A collection of 127 posts
The smileys are not bad people. They are not necessarily unintelligent people. They are unhappy people wearing a mask of happiness, confused and beaten and searching for an easy answer.
The events of 2020 have caused precisely these sorts of setbacks in global collective human progress.
For many established religious institutions, the pandemic threatens to exacerbate an ongoing retreat from organized religion.
The COVID-related disruptions of schooling have scattered hundreds of millions of children and adolescents across an archipelago of small islands that are not well-suited to fostering modern educational goals.
What is unique about our time is not “the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep,” as Thucydides put it, but the success of scientists in bringing many such spectacles to an end.
Totally Under Control is squarely focused on the bungling, mismanagement, and incoherence of the Trump administration.
It is a sign that the end of the global pandemic may—may—soon be in sight.
We were Oscar Wilde’s great-grand-nephews, dandy aesthetes obsessed as much with the curl of our hair as with art or politics.
The pandemic crisis is rapidly becoming a civilizational crisis.
Overly harsh enforcement of the law can paradoxically act to undermine it.
Hatred of the Chinese regime has become so strong and pervasive in the West—especially in the US, where China is seen as its main geopolitical foe—that it creates incentives that allow unsubstantiated allegations to spread largely unchecked.
In any case, the virus eventually reached Huanan Seafood Market, which served as a springboard from which the virus spread to the rest of Wuhan, and eventually across the entire world.
The human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party provides ample evidence of its capacity for repression and cruelty, and therefore ample opportunities for condemnation.
Bureaucratic inertia and incompetence are plentiful in China, and not just among local officials, even though apparatchiks in Beijing frequently use them as scapegoats for their own corruption.
Polarization is baked into the current system, and no reform program will completely level the playing field.