Today a history of victimization can be used to confer automatic legitimacy on a group, and to found a claim for special treatment. In turn, claimant victims are tempted to exaggerate. It can be rhetorically useful to magnify the degree of oppression experienced by one’s forbears, the better to secure the fruits…
I’ve been investing in and following the stock market for almost 35 years now. By the mid-1990s, twenty years ago, I was married, with a family portfolio worth over $100,000, and a well-established daily routine of reading about each day’s stock market action in the morning newspaper. I read stock…
[Please read Part I of this post first] Part V: Newtonian science & low hanging fruit As science advanced over the 19th and early 20th century, adding triumph after triumph, the seeds of scientism were laid. Having advanced so far, and conquered so many fields, was there any line too far,…
[Please read Part I of this post first] Part IV: The disunity of science This next part sketches an account of the disunity of science, one which makes room for Popper, but one which creates other discomforts for philosophy of science, which has generally been committed to the unity of science,…
[Please read Part I of this post first] Part III: What now of Popper? Maybe, Popper was a philosophical dead end. Maybe, falsifiability was never central or important for demarcating science. Might falsifiability have been naught but its own bold conjecture, since superseded? For those who follow Popper, scientists should never…
[Please read Part I of this post first] Part II: The Science of Climate Change From this point, it becomes too vague to refer to “climate change.” There are several knowledge claims at issue, and the availability of evidence, and the caliber of this evidence, differs across claims. For instance, there’s…
In this election year, belief or disbelief in climate change has become a litmus test: take a position, and you reveal yourself to be either Democrat or Republican. In keeping with the polarization of these times, there is no middle ground, no possibility of being unsure, no viable agnostic position.…
In tax slang, a donut hole occurs when a subsidy or tax rate goes down, and then back up again. The term entered the lexicon when the Medicare D prescription program was introduced. Participants had their drug purchases covered for the first $2000 or so, and then had to bear all…