More wisdom from Starship Troopers
Another interesting passage from Starship Troopers: That old saw about “To understand all is to forgive all” is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.
Dump Google
Google apparently dropped all the accounts of a statistics professor, with no warning. His activities and his blog were apolitical, but that didn’t seem to matter to Google. He lost his blog archives, his email address, and years of archived emails. Google tried something similar with psychology professor Jordan Peterson until public outcry forced Google to back down. Google has taken too much power over modern life, to the point where it has near-absolute power over many people’s digital lives….
Starship Troopers on economics
I’ve been reading Robert Heinein’s 1959 military science fiction masterpiece, Starship Troopers. I found interesting this discussion about value (during a flashback to a high school): “‘Value’has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human—‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different…
We’re right—we have an old poem on our side!
I got an top grade in Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. It was an intensive yearlong class taught by Charles Fried, a distinguished constitutional law expert and former Solicitor General of the United States. So, I speak with a fair degree of confidence when I say that poems inscribed on statues have no legal or precedential value in the American legal system. That one side in a major national debate continually runs to a poetry quotation as one of…