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About the Author
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, fall 2015). http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Radical-Living-Learning-Gracefully/dp/1593766181 Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://robertwjensen.org/. To join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html. Twitter: @jensenrobertw. Notes. [1] Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996), p. 106. [2] Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). [3] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, edited and with a revised translation by Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011), p. 55.
The health of a democracy depends on people’s ability to argue—to propose public policies and articulate reasons why others should adopt those policies. Democracy atrophies when substantive arguments are sidelined by dogma, when claims are asserted with self-righteous certainty but not defended with reason and logic. There’s nothing wrong with people being emotional about politics, so long as it doesn’t shut down dialogue.
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I think a lot of people would scratch their heads, trying to figure out what being transgender has to do with the broader issues. Most of us keep everything about our sexuality/sex lives separate from our working lives. What matters the most to people, at the proverbial end of the day, is whether they have the means to keep their families together, housed and fed. Many don’t. We’re 20-some years into one hell of a war on the poor, during which the overall life expectancy of the US poor fell below that of every developed nation. It has not been… Read more »