Enquiry Concerning Human Misunderstanding: John Derbyshire's new blog

Is that a smirk I see on David Hume's face? Yes it is. He has just read John Derbyshire's new blog, Secular Right, and he is trying not to laugh.

Derbyshire, the National Review writer who earlier this year reviewed Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed without actually seeing it, has a new blog: "Secular Right: Reality & Reason". Derbyshire and his colleagues will presumably be blogging there about other things of which they have no direct experience.

Reality and reason, for example.

The Derbyshire Method of addressing issues apparently is already in evidence at Secular Right, where in its very first post, on its "What is the Secular Right" page, this comment appears:

We believe that conservative principles and policies need not be grounded in a specific set of supernatural claims. Rather, conservatism serves the ends of “Human Flourishing,” what the Greeks termed Eudaimonia. Secular conservatism takes the empirical world for what it is, and accepts that the making of it the best that it can be is only possible through our faculties of reason.

But in the very first comment on the post, "Dan" remarks:

I am somewhat amused. Hume’s whole moral-political thought as premised on precisely the rejection of the ancient way of thinking. On Hume’s view, there is exactly no such thing as genuine human flourishing.

Jeesh.

And then the wheels continue to fall off.

One of the contributors to Secular Right is Razib Khan, a science writer whose pseudonym for purposes of the blog is "David Hume." Khan has several posts about the dangers of scepticism about science--this from someone using the name of a man who spent a whole book arguing against the rationality of inductive reasoning.

Obviously Khan hasn't actually read Hume. Are we surprised? This is John Derbyshire's blog, remember.

This is going to fun.

If Jack Sparrow were an economist

The economics of pirating, care of Scientific American.

Friedrich Hayek on inflation

Friedrich Hayek, the great Austrian economist, on Meet the Press in 1975. The circumstances at the time was primarily inflation and rising unemployment. Not exactly the situation we're in now, but the attempt to gin up the economy with infusing massive amounts government money could bring back the inflation beast. Hayek's most important point is that inflation draws labor into jobs that can only be sustained by further inflation.

Hat tip to Division of Labor

Queue up the audio here.

P. J. O'Roarke angling for a newspaper bailout

Hello? Bailout people? Mr. Secretary of the Treasury Paulson? Aren't you forgetting somebody? Like me? I'm a print journalist. Talk about financial meltdown! Print journalists may soon have to send their kids to public schools, feed dry food to their cats, and give up their leases on Prius automobiles and get the Hummers that are being offered at such deep discounts these days.

The print journalism industry is taking a beating, circling the drain, running on fumes. Especially running on fumes. You could smell Frank Rich all the way to Nome when Sarah Palin was nominated. Not that print journalism actually emits much in the way of greenhouse gases. We have an itty-bitty carbon footprint. We're earth-friendly. The current press run of an average big city daily newspaper can be made from one tree. Compare that to the global warming hot air produced by talk radio, cable TV, and Andrew Sullivan. [more]

Henry Paulson's letters home from summer camp

From Iowahawk, on target as usual.

How bad is the economy (compared to the 1980s, when it was really bad)?

The Tyranny of Liberalism

I am in the middle of James Kalb's extraordinarily insightful new book, The Tyranny of Liberalism. I will be reviewing it later, but for the time being here is a speech Kalb recently made to the H. L. Mencken club that covers the same ground as the book.

Canada's Queen's University to correct thought crimes with a smile

The Tolerance Police change their tactics. Now they're going to indoctrinate us nicely.

Victor David Hanson on using Latin as a weapon against the illiberal white separatists who run our schools

Four years of high-school Latin would dramatically arrest the decline
in American education. In particular, such instruction would do more
for minority youths than all the ‘role model’ diversity sermons on
Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Montezuma, and Caesar Chavez put together.
Nothing so enriches the vocabulary, so instructs about English grammar
and syntax, so creates a discipline of the mind, an elegance of
expression, and serves as a gateway to the thinking and values of
Western civilization as mastery of a page of Virgil or Livy (except
perhaps Sophocles’s Antigone in Greek or Thucydides’ dialogue at
Melos). After some 20 years of teaching mostly minority youth Greek,
Latin, and ancient history and literature in translation (1984-2004), I
came to the unfortunate conclusion that ethnic studies, women
studies—indeed, anything “studies”— were perhaps the fruits of some
evil plot dreamed up by illiberal white separatists to ensure that poor
minority students in the public schools and universities were offered
only a third-rate education.

Hugh Laurie, on the solution to our problems

Thanks to Freddie at What's Wrong with the World for this one.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel on Intelligent Design as science

This article by philosopher Thomas Nagel is one of the better treatments I have seen of the Intelligent Design issue.

From the "C'mon" department:

Even though I disagree with him on a lot of issues, Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars is normally fairly sensible--a sensibility tempered by the penchant to point to all the silly things on the right that even most people on the right would repudiate and a tendency to ignore the stronger arguments against his socially leftish positions.

But normally he doesn't descend into blatant cant as he does in a recent post about Proposition 8 advocates, who, he says, are shocked that people want to boycott them for their positions.

Both Brayton and the article he links to in his recent post play a little game in which they pretend that it's boycotts, not blacklisting and intolerance that disturb many Prop. 8 advocates.

If you can't actually respond to arguments from people who disagree with you, then just pretend they said something else and respond to that. It's clearly the preferred tactic of Prop. 8 opponents.