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I would like to briefly clarify some details about a certain proposal which was previously discussed elsewhere. First, I am not necessarily endorsing this policy. Merely noting, that in a world burdened by so many challenges, containing so many competing ethical dimensions along which to judge, and in which so many efforts have been expendedContinue reading “One Man, One Kill: Clarifications on a Modest Proposal”

[This is a book review of Newsreal by Joseph MacKinnon & Carlo Schefter. Contains spoilers for Newsreal and The Unholy Consult.] I. How do you produce absurdity? Here’s a shortcut: take some normal, reasonable belief, discern its fundamental principles, then extend those principles to their logical extremes. When this results in the ridiculous, as itContinue reading “Looks Like a Duck, But Quacks Like a Pedophilic Demon”

[This is a book review of Lethe, by Joseph MacKinnon. Contains spoilers for Lethe, Atlas Shrugged, The Unholy Consult, Three Worlds Collide, Platform, Blindsight, 1984, and Brave New World.] I. If you haven’t read it, Lethe is a dystopian novel in which England has been taken over by a totalitarian-socialist government, which controls its population’sContinue reading “Prolegomena to Any Future Dystopia”

[This is a book review of Charles Murray’s Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America. Contains spoilers for The Bell Curve, Facing Reality, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Fountainhead, and The Unholy Consult.] I. For those of you who are coming to this book fresh from reading The Bell Curve, I have some sorry,Continue reading “Defacing Reality: Leave No Uncharted Territory”

[Contains spoilers for Storm of Steel, and The Second Apocalypse series. All quotations of the former are from the Hofmann translation.] I. I’ll be honest with you, friends – I’m not much one for reading memoirs or histories. I made it about five pages into Herodotus, and don’t even mention Thucydides.  But there are alwaysContinue reading “Book Review: Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel”

I. Why do people like reading fiction? Presumably, because it is interesting. But what makes it interesting? What makes anything interesting, for that matter? Well, for a start, we might guess that people find things interesting when those things are meaningful. The best stories, then, are those with a clear narrative, where all details fitContinue reading “The (Non)Sense of Interest”

I. At one point in history, to the extent people did “school” their children, all schools were homeschools. But that time is long past, and now most children get their education from organized institutions, whether state-run or private. In some countries like Germany, homeschooling is even illegal. In other countries like the US, while homeschoolingContinue reading “Homeschoolers, Beneath the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”

[Contains spoilers for The Bell Curve, The Second Apocalypse series, Twilight, The Dark Fields, Ender’s Game, and Card’s Gatefather series.] I. If the most certain, well-studied, and robustly proven result in a scientific field is widely doubted both within the field and outside of it, then one has to wonder – why do people trustContinue reading “The Character of Intelligence”

I. The 2016 TV show Lucifer, first on Fox before getting picked up by Netflix, is about, as the title suggests, the Devil. Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, has decided to quit Hell and move to Los Angeles, where he starts by running a nightclub, before falling in with a police detective who is alsoContinue reading “Altogether Too Much Sympathy For the Devil”

I. The other day I was reading a blogger complain about adults watching Avengers. Their point was that the Avengers movies are fantasy, and adults should have better things to do with their time – presumably, things more grounded in reality. Note that there is an implicit value judgement here: that which is real isContinue reading “The Fake Slim Shady”