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Unqualified Reservations (backup)
Personal blog · unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.compoliticsphilosophy
Unqualified Reservations (backup) is a personal blog at unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com about politics and philosophy. Since 2014, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. The last post was in 2009, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts on political power, rulers and subjects, and voluntary exchange. HN commenters link it in threads on police cameras and state power, mostly quoting or linking it rather than evaluating it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Just another WordPress.com weblog
What Hacker News says?
> If only they understood that! That would not be the worst case( http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-... ) Please make a specific claim. I don't know how to address the nonsense you linked to. > Remember, though, that not all voluntary exchanges and agreements are mutually beneficial They are, to both parties involved in them. Otherwise they wouldn't go through with the exchanges, assuming n…
Comment linking /2007/05/20/the-...
on “All cameras are police cameras”>Rulers want subjects because they benefit from them. Subjects are resources, like human livestock to be milked. And oh boy, milk us they do. If only they understood that! That would not be the worst case( http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-... ) >That's it. Political power implies intervention in what people would otherwise do in their mutually beneficial, voluntary exchanges and arrangemen…
Comment linking /2007/05/20/the-magic-of-symmetric-sovereignty/
on “All cameras are police cameras”The Enlightenment is a direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation that preceded it a few centuries prior. The key ideas of Protestantism was that faith should be a) based on reason and b) involve a direct communion with God, without intervening priests, ritual or hierarchy. If this sounds appealing to you, you are basically a Protestant, possibly a post-God Protestant aka "atheist"/"agnostic"/"secular". In Cat…
Comment linking /2007/09/26/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
on “Al-Jazari”I mean, we actually know that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology regressed massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented. Like a few comm…
Comment linking /2007/09/26/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
on “Why did science make little real progress in Europe in the Middle Ages?”It is indeed good, but my concern is that some will take this to mean that they don't need to take other people at there word, and that consequently any attempt to form a common ground philosophically will not even be made (let alone whether such attempts could actually be successful). More suspect is the notion, not necessarily implied by Scott's piece but but explicitly stated in the post he linked[0], that those…
Comment linking /2007/09/26/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
on “The Ideology Is Not the Movement”