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The Long View

The Long View 2003-08-13: The Battle of Ideas

Unfortunately for John, the equivalent of Stinger missiles in Soviet Afghanistan turned out to be cellphone IEDs. The Battle of Ideas A frontpage story in today's New York Times, Rising Tide of Islamic Militants See Iraq as Ultimate Battlefield has a quote from an Islamist leader that gives

The Long View 2003-08-07: Nifty Catastrophes

With the recent conclusion of the 2015 Paris climate conference, we can see that not much has changed in green politics either. We have an agreement to reduce carbon emissions, alongside a studied ignorance of the likelihood of many of the parties to ignore or elide their targets. Outside of

The Long View: The Future of Freedom

This is a book about the failure of democracy. That is inflammatory language, and I adopt it advisedly. One of John's projects was to show how the best guess we can make, from past experience, is that the world will tire of democracy sometime in the twenty-first century

The Long View 2003-07-31: God's Idea of a Joke

Twenty years ago, I had a modem fried in a lightning strike too. I still keep surge suppressors on my internet connection. Shipping has gotten much faster since then however. It is probably worth repeating every so often, that at the time, I found most of John's ideas

The Long View 2003-07-17: More on Chesterton & Harry Potter

It is a fun thought experiment to imagine what G. K. Chesterton would have said about the Iraq War of 2003. John was right to note that Chesterton was no kind of pacifist. After all, he wrote a poem commemorating the Battle of Lepanto. However, he also had a fierce

The Long View 2003-07-14: All Uranium, All the Time

One of the things I appreciate John for to this day is explaining exactly why children's literature like J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series really are pretty harmless, in comparison to actual ritual magic. John also had enough empathy to understand why well-meaning parents might be

The Long View 2003-07-08: Neo-Hypochondria

John makes an interesting claim here: that psychoanalysis served the same function for mental illness as health resorts serve for hypochondriacs. That makes it seem less stupid than it otherwise might. Neo-Hypochondria Yesterday I suffered the torments of the damned, if the damned have Canon printers. It was one of