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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Being a sequel to The Dead Sea

Mr. Stone and Mrs. Stone lived happily, more or less, ever after. As soon as his loneliness was taken care of, and his love-boil a souvenir, Stone’s mind encountered the problem of changing the world. How can we change the world? How, how, how? He constantly thought about that. A popular science book, a history book, and a cigarette later he came up with an answer.
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Now that the trial of Scott Peterson has taken a break (For those who are interested, he was found guilty. They will hold separate hearings to decide whether to execute him or jail him for life.) I thought I could watch the news here without being utterly amazed. Apparently not. This is an actual polll question that was asked on Lou Dobbs tonight, a program on CNN.

Do you believe raising the minimum wage would attract more U.S. citizens to industries now dominated by illegal aliens?

As of now, the “yes” vote is running at 79%.

Sruthijith has a post asking why Indians are so instinctively socialist. He blames it on the fact that our universities and our academic institutions are seeped in leftist ideology.

I do not agree with him on that. Soviet propaganda wasn’t notably successful in the Soviet Union. When Russians saw that their lives were a sorry mess and completely at variance with what their books told them, the books, the ideology in them and the leaders who deceived them with this ideology became objects of ridicule. What is surprising at first glance is that such a thing did not happen in India. For this, as usual, I blame Nehru.
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What is the reason for morality? For ethical values?
This is a very important question that has faced poor Homo Sapiens since eons.

Now, granted our primeval hunter-gatherer was not civilized enough to be sipping tea while reading Shakespeare with a monocle; but he still faced the need to come up with some reason for his discomfort in doing various unethical things like say killing his tribe.
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