Crooked timber

From an article on the NY Times’ “The Stone”- Rational choice philosophy … was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with [...]

The tyranny of the elected

This is what Congress Party’s Manish Tiwari said today: If this democracy faces its greatest peril from someone, it is from the tyranny of the unelected and the unelectable. I wonder what is so sacrosanct about elections and the elected. The mob votes for someone who then goes on to represent it, which in a [...]

Cognitive dissonance, the “thrifty gene,” etc

I’m more than half-way through Taubes’ book that I mentioned about a month back and the one thing that struck me (in a good way) was that it’s more of a political work than one on nutrition. To take one simple example, the third and fourth chapters carry the titles “Creation of Consensus” and “The [...]

Leadership

It’s the people’s will! I’m their leader! I must follow them! —The Rt. Hon. James Hacker, MP, Yes Minister