If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an …
The Grateful Dead Succumbed to Coronamania, but We Didn’t Conform
I’ve played and have enjoyed hearing others—who are better at it—play live music.
I’ve seen well over 100 shows, including Springsteen (for $6 in 1977), Wilco, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Joan Armatrading, The Pogues, Queen Ida, Lucinda Williams, Pat Metheny, Habib …
The Historian of Decline: Ludwig von Mises’s Relevance Today
[This piece was commissioned by Hillsdale College and presented on campus October 27, 2023]
It’s an impossible task to explain the full relevance of Ludwig von Mises, who wrote 25 major works over 70 years of research and teaching. We …
The dogmatism of common sense
So Esther McVey has been made Britain’s Common Sense Tsar. One can imagine the scene around the Cabinet table, as Rishi Sunak calls on various of his ministers to sketch their plans for the future.
First to speak up is …
The Hypnotic Rhythm of Dependence
“I remember when Friday used to mean something,” said the disheveled man on the bus.
Dependent poverty has a rhythm.
You know the supermarket will be busy on the first of the month because that’s when food stamp cards are …
Slave or Master of Technology: The Choice is Ours
After writing the post on what Martin Heidegger can teach us about technology, I realised that some readers might come to the conclusion that everything about technology is ‘bad’ – after all, Heidegger’s conception does strike one as being a …
In Praise of Semantic Warfare
Strictly speaking, individual words and terms have no fixed meaning. Rather, these signs emerge into life as mostly empty vessels that are imbued with ever greater meaning over time by the semantic associations affixed to them by living and breathing …
Forgive but Never Forget: Lessons from the West African Slave Trade
West Africans endured slavery for 400 years, when 15 million human beings were forcibly captured and sold into bondage. During this era, the world’s major secular and sectarian institutions regarded slaves as no better than animals, but modern West Africans look to …
What Heidegger Can Teach Us About Our Technological Moment
Has anyone noticed how prophetically pertinent Leonard Cohen’s Song, ‘The Future’ is for the time in which we live? Here are some of the lyrics:
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It’s lonely here…
If He Was Alive Today, Socrates Would be Banned
A Primer on Socrates …
Socrates is considered the “father of Western philosophy” and one of the most influential human beings who ever lived.
Among other goals, the study of philosophy seeks to pursue the truth and, by so doing, …
Join the Resistance
Should governments know any limits to their power? One thousand years ago, after King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the answer became yes. The state could not legally brutalize the population with impunity.
That conviction led to …
Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies?
There’s an elephant in the room, the speaker declared. He was right. I was at a gathering, as I often am, of people who aspire to rescue their countries from descending into woke, collectivist hell. But the attendees were not …
Stop pretending to be thankful
It’s Thanksgiving week in the US and, taking time off from their usual diet of gloom and uneasy foreboding, various American media outlets have been asking readers to list things for which they feel grateful. I don’t know about you, …
Can Thanksgiving Traditions Survive a Four-Year Pause?
For decades, I enjoyed Thanksgiving. Each year, we traveled to my parents’ or one of my brothers’, or in-law’s, houses. Twelve to fifteen people sat around two, age-defined tables and ate a hearty, redolent, mid-afternoon meal of turkey, stuffing, homemade, …
Love Really Can Thwart Tyranny
Long before Freud articulated the conflict, or at best the tension between the enduring psychic – and therefore cultural – forces of Eros (life-drive) and Thanatos (death-drive), the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Empedocles, paved the way for this by positing the …