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 ...