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The Long View

The Long View 2004-09-01: The Real War, Billy Jack, Cold Fusion

John prediction record on this post is almost zero. The only thing in here I can find that didn't get disproved by subsequent events is the statement that the Islamic terror attacks on the US and European nations was another theatre of an Arabian civil war. The Real

The Long View: Imperial Hubris

My favorite paragraph from this review: The Bush Administration has rejected withdrawal. It has also declined the option of butcher-and-bolt. Anonymous says we will rue these decisions, and maybe he is right. Be that as it may, the policy the U.S. has actually adopted is sometimes called “draining the

The Long View 2004-08-30: Victory, Law-and-Order, Peace

The rosy picture of human conflict John reported in this post from 2004, called Pinkerization after Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, no longer looks so good. As late as 2008, the data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program looked much

The Long View 2004-08-27: Authenticity; Lesser Evils; Death Worms

This paragraph was written to describe the 2004 Republican convention, but I think the planned spectacle of modern protests hasn't changed much since: Then there is this consideration: where are the rabbles of yesteryear? The Simpsons What do we have now? We have performance artists, and an equal

The Long View 2004-08-20: The Sick Man of Mesopotamia

The funniest [and most horrible] thing about this blog post is how very, very wrong John was about the relative stability of Iran and Saudi Arabia. I've been hearing rumors of collapse about Saudi Arabia for a long time, even Greg Cochran has gotten in the act recently.

The Long View 2004-08-16: New Jersey; Antichrist; Prison; Kill Bill 2

John's occasional comments on New Jersey politics were always fascinating to me. New Jersey is very much another world to this native of the American West. Even our scandals seems different. A recurring theme of John's was that the increasing harshness of criminal sentencing was an

The Long View 2004-08-10: Stability; Jesus the Kid; Heinlein

John Reilly mentions Robert Heinlein's nuclear survivalism in passing here. Since I am a child of the sunny 80s, the dark days of the Cold War often seem remote to me. However, I do know that a great many things in mid-twentieth century America were done in part