Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Looking back at Looking Backward

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If you have never read Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 you really should. There are so many ways to savour its uniqueness that it just has to be sampled on one’s own. A man, for reasons explained in the book falls into deep sleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 into a socialist utopia, or at least as much of a utopia as could be imagined in 1887.

To get some sense of the book, there is this Looking backward at Edward Bellamy’s utopia written by the incomparable Martin Gardner in 2000.

Gardner is much too kind to the book. What I find so fascinating is that our reality today has so far transcended the best imaginable socialist universe that could be conjured in the nineteenth century. No one today would swap our reality for what had been seen as the near perfect world as it had once been conceived.

Murder incorporated health care division

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It’s not as if this HCQ stuff will harm you other than in very exceptional situations. It’s that if you are old and falling apart, the CV-1984 is likely to kill you. And it’s also not as if there are not plenty of doctors who actually believe HCQ will prevent you from dying and that it will even cure you. Here’s the short version: Hydroxychloroquine Lowers COVID-19 Death Rate, US Study Finds

And this is the very long version but at least give it a start. Hear him say, “we are letting patients perish unnecessarily.”

Andrews is the most vile premier this state has ever had. We have had incompetence before, also immense waste and hideous policy formation. But if he is really forbidding the use of HCQ on people who will otherwise die, this man is actually evil.

Ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice

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From Bari Weiss Knows What ID Scientists Already Knew.

New York Times opinion journalist Bari Weiss submitted her very public resignation today. It’s a must read, and it will remind you at once of the world scientists in the intelligent design community have long occupied.

“Forays into Wrongthink”

Some excerpts:

[A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else….

I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist….

New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action….

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong….

Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times…. [S]elf-censorship has become the norm.

… If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.

Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired….

All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril….

I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing.

Frauds, snares and delusions in the age of the rhetorical virus

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Just picked up a quite excellent book in our local second-hand bookshop. It is titled, Fallacy: the Counterfeit of Argument, and was written in 1959. By happenstance, this is part of the introduction:

The triumph of rhetoric is like the spread of a virus infection. When an epidemic spreads through an area, it is said to prevail there, and local measures may be taken. But to say that it prevails does not mean that everyone is infected. Some persons may escape infection; others are immune. It is not necessary to labour the analogy in order to show that it would be a good idea if the community could somehow develop a serum against some forms of persuasion.

Few can hope to become immune to all the tricks of persuasion since, like viruses, there are too many of them. People are daily exposed to appeals to blind faith, self interest, fear, prejudice, fancy. This book cannot discuss persuasion in all its variety and complexity, but it can attempt to describe and illustrate some of the most dangerous strains.

Logic is the defence against trickery. The kinds of argument with which logic deals are the reasonable ones. Mistakes are possible, even frequent, in applying the forms of logical argument, and these mistakes are regarded as fallacies, many having been noted as early as Aristotle. We shall wish to guard against them. But the most common fallacies today are of a very different sort. It is a small comfort to know that an argument is entirely logical but that its validity derives its conclusion from its premises, and that all the rules of the syllogism, or whatever, are observed to a nicety, if it turns out that the premises are frauds, snares, delusions. There are brilliant tricks for getting people to accept all sorts of false premises as true (some of these tricks have been spotted since the time of the ancient Greeks), and these tricks are so prevalent that even when people realise that something is being pulled on them, they tend to let it pass.

Which brings me to this: The COVID Coup by Angelo Codevilla. It is the best political discussion of the political dimension of Covid-1984 I have come across so far. It was also posted at Instapundit where the “best” comment reads, in full, “Fantastic article”. From the article’s intro:

What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.

Just read it long though it may be. If anything is needed more than reasoned discussion at this time, I cannot think what that is.

The Seven Deadly Sins and the evil of the modern left

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This chart put out by the Smithsonian in Washington disappeared too rapidly since it really does say what needs saying about the modern left. It is evil to its very core. Everything listed on that chart are seen as bad. White Culture is seen as bad. If you want to understand politics in the West today, you need to absorb what you are being explicitly told. These values, these beliefs are bad for you and bad for any society in which these occur.

What you see in this chart is the explicit rejection of the Seven Virtues and the adoption of the Seven Deadly Sins. Here they are in order as represented by the moral vultures seen everywhere on the left.

Envy is the resentful covetousness towards the traits or possessions of others.

Sloth is a habitual disinclination to exertion, a desire for something for nothing, the belief that the world owes them a living.

Greed is a rapacious desire and pursuit of material possessions but without first attempting to produce the valuable goods and services that could be exchanged for what they want.

Wrath is uncontrolled feelings of anger, rage, and even hatred. In its purest form, wrath presents with injury, violence, and hate.

Pride also known as hubris is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one’s own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of other people. It is considered the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins.

Lust is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire. However, lust can also mean unbridled desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things.

Gluttony is the overindulgence of anything to the point of waste.

Why is it legal for a state to order a lockdown?

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Can this be legal? Why is this incompetent fool, Daniel Andrews, allowed to shut down an entire state on his own say so?

Here’s the latest rumour: Australia Victoria is considering Stage 4 coronavirus restrictions.

Melburnians have been put back under Stage 3 restrictions, but what would Stage 4 look like?
Melburnians have been put back under Stage 3 restrictions, but what would Stage 4 look like? Source: AAP

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Mandatory mask-wearing, additional testing, and forcing businesses to close their doors are just some of the potential restrictions on the cards if Stage 4 were to be introduced.

Seriously, how insane is this?

But after a fifth day of new case numbers over 200 since the second outbreak began, authorities have flagged these rules could be tightened.

200 new cases in a state with 6.5 million people. That is approximately 200/6,500,000 which is 0.003% of the population of Victoria.

Dan Andrews is an hysterical fool. He is a blight on the population of Victoria. Virtually everything that has gone wrong since CV began has been Daniel Andrew’s own personal responsibility.

There is now even a Victorian version of the virus that has been detected in Sydney. It should be named after Daniel Andrews which is all the immortality he deserves as the most incompetent Premier Victoria has ever had.

How can such an order be challenged? If under the present constitution we can do nothing, then we must amend the constitution. Does no one any longer care about their personal freedoms? Is Labor now the party of tyranny?

You are almost certainly not going to die from the Corona Virus but you might yet be bankrupted.

LET’S ALSO NOT FORGET THIS: Conroy ‘s ‘red underpants’ comments.

Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has defended a comment he made about Australian telecommunications bosses wearing red underpants on their heads.

Senator Conroy made the remarks in a presentation he gave in New York earlier this week.

A scratchy recording has emerged of Senator Conroy talking about telecommunications and the cost of broadband in Australia during the presentation.

“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said.

“I have unfettered legal power.”

Senator Conroy made the comments comparing the Government’s position in the telecommunications industry in Australia to that in the United States.

“Not many regulators have quite that much power,” he said.

“But we don’t just have the power, we believe we have the responsibility to do something.”

So the Feds can tell us to wear whatever they like. Can the States? And can we do anything about it?

Cancel Karl

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On further reflection, there may be some upsides to this cancel culture business, specially within economics. How bout this fellow Karl Marx. There’s a dead white European male if ever there was one. Why isn’t he now being cancelled? How should economists, and social theorists generally, deal with this: Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of the race factor. Here’s the abstract:

This article argues that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of history contained racist components. In Marx and Engels’s understanding, racial disparities emerged under the influence of shared natural and social conditions hardening into heredity and of the mixing of blood. They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities, nations and social classes, while endowing them with innate superior and inferior character traits. They regarded race as part of humanity’s natural conditions, upon which the production system rested. ‘Races’ endowed with superior qualities would boost economic development and productivity, while the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. Marxist race thinking reflected common Lamarckian and Romantic-Nationalist assumptions of the era.

If we are going to colour-code who we allow to speak or whose words we listen to, which I do not for a second believe we should, why not turn to Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell says concept of systemic racism ‘has no meaning,’ warns US could reach ‘point of no return’.

“You hear this phrase, ‘systemic racism’ [or] ‘systemic oppression’,” host Mark Levin told Sowell. “You hear it on our college campuses. You hear it from very wealthy and fabulously famous sports stars. What does that mean? And whatever it means, is it true?”

“It really has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses,” answered Sowell, who added that the currency of the phrase reminds him of the “propaganda tactics” of Nazi Germany.

The true racists are the ones who believe skin colour should have any bearing on political issues.