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The Long View 2003-08-21: Staying on Message

To be honest, I find many of John's posts from 2003 painful to read. In 2016, the Iraq war is now widely seen as an unwinnable fiasco, but part of the reason I started doing this is to remember exactly what things were like back then. Twelve years

LinkFest 2016-01-01

Posting has been suspended while I'm on vacation, but here are a few quick takes on The Force Awakens. If you haven't seen the movie, you should consider all of these spoilers. PSYCHOLOGY IN STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS – THE MALE HERO HAS VANISHED! I think

The Long View 2003-08-13: The Battle of Ideas

Unfortunately for John, the equivalent of Stinger missiles in Soviet Afghanistan turned out to be cellphone IEDs. The Battle of Ideas A frontpage story in today's New York Times, Rising Tide of Islamic Militants See Iraq as Ultimate Battlefield has a quote from an Islamist leader that gives

The Long View 2003-08-07: Nifty Catastrophes

With the recent conclusion of the 2015 Paris climate conference, we can see that not much has changed in green politics either. We have an agreement to reduce carbon emissions, alongside a studied ignorance of the likelihood of many of the parties to ignore or elide their targets. Outside of

The Long View: The Future of Freedom

This is a book about the failure of democracy. That is inflammatory language, and I adopt it advisedly. One of John's projects was to show how the best guess we can make, from past experience, is that the world will tire of democracy sometime in the twenty-first century

The Long View 2003-07-31: God's Idea of a Joke

Twenty years ago, I had a modem fried in a lightning strike too. I still keep surge suppressors on my internet connection. Shipping has gotten much faster since then however. It is probably worth repeating every so often, that at the time, I found most of John's ideas

The Long View 2003-07-17: More on Chesterton & Harry Potter

It is a fun thought experiment to imagine what G. K. Chesterton would have said about the Iraq War of 2003. John was right to note that Chesterton was no kind of pacifist. After all, he wrote a poem commemorating the Battle of Lepanto. However, he also had a fierce