So-called “reaction” videos are big on YouTube and I suspect these guys are the most popular: I can see why. They have a great disposition, a palpable love of music whatever the genre, they offer good insights and don’t take themselves too seriously — they, like me, look for the funk-groove in any genre. If academia were as ecumenical as these guys (their tag line is “Free Thinkers”), it wouldn’t be the cluster-fuck that it is now. I stumbled into reaction videos fascinated as to how others now might react to the music of my youth (i.e. 70s) and indeed other era-genres. My favourite items from the Free Thinkers Lost in Vegas guys are below. Speaking of which, Sabbath is a fundamental pillar to the 70s and are a band in a genre of one: accept no substitutes, there are many pretenders. Sabbath’s purple patch was from 70-72 when four fabulous albums on the trot were released: Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), Master of Reality (1971), and Vol. 4 (1972). Paranoid was the first album I ever bought and Master of Reality was something my mum in all her naïveté came home with (she knew some A&R guy who gave her a bunch of records). “Into the Void” from MoR was a song I suggested for some primary school play — they went with “The Age of Aquarius” instead. So taken with Vol. 4 I actually travelled with in vinyl. There are many reaction channels around and two other distinctive ones in the vast spectrum, at least so far as Sabbath is concerned, is Kids React to Black Sabbath and Pastor Rob Reacts, the latter clearly taken by Geezer Butler’s unapologetic Christian lyrics.
Liberalism, Through a Glass Darkly
Our contribution to a Palgrave blog (typos will be corrected).
Booker Mural
Check out WWOZ’s A Closer Walk website. Whatever your preferred style of piano music, if you don’t know who Booker is, you really should delve into this amazing talent and one-off character.
Oakeshott as Conservative
The topic of Oakeshott’s conservatism is a contentious one, as Robert Devigne shows in his essay “Oakeshott as Conservative.” Using Burke as a touchstone, Devigne demonstrates that Oakeshott’s conservatism is complex and shifts over time. In his essays from the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oakeshott displays a Burkean antipathy toward rationalism and appreciation for tradition, though he also dissents from Burke on the value of philosophy and the rationality of history. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, Oakeshott’s differences with Burke become more pronounced, as he moves in a more liberal and legalistic direction. Despite this, Oakeshott’s justification of the “salutary stalemate” between societas and universitas in the European political tradition seems to bring him closer to Burke’s identification of the “is” and the “ought.” Devigne concludes his essay by contrasting Oakeshott with the other seminal conservative thinker of the second half of the twentieth century, Leo Strauss, bringing out their very different assessments of modernity, Burke, and history.
Symposium on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure
- Preface to a Symposium on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure — WILLIAM N. BUTOS
- An Introduction to Expert Failure: Lessons in Socioeconomic Epistemics from a Deeply Embedded Method of Analysis — GIAMPAOLO GARZARELLI and LORENZO INFANTINO
- Expert Failure and The Intellectual Crisis of American Public Administration: How The “Fatal Conceit” Continues to Threaten Liberal Democracy — PETER J. BOETTKE
- Epistemics, Experts, and Adaptive Systems — WILLIAM N. BUTOS
- Approaching the Singularity Behind the Veil of Incomputability: On Algorithmic Governance, the Economist-as-Expert, and the Piecemeal Circumnavigation of the Administrative State — ABIGAIL DEVEREAUX
- Expertise, the Administrative State, and Corporate Governance: a Comment on Koppl — RICHARD N. LANGLOIS
- Ignorance and the Incentive Structure confronting Policymakers — SCOTT SCHEALL
- Massive Error — STEPHEN TURNER
- Arrogance and Humility in the Governance of Human Interaction: A Reflection on Roger Koppl’s Expert Failure — RICHARD E. WAGNER
- A Peircean Perspective on Koppl’s Expert Failure — JAMES R. WIBLE
- Response — ROGER KOPPL
The G&T Ceremony
Martha Argerich as a child
Martha Argerich’s intimate relationship with Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor began when she was 10 when she performed the concerto in its entirety at Buenos Aires’s Theatre Colón with Washington Castro conducting Orquestra Sinfonica de la Ciudat de Buenos Aires.
