Guest 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...
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Lockdowns and liberty
This short post grew out of a response to Paul Frijters on another thread. Naturally enough, those who don’t want to lockdown are telling us about our precious liberties. You know those we fought for...
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Midnight’s Library
The graphic from the nifty NYT review. On the strength of nothing more than the fact that it’s Audible’s free book of the month, I’ve started listening to Midnight’s library. It’s fun and engaging....
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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...
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On Faust, Lord of the Rings, and lockdowns
A major theme in our book “the Great Covid Panic” is how a whole layer of politicians, medical advisers, and opportunistic business people grabbed the opportunity for more power and money during the...
View ArticleFatalism and counterfactuals in times of lockdowns
One of the more curious phenomena of the last 18 months has been the fatalism on display on both sides of the lockdown divide. In the anti-lockdown brigade fatalism props up in the guise of “this was...
View ArticleScience and the universe of is: Design and the multiverse of what might be
http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Science-v-inhabiting-our-own-world.mp4 From a recent podcast interview with Tyson Yunkaporta This post began as a comment on David Walker’s post on...
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Practical steps towards Ivan Illich’s world
For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s...
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Academia: when there’s no ‘there’ there
I The university is one of the finest creations of European culture. Alas, as a troublesome fellow once said, all that is solid melts into air. I’m a bit shy of attributing things to a single cause....
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Czesław Miłosz: Alpha, the Moralist
Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of...
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Will you join me in the alt-centre?
It’s a funny thing with names. Names given in jest and contempt are adopted by their targets. After over a decade of marketing consulting services as “Lateral Economics”, I decided it wasn’t so much a...
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Theorisation: Reinventing Orwell and smothering him in verbiage
I’ve spoken about what I call “strategisation” before. This involves dressing something up as particularly strategically apposite. The example I gave is this assertion: Services will continue to make a...
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Metaphysical Animals: a feminist masterpiece?
‘A wonderful, important and also a necessary book, which sets the records straight… and celebrates a remarkable quartet of women thinkers’ Peter Conradi I’ve previously mentioned the two books on the...
View ArticleHow come stoicism is suddenly a thing?
A quick browse of the self-help section of your local bookstore will show you that Stoicism has become popular in the last decade or so with a strong surge during the pandemic. In this week’s...
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How Economics Found Science …and Lost its Subject Matter
Re-evaluating the “equality-efficiency” trade-off Herewith an article that was published by INET a couple of weeks ago, and Evonomics more recently. I’m republishing it here as it’s my ‘blog of...
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Why AI isn’t coming for us any time soon
As some of you may know, I am now publishing a weekly substack of articles I’ve found interesting on the net and in some cases offering some summary commentary. In an unprecedented move, the kind of...
View ArticleFast foodification: what is it, what’s driving it, how do we stop it?
In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers...
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Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Ross Garnaut’s Gruen Lecture
Austro-Hungarian Economists Below is Ross Garnaut’s lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in...
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Should Liz Cheney be your hero?
Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost...
View ArticleJournalism as a system of domination: Peter Dutton edition
.@FergusonNews asks Opposition Leader @PeterDutton_MP: What would prevent you now from taking the next step and that is backing the referendum on the Voice? #abc730 #auspol pic.twitter.com/ebAUd6uM7P...
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