Apr 89 minOn stupidity and the excesses of wokenessOne of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...
Oct 10, 20219 minResisting fascism (a book review)[This review was published at H-Socialisms.] The elevation of Donald Trump onto the national political stage in 2016 provoked a heated...
Jun 15, 202111 minOn humans' language facultyYou may have heard of the “talking gorilla” Koko. I remember as a child reading about this fascinating creature that had been trained to...
Sep 13, 20206 minOn how to liveWhen I was younger, I used to wonder: should I care what people think of me? I saw arguments on both sides of the question. And I still...
Sep 6, 202019 minJournal-notes on cognitive science [From 2015.] Reading a bunch of articles on cognitive development. A fascinating field. Interesting: Human infants who receive little...
Aug 31, 202010 minOn Wittgenstein and QuineWittgenstein is an odd case. I've always had the impression that his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is genius—and not...
Aug 29, 20203 min"Government in the Future"[From 2008.] Reading Chomsky’s pamphlet Government in the Future, which sets out to answer the question “What is the role of the state in...
Aug 21, 20209 minI wish stupidity were less commonThis is going to be a whiny, self-pitying post. Just to warn you. The question is sometimes asked, "Why are stupid people frequently so...
Jun 9, 20208 minOld syllabus and lecture notes[Here are some notes from the first syllabus I wrote for the U.S. History After 1865 survey course. Below them are overly ambitious notes...
Jul 30, 201918 minNotes on a radical interpretation of the Cold War[Also here]. I’ve been reading Gabriel and Joyce Kolko’s classic The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–54...
Jul 24, 201919 minA little misanthropy can be a healthy thingThis is from a letter Sigmund Freud wrote to his pastor friend Oskar Pfister: I do not break my head very much about good and evil, but I...
Jul 11, 201910 minWhat will "the revolution" look like?Here's a blog post for you masochists who are interested in the debates that go on among Marxist intellectuals over questions around...
Nov 10, 20162 minThe necessity of revolutionary violence[Student notes.] You should read Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Gives a compelling...
Jul 20, 20163 minRichard Lewontin, Chomsky, and common senseRichard Lewontin’s article “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer” is excellent. It counsels skepticism about...
Jul 9, 20165 minElite pretentiousnessThe following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...
Jul 5, 20165 minThe silliness of logical positivism[Old jottings from my journal.] Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, from the selections I’ve read so far, is sensible. (That isn’t...
Jan 12, 20166 minFragments on bourgeois ideologistsOn neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...
Sep 28, 20152 minThoughts on thinkers[Some notes I took a while ago. They may be kind of obvious, but I think it’s interesting to adopt something like Hegel’s perspective on...
Sep 19, 20153 minA 25-year-old's love affair[From an old journal entry.] Noam Chomsky is my intellectual conscience. I think about him every day, multiple times a day. He helps...
Sep 27, 20143 minRadical human natureThe power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....