Anarchy is the absence of central government and there are two kinds of definitions. A society without a large-scale government hierarchy that has a monopoly on legitimate force. By this definition, most tribal foraging societies and other small-scale societies have…
Yearly Archives: 2022
Yuval Noah Harari says a simple story can save the planet
NYT: It’s important to have human enemies in order to have a catchy story. With climate change, you don’t. Our minds didn’t evolve for this kind of story. When we evolved as hunter-gatherers, it was never the case that we…
Posted in Environment
You can’t get no satisfaction from reducing your own personal carbon footprint.
Almost all moral reasoning concerns ideas about how we treat one another (including other sentient beings). Hence, what is moral depends upon what other people do. Driving on the right side of a busy highway is moral (and driving on…
We need a better concept of collective morality to be able to deal with climate change
Suppose God told you that you would go to hell if the median human faith of humanity is insufficient when you die. If the median faith of humanity is good enough, then everyone goes to heaven, but if not, than…
Posted in Environment, Philosophy and ethics
The campaign to change our pronouns is partly caused by the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistics
Updated 3/31/23 If people used the pronoun ‘ki’ when referring to the earth, would that make people treat the earth more environmentally? That is the hypothesis of Robin Wall Kimmerer the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. She doesn’t like calling the…
Posted in Philosophy and ethics
The BA.2 Covid variant is spiking. But it is still a good bet that the Pandemic will be over this spring.
Two months ago, I wrote that the pandemic would be over this spring. We are now officially in the second day of spring and my prediction does not look good at first glance because Covid BA.2 infections are spiking in…
Posted in Health
The rise of the Passport Bureaucracy
For most of history, passports and visas were two words for the same thing and in Europe and the US they were only occasionally required during wartime in order to exclude dangerous foreigners. In 1941, the US was again at…
Posted in Globalization & International
Medianism 