Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."
Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country--liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.
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via Daniel Klein: Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? - WSJ.com.
Watch it all the way to the end; it's only 30 seconds. I love how over-the-top this is. V for Victory! V for Vijay!
After a 4-month hiatus, I'm back on the job market again. If you need a web architect, expert (senior) PHP developer, or someone to manage your programming team as a leader/mentor, send me an email: pmjones88@gmail.com.
... compared to the technology of the 1960s, when mankind first embarked on a trip to the moon, a space elevator is simple for our modern world to build. In fact, if you took a cellphone back to the Apollo scientists, theyâd treat it like a supercomputer and have teams of engineers huddled over it 24 hours a day. With only the addition of the computing technology of one cellphone, we might have shaved a year off the date of the first moon landing.
Each day we are safe because soldiers, sailors, airman, corpsmen, and policemen place themselves between us and evil.
When these men have fallen or when their young bodies have been maimed forever in defense of our safety, the poignant moment of thanks we give inevitably dissolves over the years into an empty, formalistic expression of gratitude. We fool ourselves into believing that the trivial problems of our comfortable lives have somehow matched the bravery, the pain, and the nightmares that haunt these heroes for the rest of their lives.
In the worldâs collective consciousness, the word âNaziâ is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazisâ ideology--nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle--led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.
A Hidden History of Evil by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Spring 2010.
Curiously the phrase âeverything happens for a reasonâ is used to talk about systems and stories, but the âreasonsâ are in opposite temporal directions. In system thought it means everything is necessitated somehow by the previous state of the system, in story thought it means every occurrence will have future social significance if it does not already.
Logical conclusions must be predicated on true premises. If the premises are unexamined, inaccurate, or false, then the logic is empty. This is one reason why using "logic" to argue for or against matters of politics and policy is frequently misguided; the person invoking "logic" is all too often using faulty premises.
Misuse of logic is rampant in all fields, even academic ones. It is often used as a crutch to justify prejudices and as a club to smite those who hold opposing views. There are people who are thoroughly Aristotelian in their thinking, and do, indeed, believe in the profundity of empty logical arguments. Others, such as politicians and evangelists use logic cynically as an instrument for persuasion of those who don’t realize that “There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons, and reasons that sound good.” (Burton Hillis).
Just what is an ‘empty’ argument about the ‘real world’ of our experience?
- One kind is the argument that may have faultless logic but is based on premises that have not, or cannot, be experimentally verified. Another kind is based on premises that are not part of any well-established and accepted scientific theory.
- Some arguments are empty of content because they use words with no clear and unambiguous meaning, or words that cannot be related to anything real (experimentally unverifiable).
- The most seductive empty arguments build upon premises that are so emotionally appealing that we don’t ask for verification, or which have appealing conclusions that blind us to the emptiness of the premises.
Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world.
It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And weâve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on âremaking America.â
Horrifying that this would happen in America:
The American Academy of Pediatrics recently put forward a proposal on female genital mutilation. They would like that American doctors be given permission to perform a ceremonial pinprick or ânickâ on girls born into communities that practice female genital mutilation.
Female circumcision is a custom in many African and Asian countries whereby the genitals of a girl child are cut. ...
There is a more sinister meaning to the word ânickâ if you consider the fact that in some cases it means to cut off the peak of the clitoris. Proponents compare ânickingâ to the ritual of boy circumcision. But in the case of the boys, it is the foreskin that is all or partly removed and not a part of the penis head. In the case of the girls, the clitoris is actually mutilated.
Via Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Injustice of Female Genital Mutilation - The Daily Beast.