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The Long Lifetime

Uller Uprising Book Review

Everytime I read a book by H. Beam Piper, I’m sorry I slept on it for so long. Uller Uprising is a tightly plotted tale inspired by, but not a retelling of, the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. And it has a introduction of some of the hardest science I

The Long View 2008-08-17: Some Foolish Little Thing in the Caucasus

As John J. Reilly notes here, and in his review of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, while it is important to have a sense of history, you can also be misled if you think that the past will simply be repeated. For example, with China and the United

The Long View: Grand New Party

John J. Reilly’s review of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand New Party [Amazon link] encapsulates much of his political thinking, and should be regarded as one of his key essay’s on American politics. For example, John noted that the family structure of the 1950s was historically

The Long View 2007-10-28: The Fitness of Natural Selection; Macrohistory and Generations; The Decisive Lifetime

This is a pretty good case of a time when not looking at something quantitatively produces immense confusion. In the the case John J. Reilly mentions here, distinguishing between traits under selection and things that happen to be correlated with those traits, is something with a pretty robust theory behind

The Long View 2007-06-18: Third Party Platform; War without End; Disillusionment & Global Warming

John J. Reilly recommended that any third party or attempted realignment of American politics attempt to recreate something of the New Deal, which matches up pretty well with this chart from 2016. What goes by the name populism is often an attempt to move a nation’s politics toward the

The Long View 2007-04-02: Saecula, Bismarck & Lincoln, House of Lords

The 1860s were a peculiar decade. You saw the US Civil War, the formation wars of the German Empire, the War of the Triple Alliance in South America that killed something like 70% of all men in Paraguay, and the Taiping Rebellion in China that killed something like 15%-20%

The Long View 2006-11-20: Steyn, Tesla, and Option Two

Here is an interesting reflection on social democracy. In the United States, it is a relatively common political position on the Left to advocate for some kind of social democracy, with some people being confused, thinking this is a variety of socialism, or even communism. In history, social democracy has