Yesterday I wrote about Orwell’s 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” where nationalism meant a manner of thinking that could attach itself to more than just a state. Orwell says he chose the word because it […]
Tag: ideology
(Curiosity) If you only read one book, read one that isn’t true
A connection of mine recently self-pubbed a cyberpunkish dystopian sci-fi novel. Since I’m universally supportive of gatekeeper-free publishing, I was enthusiastic at first, but it’s since turned out to be little more than a thinly-veiled […]
(Curiosity) Against Popular Science
RC Lewontin’s short collection of essays “Biology as Ideology” was formative for me. As you might expect of a nearly 30-year-old book, parts of it have not aged well. His rant against the Human Genome […]
(Feature) Liberalism’s Last Stand
William Gibson famously observed, a couple decades ago now, that the future had arrived, it just wasn’t evenly distributed. The fact that he had to say that and that people still find it insightful suggests […]
I resist violent resistance
There’s an idea going round now, inside all the rest of it, that anything short of violent resistance is, at best, appeasement, and at worst, tacit collaboration. It’s the language of extremes that admits of […]
(Curiosity) How to Think About: Monogamy (and not be an idiot)
When we complain that people are generally bad at something, often we’re not saying they don’t understand it, as in they don’t understand it at all. What we’re saying is that they have missed (what […]
(Curiosity) Why Europe Conquered the World
A cenotaph is a marker or monument to a person whose remains are interred somewhere else. Pictured above is Enlightenment architect Étienne-Louis Boullée’s famous design for a massive cenotaph in honor of Sir Isaac Newton. […]
Science is a Myth
As an undergraduate, I took a political science class called “Ideas and Ideologies” that had a significant impact on me, and still does to this day. I was interested in politics then, much more so […]
(Curiosity) The Rationality of Disenfranchised Non-Voting
In college, I took a poli-sci class on the American Presidency. One of the things we learned was that the president’s party tends to lose seats at midterm elections and that this effect is often […]
