Well said, and a strong analogy: “Socialism is no more successful in ethics than in economics, and for similar reasons: it sacrifices the future to the present by discouraging innovation and inverts the source of positive marginal change by moving it from the individual to society. Ethical wealth, like economic wealth, will be a function […]
Socialism as *moral* failure (Den Uyl and Rasmussen quotation) Read More »
Hermann Hesse: “The German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music.” (Steppenwolf, p. 152 Modern Library ed.) Scholarly bleg question: How much did Hesse read and absorb from Schopenhauer?
Hesse on the German intellectual Read More »
Sixth Circuit Court decision, Thapar, Circuit Judge: “Traditionally, American universities have been beacons ofintellectual diversity and academic freedom. They have prided themselves on being forumswhere controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate bypicking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speechon
Compulsory pronoun use in academia? Read More »
For the first time in my life, I tried to buy wine online. We’d had a tasty Malbec in a restaurant and, in part inspired by a friend’s small collection of favorite wines, I decided to buy a case of the Malbec from an online distributor that also has about twenty stores in the Chicagoland
Laissez-faire anecdotes: trying to buy wine Read More »
Raj Mahal, a former Wall Street trader who is now a comedian, reports this conversation: ‘Last week I was talking to this girl at a bar and she asked me what I did. I told her I am a comic but I used to work on Wall Street. She said, “Thank god. Because all Wall
The power of cultural stereotypes — Mahal anecdote Read More »
Better described as parents eating their children. David Hume: [O]ur modern expedient, which has become very general, is to mortgage the public revenues, and to trust that posterity will pay off the incumbrances contracted by their ancestors: And they, having before their eyes, so good an example of their wise fathers, have the same prudent
On so-called “national” debts Read More »
15 Pairs of Contradictory Proverbs James Barnett, The People’s Almanac #2, p. 1121. 1. Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost. 2. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Don’t beat your head against a stone wall. 3. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Out of sight, out of mind. 4.
15 Pairs of Contradictory Proverbs Read More »
RIPOL Classic Publishing (Moscow) is producing a Russian edition of the Expanded Edition of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. The publisher kindly sent me a draft image of the cover. The publication date for this translation is spring 2021. The book’s thesis: The failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure
Russian translation of *Explaining Postmodernism* — cover Read More »