The Post-Partisan Emporium

Covid Totalitarianism: The Deification of Error Belgian psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet may be the most articulate voice on the most clear and present danger facing us: the mob-baiting now being pursued by formerly democratic governments. John Waters The most significant obstacle to our developing the necessary capacity to  fight back against what is engulfing us is an imaginative block preventing us conceiving of the possibility that what seems to be happening could actually be happening. These things could not be happening here, now, for the very simple reason that they are the kind of thing that used to happen far away, in different times, to people who were not as ‘intelligent’ or ‘educated’  or ‘advanced’ as we are. Dr. Mattias Desmet begs to differ with such perilous smugness. He is a professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in Belgium. He lectures on Individual psycho-analytics psychotherapy, and the psychology of the crowd. He holds a master’s degree and PhD in clin

Cancel culture in climate change by Robert Wade A microcosm on the ‘morality’ of cancel culture: the aborted conference on ‘Global Warming: Mitigation Strategies’, hosted by the Italian scientific academy the Lincei. My essay ‘What is the harm in forecasting catastrophe due to man-made global warming?’ [ link ] placed the debate about human influences on the climate in the context of a larger process of polarization common when scientific disagreements become public. As described by sociologist of science Robert K. Merton [ link ], each group then responds to  stereotyped versions  of the other: “They see in the other’s work primarily what the hostile stereotype has alerted them to see, and then promptly mistake the part for the whole. In this process, each group … becomes less and less motivated to study the work of the other, since there is manifestly little point in doing so.  They scan the out-group’s writings just enough to find ammunition for new fusillades. “   Karl Popper’s epi