Articles

Welcome to the blog page. Here's all the articles. Like the tag line for the web site says, I write about a lot of different subjects. Well, at least, when I write at all. It still haven't gotten over being disheartened by losing years and years of content to WordPress hackers. I guess I still need to work that out. In any event, here's what I've managed to slap together so far.

Precursors of Genocide

Karl Marx was the father of socialism, and co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels. Central to the thesis of socialism was the class struggle, which is to say the conflict between the working class (the proletariat) and the ruling class (the bourgeoisie). In Marx's view this struggle was inevitably violent. Embedded in the central principles of socialism is the concept of intergroup violence.

There Are No Solutions

Alcohol consumption is a problem. According to Boston University's Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, the availability of alcohol is directly associated with increased violence and death. For instance: Each year in the US, there are 7,756 homicides attributable to (assumed to be caused by) alcohol. Between 2002 and 2008, 21% of persons serving time for a violent crime reported being under the influence when the crime occurred.

The Death of Expertise

Tom Nichols PhD was professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years. In 2018, he published The Death of Expertise, a book in which he argued that "the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill informed [sic] and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement". He considers this a sign of "narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism".

The Map to Reality

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Ukrainian agronomist who lived in the Soviet Union. By 1928, he had rejected both Darwin's theory of natural selection and Mendel's theory of genetics. Neither, he declared, were compatible with the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Lysenko's ideas would've quickly met with scientific opposition and dismissed in a normal time and place, but unfortunately, the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s was neither.

Meaning and Socialization in the Information Age

I noticed today that Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced new legislation: "The National Strategy for Social Connection Act". The Act purports to solve the issue of "loneliness and isolation". Let's leave aside whether we should run screaming in terror at the very idea of the government imposing "nutrition, sleep, and physical activity" guidelines on the general population. Let's also leave aside whether such a proposed strategy would actually solve the problem it purports to solve.

The Transition of Ages

With this article, I offer a world-historical hypothesis about why we’re going through such turmoil. I've written this as a companion to the video presentation I linked earlier. Of course, you might not want to sit through an hour and a half of me talking (or rambling) about this. So, while this is a pretty long article, you can probably read it a heck of a lot faster than I can say it.

Book Age Business Models

I want to continue my examination of the death of the Book Age by looking at the newspaper business model; specifically how unsuited it is for the Information Age. This old business model is killing the newspaper industry. But it also goes beyond that. Newspaper business models are one of the primary victims of the Information Age changes we're seeing, but they aren't the only ones.

The Book Age is Over

We live in weird times. In fact we're living in times we haven't experienced since the 15th century. Since 1450, we've lived in the Book Age, which followed the creation of the movable type printing press. But that age is over.

A Theory of Secular Morality

One of the most common objections---perhaps the most common objection---that religious people have towards Secularism is that, without God, there can be be no basis for morality. Essentially, this argument means that there can be no moral system that humans can create and live by that is derived from a rational set of principles, and, thus, a moral system can only be imposed from outside of the human experience by a god. Which, by the way, proves that there is a god that exists. The follow-on corollary is usually that, if there wasn't a god, we'd all become cold-blooded murder machines.

I Don't Beleive

I was raised in a conservative, fundamentalist, Pentecostal home. My great-grandfathers were founding ministers of the Assemblies Of God Pentecostal denomination. Both of my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers was an ordained minister in it. So was my father, uncle, aunt, and, eventually, the son of my uncle and aunt.