Michael Bowen — Against Liberal Structuralism

via JosephPhillips.com

"Now we have lawyers who finagle behemoth jungles of legislation and statutory swamps for the supposed benefit of the masses, and the affairs of the average Joe are now fettered with a million rules, such things that a pious and industrious individual of virtuous word and deed doesn’t require, save a minimum few. Yes of course that’s how lawyers were instructed – they are only capable of becoming what their schools teach them, which are agents of some edifice of complexity, for the supposed benefit of the masses. Overwrought laws implemented by overlarge government bureaucracies for overspoiled children who cannot manage their own affairs independently, like individuals of piety and industry. So long as people will be petty and unable to resolve their differences on their own, there will always be lawyers and laws springing up to fill the vacuum of common sense and decency. Listen for the herald cry: ‘There oughta be a law’. Short of that, some re-education program and its attendant activism all with the same end in mind, Congressional approval and Presidential signature."

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Anthony Rek LeCounte — Rage Against the Correctness

"In the aftermath of the battle royale of articles, tweets, blog posts, and other responses to Jonathan Chait’s infamous (and more than a little hypocritical) rally against the sinistral arts of political correctness, I considered adding my own vernacular garrisons to the fray. However, a friend went ahead and offered a guest post employing most of the essential points I would have marshalled and spared me some trouble. But in maneuvering through the battlefield of what has largely been internecine wrangling on the Left, it may be worthwhile to offer some comment as one disadvantaged by the intersectionality, as progressives might say, of several measures of privilege.

There is the curious phenomenon of encountering white (usually heterosexual and often male) liberals from affluent backgrounds and elite educations who are all too willing to lecture me on the profundities of the multimodal oppression that black, gay, and working-class Americans face in this country. I will spare you, my audience, a Terri Lynn Land moment and just note that this recurring phenomenon tended to derail my attempts at having reasonable conversations with some people about how the Ferguson riots attacked black lives far more than the violence and vandalism “disrupted” any “paradigms” or “systems” of oppression. (Curiously enough, most of the black people in my social orbit somehow intuited this reality.)

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Jonathan Haidt — The moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.