Why Everyone Is Getting The Aurora Shootings Wrong

This about Society, tagged , , , , was written by for on July 22, 2012 .48 Comments

(1) Mass shootings of this type account for far less than 1% of US homicides. As such it is pointless and bizarre to try to make some kind of anti-guns point with them. (2) They are a relatively new phenomenon; even the term “postal killings“, describing mass shootings at postal offices, was first coined in […]

Exercises in Banality: The Moral Preening By Khodorkovsky Apologists

This about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for on December 29, 2010 .11 Comments

My views on Khodorkovsky – and by extension his being found guilty of $25bn embezzlement – aren’t exactly a secret (1, 2, 3) so I’ll keep this brief. 1. As usual, the only people who care about this are Western politicians eager to score cheap shots against Russia’s “assault” on transparency and rule of law […]

Book Review: Howard Bloom – The Lucifer Principle

This , about History, tagged , , , , , was written by for , on July 15, 2010 .20 Comments

Depressingly fatalist, morbidly truthful, irresistibly Nietzschean. That’s Howard Bloom’s “The Lucifer Principle” in a nutshell: a meandering trawl through disciplines such as genetics, psychology and culture that culminates in a theory of evil, purporting to explain its historical necessity, its creative potential and the possibility of it ever being vanquished. The odds do not appear to […]

Violence is Reality

This about History, tagged , , , was written by for on October 11, 2009 .15 Comments

Realism has been falling out of favor since the end of the Cold War, condemned by the Kumbaya crowd, avoided by the liberal, PC-gone-wild intelligentsia, and denigrated by “end of history” ideologues (many of whom all too cynically remain realists while cloaking it under the mantle of “liberal interventionism”). What they all have in common is […]

America’s Liberty Cycles

This about Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , was written by for on September 2, 2009 .6 Comments

This is my first follow-up post to The Belief Matrix, in which I attempted to advance a universal model for civilizational responses to subsistence crises (The Malthusian Loop) and the Western challenge (The Sisyphean Loop).  The first country I’ll apply this too is the US, because doing so will allow me to make several important […]

Victimized Venezuela III: Myths And Reality

This about Politics, tagged , , , , was written by for on April 19, 2009 .10 Comments

At the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, two great leaders, Obama and Chavez, shook hands in what could be the symbolic first gesture of reconciliation. Treasonous neocons will no doubt rush to condemn this as yet another limp-wristed and unilateral concession to “America’s enemies”, reminding their listeners that Chavez closed down opposition media, […]