Category Power
The Tragic Heroes of 2020
The last year and a half saw two major crisis – COVID19 and the breakdown of the rule of law. COVID itself was – conspiracy theories aside – almost certainly a naturally occurring infection that jumped from a wild species to humans. Its spread was aided by freedom protesters and conspiracy theorists, eager to fight […]
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals
Thomas Sowell is one of the most famous members of the Chicago School of economics. This school, though not super famous on its own, is immensely influential in both academic and policy circles. The layman might accurately conceptualize of the Chicago School as a respectable, mathematically rigorous and very idealistic alternative to Ayn Rand – […]
An Open Letter to Noam Chomsky
Dr. Chomsky, I recently watched “Manufacturing Consent,” a documentary on your career. Some of it – your highly problematic concept of freedom for example – was familiar from my previous studies. Much more was breathless panegyric on the part of the documentary maker. However, the part that convinced me to write this letter concerns the […]
Just a Tool Kit?
Before my first semester of high school an as-yet unknown English teacher sent me a message commanding that I should read four books during vacation and prepare detailed reports on each, due on the first day of class. At the time, I thought this was a pretty intense increase of difficulty compared to middle school. […]
Why NFAC May Be Good
I like this picture. I consider the existence of this armed militia a cause for hope not because I hate white people and certainly not because I want to express white guilt, but because I think it represents a real, sustainable basis for respect. I think it represents a genuine respect because, in my experience, […]
Marx’s 200th Birthday
So, let’s start with the obvious stuff. The followers of Marx made the Nazis look like amateurs on the whole “mass murder” thing, the public ownership of the means of production has, whenever tried, either collapsed or led to authoritarianism and the economic part of Marx’s theory is charitably described as a confused version of […]
#Me Too, Historical Context
Me Too, which began in 2006 but exploded into the mainstream only with the various Hollywood sex scandals of late 2017, might seem like a novel thing, a shiny new movement unprecedented and out of context, but I promise it is not. Depending on your views you might love or hate the movement, but […]
The Aesthetic Case Against Rights
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book “Overcoming Justice.” I’d love any ideas, reactions and thoughts you have regarding this article. I have several reasons for viewing rights with suspicion. I think the epistemology is all messed up and I think that the concept of human rights invalidates huge swaths of history and experience. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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