I heard on the radio this morning what I will call the Sidebar Fallacy. It is a specialized form of a hybrid between the straw man and the red herring. It is essentially an accidental getting off topic and pretending that the new topic is germane.
Author: Kilgore Forelle
Landsharks
It may take an hour-and-a-half of your time, but if you want to know about rent-seeking, I cannot recommend a better resource. Today, I have been listening to the this lecture by Dr. Robert Higgs. And it has struck me that the principal occupation of humankind is piracy.
The Taylor Series
The concept of a Taylor Series is the idea that no matter how chaotic something, taken as a whole, might be, there are parts of it that are well behaved. Then taken as a whole again, a collection of well behaved parts, the whole something is well behaved.
Voting or Choosing
I always vote for the clear choice of good over evil. I’m still waiting with regard to politics.
The Problem Definition Fallacy
Any problem solution algorithm must go through a problem definition stage, but all problem definitions do not lead to an appropriate solution. You cannot solve, but by random luck, a problem that you do not understand. And that blind-hog solution will probably not survive downstream consequences for long.
Stopping the Flow
An old TV ad cautioned us, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Yet we persist in trying fictions to stem the tide. The news is full of ships wrecked on those hazards to navigation. Let’s pass a piece of legislation outlawing fictions, and the first fiction will be flaunted while the ink is still wet.
Climate Change
The malady of the modern day is to have the wrong argument about a pertinent question. A complication of that malady is the spreading of the wrong information about the premises.
Better — Not Good Yet
I am reading Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness. Its subtitle is Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. I’m only up to reason #5, and I’m already convinced. It’s too bad that Alex Jones has usurped the name, “Info Wars,” because he is a malefactor in those info wars. Rosling, et al, are benefactors.
We Must Leave Royalism Behind
Courtiers and trappings. When the founders drafted the Constitution, they ignored the main evil — the king was not dead. We are still in the European mindset that arose out of the Medieval Age and the dementia of Hobbes.
Boys Will Be Boys
We anarchists tend to think that government itself is bad, that a plethora of bureaucrats are bad, that politicians are creeps — and so they are. But the worst part of any human endeavor are those who cannot follow objective, natural rules of not invading the lives of others, in narcissistically treating any circumstance as their Xanadu.