BC

OK, so how's that rational desire limiting working for you? Most of us have more desires than we can shake a stick at, so it is a good idea to stop wa...

And they are not doing that anyway?

Never mind larks on the wing, snails slithering over the thorn, Robert Browning. CO2 levels are rising, our celestial orb is heating up, insect popula...

Or, just don't get the body work done -- I mean, if the driver's side door still works, and the windshield is intact, that's pretty much all you need....

In far less rarified circumstances than Ming flower pots, I don't like buying even slightly dented cans, or boxes of food that have been slightly crus...

Of course they should be abolished--not personally, of course. We don't need to liquidate the super rich, just divest them of their ill-gotten gains. ...

We do not, and we do not have Homer's and Shakespeare's time, either. Dostoyevsky is obviously much closer to us. Question: Are you an active reader o...

the unabridged edition of War and Peace has a sales rank of 43,486 on Amazon--not bad for a book nobody is reading, when sales ranks run into the hund...

Before I checked in with TPF, I was watching an old BBC interview program in which John Cleese and another Python were defending recently released The...

Here's an item in the Guardian (London) about a groundswell in favor of taxing the rich much more heavily. You might find it interesting.

Yes, this is perfectly possible. After the excesses of the late 19th century gilded age, the progressives in the US passed much higher taxes on wealth...

Good idea. I haven't read it myself--just excerpts and summaries by others. Not reading books I recommend others read is not commendable, but... one c...

Well, taking Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway as an example again, Buffet has nothing to gain by wrecking his various corporate assets. If Burling...

One of the means by which capital became so very fat was by getting tax law changed to cut estate taxes (allowing more to pass to heirs after death) a...

People in my age group -- I'm 72 -- grew up in the post-WWII boom. This boom lasted from the end of the war up to about the end of the 1960s, give or ...

I'm all in favor of social welfare programs, but welfare is not socialism. Socialism entails industrial democracy where the workers own the economy an...

The problem of concentrated wealth in a nutshell is this: The uber-wealthy, who control such a large share of capital, have little incentive to innova...

I was speculating on what might be the case in 200 years, per your request. I think overstating the case would sound like "In 200 years several city-s...

In 200 years? in 2219 we will be living in an altogether different environmental regime. IF we continue to use hydrocarbons and exhaust the supply, co...

The 100 best list is, as they say, for "tech-loving super nerds". Sharpening the axe doesn't make the axe new and different. A lot of the stuff on the...

There was nothing "end-times" about my post. What I said was that quantum computing would not solve existential matters. That is a long ways from sayi...

Absolutely. Ecology hangs over every discussion of the future and is often--quite amazingly--ignored. The rate of global warming, ecological disruptio...

Yes, your cell phone integrates old radio technology with a miniaturized computer. A rule of thumb is that it takes about 50 years for a new technolog...

Inequality is an major economic problem quite aside from moral concerns. Concentration of wealth in the hands of a 1-2% of the population leads to les...

Thank you for catching that double entendre. You emphasize the importance of modifiers and context. If two executives of a frozen food company are dis...

I am much more of an essentialist than a constructionist, so essentialist associations are not something I would be anxious to avoid. But, we are not ...

The article got my back up very early on: "And now researchers have discovered it also can promote ethnocentrism, potentially fueling xenophobia, prej...

Well put, but I am not enthusiastic about this decoupling. Hey, I'm 72. At some point one has to decide which cutting edges to sit on, and which cutti...

It's interesting how minor (not an insulting term) thinkers can have a major influence. My minor thinker is Daniel DeLeon, who died... 1914? He bounce...

As that famous progressive Republican Senator, Hiram Johnson, said about identity wars, "The first victim of the gender war is truth."

Upon whatever plinth we are precariously perched, I propose we are probably preaching to the persnickety practitioners of professional nit picking. I ...

If we really are leaving it to the Badenses and Hanovers to raise their children as they see fit, then there is no reason to discuss which one is the ...

They who claim to be gender neutral are probably lying, quite possibly to themselves as well as to others.

There are regular doubts raised about the validity of social sciences, psychology included. A good deal of what passes in the social / behavioral scie...

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves..."? I too think there is such a thing as human nature, and it is true that we often de...

We are certainly aware that bad policy put into effect can have disastrous consequences. What Brexit seems to mean is that a lot of people are going t...

The only way it would be true that nothing is better than, larger than, hotter than, faster than... is if we lived in a two dimensional universe (whic...

Irresponsible, indeed. Most unkind -- but that is what we are doing. People who are in their 20s or younger, and everyone who will be born later, are ...

James Howard Kunstler, who writes about ecology, global warming, peak oil, and so on, wrote a quartet of novels under the heading "A World Made by Han...

Well, I'm in favor of eliminating capitalism and replacing it with a hybrid variety of industrial democracy, socialism, and anarcho-syndicalism, but c...

Let's bring WW2 and the Cop & Gang Story back together. There were at least a few million Germans in the policeman's shoes. "I, a good German, must ei...

I too have known some psychologists who, likewise, seemed like quite decent folk. I don't find Jordan Peterson objectionable, but maybe that is a matt...

There are alternatives to the version of capitalism that we have. We could certainly have an essentially capitalist economy with a much stronger welfa...

You are going to be disappointed again.

Despite training in counseling, despite working as a counselor, despite receiving psychotherapy (some good, some indifferent), I do not have much conf...

It's one thing to respond to the Quillette piece; it's quite another to respond to the APA document--31 pages worth, loaded with statements with which...

As you say, Hitler is literally blamed for the whole thing (see: great man theory of history). In a different context, American presidents like to tak...

I'm not sure that is correct. When the allies closed in on Germany proper, they had a list of top Nazis who they sought, and if found, arrested. Some ...

Surely in the real world. I understand that this is an extreme hypothetical situation. I get that part. It may not even be all that artificial. I gath...

It is not clear to me what the purpose of this sort of exercise is. Placing someone in this hypothetical situation where there is essentially no moral...