Friday Hodgepodge

Blog Roundup

1. If you've stopped by Jason Crawford's blog recently, congratulations: You can skip have probably already skipped ahead to Item 2. If not, be prepared to consider how close you may yet be to what I would call relative prescience:

It's almost impossible to predict the future. But it's also unnecessary, because most people are living in the past. All you have to do is see the present before everyone else does. [bold added]

Crawford follows up with a dramatic example from 1930's Germany and five good tips on how to be earlier.

2. The same justice who saved ObamaCare the first time would appear to have eviscerated a recent Supreme Court decision widely celebrated as a victory for property rights:

... In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roberts responded that such inspections are proper when government requires a business to obtain a license or permit to operate. And this is the danger in the ruling.

Governments can sidestep this ruling by simply requiring every business to obtain a permit or license. And then that same government can attach whatever conditions it chooses, including a requirement that union organizers be allowed onto private property. In granting an exception to the principle of property rights, Roberts abandoned the entire principle. [bold added]

We often see rankings of Presidents. I don't see how Roberts would do very well in a comparable ranking of Chief Justices.

3. At How to Be Profitable and Moral, Jaana Woiceshyn brings to our attention a particularly good response -- in the form of a corporate report -- to the cult of ESG that has been engulfing corporations the world over:

[T]here is a shining example of a company that turned its ESG report into an opportunity to proudly defend its industry and itself: Liberty Oilfield Services. In the report, Liberty states its mission to be "bettering human lives." It is a self-described "technology pioneer of the shale revolution" that "has driven enormous improvements in both human well-being and environmental quality" while maximizing profits for its shareholders.

I agree that this is a refreshing change from the likes of Coca-Cola, which follows ESG hook-line-and-sinker, hurling as it does racist epithets like Be less white at its own employees.

Better yet, there is much more, so be sure to read the whole thing.

4. I am about halfway through the below podcast, linked at New Ideal on why Jordan Peterson is wrong to assert that faith is necessary for one to hold moral values.

For now, I'll do two things.

First, I'll quote the material philosophers Ben Bayer and Onkar Ghate cover:

• Why groundless faith in a God is fundamentally different from rational trust in other people;
• Whether Judeo-Christian religion is fundamental to Western culture;
• Why faith isn't a necessary starting point of practical and epistemic justification;
• The issue of whether we are all seeking to do good, or some people are just evil;
• The absurdities demanded by faith in the Christian idea of the resurrection;
• The evil of how faith demands a morality of sacrifice;
• The harm of believing out of faith;
• Whether the fear of social isolation is rational;
• Whether there's a conflict between Objectivism and Jordan Peterson's ideas.

Like Bayer, I am an ex-Catholic, and I have been very happy to see him dismantle one familiar equivocation or evasion after another. As of yesterday evening, I was just finishing up a particularly tidy job on his part of walking through just how ridiculous the whole idea of the resurrection is.

In a better age, Christians worried that religion was in danger of being "laughed out of existence:" After this podcast, you may wonder why that didn't happen long ago.

-- CAV