In The Liberal Mind Kenneth Minogue, the British political theorist, tells us: “Need” belongs to a particular language of political and moral thought arising from the conception of generic men. Once we have entered into that language, we can only say individualist things. It is a language which has grown out of the liberal movement … [Read more…]
Most political and economic commentaries assume we know the proper structures and relationships for morally ordering various sorts of human communities. If things look bad, we can just fix up our governments and our religious institutions and our various private organizations with technical changes and choices of leaders with better moral character. I’d say that … [Read more…]
I’ve started reading some of the works of John Dahlberg, Lord Acton, sometimes given honorary titles such as “the historian of liberty.” Being largely cash-free, I downloaded pdf files of some of his works from Liberty Fund which has made available for free a good number of classic books on history, political theory, philosophy, science, … [Read more…]
In an earlier posting, The Liberal Mind: What is politics?, I addressed the obvious question, “What is Politics?”. I covered a lot of ground to start off a line of reasoning tightly tied to my current goal of enriching our store of words and concepts for discussing our moral and social lives. While it’s true … [Read more…]
Not long ago, I posted an essay, Is Power for the Sake of Power the Same as Power Earned by Productive Achievements? where I responded to a study which found: [T]hat individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, “The … [Read more…]
I’m speaking of rational ‘conspiracy theorists’ which means those who claim, rightly, that power-elites develop and are quite capable of engaging ruthlessly in focused criminal conspiracies when their interests are threatened. I don’t even know how to make a pitch to those who think there is a tight-knit conspiracy run by Satan or Jesuits or … [Read more…]
This article, Hunting for a Mass Killer in Medieval Graveyards , informs us that: Modern [bubonic] plague is carried by fleas and spreads no faster than the rats that carry them can travel. [And this modern plague can be defeated by eliminating fleas and/or rats.] The Black Death seems to have spread directly from one … [Read more…]
Here’s an article about a mildly interesting finding that low-information voters are more likely than others to vote for the best-looking candidate: Face Value: Looks of Political Candidates Are Key Factor Influencing Low-Information Voters. In more blunt terms, these low-information voters can be described as willfully ignorant and morally irresponsible. I’ll make an impolite request … [Read more…]
While reading an abridged version of the cosmological sections of Pierre Duhem’s massive study of Medieval science, Medieval Cosmology — published by the University of Chicago, I paid closer attention to some mathematical discussions by later Scholastics. As Duhem noted, those discussions were very sophisticated anticipations of the concept of limit which matured in the … [Read more…]
Are conspiracies self-organizing, at least in part? In general: yes. There is no centrally-controlled conspiracy run by Satanic servants or omnipotent bureaucrats. There are networks of those who inherited wealth and power and those networks are sometimes refreshed by new blood of the ambitious and talented. There are also tightly organized operations with a specific … [Read more…]