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Articles by Allen Porter
Spring Break Car Check Event to Help Campus Community Travel Safely
The U of A Police Department will host a Spring Break Car Check event on Friday, March 20, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., helping members of the campus community prepare their vehicles before traveling for the break. The event will take place in U of A Parking Lot 232, located just off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, west of Razorback Road.
No Half-Measures on Higher-Ed Reform – Mike Gonzalez
Education has become perhaps the most hotly contested arena in American politics, and there’s good reason for that. America is now in the midst of regime politics—two divergent ideas of how the country ought to be constituted are in an epic clash for primacy, which is the source of our current polarization. So naturally, schools are drawn in. All regimes have reigning sets of beliefs, and schools and universities are where this worldview is transmitted to the next generation.
Why AI Can't Think – David P. Goldman
Just for fun, I tease the hell out of ChatGPT in spare moments. Chatbots have no self, that is, no purpose for existing, and therefore can’t think. There is no such thing as thought in the abstract: thought is always someone’s thought, and mental activity doesn’t constitute thought unless it comes from a thinker who has a reason for thinking.
On "Liberal" as a Merit Badge – - Spencer A. Klavan
Michael Walzer’s The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective is avowedly not a tightly-argued work of political philosophy. “There is nothing systematic here,” announces Walzer in his preface. He developed the book out of an essay called “What it Means to Be a Liberal,” written in 2020 for Dissent (a magazine he co-edited for over 30 years).
Remembering the American Character at War – Titus Techera
Every year, I try to write about a war movie or show for Memorial Day, to reawaken interest in American history and reflect on the lessons of the great generals and statesmen who carried the flag to victory, secured the republic, and ensured that political freedom is not overawed by catastrophe or despotism.
The Truth About Sojourner Truth – Mary Cuff
In 1828, a former slave named Isabella van Wagenen took her owner to court on the charge that he had illegally sold her five-year-old son out of state. Isabella herself had only been legally free for two years at this point, since New York State was still in the process of phasing out slavery.
Puzzling About Inequality – - Samuel Gregg
Everyone loves to talk about America, especially non-Americans. Whether it is Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letter from an American Farmer (1782), Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1840), or Jacques Maritain’s Reflections on America (1958), there has never been a shortage of foreign observers who think that the rest of the world has much to learn, for better and worse, from America.
Our Common Republic? – - Casey Chalk
In the last decade, the United States has admitted nearly eleven million legal immigrants, equating to roughly the combined population of Iowa, Oklahoma, and Oregon. An additional twelve million illegal immigrants—roughly the size of the population of Illinois—entered the country over that same time span. Immigrants account for nearly 14 percent of Americans, which is nearly triple the share fifty years ago.
National Conservativism Overseas – Titus Techera
Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism movement just hosted its seventh conference since 2019. In 2023, as in 2019, it meets in London. That year Boris Johnson became Tory leader and PM after an astonishing electoral victory. Brexit would finally happen and English freedom would be restored. Today, Johnson is ruined politically and the Tories are getting ready to be wiped out at the next election. Thus, the theme of the conference: What happened to English conservatism?
The Philosophy Underlying DEI – Allen Porter
Neetu Arnold recently wrote an article about the ways that colleges and universities are preparing for a “post-affirmative action era” by developing “strategies for universities to continue racial discrimination through facially race-neutral approaches in admissions and beyond,” the goal being to “achieve diversity-related goals without triggering legal scrutiny.” This is very important journalistic work. But I’m not a journalist; I’m an academic philosopher.
ChatGPT and the Promise of Authenticity – Allen Porter
Much ink has been spilled in service of worrying, sometimes in apocalyptic tones, about the implications of rapidly developing AI technologies like ChatGPT.
Will AI Revolutionize Education?
With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, educational institutions face an existential crisis. This “large language model,” a predictive text tool that learns from a massive backlog of human-generated writing, can pass various professional exams, help students write essays, and may replace all kinds of intellectual labor (witness the doubling of Buzzfeed’s stock on the announcement that it will use OpenAI tech to create content).
Beyond the Modern Fitness Cult – Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Anyone who has caught a glimpse of the hall of mirrors that is today’s gym has seen some truly appalling images of self-obsession. In one north country gym at the end of the workday, a 40-something woman sporting a string bikini and head-to-toe artificial bronzing could be found camped out in the sauna for hours nearly every day.
Exercising the Virtues
Physical fitness supports moral health, not just the health of the body.
Exercising the Virtues – Allen Porter
Mens sana in corpore sano—“sound in mind, sound in body”—is a piece of perennial wisdom. It comes to us from the Roman poet Juvenal but has roots in the culture and philosophy of ancient Greece. In America, it was once such common sense that a sneaker manufacturer turned it into a brand slogan. Virtue ethics, one of the three main branches of ethics, is also inherited from the ancient Greeks. Virtue ethics is concerned with how or what kind of person one should be.
Everyone’s a Critic, and It’s Time to Read the Books
Would you be surprised to learn that Jesus was really a cross-dressing, gender-indeterminate “drag king”? If so, you obviously don’t know the variant of critical theory called “queer theory” as expounded by Tat-siong Benny Liew, a religious-studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., who gave this subversive reading of the Gospels in an essay published in a collection of biblical criticism. It is a cliché among academics that the humanities are in crisis.
The Brave New World of Biopolitics – Allen Porter
Bill Maher made a great point on January 28 in the “New Rules” segment with which he concludes his weekly late-night talk show on HBO. The topic was overregulation by Democrats. After noting that “the Biden infrastructure bill has a provision that requires all new cars to install an alert system that goes off when you leave a baby in the back seat,” Maher opined that “Democrats no longer possess the common sense to understand that not every problem in the world can be fixed by a regulation.
It’s Time to Oppose COVID Authoritarianism
In their now justly famous 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff proposed “Safetyism” as the name for a novel “moral culture” that had originated on college and university campuses and was rapidly colonizing the larger American culture.
The Many Faces of Government Default – Alex J. Pollock
Although government debt is a favored investment class all over the world, it has a colorful history of over 200 defaults in the last two centuries, which continue right up to the present time. This record reflects a perpetual political temptation, memorably described by the sardonic observer of sovereign defaults, Max Winkler in 1933.
Revisiting France's Strange Defeat – Daniel J. Mahoney
France today is a middle-sized power, resigned, perhaps too resigned, to play a diminished role in global, and even European, affairs. If the new Europe has a secret ruler it is undoubtedly Germany, a nation and political community that combines undoubted self-confidence with the trauma and guilt induced by the memory of the demonic crimes of the Third Reich.
Van Galder Not Only Walks, He Drives
Wendy Halloran’s latest installment on the continuing saga of Rick Van Galder the disgraced Mesa PD lieutenant has many people scratching their heads. Judge John Hudson agreed that Super Extreme Drunk Driver Van Galder had received special treatment. But the charge that would have impacted the validity of his jail stay was fraud against the court. Because he was not charged with fraud, Judge Hudson let Van Galder’s vacay go on record as time served.
Is Rick Van Galder Preparing for a Camping Trip?
It ain’t over till it’s over! Wendy Halloran’s latest investigative report on the continuing saga of Rick Van Galder’s outrageous jail stay for Super Extreme DUI won’t be her last. And the impact her team is having makes it clear that when it comes to potentially deadly behaviors like super extreme drunk driving, the public does not want Anyone to think they are above the law. Van Galder should have been treated like the potential killer that he was on the night of February 12, 2016.
So Much to Learn from the Van Galder Story
With so much to be made of Rick Van Galder’s arrest and shameful jail stay, it can be easy to miss the details that we can truly learn from. The latest in Wendy Halloran’s investigative report is Mesa PD’s investigation into the shame brought upon the department by Rick’s wife, Homicide Detective Teresa Van Galder. And there is plenty of it to go around. Still, this entire mess has something that too many Americans can actually relate to.
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