This looks like an interesting movie.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Hillary Clinton
A liberal society is one in which everybody has free-speech rights. A society in which some people have free-speech rights and some do not, depending on the self-interested whim of people with political power, is a totalitarian society realized to a greater or lesser degree. Heinrich Heine’s advice on the connection between the treatment of books and the treatment of human beings is always and forever relevant.
As I wrote recently, Trump has never read the Constitution. She hates it.
The Ascent Of Populism
A long but useful history of the conservative intellectual, from Matthew Continetti.
Sexbots
Don’t worry, they won’t ruin sex. I think that, like other technological advances, they will increase opportunities for more people.
The Limits Of Knowledge
The climate debate has an epistemological problem that proponents of policy to deal with it want to pretend doesn’t exist. I wrote about the flawed precautionary principle years ago.
Colonizing Mars
Is Elon religious enough to do it?
I don’t know, but I think there will be room for plenty of religions off planet, including new ones.
[Update a while later]
A new paper from the White House called “Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality” that contains almost nothing that would actually enable human settlement of space.
[Afternoon update]
Adam Routh wants to do Apollo again.
One-Party Government
More Americans want it. Because the Left has succeeded in dumbing down the populace about the founding principles of the Republic. I agree with this:
…since the GOP will almost certainly hold the House — and looks like it’s got a good chance with the Senate — if you want one-party government you need to elect Trump. On the other hand, Trump’s so different from the Republicans in Congress that it would still be divided government, really. Which I personally find more of a comfort than a disappointment.
Yes.
Cryonics
A very nice, but long piece on the current state of the art, over at Gizmodo.
Want To Understand Hillary?
Read Saul Alinsky (who was the subject of her college thesis that she tried to keep hidden for so long).
The American Left are the direct ideological descendants of the Puritans.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Clinton campaign repeatedly overcharged poor donors. Doing her bit for wealth inequality.
What Makes Socialism So Attractive?
Evolution has wired our brains for it, unfortunately.
The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by “romantic socialism”—that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual’s only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.
Tooby also argued that markets make intellectuals irrelevant. Consequently, academics have a huge bias against spontaneous order and the basic goal of most social science is to critique the social institutions associated with market-based society.
More darkly, Tooby pointed out that political entrepreneurs know how to appeal to romantic socialist sentiments as a way to establish themselves in power. The evolved psychological propensity toward romantic socialism facilitates political coalitions that oppose free-market societies. Since such coalitions are organized around romantically appealing ideas, any heresy is treated as betrayal. If things are not going well (and they never are in full-blown socialist societies) and since the ideology cannot be wrong, evildoers are undermining progress and must be found and punished (think kulaks and the Gulag). Such coalitions tend to revert to primitive zero-sum thinking: If there is something you don’t get that means that someone took it from you. The result is, according to Tooby, that there really are those who are willing to make poor people worse off in order to make rich people worse off.
In terms of defining socialism, I don’t make a distinction between it and Marxism, which was simply a failed attempt to explain economics and human nature scientifically. Simply put, though it’s more complex, it is the belief that one person can know better than another what that other person “needs,” and should have the power to ensure that those “needs” are met.