Vox Popoli: Mailvox: an objection to the trilemma

Levels of reality and economics. 

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/10/mailvox-objection-to-trilemma.html?m=1

Mailvox: an objection to the trilemma

DSC objects to the philosopical concept of Münchhausen Trilemma. Posted without comment.

I object to the notion that what is called "fundamentalism" is no better an epistemological foundation than the other two parts of the trilemma. 

Why do chemistry, physics and biology involve so much lab-based education? Seeing something first hand offers the hope that a person can better delineate between the realm of conjecture and "real" reality, the stuff that doesn't give a fig what you think. I find that the older I get, the more of an empiricist I become. While I have broad personal experience in but a minute part of the whole world, I base my pyramids of trust on people whose primary premises match up to my own personal experience. Those who have very little first hand experience in anything must have very little data on which to base their pyramids of trust.

I aver that there are four kinds of questions: Those answerable by logic, those where experiment yields what is essentially certainty, those that yield answers that can never be better than "today's best guess," and those that cannot be answered by empiricism at all.

• As you know, some things are true by axiom, ex. a consumable cannot be consumed and still remain available for consumption. These axioms are the foundation for what Hans Hermann Hoppe describes in his essay The Democratic Leviathan.
• Hard science rests on experiments where the outcome is the same no matter how many times one considers repeating it. While dropping a stone a thousand times to see it fall may induce someone to posit that on the 1001th try it will rise when released, such a belief is clearly irrational. 
• Much of today's "science," as you've well described, falls into the third category. It is the realm of statistical study, where confidence intervals, poisson distributions and Student T tests live. The 95% confidence interval of course posits that the hypothesis is 19/20ths likely to be true, but this is not remotely the same standard as category 2 above. Vast amounts of "social science" attempt to mimic this style of study, but there's no substance to it at all. "Real" science, in my view, is that where variables can actually be controlled, a condition that is laughably absent in a vast amount of what today is billed as science.
• What happens to us when we die? Do we have consciousness beyond our physical envelope? Is there life on distant planets? What color is a virion, and if we could see it like we see a golf ball, what would it look like? These and myriad other questions cannot be answered via empiricism. Providing systematic answers to empirically unanswerable questions is the province of religion. Today's Equalist Cult religion is particularly odd, in that most of its dogma and sacraments are actually at odds with empirically-derived reality. It is thus a pure exercise of the "power" Orwell illustrated when O'Brian forces Smith to "see" a different number of fingers than O'Brian extends. The first step toward wisdom comes by calling things by their right names.

The author notes that "Human beings are rational animals." This is daffy on its face. Most humans may be capable of reasoning, but it's self-evident that few spend any time at all in this part of their mind. As Kahneman shows, experiment after experiment documents that most of the time we let the nearly autonomic part of our brain do all the thinking. Only rarely do we invoke our deliberative, analytical mind. Most people are largely creatures of emotion, and their decisions are based on what action or belief would yield the greatest emotional comfort...and it's usually to think and do what the herd surrounding them thinks and does. I was dismayed to confront that intelligence does not coassort with rationality. Very smart people are especially good at rationalizing their folly. 

 These are the premises on which I base my objection to axiom and empiricism being lumped in with circular reasoning and "turtles all the way down." Reality exists. The notion that people see different things when observing the same thing is baloney. If I drop a golf ball and simultaneously launch one horizontally, they will always hit the floor at the same time, no matter who insists with great fervor that the dropped one lands first. If, upon observing them bounce simultaneously, an observer still insists that they hit at different times, it's not a case of competing epistemologies. Some systems of thought rest on axiom. From axiom comes reliance on empiricism, trusting ones eyes when what's seen conflicts with others' ideological constructs. This is not a three part problem. Two of the trilemma's legs are folly, the third is the only means of attempting to align with reality in order to decide and act. Among today's great follies is insistence on baseless conjecture as fact. Our society is structured under Taylorist notions, that there's one best way to live, and the dogma that populates this conflicts openly with observed reality.

A modern example: Say's Law is "In order to consume, you must first produce." This is a logical axiom, given that if people consume without producing, eventually there's nothing produced and thus nothing to consume. If that's "fundamentalism" and somehow not axiomatically true, show me (Mr. Macris.) Monetary Madness since the 1960's posits that the ability to enter the market (to consume) can be created out of thin air via the act of borrowing. The IOU (generally a T-bond/T-bill) becomes wealth, and the borrowed loot goes straight into someone's hands to be used (mostly) to consume. No production precedes this consumption, so the net effect is less product available (but a vastly rising perception of wealth, both in holding the debt and in the rising prices of assets goosed by a tsunami of credit money.) 

Since the bond market low in 1981, the US gov't didn't need to tax in order to spend. This is why spending could skyrocket as tax cuts were passed. Domestic production could be shipped to China, who then sent us endless pre-landfilled junk in exchange for Treasury Debt. Since China doesn't trade in dollars, that loot came back here...and we now see that Americans pawned their land, their businesses and THEIR POLITICAL SYSTEM in return for some trinkets. China bought our legislatures, our executive branch agencies and our judiciary. Pretty smart on their part. With the helicopter drop of $1,200/person thing this summer, we now see that credit creation has entered a new phase, where the government still does not need to tax, and people no longer need to work in order to consume. Everyone's a welfare recipient now., not just people on SSDI, AFDC, Section 8, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Prior to this summer, only Big Business oligarchs and financiers received such loot. 

Where'd Say's Law go?

Vox Popoli: The end of the annual flu

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-end-of-annual-flu.html?m=1

The end of the annual flu

The medical and scientific communities can't figure out where the flu has gone or why it has virtually disappeared:

In the Southern Hemisphere, where the flu season happens during our summer months, the WHO data suggests it never took off at all. In Australia, just 14 positive flu cases were recorded in April, compared with 367 during the same month in 2019 – a 96 per cent drop. By June, usually the peak of its flu season, there were none. In fact, Australia has not reported a positive case to the WHO since July.

In Chile, just 12 cases of flu were detected between April and October. There were nearly 7,000 during the same period in 2019. And in South Africa, surveillance tests picked up just two cases at the beginning of the season, which quickly dropped to zero over the following month – overall, a 99 per cent drop compared with the previous year.

In the UK, our flu season is only just beginning. But since Covid-19 began spreading in March, just 767 cases have been reported to the WHO compared with nearly 7,000 from March to October last year. And while lab-confirmed flu cases last year jumped by ten per cent between September and October, as a new season gets under way this year they've risen by just 0.7 per cent so far.... Other research by Public Health England has confirmed this. Globally, it is estimated that rates of flu may have plunged by 98 per cent compared with the same time last year.

'This is real,' says Dr David Strain, senior clinical lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School. 'There's no doubt that we're seeing far fewer incidences of flu.'

So where has flu gone?

Covid-19 is the flu, obviously. Despite whatever differences there might be between a coronavirus and a rhinovirus, Covid-19 is simply playing the role that the annual flu strain, which is different every year, does. It is a little more dangerous than the normal flu virus, though considerably less dangerous than certain historical strains. Which is why all the lockdown and mask nonsense is now totally pointless, and is merely delaying the natural process of the virus working its way through the population before it finally peters out.

It wasn't a bad idea to err on the side of caution when the virulence of the disease was unknown. But now we know, so there is no reason to continue being paranoid about it.

Truth in US Is Being Drowned Out by the Lies of the Left

This is an excellent summary of all the lies Democrats believe and spread. Ironically, Prager adds the liberals aren't leftists lie at the beginning, as it liberals are the moderate Democrats. There are no moderate Dems, look at Congressional votes for Obamacare and SCOTUS. There once were classical liberals who simply wanted more liberty, unfortunately the word has been perverted like everything else leftists touch. They are all communists now, it's just a matter of whether they admit it or run cover as ignorant useful idiots who pretend to be reasonable. 

Also, Prager should have added these lies proceed from the father of lies, Satan himself who is laughing at our decay and pain. 

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/25/america-is-drowning-in-the-lies-of-the-left-truth/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=america-is-drowning-in-the-lies-of-the-left-truth

America Is Drowning in the Lies of the Left

Dennis Prager / @DennisPrager / October 25, 2020 /

The father of modern leftism, Vladimir Lenin, pictured here, named the Soviet communist newspaper "Pravda," the Russian word for "truth." (Photo: Library of Congress/Corbis/VC/Getty Images)

There are conservatives who lie, and there are liberals who lie, but both conservatism and liberalism hold truth to be a supreme value.

COVID-19 explodes the myth that women ‘opt’ out of the workforce | The Japan Times

Is it that women opt out OR that given the demands of parenting with two working adults one must do more care for kids and that responsibility disproportionately falls to women for obvious reasons: child birth, maternal instincts, caring and empathy, male preference for things over people, and skill set and earning power differences. The erasing union jobs and artificial supply deflation for qualified workers means that every family has to make the choice which spouse is the primary caretaker? Most families when asked who will take care of the kids seem to choose females, but some chose males. The decision is not forced on women but upon married couples. 

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/10/25/commentary/world-commentary/coronavirus-women-workforce/

COVID-19 explodes the myth that women 'opt' out of the workforce

Sarah Green CarmichaelOct 25, 2020

The opt-out myth looms large in U.S. culture. In fact, only 11% of women are out of the workforce to care for children full-time at any given time. | BLOOMBERG

In August and September, more than a million people dropped out of the workforce. Eighty percent of them were women. Women have been losing jobs at a rate far higher than that of men throughout this recession, figures that can't be entirely explained by industry effects. And it might get worse. One in four employed women (one in three mothers) are considering quitting or dialing back at work, according to McKinsey — the first time in six years of research that they've found any difference in men's and women's interest in quitting.

Working parents are especially feeling the crunch. A FlexJobs survey of working parents found that 25% of fathers and mothers had reduced their hours to cope with childcare demands. But women were much more likely than men (17% to 10%) to quit. While the pandemic has forced all parents to take on more housework and childcare, studies show mothers taking on the vast majority of it.

What's happening here is pretty obvious, and predictable: A lot of extra care work is falling on women and driving them out of the workforce.

I hope this will be the end of the "opt-out" myth — the assumption that one reason, maybe even the main reason, you don't see more women leading organizations or governments is that so many women "choose" to stay home. In reality, the number of women who give up their careers is small, and the choice is almost never truly a free one.

The opt-out myth looms large in our culture. In a survey, Harvard Business School professor Robin Ely found that large majorities of women and men think that women "prioritizing family over work" is the primary barrier to women's career advancement. In fact, only 11% of women are out of the workforce to care for children full-time at any given time. Of Gen X women, only 28% had ever taken a break of six months or more to care for children. That's not enough to explain why there are so few women in the halls of power.

While this time away from work is often portrayed as a choice, the evidence shows that it's usually a choice reluctantly made. Research has uncovered three major external factors that steer women in this direction: inflexible workplaces, oblivious husbands and bad public policy.

Interviews with professional women who drop out point to intransigent workplaces as the biggest problem. The U.S. remains a country where only 19% of private-sector workers have access to paid family leave. Many women find their requests for flex time or other post-baby accommodations denied. In time-greedy professions such as law, consulting and finance, a request to work only 40 hours a week can be seen as equivalent to going part time.

An important secondary factor is how much parenting fathers do, and how much work they do around the house. Two-thirds of women who drop out of the workforce cite a lack of support from their husbands. While husbands often offer verbal and emotional support to their wives (saying "I'll go along with whatever you decide," or "You can do whatever you want"), this does not necessarily translate into material support. And it's material support — supervising Zoom school or doing household chores unprompted — that has a positive impact on wives' careers, not to mention marital stability. Yet men don't always realize how little they're helping; time-use studies find that men overestimate how much housework they do. (Data on same-sex couples are more limited, but more hopeful: Apparently when gender stereotypes don't dictate who does the laundry, more equitable arrangements are easier to imagine.)

The third problem here is public policy. The U.S. has always struggled to make day care affordable. Paid leave is not guaranteed. All of this puts more pressure on parents. Before the pandemic, women had higher labor force participation rates in countries where childcare is subsidized and maternity leave is paid, as in Israel and Sweden. And most American women who drop out return to the workforce within two years. Imagine that the U.S. had paid maternity leave and affordable infant care; these women might never quit their jobs.This year, it's obvious that many women are dropping out of the U.S. workforce because schools and day care have not fully reopened. Husbands are pitching in, but not enough. And policy makers are MIA, apparently expecting women to be the shock absorbers of the economy.

So let's kill the term "opt out." When women leave the workforce, they're not exercising their options — they've run out of them.

Sarah Green Carmichael is an editor with Bloomberg Opinion. She was previously managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron's, and an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted the HBR Ideacast.

PHOTO GALLERY (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

Operation Dark Winter - Wikipedia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dark_Winter?fbclid=IwAR2ZRR-b88REx3-UNfuEvDHVwRCeSrNnZPG5vVOJbsHKVrbGBiPzksPNrng

Operation Dark Winter

Learn more This article needs additional citations for verification.

Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001.^[1][2][3] It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.

Operation Dark Winter
Location	Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, U.S.
Date	June 22, 2001 – June 23, 2001

Overview

Objective

Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely^{[citation needed]} intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.

Scenario

Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.

The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.

Summary of findings

According to UPMC's Center for Health Security, Dark Winter outlined several key findings with respect to the United States healthcare system's ability to respond to a localized bioterrorism event:

• An attack on the United States with biological weapons could threaten vital national security interests.^[4]

In addition to the possibility of massive civilian casualties, Dark Winter outlined the possible breakdown in essential institutions, resulting in a loss of confidence in government, followed by civil disorder, and a violation of democratic processes by authorities attempting to restore order. Shortages of vaccines and other drugs affected the response available to contain the epidemic, as well as the ability of political leaders to offer reassurance to the American people.^[5] This led to great public anxiety and flight by people desperate to get vaccinated, and it had a significant effect on the decisions taken by the political leadership.^[5] In addition, Dark Winter revealed that a catastrophic biowarfare event in the United States would lead to considerably reduced U.S. strategic flexibility abroad.^[4]

• Current organizational structures and capabilities are not well suited for the management of a biowarfare attack.^[4]

Dark Winter revealed that major "fault lines" exist between different levels of government (federal, state, and local), between government and the private sector, among different institutions and agencies, and within the public and private sector. Leaders are unfamiliar with the character of bioterrorist attacks, available policy options, and their consequences. Federal and state priorities may be unclear, differ, or conflict; authorities may be uncertain; and constitutional issues may arise.^[5] For example, state leaders wanted control of decisions regarding the imposition of disease-containment measures (e.g., mandatory vs. voluntary isolation and vaccination),^[5] the closure of state borders to all traffic and transportation,^[5] and when or whether to close airports.^[5] Federal officials, on the other hand, argued that such issues were best decided on a national basis to ensure consistency and to give the President maximum control of military and public-safety assets.^[5] Leaders in states most affected by smallpox wanted immediate access to smallpox vaccine for all citizens of their states,^[5] but the federal government had to balance these requests against military and other national priorities.^[5] State leaders were opposed to federalizing the National Guard, which they were relying on to support logistical and public supply needs,^[5] while a number of federal leaders argued that the National Guard should be federalized.^[5]

• There is no surge capability in the U.S. healthcare and public health systems,^[5] or in the pharmaceutical and vaccine industries.^[4]

The exercise was designed to simulate a sudden and unexpected biowarfare event for which the United States healthcare system was unprepared. In the absence of sufficient preparation, Dark Winter revealed that the lack of sufficient vaccine or drugs to prevent the spread of disease severely limited management options.^[5] Due to the institutionally limited "surge capacity" of the American healthcare system, hospitals quickly became overwhelmed and rendered effectively inoperable by the sudden and continued influx of new cases, exacerbated by patients with common illnesses who feared they might have smallpox,^[5] and people who were otherwise healthy, but concerned about their possible exposure.^[5] The challenges of making correct diagnoses and rationing scarce resources, combined with shortages of health care staff, who were themselves worried about becoming infected or bringing infection home to their families, imposed a huge burden on the health care system.^[4] The simulation also noted that while demand was highest in cities and states that had been directly attacked,^[5] by the time victims became symptomatic, they were geographically dispersed, with some having traveled far from the original attack site.^[5]

The simulation also found that without sufficient surge capability, public health agencies' analysis of the scope, source and progress of the epidemic was greatly impeded, as was their ability to educate and reassure the public, and their capacity to limit casualties and the spread of disease.^[4] For example, even after the smallpox attack was recognized, decision makers were confronted with many uncertainties and wanted information that was not immediately available. (In fact, they were given more information on locations and numbers of infected people than would likely be available in reality.)^[5] Without accurate and timely information, participants found it difficult to quickly identify the locations of the original attacks; to immediately predict the likely size of the epidemic on the basis of initial cases; to know how many people were exposed; to find out how many were hospitalized and where; or to keep track of how many had been vaccinated.^[5]

• Dealing with the media will be a major immediate challenge for all levels of government.^[4]

Dark Winter revealed that information management and communication (e.g., dealing with the press effectively, communication with citizens, maintaining the information flows necessary for command and control at all institutional levels) will be a critical element in crisis/consequence management. For example, participants worried that it would not be possible to forcibly impose vaccination or travel restrictions on large groups of the population without their general cooperation.^[5] To gain that cooperation, the President and other leaders in Dark Winter recognized the importance of persuading their constituents that there was fairness in the distribution of vaccine and other scarce resources,^[5] that the disease-containment measures were for the general good of society,^[5] that all possible measures were being taken to prevent the further spread of the disease,^[5] and that the government remained firmly in control despite the expanding epidemic.^[5]

• Should a contagious bioweapon pathogen be used, containing the spread of disease will present significant ethical, political, cultural, operational, and legal challenges.^[4]

In Dark Winter, some members advised the imposition of geographic quarantines around affected areas, but the implications of these measures (e.g., interruption of the normal flow of medicines, food and energy supplies, and other critical needs) were not clearly understood at first.^[5] In the end, it is not clear whether such draconian measures would have led to a more effective interruption of disease spread.^[5] What's more allocation of scarce resources necessitated some degree of rationing,^[5] creating conflict and significant debate between participants representing competing interests.

Key participants

President	The Hon. Sam Nunn
National Security Advisor	The Hon. David Gergen
Director of Central Intelligence	The Hon. R. James Woolsey, Jr.
Secretary of Defense	The Hon. John P. White
Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff	General John Tilelli, USA (Ret.)
Secretary of Health and Human Services	The Hon. Margaret Hamburg
Secretary of State	The Hon. Frank Wisner
Attorney General	The Hon. George Terwilliger
Director, Federal Emergency Management Agency	Mr. Jerome Hauer
Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation	The Hon. William Sessions
Governor of Oklahoma	The Hon. Frank Keating
Press Secretary, Gov. Frank Keating (OK)	Mr. Dan Mahoney
Correspondent, NBC News	Mr. Jim Miklaszewski
Pentagon Producer, CBS News	Ms. Mary Walsh
Reporter, British Broadcasting Corporation	Ms. Sian Edwards
Reporter, The New York Times	Ms. Judith Miller
Reporter, Freelance	Mr. Lester Reingold

In popular culture

• Tom Clancy's The Division, a video game inspired by Dark Winter.
• I am Pilgrim, a novel by Terry Hayes, Corgi. pp. 313–315

See also

• 2001 anthrax attacks

References

1. O'Leary, N. P. M. (2005). "Bio-terrorism or Avian Influenza: California, The Model State Emergency Health Powers Act, and Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Emergency". California Western Law Review. California Western School of Law. 42 (2): 249–286. ISSN 0008-1639.
2. Chauhan, Sharad S. (2004). Biological Weapons. APH Publishing. pp. 280–282. ISBN 978-81-7648-732-0.
3. Kunstler, James Howard (2006). The Long Emergency. Grove Press. pp. 175–178. ISBN 978-0-8021-4249-8.
4. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} "Dark Winter – About the Exercise". University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – Center for Health Security. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Retrieved 11 July 2015.^{[dead link]}
5. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa} O'Toole, Tara; Michael, Mair; Inglesby, Thomas V. (2002). "Shining Light on "Dark Winter"". Clinical Infectious Diseases. 34 (7): 972–983. doi:10.1086/339909. PMID 11880964. Retrieved 11 July 2015.

External links

• Operation Dark Winter
• Shining Light on "Dark Winter" (from the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases)
• Local Response to a National Threat
• Preventing "Dark Winter"
• CNN: Dark Winter and lack of USA Preparedness
• Dark Winter Teaches Bioterror Lessons
• Dark Winter at SourceWatch

Some Students Want Me Fired for a Thought Experiment - WSJ

Unpopular thoughts. 
https://www-wsj-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/some-students-want-me-fired-for-a-thought-experiment-11594854800

Some Students Want Me Fired for a Thought Experiment

Civilization's progress depends on the freedom to express eccentric and provocative ideas.

By

Walter E. Block

July 15, 2020 7:13 pm ET

Loyola University in New Orleans.

Photo: Getty Images

A large group of students want me fired from my faculty position. The main charge they make against me is that I believe slavery is wrong for the wrong reasons—"because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong."

In truth, I repudiate slavery on both grounds. I even favor reparations, but not from all whites to all blacks. Many whites came to the U.S. long after 1865 and owe nothing to anyone. Many blacks, too, are, or are descended from, recent arrivals, and are thus entitled to no compensation.

Slavery should have been declared a crime, ex post facto. The guilty should have been imprisoned and their property given to their victims, the new ex-slaves. "Forty acres and a mule" is a rough approximation of the compensation that was due. Nowadays if a great-grandchild of slaves can demonstrate this connection, he should be able to obtain acreage from the great-grandchildren of slave holders who improperly held onto their plantations.

It's true I have argued "there is nothing inherently wrong with slavery"—an eccentric and provocative view. To understand it, consider a thought experiment: Suppose my son has a dread disease. Its cure costs $10 million, which I don't have. You do, so we make a deal: You give me the funds. I come to your farm to harvest crops or to your home to give you economics lessons. If you don't like the way I perform these duties, you may physically assault or kill me.

Is this a legitimate contract in the free society? I say yes. We both benefit from it, at least in theory, as in all voluntary transactions. Hence there is nothing inherently wrong with slavery; it is illicit if it is imposed by one person over another, but not if both parties agree. (I have similarly argued in these pages that socialism is unobjectionable if it is voluntary.)

The petition authors are not the first to misrepresent my views. In 2014 a reporter from the New York Times interviewed me. I tried to explain the gigantic chasm between voluntary and coercive slavery and patiently expounded that the latter should certainly not be legal. The paper published a story that implied I, a staunch libertarian, favored actual slavery as practiced in the U.S. until 1865. I sued for libel. The lower court threw out my case, but the appellate court ruled in my favor. I settled with the newspaper on mutually agreeable terms, and it ran a correction more than six months after the story's publication.

Hardly anyone, even among libertarian intellectuals, agrees with my case for permitting voluntary slavery. I can well understand why it would repel people, including the students who signed the petition. But the defense of academic freedom, and specifically of the freedom to think about and express eccentric and provocative ideas, is crucially important for progress in philosophy and science. If scholars are forbidden to probe the implications of basic principles wherever it leads them, so much the worse for the future prospects of civilization.

John Stuart Mill put it best in "On Liberty": "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. . . . Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. . . . He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them."

Even my harshest critics will readily acknowledge that I defend the principles of private property rights, liberty and laissez-faire capitalism in earnest and to my utmost ability.

Although the students who signed the petition—none of whom, I believe, have ever taken one of my classes—want me fired, I bear them no ill will. They are young people, just starting out. My door is always open. I invite any and all of the signatories of the petition, some 650 of them so far, to engage in a dialogue with me about these issues. More than 4,500 people have signed a counterpetition saying I deserve a raise. I am very grateful to them.

Mr. Block is a professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans.

Wonder Land: The pre-liberal idea of settling issues with coercion has made a comeback in the U.S. Image: Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Best regards,

Dr. Jeff Darville 

Brevity due to mobile device

Sent from my iPhone

A reasonable article by a moderate which Joe Biden can not follow because he's beholden to the radical fringe.

https://www.newsweek.com/why-supreme-court-has-nine-justices-opinion-1540685

Why the Supreme Court has Nine Justices | Opinion

On 10/21/20 at 6:00 AM EDT

Keith E. Whittington , William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Princeton University

In recent years, partisans on both sides of the political aisle have accused the sitting president of trying to "pack the courts." Democrats are now making those accusations with a vengeance. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett is "the court-packing the public should be focused on." Biden ally and Delaware senator Chris Coons asserted that the confirmation of Barrett would "constitute court-packing." Longtime Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee member Dick Durbin contended, "The American people have watched the Republicans packing the court for the past three and a half years."

That's not what "court-packing" means. Throughout American history, presidents routinely tried—with some ease when they were of the same party as the majority of the Senate, with some difficulty when the Senate was in unfriendly hands—to appoint judges who share their own visions of the Constitution and American governance. When vacancies open up on the bench due to the death or retirement of sitting judges, presidents fill those seats with new judges who share their values. What else would they do?

Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, and the author of Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Good advice on how leaders connect with others. 

https://hbr-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/hbr.org/amp/2020/10/storytelling-can-make-or-break-your-leadership

Storytelling Can Make or Break Your Leadership

"It's a new goal-setting framework." That was one of my large enterprise clients' attempts at an inspirational rallying cry for their rollout of Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. As you might expect, it wasn't met with much enthusiasm: "Why do we need a new goal-setting system?" managers and employees protested. "What will this mean for my evaluation? Am I still on track for that promotion?"

The problem wasn't anything inherent to the proposal — instead, what was lacking was the executive's storytelling. Telling a compelling story is how you build credibility for yourself and your ideas. It's how you inspire an audience and lead an organization. Whether you need to win over a colleague, a team, an executive, a recruiter, or an entire conference audience, effective storytelling is key. As a speaker, publisher, and author of four books and dozens of articles, I've found that my most effective stories all shared the following five characteristics:

1. Be audience-specific.

2. Contextualize your story.

3. Humanize your story.

4. Make it action-oriented.

5. Keep it humble.