A reader comments by e-mail:
I sometimes read your website. I'm generally impressed by (and envy) your clear-headedness and detail when it comes to technical questions, but I find myself turned off by some of the more "poetic" stuff and the political analysis (the former because I hate poetry, more on the latter below).
[. . .]
Why are you so harsh with liberals? I can see why you might be annoyed by the mainstream liberal media . . . but I don't think the mainstream conservative media is any better. [. . .]
There are a couple of questions here. One is a question I ask myself: Why not stick to technical philosophy? Why place technical philosophy posts cheek-by-jowl with polemical political posts? Not to mention all the other sorts of posts I write.
One answer is that I am interested in everything, potentially if not actually, and to maintain separate weblogs would be too time consuming. So I dump everything in one place. I'm averse to narrowness and overspecialization. If you want to understand the world you have to think about all the problems in their systematic interconnection, and not stick your head down some specialist rathole as too many professional philosophers do. (I once heard tell of a young philosopher who wanted to devote his career to investigating epistemic closure principles!) And although I am fundamentally a contemplative sort, a quietist if you will, I cannot stand idly by and watch the parade of liberal nonsense without speaking out against it.
But there I go again, being harsh on liberals. Well, let me first point out that I have also spoken out harshly against some conservatives. Here I refer to Ann Coulter as a "screeching bombthrower" and a "contemptible jackass." And here I criticize Coulter for her vicious attack on the 'Jersey girls.' I have also criticized Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly on several occasions. Here I blast Mr. Bill for his lack of understanding of the religion in which he was raised. I have also been rough on Protestant Christians and especially Biblical literalists. In the comments to this post, I oppose some hidebound conservatives on gender-neutral English.
So I think I can lay reasonable claim to being balanced. In fact, though this will sound absurdly self-serving, I deem all of the positions I adopt to be balanced, moderate and eminently reasonable! And I'm also eager to give old-school liberals their due on several issues.
Consider universal suffrage and racial equality. It was not the conservatives of old who worked for these reforms, but liberals. But we contemporary conservatives count these as genuine gains. Or do you fancy that Peggy Noonan and Bill Bennett do not? What we object to is the extremism of contemporary liberals who take sound ideas and pervert them. Giving women the vote was an entirely reasonable extension of the formal-egalitarian ideal. But granting it to felons, or illegal aliens, or children, or people who cannot prove their identity, is a perversion of the egalitarian ideal. These perversions are precisely what many contemporary liberals promote. But when conservatives rightly protest their extremism, they slanderously tax conservatives with wanting to 'turn back the clock' — to use their silly phrase — on genuine gains.
Now consider racial equality. I'm a conservative and I'm all for racial equality. I want people to be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," similarly as I want my weblog to be judged not by its 'skin' but by the character of its content. But precisely for this reason, I am opposed to that perversion of the ideal of racial equality that flies under the flag of Affirmative Action. Reparations for Blacks is another loony extremist idea that perverts the genuine concern for equality of opportunity. And let's not forget that equality of opportunity is no guarantee of equality of outcome. It is therefore fallacious to infer that there is no equality of opportunity because there is no equality of outcome.
Many other examples could be given. It is reasonable to ban smoking in public places. But to ban it in bars and tobacco shops is unreasonable. And so on. It is the extremism and irrationality of contemporary liberalism that turned many of us away from liberalism and drove us out of the Jackass Party. It really has become a sorry party. Look at the head honchos: Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, et al. The reasonable and judicious leave, as witness Joseph Lieberman. Of course, I am not recommending that anyone become a Republican. I'm an registered Independent, and I recommend that status.
So why am I hard on contemporary liberals? Because they spout so much pernicious nonsense, so often.