URLs du Jour

2021-09-27

[Amazon Link]
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Our Amazon Product du Jour was suggested by Instapundit Helen's Deal of the Day yesterday. This one is a magnet, for people who think they might regret a sticker someday.

  • Just in case you thought my constant refrain, "The CDC kills people" was an overreaction. You'll want to check out the (comparatively) sane Peter Suderman on the topic: The CDC Made America’s Pandemic Worse.

    The pandemic was a test of America's public health bureaucracy. It failed.

    Those failures were legion, and they were spread across multiple officials, agencies, and layers of government. But no institution failed quite as abysmally as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, through a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and astonishingly poor planning, wasted America's only chance to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 before it spread widely.

    The CDC is supposed to be America's frontline institution in the fight against infectious disease. Its job is to analyze viral threats, track their spread and development, and provide the public with relevant information about how to respond to outbreaks. Not only did the agency do this job poorly in the early stages of the pandemic, but it actively hindered efforts that would have greatly improved America's response, and it made planning errors that were both predictable and avoidable. At nearly every stage of the pandemic, the CDC got things wrong and got in the way. Its failures almost certainly made America's pandemic worse.

    And, unlike "statist" European countries", we still don't have cheap OTC Covid tests "thanks" to the FDA.


  • [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    From our "Always Useful Advice That I Need To Keep Relearning" Department. Pierre Lemieux's Avoiding Biases: Lessons from Michael Huemer. Excerpting selections from the book Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy, Amazon/Kindle link at your right.

    Rationality is the master intellectual virtue, the one that subsumes all the others. (p. 32)

    Objectivity, like all other intellectual virtues, is part of rationality. The character trait of objectivity is a disposition to resist bias, and hence to base one’s beliefs on the objective facts. The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you. (p. 32)

    The purpose of intellectual discussion is promoting truth (for yourself and others). If your view can’t survive when you treat the opposing views fairly, then that pretty much means your view is wrong. As a rational thinker, you want your beliefs to be true, so you should welcome the opportunity to discover if your own current view is wrong; then you can eliminate a mistaken belief and move closer to the truth. If you are afraid to confront the strongest opposing views, represented in the fairest way possible, that means that you suspect that your own beliefs are not up to the challenge, which means you already suspect that your beliefs are false. (p. 34)

    The human mind is not really designed for discovering abstract, philosophical truths. Our natural tendency is to try to advance our own interests or the interests of the group we identify with, and we tend to treat intellectual issues as a proxy battleground for that endeavor. Again, we don’t expressly decide to do this; we do it automatically unless we are making a concerted, conscious effort not to. And naturally, when we do this, we form all sorts of false beliefs, because reality does not adjust itself to whatever is convenient for our particular social faction. (p. 35)

    If you can only maintain your beliefs by being biased or irrational, then your beliefs are almost certainly wrong. (p. 38)

    Irrationality and bias can support any ideology, including your opponents’. Nazis, Marxists, flat-Earthers, and partisans of any other crazy or evil view can base their beliefs on irrational biases, and there is no way to reason them out of it if you’ve rejected rationality and objectivity. So don’t attack objectivity and rationality. Unless you’re an asshole and you just want intellectual chaos. (p. 39)

    Also, by the way, collect information from the most sophisticated sources, not (as most people do) the most entertaining sources. (p. 39)

    Dogmatism is probably the most common kind of failure of objectivity. (p. 40)

    I gotta get that book somehow.


  • Speaking of Michael Huemer… At his own website, he tackles the important question of the last sixty years or so: Ayn Rand: World’s Greatest Philosopher, or Incompetent Jerk?

    The title question reflects two common attitudes toward the controversial novelist/philosopher. Her followers (the “Objectivists”, or “Randroids”) often consider her a genius, the first human being to provide a completely rational philosophical foundation for everything. Her critics, however, find her a stupid jerk.

    The truth is a little of both. Ayn Rand was an intelligent and innately talented individual who nevertheless wrote some crazy-ass nonsense. To me, she is sort of a tragic figure – someone who had some great successes which were marred by tragic intellectual and personality flaws.

    On target, I think. Bonus quote: "People who are familiar with contemporary philosophy, when they look at Rand’s work, typically describe it as simplistic and poorly reasoned. That is because it is in fact simplistic and poorly reasoned." Ouch.


  • … But would probably prefer not to have. There, I finished off the headline of Kevin D. Williamson's NYPost column: Texas' new law forces the abortion debate Americans need.

    The Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade, not because abortion is evil — though it is evil — but because Roe is bad law, a fantasy woven out of the 14th Amendment, which contains not a word about abortion or the right to privacy the court has alleged to discover there. Its defects are obvious even to liberal thinkers such as Edward Lazarus, a clerk to Roe author Harry Blackmun, who declared that the opinion “borders on the indefensible.” 

    Congress should keep its nose out of the question, because Congress has no legitimate power to micromanage how states regulate abortion. That will disappoint the pro-choice lobby, who take a bizarrely sacramental view of abortion and a scriptural view of Roe. 

    But pro-lifers should gird ourselves for disappointment, too. Overturning Roe is not the end of the work but the beginning. Once the subject is returned to the legislatures, some states will abolish abortion in all or most circumstances, some states will maintain abortion regimes that are as permissive as they were under Roe or even more so, and most states will, in all likelihood, follow public opinion in taking a generally liberal approach to abortion in the first trimester and then an increasingly restrictive position thereafter. 

    Way back when, the pro-abortion folks trumpeted: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." Well, now it is a sacrament, albeit one covered in thick layers of dishonesty and euphemism.


  • What people call "current events" could be more accurately described as "perpetual events." Because there's nothing new under the sun, etc. Here's Jeff Jacoby: As Washington debates the debt limit, the hypocrisy is at flood tide. (You'll have to click a few times to get the whole thing from the Boston Globe.)

    There has been no end of dire talk about the terrible scenarios that would result from the United States defaulting on its debt to bondholders, but there is zero danger of that happening. As Moody’s, the credit-rating agency, explained during a previous debt-ceiling fight, “the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact.” Maxing out your credit card doesn’t mean you’re a deadbeat; it means you have to pay down some of the principal before you can make new charges and until then can only spend what you earn.

    If the debt ceiling isn’t hiked, holders of US Treasury bonds aren’t going to get stiffed. They’ll be fine. Washington this year is projected to raise around $3.8 trillion in taxes and tariffs. That is 10 times the roughly $380 billion needed to service the current debt.

    America can certainly cover its interest payments to lenders with what it collects in taxes. But interest is only one narrow slice of federal outlays. What Washington can’t cover is the entirety of the $6.8 trillion that the federal government is planning to spend this year — everything from Medicare to government salaries to medical research to highway funding to veterans benefits. As things stand now, roughly $3 trillion — more than 40 cents of every dollar the government spends each year — is borrowed. Those borrowed dollars keep getting added to the debt, which now approaches $30 trillion. Not even the United States can indefinitely keep this up.

    And as Herbert Stein pointed out with remarkable pith: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."


Last Modified 2024-01-20 5:01 AM EDT