Reading Time: 3 minutes Every year of the calendar, for ages and ages, up to and including this year, religious people have believed the end of the world is coming soon. But the end never comes. I would evince a high degree of vanity to think the end of the world will occur in my life span. The whole […]
utopia
Posted inPolitics
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Posted inGeneral
Prelude to Commonwealth, III: Hopepunk Dreams
Reading Time: 6 minutes Especially in dark times, stories of hope and utopia show us how the world could be better than it is, and thereby give us a blueprint for creating that better world.
Posted inGeneral
Prelude to Commonwealth, II: On Climate Despair
Reading Time: 5 minutes Much will be lost, and it’s right to grieve for that loss, but giving in to despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The fight against climate change has a bigger prize than the preservation of what we already have; if we win, we can create a better world.
Posted inGeneral
Prelude to Commonwealth, I: On Late-Stage Capitalism
Reading Time: 6 minutes Inequality has reached crisis levels. We can change the basic assumptions that society is built on, but to do that, we need to visualize the new shape of the world before we can make that image into reality.
Posted inGeneral
Repost: The Perils of Scriptural Morality
Reading Time: 3 minutes [I’m taking a break from the blog to bond with and care for my new son. Please enjoy this classic post! I’ll check in periodically to answer comments.] I was cheered by a story I saw last week about about heroic activist groups working to end the barbaric custom of female “circumcision”, aka female genital […]
Posted inGeneral
We Need All the Brainpower We Can Get
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’ve solved all the easy problems already. Now we need more people to help out with the big ones.
Posted inGeneral
On Seasteading and Liberlands
Reading Time: 4 minutes Building your own utopia turns out to be just a bit harder than anticipated.
Posted inGeneral
Atlas Shrugged: L’Etat, C’Est Moi
Reading Time: 7 minutes Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter II While Ragnar Danneskjold thinks of himself as a reverse Robin Hood, I think he’s more like the Objectivist Santa Claus. He comes down the chimney to give gold to all the good girls and boys of superlative individual value. He may not have a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer, […]
Posted inGeneral
Atlas Shrugged: Welcome to Atlantis
Reading Time: 6 minutes Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter I And now, we embark on the third and final part of Atlas Shrugged. When we left off at the conclusion of Part II, it was on a cliffhanger: Dagny’s plane was spiraling down for a crash landing, plummeting into a mysterious valley that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Part […]