Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Scientific consensus

Scientific consensus seems a reasonable concept. If a great number of individual scientists arrive at a similar opinion this is generally a sufficient reason to have confidence in those views. Skeptics about scientific consensus often use examples of scientific views that started out as a minority view to become the majority view later. Although these [...]

Liberty and oblivion

In 1991 the Libertarian Alliance published an article called “Immortality: Liberty’s Final frontier” (PDF) by David Nicholas. In this article the author argues that “the continuing fact of death renders all talk of liberty ultimately futile.” The author further argues that our concern for the future will diminish as we approach death. But instead of [...]

Bryan Caplan on the media

In his excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan writes “like politicians, the media show viewers what they want to see and tell them what they want to hear” and speculates about the possibility that voters’ beliefs about other topics than economics may not be any sounder. When I find mistakes in [...]