Pete Bornschein

Peter Bornschein, Are Cultural Explanations for Racial Disparities Racist? in advance - PhilPapers philarchive.org/rec/BORACE-8

@SocRepProject Also, on your usage, the following statements turn out true: “Black and women’s suffrage is unconstitutional;” “Federal laws prohibiting slavery are unconstitutional.”

@SocRepProject Do you understand that’s not what most English speakers mean by “constitutional,” and it’s because of your idiosyncratic usage that people are piling on you by pointing out the 16th amendment?

Yes.

@axel_lieber @SocRepProject @Brotolo_ I thought maybe this person had some fancy legal reasoning for why the 16th amendment is void. I guess not. They’re just using “constitutional” to mean “what the founders envisioned,” which isn’t what that word means.

@Pbornsch @SocRepProject @Brotolo_ Crickets.

The income tax is unconstitutional.

@ajo96th @SocRepProject @Brotolo_ As best I can tell, this person thinks “constitutional” means “what the founding fathers envisioned,” as opposed to “what the constitution says or implies.”

@SocRepProject @Pbornsch @Brotolo_ That doesn’t answer the question posed. The founders also gave us the ability to amend the constitution. The 16th amendment did that so why is the income tax unconstitutional

@SocRepProject @Brotolo_ How does this Ron Paul quote support the claim that the income tax is unconstitutional despite the existence of the 16th amendment?

@Pbornsch @Brotolo_

@SocRepProject @Brotolo_ Can you explain why you believe the income tax is unconstitutional given your awareness of the 16th amendment?

@Brotolo_ This may come as a shock, but I’m actually aware of the 16th’s existence

Very good.

Draconian restrictions on academic freedom at Texas Tech. The Chancellor has written a memo to the 5 TT University Presidents, essentially banning any substantial SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) content. Want to write your thesis on the fraternal birth order effect? (Gay men tend to have more older brothers.) Nope. "Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students." Want to study Rach Cosker-Rowland's book on Gender Identity? How about classic psychological works that invoke gender identity, e.g. Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of gender development? All that's out too. I'm hardly a fan of gender identity in its contemporary guise but this is nuts. I hope @TheFIREorg or @AFA_Alliance take an interest. Link to memo below.

@CJFerguson1111 You need to have that on a t-shirt.

@AffordAnything This seems like silly moral panic to me.

The WSJ just ran the most depressing headline in human history. The piece is a first-person column from two retirees. They say that without bosses, deadlines, or meetings, there's nothing to interrupt zombie doomscrolling. "We retirees have a particular vulnerability," writes one of the co-authors, Stephen Kreider Yoder, a retired WSJ editor. "We have time on our hands and no external authority telling us to snap out of it." "Let's have a show of hands: "How many retirees have ended a day looking up from the phone, wondering where the time went and feeling the mental equivalent of having finished off a family-size bag of potato chips?" "Yeah," he writes. "That's what I thought." We spend decades trying to buy back our time ... and then spend it staring at our screens.

If, like me, you don’t know much about Australian history and wish to remedy that, I highly recommend this podcast by ⁦@JohnRuddick2⁩. 👇 @PoliticalHistoryofAustralia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@PoliticalHist…

Social contract theorists say that the government’s authority is created by a contract between citizens and the state, whereby we agree to obey the laws and pay taxes, and the state agrees to protect us. I wrote the following dialogue to satirize the Social Contract Theory.

@PAHoyeck @dioscuri Do you have any idea why he blocked you?

@dioscuri Really wish he hadn't blocked me :(

At least twice a month I get an email from a smart scientist or engineer excited to share their 72-page solution to the problem of consciousness. When I am dead, the gods of the underworld will tell me if any of them were right.

Dangerous false beliefs might seem foolish, but they actually serve an social important function. Believing in something that can actually hurt you (e.g., denying covid) is a desirable feature of a belief, not a bug. This costly signal effectively communicates a social identity to others, and it also signals that someone values this identity so much that they are willing to take personal risks to obtain the social benefits of group membership. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Some rare good news

@IlyaSomin Left-wing support for rent control would decline drastically if Trump came out in favor of it.

I hope so, too. But they’re not yet completely there even on tariffs. And there’s lots of left-wing support for rent control. The right, of course, has its own widespread economic fallacies, most notably on trade and immigration.

"While I admit that wars occasionally have good overall consequences, it’s very difficult to identify these wars in advance.  And unless you’re willing to bite the bullet of involuntary organ donation, 'good overall consequences' are insufficient to morally justify war." betonit.ai/p/the_common-s…

Horseshoe theory remains undefeated When you do something to knock supply and demand out of whack, and have no solutions, last refuge is to blame greedy firms

"We present...a “heptalemma”. It shows that seven initially plausible theses about physical reality are jointly inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics..." I don't work in this area, but "heptalemma" is badass. philpapers.org/rec/DEBAHF-5

Can Congress prohibit home distilling? Judge Edith Jones explains no. That the 150 year old law prohibiting home distilleries runs afoul of the Taxation and Necessary and Proper Clauses (with opinion sections "Necessary" and "Proper"). This is a Big Deal opinion

👻"we have some basis to think that philosophers *should* open-mindedly engage with controversial views" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/me…