Welcome to my blog. Since this is the first blog posting here, I thought I would explain what I hope to do and have to say. Before you get excited, expecting radical and amoral content, the title of this blog is a play on words. To be insufferable is to be unbearably arrogant or intolerable. While some may view what they read here over time as arrogant, that is hardly my intent. The last thing I want to be is an insufferable academic. I want dialogue and your comments. Love it, hate it, whatever, I want to know what you think. What I find intolerable in intolerance, and much of what I write will be about intolerance (I wanted to use the word insuferability, but my computer keeps telling me it’s not a word). What I mean is Intolerant public policy, intolerant leadership, intolerant government… I think you get the picture. Too few of our leaders are humble and far too many are insufferable. They too often enact insufferable policy that appeases a set of doners or a particular voting block without considering the consequences of their actions beyond the next election.
What I think is insufferable, others may see as perfectly Okay. We all have a particular world view shaped by our history, culture, environment, and those we choose to associate with. As Jonathon Haidt has written, like it or not, all of us associate with a team of individuals with similar world views which shape our perspective on life. Learning to get along when our teams disagree is part of the journey. Hopefully that makes all of us less insufferable.
The second half of this blogs’ title is ‘libertine.’ A libertine lacks moral principles or a sense of responsibility. Unfortunately, there seem to be too many libertines in the world today. This blog will focus on principled discussions on a variety of topics mostly centered around what interest me, including my research and at times will venture into the political landscape. Much of it may be radical, but not amoral. Some my find it insufferable but it will not be intolerable, at least for most reasonable people. I do not see my work as especially radical, but others may disagree. They may see it is irresponsible to believe in such radical ideas as liberty and the scary notion of freedom for a parent to choose a school for their children, or even worse…. the possibility the throwing more money at public schools without fundamental change won’t make public schools any better.
Education is an important area of concern for this blog, as is immigration policy. Many believe the current federal government policy on immigration, especially at the Southern border is very libertine or irresponsible. Others may see is as common sense and doing anything else like building a wall, or just enforcing current immigration laws as amoral, radical, and crazy. Is immigration policy based on existing legal principles and enshrined into law by Congress and the President amoral? Is disregarding these principles and essentially creating an open border to allow almost anyone not fortunate enough to be born in America more moral?? How you answer these questions may very well depend on whose team you are on. Here we hope to get past our team devotion and dig deeper, to examine not just what is good for our team, but for what is good for the larger society.
New posts should appear at least once a week. Check back to see the latest, and don’t forget to add your own comments. Listening to each other is how we learn and expand our understandings.