Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Some US women soccer players are suing the U.S. Soccer Federation for wage discrimination, since the USSF pays men more: 'In early January you submitted a proposal for a new CBA that had "equal pay for equal work as its guiding principle."' OK, let's test out whether their work is equal to the men's: have the women's team play the men's... oh, say, 20 games. If the women win a single game, they get equal pay.

I swear, I could have written this piece in advance. To any non-Marxist, it will look like complete nonsense, and you will wonder who could be convinced by such arguments. But to wonder that is to miss this point : Zimmer is not trying to convince anyone. What he is doing is shoring up the defenses of a position to which he and his readers are already committed. Chait's piece might have shaken the resolve of a few comrades, so they must be given talking points they can repeat, to drown out the disturbing sound of the enemy beyond the gates. This quote is priceless: "For Marxists, on the other hand, freedom of expression is not a free-floating abstraction—it’s a key aspect of the radical democratic vision of building a society free of oppression and exploitation. Marxists value free speech because they are committed to building a society where all can decide matters of public concern democratically, as genuine equals. Thus, the Marxist has a consistent way of explaining w...

Part one here . So how is it that liberalism became so tied to the position that rational argumentation is the primary way by which people change their opinions and behavior, despite all of the evidence to the contrary? To answer that question, we must understand liberalism as an attempt to solve a very serious problem, that of religious civil war. With the Catholic Church's loss of authority over the moral life of Western Europe, the region had become subject to a series of terrible civil wars over just who would possess that authority. All sides still agreed that reason alone, without guidance from a properly oriented will, was liable to drift off into mere self-justification. But how should we decide whose will is properly oriented? Charisma? Faith alone? Faith plus good deeds? The performance of miracles? Apostolic succession? The battle over these questions devastated Western Europe. People were desperate to find a way to stop the fighting, and liberals suggested one: ...

Jonathan Chait notes that , in 2016, we are still arguing over whether Marxism works. Once we recognize that the commitment to Marxism is not a matter of the Marxist's reason, but of the Marxist's will, this becomes perfectly understandable, doesn't it? The Marxist's reason is not seeking the truth, but, at the direction of his will, is trying to defend Marxism . The rational arguments Chait deploys against Marxism, from the point of view of the Marxist, are not invitations to seek the truth, but attacks to prevent the achievement of an already determined goal, one that orients the Marxist's life and gives it meaning. Chait's "capitalist logic" is viewed as a weapon that reactionaries use to prevent the realization of the Marxist dream. When your enemy is raining down arrows on your army, you don't stop to analyze the arrows for how well constructed they are! You deflect them, and shoot back arrows of your own!

Introduction here . Let us imagine two Americans, both 50 years old, both college educated, in both with equally high IQs. Both of them are politically involved, and both like to read policy arguments and op-eds with regularity. Let's call them Al and Bill. Despite their similarities, there are also important differences between the two men: Al grew up in rural Texas, where his father wildcatted for oil, while his mother was a housewife. He attended a small Baptist college in his home state. After successfully starting and selling a propane delivery service, Al has bought his own cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Bill grew up on Manhattan's West side. His father was an editor for The New Yorker , and his mother worked in corporate donations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He attended a small liberal arts college in Vermont. After college, he lived in an intentional democratic community in the Vermont country side for a couple of years, before returning to New Yor...

It is a conceit of modern liberalism that the main way people change is that they are presented with "good arguments" against the way they have been living or the decision they have been making, and therefore change it. This is nonsense. (We we'll get to why liberalism chooses to embrace this nonsense later, perhaps tomorrow.) Plato described the importance of the periagoge , the turning around the psyche, in the pursuit of philosophy. One could not successfully pursue philosophy, per Plato, unless one had experienced this turning around of the psyche, away from the shadows and towards the light. Why would this be? I'm going to explain this in a Buddhist framework, because today, that is the one I feel like working with. For Buddhists, the person who has not undergoing the turning around is living in samsara , a world of illusions created by the ego. Their will is directed towards achieving the fleeting satisfactions available in the world of samsara. And reason is th...

Is that any analogy must differ from the situation to which it is analogous in some ways, or it would just be that situation. This problem is especially tricky when dealing with people in the grip of an ideology, because inevitably, what they will do is seize upon one of these differences, and play it up as if the fact there is some difference makes the analogy worthless. (Of course, if that were true, every analogy would be worthless, because, as I said, there is always some difference.) And so it went with my first round of Turing Test analogies . The point of the whole exercise was to show that black box tests don't tell you anything about where in a system the intelligence lies. If a computer passes the test, I would agree that is evidence that there is intelligence somewhere in the system! Furthermore, I can tell you just where that intelligence lies: it is with the programmers who built the program that enabled the machine to pass the test. Just like there is intelligence...