I don’t remember the last time, if ever, that I ran three memorial posts in such close succession, but I wanted to mark the passing of my friend Carol Welsh (b. 1970) on the morning of Wednesday, December 29, 2021. Carol died of complications sustained over a 21-year struggle with a brain tumor, a recurrent ependymoma malignant by location. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: December 2021
Omicron, Delta, and the Revenge of Count von Count
I heard today from a physician whose hospital is on the verge of collapse, and an ICU nurse at a different hospital who is likely struggling with COVID, but being instructed not to get tested so as not to miss work. Two fairly typical stories from the edge of the healthcare abyss, but entirely predictable and a long time in the making. “Hospitals are understaffed” is now common knowledge, not a news story. The question is why. There’s no way to answer that question in the absence of information about staffing and budget decisions, themselves connected to facts about medical billing and collecting. This article is a case in point.
Hiromi Shinya, RIP
I hate to run two memorial/obituary posts in a row, but this post by Chris Sciabarra, memorializing the generally unknown Hiromi Shinya, deserves a wider audience. I won’t try to summarize; just read it.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, RIP
I never knew either of my grandfathers, but every night in high school, growing up in the 1980s, I came home from school and soccer practice, said my prayers, and turned on the TV for the latest news from or about two elderly men half a world away–Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.
Fatal Vision: Boosters, Variants, and Equity
Getting a booster is no panacea, but not getting one may be a fatal mistake. That, at any rate, is the finding of a set of Israeli studies in the New England Journal of Medicine, one published in October, the other published just a few days ago. An excerpt from the abstract of the “Conclusions” section of the latter:
Across the age groups studied, rates of confirmed Covid-19 and severe illness were substantially lower among participants who received a booster dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine than among those who did not.
Read both articles all the way through for all of the relevant provisos and qualifications, but I think it’s fair to summarize both by saying that they jointly found that boosters reduced the incidence of both serious morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19, inclusive of all variants but Omicron (about which it’s too early to tell). Continue reading
Anti-Fascist Questions for Anti-Woke Warriors
For the past several years, “cancel culture” has been held out, mostly on the political Right, as a terrible thing that must be stopped. Personally, I regard “cancel culture” as an instance of what Ayn Rand called an “anti-concept,”
an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept.
The legitimate concept is a principled commitment to non-legalized moral accountability, which “cancel culture” equates, tendentiously, with mob rule and mass hysteria. For those wedded to the term, a principled commitment to moral accountability, outside of legalized officialdom, just is mob rule and mass hysteria. What else could moral accountability be?
Continue reading
Desert and Merit (5)
In a concluding section near the end of his chapter on desert and merit, George Sher makes a final, and to my mind puzzling claim, or set of them. Here’s the relevant passage, at length:
When someone satisfies criteria of performance established by fixed sets of conventions, he ought to receive whatever prizes, recognition, or grades those conventions dictate; and when an applicant is best-qualified for a job or educational opportunity, he ought to receive that opportunity. Yet these desert-bases, however important, do not exhaust the forms of merit that are said to create desert. We also say that persons with interesting ideas deserve to be heard, that superior political candidates deserve to be elected, that authors of outstanding books deserve recognition, and that scientists who discover vaccines or generals who lead victorious armies deserve honors and awards. We cannot plausibly ground these desert-claims in either the principles of veracity or fidelity or the requirement that pesons be treated as rational agents.…Thus, barring further developments, our working assumption–that all major desert-claims have real normative force–must here be abandoned; here, we must settle for a non-justificatory account (Sher, Desert, p. 129).
The non-justificatory account turns out to be a Humean error theory: Continue reading
A is A, Except for Book Reviews
Stephen Hicks continues the venerable if mortifying Objectivist tradition of “reviewing” a book he hasn’t read, then accusing the authors of superficiality, low intellectual standards, and wanting to exploit buzz words for click-bait. Would he endorse this procedure for reviewing his own books? Or is that too Kantian a question?
This has been installment #2 in my continuing series on Standard Objectivist Procedure or Studies in Objectivist Propaganda, or whatever I called it, not that it matters. Here is installment #1.
Oh, Ryan
Ryan Davis offers a debunking interpretation of O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” at 200ProofLiberals. After summarizing the story, he spoils the ending, then tells us why he doesn’t “buy” the story’s implications (so yes, spoiler alert below the fold). Continue reading
The Wizards of Uz
From E.M. Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born:
According to the Bible, it is Cain who created the first city, in order to have, as Bossuet puts it, a place wherein to hide his remorse. What a judgment! And how many times have I not felt its accuracy in my night walks through Paris!
So can we can infer that “the perfect and upright” Job created the first suburb in order to have a place wherein to display his self-satisfaction? Or was it to hide his despair? Or both?
Policy of Truth 