The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals. One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to… Continue reading The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

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SOPA and the oblivious

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom. That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.

Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

I’ve written before about scientific error cascades and the pernicious things that happen when junk science becomes the focus or rationale of a political crusade. The worst example of this sort of thing in my lifetime, and arguably in the entire history of science, has been the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) panic. Now that the… Continue reading Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

Community versus collectivism

Community and collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community. Collectivism is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it is actually about the use of force.… Continue reading Community versus collectivism

Living in Euro-Cloud-Cuckoo land

I often tell people that I think The Economist is the best news magazine in the English language – and not because they make a relatively frequent habit of quoting me, either. The house style is intelligent, often penetrating, witty, and sober about important things. It is very rare that The Economist indulges in wishful… Continue reading Living in Euro-Cloud-Cuckoo land

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What ‘privilege’ means to me

Recently there’s been some back and forth on feminist blogs about the term “privilege”, beginning with “Shut Up, Rich Boy”: The Problem With “Privilege.” and continuing with several responses defending the use of the term. Here’s what the feminist term of art “privilege” means to me.

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Politics as usual is over

A number of my regulars have asked me why I don’t blog about politics as much as I used to. Fundamentally, it’s because I think the value of political persuasion is decreasing fast. Political persuasion matters most when when policy options are relatively open and unconstrained by objective conditions that politics cannot alter. It matters… Continue reading Politics as usual is over

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Heavy weather and bad juju

Many primitive societies believe that maleficient spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes – cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the… Continue reading Heavy weather and bad juju

Examples and consequences

SF author and civil-rights activist Joel Rosenberg has been unjustly arrested. Good coverage at PopeHat; essentially this is harassment following a Nov 5th assault on Joel by a cop while he was pursuing a FOIA request related to his first arrest, on bogus charges that prosecutors subsequently dropped. I have very mixed feelings about this… Continue reading Examples and consequences

Other peoples’ money

“The trouble with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher once famously said, “is that sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money. This observation is the key to understanding the wave of government bankruptcies that has already begun to break over us.

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Indistinguishable from malice

I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10. Watch it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.… Continue reading Indistinguishable from malice

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Democratic decline, interrupted

Veerrry interresting. Michael Barone, editor of The Almanac of American Politics for many years, writes an in-depth article on the psephology of the 2010 midterms titled Dems retreat to coasts as GOP rules vast interior. I read this and had a feeling of deja vu.

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Pessimistic anarchism

I received email recently asking me to respond to an article in the Huffington Post, No Safe Harbor on Gulf Coast; Human Blood Tests Show Dangerous Levels of Toxic Exposure. Questioner’s English wasn’t very good, but the question he was trying to pose was how market anarchists like myself can oppose government action to mitigate… Continue reading Pessimistic anarchism

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Engineering history

On a mailing list I frequent, a regular expressed doubt about the possibility that very small subgroups of a society (less than 5% of its population) can cause large changes in the overall direction of its evolution without long historical timespans to work in. But I know from experience that this can happen, because I’ve… Continue reading Engineering history

Kafkatrapping

Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of… Continue reading Kafkatrapping