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Political Philosophy

The Long View 2002-02-07: The Irrelevance of Peace

This entry of John's blog is pretty short, and pretty pithy, so I'm just going to copy the whole thing here. John Derbyshire, unlike John Reilly, is rather a pessimist; John Reilly described himself as an inveterate optimist, and the mission of his blog was to

The Long View: A Republic not an Empire

I don't think I have a one-word summary for John's foreign policy preferences. Maybe someone who disliked him could come up with something pejorative, but I don't feel the need. I do know that John didn't have any time for isolationists of

The Long View: Imperium

The Long View: Imperium

John's interests in cycles of history and millennial movements sometimes led him down strange alleys. One of those was his study of modern international fascism. It is pretty common to slur someone as a fascist, far less common to actually meet one. They still exist, and probably loom

The Long View: Constitution of the Ecumenical Empire

John was very interested in the form the future might take. He wrote a book that was his attempt to limn the future by means of a program he wrote in BASIC and the ideas of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee. Like myself, John felt that the idea of cycles

The Wrong Way to Advocate for Your Cause

The Wrong Way to Advocate for Your Cause

Yesterday on NPR I heard a story about a panic in a Charlottesville, VA grocery store caused when a man carried his rifle into the store. I am all for gun rights, but this was just plain foolish. Scaring people doesn't win them to your cause. This episode

What is Conscientiousness?

Brent W. Roberts at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has a nice page summarizing the concept of conscientiousness. Roberts mentions interesting challenges in this field of study, and even talks about the effect behaviors associated with conscientiousness have on the fate of nations. What is Conscientiousness? Conscientiousness refers to individual differences

Imagine

John Lennon's Imagine is one of his most remarkable songs. It remains popular 40 years after it was released. Imagine seemed to sum up the aspirations of the '60s perfectly [even though it was released in 1971]. I like the song too, but there is little in