“Liberals first. In their eagerness to empathize with the victim, they can turn the victim into an object rather than an independent actor.

[…] Conservatives dehumanize in their own way. In their zeal to preserve civilization and the American way of life, they demonize those that they see as a threat to civilization.

[…Libertarians ] struggle to imagine that some people are poorly served by markets, that some transactions involve exploitation of ignorance and that the self-regulation of markets can fail.”

“If both of these authors are correct, then we have two political parties that aren’t really about anything. They’re competing fiercely and inarguably offering Americans some kind of choice – only someone truly out on a limb would argue that there is no difference at all between having Trump or Hillary in the White House – but they’re more like two sports teams than opposing political parties at this point. How can you have two groups locked in fierce competition when neither one of them really stands for or is about anything coherent? Easy: you frame things as the politics of identity.”

“Yet every underemployed American represents a failure of entrepreneurial imagination. We can do better. Our educational system must improve the way it provides skills that bring higher earnings, and we need to experiment with new forms of vocational training. We should encourage entrepreneurial energies, including by making it easier for small businesses to get up and running in low-income areas. And social programs that deter employment should be reformed—and ideally replaced by a simple pro-work subsidy. It’s time to end the war on work.”

“Housman insisted that the task of poetry was “to transfuse emotion—not to transmit thought”; it was to make your throat clench and your hair stand on end. The emotion his own poetry most often elicits is that of overwhelming sadness.”

“Tricks of evolution aside, I’m left to wonder: what makes people insecure? Why is the condition so common? An obvious culprit, if you’re in my position, is capitalism” …

SMH, the ancient religions answered these questions a long time ago. But modern atheists can’t get past the ‘wrongness’ of the literal interpretations of the texts to discover them.

“A recent study by psychologists at the University of Virginia asked subjects to simply sit in a room and ‘just think’ for 6 to 15 minutes. In the room was a button allowing subjects to electrocute themselves if they wanted. The researchers found that the majority of subjects would rather electrocute themselves than just sit quietly and think.”

“With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.

This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.

This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior.”