Quote of the Day
Here’s the thing: curling is evidently not so much a sport as it is a pastime that was created for the clinically insane. No one in the United States could possibly take this seriously. It makes no sense.
Here’s the thing: curling is evidently not so much a sport as it is a pastime that was created for the clinically insane. No one in the United States could possibly take this seriously. It makes no sense.
Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.
All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government “committed” to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps [...]
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push [...]
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is [...]
College debt shows up a lot in these stories, actually. It’s more insistently present than housing debt, or even unemployment. That might speak to the fact that the protests tilt towards the young. But it also speaks, I think, to the fact that college debt represents a special sort of betrayal. We told you that [...]
This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been [...]
…it’s striking how much time and energy is spent in this most vibrant and innovative sector of the economy on these patent wars. It’s an equilibrium that’s obviously wonderful for patent lawyers, and seems to serve all the major incumbents well enough but I don’t think it really bodes well for the world. When firms [...]
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, [...]
In the essay, Mooney reviews arguments from neuroscience about why we believe what we believe, how we react to new information that contradicts our existing convictions, and about the actual cognitive processes involved in persuasion or being persuaded, concluding that at least some of the tendency to reject new information or challenges to our beliefs [...]