Prediction: Unions

Within 30 years, the majority of private sector union members will vote Republican, not Democrat.

The one and only Other

A great article at Love as a Found Object: No Other

This article gets at the heart, the very heart of progressivism. The evil in the world, if I were sufficiently intolerant to call it that, is merely a manifestation of the separation between people caused by powerful institutions and the people vested in them. Once there is unity and everyone thinks and believes as one, there will truly be freedom, equality and brotherhood.

Of course, when it's written down or said out loud, it ends up sounding creepy and Orwellian, but that's kind of the point.

A piece of the kernel

One of the fundamental mistakes progressives make is this:

It is not necessary to rebel to be free.

Illusory Objections

Hat Tip: Philosophy, et cetera

Interesting Post: What Is an Illusion, Exactly?

The author's point of contention is that an illusion should not count as an illusion if the person being "tricked" expects the illusion and would count it bizarre if the illusion didn't manifest itself.

If one knows enough about the world, one should know that an oar partly submerged in water (seen from a particular viewing angle) should look bent just like that. If it looked straight, I suppose, a longtime oarsman or a person very familiar with the laws of refraction might think the oar looked strange, might even think that it looked like an oar that is actually bent (bent in such a way as to exactly compensate for the bend a straight oar would seem to have at that angle). Perhaps part of what it is for an oar to look straight is for it to also (in a different sense) "look bent" when it is partly submerged in water.

This seems like much ado about nothing. The mind is not a monolithic thing - it is built of layers. In this case, the bottom layer is the retina which directly observes the stimulus. At the top layer is the consciousness with a picture of how the world is. It seems clear that an illusion (of any sort) is a phenomenon which tricks a lower layer of the mind, but can be discovered by upper layers. If it didn't trick some lower layer, it wouldn't be particularly remarkable. If it wasn't discoverable by an upper layer, such a phenomenon would surprise people every time, and would not be identifiable as an illusion.

As a more concrete example, tasteful plastic surgery tends to improve womens' dating market value. Even if men can recognize consciously that a particular women has had work done on her, they will generally still treat her as more attractive than otherwise - even though the plastic surgery is a dishonest signal of reproductive fitness.