No relation to the sports channel.

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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

    The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

    Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

    (Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)


  • The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

    Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

    Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).












  • Christian tradition teaches that we are the hands of God; that God gets things done in the world through the instrumentality of human action. When you do an act of kindness for your neighbor, you are instantiating God’s kindness; when you defend your neighbor from harm or oppression, you are instantiating God’s protection.

    One of the big differences between Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideology of nonviolence and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology of nonviolence is that King accepted self-defense while Gandhi rejected it. Dr. King carried a pistol in his early career, and was later defended by armed bodyguards; while Gandhi rejected armed protection and called for oppressed people to surrender to their oppressors. So empirically, rejection of self-defense is less Christian and more Hindu.



  • Feudalism, where economic power comes from control of the land and familial connection to the conquerors of the land, was broadly supplanted by capitalism, where economic power comes from control of commercial and industrial capital, which are traded openly in capital markets.

    Capitalism has several features that feudalism does not:

    • The most productive property in capitalism is industrial and commercial capital: the means of industrial production and trade. While land remains profitable, it is no longer the center of economic productivity; and ownership of the land does not convey the sort of dominion over its use that it did in feudalism. (Nobody thinks it’s weird to build a factory on leased land, for instance: the ownership of the industrial capital does not follow the ownership of the underlying land.)
    • Shares of productive property (capital) can be freely bought and sold in capital markets. In feudalism, productive property (land) changes hands through warfare, political processes such as the elevation of new lords by a king, and familial processes such as marriage and inheritance.
    • Contract law becomes supremely important in capitalism, as capitalist firms are largely creatures of contract law rather than traditional rights.
    • The capitalist managerial class by and large does not arise out of the families of the feudal aristocracy, and does not conduct itself according to the social rituals of the feudal aristocracy. For instance, corporate mergers are not arranged through marriage of the heirs of CEOs.
    • Although this is not fully true of early capitalism, in modern capitalism workers are typically free to leave their jobs, and employers are broadly free to fire them if they are not productive. In most forms of feudalism, serfs are bound to the land and may not lawfully leave their lord’s service.

    On that last point — Capitalism emerged out of colonialism. Many of the first firms traded on capital markets were colonial enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC). These firms employed slave labor and enjoyed legal monopolies on trade. This puts the lie to the libertarian claim that capitalism requires free labor and free trade. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery and monopoly. For later examples see the United Fruit Company and other American colonial ventures.