words with a slightly different meaning—“feeling” instead of suffering. This, Kundera
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Was Plato Liberal or Totalitarian?0
- Philosophy
- September 26, 2016
No one reading Plato’s work Republic is likely to come away seeing it as a manifesto for libertarianism. However, it’s common to hear people claim that it is a blueprint for totalitarian collectivism, as, for example, FEE past president Richard Ebeling wrote in his September 23, 2016 column. Plato isn’t even engaged in utopian political
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