Yesterday was the seventeenth anniversary of Introspection, my first blog. It lasted for just seven years and change before the daily short-format gave way to this more haphazard long format, now nearly ten years into process. My first post was…
Category: Politics (n.): a strife of interests masquerading
Stop Calling Trump Incompetent
“There’s an old joke, um, two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort. And one of ’em says ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says ‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions!’” -Woody…
This Land is… Your Land?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I feel about the United States of America. I suspect I am not alone in this. In fact, I know I am not alone in this. Every post on Facebook, half of…
The Case Against Free Trade
I spend a lot of time arguing on Facebook. It comes and goes as a use of time. It’s often frustrating, but in the best moments, it feels like there’s a real opportunity to change someone’s mind. Facebook has become…
Obama’s Legacy, Trump’s Window, and the Future of Hope
I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, or in 2012. As regular readers will know, I also didn’t vote for the Republicans in those elections. I wanted to vote for him in 2008, came very close, but ultimately decided…
The Singularity is Already Here
The Singularity is already here. It’s corporations, not computers. You’ve probably heard of the Singularity. It’s a hypothetical future event, dystopian in nature, wherein the need for human intervention in human affairs is swept aside by super-intelligent computers who self-teach,…
Our Need for an Enemy: America’s Adversarial Obsession
“Down the corner by the hotdog stand I seen a man I said ‘Howdy friend, I guess it’s just us two’ He screamed a bit and away he flew Thought I was a Communist” -Bob Dylan, “Talking World War III…
What We Could (Should) Have Done for Aleppo
As a pacifist, one of the most frequent criticisms I face is that I am advocating “doing nothing” in the face of atrocities near and far. There are just bad people in the world, the argument goes, who will kill…
Expectations of American Power
I almost titled this “Donald Trump and the Expectations of American Power”. Just as you could title anything in the last decade “Harry Potter and X” and have it be an instant hit, so too does placing a “Donald Trump…
We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
Look at that headline. Look at it! I know I was excited in my 6,000 word election recap to observe that the problems with our reported unemployment figure and its relationship to labor force participation data had become a mainstream…