Why they can’t protect us.
Unfortunately.
Category Archives: Philosophy
A Book Review
It’s not really a review, per se, but the book is featured at Ricochet today.
The Culture War
It’s a clash of two faiths. And it’s one that the Left will do anything to win. They’re really just the modern-day descendants of the Puritans.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why it’s so hard to get “progressives” to live by their own rules.
To them, rules are for the little people.
Clueless Scientists
Some thoughts on their foolish political tendencies. And as noted, this Sagan quote is crucial in the “settled climate science” debate:
Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those that tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious who comes ambling along.
“Scientist” isn’t a profession. We are all scientists to one degree or another, if we are successful at every-day living.
Giordano Bruno
Sorry #Cosmos, he may have been a martyr for religious freedom, but for science? Not so much.
But, you know, it has that truthiness thing going for it.
The Path Forward In Space
Dennis Wingo has the 2014 edition. Long but worth a read. I disagree with him on the first flight for commercial crew. I think it may happen as soon as next year.
The Mammoth
We’re starting to resurrect extinct animals.
What could go wrong?
What Is Life?
This is an interesting interview, but Beck seems to be confusing “life” and “consciousness.” The appropriate answer to his question is something that self replicates using local resources, but that has nothing to do with AI, or uploading.
Diversity Of Thought
It’s the most important diversity, but the one that the Left absolutely will not tolerate.
One could easily dismiss these students as part of that long and glorious American tradition of smart young people saying stupid things. As Oscar Wilde remarked, “In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”
But we all know that this nonsense didn’t spring ex nihilo from their imaginations. As Allan Bloom showed a quarter century ago in The Closing of the American Mind, these ideas are taught.
Indeed, we are now up to our knees in this Orwellian bilge. Diversity means conformity.
And ignorance is strength.
The Risk To Liberty
It doesn’t come from the welfare state, but from central planning:
Obamacare provides the illustration of this, as I think many people have intuited. The “economic problem,” of course, is inescapable in health care. The supply of health care is scarce (only so many resources can be dedicated to it relative to other ends in society) and the demand is pretty close to unlimited. Somehow or other we have to decide how to allocate these scarce means among all the different ends–preventive medicine, end-of-life care, primary research, specialists v. generalists, etc.
Now one possibility that–thank goodness–we have historically rejected in the United States is the idea that certain people should just feel a moral obligation to die for the good of society. You do hear this sometimes–that some people should voluntarily forgo life-extending treatment for the “good of society”–and it sends chills down my spine. This is essentially the Maoist approach.
The alternative is to come up with some way of allocating scarce resources among competing wants. The myth of Obamacare is the same problem repeated: it rests on the idea that we can simply change the means of health care delivery (central planning of health insurance) but it will not require determining the ends at some point–i.e., in the end who gets treated and what treatments are covered and which are not. So, for example, the core of Obamacare is the system of cross-subsidies for some treatments (maternal care) and the expense of others (unmarried or infertile people). So infertile people have less money for things that they want to do (such as join a health club) because they now have to pay more money for things that the central planners have decided is more important than whatever they would do with their money.
And of course, E. J. Dionne remains clueless, as always.