May 2013
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“If Governor Scott would just sit with me and others like me, I know he will veto...”
– That’s Seth Penalver, who was exonerated after 18 years when evidence of innocence was uncovered.
Here’s what he’s talking about:
In the final days of the legislative session, the Florida legislature passed a bill which limits the appeals and speeds up the execution process of...
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Not Hot Enough for Breitbart →
Boy genius Ben Shapiro takes to Breitbart.com to complain that Maxim’s list of hot women includes two women that he doesn’t think are very hot. One of them — Hoda Kotb — is old, for crying out loud! The only reason women like Kotb would find herself on the list is that she’s a liberal and, of course, Maxim is well-known for only celebrating the hotness of liberals;...
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WatchThis week on the Hero Report podcast, we’re joined by Peter Georgescu, author of The Constant Choice. Peter writes on heroism, illustrating with events from his own story of escape from Communist Romania.
Tell us what you think about this episode, discuss these issues with us on Twitter (Matt Langdon / Ari Kohen), and join us every week on Google+ for our live broadcast (where you can chat...
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Nebraska's Death Penalty
Nebraska’s death penalty is arbitrary, unfair, expensive, and useless … in short, it’s hopelessly, hopelessly broken:
Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment, Nebraska has spent an estimated $100 million on death penalty cases and executed three people.
“Why do we have something on our books that is so inefficient?...
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Here We Are Now Entertain Us
Here’s Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, putting forward what might be the motto of the contemporary edutainment industry:
I was taking an advanced calculus class and my instructor was reputed to be a fabulous researcher, but he barely spoke English. He was a very boring and bad teacher and I was absolutely lost and in despair.
So I went to the campus tutoring centre and they had Betamax...
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Syria and the Bystander Effect
About a week ago, as people were writing about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, I read a blog post in which the author argued against American intervention and in favor, more broadly, of a moral responsibility not to intervene when others are suffering:
Let us suppose that I see a person being physically assaulted on the sidewalk. The aggressor appears to be using their fists, but no...
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“Didn’t you know? Confirming a new EPA chief is vastly more important than voting...”
– That’s a blogger named Lily, responding to my earlier post about how Republicans blocked the confirmation of the new EPA chief by not showing up.
Lily’s blog tells us she’s from Florida and she “basically combat[s] nearly every Republican stereotype.” Except the...
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Babblr's Real-Time Malfunction →
A few guys thought it would be cool to launch an instant chat plug-in for Tumblr. Here’s what happened:
With all the excitement of yesterday (FINALLY, Tumblr has instant chat!), we bet you are little confused as to why your Babblr chat is not currently working. To put it simply, we had so many people SO excited about Babblr – over 34,000 downloads in just 3 hours – that our servers...
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Libertarian Human Rights? →
Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Bas van der Vossen tosses out a challenge to his fellow libertarians:
[L]ibertarians are at risk of defending a vision of a just society that would violate standard lists of human rights. That is not a good place to be. The language of human rights is the world’s moral lingua franca.
I think he’s on to something, to be sure. Libertarians...
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Further Thoughts on Courage
I’ve gotten some interesting pushback on my earlier post about courage and cowardice, with a number of people arguing that terrorists can be courageous as long as they have some legitimate fear of death or punishment and they overcome that fear to take the action under our consideration. In other words, because the Boston bombers might have (correctly) believed that they would be killed,...
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"the SUBTLEST way possible" →
Almost 900 people are RSVPed for a July 4th march on Washington, D.C. where protesters plan to carry loaded rifles. In D.C., openly carrying guns is against the law. But the organizer of the event, libertarian radio host Adam Kokesh, says the march is an act of “civil disobedience” that attempts to prove gun advocates’ point in the “SUBTLEST way possible.”
The event’s Facebook...
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The Death Penalty Deters? →
Here’s another awful case where the prospect of the death penalty doesn’t prevent murder:
A convicted rapist accused of strangling a corrections officer to death with an amplifier cord in the prison chapel is standing trial on charges that could carry the death penalty if he’s convicted.
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Scherf wrote detectives and prosecutors, saying he wanted to plead guilty. He...
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An Unqualified Apology? →
Niall Ferguson apologized today for recently making a series of bizarre “off-the-cuff” comments about John Maynard Keynes that were publicized and pretty much universally decried:
I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.” The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and...
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Shapiro To Morgan: Calling Someone 'Brave' For... →
The geniuses at Breitbart.com are proud of Ben Shapiro for defending his lack of understanding of the undercurrent of fear and hatred of the Other in America in an interview with Piers Morgan the other day. They’re so proud they put it on their website with a transcript. Here’s the quote that really sums up the whole interview:
SHAPIRO: I understand, I wear a yarmulke on TV, right?...
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WatchKevin Arnovitz covers the NBA for ESPN. We welcome him to the Hero Report podcast this week to discuss Jason Collins becoming the first openly gay male professional athlete in a major team sport and whether or not Collins’ decision to come out constitutes heroism. Kevin provides some insight into the culture of the NBA and we talk a bit about next steps for gay athletes.
Tell us what you...
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Looper
It’s not often that I have time to sit down and watch a movie. But since my children aren’t sleeping and I have to regularly get up and return them to bed or pat them and make shushing noises, I’ve found myself with some time on my hands at very unusual hours.
As such, I finally got to see “Looper,” a film I’d been pretty excited to see when it was first...
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Courage, Cowardice and Terrorism
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, Bill Maher got himself into a great deal of hot water by opining that terrorists who flew planes into buildings might be called a great many things but “cowards” shouldn’t be one of them.
We might well disagree with Maher, thinking about a definition of cowardice that doesn’t turn entirely on someone’s...
April 2013
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WatchThis week on the Hero Report podcast, we discuss the events immediately following the bombing in Boston and wonder about duty-bound heroism. And I commit to preparing myself to act heroically by signing up for some training. Are you prepared?
Tell us what you think about this episode, discuss these issues with us on Twitter (Matt Langdon / Ari Kohen), and join us every week on Google+ for our...
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The Big News!
I’ve just learned that my second book, which is on the topic of heroism, has been accepted for publication! Like my first book, it will be part of the excellent Routledge Innovations in Political Theory series.
Here’s a brief description of the book:
The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. I turn to classical conceptions of the hero in order to explain the confusion...
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Minerva Project Announces Annual $500,000 Prize... →
The Minerva Project, a San Francisco venture with lofty but untested plans to redefine higher education, said on Monday that starting next year it would award an annual $500,000 prize to a faculty member at any institution in the world who has demonstrated extraordinary, innovative teaching.
“We hope the Minerva Prize will be the Nobel Prize of teaching,” said Ben Nelson, Minerva’s founder.
...
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Good News!
After years and years of writing and lecturing about the death penalty, as well as protesting it, I’ve finally caught the attention of noted death penalty troll Dudley Sharp.
In fact, I’m willing to bet he’ll comment on this post before the day is out.
Mr. Sharp owns or is somehow affiliated with just about every domain name that a high school student who was writing a term...
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