If you were puzzled about the Hari Seldon reference in my previous post but were too embarrassed to ask, here is the answer. (Skip the next two paragraphs if you know who Seldon was, but were still puzzled by the reference.)
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Now that I have lambasted ethics and reason among other things, one has little choice but to lambast the High Priest himself – libertarianism.
The thing is, and I feel like a catholic in a confessional here, I feel that libertarianism is in some ways intellectual cowardice.
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Swami, commenting on this post asks a typical question, one which I’ve always found irritatingly ambiguous.

Ravikiran Ji,
a) If Nehru was alive in 1991 as a retired politician, would he have supported the economic liberalization initiated by Manmohan Singh and co.?
b) If Nehru was alive today, would he agree with the economic path that India is taking today?

Why do I find such questions ambiguous? And irritating?
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If you’re throwing a Thanksgiving party, you might want to have your guests sign a legal waiver allowing you to serve unlimited helpings of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce without fearing you’ll get hit with a big fat lawsuit.

That’s the advice of the Center for Consumer Freedom, which has drafted a release form called the “Thanksgiving Guest Liability and Indemnification Agreement” to prevent sue-happy guests from slapping the host of a feast with an obesity lawsuit.

The agreement makes eaters agree not to haul the dinner host into court for the failure to, quote: “provide nutritional information, warn of potential for overeating, or offer healthy alternatives

(source)

Yes, I am a libertarian, but…
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The current fascination with reason, logic et al which runs in many strains of philosophy like Libertarianism, Objectivism et al – is in many ways coming full circle back to square one. I think it sprang up in retaliation to post-modern subjectivism which dictated truth is relative, ethics are relative, everything is relative (maybe it originated in West Virginia where apparently everyone is also a relative).
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Previous Episodes: #1, #2

Days and nights passed and the mango-seller kept looking at the cathedral on top of the hill. Then one morning, everyone at the bazaar arrived to see the most astonishing sight they’d seen.

The hill had dissapeared. The cathedral was lying on the flatland, crushed into smithereens like a sand-castle dropped carelessly from the clouds.
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A while back, agnosticism was a big fad. It was cool and all to have doubts about religion, but totally not cool to be extremist about it. There could be a God, or they could be no God eh? To take a stand – theism or atheism – implies taking a belief; to trascend the realm of logic and provable assertions. Besides, there’s nothing wrong in covering your bases what?
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A previous post generated many doubts about random sampling, adequate sampling, and induction.

This post, as you might have induced by now, is about induction.
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I know that I’ve been saying that I won’t blog much, but I can’t keep away from reading blogs and comments and I keep getting ideas for posts from all over the place. Now my problem is that it takes me seconds to form an idea, but a lot of time to transform the idea into a coherent post. Right now, I will list down all the ideas for posts that I have bottled up inside me, waiting to bubble out. If time permits, I’ll actually post on them.
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An earlier post talked about the susceptibility of either sex to emotion and ego.
This post is about susceptibility too. To stress.
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[Previous Episode: #1]

When the Chief arrived at the market, looking for the mango-seller, he saw an amazing sight in the bazaar. Since in the new economy, you couldn’t sell anything which cost more than a certain “ceiling” price, people were still purchasing entire airplanes and cruisers and satellites, but as components. This whole thing was wrong, it wasn’t re-distributing anything. After taking care of the mango-seller, he thought, I’ll re-build the economy again.

The mango-seller was sitting with his thela in front of a cathedral and trying to bargain with Lord Meghnad Desai, the eminent economist.
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Now that morality and ethics and other such inconvenient things are dispensed
away with, one can start discussing matters of import.

One such issue is what to do with increasing productivity of mankind.

Basically, lesser number of people can do work that might have required more people.
A free-marketeer would say that’s a good thing – people are freed to pursue other activities.
But a socialist does not buy this argument at all.
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