Sunday morning humor, and thinking

The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.

- H.G. Wells

Sometimes we get too serious, and drain all the fun from something in the course of cracking our hard, intellectual nutshells. All Thought and no Play makes us a grumpy old geezer, or something.

So here's something pretty danged funny to start your intellectual day off. Three Minute Philosophy is a series of (what else?) 3 minute overviews of famous philosophers. It's mildly NSFW, and very, very funny. Especially the one on Immanuel Kant (both the NSFW and the very funny parts apply in spades here).



Many more over at Youtube - watch one, collect 'em all!

(via)

But all fun and no thought makes us rather dull. While still chuckling about John Locke, wander over to Rhymes With Gars And Girls and ponder Sonic Charmer's thoughts about Democracy, Locke's great passion:

But the concept of market failure is intellectually sound, namely, the possibility of market patterns in which everyone pursuing their self-interest rationally leads to an overall outcome which is worse than some other possible outcome (to be precise, not Pareto-optimal). The classic example is a factory that pollutes, the pollution being an externality borne by society at large that won’t be priced into the factory’s product (absent some sort of Pigovian tax). It can be debated whether this or that cited example of a ‘market failure’ really is one, or whether its definition begs the question, but the concept is worth thinking about.

I think nowadays we need a twin concept: democracy failure. Presumably, democracy, like markets, is supposed to optimize outcomes for people in some way or another. (Otherwise, why do we have it?) So then, just as with market failure, democracy failure could be defined along the lines of, a (self-sustaining or sustained) pattern that can emerge in democratic governance in which the outcome is undesirable in some appropriately-measured way.

There's a lot of smart there, and a lot that will make you think. His post is a little depressing in its implications, but then I think on the Second Amendment and watering the Tree of Liberty with tyrant's blood, and I'm happy again. It's Sunday, after all. Don't want to crush the truth while taking hold of it ...