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The Long View

The Long View 2007-01-27: The Real Enemy; Guardian Robots; The Constant of Tolerable Terror

Two of the links John J. Reilly put in this post are really good: A Culture Worth Dying For The fact is that if democracy meant nothing else than that blasphemy could be freely circulated, or that pornography was always available at the touch of a button, or that Michael

The Long View: We All Fall Down

The best paragraph in this fascinating book review by John J. Reilly is this: As an aside, we may note that this solidifying of the self into an entity that acts without regard to desire is also the goal of certain esotericists. The adamantine self becomes a "body of

The Long View 2007-01-26: The Dead Hand of the Seventies Flexes but Is Mitigated by Scientific Advances

I have never bothered to closely follow popular science news for two reasons: 1. It is often confused, at best 2. Even when it is well-reported, whatever results are covered tend to be invalidated over time Nothing here strikes me as especially dumb, but I like to wait for the

The Long View 2007-01-24: The State of the Union

This The Long View post is brief, so I will be similarly brief: I still think you could assemble an interesting majority coalition in American politics that was all-in for universal healthcare, moderately skeptical about immigration, and just a little bit anti-free trade. I don’t expect this to happen,

The Long View 2007-01-21: I've Had a Really Bad Weekend

I did not have a bad weekend, but John J. Reilly was rather disappointed in the Republican convention in 2007. JJR had some substantial disagreements with the domestic policy of President George W. Bush, leading to this cri de coeur: What a fraud the Republican Revolution was. It was not

The Long View 2007-01-17: Franco-British What-Ifs; Steyn on Children of Men; Obsolete Doomsday Clock

A Franco-British Union is the kind of alternative history that John J. Reilly loved to post about, except this one was seriously proposed more than once in mundane history. Franco-British What-Ifs; Steyn on Children of Men; Obsolete Doomsday Clock This is not one of the great "What-Ifs" of

The Long View 2007-01-15: Stephen King & The Second Religiousness

I’ve never been a Steven King fan, but his influence is hard to escape in American fiction. John riffs off of Ross Douthat’s attempt to make sense of the historical moment King can represent. Stephen King & The Second Religiousness The title of this entry was not the