Antinatalism is the view that it is wrong to bring new conscious beings into existence. Here I present and refute what seems to be the most popular arguments for it, as presented by David Benatar. The title of this post is a reference to the many ways Benatar refers smugly to his hypothetical critics, even though he himself criticises hypothetical critics of addressing his arguments smugly. I will not do that and confine my cheesy remarks to these introductory remarks. What follows is an argument from n_on-…

Collections of papers and articles that I've spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. Psychology Sinnot-Armstrong, W. The Disunity of Morality There is no fixed region of the brain unique to moral judgement Simple explanations for morality (It is for suppressing self-interest, it is for cooperation, it serves X social purpose) are wrong Morality is like memory: many components to be individually studied. Rowley, D.A. et al. Counter-intuitive moral judgment following traumatic b…

[This post is part of the Soviet Series] In 1922, the relatively young Soviet Union was a relatively poor country recently afflicted by a civil war and a revolution. After the Second World War, the USSR was a superpower capable of stopping Germany's Wehrmacht on its tracks[1]. What happened there? Given the title, it won't come up as a surprise that Stalin happened. This post will analyse the impact of Stalin on Soviet growth, beginning with a presentation of some statistics regarding Stalin's achievements,…

Brief comments. A few days ago, Richard Spencer, who is a self-described white nationalist, though he dismisses being labeled as a neo-Nazi (Make of that what you will, google around), was punched. Relatedly, a few days ago a band beat up a girl in Murcia (Spain). After the fact, it seems -though it has not been officially confirmed- that the attackers were extreme left-wingers and that the 19 year old girl in question was a  a self-defined 'patriot' with ties to a certain extreme right-wing organisation. M…

A brief analysis of it I did: [gist]59eb902b479adebcb2b56e1a400726dd[/gist]

So here we are, one year later after my last yearly review. How has the blog fared since then? Recall, this was the number of visits once year ago Now this chart looks like this So once again, the number of visits in 2016 has surpassed the number of visits in all of the previous years combined, just like in 2015. This is Trump voice Amazing, I love all of you /Trump voice In 2014 I published 38 posts, 61 posts in 2015. This year I managed to publish 58 posts. That amounts to about one post per week more o…