One of the reasons I know I’m not a nihilist is because I’m still outraged by injustice. I’m a pessimist, but I still seem to believe in something. Nothing has made this more apparent to me than the utter lack of accountability here in the U.S. (where I live) over the Epstein files. The feeling is like if you were at a cookout with your friends and one of them admitted to being a serial rapist and the host just kind of said “well that’s crazy. Anybody want some hot dogs?” In other words, there is just sort of a stunned sense of “is anyone actually going to do something about this?” It’s almost enough to make a person question their own sanity: maybe I’m the crazy one for thinking this stuff is heinous and disgusting, or for thinking that there would be something even approaching accountability.
Society, Culture, and Economics
How to Change Minds
So far in 2026, here in the United States, I’ve encountered a fair number of people calling for the impeachment, removal, and even arrest of various officials in the Trump administration. Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Greg Bovino because of the lies and mishandling leading to, and in the aftermath of, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and just the overall illegal occupation of Minneapolis. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel due to aiding, abetting, and covering up the Epstein conspiracy. Trump himself for being the ringleader (or perhaps useful idiot) of this grotesque spectacle, all while enriching himself and threatening to “nationalize” the 2026 midterm elections. While impeachment and legal action are certainly in order, those actions, I contend, are the easy part. The hard part is to demonstrate to the ~40% of the U.S. population who either loves what the regime is doing, or who are fine enough with it not to care, that all of this really is as bad as what the detractors are saying. Such an undertaking – completely discrediting the fascist authoritarian project in the eyes of a significant majority of U.S. citizens – requires being able to change peoples minds. But how does that happen?
Renee Good, Greenland, Maduro, and Epstein
At least in my own siloed echo chambers, the three stories getting discussed most often as of writing this are the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the colonial conquest of Venezuela, and the threats of conquering Greenland. A fourth undertone is that all these other stories are meant as distractions for (it is implied) the real story, which is the Epstein file release (or lack thereof). I’ll give my opinion on each of these in turn.
Is AI Doomerism Part of the Hype?
I think that I, like many people, am drawn to the drama of both AI Doomerism (artificial intelligence is going to be existentially disastrous for the human species, and therefore we need to slow or halt its development) and AI Boomerism (AI is going to be enormously beneficial for the world, and therefore we need to accelerate its development, i.e., we need an AI boom). In the former, we get cool sci-fi stories like The Terminator and The Matrix, with all the action and heroism that comes with it, where the latter gives us stories like Her and Star Trek, with all the philosophical wonder at what it means to be human and what consciousness is. Especially as someone who wants to be (or at least likes to pretend to be) an author, and someone who is interested in philosophy, these stories are engaging and it’s easy to get caught up in them. But in the real world, AI has more mundane, but no less impactful, real world consequences. And so, people like me who often live with their head in the clouds, easily swept up by the high-minded ideas of AI, need to be brought back down to earth.
Vince Gilligan’s “Pluribus” is a Metaphor for MAGA
Spoiler alert for season 1 of Pluribus. Also, I just finished watching the show and haven’t looked into anyone else’s hot takes, so apologies of this one has already been said. But to me, whether intentionally or not, Pluribus is a striking metaphor for Trump and the MAGA movement in the United States.
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares – Review and Commentary
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (September 16, 2025), 272 pages.
The Woke Right Did Not Start With the Woke Left
In my recent post about Donald Trump being an authoritarian dictator, I linked to an article by Jonathan Rauch discussing the woke right. The article claims that the right has gone woke because they learned this tactic from the woke left, stating:
The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s.
This is incorrect. The right has been woke since at least the late nineteenth century, likely much earlier.
Why I Came to Believe the Patriarchy is Real
When someone mentions “the patriarchy” many people seem to conjure an image in their mind of men dominating women. This is certainly what I thought when I first heard people talking about this term maybe ten or fifteen years ago. Patriarchy, in this view, is a system where men sit at the top of wealth and power hierarchies while hoarding all sorts of benefits and privileges. Meanwhile, women are relegated to second class citizenship, prohibited from rising through the ranks of wealth and power hierarchies. The idea seems to be that, under patriarchy, men do not suffer or struggle while women are crushed under the weight of oppression. But then the men who hear this think “but wait, my life sucks. This can’t possibly be true!”
Patriarchy is actually quite a bit more nuanced than this. As Bell Hooks said, “Patriarchy has no gender.” Indeed, patriarchy is likely the cause of many of the struggles that men suffer. Not least of which is the male loneliness epidemic.
Common Sense for Modern America
It may not yet be politically correct to say what is about to be said here, since the long tradition of respectability politics makes it easy for the perpetrators to hide behind a façade of reasonable discourse. A well-curated program of propaganda makes what is occurring appear not as wrong, but instead gives it a superficial disguise of being right, making it easy to resort to outrage in defense of the status quo. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?
Genocide is a legal term. Here in the United States there is a lot of hand wringing about what to call the atrocities being perpetrated by the Israeli government against the population within the Gaza strip. Is it a genocide? Or just “merely” ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to call this one thing or another – financial and/or political incentives, but also legal ones. So, let’s look a bit at how we might clarify things.
Donald Trump is an Authoritarian Dictator
Donald Trump might have been democratically elected in a free and fair election in November of 2024, but his actions since coming into office fit the definition of an authoritarian.
Expertise, Meritocracy, Pseudo-Intellectualism, and the Problem of Testimony
The vast majority of what people “know” about any given subject they only know because someone told them, or they read it in a book or online, or heard someone talk about it online. The point being, we get our knowledge from what philosophers call the testimony of others. This worked out well in our hunter-gatherer past, when a member of a tribe knew everyone else in the tribe. Person A knows that person B is someone capable of or knowledgeable about X, and so person A can trust person B with telling them about X.
In much larger societies, such as in modern nation states, many, if not most, of the people we run into online and in our daily lives will be strangers, or at the very least not people we are intimately familiar with. This means that much of what we are told comes from strangers, who are usually themselves relaying information they were told from yet other strangers. Since we don’t know if these strangers know what they’re talking about, humans have come up with various means of lending their testimony legitimacy and trustworthiness.
The Trump Assassination Attempt: the State of Current Politics in the U.S.
Like him or not, July 13, 2024 is the day Donald Trump won the 2024 election. It’s a good thing that Donald Trump was not assassinated; it would have been a bad thing if he had been killed, or even wounded worse than he was. I hate the guy, but I’d hate even worse to live in a country where elections are decided by assassins (instead of the oligarchs who usually decide them). One can look back, for instance, at Japan in the early twentieth century for a country where many elections were decided by assassination. More recently, the election in Mexico was plagued by assassination. The point being, no good can come from such a state of affairs.
The Crisis of Meaning and the Assumptions of Political Christianity
Fairly recently there has been somewhat of a resurgence of appreciation for religion, and Christianity in particular, among public intellectuals. The idea seems to be (and this is one I’ve harped on before) that secularism has failed to give anyone a sense of meaning or purpose – humanism does not fill the “god-shaped hole” that everyone has – and in fact has only engendered political extremism as a poor substitute for that sense of purpose we all seek. As such, the thinking seems to go, we ought to turn back to what worked for thousands of years, to religion, and Christianity in particular. Are these political Christians onto something?
Nature vs. Nurture: an Unsolvable Problem
A large underlying part of the culture wars has to do with the nature vs. nurture debate. The “nature” camp wants everything about humanity to be explainable in mechanistic, biological terms. The “nurture” camp wants everything about humanity to be attributable to social construction and cultural influence. Probably most people understand that there is some interplay between these (i.e., nobody is purely in one camp or the other), but will tend to favor one over the other. But is anyone correct? And, more importantly, is it even possible for anyone to be correct (or to know whether they are correct)?
The Myth of the Flat Earth
Let’s be up front: the notion that the earth is flat is ludicrous. Anyone who believes this either is ignorant of the evidence, or simply wants to believe it more strongly than they care about evidence. A lot of people seem to think it has more to do with the former, but it almost certainly has more to do with the latter. This is because humans crave meaning-making mythologies, and the conspiracy cult of the flat earth offers just that.
New U.S. Constitution? A Proposal
I am born and raised in the United States, and so this post is going to take a U.S.-centric view, but the same ideas could be applied in other countries as well, especially if those countries are facing similar issues. The issues I speak of are the growing sense of political divisions and loss of trust in the government, leading to a loss of trust in the very ideas of democracy, liberalism, enlightenment values, free market economics, and civil liberties. Popular responses to this discontent takes one of two forms: the position that we need to overhaul the entire system (e.g., with a revolution), or the position that we ought to double down on what we are already doing. In this post, I would like to propose perhaps a sort of middle ground.
The 2023 Israel–Hamas War: Conflicts About Conflicts
I’m no expert on international relations, and I’m even less qualified to speak on the hornet’s nest of the century-long issues pertaining to Israel-Palestine. Lack of knowledge or expertise rarely prevents anyone from forming strong convictions about something now days, though. So, why not give this particular hornet’s nest a shake?
What is Inequality?
I’ve made a post on the question of what equality is, but what is its opposite? The obvious answer would be: the opposite of everything in the equality post. But there are more nuances to it than that.
Section 230: Should We Get Rid of it?
Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, known as the Communications Decency Act, contains the famous Section 230(c)(1), which consists of the 26 words that created the internet:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
You can see the full text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 here (Section 230(c)(1) is on page 101). Why this is in the news lately is that a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may be deciding whether Section 230(c)(1) ought to be upheld or disposed (namely, in the cases Gonzalez v. Google, LLC and Taamneh v. Twitter, Inc.).