Uncategorized
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Obama’s Shadow
Barack Obama, the leader who inaugurated the era of politics that has now come to a definitive end, preached about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, while bending it toward self-enrichment for a select few (including himself). He established a new hierarchy in American culture: a chosen class of elite progressives at
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Exit Poll
Eavesdropping on a pollster phone conversation with Estelle, a "Main Street? Trump voter. She's a mother of three, works for the DMV in Jefferson City, MO, [and is a completely fictional person]: Yes. I voted for Biden in '20, but, yes, I voted for Trump today. Why did I vote for Biden? I don't remember.
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“Freedom From”: Where Right and Left Meet
The "Molochian System" is what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. The Libertarian Right hate it, and in its heyday so did the New Left–and for good reason. I think that what many among the Left intelligentsia today, those in media, in the culture biz, in the universities, don't understand is that they've given up on
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The Election
Astonishing. I had hoped we could find an easier way. But it looks like we’re going to have to do it the hard way. There is so much to say, but I’ll keep this short. We need more perspective. But it does appear that we are more advanced in our collective insanity than I had
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Question: Why Do People Believe Nonsense?
A: Because they want to. Q: But why do they want to? A: Many reasons, but in politics It gives them a feeling of communion and solidarity with others who believe the same nonsense. Both Liberals and Conservatives do it. Q: But why believe nonsense when they could believe something that's not? A: Who is
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Getting Relgion
It is perfectly possible to imagine a future for the capitalist system in which its built-in atheism becomes, so to speak, official–in which, belatedly taking its cue from Nietzsche, it may throw off its mauvaise foi and dispense with a moral superstructure which is not only increasingly superfluous in practice but embarrassingly at odds with its own
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The Longing for Moral Order
Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heaves above me and the moral law within me. Immanuel Kant David Brooks in an essay this week in the Atlantic explains why he resists becoming a Democrat:
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Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins
..given the deep divisions in the nation, it is not likely that the 2024 election will resolve the cultural conflict. In the absence of a unifying national myth, the states are dividing along ideological lines, as they did before the Civil War period and again in the Jim Crow era, with radically different laws on
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Reconnecting with the Cosmos
I get the feeling when I write about Charles Taylor, some among you find your eyes glazing over, but there is no contemporary thinker who I think is more important for helping us to move through this Post-Liberal moment if we are interested in doing that without embracing illiberal alternatives. The task, as I've written
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The Cathedral Lectures
AGI, Hope, and the Human Future The full transcribed texts for the three lectures are posted below this synopsis. The synopsis is designed to concisely pull together the main themes spread out over the three lectures. Synopsis–AGI, Hope, and the Human Future: Resisting the Techno-Capitalist Matrix One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in