There are a lot of very bright people ensconced in academia, and that’s a tragic thing, for them and for us all. Academia, you see, abuses and limits their talents.
To put it simply and directly, academia has sequestered and drained many of the best minds of our era. Academics know this and complain about it among themselves, they just don’t see any alternative. (The 21st century status quo rests upon people seeing no alternative.) Continue reading “Academia And The Tragedy of The Smart Kids”
As I’ve mentioned before, what we used to call “the offshore circuit” has been revived. It involves a fairly small group of providers and consultants, and provides professional guidance for people who’d like to structure their lives differently and gain some serious financial liberation.
My part in the group involves teaching people why and how to protect their data, and sometimes about cryptocurrencies. Continue reading “The Offshore Symposium”
Today we’ll conclude our coverage of fallacies in brief.
Kafka-trapping: A sophisticated argument or group of arguments focused upon imposing guilt upon an opponent and then using his or her sense of guilt as evidence against them.
This is obviously an especially malicious form of argument, but if used by a skilled manipulator it can be very effective. Most people, after all, have a keen sense of justice and a proclivity for self-examination. And so they can, with well chosen assertions, be made to feel guilty for something. And with that, the manipulator can close his or her case, claiming that the other person has revealed their guilt by feeling guilty. Continue reading “Fallacies In Brief, Part 3”
I haven’t written about this in seven years, and so I think it’s time to re-post about two significant experiences I had. With long-range weather forecasts being used to terrify people, I think these stories have some value. Continue reading “My Adventures At Climate Change Central”
Today we’ll continue covering fallacies in brief.
Proving too much: When an argument leads to an overly-generalized conclusion. For example: The because some notable criminals listened obsessively to Rock and Roll, Rock must cause criminality.
This trick is rather obvious, of course, but it works as so many others do: by riding on emotions to bypass analysis. Continue reading “Fallacies In Brief, Part 2”
Today we’ll start covering fallacies in brief. I think we’ve covered all the crucial ones at this point, but fallacies tend to come and go over time, and so even those which aren’t often used now may come back in a decade or two. (Beside, the fallacies I see in use may not be the same fallacies that you see in use.)
And so I’ll give brief coverage to a larger number of additional fallacies. Here we go: Continue reading “Fallacies In Brief, Part 1”
The fallacy of false equivalence (also referred to as a fallacy of inconsistency) is an equivalence drawn between two subjects, using flawed or false reasoning. The user of this fallacy makes two things sound alike – usually like they’re both the same thing – while they really aren’t. Here’s an example: Continue reading “Fallacy #17: False Equivalence”
Although most of us don’t like admitting it, we in the West are living in a state of tyranny. I won’t waste time on details, but when force-backed edicts intrude into every aspect of our lives (“Did you strap your child into a seat approved for their height and weight?”), using the T-word is a function of our emotional readiness, not an issue of fact.
What I’ll give you in this post is a solution to the present tyranny. This solution involves no violence, costs nothing, and is available to all of us. It’s even simple. But it does have one drawback: It requires you to make decisions and to act on them. Continue reading “The Antidote To Tyranny”
This week I’d like to go through some mass attacks on our thinking… high-cost, large, professional manipulations. We’ve gone through some of these before, as with the big lie of our Fallacy #13, but the ones we’ll cover today are unique, new (100 years old or less), and dangerous.
What’s also unique about these attacks is that people can be very sensitive about them. Nearly everyone has fallen for one or more of them, and people don’t like admitting their errors. As we noted in Other Attacks, Part 2, people tend to defend their mistakes, which is how errors perpetuate themselves and end up at wild extremes. Continue reading “Other Attacks, Part 5”
I had another pleasant and far-ranging conversation with Doug Casey and Matt Smith recently.
