WBH Weekly Digest 2023-04-15 Mapping it Out
New series Land of the Black Sun, a podcast appearance by Ben, the influence of Blade Runner, and sweet fan art.
Imperial
The Long View 2008-09-07: Some Notes on the American Political Major-Party Conventions of 2008
John J. Reilly gives us some solid grounding here in the foundations of cyclical theories of history, and also provides his assessment of why neither American party has been able to create a durable governing order akin to the New Deal.
This essay is highly recommended.
Some Notes on the
The Long View 2007-07-04: The Declaration of Independence & The Imperial Contract
This is one of the rare blog posts of the Long View that gets into something more interesting than just the controversies of the day.
If you were to do a network analysis [which I have considered doing] of John’s internal hyperlinks, the essays and reviews he cites here
The Long View: The Forge of Christendom
Cricketer, historian, and author Tom Holland is here a proponent of the thesis that one of the things that truly differentiates the Christian West, Christendom, is the separation of powers between church and state that gradually evolved out of a fight over who was allowed to nominate bishops.
However, Holland
The Long View: America Alone
If the National Intelligence Council really predicted that the EU will collapse by 2020, their prediction is looking like a real long shot at this point. Maybe that is why DARPA funded Philip Tetlock's superforecaster project: to improve the accuracy of things like this.
To be fair, if you had
Ecumenical Twilight Updated
I updated John Reilly's short story, Ecumenical Twilight, with a linked table of contents. I love this story. Like so much classic scifi, it is an deep essay on politics wrapped in a shallow speculation about the possibility of life on Europa, the moon of Jupiter.
There are images from
The Long View 2005-06-27: Persian Populist Surprise; Terraforming; the Emerald City
Spengler [David P. Goldman] and John Reilly had sets of ideas that were mildly adversarial and mildly complementary. I don't know whether they ever corresponded. For example, Spengler was right that democracy in the Middle East would unleash terror and war. John Reilly was right that Iran is a far