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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 3
In the first lecture I talked about how Primal Alienation is the source of all that ails us. And how humans will do almost anything to ease its disease. If the main symptoms of our alienation are our feeling of being cut off from one another, nature, our bodies, our work in the world, and
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Chesterton’s Fence
If one reads the articles of the early Swedish feminists, they ran the gamut from socialists to liberals and Christian reformers. Some disliked the patriarchal family and thought it necessary to abolish it. Others thought that its flaws could be reformed voluntarily through public education. Some feminists considered men and women fundamentally equivalent and all
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Essential Excerpts: Summer 2022
From "Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism", 7/3 As Jackson's defeat of Adams was a fork in the road in 1828, so was Reagan's defeat of Carter in 1980. Both roads led to disaster. Both Jackson and Reagan were popular, larger-than-life characters, and both left toxic legacies. After Reagan in the 80s, morally deformed figures
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Essential Excerpts 2022: Spring
This is the second installment of of excerpts from essays posted in 2022. The first can be found here. From "Imagining a Positive Human Future", 4/3 Marxism was an eschatological cult despite its materialism, and with the de-legitimization of the Marxist grand narrative, the Left lost any way of framing a positive imagination
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Essential Excerpts: Winter 2022
I'm one of those human beings who doesn't know what the thinks until he writes about it, so the posts in After the Future tend to be unwieldy and prolix because they are essentially freewrites. So it was useful for me to review what I wrote in the last year to see if I could
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A Word about Biden’s Philadelphia Speech
Republicans were not really Mr. Biden’s target audience in any case. For all his expressed hopes of bringing the country together, the president and his team have come to accept that 40 percent of Americans are beyond his reach, unwilling to listen. And so Mr. Biden was speaking not to them but to the 81
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How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 3
[Deleuze's and Guattari's] Anti-Oedipus resonated for a new era whose radical spirit was bent on subverting hierarchies. But, just as the swinging sixties notion of the sexual revolution had concealed its opposite, namely the repressive desublimation Herbert Marcuse indicted in One-Dimensional Man, so Anti-Oedipus’s injunctions towards non-fascist living produced a cure worse than the disease;
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Arendt on the Cynicism of the Masses
From an interview with Hannah Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge: This is the creation of the mass and it isn’t just fascism. This isn’t just populism. This is totalitarianism proper in Arendt’s mind. She says at one point, and this is a quote that’s resonated with me for a few years now, that “the masses’ escape
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What Is “After the Future” About?
After the Future is a public diary that I’ve been writing for over twenty years. It’s what I’d be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them
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Justice, Yes; Racism-Shaming, No
Yet when activists try to combat racism by calling it out, they often struggle to accomplish their goals. Focusing on Trump’s racist behavior did not keep him from winning the presidency. The Black Lives Matter movement has mostly failed to implement its Race-based strategies are especially challenging in a country where living standards have stagnated