An op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “We Have Ruined Childhood” offers disheartening data about childhood depression and anxiety, closely linked to school attendance, as well as the disturbing trend away from childhood free play and toward increasing schooling, standardization, and control.
Tag: society
Dominance: Material vs. Rhetorical
Do the rich dominate our society? In one sense, they obviously do. Rich people run most of the business world, own most of the wealth, and are vastly more likely to be powerful politicians. In another sense, however, the rich aren’t dominant at all. If you get in public and loudly say, “Rich people are great. We owe them everything. They deserve every penny they’ve got – and more. People who criticize the rich are just jealous failures,” almost everyone will recoil in horror.
The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment: Understanding the Court’s Landmark Decisions
The Second Amendment is one of most fundamental provisions of the Bill of Rights, and one of the most fiercely debated. Since it was first put to paper, legal scholars, gun owners and anti-gun activists have engaged in an endless discussion over the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment, and for most of that time, gun owners have been on the losing side of the argument.
Don’t Become Like The Evil Losers
“Laws” kill people, including innocent people. That fact is swept under the rug by those who want to impose “laws”. All “laws” are enforced by death, no matter how trivial, but that’s not the only way they kill people.
Words Poorly Used #143 — Nation
According to Reason’s online publication, Benjamin Franklin once said, “No nation was ever ruined by trade.” Then a Facebook friend and I engaged in an amicable dispute about Franklin’s intent relative to the word “nation.” My friend said it was a stand-in for “government.” I responded.
Err on The Side of Liberty
There are many things I don’t know. There are things I think I know but I get wrong. There are also things people may believe I’m wrong about, but I’m not — a topic for another day. When I’m wrong, I want to be wrong in the least harmful way possible.
The Anti-Gun Bigots’ Silly Strawman
Anti-gun bigots have a “new” favorite strawman. They demand to know why the right to own and carry weapons (they’ll sometimes mischaracterize this as “Second Amendment rights”) is more important than the right to not be murdered. The dishonesty– or ignorance– displayed by such a question is absolutely stunning.
Don’t Let Mass Shooters and the New York Times Destroy Freedom of Speech
As a practical matter, “extremists,” like everyone else, will choose to state, promote, and argue for their beliefs. If they can do so in public, those beliefs can be engaged and argued against. If they can’t do so in public, they’ll do so in private, without anyone to convince them (and those they quietly bring into their circles over time) of the error of their ways. The rest of us won’t have a clue what might be in the offing — until the guns come out, that is.
How Our Culture Disempowers Teens
Teenagers are extraordinarily capable. Louis Braille invented his language for the blind when he was 15. Mary Shelley, daughter of libertarian feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote Frankenstein when she was 18. As a young teen, Anne Frank documented her life of hiding from the Nazis during World War II. Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Prize at 17.
Locked Up: How the Modern Prison-Industrial Complex Puts So Many Americans in Jail
For American society as a whole, the prison-industrial complex has created a perverse incentive structure. Bad laws drive out respect for good laws because there are just so many laws (not to mention rules, regulations, and other prohibitions used by federal prosecutors to pin crimes on just about anyone). How did we get here?