Written
Nobody should be surprised by news that Roomba vacuums caught images of users in (umm) compromising positions and then the Venezuelan workers who review the images for product development posted them in an online forum. This is a major reason that, even as an “early adopter” type of guy, I’m reluctant to move onto the…
Perhaps my favorite moment in all of music ever comes in the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The music is a bouncy march, and in the libretto, the singers are proclaiming an intent to take paradise by storm, like “a victor.” The mood changes suddenly, however, and I’ve always thought it a deliberate statement…
This incident occurred the week before Christmas, but I still can’t believe it’s real: A charity volunteer has been arrested and charged on four counts after she told the police she “might” be praying silently, when questioned as to why she was standing on a public street near an abortion facility. Police approached Isabel Vaughan-Spruce…
Like him or hate him, this thread of tweets from Jordan Peterson should be a wakeup call as to the direction of Western Civilization: BREAKING: the Ontario College of Psychologists @CPOntario has demanded that I submit myself to mandatory social-media communication retraining with their experts for, among other crimes, retweeting @PierrePoilievre and criticizing @JustinTrudeau and…
Like it or not, we’re all tangled up with each other, so in some degree, the choices we make and the value we create or destroy affect everybody. How we structure society is a decision about how we utilize “our” resources. That doesn’t mean maximizing efficiency or economic advancement or anything else must be the…
A skeptical reader can find many things worthy of comment in David McRaney’s How Minds Change even beyond the author’s central objective of training people how to manipulate others psychologically to implement radical policies. Not wanting to write a book in response, I’ll probably just bring them up as they become relevant. One side point…
Whether Western Civilization is fundamentally build on a principle of cooperation is a fundamental philosophical dividing line in our current politics.
Grappling with matters of identity and the complicated experience of being human isn’t, of itself, the problem. The follow-on transgressions, such as a willful action to deceive and undermine others’ beliefs based on false pretenses, are: “Recently, the Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance was made aware of instances where it had been discovered…
For that lesson alone, readers should give it a few minutes. But this paragraph near the end captures something far more intimately relevant to our times than even Munger may have intended: Once you are duped into believing destruction is productive, almost everything that a rational public policy would label as a cost becomes, by…
It’s “climate change,” of course; that’s the easy go-to answer for anything having to do with the natural environment. Even when there’s a more proximate explanation, the global bogeyman has to be tacked on, as the Boston Globe’s Dharna Noor does in this case: The culprit behind all those dead trees: Drought, which hit New England…