Society, Culture, and Economics

Meritocracy: Should it Evolve or Go Extinct?

/ Thomas Harper / 9 Comments
meritocracy critical race theory

One of the main issues that proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) have with the liberal status quo is the idea of meritocracy. Ideally, meritocracy means that the persons who are best qualified for some position in the economy (or even society at large) will be the ones who obtain those positions. The CRT proponent will say that meritocracy is not only bad in practice, but also bad in principle. Thus, some other criteria – such as ones status in a particular group, such as race or sex – ought to be used when determining who fills different positions.

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Afghanistan Withdrawal: Symptoms and Etiology

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment
Afghanistan withdrawl Taliban

I have not made a post here about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan not because I don’t have opinions about it, but because I don’t really have a hot take on it. The war was misguided from very early on, strategically inept, and the withdrawal was a complete boondoggle. I think one would be hard pressed to find many differing opinions on that third point, though possibly for different reasons.

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Classical Liberalism in a Godless World

/ Thomas Harper / 4 Comments
politics without religion gen z atheism

Classical liberalism was the inauguration of ideas such as personal and economic liberty, secular government, and being allowed to define happiness based on your personal beliefs. What has resulted from the liberalism of western society is an atomization of our personal lives. People feel less connection to family and community; relationships have become another avenue to pursue happiness, with the consequence that friendships and romantic partners, like material possessions, can be jettisoned as soon as they don’t spark joy; and shallow materialism has become a stand-in for happiness. Is this because we lost what allowed liberalism to work in the beginning – namely, religion?

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COVID19: Hysteria or Crisis?

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covid hysteria stockholm syndrome or crisis

The death toll in the U.S. as a result of COVID is equal to the U.S. death toll of WW1 and WW2 combined, but in half the time. This is not even mentioning the people who got sick but survived and are now dealing with long term complications and financial stress as a direct result of being sick with COVID19. Was (and is) our reaction to the COVID19 pandemic hysteria? Or was/is it a reaction commensurate with a real crisis?

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COVID and Gain of Function Research

/ Thomas Harper / 2 Comments
Anthony Fauci Rand Paul gain of function

About a month ago I recorded a video examining the scientific evidence of the lab-leak hypothesis for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Since then, a heated exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci has transpired in which the issue of whether the United States, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has funded so-called gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). I was planning on making another video on this subject (and probably will at some point), but after some discussion with a commenter on my earlier video, some more philosophical questions have emerged that I am going to discuss here a bit.

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Cancel Culture: Good or Bad?

/ Thomas Harper / 10 Comments
cancel culture social media outrage

So-called “cancel culture” is the inclination, usually on social media, to draw negative attention toward those individuals who have transgressed certain cultural mores. This is often observed when someone has made a social media post that is construed as bigoted against a marginalized group. This “cancel culture” is an interesting phenomenon that takes something very human – ostracizing transgressors – and cranking it up exponentially.

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Why I Am No Longer a Libertarian

/ Thomas Harper / 9 Comments
libertarian philosophy

The first election in which I voted was the 2004 race between the Democrat challenger John Kerry and the Republican incumbent George W. Bush. I voted for Kerry primarily because I was against the war in Iraq. In 2008 I voted for Barack Obama, again because of the war (and because I didn’t like McCain’s hawkishness), but also because I believed Obama to be the candidate that would best preserve the civil liberties that Bush had been attempting to dismantle during his tenure. By 2012, though, I had become disillusioned with the Democratic party – Obama did not deliver on the things I felt were important (getting out of our Middle Eastern wars and upholding civil liberties at home). I could never bring myself to vote Republican, though, since in my mind they were (and still are) the party of neocon war hawks and pearl-clutching social conservatives. So, in 2012 I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian party candidate (which I did again in 2016; I voted for the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen in 2020).

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Veganism, Animal Rights, and Cognitive Dissonance

/ Thomas Harper / 6 Comments
egg industry chick maceration

I am not a vegan, or even a vegetarian, but I recognize my own cognitive dissonance on the issue. That’s not to award myself any brownie points or anything, just a statement of fact. Indeed, it likely only makes my own cognitive dissonance on the issue even worse.

I think even the most avid hunter or advocate of the carnivore diet would decline to offer any defense of the factory farming industry, which is an important subcategory of the overarching animal rights issue in general. But there is more hypocrisy involved than just the overt acceptance of factory farming imposed by law and the tacit acceptance of factory farming in everyday people as they turn a blind eye to it and continue consuming animal products, thereby maintaining the very demand that resulted in the invention of factory farming.

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Richard Dawkins Tweet and Transgender Identity

/ Thomas Harper / 2 Comments
Richard Dawkins transgender tweet

Recently, the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins stirred up controversy with a tweet wondering about the differences between transgender identity and so-called trans-racial identity a la Rachel Dolezal. This upset people for many reasons, but one of them is his word choice: saying that transgender people “choose” to identify as the gender opposite to the sex they were born with. The backlash resulted in Dawkins having his 1996 Humanist of the Year award revoked by the American Humanist Association, which caused its own controversy.

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Whiteness and Different Flavors of Racism

/ Thomas Harper / 5 Comments
critical race theory whiteness

I recently read the article on FiveThirtyEight by Hakeem Jefferson and Koji Takahashi titled How The Politics Of White Liberals And White Conservatives Are Shaped By Whiteness. According to the article, and everything else in recent years on the topic of racism and ‘whiteness’, what I have to say will be motivated only by my racism, but hey, I thought I’d take a wack at it, anyway.

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Separating Content Creator and Content: The Growth or Death of the Author?

/ Thomas Harper / 1 Comment
Louis CK Joss Whedon Marilyn Manson allegations accusations

When an artist does something heinous (or, at least, is accused of something heinous), can we separate the artist from their art? This conundrum has become more salient in the Me Too era, where many people in film, TV, music, comedy, influencer, and other forms of entertainment and content creation are called out for their bad behavior. There doesn’t seem to be any readily available answers, but that doesn’t mean these aren’t important questions to ask.

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The Other Five Crises of the American Regime

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment

The article written by Michael Lind titled “The Five Crises of the American Regime” attempts to diagnose the underlying causes of the United States’ current situation – that of increasingly polarized politics and the anger and grievances of the polity. It is a great article, and I recommend reading the whole thing. Here, though, I want to discuss five other crises that are contributing to the decline and fall of the American Empire.

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Why I Voted Third Party

/ Thomas Harper / 1 Comment

During these declining days of the U.S. Empire, everything has become politicized. People demand political participation, if not full on activism (for their preferred positions, of course), from celebrities, corporations, and family members alike. The politicization of everything is, of course, a prelude to totalitarianism: your every action has political implications, and therefore you must always be virtue signaling, demonstrating your loyalty to the cause. My own deep-seated cynicism about politics has been a blessing and a curse. And it’s also why I voted third party.

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Why do Humans Care About Fame?

/ Thomas Harper / 3 Comments

Humans seem to be evolutionarily predisposed towards interest in what other people are doing, since this has allowed for the social cohesion that’s been instrumental to our survival. There is also an element that, the more other people there are who care what a particular person says and does, the more people will care what that particular person says and does, creating a positive feedback loop. Social status in the form of notability must have developed as a way of attaining reproductive access.

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Amy Coney Barrett, Mitch McConnell, The Supreme Court, The Senate, The 2020 Election: The End of the United States?

/ Thomas Harper / 1 Comment

COVID-19 is yesterdays news. The number 200,000 is too large, it becomes abstract: those aren’t people, they’re just a number – a statistic rather than a tragedy. Now we can enjoy the bread and circuses of (national) politics while the tent collapses around us: the election is less than 6 weeks away and a liberal judge inconveniently died. Amidst the politically-motivated hagiography being heaped onto the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump has put forth his own candidate: Amy Coney Barrett. For many, this is beyond the pale.

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Language Games, Assimilation, and Accommodation: Using Wittgenstein and Piaget to Understand Epistemic Disunity

/ Thomas Harper / Leave a comment

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously talked about language as an interconnected assemblage of language games that make up a world-picture. A world-picture are all of the assumptions, norms, and grounds that a community holds as certain, and from there certain propositions in the language games the community employs will be either true or false. While I somewhat disagree with Wittgenstein’s conclusion that the truth criteria of any proposition is its proper usage within a language game, rather than the proposition’s correspondence with reality, I think his analysis gives a good framework for examining the epistemic disunity in the culture of the west.

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