Clik here to view.
Happy little optimisers we
I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it – implicitly – from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around...
View ArticleThe Pell Principle: Mission will trump morality
The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I’ll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What I’m reading: Things about the Parthenon YOU WON’T BELIEVE!!
What is the meaning of the relief sculpture above? I recall when I was last on the Athenian Acropolis just over a year ago marvelling at the Parthenon, not just its emphatic and sublime beauty but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where else would they come from?
Minister Dutton says that 2/3 of people recently charged with terrorism in Australia have Lebanese Muslim backgrounds. However, the first rule when considering dramatic statistics should be to think...
View ArticleSome Game of Thrones Season 8 speculation
Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me...
View ArticleIs Catholicism in rude health? 2017 edition
Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has...
View ArticleThe #MeToo moment: another disaster for the Democrats?
The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves,...
View ArticleLet’s have another World War!
Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately...
View ArticleOur countries need us.
Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet,...
View ArticleIs there now more psychological violence?
In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though?...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The final chapter of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism
The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history....
View ArticleThe logic of the inevitable (nuclear) apocalypse. Can the Gods save us?
The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is...
View ArticleHow Social Science could be taught. A vision for the future.
[note to self] Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines...
View ArticleSix tough institutional challenges this century
In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed...
View ArticleGeorge RR Martin just reminded us of the horrors of war and our role in them.
Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had...
View ArticleIs it the duty of the state to police a positive national history story?
Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even...
View Article6 post-Corona Institutional questions
The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
May the farce be with you: legal edition
Well, well, well. The legal system has bungled its way to releasing a guilty man. Even if George Pell were not guilty of any acts of child molesting (as it was called during most of the time he was...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From being to seeming: why empirical scientists failed in times of Covid.
There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What experiments on cult behaviour tell us about lockdown beliefs
With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns....
View ArticleOn the nature of gods and inequality.
Sometimes one has an idea that blazes into one’s consciousness as a solution to one particular concern, which then starts to be something much bigger than just a solution to a problem. It becomes an...
View ArticlePragmatic utilitarianism?
I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic. I do not merely say that governments should make policy...
View ArticleSex and war in Afghanistan
I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard...
View ArticleGuest post from John Burnheim
John sent me the text below in response to reading my essay on John Macmurray. As you may know he trained as a priest and after many decades lost his faith. He is now in his nineties and must have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Great Covid Panic: now out!
It’s here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months. It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries...
View Article
