Month: November 2019
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A Celebration of Winsor McCay
My favorite illustrator ever, Winsor McCay (1869-1934), worked for decades as a newspaper political cartoonist, illustrator, and animator. I learned about McCay while browsing through books in the 1990s, I think it was, in a shop in Seattle’s Fish Market, and I just stumbled upon a collection of his work titled Daydreams and Nightmares, which…
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Against Anti-Natalism
The arguments for anti-natalism are terrible. The claim that can be justified in giving birth only if new people consent to the risks involved in new life is incoherent. David Benatar and many anti-natalists are constantly found assuming not living is preferable to living, but it strikes me as not just (a) unsupported by the…
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A Theory of Evil
First posted Aug. 16, 2019. Revised and reposted Nov. 4. Good to read alongside “Why Be Moral.” For a long time, the nature of evil eluded me. But dark contemplation of the Jeffrey Epstein case and of the very existence of pedophile rings has clarified the nature of evil for me. Here, then, is a…