Earlier today Jeffrey Tucker asked on Twitter “In theory, the higher end your status and the more protected your position, the more you are willing to tell the truth. In practice, it seems to be the opposite”. As I pointed out in my replies, there’s … Continue readingAccident of Birth: A Feature, Not a Bug?
Novak Djokovic’s case, and especially his recent reversal at the hands of a regime who obviously hate him personally and want to turn (what they no doubt consider to be) a filthy unvaccinated Serb untermensch into an example of their power for the undesirables to … Continue readingA Stream of Thoughts Against Lockdown
At LessWrong Virgil Kurkjian has a fascinating post, “Leto among the Machines”, analyzing Frank Herbert’s “Dune” chronicles, specifically its worldbuilding point of the Butlerian Jihad (the elimination of computers from human civilization), from a “rationalist” perspective, especially how the Butlerian Jihad makes perfect sense once … Continue readingNemesis Among the Machines
“Extremism can come in many forms,” President Biden said at a speech recently. “It can come in the rage of a mob driven to assault the Capitol. It can come in a smile and a fleece vest.” “Extremist” or not, turns out coming in a … Continue readingTriumph of the Fleece Vest
Kurt Gödel is famous for his “incompleteness theorems”, and ranks among the all-time great mathematicians (he was also a logician and a philosopher). What’s less well known about him is that he claimed to have discovered an “inner contradiction” in the United States Constitution, a … Continue readingGödel’s Loophole: My Pet Theory
What if I had a country to call my own, one that belonged to me, my very own answer to the Principalities of Liechtenstein or Monaco? First and foremost I’d want it to be a refuge of liberty, a free society where the best of … Continue readingIf I Had a Country
We should abolish elections and replace them with sortition, random selection from the citizenry, thus guaranteeing a representative body. I’ve posted about that before. But if we must have elections, what voting system should we use? Pure proportional representation, that’s what; specifically multi-winner ranked choice … Continue readingFor Proportional Representation
“9/11”: a word filled with feeling, the bulk of it bad, for all but those fortunate enough to have neither experienced nor heard of it. In the heat of the moment, when Islamic terrorists rammed two hijacked jet planes into the twin towers of the … Continue readingTwenty Years of Terror
The results of the 2020 United States Presidential election are well known by this point, and much analysis has been offered, including by myself on Twitter. For the first time on this blog I would like to offer some of the thoughts I’ve expressed in … Continue readingChecking in on American Politics: 2020 Edition