We need something more than rational scepticism. We need a new ideology – something like a religious movement of our own – one that’s more optimistic about the future of humanity, that places a little more faith in the ability of people to do their own risk assessments and voluntarily adjust their behaviour if necessary.
Pascal Made Slaves of Us All Continue Reading
We face the question of how to purity test our leaders—both official and unofficial—in light of all the devastation we’ve witnessed during the response to COVID-19. If you believe, as I do, that the importance of this issue presently eclipses that of any other, then every step should be taken to select for leaders who opposed lockdowns as early and as vocally as possible.
How Long Did It Take Them Realize that Human Rights Matter? Continue Reading
The current fad of the financially fabulous is Effective Altruism, which essentially involves promising to give your money while you are still alive to causes and organizations that “do good,” while simultaneously tethering them to your whims through financial dependence. A very specific example of this is the massive money going to barely-surviving but purportedly legit media organizations (or you can just buy the Washington Post.) You get good press when you own it.
Ineffective Maltruism Continue Reading
Life is a messy, risky, and at times lethal adventure, and while it’s perfectly acceptable and in fact compassionate to try to lower this risk to some extent, a complete elimination of all risk would create a dull, lifeless world devoid of conviviality and meaning. The people of Jack’s town are willing to accept some level of pain, sadness and suffering in order to reap the concomitant rewards that come with living life to the fullest.
The Boy Who Trapped Death in a Nut Continue Reading
Like any old school respiratory virus, this one made us feel lousy, albeit with a different constellation of symptoms. We handled it the same way as other viral illnesses: we drank extra water, took some home remedies, and tried to get some extra sleep. A few years ago, no one made a big deal about, or needed to categorize, being sick like this. People rode it out. No one cared what you had. Or didn’t have.
Fear of Covid Is the Opiate of the People Continue Reading
What’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
Where Have the Voices for Liberty Gone? Continue Reading
We dare not relent lest the despotism we experienced only very recently be repeated and entrenched. We know now that it can happen, and that there is nothing inevitable about genuine progress. Our job now is to regroup and recommit to living free lives, never again believing that there are magical forces at work in the world that make our role as thinkers and doers unnecessary.
Forty Years of Freedom Slipped Away So Quickly Continue Reading
The way things are going at this point, the most viable alternative seems to be to get working to build a parallel social structure which can exist alongside or even tunneled within the Fascist Imperial state, and which might eventually replace it. How could such an organization be structured?
Integrity Lost and Regained Continue Reading
The problem in our current world is that “experts” demand our behaviors conform to their self-proclaimed expert prognostications, for which they are never held responsible in any way. No costs to those predicting the future are associated with prognostication errors. All costs of future-telling errors are borne by not-prognosticators. Those costs are borne by the people, by society, by the economy, all too often by children, etc. The rest of us bear the costs.
Time to Trust Your Inner Expert Continue Reading
A disease that leaves 99.85 percent or more people perfectly alive as an “unprecedented threat” to humanity allegedly requiring palliative measures that just so happened to induce massive social fragmentation and one of the biggest upward flows of wealth in history. Sure no problem Papa, whatever you say.
Infantilized R Us Continue Reading
My Plan A, in the event of unsavoury political developments unfolding, such as it was, involved writing letters of protest to politicians and others. It wasn’t really a plan, more of a reaction, and an orthodox one at that. In any event, it was a pathetic failure. It didn’t even give me the illusory comfort of a response, let alone a tangible improvement.
Plan A or Plan B? Continue Reading
In the end, the truths that De Las Casas preached did prevail but the human project is always at risk of going backwards in time. We know this now better than many previous generations, simply because we’ve been witness to such horrible abuses over these last three years. Human sacrifice is clearly not vanquished from the earth; it only takes a different form today that it did 500 years ago.
De Las Casas and the 500-Year Struggle for Liberty Continue Reading
