I have (of course) noticed that many of my posts of late have been political-polemical. Here are some positives:
Coleman Hughes, black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia, making any number of eminently admissible arguments about race issues which it appears (here come the polemics again...) the American left is neither prepared nor has the good faith to take on. If he's right, then the American left has been shitting the bed for long enough that even a single undergrad philosopher can run circles around them, more or less. Nothing that I've seen in the comments sections of his articles (I went through the entirety of the comments for this one, just to see...) would suggest that the American left has much in the way of rebuttals that would make any reasonable and duly informed person think that the American left has anything like a monopoly on good arguments on race issues. (Much as with the Trump-Clinton election, the American left would have you think that it's some kind of knock-down, not-even-a-close-call argument in favor of the leftist viewpoint on this and a wide range of other issues.) I did google 'criticism rebuttal response to coleman hughes' and the search returned all of one result of any usefulness, also a thoroughly admissible entry into the discussion. However...
In the course of reading a number of Hughes-related posts, I encountered this article, "Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility," by Glenn Loury, and it is about as thoughtful and humane an article as I've ever seen on the subject of America's Racial Problem. But it is most certainly not a leftist article - and it's the kind of article that I would be surprised to find the left having the courage, integrity, honor, good faith, etc., to take on (which would require admitting that the left, by narrowing its focus to only certain causal factors, has been shitting the bed for decades). So basically it's either-or: Either Hughes and Loury (and numerous other often-black conservatives who've studied and written about this topic indepth) have eminently admissible arguments, in which case the American left has been shitting the bed, Or the American left's MO has been reasonable, normal, dialectically accountable, honorable, etc. Take your pick.
Hughes and Loury are, in effect, throwing down the glove to issue this challenge: "Okay, leftists, let's do talk about the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and ongoing systemic injustices. And you, lefties - you get to address the problem of the sky-high rate of single-parent families in the black community. Deal?" Concerted silence/evasion in the face of this offer/challenge is what I expect from the American left. (Implicitly contained in the challenge is what I've alluded to above: that the American left acknowledge how badly it's been shitting the bed and make a hearty effort to prevent further bed-shitting. I don't expect that to be forthcoming any time soon, i.e., I would be rather surprised - pleasantly so - if that were to happen.)
On to another positive, without the polemical implications this time (except those pertaining to the ecologically oblivious/their enablers...):
I recently read The River Why by David James Duncan, which I spotted on a home bookshelf. It's both fun and thought-provoking, and made an impression that books rarely do for me. (A few other titles of lasting interest for me: Mises, Socialism; Letters of Ayn Rand and The Romantic Manifesto; Norton, Personal Destinies; Nozick, The Examined Life; Rasmussen and Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature; Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment.) Then again, I'm not especially well-read when it comes to books and I'm not a particularly fast reader; for building my reading list I have to use my sense of quality/importance over the pursuit of quantity. As for The River Why, one might get a good sense of its qualities from the goodreads users' reviews. I just wanted, at the least, to provide a pointer in its direction (just in case I kick the bucket before the next blog posting, etc.).
