Careful examination of real-world conflict does occasionally uncover not moral equivalents, but moral approximates. Though the two sides’ moral status is not precisely equal, they are morally more-or-less the same.
Tag: protest
Being Forced to Help Not Helping
Being forced to help isn’t helping. Complying with a threat doesn’t make you a compassionate or moral person. It shows you can be manipulated and easily scared into doing what someone else thinks you should instead of acting on your own values.
The Benefits of My Evangelical Upbringing
I often wonder how people go about their lives acting on important core ideas and assumptions without seeming to have any interest in or feel any necessity to examine, define, and make logical sense of those ideas and assumptions. Being wrong is one thing. Being uninterested in examining tacit truth claims is another.
The Speech of Heroes
Almost everyone loves the idea of “speaking truth to power.” Standing tall, talking boldly, consequences be damned – how heroic! Yet on reflection, this Speech of Heroes takes two radically different forms.
Iraq: America’s Other “Longest War”
As the calendar prepares to flip from 2019 to 2020, protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. As I write this, the action — a response to US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed at least 25 and wounded more than 50 — hasn’t yet become a reprise of the Iran hostage crisis of 40 years ago, but it’s eerily reminiscent.
JEDI Mind Tricks: Amazon versus the Pentagon and Trump
It’s not Amazon who’s getting screwed here, it’s the American taxpayer. JEDI is Pentagon budget padding at one end and corporate welfare at the other, not an essential element of a robust national defense.
Find Out How To Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
It’s a dangerous thing to have too many convictions and too few actions to support those convictions. It’s dangerous for all the obvious reasons: you tend to become a hypocrite, you tend not to actually help, etc. But it’s also dangerous for your ability to form new convictions. I’ve noticed it in myself: a growing feeling of being jaded at the problems I hear about in the news.
Non-Intervention: An Imperfect Solution to a Terrible Problem
Beijing doesn’t get to decide how Washington treats us. Washington doesn’t get to decide how Beijing treats the people of Hong Kong.
Negroes With Guns: The Untold History of Black NRA Gun Clubs and the Civil Rights Movement
With the violent crime rate increasing disproportionately in urban communities, it’s no surprise that a recent phone survey of black voters found that 80 percent felt gun violence was an “extremely serious” problem. However, it seems this surge in violence actually has many in the black community changing their views on gun ownership.
City Shuts Downs Preschoolers’ Farm Stand Citing Zoning Violations
It’s like something out of The Onion: city manager shuts down preschool farm stand out of fear that, if allowed, “we could end up with one on every corner.”