Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The globalist elites have a problem they must continually solve: there are a lot more of us then there are of them, and they have to keep us from noticing that. A tried-and-true strategy for doing this is divide and conquer: if they can convince half of the poor and lower middle-class population that their real problem is the other half of the poor and lower middle-class population, and vice a versa, they are good to go. And thus we get the twin memes of "white privilege" and "welfare parasites." The function they serve is to help convince poor black families in the South Bronx that their real problem is poor hillbilly families in Kentucky, and vice a versa. To the extent these two memes take hold, they block the possibility of a true populist revolt against the rule of the current elite.* Of course, many, many people sincerely buy into the ideological superstructures being erected to support elite rule. The fact that they materially benefit from their subsidiary po...

Is my bedtime reading tonight. First off, let me say that as a writer, Grisham is light years ahead of James Patterson. No cocks flopping around like cod in a basket for Mr. Grisham! That being said, cranking out material at the velocity that people like Patterson and Grisham do has its cost in either case. (Grisham finishes a novel every six months.) So we find in Grisham a sentence like: "He was much too careful about the security system to get careless." Well, yes, since "being careful" means "not being careless," that sentence says nothing more then "He was very careful" or "He was not careless." But the one I found more puzzling is that several times, in reference to mountaintop removal mining, Grisham has a character say "It is legal because it is not illegal." Here, it is not so much the fact that we apparently have a tautology like above that bothers me. It is, rather, that Grisham appears to think that this should not...

Open borders fantasists always want to turn any discussion of immigration into a question of race, and of course, label their opponents "racists." This is today's trump card: once you play it, your opponent is just supposed to whimper away with his tail between his legs. For example, one person in my Facebook feed said that Brexit was all about the dislike of "brown people." He apparently is not aware that after 2004, when England was being flooded with very pale Poles, Latvians, and Lithuanians, many people in England saw that as problematic, even though these immigrants were whiter than the average Englishman. That is because the real issue is culture, not race. If the families of England were to adopt a million Pakistani newborns this year, in 20 years, they would be a million brown-skinned Englishmen. But if 1 million Pakistani adults were to come to England this year, and settle in nearly 100% Pakistani enclaves, then in 20 years, we will see little pocket...

The idea, if we should even grace it with such a lofty name, is that we get a complete mapping of all the neural connections in someone's brain. Then we "upload" that mapping into a computer: Voilà! A human mind in a computer. This is pretty much akin to the idea that if we get a very, very detailed mapping of the wiring and electrical appliances in my house, we can then take that blueprint and read by the light it gives off, and perhaps dry our clothes with it.

The basic idea here is Hilary Putnam's, not mine: Sumner holds, with Richard Rorty (although Putnam claims that Rorty actually abandoned this view!), that objectivity is simply a matter of consensus: to say that "X is objectively true" is equivalent to saying "X is held to be true by me and my community." There are a number of problems with this view, and Putnam exposes one in a clever way: What about Rorty's idea that truth is just a matter of consensus? Is that idea true? Per Rorty, the way to test this is to see if it is the consensus in the relevant community of experts. But, in fact, the overwhelming majority of philosophers reject this view. So if we take Rortian relativism seriously, we must convict it of proving its own falsehood.

Hilary Putnam has an excellent chapter called "Materialism and Relativism" in his book Renewing Philosophy . In that chapter, he analyzes how what we identify as "the" cause of some of it is dependent on what we are interested in at the time. He gives the example of explaining a man's heart attack. We could say his heart attack was caused by: 1) his shoveling snow 2) his genetics 3) his high blood pressure 4) his failure to follow his doctor's orders And more. And all of these explanations can be correct, and none of them contradict the others. If we want better screening for potential heart attack victims, we may want to focus on number two. If our interest is in cautioning people to take it easy after the upcoming blizzard, we might focus on number one. Interest is in getting people to pay attention to their doctor, we might focus on number four. And so explaining a terrorist attack: easy access to guns, radical Islamist ideology, the hatred in a man's...

My review of Rodney Stark's book is available here .

Eneg: Some people have the silly idea that we all might be characters in a novel, and what we think of as the "real world" is actually just the novelist's setting. Of course this is nonsense, since novels are not a place, and so nothing whatsoever can live "in" them. Salis: But what about a sufficiently rich novel? One with lots and lots of details about rivers and hills and cities and forests? Eneg: Huh? What difference does the amount of detail make? Where do you think people living in the novel are ? Salis: In the novel! Eneg: What do you mean? They live inside the paper and ink? Salis: No, they live in the story! Eneg: But the story is not a place. The only physical parts of the novel are the paper and ink, and they are a place one can live, if one is a bookworm. But the story only arises in our imagination, as we look at that paper and ink. Salis: So, you are just like the people who in 1700 said a novel but never capture the inner flow of our mental life: ...

"Artificial intelligence as we know it doesn't really try to simulate intelligence at all; simulating intelligence is only its notional activity, while its real activity is just writing clever programs for a variety of tasks." -- Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy

It is very easy to free ride on the existence of markets themselves. I do it all the time when I go shopping. My wife will ask me, "How much were the strawberries?" "I have no idea." "What? You didn't even check?" "No: I trusted the free market." In other words, when shopping, I often simply assume that prices are "right." If there were serious mispricing, the people who cut out 25 cent coupons and save them for weeks, and then take ten of them out of their purse at the checkout line, those people will have already spotted it. Thanks to them, I can simply pick up whatever items I want off the shelf and assume that I am paying roughly the "fair" price.

If a car full of partying people is heading towards a cliff, there are two possibilities: 1) The majority of the people inside recognize the danger before it is too late. In that case, the car won't go over the cliff! They will change course. 2) The majority of people inside think there is no problem, until it is too late. These are the only cars that actually go over cliffs. When I note that "our car," i.e., Western Civilization, is heading over a cliff, I get lots of responses telling me, "Everything is just fine!" That's how I know the car is going to continue on until it plunges off of the cliff.

Black janitor accused of crime. IP, Verywhitetown, Connecticut, June 22, 2016 Thaddeus Gotbucks was found dead in the clubhouse of the Verywhitetown Country Club Tuesday evening just after he had finished a round of golf. Jeremiah Poboy, the club's janitor, who had been heard arguing with Gotbucks earlier in the day, has been charged with the murder. The town said that they intend to appoint a jury of twelve of Gotbucks' fellow club members, all of whom happen to be white. When Poboy complained that this jury would be biased, a spokesperson for the town called Poboy "a racist who thinks whites aren't competent to serve on juries." _______________________________ Wow, that's a pretty bad distortion of Poboy's actual complaint, isn't it? It would be as though I complained about a particular judge who I thought was biased against me because of my plan to invade Uzbekistan. I say, "I guess as an Uzbek, he might not like me." And in r...

It used to be that when people contemplated "big ideas," they asked things like "What is justice?" or "How should people live together in a political community?" But today, apparently " big ideas " means contemplating complete nonsense, like "Are we living in a simulation?" A simulation is an abstraction. Of course, there is something really going on: it is electricity moving around some circuits. But think about the proposal from that perspective: maybe we are really just living inside some electricity moving around circuits. How could someone "live inside" an electric current? The rest of the simulation is nothing more than our own interpretation of what that electric current represents. There is no thunderstorm in a weather simulation; we choose to interpret the current's movements as representing a thunderstorm. If we wish, we could instead choose to interpret it as a piece of music , or directions for firin...

The Economist offers us an especially ill-defended version -- the author doesn't really find the liberal view of man needs any defense at all, and so simply assumes it as incontrovertible. This serves to make the assumptions stand out. The title itself implies that there exist a sharp line, assumed throughout liberalisms, that there are two sharply distinct spheres: the personal choices, over which no one at all has any say other than the chooser, and public choices, which can be regulated. But has been pointed out before, this line is arbitrary, and can be drawn pretty much wherever the drawer wishes, since all choices have both personal and public aspects. What happens in practice is that for some question where a liberal theorist wants the activity to be legal, he highlights the private aspects, but if he wants it to be illegal, he highlights the public aspects. (Buying a gun is, of course, "a personal choice," but I will lay odds that this writer, looking at th...

Has anyone else noticed that people are loosing track of how to spell "losing"? I see "loosing" more and more often these days. Yesterday, I discovered it in a novel I'm reading: "He was loosing his integrity." What happened? There may be some general decline in educational standards, but why is this particular word loosing its correct spelling so fast? And just how would these people spell it if they were, say, "loosing the animals from their cages"?

Unless you didn't get your views from anywhere at all, they are unreliable . I have a question: who knows if Cowen's parents were/are religious skeptics? If they are, does that make him feel his own views are less reliable? I'd bet not!

"'This is absolutely rigged for money or ratings, I’m not sure which,' Ayesha Curry, Stephen's wife, wrote on her Twitter account . 'I won’t be silent.'" Ayesha later deleted the tweet. Yes, it's probably a bad idea to claim that a game that pays your husband many millions of dollars a year is "absolutely rigged"! This rumor flies around among the fans of whichever playoff team loses a couple of games after going up: "The NBA just wants to extend the series!" But we can tell that either it isn't true, or the NBA is really terrible at rigging: in the past 30 years, only five series have gone seven games, just barely more than the number (four) of 4-0 sweeps. Given we are seeing the two best teams in the league meet, we might expect the finals to be pretty even, and so it looks to me like the NBA's rigging, if occurring, is getting it no more seven-game series than we would expect from pure chance! Why, they might as we...

Geoffrey Pullman has done a nice series of posts on what he calls "nerdview," which he defines as: "a simple problem that afflicts us all: people with any kind of technical knowledge of a domain tend to get hopelessly (and unwittingly) stuck in a frame of reference that relates to their view of the issue, and their trade's technical parlance, not that of the ordinary humans with whom they so signally fail to engage." This post in the series looks at the "nerdview" phrase "mixed cardboard." Reading it, I realized that this case is similar to something I hear on the train: "Please use all doors to exit." The instruction is written from the point of view of the "human-train interaction designer," who, from his lofty perch, sees departures from the train working best when the passengers evenly distribute themselves between every possible exit door. But from the point of view of the individual passenger, the instructi...

The old atheists, like Nietzsche, knew what happened when a civilization abandons its spiritual foundation : "A people that still believes in itself retains its own god. In him it reveres the conditions which let it prevail, its virtues: it projects its pleasure in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. Whoever is rich wants to give of his riches; a proud people needs a god: it wants to sacrifice. Under such conditions, religion is a form of thankfulness. Being thankful for himself, man needs a god."  ( The Antichrist , section 16, Kaufmann translation) Consequently, a culture that doubts its religion comes to doubt itself and its own legitimacy. And a culture that repudiates that religion is, in effect, committing a kind of cultural suicide. The moral and social order to which the religion gave rise cannot survive its disappearance. The trouble, in Nietzsche’s view, is that too few see what this entails: "Much less may one...

"The media establishment formed a protective wall around the existing order. Individuals or movements that raised issues potentially dangerous to the powers-that-be were sooner or later co-opted, discredited, or destroyed out right. Before serious challengers could achieve real political momentum, they were brought low by scandal, innuendo, or fear mongering. Only persons who accepted the reigning moral, political, economic, and cultural order could achieve political influence." -- Claes Ryn, A Desperate Man Yes. The only way an individual might actually be able to survive the media onslaught that descends on every outsider candidate would be if he: 1) Were very wealthy, so he didn't have to worry about the donor class rejecting him. 2) Didn't care in the least about scandal. His reputation already was scandalous! 3) Was an egomaniac so that the constant attempts at smearing him simply slid off him. 4) Was a master manipulator of the media, so that he could...

From the formless void Order aries Thatcher and Reagan approve

Some people like the idea of "persecuted scientists" so much that they take any scientists who was arrested or punished for anything and call that person "persecuted." Like here : "Turing was famously chemically-castrated after admitting to homosexual acts in the 1950s. Turing isn’t the only scientist to have been persecuted for his personal or professional beliefs or lifestyle." First of all, Turing scientific work, as far as I know, had nothing whatsoever to do with his punishment. Furthermore, he plead guilty to what were, at the time, criminal acts in Britain. We might thing it is wrong that these acts were criminal, but if we think marijuana criminalization is wrong, does that mean pot smokers are being persecuted ? This is, of course, a matter of definition, but that's not how I would use the word. Some of the other parts of the article are pretty bad too: "[Rhazes] was responsible for introducing western teachings, rational thou...

Old William of Ockham He knew how to sock 'em And keep the excess at bay He'd take out the razor He kept in his blazer And slice the extra away

I'm staying over somewhere and, looking for something to read, I found a novel by James Patterson and Andrew Gross. I've never read Patterson, but I know he is kind of a book factory, and I assume the authorship actually means that Gross wrote it with Patterson's supervision. Well, I figured I would give it a try. On page 56, there is a scene where a man is being seduced, and the authors write: "His 54-year-old cock flopped around in his pants like a cod in a catch basket." OK, this book was written by two men, and I don't think I am gender stereotyping if I guess that both of them have penises. For all of you out there who also have penises, and even for those of you who may not have one but have ever actually witnessed one in action, have any of you ever seen one behave anything remotely like a cod flopping around in a catch basket?

I will be teaching probability and statistics in the autumn. I've begun reviewing my textbook ( Introduction to Probability , Freund), and in the introduction I find this claim: "everything relating to chance was looked upon as divine intent ... Thus, it was considered impious, or even sacrilegious, to try to analyze the 'mechanics' of the supernatural through mathematics; indeed, some of the mathematicians connected with the early study of probability theory were persecuted for this very reason." The author does not cite a single source to back his claim that studying probability was considered "impious." He does not mention a single actual person who was ever persecuted by anyone for studying probability theory. I studied the history of science at the graduate level for a year at King's College in London, and our lecturer assured us that on any scientific topic that did not seem to directly impact the interpretation of scripture, the Catholic ...

"Working on an important programming project. I've been putting this off for weeks, but today I've finally gotten going." "That's great. How did you do it?" "I have an even more important book review due. So now the programming project can progress." "But... how are you going to get the book review done?" "Easy: I just need to take on an even more important project, so that finishing the review becomes procrastination. The I'll have it done in a jiffy."

is having a long-extinct species named after you really an honor?

1) Bomb Muslim countries, kill residents, wreck their governments, create chaos and refugees. 2) Allow large numbers of immigrants from the countries we are wrecking into the US. 3) Force libertine American culture on them. 4) Watch terrorist acts erupt. 5) Repeat step one. "This couldn't be anyone's plan !" you say. "It's insane." Yes, it's insane... unless you have gotten wealthy off of the sales of weapons and security services, can afford pretty good security yourself, and will get even wealthier off of more such sales the more times we go around the loop!

"To my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of the Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded..." -- Warren Hollister , quoted in Bearing False Witness , p. 86

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) seems to think that Copernicus had to introduce “loops” (epicycles) into the planets' circular orbits to get the orbital period correct: “it would not do for the earth to circle the sun in only three hundred days” (151). This is silly: one can always change the diameter or speed of a circular orbit in one's model and thus get the orbital period correct. The real problem with positing circular orbits instead of the actual elliptical ones has to do with the relationship of different parts of a planet's orbit, as can be seen with a visual representation: In the portions of a planet's orbit where the ellipse if flatter than a circle, the planet will appear to move too fast for it to have a circular orbit. And in the portions of its elliptical orbit where the ellipse is more curved than a circle, the planet will appear to move too slowly . So the actual problem with Copernicus's system (and Ptolemy's) is not that circular orbi...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) notes that while slavery was hardly questioned in antiquity, the Catholic Church gradually eliminated it in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. When Aquinas condemned slavery as "contrary to natural law," this soon became the official Church position. Nevertheless, some Church officials, even some popes, continued to own slaves. But some popes engaged in fornication and had children out of wedlock, despite official Church opposition to sex outside of marriage. And the Spanish and Portuguese imperialists often continued to enslave people, despite Church opposition. For instance, Spain colonized the Canary Islands in the early 1400s, and started enslaving the islanders.  This prompted Pope Eugene IV to declare that "these people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without exaction or reception of any money" (quoted on 171). In the 1500s, Pope Paul II asserted that "the same Indians and all other p...

CSI: Miami: A guy is found dead, and his car has some strange scarring on the paint job. The forensics team determines it is from acetone. Ah! His ex-girlfriend works at a nail salon. The drama unfolds: she saw him out at a nightclub with another woman, so she went to her car... and fetched the gallon or so of acetone she apparently always keeps in the boot... because, you know, she works at a salon !... and dumps it on the hood of his car. This is quite realistic, in my experience. I work at a college, and therefore I always drive around with hundreds of syllabi in the back seat of my car. And if I spot an ex fooling around, I dump all of them on her car, hoping I can bore her to death by making her read them.

A story: This Hatian guy hangs out at my local. (By "Hatian guy" I mean, "his ancestors are from Haiti," not "he's not really American." That's the way we talk in the outer boroughs, OK?) I thought he had introduced himself to me as "Sony." But another friend kept calling him "Tony." So I asked, "Hey, I thought you said your name was 'Sony.' But I keep hearing Wille call you 'Tony.' What is your name?" "Yeah, it's Sony... and you know why? My dad was an asshole : he named me after his stereo. I think he liked that stereo more than me!"

When Howard Dean's candidacy was sabotaged by the spread of the "Dean is crazy" meme, I began to recognize that although America ostensibly has two political parties, the goal of our elites is to make sure that each party runs a presidential candidate acceptable to them. Sure, the two parties are not identical, and there is plenty of room for disagreement so long as that disagreement is not on issues important to our elite class: 1) globalism and the gradual destruction of nation-states (so that trans-national corporations gain power); 2) continual low-level warfare around the world (so military contractors make more and more money); and 3) continued macroeconomic turbulence (so top investment banks become richer and richer). When a candidate who is not "on board" on these issues seems to be a threat, there are certain standard ways to deal with him or her. They involve spreading the memes that: 1) that candidate is a racist; 2) that candidate is cr...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) documents the fact that the notion that there were massive "forced conversions" to Christianity in Late Antiquity is false. His own work ( The Rise of Christianity and The Triumph of Christianity ) has shown that the main factors prompting conversions were social and doctrinal: "socially, Christianity generated an intense congregational life" and "doctrinally, in contrast to paganism''s belief in limited, unreliable, and often immoral Gods, Christianity presented an image of God as moral, concerned, dependable, and omnipotent" (56). He demonstrates that the Christian emperors continued to employ large numbers of pagans as consuls and prefects. He quotes the Code of Justinian, from as late as the sixth century, declaring: "We especially command those persons who are truly Christians, or who are said to be so, that they should not abuse the authority of religion and dare to lay violent hands on Jews and pagans, ...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) writes of Copernicus: "To make his system work, Copernicus had to postulate that there were loops in the orbits of the heavenly bodies... However, these loops lacked any observational support; had they existed, a heavenly body should have been observed looping." (151) What are we to make of this? Copernicus introduced epicycles into his system (Stark's "loops") precisely to get his system to fit with the observational data ! The "observational support" was that, with the loops, Copernicus could predict where planets would be reasonably well, but without them he could not. When Stark writes "a heavenly body should have been observed looping," doesn't he realize that, for Copernicus, that is exactly what we are observing ? Of course, today, thanks to Kepler, we have a simpler system for explaining these apparent loops. Nevertheless, Copernicus introduced epicycles because they were the only way he ...

My paper " Was Berkeley a Subjective Idealist? " documents some of the many claims that he was one, and also some of the many times the claim has been refuted. I hope to write a book exploring this topic in more depth one day. (I actually have a contract to write it, but I don't know if I can manage the time.) Thony here documents a similar history of the notion that Johannes Kepler murdered Tycho Brahe, and notes this is far from the only "zombie error" like this in the history of science. It seems that once errors like this begin to circulate, it is almost impossible to put them to rest once and for all. Any ideas on how these "zombies" might be put to their final rest?

Just a story: I finished playing with my mates at a reggae club in Bridgeport, CT, at about 1:30 in the morning. The place we were playing is on a street that is kind of busy at 6 PM, but very deserted at 1:30 AM. I packed up some of my gear and walked out of the club to put it in my car. There was only one person anywhere to be seen: an Hispanic guy, standing in front of the club, looking a little "off." He hadn't been inside for the show, and there was nothing else left open in the area at that hour, so I have no idea why he was there. No cars were passing by, the club's patrons had gone home, and the rest of the band was still inside packing up. In his hands was a canvas bag maybe three feet long but only a few inches in width.  He held it up as I got close to him, and said, "Hey, do you want to see my machete?" I stopped walking and looked at him for a few seconds, my head tilted and my lips pursed to express my state of serious contemplation. ...

Universities seem to spend a lot of time teaching MLA, APA, and Chicago reference styles, even at the undergraduate level. What is this all about? 1) Most undergraduate students are not going on to academic careers, and will never need to bother with this stuff again once they graduate. 2) Even if they are going on to academic careers, this is far from the most important thing they will need to know! I have published about thirty papers in academic journals over fourteen years. In all that time, I have first submitted every single one in "my" format: Maurer, Armand, ed. The Philosophy of William of Ockham: In the Light of Its Principles . Toronto Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1999. I've probably submitted those 30 papers to about 60 journals. (I've received very few rejections, mostly because I target a journal I think likely to accept the paper, rather than one likely to reject it: I can't stand spending years shepherding a paper...

My list isn't complete, but let me describe what I like. The best: The Sopranos The Wire Very good: Luther Il Commissario Montalbano Good: Longmire Inspector Morse Poirot Miss Marple Nebbie e Delitti Colombo Watchable: Lie to Me White Collar Don Matteo Unwatchable but I watch them sometimes anyway: CSI: Miami Bluebloods Criminal Minds Just Plain Unwatchable: NCIS Murder She Wrote Any suggestions for what I've missed that I would like?

I say, "France really should have paid more attention to Hitler's military buildup during the 1930s, and responded more energetically." I am told, "Ooh, you are blaming the victim of Hitler's aggression!" No: the French leaders, in failing to adequately defend their nation against German aggression, committed a sin of omission . German leaders, in attacking France, committed a sin of commission . Someone who commits a sin of omission fails to adequately attend to the good. Someone who commits a sin of commission willfully embraces evil. The latter is far more culpable than the former. Admitting that there are sins of omission in no way shifts the focus of culpability from the aggressor to the victim!

As Claes Ryn has demonstrated, moral sentimentality increasingly has displaced moral realism in Western culture. We have always had moral education, and it has always taught people not to do bad things. But moral realism recognizes that evil is real, and that, whatever they are taught , some people embrace evil anyway, and so will do bad, indeed very, very bad, things. Furthermore, recognizing this, it is sensible to take steps to guard against such evil people. Moral sentimentality, on the other hand, believes that evil can somehow be wished away if we all just adopt the right sentiments . Murder must exist only because we have somehow promoted a "murder culture." And anyone who advises unarmed people not to wander around in dark alleys in dangerous neighborhoods late at night must be "blaming the victim" of murder for their own death! We have been teaching people not to murder since at least the code of Hammurabi, and probably even way before that. Hitler, wh...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) has some interesting quotes on faith and reason: "For, as Quintus Tertullian instructed in the second century: 'Reason is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason -- nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason'" (138). Or, from Clement of Alexandria: "Do not think we say these things [Christian doctrines] are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason." (138) The idea that faith is the opposite of reason is a fairly recent idea, and would have stunned most Christians from the time of Christ through the Middle Ages. It is based on a (willful?) misunderstanding of what was meant by "faith." So, for instance, when  Bertrand Russell writes , ...

In Bearing False Witness , Stark credits William of Ockham with recognizing "that space was a frictionless vacuum." I had never heard this claim before, so I was prompted to investigate. This book seems to claim the exact opposite: a vacuum would be "a mathematical body of three dimensions that bodies can occupy for a time and then leave for other bodies to occupy. In [Ockham's] view, as in Aristotle's, there is no empty space of this sort" (446). Well, I need my copy of Atomism and Its Critics . Once I get that, I'm sure I'll have this sorted. But if anyone has any insight on this point, let me know.

That doesn't mean you should leave your car unlocked on a dark street with the keys in the ignition.

Starks's Bearing False Witness is somewhat tendentious when it comes to the " lost gospels ." These gospels are, too a great extent, " Gnostic " in character. The trait that characterizes gnosticism, in general, is that it is neither works nor faith that bring salvation, but knowledge . More specifically, it is usually secret knowledge, available only to spiritual adepts, that saves. And even more specifically, that knowledge is often held to be the knowledge that the physical world is a prison, trapping the adept in his or her body, and blocking the adept from realizing the soul's true nature, as a resident of a better, divine realm. Gnostic texts often described an elaborate metaphysics of this imprisonment, involving multiple levels of divine beings. In particular, one divine being, the demiurge , had fallen from the Pleroma , essentially gone mad, and created a prison -- the physical world -- in which he could entrap other spiritual beings and garner...

I am now reviewing Rodney Stark's Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History . (Stark, by the way, is not a Catholic.) So we'll be addressing the Middle Ages often in the next week or two (the book is short). First, let us take up Jews and the Catholic Church. Stark stresses something I have seen historians specializing in the Middle Ages point out: while Jews sometimes were attacked or killed by Christians between 500 and 1400, the Church hierarchy was always their defenders. For instance, during the First Crusade, some crusaders decided that, that before they went all the way to the Middle East to fight "God's enemies" they should take care of some of them (i.e. Jews) who were living next door in Europe. And so Emich of Leisingen set out to kill Jews in the Rhineland. Their first stop was Speyer, but: The bishop of Speyer took the local Jews under his protection, and Emich's forces could only lay their hands on a dozen Jews ...

Any living society is based on a shared way of life, a " public orthodoxy ": once it abandons that and is "open to whatever," it is disintegrating, and will soon cease to exist.

Of course not. That's what cats are for:

1) He's an egomaniac! Yup. Probably only an egomaniac could survive the smear gauntlet the establishment will present to any non-establishment candidate. But yes, he is an egomaniac. But while he is an egomaniac of a dangerous sort, he is not one of a catastrophic sort. It is egomaniacs who have tied their self-worth to an ideology that we really need to worry about: see Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Trump seems blessedly free of any ideology. 2) He'll say anything to win! Yup. In his conflict with the Trump U. judge, Trump is looking for any angle that can discredit his "opponent." Trump is obsessed with "winning." If he loses the Trump U. lawsuit, he wants a handy explanation for why: "The Mexican-American judge was against me because I want to build a wall!" That is probably BS. Trump is the paradigmatic bullshitter . He is not such much a liar as he is someone unconcerned with the truth: he says whatever he thinks he needs to...

This will be coming out in The Journal of the History of Economic Thought, but probably not for another year or so. In the meantime, you get it first: ___________________________________________ Sumner, Scott B. The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression . The Independent Institute, 2015. xviii, 507 pp. Hardcover, $37.95. The Midas Paradox is the result of Scott Sumner’s many years of contemplating the causes of the Great Depression. Sumner adopts a novel “gold market approach” in this work, holding that the demand side shocks largely responsible for the worldwide economic downturn were increases in state and private actors’ desire to hoard gold. The “paradox” of the title arises from the logical fact that, with a relatively fixed amount of gold available, it is impossible for all market participants to increase their gold holdings simultaneously. When they try to do so, the result is instead a decrease in e...

My question did not get as many responses as I had hoped, but let us take on that will illustrate my point quite nicely: "I think he will do quite poorly with Mexican Americans, due to his rapists remark, his remarks about the Trump University judge, and his support for a deportation." I have seen tons of similar claims by anti-Trump folks. So let's look at claims 1 and 2 below: 1) Now, I do not think for a second that this commenter is prejudiced against Mexican-Americans. But his claim is that, in general , Mexican-Americans will be be anti-Trump, given Trump's past statements concerning Mexicans. 2) What did Trump say about the Trump University judge? His claim is that this particular Mexican-American judge will be anti-Trump, given Trump's past statements concerning Mexicans. 1) and 2) are essentially the same claim, except that Trump's claim is less of a generalization . (He only made the claim about a single person!) The moral: it is absolu...

On teaching intermediate macro .

I'm finishing up my review of Scott Sumner's The Midas Paradox , and I see he uses the term "neoliberalism" to describe the intellectual movement represented by Friedman and Hayek, and embraced (at least rhetorically) by Thatcher and Reagan. Because it was a new intellectual current, hence "neo," and it was a variety of liberalism, hence "liberalism." This shouldn't be too controversial, but I've seen a fair number of libertarians going nuts over the term. Their main complaint seems to be, "Well, people use it as a term of disapprobation." Yes, they do. Opponents of intellectual movement X will often use 'X' as a negative word. Think of how, say, libertarians use "socialist" or "statist." Or how almost everyone uses fascist . Do we have to stop calling Mussolini a fascist because the term  is often used disapprovingly? I note that Sumner describes himself as a neoliberal. And when he uses t...

As Scott Adams notes , the new "official" rhetoric, comparing Trump to Hitler -- have you noticed this popping up a lot lately? -- justifies assassinating him if he is elected. Of course it would be OK to assassinate the new Hitler! A smart ruling class knows it is risky to conspire to have a presidential candidate they don't like taken out. It is much safer to keep spreading the idea that he deserves assassination, and then just wait for some mentally unbalanced person to do their work for them.

Mises made this point long ago, and Stephen Gordon backs it up . The government can only decide from whom a tax is collected: it has no power to decide upon whom the actual burden of the tax falls. That is why (given we are going to have taxation at all -- I know you anarchists object!) it is best to have one simple, easily assessed, tax. I recommend taxing land: you can hide your income or fudge your expenses, you can't hide or fudge your land, so the IRS won't need a large enforcement apparatus, and people can stop trying to game the tax system. And everyone relies on land whether or not they own any, so the incidence of the tax won't fall only on landowners. The broken nature of our political system is illustrated by how little chance any such reform has of passing: such a reform would benefit pretty much everyone except tax attorneys and tax accountants, and yet they would still be able to block its passage.

A Facebook friend posted Trump's stumble on "my African-American." (It's clear from the context Trump was indicating "my African-American supporter, who I was just mentioning.") By way of contrast to "this racist clown," he mentioned past greats, like JFK and... FDR. FDR, who put 100,000 people in concentration camps because of their ethnicity? That FDR?

Traffic has picked up a bit here. Wondering why, I've been looking at my stats in Blogger. The top five posts for the most recent month are: What did the Indians know? Apr 23, 2013 Agrarian Authoritarians Apr 25, 2013 Avoid Weather Blasphemy! Apr 25, 2013 What is going on with this plant? Apr 23, 2013 That's an Ad Hominem Appeal to Authority! Apr 21, 2013 Isn't this traffic pattern a little weird? All five of the most viewed posts from the past month are from within four days of each other, from over three years ago! How could this happen? Each of the above posts has many hundreds of views in the past month! (I could get if two or three people shared some links how a few old posts could suddenly become a bit more active... but hundreds of hits?)

The problem with this "principle" is that by itself it is almost completely empty. Of all political persuasions, probably only fascists, who glorified violent conflict as ennobling, would not agree to it: communists, liberals, conservatives, and not just libertarians, all will sign on to the NAP. Because communists, you see, believe that grabbing property and calling it your own is aggression! And liberals think that not paying your fair share of taxes is aggression. And conservatives (in the old sense) think not deferring to established authority is aggression. Of course libertarians disagree with all of those positions. But the disagreement is not whether aggressing against the innocent is good! The disagreement is about what constitutes aggression . Libertarians are not the only political faction against aggression... they are the only political faction who defines aggression the way they do.

Given the wall proposal, and all that? Please as many people as can spare the time for even a one-word answer, make a comment. (I've opened up comments to non-registered users for this post alone.) UPDATE: You know, here in the US, "Irish" is often used as a shorthand for "Irish-American." When someone asks me, "Are you Irish?" I say, "Yes." I don't go all pedantic on the and say, "No, I am Irish-American." Similarly, "Mexican" can be used as a shorthand for "Mexican-American," without implying Mexican-Americans are not "real" Americans! But I've updated the title for those who can't fill in an elliptical expression.

Even private government , it turns out.

I ranked all the candidates standing a few months back on two criteria: 1) Less likely to start wars; and 2) Less in Wall Street's pocket. Bernie Sanders came out on top in both rankings. Donald Trump was second in both. Hillary Clinton was at the bottom, along with Marco Rubio, in both rankings. My ranking Trump ahead of Clinton on peace was confirmed by Bill Kristol trying to get a third-party candidate to throw the election to Clinton. Now my ranking Trump ahead of Clinton on independence from Wall Street has been confirmed as well: "Some of them also have very reasoned arguments for Trump. Hillary is a known evil. Trump is unknown. They'd rather bet on the unknown, since it will also send a big message to Team Dem that they can no longer abuse progressives. I personally know women in the demographic that is viewed as being solidly behind Hillary—older, professional women who live in major cities—who regard Trump as an acceptable cost of getting rid of ...

A long, long time ago, I ran into my friend Salis while I was prying a rock from the ground. "Boy, that lever sure is making an effort to get that rock out of the ground!" Salis remarked. "No, I don't think so... I think it's just a tool. I'm the one making the effort," I replied. A few centuries later, he came across me using a polyspastos to place large stones high atop a building. "Whoa, now there's no way you can deny that thing is making an effort to lift those stones!" he commented. "Well, certainly is is a better lifting machine, but why does that make any difference as to whether or not it is 'making an effort'?" "Ha, back in the day, you never thought machines could lift this much. And you know they'll be even better tomorrow." "Yes, but how is that..." "People like you are stuck in the past!" Finally, several centuries later, he came across me using a TA...

and so do Scott Adams and I: "Have you wondered why Republican Bill Kristol and others are looking for a third-party candidate who will guarantee a Clinton win over Trump? That’s probably because they know Clinton is in the pockets of the defense industry, and perhaps so are they. "The defense industry needs America to fight wars. History suggests Clinton will be a normal president who starts wars when the defense industry tells her to do so. Trump is less likely to play that game because he doesn’t need their money. That makes Trump the lower risk of starting a war. He has no profit motive."

As I've said elsewhere, Donald Trump is hardly my first choice for president of the United States. Here are the choices I listed there that I would have preferred to the choice I'm actually faced with: 1) Bring Dwight Eisenhower back to life and allow him to serve for a third term. 2) Don't even bother with resurrection: just put Dwight Eisenhower's corpse in the oval office. 3) Suspend the constitution, and allow Barack Obama to serve for a third term. 4) Maybe you friggin Democrats could've voted for Jim Webb when you had the chance, hey? 5) Maybe you friggin Republicans could've voted for Rand Paul when you had the chance, hey? 6) I've been available this whole time, and I'm waiting for the call to step in and stop the madness. So it's not like I'm a yuuuge Trump fan! But none of 1-6 is going to happen. Nor is Gary Johnson conceivably going to win the presidency. So our options are that either Clinton or Trump will be our next presid...

The brain was not a mechanical device in 1750, just because such devices were the cutting edge of technology then. And brains are not computers today , just because computers are the latest whiz-bang technology.

Why should we believe that unrestricted free speech results in the triumph of the... best? most truthful?... opinions? Science, thank goodness, never adopted Mill's speculative view: science ruthlessly winnows out bad papers, bad experiments, and bad theories, giving them the least exposure possible -- perhaps just an editor, perhaps an editor and two referees -- so that only better science gets published. (Of course, mistakes are made! But the system largely works.) So in morals, why should we expect free speech to produce good results? In fact, I claim that in morals have excellent reason to think it will produce degeneracy: after all, who doesn't like to be told that those vices they want to indulge in really are virtues? Does someone think "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" won out because it was the best advice, or because it panders to what we are inclined to do anyway?

Economizing is a mode of experiencing the world. It is the world seen in terms of scarce means that may be employed to achieve one's chosen ends . Every one of us economizes; the subject of economics is us , and to an extent we know the subject already! The scientific study of economics is the attempt to make our implicit knowledge of economizing explicit and conceptually precise . To achieve the above, economists have developed concepts such as scarcity , opportunity cost , exchange , demand , supply , profit and loss .

On a TV show, I saw an ill woman ask for help in killing herself: "I want to leave on my own terms." She views her life as a consumption good, to be discarded once it is not "providing utility."

encourages neurosis .

Slippery slopes, you say? They don't exist ! A year or so ago, I told a defender of legal abortion that his arguments, if accepted, imply the young babies could be killed by their parents for the exact same reason he argued fetuses could. "Outrageous!" I was told. "A smear tactic! No one would ever advocate that!" But, of course, he, being a decent human being, just didn't want to go there: his arguments certainly did imply that newborns can be killed, and the "researchers" who wrote the paper discussed in the link above at least have the honesty to admit that. But here is the really "humorous" bit from the article: "The journal’s editor, Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were 'fanatics opposed to the very values of...