Two blogs I just discovered that I should have begun reading earlier are The Daily Burkeman1 and Left Conservative, both of somewhat paleo orientation. Two interesting posts from the latter are Immigration v. Non-interventionism and the single issue sweepstakes in which Latin American immigration is linked to problems in the emmigrants’ countries which are in turn linked to U.S foreign policy (I would highlight the drug war), making it in the end a form of “blowback” (I think relevant in light of recent events), and Reason Magazine, Populism and Ron Paul: An essay on the idiocy of the “libertines”, in which Paul, David Duke and Jesse Jackson are all saluted for their anti-establishment principles.

On an unrelated note, Chip Smith continues bringing back material from the print edition of the Hoover Hog (previously discussed here), with the latest entitled Race-Baiting on the Brink of Apocalypse, discussing Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints and the work of William Luther Pierc, most importantly the Turner Diaries. A review of Saints and a general discussion of the old paranoid “invasion literature” from a Spanish perspective is given by Michael Gilson de Lemos here (if anyone knows what he’s referring to by “Triage” and “Trio”, let me know). Elsewhere Chip points out that the other Smith (Bradley, author of this non-Shoah related book) has a blog devoted to asking Holocaust believers to name one victim of the gas-chambers and give proof. Being only an amateur believer who accepts the conventional wisdom of experts as Bryan Caplan would advise, I cannot do so, but I did suggest The Nizkor Project and Real Open Debate on the Holocaust as places where skeptical questions may be answered. As long as we’re on the subject of revisionism and WW2, “thorough-going revisionist” Mark Brady says based on early reviews that Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke fails to make the case that needs to be made.

A theory I find even less plausible than that there were only about 300,000 Jews in Europe or that nearly 6 million fled during the Third Reich is proposed by Hopefully Anonymous here. He ponders why the religious are focused on immortality whereas more scientifically inclined folks are skeptical even of atheist transhumanists and suggests that Jesus and other religious leaders “consciously (though non-transparently) created constituents for their future technology-based ressurection”. In the comments I scoff and give a hat-tip to my favorite theory of the “real Jesus” in Koenraad Elst’s Psychology of Prophetism.

Although lots of folks at Mises scoff at “empirical evidence”, they’re not above pointing it out when it supports their positions. Recently Stephan Kinsella highlighted something from Techdirt’s Mike Masnick suggesting that eliminating the patent system increases innovation. It’s actually Kinsella’s second post on Masnick’s article, the first is here. Kinsella has previously discussed empiricism and I.P here, here, here and here. His main attack on the concept is in Against Intellectual Property, which sounds suspiciously like Against Intellectual Monopoly. Stealing titles, eh? For a blog devoted to criticizing IP, see Intellectual Privilege by Tom W. Bell, who co-blogs with Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia. Responding to a debate between Bell and Whitman, Nick Szabo analogizes IP to the censorship powers of lords and nobles in the feudal era. That might make him sound less favorable to the concept than he actually is, since he promotes that era’s idea of property rights in governance as a preferable alternative to the modern totalitarian theory of sovereignty.

Finally, a post I found a long time ago, forgot and rediscovered recently and decided to share with you all is Skeptico’s How do you prove photography to a blind man?, which is a response to a psi-believer but I was reminded of by the analogizing here of atheist materialists to “a blind man who does not believe in color because he cannot detect it with his other four senses”. Vox Day claims science disproves rational materialism here (UPDATE: He elaborates here and here). In his most recent Overcoming Bias post Righting a Wrong Question, Eliezer Yudkowsky attempts to dissolve questions about beliefs into issues of our senses entangled with reality.