Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In an earlier post which I wrote after seeing Barack Obama’s commencement address (in which he advocated civility), I worried about the president’s failure to condemn the relentless campaign to falsely smear dissenters as racist, and concluded with a rhetorical question: …while I am glad the president said that “we can’t expect to solve our…

Politics 101: The politics of a coalition is dominated by the least committed member of the coalition. In response to the comments at Eric’s And if you’re against socialism but not a conservative, then what? Edited for clarity.

Eric at Classical Values repeats the old saw: “the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.” I always thought the left was looking for lunatics. Preferably well educated lunatics: George Orwell: “Some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them” Looking for converts implies that Republicanism is faith…

Anyone remember when being against Bush was the litmus test for liberalism? These days, it often seems as if being against Bush has become a litmus test for conservatism. The old rule used to be that “the Right is looking for converts and the Left is looking for heretics.” Now it seems to be the…

What do you do if you hate socialism but don’t like conservatism? Unfortunately for me, I have found myself in that predicament ever since the election of Barack Obama. Oddly enough, no one seemed to care when Bush was president, because in those days people who disliked socialism more than they disliked conservatism were considered…

This post by Ann Althouse reminded me of something it only touches on by implication, but which is a major reason I tend to loathe politics. From the discussion of the Alphas and the Betas (of Huxley’s Brave New World): Are the Alphas superior? They have to work so hard and wear grey… I’m so…

Funny that I was just saying the Internet is all messed up, because after reading a post that Glenn Reynolds linked about the Tim Burns congressional race in Pennsylvania, I wanted to know a little more about the candidate, so I clicked on the TimBurnsforCongress.com web site. I can’t see it, because it’s been blocked…

While I haven’t seen any news stories about it, today looks like a bad day for the Internet. Google has been down since this morning, with occasional brief periods of being up (although loading very slowly) Blogspot blogs are mostly dysfunctional, as is YouTube. Yahoo has been working though, and so do the non-Blogspot blogs.…

Al Fin has an article on natural oil spills. He links to a Science Daily piece on oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico. ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2000) — Twice an Exxon Valdez spill worth of oil seeps into the Gulf of Mexico every year, according to a new study that will be presented January…

Although I was in the audience watching Barack Obama’s speech yesterday, I was too exhausted last night to write about it. But maybe that’s not fully accurate, now that I’ve slept and I’m not exhausted, I still don’t want to write about it. As I said yesterday, I thought he made some good points about…

The cost of inaction: Rudd has created a Department of Magnificent Uselessness in response to a crisis that never existed and against which he will take no action. This is absolutely beautiful. Hey Tim, just be thankful you aren’t paying Gavin Schmidt’s salary too.

President Obama is in town today to speak at the University of Michigan’s commencement ceremony. (Something that was hard not to notice, as I live a block and a half from the stadium, and the commotion upset Coco.) I don’t know what it means to true believers in the new One World Religion of Environmentalism,…

While I don’t know how socialist a country has to become before it stops working, I think we’re fixing to find out pretty soon unless something happens to reverse the tide. But I learned something fascinating in the past couple of days which made me wonder how entrenched a particular well-entrenched technology industry might become…

While reading a review of the book Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History I came across this interesting tit bit (British spelling). Then there’s the year 1620, when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. Instead of seeing this as the first great turning point in the nation’s colonial history,…

I have found that sometimes the best way to determine whether you’re really sick of something is to “take a break” from it. I haven’t written about politics for the last few days because I am so sick to death of it, and while you might think that taking a break from something you hate…

Ann Arbor is a college town, and is generally pretty quiet except when there are big football games. That makes this neighborhood a bit of a zoo, but it’s not too bad. However, in the year and ten months I have been here, I have never seen anything quite like what’s going on right now.…

The Democrats appear to be adopting another losing position when it comes to the Banking Bill. With crucial midterm elections nearing, Democrats have lost the advantage they’ve held for years as the party the public trusts to steer the economy. I wonder if that loss of trust has anything to do with the banking bill…

No, I do not advocate such a thing, but that was a very popular leftist slogan in the late ’60s and early ’70s. There were buttons, posters, songs, and films. Take a look at this vintage 1968 film, and see the kids singing “OFF THE PIGS!” I don’t think anyone was ever prosecuted for using…

They say that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and while I hate to foolishly insist on consistency, I nonetheless found my consistently foolish inner hobgoblin was activated by Dr. Helen’s PJM insightful piece about society’s very different attitudes toward genital assaults on males as opposed to genital assaults on females. no…