Like the gods of legend, these “gods” of our personality don’t like people who spurn them. And it doesn’t take a long look into Greek mythology to know that the gods do awful things to people they don’t like. Afflictions of madness, afflictions of lust, transformation into animals – it’s not pretty.
Tag: consequences
Christopher Coyne: Why Humanitarian Action Fails (46m)
This episode features a lecture by economics professor Christopher Coyne from 2014. He discusses the sometimes disastrous unforeseen consequences of poorly-planned humanitarian interventions around the world.
The Roots of Inertia
Why don’t low-skilled workers try harder to better their condition? While this might seem a neoliberal question, it weighs on Barbara Ehrenreich’s mind: I was baffled, initially, by what seemed like a certain lack of get-up-and-go on the part of my fellow workers. Why didn’t they just leave for a better-paying job, as I did when […]
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What Liberty Allows for and What it Demands
Liberty allows for recklessness, but it demands accepting its consequences; it does not repress vices, but it encourages the development of virtues; it tolerates diversity, but it excludes it from ventures based on unanimity; and it does not condemn self-love, but it flourishes in the love of one’s neighbor.
The Not-So-Just World Hypothesis
One of the main forms of (alleged) evidence in favor of the Just World Hypothesis is that people derogate and blame the victims of crimes. But I’ve simply never noticed this in real life. All I’ve seen, rather, is that people claim that other people derogate and blame the victims of crimes.
Seek Not to Be Understood
If you make your life an interesting life, the confluence of events, the collision of unforeseen consequences, will make it an unique life — a life that will not fit in an academician’s box, a life that will not constrain you to climb into a box.
The Problem with “Here I Stand, I Can Do No Other”
“Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” According to some tellings, this is how Protestant Christian reformer Martin Luther responded to demands that he recant positions which the established Church of his time considered heretical.
Glad to See Space Escape Government
I resent government agencies pretending to have some political authority over space flight and the companies practicing it, but the nature of government is to get in the way. Government offices are filled with hordes of people unqualified to do anything but issue or deny permits, and they are going to keep asserting control — fighting the future — as long as they can get away with it.
The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America’s Secret War
With American military personnel now entering service who were not even alive on 9/11, this seems an appropriate time to reexamine the events of September 11, 2001 – the opaque motives for the attacks, the equally opaque motives for the counter-offensive by the United States and its allies known as the Global War on Terror, and the domestic fall-out for Americans concerned about the erosion of their civil liberties on the homefront.
UBI: Some Early Experiments
The Universal Basic Income is only a tangential interest of mine. Yet when I’ve debated it, I’ve been consistently impressed by how little the eager advocates try to teach me.* Case in point: I learned more from reading three paragraphs in Kevin Lang’s Poverty and Discrimination than in my typical conversation with a UBI enthusiast.