PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER

Comedy on the Edges

Is there comedy so offensive that it shouldn’t be allowed? Do some jokes encourage bigotry and hatred? Could edgy comedy ever be good for society? These are some of the questions we’re asking in this week’s show, our first new show since Ken died last month.

Dark Knowledge: A User’s Guide

The Intellectual Dark Web has developed into an academic counterculture, with an enormous and rapidly growing fan base. While it’s wonderful that there are sites where taken-for-granted orthodoxies can be challenged in accessible ways, I have grave concerns about the way that this movement is unfolding.

To Retract or Not to Retract

Third World Quarterly, a journal that boasts Noam Chomsky on its editorial board, recently published, then withdrew, “The Case for Colonialism,” by Bruce Gilley when death threats were made against the journal's editors. But was the journal right to retract the piece?

Should White Artists Paint the Body of Emmett Till?

Should your race restrict what you're allowed to paint? Is it wrong for white artists to depict black suffering? Or is this just political correctness overdone?

The Culture Wars: Phase 2?

Here is a conjecure.  We are by now deep into a new phase of the so-called "culture wars."  The current battles in the culture wars are ased partly on competing and apparently irreconcilable perceptions over the extent of what some see as genuine oppression and others see as merely so-called "oppression."  I was prompted  to this conjecture partly by recent events on various university campuses and partly by some advice I ran across on a Unitarian-Universalist website about how to be effective allies to those with marginalized ide