Philosophy
Slip of the Tongue? When We End Up Saying More than We Mean
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008Went for a sail in NY harbor over the weekend. Saw this yacht tied up to the pier…
GET A LOAD OF THE BOAT’S NAME…
Hmmm… wasn’t Utopia 1 good enough? The original “Utopia” must not have been all it’s cracked up to be.
Ditto for Utopia 2.
Clearly these people are having trouble finding happiness.
Well maybe “third time’s […]
Orwellian Olympiad (II): Ministry of Truth Revises Gymnast’s Past and Gets Caught… THIS TIME
Thursday, August 14th, 2008Following up on last week’s post on George Orwell’s 1984…
The latest Olympic development is not just that the Chinese government falsified a gymnast’s birth date on her passport, but that they went back and altered PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED NEWSPAPER REPORTS about her age!!
Columnist/Blogger David Flumenbaum has posted copies of an article from the China Daily that […]
Orwellian Olympic PR Deception: Are We Too Dumbed Down to Care?
Monday, August 11th, 2008Stuck for nearly half a day in an airport this weekend, I was browsing the itty-bitty bookstore and stumbled on George Orwell’s 1984. If you haven’t read it in a while, I’d highly recommend it.
We are so inured to the machinations of politicians, business leaders, spin doctors, and even the media that we tend to […]
Wherein We Offer a New Philosophical Framework for Understanding the Imperatives of PR
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008A recent “60 Minutes” story, originally aired on February 24, claimed that the prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Sielegman was politically motivated and directed from the White House by His Evil Eminence Karl Rove.
On the Huntsville TV station WHNT, most of the 13-minute story was lost in an 8-minute broadcast interruption. The station first […]
Free Market Malarkey II: Reductionists Gone Wild, the Theorists Want the Lobbyists to Run Your Life
Friday, December 21st, 2007This is Part II of an ongoing series…
The first post in this series got many comments — thank you to all. Especially those who were up for a conversation.
Most comments were from free-marketeers who accused me of being anti-economics. So let’s begin with this: I’m not anti-economics! It’s a wonderful science for managing systems of […]
Bryan Caplan’s Free-Market Malarkey: Why We Should Be Terrified of Economist’s “Rational” Electionomics
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007This is Part I of an ongoing series.
Arguing with an economist is like trying to eat spaghetti with a spoon. It’s slippery, messy and seldom worth the effort.
But occasionally the claims are so outlandish and the affront so egregious that one can’t back away from a confrontation. Such is the case with a screed called […]
The Case of the “Intifada” T-shirt: Don’t Be Niggardly with That Gay Swastika!
Monday, August 13th, 2007When I was a kid, in Boston in the early 1970s, bumper stickers of the “England Get Out of Ireland” variety were not uncommon. And my mother, an Irish ex-pat, while never overtly militant, very much enjoyed playing the spirited and nationalistic records of groups like the Wolftones. We sang with pride about the IRA […]