Reasoned Consideration

[This article constitutes some rough 'draft thoughts' and is a work-in-progress, potentially subject to substantial re-editing - input and comments welcome - these ideas are not 'fully-formed', and it's a complex issue. The slightly ambitious question is really, what political changes 'should' we make in Africa if we were to broadly expand liberty and increase the protection of individual rights.] "Africa Before the Scramble, 1876" The concept of "illegal immigrant" as it pertains to African countries is historically based primarily on colonially defined borders (e.g. Berlin Conference 1884-85 , i.e. the "Scramble for Africa", and later 'tweaks' to the lines drawn on maps ... in some cases the colonists even effectively drew these lines right through local communities , splitting them - e.g. the Batswana groups have been split across four countries: Botswana, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe). As compared to p...

[ Image credit ] Marlise Richter , a self-described “Sex Positive Feminist”, writes on the apparently vexing question of whether women should be 'allowed' free agency: " Stripping the tears of bleeding-heart feminists and other sex abolitionists ": "Liberal feminist Emma Powell visited Mavericks Revue Bar to investigate two pressing questions. One was how “places like this” could exist under the South African Constitution. The second was whether the stripper “girls” looked happy. Her impressions were captured in a Daily Maverick article dramatically titled “House of the Rising sun, built on misery” ... I ask to meet some of the dancers. Early one evening, before their work starts, I sit with four well-groomed women. They are from the UK, Romania, Brazil and South Africa. I give them copies of Ms Powell’s article. (Yes, they can read! Yes, they have opinions!) Indignation and annoyance reign. With voices high in irritation, they describe the ...

"Generating Discussion" is not  per se  virtuous - after all, Hitler also "generated discussion" - a lot of discussion. It's only a virtue if you generate useful discussion.

"Please don't kick me!" This article contemplates  Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots : "Even for fully informed adults, the difference between alive and lifelike may be muddled enough in our subconscious to warrant adopting the same attitudes toward robotic companions that we carry towards our pets. A study of Sony AIBO online message boards reveals that people were dismayed to witness the story of an AIBO being tossed into a garbage can. Not long after the Pleo robot dinosaur became commercially available in 2007, videos of Pleo “torture” began to circulate online. The comments left by viewers are strikingly polarized – while some derive amusement from the videos, others appear considerably upset, going so far as to verbally attack the originators and accuse them of horrible cruelty. The Kantian philosophical argument for animal rights is that our actions towards non-humans reflect our morality — if we treat animals in inhumane ways, we become inh...

It's possible for something to be a fad and   also happen to be correct . People who pride themselves on not 'following fads' sometimes blindly follow the wrong path instead. Or to put it another way, sometimes the 'sheeple' are right. If your ego is tied up in your ability to 'not follow the crowd', you may fail to follow the crowd when they happen to be going in the right direction. Forget about whether something is a fad or not - the only thing that matters is whether something is  correct  or not. What you need is a set of 'mental tools' to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas. This mentality seems to be a kind of 'inverse  argumentum ad populum ' - effectively believing something is false  because  it is popular. Sometimes the sheep are going in some particular direction simply because there's food, water or sanctuary from danger that way.

A 'bad philosophy' can be more incapacitating than an actual handicap.

From this post, " Moderate Rationality ": "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom" - Martin Luther King Jr. "Imagine what "moderation" in mathematics would mean. It would mean not that 2 + 2 = 4, but that it's more or less 4, maybe we can "agree" that 2 + 2 = 4.2. You don't land a man on the moon with this sort of attitude about ideas. The field of ethics is even more important than the field of m...