Inactivism

What made us rich was liberty, not helpful nudges and lovely industrial policies and wonderful protections enforced by the government’s monopoly of coercion, on display in China in the hugely unprofitable governmental enterprises.--McCloskey

Happy Halloween!

Tremendous series. I stayed up til the end last night. Nothing I expected--or anybody expected. Just a terrific event. Washington deserved every bit of it.



Rob Lowe and Liv Tyler on a redo TV series?

Fighting sexual inequality: Monogamy reduces the ability of high-status males to monopolize women and helped to equalize mating opportunities. Reproductive justice! This decreased violent competition among males. Jordan Peterson has been especially vocal about the sexual-egalitarian and violence-reduction benefits of monogamy.

AR-15: AR stands for ArmaLite Rifle, which is manufactured by Colt Manufacturing Co. 

If the solidarity and love for our fellow compatriots that we do not personally know led us to forbid the importation of goods from other producers that we also do not personally know - say, like those in Asia or Europe - we would destroy the ability of markets to support specialization and thereby create wealth and human betterment.  Such conflict prominently takes the form of sharp controversies over inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, and whether or to what extent wealth creation generates inequality through innovation and the subsequent distribution of its benefits.--Smith and Wilson.
If politics disrupt that relationship--through whatever stated grand motive (like "social justice")--that virtuous relationship is replaced by something else, certainly inferior to what it started with. Controlling wealth creation is more than arrogant, it is by definition destructive.

Science: from Latin scientia, present participle of scire (to know). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to cut or split), which also gave us schism!

An unmanned X-37B space plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, wrapping up a record 780 days in orbit, the US Air Force said Sunday. The mission broke the mysterious plane's own record by spending more than two years in space. "The X-37B continues to demonstrate the importance of a reusable space plane," secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in a statement.

Competition is, to paraphrase Hayek, how we decide who will serve us best.  (Murphy--Jon, not the dog)

“At this time there are no known benefits for taking CBD over-the-counter,” explains Dr. Davey Smith, Chief of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego. “CBD is this generation’s snake oil, where millions are engaging with the product without evidence of any benefit.”

On October 31, 1517, legend has it that the priest and scholar Martin Luther approaches the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and nails a piece of paper to it containing the 95 revolutionary opinions that would begin the Protestant Reformation.

                          Inactivism

Retired community activist and former President Obama said in an interview that publicly shaming people on Twitter is "not activism."

"I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people — and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of 'the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,'" he said.

Obama went on to say, "This idea of purity, and you're never compromised, and you're always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly."

Calling for more nuance in difficult conversations, Obama said, "The world is messy, there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you."

This, of course, is totally untrue. Shallow outrage and virtue signaling is exactly what social activism is. And a constituency that needs to be told that the world is "messy" and has "ambiguities" cannot possibly be expected to initiate any significantly worthwhile change.