With Both Hands

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Benjamin Espen

The Long View 2004-04-27: The Darwin Award Ceremonies

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote just this week that the birth rate in the United States now stands at lowest level ever recorded. It turns out the anti-natalist political program branded as reproductive rights has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators. Like many such things, it has also taken on

The Long View 2004-04-23: Cracking Ice

Rumors of the demise of the North Korean system were clearly exaggerated. Kim Jong-il made it another 7 years after this 2004 news item. Cracking Ice Accounts of yesterday's train disaster in North Korea are proliferating and inconsistent. (So is the romanization of the place where it occurred:

The Long View 2004-04-19: Delusions of Utility

I never liked the second and third Matrix movies much, but I did appreciate that the movies were sufficiently high concept to introduce a lot of otherwise uninterested people to philosophy. My main objection is the that the idea so many people were introduced to is Gnosticism. Now that the

The Long View 2004-04-16: Hegemony and the Left

Thanks to a South Asian history professor I had, I always hear the word 'hegemony' with an British accent in my head. I also remember dropping my coffee into my favorite hat in that class, but the TA was teaching that day. Unlike a lot of John'

The Long View 2004-04-14: Failed Campaign

Actually, al-Mahdi is like Jesus in Christian eschatology, in that he is the one who will reorder the world in complete justice. Failed Campaign The events on the ground in Iraq are progressing as well as can be expected for that difficult enterprise. The long-expected Islamist attempts to foment civil

The Long View: The Coming World Civilization

The most interesting idea to come out of this book by William Ernest Hocking is the 'unlosables', those aspects of a culture that persist even when the society that created them falls into decay. It the unlosables that we speak of when we refer to the Greek or

The Long View 2004-04-09: Good Friday

The best thing I can say about this post from twelve years ago is that almost nothing has changed in that time. Good Friday Let us begin with the Stations of the Cross. For our meditations, we will use the lyrics to Fires (Which Burned Brightly), by the old art-rock