Brandon Turner

there are strong reasons to object to increased role of casual gambling in every day life--and stronger still reasons to worry about the corruption that gambling tends to bring into public spaces but most of today's takes on prediction markets and Brazil are just variations on this

what's silly about these objections in particular is that we've spent the last ten years reciting the arguments that emphasize that weighted models only predict the odds of outcomes and not the outcomes themselves "the upshot said there was a 40% chance it would happen--therefore it will happen!"

four articles across two years must be a moral panic

lol, right on queue--time to pull out the principal skinner meme!

guys if you think effective altruism is crazy, wait til you hear what Nussbaum and others of considerable standing have said about animals and the "problem of predation"

Even one of the great failures of lib-coded cities--eg. their astonishing homeless populations--can be attributed to hillbilly bigots. What a world! No policy solutions in sight--except changing hearts and minds!!

i spend a lot of time explaining to boomer conservative colleagues that the "love of equality" that shows up in eg. Book VIII of Republic has less to do with eg. transgenderism and much, much, much more to do pedophile Denny Hastert

far more useful to think of it as an exceedingly rigorous extension of modern concerns over authenticity or various protestant-coded concerns about inner/outer truths and sexual purity. the space is filled to the brim with virtue talk; "depraved" is the last word i'd use to describe it.

i spend a lot of time explaining to boomer conservative colleagues that the "love of equality" that shows up in eg. Book VIII of Republic has less to do with eg. transgenderism and much, much, much more to do pedophile Denny Hastert

who does this sound like? does this sound like the woke left--which is if anything hyper-moralized? or does it sound like today's GOP, which is opposed on principle to the *very idea of criminality* every consequence is a "weaponization" of the justice system. nixon himself "rehabilitated."

looks like I'm canceling my NYT sub after all

we've done a lot of dunking on libertarians on here and I have wanted to point out for a long time that while very many *libertarians* revealed themselves to be authoritarians or useful idiots, libertarianism has been *extremely vindicated* in a number of key ways

I have many times said that 2016 pushed me further to the right, and I submit that it pushed a number of traditional lefties to the right as well--on economics especially, but also on civil society and associations of all stripes

i think expanding the court is a bad idea; altering a court whose legitimacy rests on its perceived stability and neutrality bc you think it unduly or unjustly hinders your preferred political program is, i think, both wrong and bad that said, i hope the dems pack the court (or at least reform it)

inching ever closer to the view that the anti-Pangram crowd is basically telling on itself

it is worth stepping back occasionally and remarking upon the extent to which deans and administrators of all sorts have turned the job of an academic into **finding and spending** money

genuine question: let us agree that departments and, if necessary, faculty senate should be in position to evaluate cases re: what is/isn't germane to course material; speech that seems inappropriate within the university. how do they enforce these evaluations on a faculty member?

thereby simply re-establishing the current top-down model of university governance?

genuine question: let us agree that departments and, if necessary, faculty senate should be in position to evaluate cases re: what is/isn't germane to course material; speech that seems inappropriate within the university. how do they enforce these evaluations on a faculty member?