My morning link posts usually arrive with virtually no editorial comment on my part, the sentence or so I give is mostly intended to interest the viewer to follow the link to the post indicated. I’ve got a short time this evening, and I’m caught up on my link browsing, so I thought I’d try to offer a smaller number of links here with a short paragraph surrounding it.

There’s been some discussion on and off about setting barriers. In general democrats think that bringing more to the table, irrespective of their seriousness or issues awareness is not relevant. What they feel is that more is always better. Yet, experience should, one might think, tell a different tale. Setting higher standards, yes it gets you less people making the decisions or performing the act, but it often raises the level of the result. Speaking of results that are not so impressive.

The friendly neighborhood Rust Belt Philosopher has a short post on fallacies. He starts off writing:

One of the nice things about fallacies is how they usually have equally fallacious mirror images. The ad populum fallacy, for instance, could be reversed into the invalid argument that a view is accurate because nobody (or very few people) believe it.

Recently I’ve come to find that ad populum point of view in historical reviews, i.e., the popular conception of what happened is wrong more than it is right. The popular view of what happened and why … is wrong. Not just a little wrong often, but exactly wrong. For example, virtually nobody believes that the BEF was innovative and responsive to situations in the field during WWI. Actually the common popular view was that the leadership was amazingly unresponsive, stupid and tradition/hidebound sending millions to their deaths in trenches because of their stupidity. This is alas, exactly wrong, but the popular view remains. The litany of “exactly wrong” historical popular views might be almost as long as the ones that the popular view gets right.

Joe Carter at First Thoughts has some ideas about monotony. The movie Up! offered the same theme, in part, in modern cinematic experience, highlighting the primacy of the ordinary in life. Ordinary moments with our spouse, children, neighbor, or for that matter God are really in the end more important than the ones we find to be pivotal. In a recent post of mine, arguments in favor of asceticism were made. In part, asceticism is about realizing those quiet moments with God are important and making that goal a formative in how you set your life and its goals.

This post will have evoke the standard responses from right and left. Up three paragraphs Mr Niven remarks in his post on the fallacy that correlation does not imply causation. That, in part, will be a crucial link in the argument by the left in this regard. Automation is part of the modern world. As a minimum wage goes up, the cost of replacing that unskilled worker with automation goes up. As the minimum wage goes up, it becomes harder to justify paying for the production of that same unskilled worker. It makes entry harder. Why does the left pretend this isn’t true?

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Filed under: LinksPolitics

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