Freddy

Either side can easily be portrayed as the underdog, because victimhood is limited only by imagination. So we must consider the question not in terms of who is most oppressed, but who is most reasonable? Who is most willing to compromise, and whose goals will, overall, benefit Israelis and Palestinians most?

"Yak shaving." Our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet

it has not caught on within the lab. This is a shame, because it

describes all too well what I find myself doing all too often.

You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some

stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what

you're supposed to be w... See more

So when their chosen heroes — the freedom fighters in whom they invested so much moral cachet — showed up at a concert and started beheading raver kids and Asian workers and abducting grandmas and God knows what else, what were Western leftists supposed to do? In situations like that there are really only two things you can do, without switching yo... See more

The reason the ultra-left run into so many ideological inconsistencies is because they are underdogphiles. They see the underdog through a highly fetishized and sympathetic lens.

Support for the underdog isn’t a bad thing—and in fact, it’s actually highly necessary in many cases—but their fetishization amounts to blanket support, meaning there is no... See more

The point is rather that we should be highly suspicious of people and movements that depict themselves as escaping human nature's self-serving and competitive instincts or propose societal transformations that rely on our collective ability to escape them. And more generally, we should be sceptical of any narrative endorsed by those on the left or ... See more

Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.

I think the first person to grasp the unavoidability of political bias fully is the American journalist Walter Lippmann. In my vote for the most insightful paragraph ever written on the epistemological challenges confronted by citizens in large, complex, modern societies, he wrote,

“There is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire,

... See more