We live in a time when being dumb is reward and being smart is counter-culture. If one makes a claim for harbouring a disinterested approach to truth, then one needs to explore ideas beyond one’s ideological reservation, most of which have long since become barren and infertile through infelicitous activity. It used to be that being liberal was punkishly…
Very roughly analogous to the corrosive effects that the internet has been to our out-of-touch and typically regressive gatekeepers, so too was VHS the corrodent to the Romanian communist state. Now, as then, these gatekeepers entertain the shallowest of insights into the dynamics of situated moral psychology, deluded by their lazy rationalistic disparaging of “low brow” culture, the elites of all…
Decency was his hallmark Today marks six years since my chum Rob Haskell’s death — his obit here. Rob was at the forefront of academic freedom/free speech 20 years ago. Not surprisingly, this kind, generous and open-minded academic was treated very shabbily by the lily–livered and bulling commissar regressives — they were out to get…
Here’s a nuanced and deep analysis on Brexit and extrapolations for a wider phenomenon. Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values. Since many academics are in the business of activism masquerading as inquiry, I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’d urge the more intellectually honest…
Causality questions aside, you’re still arguing that according to your data impulsive people who dislike rules are more conservative. Full write up here. (An aside: when the target article was first published, so many of my “sophisticate and rational” friends and academic colleagues predictably revealed their crude confirmation biases via their social media virtue-signaling). confirmation…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives the Platonic rationalist “elites” a mega bitch slap (Original source here). Supplemented by the recent lunacy as per below, I suspect that though philosophers (rightly so) got their knickers in a twist a couple of years ago when deGrasse Tyson slammed the value of philosophy, they’d be well on board with this…
Released 50 years ago. Frank would roll in his grave knowing that the Brain Police are their most powerful right now. In the ’80s they were primarily daft pearl-clutching Washington Wives (abetted by the so-called “Moral Majority”/ in the UK we had Mary Whitehouse). But thanks to Frank we had some push back because these pearl-clutchers weren’t the sharpest pencils in…
Is a group a bland puree unless it includes a “critical mass” of the targeted minorities? Peter Minowitz’ newly published and freely available paper in Perspectives on Political Science. . . . as if colorful skin guarantees colorful thinking and white skin precludes it . . . Identity politics and affirmative action may well have met a…
a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress Well put Damon! Here is one of the more insightful, philosophically literate and least hysterical or pompous analyses. On this topic I have written the following in a forthcoming paper. Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist…
Based Mom and Based Goddess let rip on the toxic cocktail of cultural infantilization, the new Stalinism (kangaroo courts), free-speech, identity politics, advocacy posing as academic inquiry, willful ignorance of the past, the ethics of teaching (intellectual dishonesty), utopianism, “cultural appropriation”, radical social constructivism, and on crapping on the “secret people” (gamergate) — totemic of those whom the…
manwithoutqualities 