Philosophy

In his recent book Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase describes how Theodore Kaczynski, a 16-year-old Harvard student in 1958, suffered traumatizing abuse as an unwitting test-subject in a CIA-connected psychology experiment designed to manipulate human behavior under intensive isolation and harsh interrogation (and also ultimately: LSD and torture).  This humiliating, formative experience, Chase argues, shaped Kaczynski’s dislike for the techno-scientific manipulation and control of human beings.  But Chase also maintains that the Harvard Gen Ed.

Brain Busting Bombs — News (faux, sic, err, persona non grata)
This is an experiment. Quickly, in tsunami like fashion, riffing with the junk of the day, picked up from mainstream madness newspaper news, and from the feeds on NPR, National Pediatric News. Other polluted pipelines from the crapper, like HuffPost, all the junk on line, etc. etc.

Just what are we teaching young people, society at large,  in and out of school? Just what is it to be an American today, awash in consumer madness? The Last One with the Most Toys Wins bumper sticker,  or is it this little chant:  You’ll have to peel this i-thing Apple appendage from my cold dead mind, err, hand?

So, in Washington, the defeat of I-522, the genetically modified organisms, i.e. food, labeling initiative has been aided and abetted  by, well, they call it a “war in the media” with the armies of the corporations launching frontal, rear, aerial, underground, cyber and Madison Avenue assaults. So, the “media” are the balancers and arbiters of justice.

[Note: More New Statesman non-news in a time of global Big Brother, Climate Calamity, $5.5 Trillion Held by 1,400 People, War is Peace, Lies are Truth, in a piece, titled: "A Discourse on Brocialism ... On Brand, iconoclasm, and a woman's place in the revolution: a dialogue with Richard Seymour on the question of how to reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fall down when

The conundrum of what you do with that puma that comes wondering into town. Or that wolf jumping electronic fences for some of papa’s Angus beef. What do you do with that toothless meth head, crazed and full of steam pipe madness when he comes rushing at you with a machete. What to do with the careening car jumping curbs while you bicycle around town. What to do with the woman about to push the child in the stroller off the cliff. What to do with the disheveled dude with the lab coat with the syringe of gasoline about to dip the needle into grandmother’s wrist.

Jeff Tucker and Tom Woods had excellent criticisms of The Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace released a document Monday, calling for a world economic authority and condemning the “idolatry of the market.” But were I still a devout Catholic, of the opinion that the Church was infallible when speaking through its pope ex […]

From the Appendix to my post Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors, quoted below. See also “Objectivist Law Prof Mossoff on Copyright; or, the Misuse of Labor, Value, and Creation Metaphors”; “Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor”; “Thoughts on Intellectual Property, Scarcity, Labor-ownership, Metaphors, […]

In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s classic article In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics, he has some very interesting observations about falsificationism and empiricism: Popper would have us throw out any theory that is contradicted by any fact, which, if at all possible, would leave us virtually empty-handed, going nowhere. In […]

From a comment on the Mises blog from a while back: Stephan Kinsella March 11, 2005 at 2:34 pm One thing to keep in mind is there is a difference between being immortal and knowing you are immortal. I have noted this before (where, I cannot find) regarding Ayn Rand’s views about the nature of […]