Societal Norms, Reverse Subjection?

Mill was focused on the subjection of females, and with the modern world we live in I can’t help but think to some extent there is subjection in the other direction thanks to what society considers normal. Women have made great strides in being able to do jobs which were once considered men only, but [...]

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Mill and Women in Combat

After reading the first two chapters of Mill’s The Subjection of Women I cannot help but consider the strides women have made in terms of equality with men. Certainly the opportunity in the United States for women to become educated, a major concern of Mill, is equal to men. Women can now obtain the same jobs [...]

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Court Is In Session

Our society is and has been a malleable creature. It has constantly been evolving and restructuring as we have changed the relationships with our neighbors and our government. As our neighbors came closer and closer, as our cities grew taller and taller, and as our government wanted more and more from us, the format of [...]

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Hobbes, Game Theory, and the BBC

One of my friends has recently been trying to get me to watch the BBC series “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom”. So far, I’ve only watched the first episode (of three total), which discusses the implications of the notion of inherent self-interest and game theory during the Cold War. For those [...]

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Madison and Factions-The Civil Rights Movement

“A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source” (Madison, The Federalist Paper 10).   In this passage from the Federalist Paper 10, Madison predicts that [...]

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Burke, Mill, and Tradition

            While Burke strongly advocates sticking with tradition and with what has worked for previous generations, Mill adopts a different approach.  In Mill’s opinion, a tradition is only legitimate if other ways of living have proved inferior.  Mill gives more trust to the ability of man to successfully reason, whereas Burke [...]

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Belle and Mill on Prostitution

A couple of recent articles on news.bbc.co.uk discuss the unmasking of Belle de Jour, author of blog “Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl”. Dr. Brooke Magnanti is a research scientist for The Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, and has been keeping a blog about her secret underground life as a [...]

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No Place for Amateurs

In recent decades, there has been a trend to seek candidates for high office who are not professional politicians, the logic being that such amateurs have not (yet) been corrupted by the political process. Recent examples trace back as far as Ronald Reagan, and include such stellar examples as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and, most [...]

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Wale, Factions, and the NAACP

Last week Wale’s debut album, Attention Deficit, was released worldwide. As my favorite artist, a DC native (like myself), and an overall superb musician I have been listening to Attention Deficit non-stop. One track on the album is titled “Shades” in which Wale discusses the inter-race conflict of the black society between African Americans with [...]

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Mill and the Limits of Free Speech

John Stuart Mill writes an excellent and, in my view, convincing defense of free speech even in the most extreme cases in his work On Liberty. If, reasons Mill, a government silences an opinion, it assumes that opinion to be a literal impossibility. “There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, [...]

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