No mentions of law, no hint of political life. It's easy to say there's no political philosophy or theory at stake here. I've known plenty of people who've read a few (very good) books and turned themselves into complete cranks.īelow I've written on Robert Frost's 'Hyla Brook,' a poem which addresses pastoral poetry. But it is important to look for theoretical knowledge separately, too, even if there is a danger that it can be too remote, too useless.

Look at how people are in denial about an obvious problem we can see class, race, morality and even nationalism (i.e. The fact alone seems to constitute political philosophy. Instead, there's a refusal to count them. There's no sense of 'What will people think, that the richest country on earth can't house its own citizens?' No shame whatsoever. A crisis not just for individuals, but government and society. I'm just amazed that we refuse to count properly in what constitutes a crisis. This constant tide is obscured by the once-a-year count. The number of people who were homeless at some point in the year, according to an analysis by the Economic Roundtable, was closer to 102,000. Over the course of a year, people are constantly sliding into homelessness, while others filter in and out of housing.

A representative passage from KJ Shepherd, who in 'Who Counts?', looks closely at our failure in counting the homeless: Los Angeles County’s PIT numbers, at around 59,000, do not capture the real dynamics of homelessness, as nonprofit research has revealed. I'm learning a lot from Protean Magazine, a leftist publication with a really beautiful print version. I feel like my job isn't to win the debate, but know better so I can act on the opportunities and situations which inevitably occur. And you need to be prepared for this: plenty of people deal in bad faith, holding that if politics remains a debate club, they don't have to be accountable for anything. You need to be able to cite a fact, explain how you got it, and work through its significance. Not just assume that, say, 'the government' is 'too big' or 'too liberal,' or rely on media that deals in lies and aims for outrage. In order to do political philosophy, one has to actually know something practical.

Poem about a dry brook