Speed Reading — a joke
The latest in cognition research: Accordion to several studies, replacing words with the names of musical instruments in a sentence often goes undetected.
Speed Reading — a joke Read More »
The Moral of Two Scandals — Enron and Ontario
Ontario’s financial debts, as of 2018: “Ontario’s debt has ballooned to $312 billion, the biggest debt held by a subnational government anywhere in the world. Ontario owes twice as much as California, which has a population bigger than all of Canada.”[1] Enron’s debts as determined by its bankruptcy proceedings: “The company paid its creditors more
The Moral of Two Scandals — Enron and Ontario Read More »
Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany
I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From
Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany Read More »
Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript
In 2016, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on a variety of topics, including the pronoun wars. At that point, Professor Jordan Peterson had recently taken a strong public stand against being required to use some newly proposed pronouns, and that refusal had generated controversy. Here is the transcript of my four-minute opinion on Peterson and
Hicks on Pronouns and Peterson — transcript Read More »
Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs
Ignasi Boltó, a.k.a. the Spanish Libertarian, asked me eleven questions (below or at YouTube): 1. What’s your intellectual evolution? 2. Why do you say that postmodernism is the evolution of Marxism? 3. What values define Western Civilization? 4. Why does the New Left fight nihilistically against individual rights and capitalism? 5. Does philosophy matter to
Spanish Libertarian interview on pomo, Jordan Peterson, and red-pilling SJWs Read More »
Was Magritte an artist — or a philosopher?
In my “Why Art Became Ugly,” I claimed that modern art’s trajectory was to abandon art for philosophy. In modernism, art becomes a *philosophical* enterprise rather than an *artistic* one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to *do* art but to *find out* what art is. Here’s a new-to-me datum about René Magritte, from
Was Magritte an artist — or a philosopher? Read More »
When Altruism becomes Pathological [Good Life series]
Who is more likely to cheat — those who play individual sports or those who play team sports? A fascinating experiment by Professor Sharon K. Stoll and reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education compared athletes in individual sports such as golf or singles tennis with those playing teams sports such as basketball or doubles
When Altruism becomes Pathological [Good Life series] Read More »
Gandhi’s pacificism and the Nazi threat
From Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire: Gandhi advised the British to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, and he advised Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime: “Gandhi’s position on nonviolence was absolute. Aggression could never be returned. He did
Gandhi’s pacificism and the Nazi threat Read More »