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Solutions to the Fermi Paradox

My personal guess as to the solution of the Fermi "paradox" (not really a paradox) is fairly boring: 1. Space travel is virtually impossible.  This is really the main reason.  The Tsolkovsky Rocket Equation is a harsh taskmaster.  This shows how hard it is to get out of a planet's gravity well: you need to burn fuel to launch yourself.  But the more fuel you have, the heavier your craft is, thus the more fuel you need.  The expansion is logarithmic, and it implies that the expense of even lifting a small number of people into orbit is enormous.  And then, once you're up there, out of the atmosphere, beyond the magnetosphere, then you have real problems: space is trying to kill you.  The radiation up there is extremely unhealthy.  And the faster your spaceship moves, the more problems you have.  If your ship can move close to the speed of light, then, relativistically, there will be particles whizzing into the front of your ship at close to t...
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Logical Positivism

  There's something really nice about people who remain passionately steadfast in their devotion to a religion that has largely discredited and abandoned.  In a way, that's when true faith begins.  I want to comfort and encourage such a person - Linus in the pumpkin patch. That's how I feel about logical positivism. 
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Jung and Lacan

Jung and Lacan are more similar than either of their followers would like to admit. Jung said "God enters through the wound."  That's Lacan in a nutshell.
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Petit-Petit-Bourgeois and Microbourgeois

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Reasonable vs. Logical People

  When we describe people as "reasonable" or "logical," these are usually regarded as synonyms.  And in many contexts, this is probably true.  But in my experience, in certain contexts, logical people can be quite different from reasonable people - almost opposites. By "reasonable," here, I mean something like what Aristotle called the "golden mean," which is perhaps comparable to Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, called the "middle path" - that is, remaining moderate and not going too far in either extreme.  "Moderation in all things," as the saying goes.  It means being open to hearing ideas or criticism from any source, without prejudicially rejecting them or automatically dogmatically adopting them, and always being ready to change your mind.  In short, it means holding onto one's own beliefs "at arm's length," as it were.  It means being nuanced in one's picture of the world and recognizing that realit...
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The reason that the situationist analysis of the "spectacle" is a better theoretical lens than the Frankfurt School's concept of the "culture industry" is that the concept of the "culture industry" is based on a concept of "regression" that allowed theorists like Benjamin and Adorno to pass off reactionary cultural politics as Marxism.
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Fuck "Revealed Preference"

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      Give 'Em What They Want   There is no greater thought-terminating cliche than "revealed preference". If you ever meet a person using this phrase, run. For those not familiar with this phrase, it was coined by economist Paul Samuelson in 1938, in his paper, "A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behavior."  Samuelson was a self-described Keynesian economist who later wrote a popular economics textbook, "Economics: An Introductory Analysis."  (As Samuelson himself once remarked, "Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.")  He also wrote a popular newspaper column about economics.  Gradually, the term spread through the field of economics, and then into broader culture. Samuelson's initial discussion of revealed preference was modest and technical, describing a way of measuring consumer behavior.  And understood that far, revealed preference is a perfectly reasonable standard by which to make...
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