Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
29 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, Canada, political correctness, racial discrimination, regressive left
I’ve spent a lot of time pushed many electrons going after the fallacy in New Zealand that indigenous “ways of knowing”—in this case from the Māori—are just as valid as so-called “Western ways of knowing,” which is what Kiwi progressives call “science”. You can see my pieces here, but there are many. This sacralization of…
Indigenous “ways of knowing” invade Canadian science classes
15 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of religion, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, British politics, free speech, Freedom of religion, regressive left
The Telegraph reports: A short video went viral last weekend that briefly restored my faith in British policing. It showed a female Metropolitan Police officer standing alone in Whitechapel, surrounded by a crowd of angry Muslim men, calmly defending the right of a Christian street preacher to preach. “In this country, we have freedom of speech,” she…
A good UK police officer
03 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in defence economics, discrimination, economic history, gender, labour economics, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, Iran, sex discrimination
I put something like this up years ago, but it’s a good way to see, with just a few clicks, what happened to Iran after the “Revolution”. Let’s taken women’s dress, a touchstone of misogyny and theocratic oppression. Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, it was a pretty free country in that respect, and everyone…
Iranian women: 1970 vs. 2020
15 Feb 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, economic history, economics of religion, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, free speech
In this Free Press article, Steve Pinker and Marian Tupy (the latter identified as “the founder and editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of Superabundance”) once again recount the undoubtable progress that humanity has made over the past six or seven centuries. The progress described here will be familiar…
Pinker and Tupy tout worldwide progress, espouse an objective morality
07 Feb 2026 1 Comment
in defence economics, discrimination, economics of crime, law and economics, laws of war, liberalism, Marxist economics, war and peace Tags: Age of Enlightenment, free speech, Gaza Strip, Middle-East politics, political correctness, regressive left, war against terror
Juliet Moses writes at Quillette: The furore surrounding the storied Adelaide Writers Festival, the longest-running and largest literary festival in Australia and one that receives significant taxpayer funding, has made international headlines. Our drama ostensibly begins when the Festival’s board disinvites Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian writer with Palestinian heritage. Its climax sees a cultural…
The Adelaide Writers Festival
06 Feb 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, economics of crime, law and economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: age of empires, Age of Enlightenment, constitutional law, economics of slavery, regressive left
Today we celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – a day which should be called Emancipation Day. For on the 6th of February 1840, slavery became illegal in New Zealand. The granting of British citizenship to Maori freed the slaves in law (the practice took a while longer to end) Slavery was not…
New Zealand Emancipation Day
13 Dec 2025 Leave a comment
in economic history, liberalism Tags: Age of Enlightenment, pessimist bias, The Great Enrichment
Steven Pinker’s claim that human beings are now better off than at any time since the beginning of recorded history has provoked fierce resistance. Critics often regard it as complacent, technocratic, or morally obtuse in the face of ongoing suffering. Yet when the claim is properly understood—not as a denial of present evils, but as […]
A Case For Human Progress
07 Dec 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment
Simon Wilson, like many on the hard left, sees the West as basically malignant, and that its achievements were based on oppression. This is not an uncommon view from the left. David Harvey does an excellent lengthy response to Wilson’s assertions. Read it all, but here are some key aspects: The article argues that Hammurabi…
Harvey vs Wilson on western culture
27 Oct 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, free speech, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left
I’m getting tired of virtue-flaunting miscreants who yammer about our anthology The War on Science (Lawrence Krauss, ed.). Their beef? By and large, the 32 chapters by 39 authors discuss the negative effects of woke ideology on science, effects that come largely from inside science: scientists themselves, journals, publishers, university programs, and so on. And, […]
Why it’s not stupid to criticize aspects of leftist ideology that pollute science
11 Oct 2025 1 Comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, free speech, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left
Robert Bartholomew writes: For millennia, indigenous cultures have accumulated a vast repository of information that has helped them to adapt and survive. Prior to European contact, the Quechua of the Andes used quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree to treat fevers. It later proved to be the first effective treatment for malaria. Salicin from […]
Ancient Wisdom vs Science
02 Oct 2025 1 Comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: Age of Enlightenment, free speech, political correctness, regressive left
Cancel culture has emerged as one of the most prominent features of the digital age, celebrated by some as a form of grassroots justice but increasingly criticised as a destructive force. Far from fostering accountability, cancel culture corrodes civil discourse, punishes disproportionately, and undermines the very values of free expression and fairness it claims to […]
Against Cancel Culture
19 Sep 2025 Leave a comment
in economics of education, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, free speech, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left
Predator Free NZ (“PFZ”, and “NZ” is New Zealand) is apparently a science-oriented trust whose goal—a worthy one—is to keep non-native predators, such as the common brushtail possum, out of New Zealand, as they destroy native wildlife and have other bad effects on the ecosystem. (The possum, for example, destroys native New Zealand birds and…
More unsubstantiated assertions of indigenous “science” in New Zealand
16 Sep 2025 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, law and economics, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA, property rights Tags: Age of Enlightenment, free speech, gender gap, political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
Reading time: Whatever. . . You’ll probably guess from the title of this short (150-page) book by Agustín Fuentes (Princeton University Press) that I am not keen on its thesis, and you’d be right. In fact, the thesis is nothing new, even if you have read Fuentes’s article about it in Natural History and Scientific […]
Short (?) review: “Sex is a spectrum”
21 Aug 2025 1 Comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, liberalism, Marxist economics Tags: Age of Enlightenment, free speech, political correctness, regressive left, sex discrimination
Well, Laura Helmuth may no longer be at the helm of Scientific American, but the magazine seems to have again again dipped its toes into the waters of unscientific ideology. To wit: they’re posted a 14-minute podcast emphasizing that nature—and that includes humans—is “non-binary”. The problem is that, as usual, they get what is binary […]
Scientific American reverts to unscientific wokeness
02 Jul 2025 1 Comment
in economic history, economics of education, environmentalism, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - New Zealand, Rawls and Nozick Tags: Age of Enlightenment, conjecture and refutation, cranks, philosophy of science, political correctness, regressive left
I’ve written a lot about the controversy in New Zealand involving whether the indigenous “way of knowing,” Mātauranga Māori (MM), is equivalent to modern science (often called “Western science”) and, as many maintain, should be taught alongside modern in science classes (see all my posts here). As I’ve noted, because MM does have elements of […]
A interview with a “heterodox” New Zealand scientist: “Why Mātauranga Māori Isn’t Science:”
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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