George Will is always worth reading.

In 1954, Fredric Wertham brought science – very loosely defined – to the subject of juvenile crime. Formerly chief resident in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, he was politically progressive: When he opened a clinic in Harlem, he named it for Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law who translated portions of “Das Kapital” into French, thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals.

Without ever interviewing the convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg, Wertham testified on her behalf concerning what he called her “prison psychoses.” Since 1948, he had been campaigning against comic books, and his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which was praised by the progressive sociologist C. Wright Mills, became a bestseller by postulating a causal connection between comic books and the desensitization of young criminals: “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.”

Wertham was especially alarmed about the one-third of comic books that were horror comics, but his disapproval was capacious: Superman, who gave short shrift to due process in his crime-fighting, was a crypto-fascist. As for Batman and Robin, the “homoerotic tendencies” were patent.

Green Arrow was the guy I always worried about. At least Hawkman was demonstrably heterosexual, although who knows what they got up to in the Polaris system?

Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives’ agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise – an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism’s itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon – the Pecksniffian progressive.

I’m more concerned about the Pickwickian progressives, myself.

Read it.

Anyway, for no reason I can recollect, I didn’t change my watch on the captain’s say-so on the way back into Gatwick, so I am still living sporadically on British Summer Time. Obviously, I sit in front of a computer for much of the day, so every passing second goes by digitally in the right-hand corner of my screen. (Annoyingly, that’s my good eye as well.) But I don’t clockwatch if I’m working in the garden or walking the dog through the woods and fields. And there’s nothing to tell me that my watch is wrong when I do look at it because the time it tells is matched by the quantity of daylight. Ten past five by my watch: ooh, better get a move on, dog, or it’ll be pitch-black-dark in the bluebell wood by Cowhouse Farm. And by the time we’ve got in and hauled wellies off and switched off the kitchen lights, the black windows make an appropriate end-of-the-day darkening. Six o’clock or thereabouts, hmm, time to think about what to cook for dinner.

Preach it, sister. I don’t care which one they pick, they just need to PICK ONE AND KEEP IT.

Read it.

Thoughts worth pondering.

It is rarely noticed, for instance, how much the Preamble shares, in terms of both form and content, with earlier documents in American political history — documents, even (somewhat awkwardly for our anti-Preamblists), which go no further than doing what the Preamble does. That is to say: casting an eye across the centuries of political arrangement in North America, it is something of a puzzle to discover several documents of high importance, which appear to anticipate in framework and substance, the political work done later in the Preamble — at least, it is something of a puzzle if we accept the “throat-clearing” doctrine of the anti-Preamblists. It seems that at certain crucial moments, when our ancestors were bent over the problems of constituting political structures for themselves, they produced documents that accomplished little more than a good clearing of the throat.

Read it.

7. Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

9. Support bacteria. They’re the only culture most people have.

11. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

13. How many of you believe in psycho-kinesis? Raise my hand.

Read it.

For years, we’ve pointed out how rather insidious it is to refer to copyright and patents as “property,” as it leads to those who support traditional property rights to default to supporting these government-granted monopoly privileges as if they were property.

I’ve always been of opinion that ‘intellectual property’ was an intellectual handjob, like ‘social justice’. The essence of property if you’ve got it, nobody else has it, or can have it, and that just doesn’t apply to information.

Joe Wikert has some interesting thoughts.

First, Google is under attack from every angle.  Sure, they’ve felt competitive pressures before but whether it’s from Facebook, Bing or some startup in a garage, I get the impression it’s more intense now than ever before.  No wonder they’re giving all employees a 10% pay raise!  Seriously, search is getting more social every day and tomorrow’s recommendations from people you know via Facebook are infinitely more valuable than search results from yesterday’s algorithm.

That brings me to my second key takeaway from Web 2.0: The importance of a social strategy for every industry, inculding publishing.  I can already hear the skeptics saying, “reading is a time of solitude, not something that’s done socially.”  That’s mostly right, but it ignores at least two key areas where a social strategy can have a profound impact on the publishing industry: recommendations and remixes.

Slow news day.

This is the sort of ADD topic that NPR does best. Would that it restricted itself to this, its core competency.

Read it.

My own suspicion is that when people think that greed explains the financial crisis, they’re falling for a lazy explanation, akin to seeing a car blow up and “explaining” it by saying that there was oxygen present.

My friend agreed, but asked: “Are current laws against corruption really adequate, or are there useful opportunities for reform? Is our system of greed-channeling incentives rightly constructed? Doesn’t the behavior of the banks before, during and since the crisis demonstrate that in fact we are not channeling the right incentives?”

Those are just the right kinds of questions. Greed is a moral and spiritual problem, and its solutions are also moral and spiritual. But economically, what we want is to make sure that whether someone is acting out of greed, legitimate self-interest, or whatever, they don’t have incentives to destroy the financial system. If financial reforms require that no banker ever be greedy, however, we’re doomed.

Excellent thoughts.

Read it.

Well, it probably has fewer Muslim extremists, for one thing.

For another, the Good Guys are allowed to shoot back. That’s always a plus.

Lynn Viehl is always worth reading.

Chocolate. Not only can’t I eat it because it’s not part of my heart-healthy twigs-and-bark diet, but I then have to give it to someone else and watch them eat it. Which is when I start sobbing.

Gadget Docking Stations, Accessories, etc. I do not own an iPod, an iPad, an e-reader, a fancy mobile phone or any of that other junk. I have nothing that needs a recharging station, and I don’t want a netbook, a boogie board, a happy light, anything that displays up to ten thousand digital photographs, or that tells me on the hour what the weather is like in Sydney because I can’t figure out how to program it for my time zone.

Grow Your Own! Kits. I’m not especially enamoured of tomatoes that grow upside down, herbs in tiny pots, Chia pets or ugly brown bulbs that are supposed to produce gorgeous flowers but no matter how carefully I follow the directions only remain ugly brown bulbs.

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As they do so many negative aspects of life.

On the other hand, although I can think of many arguments in favor of throwing Congressmen in jail, I can’t think of any for making them go through airport security; I doubt that any of them are going to hijack the plane and fly it into the White House. (More’s the pity; I would vote for such a person.)

Erick Erickson smells blood in the water.

100% NARAL rated Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, the Republican who relied on Democrats to get into his job and then obstructed major conservative reforms in the Texas House of Representatives, is worried he might be voted off the island.

For the Speaker of the Texas House to be calling a blogger from Georgia to, I assume, convince me he is not the 100% NARAL rated and Planned Parenthood praised Democrat in Republican clothing that I know him to be, must mean we are having an impact and he is worried.

Read it.

Isn’t that just the most awesome title for a PhD dissertation ever? Seems a pity to waste it on a blog post.

Assume that you are a student applying to college.  Assume also that your high school has a declared policy limiting the number of schools to which you can apply.  It says it does so in order that you will “take applying seriously.”

You rather suspect that the school does so in order to be able to push particular students it favors for particular colleges, so that too many students do not create too much “noise” and competition for a place that the high school counselor thinks is most competitively filled by a particular student.  The high school’s incentive, in other words, is first to maximize its ability to get students into particular colleges as an institution seeing the students as a school cohort, not to simply support each student in his or her efforts on an individual basis.  One effect of this is to favor students who come from wealthy, powerful, or highly connected legacy families, since those students are most likely in the first place to be able to get into the most competitive schools.  But although you suspect this, it is rather difficult to prove without something like discovery in a lawsuit to find out exactly on whose behalf the counselors call certain colleges and discourage other students from applying at all.

But it’s a very interesting blog post….

Bryan Caplan bares his soul. Sort of.

At yesterday’s lunch, Tyler asked us to name the most important lesson we learned from the crisis of 2008.  My answer: The Fed is much worse than I thought.  I used to think we could trust an economist of Bernanke’s caliber to deliver tolerably good macro performance using inflation targeting – and avoid giving barbarous politicians the excuse to push bailouts and “fiscal stimulus.”  Instead he threw his own principles to the wind, joined the sky-is-falling chorus, and helped end the Great Moderation.

Check it out.

For sufficiently ballsy values of ‘up’.

FuturePundit draws back the curtain.

Consumers who are deeply religious are less likely to display an explicit preference for a particular brand, while more secular populations are more prone to define their self-worth through loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations.

David Friedman continues his discussion.

Generalizing the point, “sustainability” becomes an argument against whatever policies one disapproves of, in favor of whatever policies one approves of, and adds nothing beyond a rhetorical club with which partisans can beat on those who disagree with them.

If a particular policy makes potable water less available to future generations, with the result that many of them get drinking water in bottles rather than from the tap, but also makes future generations enough richer to more than pay the cost of that bottled water, is that policy consistent with sustainability?

If we define sustainability in terms of individual effects, treating as unsustainable anything which makes future generations less able to meet any one of their needs, there may be no policies at all that are sustainable, since each alternative alters the future in different ways and any alteration is likely to be bad in at least one respect. If, more plausibly, we define it in terms of net effects, then the demand for sustainability turns into the demand that we not follow policies that make future generations worse off than the present generation.

Read it.

The company’s goals are to build a headquarters that would be “nurturing and regenerative to the environment, provide a vibrant community and work/life balance for all,” Google real estate chief David Radcliffe wrote in a letter to city officials earlier this year.

The new ‘company town’, with fitness and day care facilities.

Jeff Jarvis has some primary source material on what young people are like today.

Jeff is a tenured professor at a Left Coast urban university, and so is Hip And Trendy; hence his evaluation of These Kids Today, above. I’m not so optimistic, but I suppose that’s just me. His attitudes toward the mainstream Voices of the Crust are fairly refreshing, however, and indicate that perhaps the Crust is loosening up a bit. We’ll see.

Read it.

“For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Computer Programming:

1. Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
2. The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.

Software Engineering:

1. Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
2. Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

Making sure we can continue our present activities into the indefinite future makes sense only if we believe that we will be doing those things into the indefinite future. Judged by what we have seen in the past and can guess about the future, that is very unlikely. We do not know what the world of forty or fifty years hence will be like, but it will not be the same as the present world, hence it is very unlikely that we will be doing the same things in the same way and requiring the same resources to do them with.

Read it.

I am finding the spate of recent articles about the huge and growing inequality of wealth in the US pretty tedious.  I suspect they are making some basic mistakes.  They usually take the form of saying the wealthiest X percent of the US population owns Y percent of the wealth, where Y is a much bigger number than X.  What I don’t get is, why should I care about the relationship of X and Y?

Envry and resentment–emotions that ‘progressives’ clutch close to their bosoms to make up for the fact that every time they try to improve conditions they only get worse.

We humans are an envious breed, but we mostly put our own wealth ahead of equality.  And if I could be a few thousand dollars a year better off, at the cost, so to speak, of some guy who lives in some gated paradise I don’t even drive by, becoming millions richer than he already is, well that is a sacrifice I am prepared to make.  As long as he is not around to rub my face in the fact that while he’s buying a new jet, I’m just buying a riding mower, I don’t care.

Ah,  but Democrats do, and they’re the ones passing the silly laws … and, unfortunately, writing the tax code.

Mencius Moldbug is always worth reading.

One of the many divine paradoxes in our political formula is the double valence of democracy. This word, its declensions, its synonyms, carry positive associations well up in the sacred range. Deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic. Yet at the same time, we have a related family of words, such as politics and its declensions, which seem to mean exactly the same thing – yet reek of heinous brimstone.

Of course, to the hardened UR reader, this is just one more sign that we are dealing with an essentially magical belief system. I will defy any Republican or Democrat to explain this paradox. He can only fall on his knees and worship it. In short, his political loyalty is instantly recognized as a religious affiliation.

The Other McCain is in a bad mood.

No one — not David Frum, not Conor Friedersdorf, not even Charles Johnson — has been the source of more genuine evil in American politics than David Brooks.

Don’t hold it in, Stacy; tell us how you really feel.

Read it.

Economics aspires to be a science. But in this it does not succeed. Neither does finance. This despite the fact that there is an annual, optimistically named Nobel Prize in “Economic Sciences.”

Financial crises keep happening—the list is long. Could they be avoided if economics and finance were science? To paraphrase financial observer James Grant: science is progressive, but finance is cyclical.

Read it.

Some mutations are so rare that they are known only by their chromosomal address: Samantha and Taygen are two of only six children with the diagnosis “16p11.2.”

It turns out that individuals (and their parents) who share these diagnoses are meeting and exchanging information and forming mini-alliances.

Read it.

This is a bit of a provocative post, and its impressions (I dare not promote them to the level of conclusions) should be taken with the amount of salt found in a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Essentially, I was doing some reading about medieval medicine and was struck by some of the similarities between it and computer engineering, which I attempt to describe below.

This guy has some interesting notions.

Read it.

I’m in.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Ever wonder what happened to your high school valedictorian? He or she might just have wound up in Washington, D.C. That metro area has the nation’s highest percentage of residents with college degrees.

Call it America’s brainiest place to live.

That must be why the national government is such a lean, mean, efficient machine.

I’ve lived around people with college degrees, and most of them can’t find their butt with both hands, a strip map, and a ground guide. Smartest? Not so much.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

What are the three errors, seen from the standpoint of measuring and taxing the real gains from buying and selling assets?

1. The failure to index capital gains, to measure them in real rather than in nominal terms. At a zero inflation rate this wouldn’t matter, but if inflation is substantial it taxes investors on imaginary profits, heavily discouraging any form of investment activity that will eventually show up on a schedule D.

2. The failure to retain the basis for capital gains when an asset is inherited. Under current law, when my imaginary investor dies in 1998 and his son inherits his $300 asset, the basis for the asset shifts up, so neither the real $100 gain nor the imaginary $100 gain ever pays capital gains tax.

3. The estate tax. Instead of paying capital gains tax on either the real or the imaginary capital gains, the son is taxed on the amount of the estate, some unknown fraction of which consists of actual capital gains. This is double taxation on part of the estate, single taxation on another part, and, given the exemptions in the estate tax law, zero taxation on a third part.

Freeberg is always worth reading.

It must be easier to be an atheist when you’re a vegetarian. Imagine how silly it would be, if we were surrounded by Tribbles who were made of marshmallow and chocolate with a yummy caramel center, to say “they’re just like that because they evolved that way.” To a meat-eater gnawing on chicken wings on a rainy Sunday morning, this is what atheists sound like. Cook the animal’s flesh over flame and it turns into a delicious snack, you’re saying that was not part of a design? It certainly isn’t survival-of-the-fittest to have yummy flesh on your bones that tastes good with a dry rub.

And you can’t say any fairer than that.

Read it.

Traditional school science is being dumbed down as teachers focus on social issues to make lessons more “relevant” to pupils’ lives, according to a leading headmistress.

And this is a problem in the U.S. as well. The problem lies, I suspect, in the fact that the teachers and administrators aren’t really convinced that science has any intrinsic value, and they are projecting those attitudes onto their students: After all, if I the teacher have doubts, then such doubts are natural, and so of course the students will have doubts as well.

Leaving aside the problems inherent in the increasingly common tendency for teachers and administrators to project their attitudes onto their students, I suggest that the problem is one of teachers and administrators losing their grasp on what education is all about. (I know: What a shocking notion.)

Most teachers would really rather be going on intellectual spelunking expeditions with college students than drilling pre-pubescent children, and so sort of reflexively try to intrude pedagogical methods suitable for semi-mature young people into what they’re doing with kiddies. This is always a mistake, and one that I am convinced is behind much of the deterioration of our ‘educational’ systems today.

Fortunately, we are increasingly gaining access to technology that can correct this problem. Prior to about age 12, most kids need facts and skills, not intellectual adventure (look at how schools a hundred years ago did things–and at what they, and their students, accomplished), and the best way to impart facts and skills is repetitive memorization, drilling, and testing–activities for which computers are ideal. When the time comes that automated processes are no longer appropriate, then the teachers can take over and play coach. Until we get such a system in place, our schools will continue to suck.

I am convinced that such a system will eventually arise, if for no other reason than that some desperate group of parents somewhere will try it because they’ve tried everything else, and it will be so successful that everyone else will either adopt it or lose the competition for educational excellence. But getting there will be painful, and a large part of that is the unfortunate fact that teachers as a profession are more ignorant about what they ought to be doing than almost every other field of endeavor.

Read it.

Is this a purely English obsession? Looking at much American television, the interest in class and status seems alive and well, despite a widespread belief that Americans don’t “do” class. There are the fascinated homages to opulent wealth and the people struggling to get into that world – 30 years ago, Dallas and Dynasty, these days the awesomely snobbish Gossip Girl and the milder Brothers and Sisters.

I think that the popularity of stories about social class stem from the fact that ‘celebrities’ we will have always with us, and there seems to be a natural homeopathic impulse in people to believe that acting the way rich & famous people act will somehow replicate the effects of being rich & famous, as if being rich & famous were some guarantee of quality. Needless to say, most ‘celebrities’ today fall down on the job (assuming that this is their job to do). As a result, people are attracted to stories set in environments where the equation of wealth and fame with Quality was not only embraced but positively cultivated–and that means looking into the past. (Or into fantasy–it’s no accident that most successful fantasies, like The Lord of the Rings, are set in societies that have nobles and peasants, with the nobles being central to the story.) The constant blathering in the press about sports figures being ‘role models’ merely underscores the accuracy of this analysis.

Exempli gratia: Lance Armstrong. Does he use drugs to win his races? Damn the man for being a negative role model. Does he win his ‘fight’ with cancer? Praise the man for being a positive role model. And all of this is completely divorced from the consideration of whether or not it makes any sense for someone in a normal life to take inspiration from a guy who rides a bicycle for a living. Think about that one for a minute.

Of course, I plan to buy the Downton Abbey series on DVD when it comes out, as it inevitably will. But at least I’ll understand what’s going on.

And, really, is The Sopranos all that different? Most of the trouble into which Mafia guys get is caused by their congenitally poor impulse control … and impulse control is the essence of ‘upper class’.

Which class people belong to, and to which they want to rise; these questions have been the raw stuff of drama for centuries, and are not going to disappear.

It’s as if we only notice the questions, however, when the presence of a butler and a duke alert us to them.

Read it.

Stick-limbed, balloon-bellied, ancient-eyed, the tiny, failing bodies of Biafra had become as heavy a presence on evening-news broadcasts as battlefield dispatches from Vietnam. The Americans who took to the streets to demand government action were often the same demonstrators who were protesting what their government was doing in Vietnam. Out of Vietnam and into Biafra—that was the message. Forsyth writes that the State Department was flooded with mail, as many as twenty-five thousand letters in one day. It got to where President Lyndon Johnson told his Undersecretary of State, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”

Although sadly decayed, the New Yorker still has some of the best writing in the English language.

Read it.

[At work] There are always small-scale, short-term reasons not to upset the apple cart, which is why the proprietors of the apple carts tell you that

(a) you’re playing the game of Monopoly

(b) on a given turn in the game of Monopoly, you roll the dice, move your token, buy and sell properties…and nothing else.

The truth is, though, that you’re not playing Monopoly, either in your job or in your life.

You’re playing D&D.

The great thing about D&D is that it tells you that you’re playing D&D, and that you’ve got infinite choices.

The bad thing about Monopoly is that it tells you that you’re playing Monopoly, and you’ve got finite choices…when, in fact, you’re still actually playing D&D.

Playing D&D is more work than playing Monopoly.

…and it’s a lot more fun.

Read it.

Hint: Don’t get on the fargin plane in the first place. That seems plain enough.

Read it.

When people tell me how mad they are at Wal-Mart for driving the mom-and-pop stores out of business, I ask them how Wal-Mart managed to do that. Did they go around torching their stores in the middle of the night, threatening the moms and the pops with baseball bats if they didn’t close their stores?

The consumers drove the mom and pops out of business. The consumers preferred Wal-Mart (and Target and K-Mart) to the mom-and-pops. To the extent Wal-Mart did the driving, it was by offering better products at better prices.

George Will is always worth reading.

Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012.

The Other McCain has some advice for Republican candidates.

Note to future Republican candidates: Do you own damned laundry and wash your own damned dishes. If you have ever employed a domestic servant named “Maria,” please don’t run for office as a Republican.

Hypotheticals are always tricky. When you’re second-guessing Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg, your own plans are always executed flawlessly. So it is in election post-mortems. It is a lot easier to imagine the victories of Sue Lowden in Nevada and Mike Castle in Delaware than it actually would have been to achieve those objectives. And, hey, if you can’t win your own party’s primary, what does that say about your prowess as a candidate?

If the only way the GOP can win a Senate majority is by electing useless turds like Mike Castle, we’ll just have to learn to live without a Senate majority.

If all the GOP offers voters is Liberalism Lite, or if Democrats are allowed to represent their agenda as “centrist” or “moderate” — so that opposition is pre-emptively defined as “extremism” – Republicans will lose their political raison d’etre.

So the strategical upshot is that conservatives should work to defeat Democrat Blue Dogs by exposing the phoniness of their “centrism” and never – ever – support a RINO in a primary.

Preach it, brother.

Arnold Kling points out an inconvenient truth.

The usual bleeding-heart cry is that it is absurd for a society to have people as rich as Bill Gates and still have poverty. But government is much, much, much richer than Bill Gates, and no bleeding heart complains about government’s indifference or misplaced priorities.

Read it.

A key shortcoming of statutes and regulations is that they impose one-size-fits-all rules on the behavior of individuals and businesses. Thus “helpful” statutes and regulations turn out to be unhelpful because they substitute rigid rules for the application of local knowledge and on-scene judgment to unique circumstances.

Jeff Jarvis sees the cracks beginning to form.

Old TV channels have become an unnecessary layer of curation. It’s the shows we want, not the networks. Networks are and always have been meaningless brands. They provided services: distribution, promotion, monetization. But as in the rest of media — as with news publishers, book publishers, radio stations, book stores — those functions can now be taken away from the middlemen and done more efficiently elsewhere.

The problem for Cablevision is that the unraveling has to start at home. It can’t unbundle Glee and the World Series from Fox until it unbundles its huge packages of utterly unwanted channels that cable companies force us to pay for though we never watch them. Physician, heal theyself.

Of course, this unbundling will be painful for cable companies. They gather huge revenue selling those bundles to trapped customers who have no choice but to pay for Fuse if they want Food. It won’t be an easy transition. But once choice arrives, we will demand our freedom from bundles.

And this unbundling will be quite painful — no, fatal — for many channels. No longer subsidized by being sold with Food, Fuse may die.

David Friedman understands the dialectic.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a very long time ago, it was common for undergraduate acquaintances to have, and talk about having, a shrink—a psychoanalyst. I never saw much evidence that psychoanalysis was improving their psyches to any significant degree, which led me to suspect that the real function of the shrink was to make the patient feel better, and perhaps more important, by paying attention to him or her. A friend who was getting his doctorate in psychology asked one of his professors what the evidence was that psychoanalysis worked, read the articles the professor suggested, and concluded that the evidence was that it didn’t; I take that as at least mild support for my interpretation of the role of the shrink.

Read it.

A reminder that you can find good stuff in Wikipedia if you look hard enough.

Read it.

Read it.

Whenever I speak with professors of philosophy, I am often surprised by how many of them embrace a Platonic rationalism in their thinking, particularly in moral philosophy. What I mean by that is that they assume that all of morality must rest on an intuition of a cosmic order of goodness or badness, right or wrong, so that moral thinking is like mathematical thinking in being concerned with grasping some eternal patterns of universal and eternal truth.

For many philosophers, this Platonic conception of morality is so strong that they cannot even comprehend how morality could be understood as rooted in the empirical reality of human nature, because for them moral philosophy is not an empirical study at all, but rather a purely normative study, and the standards of normativity transcend any empirical reality of human experience. One can see this in their method of thinking, which relies heavily on thought experiments based on purely imaginary scenarios beyond anything we could know by ordinary experience or historical study. John Rawls’ conception of the “original position” is one example of this.

As a political scientist who studies the history of political philosophy and the application of Darwinian science to political philosophy, I tend to think of moral and political order as arising from human history, and I use Darwinian science to illuminate that history as part of human evolutionary history. This sets me against those moral philosophers who assume that moral order–the normative order–must transcend human history as being “merely empirical.” I find this scorn for the empirical reality of human history and the striving for a transcendent world of utopian normativity to be strange.

So work your brain a little. I will do you no harm.

Megan McArdle lays it all out.

Wisdom. Attend.

Read it.

Next to zombies, Nazis are the easiest, most guilt-free targets you can ask for.

Read it.

The more emphasis you place on finding work you love, the more unhappy you become when you don’t love every minute of the work you have.

I hate passionate people. Passionate people are surrendering control over what they do to impulse and emotion. Such people are less than human.

I especially hate employers who want their subordinates to be ‘passionate’. That’s like employing convicted felons; sure, it might work out, but it has a lot of potential to end Very Badly.

I prefer being actionate myself. Actionate people get results; passionate people merely suffer entertainingly.