On stupidity and the excesses of wokeness
One of the first laws of human existence, or at least of existence in class societies (determined by anti-human institutions that mold...
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- Oct 10, 2021
- 9 min
Resisting 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, 2021
- 11 min
On humans' language faculty
You 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, 2020
- 6 min
On how to live
When 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, 2020
- 19 min
Journal-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, 2020
- 10 min
On Wittgenstein and Quine
Wittgenstein is an odd case. I've always had the impression that his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is genius—and not...
- Aug 29, 2020
- 3 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, 2020
- 9 min
I wish stupidity were less common
This 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, 2020
- 8 min
Old 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, 2019
- 18 min
Notes 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, 2019
- 19 min
A little misanthropy can be a healthy thing
This 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, 2019
- 10 min
What 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, 2016
- 2 min
The 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, 2016
- 3 min
Richard Lewontin, Chomsky, and common sense
Richard Lewontin’s article “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer” is excellent. It counsels skepticism about...
- Jul 9, 2016
- 5 min
Elite pretentiousness
The 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, 2016
- 5 min
The 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, 2016
- 6 min
Fragments on bourgeois ideologists
On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...
- Sep 28, 2015
- 2 min
Thoughts 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, 2015
- 3 min
A 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, 2014
- 3 min
Radical human nature
The power of indoctrination is shown by the fact that most people don’t consider themselves radical leftists, socialists, or anarchists....