Some thoughts on email and battery conservation in airplanes.
Also from Achenbach: a nice review of Gravity (with spoilers, for those who, like me, haven’t yet seen it).
Category Archives: Philosophy
The Uploading Problem
Reason’s Forty-Fifth Anniversary
If you’re not attending the event in LA tonight, you can watch live on Reason TV.
An Extinct Tree
…is resurrected. Though, if there were viable seeds, can the species really be said to be (or have been) extinct?
The Soul-Mate Myth
Dr. Helen has some thoughts.
I’m pretty sure that XKCD has pointed out the mathematical improbability of having a single “soul mate.” As Glenn says, they’re made, not found.
Flogging
Why it’s more humane than prison.
I think that any prison warden that tolerates prison rape should be flogged.
The Anglosphere
…and the future of liberty:
it is worth pausing to register the medium in which the ideas unfold: English. Nalapat remarks that “The English language is . . . a very effective counter-terrorist, counter-insurgency weapon.” I think he is right about that, but why? Why English? In a remarkable essay called “What Is Wrong with Our Thoughts?,” the Australian philosopher David Stove analyzes several outlandish, yet typical, specimens of philosophical-theological linguistic catastrophe. He draws his examples not from the underside of intellectual life—spiritualism, voodoo, Freudianism, etc.—but from some of the brightest jewels in the diadem of Western thought: from the work of Plotinus, for example, and Hegel, and Michel Foucault. He quoted his examples in translation, he acknowledges, but notes that “it is a very striking fact . . . that I had to go to translations. . . . Nothing which was ever expressed originally in the English language resembles, except in the most distant way, the thought of Plotinus, or Hegel, or Foucault. I take this,” Stove concludes, “to be enormously to the credit of our language.”
Unfortunately, the people in power right now resonate much more strongly with Hegel and Foucault than they do with Locke and Madison. Not to mention Rousseau. And they care little for liberty, preferring instead “social justice,” which means nothing more than “what I want.”
Rebooting Star Trek For The Small Screen
The Case Against Hope For ObamaCare
I agree with James Taranto:
We resent being told how to feel, and we hope ObamaCare fails, spectacularly and quickly.
We hope it fails spectacularly because that would provide an emotionally satisfying dramatic conclusion. If Barack Obama is forced to spend, say, the last two years of his presidency contending with the undeniable failure of his signature initiative, that would be a fitting punishment for the hubris of his first two years, especially since the imposition of ObamaCare on an unwilling country was the main consequence of his hubris.
We hope it fails quickly for an additional reason: to minimize the damage. Imagine if the Post had written a similar editorial in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, titled “Everyone Should Hope Communism Works.” That would have seemed equally high-minded: If communism didn’t work, tens of millions of people would be made miserable.
Which, of course, is precisely what happened over the next 70-plus years. The Post might respond that that’s an argument against communism rather than an argument against hoping communism works. But when you put it that way, it’s not such a clear distinction, is it? The communist revolution would not have succeeded absent a critical mass of people hopeful communism would work. Nor would it have endured as long as it did if no one had an emotional interest in its perpetuation.
Unfortunately, many still have that emotional interest.
Diagnosing the IPCC
It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:
Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.
Read the whole thing.