I think you will enjoy this recent episode of the This Machine Kills podcast.

We discuss Quinn’s analysis of “new fusionism” or a mutant strain of neoliberalism that crystallized in the 1990s, which sought to ground and defend neoliberal policies through their own bastardization of biological sciences — cognitive, behavioral, evolutionary, genetic, and so on. They then used scientism to justify and propagate political ideas and economic models based on hardwired human nature and hierarchical differences between races, cultures, and intelligence. The fringes of the 1990s have now become the mainstream of the 2020s.

Proportional representation would go a long way toward fixing many of this country’s issues.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington–Hill_method

Mac and cheese with chopped hotdogs was a staple of my childhood. Used to drown it in ketchup to make people squirm.

I was also a weird kid mixing jam and cheese (even grape jelly and American cheese) on sandwiches to the abject horror of parents and kids alike.

I’ve taken it to adulthood with cream cheese and Peruvian pepper jam (just a light spread) on a savory bagel.

Nowadays, if you “pair” jam and cheese on a cracker instead of bread, you can avoid the weird looks entirely and even seem sophisticated.

Another way to mitigate the force of inductive skepticism is to restrict its scope. Karl Popper, for instance, regarded the problem of induction as insurmountable, but he argued that science is not in fact based on inductive inferences at all (Popper 1935 [1959]). Rather he presented a deductivist view of science, according to which it proceeds by making bold conjectures, and then attempting to falsify those conjectures. In the simplest version of this account, when a hypothesis makes a prediction which is found to be false in an experiment, the hypothesis is rejected as falsified. The logic of this procedure is fully deductive. The hypothesis entails the prediction, and the falsity of the prediction refutes the hypothesis by modus tollens. Thus, Popper claimed that science was not based on the extrapolative inferences considered by Hume. The consequence then is that it is not so important, at least for science, if those inferences would lack a rational foundation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

I just knew my philosophy degree would come in handy one day.

69420 views.

Nice.

“Catholics aren’t Christians” was a common phrase evangelicals used throughout my childhood.

Yeah…