One of my favorite Kipling poems: AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left…
All posts in philosophy
So what differentiates socialism from “things government does”? I have seen it quite seriously argued that anything that government does is socialism so, what are you some kind of anarchist? I have literally seen dozens of variants on that. First of all, I don’t think the libertarian ideal of some sort of private contract enforcement (“dispute resolution”) firm is going to work. By default, any such organization that’s large enough to enforce contract for a large number of separate entities be…
Today is a day taken to honor the fallen. I’ve served, my father has served, and both grandparents served their own countries before then. The history of Memorial day, and of Arlington cemetery, is of interest, but the question I have today is borne of some discussions with my family over this last weekend. Namely – related to nationalism. I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m nearly the lone Trump supporter, and one of three, maybe four, nominal conservatives toany degree in a crowd of feelgood…
I’ve mentioned before – that old rule about “once is coincidence” also applies to large systems of any sort. Even if you have thousands of computers running, if three of them develop the same misbehavior, it’s not a fluke, there’s something wrong with the system. A bug, or something else overlooked, but not simply “oh an edge case”. In case you’re wondering, this applies in part to yesterday’s post. Sure, we’ll never get rid of evil, but when you’re talking about orders of magnitude of differen…
How few people need to be truly radical for "just a few of them" to be a systemic issue?