I just read an interview with my friend Tim O’Reilly in which he
approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions”. There are some books so bad, but so plausible and
influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an
obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl
Marx’s Das Kapital, exert a weird [...]

(An updated version of this essay lives here.)
One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that
human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from
committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics,
religion, and the state.
It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the apparently
ceaseless flow of atrocity reports [...]