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The Long View

The Long View: Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic By Tom Holland

John J. Reilly thought Rubicon [Amazon link] by Tom Holland, the cricket-playing English historian often confused for Spiderman, was an interesting counterpoint to The Last Generation of the Roman Republic By Erich S. Gruen. There is a lot of fascinating history here, from Pompey’s clever embrace of the concept

The Long View: The Last Generation of the Roman Republic By Erich S. Gruen

Like John J. Reilly, I too am fond of making allusions to the late Roman Republic and comparing it to the present, but this book review also makes the excellent point that you shouldn’t try to map politics of the present too closely onto the past. What goes by

The Long View 2007-06-25: The Holy Grail; The Precautionary Principle; Cryptozoology; The Collapse of Europe Conference; The Costs of the Immigration Bill

When I republish one of John J. Reilly’s The Long View blog posts, I usually try to find some parallel in current events, or link his comments into his greater oeuvre. But, sometimes this is a struggle. This post has been. In retrospect, John’s blogging was less interesting

The Long View: Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion By David Gelernter

Another great review by John J. Reilly. One of the things I admired about John was his ability to make you learn something useful and interesting when he critiqued a book. Many of the books he reviewed were elevated by the experience. Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion is certainly

The Long View: The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited Edited by John Matthews

This is a follow-up and a reconsideration of an earlier work on the relationship between the Rosicrucian movement and the subsequent flowering of scientific inquiry in Europe. In short, Francis Yates’ argument was that the Royal Society, and other organs of the Enlightenment were the fruits of a millenarian movement

The Long View 2007-06-21: Immigration and Rotten Boroughs; Zero Population Growth Anachronism; NASA's Greatest Triumph; No Black Holes; Global Warming Plan B

Here is a case of John should have checked the numbers and didn’t: No, the problem is not "too many people": Japan and California are roughly the same size, but Japan has four times as many people as California and is substantially richer. In part, CAPS is

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