Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Imagine you are in the car heading straight for a cliff. Without a change of course, you and all of the other passengers are going to plunge over that cliff to certain death on the rocks below. Then someone comes along and promises to steer the car in a radically different direction. This disturbs a lot of the other passengers: they are used to the direction the car is going; they have gotten comfortable with its steady speed and with the lack of jolts and bumps they experience. They tell you: "That guy who wants to be the driver: he's dangerous! His plan is untested, and anyway he keeps changing it. For all we know, he really just wants the car for himself!" "All that maybe true, but what do you suggest we do instead?" "The other job applicant is better known. We have to go with her: it is the only responsible thing to do. She drives much more calmly, and stays right in the middle of the road." "You mean the road heading straight off of that clif

"Many of those who are called conservatives today seem to be no more immune than others to ideological pipe dreams and wishful thinking. Trusting in free markets and deregulation to set society right is a particularly striking example." -- Claes Ryn, "How Desperate Should We Be?", Humanitas , Vol. XXVIII

I am sketching out here the outline for a paper on which I am starting work: F. A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott were two of the most prominent 20th century critics of what they referred to as "rationalism." The two thinkers knew each other personally, and read each other's work. So it would be easy to assume that, when each attacked rationalism, each was aiming his arrows at the same enemy. But was this really the case? In this paper, I will argue that, in fact, Hayek and Oakeshott understood the problem of rationalist thought quite differently. Furthermore, I contend, this difference is not a mere "brute fact," but can be understood as based in their differing philosophical outlooks. Hayek's philosophy, while never articulated at great length, appears to have been a variety of "emergent phenomena" materialism. In his view, reason was not an aspect of human activities in general, but only emerged in the process of abstracting from "senso

Pelicans' guard Bryce Dejean-Jones was shot to death after he broke into an apartment and then kicked in the bedroom door of the man who lives there. The explanation? "Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated reports that Dejean-Jones mistakenly entered the wrong apartment while trying to visit the mother of his child." OK, just a tragic mistake then? Well, except for the fact that Dejean-Jones tries to "visit" the mother of his child by breaking into her apartment and kicking down her bedroom door .

Scott Sumner makes a very good point here: "This leads to another cautionary observation about the 'lessons of history.' Either of the two policy counterfactuals [of tighter or looser monetary policy] for 1928-1929 might have led to a smaller 'Great Depression,' but in retrospect the undervaluation of gold made some sort of downturn almost inevitable. Had either alternative strategy been followed, and a modest depression resulted, that alternative would have almost certainly received historical censure." -- The Midas Paradox , p. 397 Sumner offers as an analogy the allied policy towards Germany after World War I. He argues, plausibly I think, that Allied policy was just about perfectly bad. If Allied peace terms had been more forgiving, Germany would have recovered better, and the appeal of the Nazis would have been blunted. But if the policy had been even harsher than it was, then, Nazis or no Nazis, Germany would have been to weak to remilitarize the Rh

When I was four or five years old, I had re-occurring dreams that I was a young bird living in a burrow in the ground. Perhaps some Freudian out there can tell me what those dreams meant; I have no real idea, only a vague feeling about them. (They were very disturbing, and I always was afraid that someone walking along the surface was about to crush my burrow.) But if I had had circa-2016 "progressive" parents and had reported this dream to them, I can imagine they would have found a doctor for me who would amputate my arms and build me wings, and my parents would have demanded that I have full access to the aviary at the zoo. Growing up is tough, and we certainly should be kind to children as they experience confusion about their identity. But being kind has nothing to do with encouraging children to think that their fantasies are reality, and performing irreversible medical procedures on children far too young to be making such life-altering choices.

This is the follow up to my post on pornography : it is important to understand Aquinas's definition of pornography to understand what follows. To recap briefly, for Aquinas and Joyce, proper art (art that is filling its own unique function) produces an aesthetic arrest in the audience. Improper art (art being used for ends that are not properly its own) produces movement towards or away from, either by lecturing us (didactic art -- think Ayn Rand or some recent novel instructing us on how to think about race relations), or by producing in us a feeling of longing or disgust. The latter is pornographic art. Once you have this philosophical definition of pornography in mind, rather than just thinking about explicit sex scenes, it is amazing how much of this one will find in, say, an ordinary TV show. I've watched a few episodes of CSI: Miami recently, and besides the "soft porn" of long shots lingering on women's cleavage*, bikini bottoms, and so on, there are

In preparation for a forthcoming post, I give you James Joyce explaining Thomas Aquinas's theory of art: —The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. —You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire? —I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy

When I was young, we would sometimes play "Cowboys and Indians." I don't recall anyone minding getting the Indian side: in fact, it was cooler to do so. The Indians were not some despised vermin to be stamped out: that would not of been a game worth playing. They were a worthy and difficult opponent, brave and cunning. (That, by the way, is why sports teams have been named after them: no one calls a team the "Duluth Worthless Scum" or the "Albuquerque Cowards." And recognizing this is probably why 90% of American Indians do not find the name "Washington Redskins" offensive.) Wasn't this attitude a lot more respectful towards Native Americans than the view that they were helpless victims, and today they will only manage to get by if ceaselessly worried over by white liberals?

The claim is common; it appears, for instance, here . I contend that this claim is itself irrational, and loss aversion makes perfect sense. Whatever I have now, I am getting by with it, and a loss of some of it might endanger my lifestyle, my family, or even my life. Whatever I don't have now, I am getting by without it. And while getting it might seem attractive, I really don't know: perhaps it would ruin me! (Think of the curse of the lottery winner .)

Our foreign policy over the last couple of decades has wrecked the lives of millions and millions of people in the Middle East. It has reduced country after country to anarchy in the bad sense: starvation, lawlessness, civil war. And surprise : all of this chaos enriches American corporations that sell weapons and "security" to foreign governments. There are many important issues dividing the American electorate: SSM, gun control, abortion law, etc., etc. I don't wish to downplay the significance of the debates on these topics, except to note that every one of them, on a global scale, pales in significance to the moral necessity that we stop destroying the lives of millions and millions of people in the Middle East. And it is clear to me that Hillary Clinton will eagerly continue to pursue the policies that create this destruction: indeed, she was the prime architect of some of the past destruction. Donald Trump is not my ideal candidate for president: I would l

An interesting answer one can glean from Scott Sumner's The Midas Paradox is.... America' oldest enemy, France! "France was easily the largest gold hoarder during the Great Depression. Her monetary gold stock rose almost continually from $711 million in late 1926 to over $3.2 billion at the end of June 1932 (nearly 30% of the world total)" (p. 138).

If I wish to pretend that is true, it is a little nutty, but so what? But if I start to insist that I can command my neighbors to take up arms, and gain a legal right to sue them if they fail to play along, then the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

It is a crucial matter in thinking about the social sciences to realize that not every -- perhaps even not most -- functional explanations in the social sciences depend on any actor consciously willing that the end product of the function in question be realized. For instance, Marx's class-based analysis of social life does not depend on the "capitalists" deliberately conspiring together to further the interests of "capital": it is enough that the capitalists meet at the same parties, vacation in the same resorts, send their kids to the same elite schools, etc.: through this persistent social interaction, they will arrive at the same views on issues affecting the balance of power between capital and labor, and so on, all the while sincerely believing that they are analyzing each individual question from a completely objective point of view. And so it is with functional explanations of support for the current military-industrial complex: there are many, ma

Contemplate this post . Here is a key passage from Shannon's original paper: The method of attack on these problems may be described briefly as follows: any circuit is represented by a set of equations, the terms of the equations corresponding to the various relays and switches in the circuit. A calculus is developed for manipulating these equations by simple mathematical processes, most of which are similar to ordinary algebraic algorisms. This calculus is shown to be exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic. What I want to highlight here is that Shannon was talking about existing circuitry. Was this existing circuitry really doing symbolic logic all along? Or did Shannon just realize that we could interpret that circuitry as performing logical operations? And there is no reason the "circuits" in question need be electrical: they can be plumbing , and what flows through them can be water. (Interesting

Mathematics is the study of relationships where the purely prepositional character of the relationship in question is abstracted and isolated from any other qualities any actual objects in such a relationship might have. For example, an element is in a set or not in it: we are looking at pure "in-ness" itself, and ignoring the various ways one thing can be in another: the Thunder are in the NBA conference finals in a different way than Connecticut is in the Union, and both are different from how the dog is in the doghouse. But in set theory we don't concern ourselves with how the Thunder played to get in the finals, or whether Connecticut has a right to leave the Union, or if the dog enjoys his house. We abstract away from all that, and just consider "in" or "out"... "greater than" or "less than," "isotopic to" or "not isotopic to," "countable" or "not countable," and so on. As Gauss

I am trying to make a summary table for teaching macroeconomics. This is simplified, of course, but useful still, I hope: Classical Economics Keynesian Economics Say’s Law Always holds. Only holds when leakages do not exceed injections. Unemployment High unemployment is a structural problem. High unemployment can come from insufficient aggregate demand. Equilibrium Markets equilibrate quickly. Markets may equilibrate slowly. In response to a supply or demand change… A price change will produce a stable equilibrium. The other curve may shift, producing a cascade of changes. In response to a recession… Let the market work things out. The government should engage in stimulus spending. Expectations Market actors' expectations rapidly converge towards a stable equilibrium. One group of market actors' expectations may affect another g

A nice balanced perspective : the state is necessary, but not primary.

Isn't there something curious about the thought experiment described here : "But he did devise a simple thought experiment that told us something profound about gravity. Take two weights, one light, one heavy. If heavier objects fall faster than light ones, as Aristotle said, then the lighter weight will lag behind. That implies that when the two are tied together, they will fall more slowly than the heavy weight alone. But together, they weigh more than the heavy alone, so they should fall faster. Wait, so is it faster or slower?" This supposedly "demonstrates" that heavier objects can't really fall faster than light ones, because it creates a paradox: tied together, the conglomerate must fall both faster and slower than the heavy object alone. My problem is this: in a fluid, light objects, especially those with relatively  large surface areas, really do fall faster than heavy ones, especially if the latter have relatively small surface areas. So if

A culture of “atomic individualism” produces individuals addicted to atomic individualism! The funny thing is that all of the “individuals” it produces have the exact same  possessive attitude towards their "individuality" ("It's MY body and I can do whatever I want with it!" etc.), almost as if they were not really individuals at all, but mass-produced parts designed to fit into the machinery of state capitalism. But don't think about that too much: just keep telling yourself, "But I really am a unique individual!" That is working fine for the hundreds of millions of others just like you!

My local in Brooklyn is about 99.9% Democrat in its voting. In fact, I was mentioning that my PhD is in politics, and my great friend who bartends there said, "But you never talk about politics!" Well, yes: politics really ought to be a minor part of our lives. The major part ought to be loving our family, taking care of our neighbors, doing our jobs, enjoying our hobbies and vocations... we ought to resort to politics only when those things break down. (That does not mean we can "do away" with politics: there will always be points where those things do break down, and then we need a healthy concept of the political to get us through those break downs.) In any case, tonight I heard a regular there say, "You know, when you look at the actual policies Trump is proposing, they seem pretty reasonable." Trump's marketing shift to sell himself to mainstream voters has barely begun, and already, someone at this Democratic stronghold is willing to publ

R. V. Young makes the point I was making the other day: For thousands of years, until the late 1800s, our ancestors were completely oblivious to the existence of a fundamentally distinct class of human beings. Indeed, during the long period of Greco-Roman antiquity and more than a millennium and a half of Christian civilization, man did not even have a name for this class.  Or so asserts an almost universal assumption fixed in the language almost everyone uses: that “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” are two permanently and innately different kinds of human being, and that “sexual orientation” constitutes a difference comparable to the difference between male and female. Widespread acceptance of “homosexuality” and associated terms thus biases discussion of the subject before an argument is even formulated.  What might be called the philological evidence calls this notion into question. If it were true, someone would long ago have given this class a name. That no one did until v

I've been thinking about what "statistics" means. I came up with a tentative definition on my own, and then a little googling led me to think I'm not entirely wrong. My intuition: We take a manifold. We select a point on the manifold as the origin. We "populate" that point with an infinite set, say, the reals between 0 and 1. Then we choose a function that propagates the set members out from the origin. At whatever stage of propagation we choose, we determine what proportion of our original points are in what regions of the manifold. That is our "probability distribution." This was just an intuition, and of course it lacks formal rigor. But as soon as I "saw" this, I realized, "Oh! so of course we could have, say, a normal distribution mapped not just on a plane, but also on a torus, or a sphere, or a Klein bottle." I previously had never heard of such distributions, but after "seeing" this concept, I loo

When I took "Liam" as my confirmation name in 1970, it was a very rare name in the US, one which I knew of only because of my inordinate curiosity about things Irish. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was the second most popular boys name in the US last year!

The Christian Science Monitor highlights a study of racial attitudes that supposedly shows that intelligent people are more racist than one might think. How is this? After first it might seem it is not so: "Wodtke... found that the group that scored higher on the [intelligence] test were less likely to hold racist beliefs than their lower-performing counterparts. For example, among those who did well on the verbal test, 29 percent said blacks were lazy and 13 percent said they were unintelligent. By contrast, among those who performed poorly on the intelligence test, 46 percent described blacks as lazy and 23 described them as unintelligent. "Lower scoring test-takers were also more likely to disapprove of intermarriage, and not want a black family living next door." But there's a catch: "But when it came to government policy – affirmative action, or busing, for example – smarter respondents were no different than their less-intelligent peers...

As he makes an ever greater fool of himself .

I had seen one Scott Adams analysis of Trump, but alerted by Andy, I now realize he is doing ongoing analysis. Here is a good point: "Another Clinton attack ad features Republican foes of Trump saying bad things about him. The unintentional effect is to lump Clinton with the GOP establishment. It makes them look like they are on the same side against Trump. That plays perfectly into his outsider narrative, and it is another huge failure of persuasion."

Nate Silver has been getting some flack for his declaration that Donald Trump had a 2% chance of winning the GOP nomination. One thing to note in Silver's defense: "2% chance" is not "no chance": 2% chance events happen! But the real problem is elsewhere: Silver thinks we can assign "objective" probabilities to one-off events. But to assign a probability to any potential happening in an "objective" way, we have to abstract from the particular circumstances of time and place absolutely everything that cannot be reduced to a number by which we can "objectively" place that potential happening into a class with other, past happenings taken to be "identical" to the potential happening in all relevant features except those differing numbers. (For instance, we will have to turn each presidential candidate into a point in a vector space, where the number of "factors" we choose to include in our analysis are the dimen

Burglars are often injured because they have to creep into houses in the dark, and sometimes they are even shot by homeowners. Let's start a campaign for "safe, legal burglary"!

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the supreme being for man. It ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being." -- Marx, quoted in Bertell Ollman, Alienation , p. 48 The above, of course, is pretty much the exact position Satan is depicted as adopting in Paradise Lost : he cannot stand the fact that he himself is not God, and decides it is "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n." Even from a materialist perspective, Marx's position makes little sense: shouldn't we instead recognize that we are "just another animal," "a small bit of a vast universe," and not a "supreme being"? If materialism were true, making a god of man is surely an absurd proposition! Marx is, indeed, a genius, full of keen insights into social situations and historical developments. And this explains his lasting

I found the CD with Bart Ehrman's lecture on the virgin birth. The reason he says that "almost surely" it did not happen? "There's only one way to conceive a child and that's through sexual intercourse." There you have it Ken B. Miracles don't happen, because it would be miraculous if they did!

"The sun is the object of the plant -- an indispensable object to it confirming its life -- just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power." -- Engels, quoted in Bartell Ollman, Alienation , p. 28 It turns out that when Marx and Engels objected to Hegel's "idealism," what they were actually objecting to was his notion that broad, philosophical ideas direct the course of history. They want to "place the blame" on more mundane "materialist" factors. However, their basic conception of those factors is still idealist, in that the factors are composed of internal relations (as we see in the quote above). And Marx even goes so far as to say that one of the "material" factors determining an outcome can be... a theory!

"[When Marx characterizes the capitalist production process] as the negation of the negation… Marx does not dream of attempting to prove by this that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he then also characterizes it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all." -- Engels, quoted in Bertell Ollman, Alienation , p. 60

You guys are a bunch of kooks! I missed this at the time it was posted, but Lord gleefully parodies a "progressive" take on the Christian-baker case: the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, when they politely declined to bake a cake for a lesbian couple, were "forcing" the couple to "obey" the bakers' religion. But when the lesbian couple used the power of government to impose a $135,000 fine on the bakers, rather than walk down the street to another baker who would have happily taken their business... well, no one was being forced to do anything, no sir! Good one, Lord!

They are, without meaning to, ripping the mask off of our one-party state, run by the military-industrial-legal-financial complex (henceforth MILF). The MILFs are quite happy to have "two" parties fighting fiercely over abortion, and who gets to go in which bathroom, and legalized pot... because they don't care about these issues one little bit. So long as both candidates are on their side on MILF issues... they win every election. This realization was starkly thrust upon me in 2004, when 50% of the American people wanted us out of Iraq... and we got two candidates committed to keeping us in Iraq! How could this be? In a two-party system, with an electorate divided 50-50 on a crucial issue, how could we not get one candidate taking each side? Well, because there aren't two parties. There are the two masks of the MILF party, "fighting" furiously over non-MILF issues, to keep the voters distracted, while in almost complete agreement over MILF issu

Remember how on the X-Files Scully never seemed to learn from the huge string of "impossible" events that had come before the current episode that perhaps she should stop calling these things "impossible"? I find it amusing how many of the people who today are saying it is "impossible" that Trump will beat Clinton were once saying it was impossible he would make it past the first debate, then that it was impossible that he would win a primary, then that it was impossible that he would rise above 30% support, then that it was impossible that he would win once the field narrowed, then that it was impossible for him to clinch the nomination before the convention...

Oprah Winfrey. Or the closest he can get to Oprah. Think about it: every personal fear voters have about Trump will be assuaged by having her (or someone like her) on the ticket: Too volatile? He'll have Oprah there to calm and counsel him. Racist? How could he be, if Oprah is running with him? Anti-woman? See previous answer. Remember, Trump has approached the whole campaign like a reality TV show. He's not going to ask, "Who would be most qualified if I die?" (not that conventional candidates do, but they pretend to) but "Who can I be paired with that will give me the biggest boost in ratings?"

At Chobani .

Explained here . (By the way, I think the main factual contention of the essay, that "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality" are not natural categories, but inventions of the 19th-century, is pretty well established, and often by "queer theorists," and not just traditionalists.)

Ross Douthat has an interesting essay out on the reactionary mind . Worth reading, but I have an objection: the term "reactionary" is mostly made up Marxist nonsense, dependent upon the artificial scheme Marx imposed upon history. Communism was the inevitable future of society, and the only people who would resist that bright dawn would be morally deficient "reactionaries." The term might have a genuine use for someone who really does just want to "turn the clock back," and recreate some earlier time. But such people are few, and to them we can only quote the great philosopher Steve Miller: "Time keeps on slipping, slipping, into the future." But otherwise the use of "reactionary" is like that of "fascist": "Yuck, I don't like you!" Most people, in fact, think we have taken wrong turns here and there, and would like to reverse those courses. Those on the left often want to return to the stronger labor u