Alex Jones, of Infowars, has decided that sometimes mass shootings aren't staged. They aren't all "false flags" operations, and apparently the Sandy Hook shooting was one of the real ones. Further, he has diagnosed himself, saying (in response to a lawsuit by one of the families of the dead children), that he suffers from a "form of psychosis." I'm not sure that diagnosis helps him in the civil case. Here is Slate 's coverage of Jones' latest, with links to others: click at will . Unfortunate psychosis indeed, from which (1) he has not as yet fully recovered; (2) he only recognizes as such when things aren't going his way in court, and (3) one that he continues to try to create in others.
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This is fascinating. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-did-kamala-harris-let-herbalife-off-the-hook_n_5c8fab16e4b03e83bdc39a37 I will be curious to see how far Kamala Harris gets within the Democratic Primary campaign and, as her campaign proceeds, how much of an impediment her involvement with Herbalife (specifically with a husband-wife lobbying team both of whom did work for Herbalife) will be. There is an ethnic issue here: Herbalife draws its sales force, aka its sucker supply, largely from the Hispanic community, and it has come under fire from activists in that space. But underneath that, there is the notion of what if anything is the difference between a "pyramid scheme" and a legitimate multi-level marketing firm, other than the pull of the lobbyists the latter can hire. In either case we are talking about operations where some sales people make money by recruiting other sales people, who can do the same, though for appearances sake it is good that they ...
This is a great scandal for generating bad jokes. Here are three: 1. What about that FBI, eh? They can't find conspiracy to rig an election (with the help of a foreign power) by a man who openly boasts about it in front of microphones: but they can sure as heck catch an actress trying to get her dumbest kid into college! 2. For half a million dollars the kid gets into USC? That's a rip-off. For that kind of money she shoulda gotten into Hogwarts! 3. Some of these kids who've gotten into college with the help of a crooked water polo coach are going to have to be told that they don't bring their horse to the games. Wooka wooka wooka.
The Oxford University Press has posted a timeline of women in philosophy. In order not to go back to Hypatia, which would make for an unwieldy graphic, the Oxfordians have arbitrarily begun the timeline in 1678, when a woman was for the first time granted a doctorate degree in philosophy. The university that broke that particular cave ceiling? The University of Padua in Italy. The woman involved? Elena Cornaro Piscopia. Senora Piscopia is new to me. Here are two other facts from the timeline that are also new to me, arbitrarily selected: Susanne Langer published a paper in the journal MIND (a leading British philosophy journal) in 1926. Langer is often regarded as the first woman "professional philosopher." Her 1926 paper was titled "Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of Logical Types." It expressed her interest in symbolic logic, which she would later put to work in the development of aesthetics. Finally, for our brief survey, the first college course ...
A common fallacious form of argument is that known as the "motte and bailey," also sometimes called the "bait and switch," though the archaic term "motte and bailey" is more evocative for those of us who aren't engaged either in retailing products or in fishing as a regular matter. The term "motte" suggests a strong defensive position (not to be confused with a "moat," though obviously related -- we'll get to that). The motte is the raised earthwork in front of a castle. It may have a wooden palisade on its crest. The "bailey" is a pleasant and less militarized zone, perhaps a courtyard or market, outside of the protection of the motte. A moat, or perhaps a dry ditch, might exist protecting the whole motte-and-bailey complex. The idea is that the whole complex is defensible against small numbers of foes. But against a larger more determined attack, when a raid becomes a battle, the bailey might have to be aban...
A lot of hopes have been invested for decades now in the idea of a "Tobin tax." The idea, first formulated by Yale University economist James Tobin in 1972, is that a government can tax short-term, round trip transactions from one currency to another. That is, speculators might transfer their US dollars into UK pounds and, shortly thereafter, their pounds back into US dollars. That would be done, and is done, as a way of profiting off expected changes in the relative value of the currencies concerned: it is betting. Tobin's view was that such betting is destabilizing and it ought to be discouraged: thus the tax. Further, Tobin worked up this proposal soon after Nixon had destroyed the older Bretton Woods system. There was a great deal of concern over what would replace it, how the financial world was going to get along if every currency simply floats against any other, with no agreed up measuring/reference point. The idea seemed to die a quiet death. It was resur...
In its own way this is the most puzzling of Plato's many dialogs. The PARMENIDES establishes that Plato was fully aware of the standard arguments against the "Theory of the Forms." He puts them into the mouth of the elder Parmenides who is supposed to have met a young Socrates. What is supposed to be the take-away? I would guess that it is that the views expressed at the start of this dialog are those of the YOUNG Socrates, and that we're supposed to contrast this decisively refutable stuff with some more sophisticated version of the theory of the Forms we could attribute to the older man, and to Plato himself. But I don't understand of what the implied and later-acquired sophistication consists.