Category: Theory
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Our Moral Abyss
First, let me state my basic thesis poetically. To some, it will sound unoriginal, implausible, and overwrought: We in the West are falling in a moral abyss. We are in mid-fall. It’s been long since we careened off […]
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How to pop the education bubble
1. Soul-making and the education bubble One of my biggest pet peeves is the reduction of education to an economic transaction—to the gaining of marketable skills in exchange for fees. That’s all wrong. […]
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How to end Western civilization
[A video version of this post is at the bottom of the page.] I was reading Climbing Parnassus, a book-length defense of learning Greek and Latin, and it goes into historical depth about […]
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Why There Is Free Will
I. Some quick preliminaries I believe there is free will. I am a compatibilist. In this essay I will defend this view. I’ve taken this line ever since college, but have never taken […]
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Why Edward Snowden deserves a pardon, explained in 10 easy steps
Let me put this briefly and simply. The government should not be snooping on us. But they started anyway. That was wrong and unconstitutional. When they did, they made their snooping program secret. […]
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Who might you find in the lowest circles of hell?
I liked my answer to this Quora question so much that I had to put it here on my blog as well. I also used it to answer the question, “Why is murder […]
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Is it time to establish Internet user unions?
Since everybody and his grandma have gotten on the Internet in a big way in the last few years, the social influence of giant Internet companies has skyrocketed. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Amazon, Twitter, […]