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Smoke & Mirrors

If you like Islay single malts and/or smokey dark chocolate, you might like this brew, not to be confused with- but certainly a good accompaniment to- reading the very excellent Smoke and Mirrors by James Robert Brown, one of the earliest and one of the most smarting bitch-slaps to the social constructivist tripe (typically associated with gender studies,…

The Strange Death of Europe

The eminently sensible, sane, humane, informed, analytical, eloquent, cultured, honest and ballsy Douglas Murray has a very timely and important book about to hit the shelves. The mass self-delusion of the regressive left and their feckless fellow-travelers (you know, the Sarsourian-type zombies from middle-class families) is the most astonishing and perverse of herd instincts. While they (and their intersectional pseudo-theorists) fetishize…

Walker Percy Wednesday 128

A RECENT POLL ASKED people what they feared most. A majority of respondents agreed in ranking one fear above all others, above fear of sickness, accidents, crime, war, even death. It is the fear of speaking before a group, stage fright. Yet in the conventional objective scientific view, man is an organism among other organisms…

Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul

Long write-up in The New Yorker Dennett does not believe that we are “mere things.” He thinks that we have souls, but he is certain that those souls can be explained by science. Andy ClarkCognitive scienceDaniel DennettDavid ChalmersdualismGilbert RyleMaterialismneural correlatesNeurophilosophyneurosciencePhilosophy of mindquineReligion

The Embedded Epistemologist

I was startled to read, in the 6th edition of a well-known textbook, McCormick on Evidence, that the “reasonable doubt” formula “points to what we are really concerned with, the state of the jury’s mind,” whereas “preponderance of the evidence” and “clear and convincing evidence” “divert attention to the evidence.” This has things exactly backwards:…

Meaning and Chaos

Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson take another run at a discussion and the result is far clearer and more satisfying than the first effort (I happen to think that the first podcast was not wasted time at all). Having heard Harris and Weinstein and now Harris and Peterson, I think we would be in for a treat listening…

Hall and Oats Speak

First, revisiting Daryl Hall in Salon on the incoherence and idiocy of “cultural appropriation” (nothing more than a species of crude rationalistic fundamentalism, a classic marker of the authoritarian mindset, arrogant enough to think that the mercurial nature of a healthy culture should/could be controlled); and second, John Oats has a memoir about to appear. daryl hallhall and…