Coming Discontinuity

• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

  And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means

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• The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

  I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live–as much

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• Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan

  Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess

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• What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

  [I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable

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• In the meanwhile…

  Yesterday I wrote about what I believe has to happen in the long run if the machines aren't going to win. By the machines winning I mean that we're at a balance point where technological development can go one way or the other: either the machines will serve human needs or humans will come to

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