Joseph Porter (@jjosephporter) / X

Joseph Porter

1,079 posts

Joseph Porter

@jjosephporter

al shal be wel, and al shal be wel, and al manner of thyng shal be wele

Joined August 2023

Pinned
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 2, 2025
I am now accepting applications for direct donors. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Christopher Anadale
@ChrisAnadale
Jul 1, 2025
The U of Tulsa destruction will make it harder for anyone to recruit top academic talent to start new initiatives: why leave a secure tenured job & move your kids across the country if the institution can turn on a dime and kick you out? What's the point in trying? Maybe
16K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 8, 2025
This is how @Columbia's "Contemporary Civilization" course ends. A nice illustration of the lopsidedness of almost all humanities curricula— promising "a wide range of perspectives" and then excluding all unapproved perspectives
1M
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 8, 2025
Replying to @jjosephporter
Forget Kirk or Oakeshott or Scruton (let alone Yarvin). Even, say, Hayek is excluded. Even Rawls lol
45K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 8, 2025
Replying to @gmiller and @Columbia
Here ya go:
college.columbia.edu
Contemporary Civilization
COCI CC1101 and COCI CC1102 — The purpose of Contemporary Civilization, or “CC”, as it is popularly known, is to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities—political,...
17K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 9, 2025
Replying to @sudoraohacker and @Columbia
STEM is great, but it ultimately can't replace a good liberal arts education. We need to create good liberal arts programs!
11K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jun 4, 2025
Replying to @shylockh
Murder may be down, but mayoral misuse of the POV meme is way up
4.9K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 10, 2025
1. I appreciate @zenahitz' thoughts. Some of my own (🧵): It's true that some of the @Columbia reading list is "recognizably canonical." Part of what that shows is how distorted the modern canon is! A parable:
Zena Hitz
@zenahitz
Jul 9, 2025
A few Thoughts. 1. Ending as previous, with Rawls, Nozick, and Berlin, is well gotten-rid of. 2. About half of this list (Gandhi, Fanon, King, Foucault, De Beauvoir, Fields) is recognizably canonical and a reasonable way to approach some widely discussed topics.
31K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 9, 2025
Replying to @gmiller and @Columbia
You're welcome! And I have my opinions, but the more important thing to note (IMO) is that your question is a microcosm of the broader question what exactly has happened to Western Civilization!
2.2K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 8, 2025
Replying to @tai_gui_le and @Columbia
I doubt it, but I guess we’d have to take the class!
10K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
May 19, 2025
Replying to @slatestarcodex and @bryan_caplan
Not defending Bryan's take but your first two examples are empirical claims and your last is a normative claim which (as you know) libertarians often defend as an extrapolation of common-sense moral intuitions
3.7K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jun 12, 2025
Replying to @shylockh
You may be interested in what Hugo himself had to say
3.2K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 10, 2025
Replying to @jjosephporter @zenahitz and @Columbia
2. Imagine a Great Works-y course at a hypothetical 2025 Soviet university. Its modern selections might include a "wide range of perspectives"—not just Marx and Engels but Lenin, Trotsky, etc. Maybe even Bukharin and Lukács!
770
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
Jul 9, 2025
Replying to @postdiscipline and @Columbia
If you don’t think that’s a lopsided list, I don’t know what to tell you
3.1K
Joseph Porter
@jjosephporter
May 15, 2025
This is late-stage Progressive managerialism, not late-stage capitalism. Late-stage capitalism is Mars colonies, flying cars, household robots, and bespoke genetic modification
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