arossp

Making the World Better

https://aaronrosspowell.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/jungwoo-hong-100345-unsplash.jpg If you believe Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, libertarians are nuts. In...

On Assessing Arguments

Let’s say you believe X is true. You know that many smart, well-educated people believe X — including you! — but also that many smart, well-educated people disb...

What Atheism Offers: Justifying a Life’s Purpose

There exists a need among theists to justify life’s purpose. Far from being content with self made goals, with personal achievements set by the individual for h...

Abandoning Superstition: Why I Don’t Believe In God

If you take a look at the history of ideas from the Enlightenment onward, an unmistakable trend is the steady abandonment of superstition. Weather patterns aren...

Why Religious Arguments Don’t Have a Place in Politics

Religion has no place in policy debates. Because of the special nature of faith-based beliefs and values, religious arguments cannot bring anything valuable to ...

Intelligent Design’s Logical Fallacies

The many articles on Newsvine regarding creationism and intelligent design have sparked a good deal of comments from proponents of those views, several expressi...

“The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” by Timothy Keller

Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism was a random find. I’d returned a handful of books to the library and was looking for someth...

Practical Political Philosophy and Will Kymlicka’s Endnote 42

Confusions of the real and the ideal underly far too many policy debates. Libertarians, for instance, often assume perfectly functioning markets and compare the...

It’s Okay To Kill: A Libertarian Argument for the Death Penalty

For those of us who believe in limited government and the fallibility of human certainty, the death penalty can pose quite a problem. Is it ever okay to kill so...

What Kind of Libertarian Are You?

My libertarianism’s of an off-the-beaten-path sort, with its intellectual roots among the Ancient Greeks. I was recently asked on Twitter whether my libertarian...

The Last Jedi Betrays the Original Trilogy and its Heroes

Through sheer storytelling laziness, it tells us that nothing that came before mattered. The Last Jedi is the most disappointing Star Wars movie since Attack of...

Decentralization and privacy are inevitable — in tech and in government.

Good tech principles will become good governance principles, whether governments want them to or not. Decentralization and encryption/privacy are good principle...

Technology, Radical Liberty, and Freedom Without Permission

Decentralization will bring about a radically freer and more dynamic world, and without waiting for the blessing of government. Decentralized, DIY Beginnings I ...

Free Speech and the Whims of College Kids

When I was in middle school, my history class staged a walkout. I don’t recall the reasons, but I’m sure at the time we all thought them righteous and just. I’m...

The Humble Case for Liberty

The virtue of humility is found in recognizing our limits — and that humility ought to make fans of limited government. I could be wrong about pretty much anyth...

Has there ever been a box office smash scifi movie with less cultural impact than Avatar?

We’re on our way to four(!) Avatar sequels, which is probably the same as number of people excited about Avatar sequels. It’s pretty striking, really, how quick...

America’s Hyperbole Problem

Ours has become a culture of hyperbole. Nothing characterizes American social interaction, mediated through politics and social media, more than our need to ass...

How Aristotle Predicted Twitter and the Alt-Right

I’m rereading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for the umpteenth time, and a passage early on struck me as informative about much that’s going on in American cult...