Author Archives: authorbengarrido
Politicians > Military Leaders > Businessmen, Really?
Between Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Han Fei-tzu and my rapidly worsening podcast addiction, I’ve been learning an awful lot about ancient history recently. One of the themes I’ve kept running across is this pattern where good politicians seem to be much more important and much more powerful than generals or […]
A Panegyric Upon Liberty
Let us sing of liberty! Through the clouds of oppression, however thick, ever our sweet light of freedom shown. Though the bloody hands of tyranny bind and abuse our lady of liberty, she struggles on, inevitable in her triumph. Let us sing of liberty! Under your yoke, however weighty, we have suffered with the […]
Beyond Christianity, Part 3
I recently asked a group of writers how I could write a convincing homophobic character who is himself a closeted gay. Since I’m a novelist asking this question to a group advertising itself as a resource for writers, it seemed to me a pretty reasonable question. I didn’t get anything useful for character development, but I […]
Beyond Christianity, Part 2
A friend on Facebook recently posted a Fox News video about “liberal agitators” at a Trump rally. Being that this was from Fox News, the agitators they chose to show were not particularly articulate. I was milliseconds away from forgetting all about it until I saw this comment beneath the video: “They’re being paid to […]
Beyond Christianity
For those of you who’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that I spend a lot of time thinking about modern morality. If you haven’t been following along but still want to be one of the cool kids, you can check out this or this or this or, if you’re feeling super […]
The Face of Oppression is Positively Adorable
While walking to my local grocery last Wednesday I found four hamsters in a trash pile. Unfortunately, two had already died and the other two looked like they were well on the way to freezing. I don’t really think of myself as the sort of person who has hamsters, but I also wasn’t going to […]
Kurt Godel and the Limits of AI
About two months ago I had the distinct pleasure to read Self Aware Patterns’ fascinating article on artificial intelligence. Mike Smith, author of that excellent blog, argued that AI need not fail because of Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem. He approached this problem from an empirical and deterministic theoretical framework. This inspired Tina Forsee, the writer […]
Ghost Town Exploration
With all the casinos defining Reno’s skyline, and the gambling halls studding the main drag of almost any small town in Nevada, it’s easy to forget how our state began—mines. More specifically, Nevada began as a source of financing for the Union during the Civil War. Like Liberia with its conflict diamonds, our silver helped […]
A Letter to My Students
Dear Students, Welcome back to Mokwon University. I hope you had a wonderful vacation and I hope you’re rested for the new semester but what I really hope is that you take the opportunity to do something cool in 2016. It’s true that cool stuff is more fun but that’s not my biggest reason […]
The Doomed Moralists, Part Two
In Part One of the Doomed Moralists, I argued that a moral practice becomes good because it makes a society more powerful. I don’t want to restate too much, but I took the view that good and bad are constantly evolving concepts that are always tested in the crucible of competition. Fellow writer Malcolm Greenhill […]
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