The Independent Whig
The Bees and the Hive
The Bees and the Hive: Liberal and Conservative Perceptions of Human Nature
The liberal vision employs only the moral color receptors cognitive tools of care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression. These are the Big E of the moral visual acuity chart. They, and the Liberal vision, are focused almost entirely on the individual; the bee in the hive of society. The moral intuitions of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, are the … Continue reading
Recommendations
The real problem as I see it is that much of the squabbling between the left and the right over this or that policy or moral issue is based on a set of assumptions about what motivates us and how our minds work that is tilted decidedly to the left, and that we now know … Continue reading
What is Liberalism?
(This post is an excerpt, with some minor updating, from the longer essay in the post What Is Rick Perry Talking About? ) What is Liberalism? Liberalism is the morality which is built on the two moral foundations of Care/Harm and Proportionality/Cheating (i.e. fairness), and eschews the others – as illustrated in this 19 minute … Continue reading
Why Rep. Carson Thinks the Tea Party is Racist
Democratic Rep. Andre Carson told a Miami crowd last week that the Tea Party movement would “love” to see black Americans “hanging on a tree.” (1) He is not alone among liberals in depicting the Tea Party as racist. Janeane Garofalo attributed the Tea Party to “racism, straight up,” (2) and Keith Olberman agreed with … Continue reading
What is Rick Perry Talking About?
One of the most quoted passages from Rick Perry’s book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington is this: We are tired of being told how much salt to put on our food, what kind of cars we can drive, what kind of guns we can own (and) what kind of prayers we are … Continue reading
About The Independent Whig
NOTE: This post shows the About page as it originally appered. The About page will be updated occasionally as this blog develops and matures. Introduction: This blog takes its name from a series of essays written in 1720 by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose later work was serialized in The London Journal, and then … Continue reading
I Support Viewpoint Diversity
A politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities. We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.
Venn Diagram of Liberal and Conservative Traits and Moral Foundations and
The Independent Whig 