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 .