Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I have watched a bit of the new Father Brown series. It is pretty awful. "Based on" a character from GK Chesterton, a man who wrote Orthodoxy , this version is a woolly-minded progressive Who is constantly telling people not to be "judgemental" and suggesting that suicide is not really a sin. But the writers can't even get elementary facts correct when they are trying to show off their intellectual bona fides. In one episode a character quotes Confucius, and says, "you know: Buddhism." (The character is supposed to be an expert who studies these things seriously.) In another episode, a father is criticizing his teenage daughter's reading. He says, "at your age, I was reading Rousseau and Derrida." The show is supposed to be set in the early 1950s. The father himself looks to be 50-something. And Derrida was born in 1930. So the father must have been reading Derrida about 10 years before that writer was born. Which is fairly prescient of t...

is aggression. According to socialists . This makes the point that libertarians (reasonably) can't just claim aggression and shut down the discussion: other people have other definitions of aggression. (H/T to Samson Corwell for the link.) NOTE: I disagree with socialists here. But this shows that one's notion of aggression needs to be argued for , not simply asserted.

I typed my card number 3 times before I realized that the programmer who wrote the code for the site I was on actually demands spaces in the card number! This is incredibly lazy programming: any format should be OK that contains the correct numbers. It can be converted to any other format with one line of code. So then I typed the number with spaces... and was told "Maximum authorization attempts exceeded"! Why let me try again, when I was already at the limit?! There should be a message saying "That was your last attempt" after attempt three, not one that says "Ha ha! We let you try one more time, even though we knew we weren't going to accept it!" after attempt four.

I keep a bottle of Listerine in my desk drawer. (Hey, you do need something to kill the smell of the whiskey, don't you?) Sometimes I bring it to the bathroom with me, but tonight, it was late, I just took a mouthful at my desk, and then got up to walk to the bathroom to spit it out. In doing so, I realize that the bathroom is just about one full Listerine from my office, where "a Listerine" is the maximum distance you can walk with a mouthful of Listerine before it burned so badly that you just spit it out wherever you are. So you could tell someone, "Don't put that Listerine in your mouth here: the bathroom is at least three Listerines away! You're going to wind up spitting that stuff out right outside the CEO's office door."

Nor are tigers better than lions. But they are also not equal, not in the sense of equal as "the same." If you need a pack hunter to bring down very big game, you'd better hire the lions. Need a stealth hunter to sneak up on something alone? Get your self a tiger. Some people might misread my post on sports performance as implying that men are "better" than women. (In fact, progressive ideologues will want to misread it that way, so they can hurl accusations of "misogyny," because that is how they silence opposition.) Well, men are better... weight lifters, on average. And "better" serial killers, and genocidal maniacs, and better rapists. None of the last three are at all good things to be better at. Men and women are equally children of God. But very different children.

is like poking out one of your eyes, and then telling everyone that you see no evidence of depth in the world around you.

I was just told that because individuals in a nation have diverse interests, the "national interest" does not exist: I was trying to "homogenize" these different groups and treat them as if all of their interests were identical. As pointed out many times here before, methodological individualism is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense to boot: it leads smart people to say silly things like the above. Not every cell in my body needs to benefit from a course of action for that course of action to be in my self interest. My foot may need to be amputated for me to survive, but this is very bad for the cells in my foot. (They might have lived another month if left attached, but now they die immediately after the operation.) The interest of cancer cells in my body may run directly against the survival of my body. Not every player on a sports team needs to benefit from a course of action for that action to be in the team's interest. Benching Callahan might be the best thi...