Every accomplished torturer serves a long apprenticeship, beginning on insects, proceeding, if he shows sufficient relish, to small animals, and only then moving up to human beings.
Aug 292023
Aug 282023
I can no longer read of an academic conference without thinking of the scene in Love and Death when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton bring their village idiot to a village idiots’ convention, where they are greeted by a huge banner reading WELCOME IDIOTS.
Aug 252023
Genes are the privilege that dare not speak its name.
Aug 242023
A surprisingly common tactic of philosophers is to solve their problem by denying that it exists: thus Parmenides on change, Berkeley on the external world, Dennett on qualia, or Rand on conflicts of interest. It works, if what you want is less correctness than renown.
Aug 232023
The last one to leave won’t have to turn out the lights: the power will have failed long since.
Aug 222023
We would all be incomparably better-educated if we had read the same books in the right order.
Aug 212023
If you want to argue better, get better arguments.
Aug 182023
The sole sacred duty of the critic is not to praise where praise is not due.
Aug 172023
In normal times, the party offering the most extreme version of popular ideas natters pointlessly. In revolutionary times, it wins.
Aug 162023
A networked world is a legible world, and a legible world is an unfree world. We all have social credit scores now.