Author Archives: admin

Quotes about Academia

“Every man who does not have a trade must eventually become a rogue” – Baruch Spinoza

Nassim Nicholas Taleb reflects this same sentiment when he says: “…as a practitioner, my thinking is rooted in the belief that you cannot go from books to problems, but the reverse, from problems to books.”

“Learn a trade so that you experience the real world. Identify a problem that exists in the real world. . . . Otherwise you invent a mystical hammer and go on and endless search for the appropriate nails – which you seem to find all over the place.” ~ Curt Doolittle

Foucault On Obscurantism: ‘They Made Me Do It!’

No one should ever go to a university without understanding the nature and motives of post-modernism.

“… Searle claims Foucault told him: ‘In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.’ When Searle later asked Pierre Bourdieu if he thought this was true, Bourdieu insisted it was much worse than ten percent …”

www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

“free-ride-a-tarian”

From a FB argument:

“If libertarians continue to insist that 1) libertarian ideas are deep abstractions with only distant and complex relationships to the tangible world 2) that violence is a vice instead of a virtue 3) that society can be build upon the non-aggression principle alone.

Then libertarians will continue to 1) fail 2) make fools of themselves.

They are trying to achieve liberty at a discount. They are fraudulently pretending that they live on Robinson Crusoe’s Island, sheltered by the violence of an ocean.

The best they’ll achieve (if lucky) is free riding on the effort and sacrifice of people more willing to defend the social norm of property — the aristocrats. I would not call such people ‘libertarians’ I would call them ‘free-ride-a-tarians’ or ‘parasite-arians.'”

***

To put it another way, my criticism is that it’s unhelpful to pretend the private property rights are somehow “natural” or extensions of our biology or given to us from “nature or nature’s God.”

Nature is a very harsh place. Property rights are fought for and won and protected.

It is unhelpful to pretend otherwise.