Tea’d Off
Andrew Breitbart's May 2010 defense of the Tea Party in an exclusive interview with the HPR.
On the Newsstand:Equality
Free the Toys!
Does a wooden wind-up cowboy really have three movies worth of material in him? Surprisingly, yes. I thoroughly enjoyed Toy Story 3, and only wish that Woody, Buzz, and the others would stop being such, well, toys. Toy Story 3 takes place around ten years after the second movie. Andy, the toy’s young owner, is about to head off to ... Read More
Response to Sam on Racism and Rand Paul
Sam, I agree with you that Rand Paul is off base in his remarks about the Civil Rights Act, but I have a few quibbles about the way you make your argument. (I see that when you aren’t going after Ayn, you are going after Rand with equal intensity. Young libertarians seem to love the Rands as much as young collectivists seem to despise them!) Now I ... Read More
Couple More Thoughts on Rand Paul
First, I think Adam Serwer has really crystallized the basic problem with how conservatives (and a fair number of over-polite liberals) talk about race. It seems really weird to give Goldwater all this credit for not being personally racist while championing a cause supported by racists, and say this is the same thing as Kennedy and Johnson being racist but ... Read More
An Assault on the Defense of Manliness
Sometimes the only way to properly criticize someone with ridiculous views is to quote them at length, and then, channeling Seth and Amy from “Saturday Night Live,” say with as much surprise and disdain as one can muster, “Really?!” I found myself saying “Really?!” a lot this morning when I read Rachel Wagley’s “defense of manliness” in the Harvard Crimson. ... Read More
E.U.: Vacationing a Human Right
In a bold step intended to reduce poverty, the European Union will soon be providing some of the Continent’s poorest citizens with subsidized plane tickets and hotel rooms. The Toronto-based National Post reported on Monday that the European Union has declared traveling for tourism a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayer money for those ... Read More
Half the Sky
Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about “intern slavery,” twice, and then American slavery. But what about today? Slavery of course is still a very real problem; in absolute terms, by every estimate, there are more slaves today than there ever were in history, and the trade of human lives is more active and more hazardous ... Read More
Final Clubs and Gender Relations
In today’s Harvard Crimson, Daniel Herz-Roiphe has written an unusually articulate, well-argued entry in the perennial “Why Final Clubs Are Still Really Bad” essay contest. I’m glad he focused on gender discrimination and inequality, rather than also trying to tackle racial, hetero-normative, and class-based elitism. Those other forms of discrimination are equally important, but I think they’re pretty low-hanging fruit. ... Read More
Weighing In: The Great Tax Debate
The Great Tax Debate begins every year in the blogosphere around April 15th. On the line are normative claims, like whether and to what extent we should be distributing resources communally. But the facts are easy to get wrong too. So today I thought I’d lay out some factual correctives to Peyton’s exemplar of the Great Tax Debate form, “Robin ... Read More
Weighing In: Are Interns Slaves?
In dueling editorials, two sets of Crimson editors opined today on the federal crack-down on unpaid internships. I’m with the pro-payment crowd, but I think that both the sides made the same conceptual error by assuming that this is a straightforward case of equality versus opportunity. The majority view was that, even though stricter regulation “might result in fewer internship ... Read More
