It's the money, stupid.

The people who have kept the world from a slide into darkness and pulled it forward have, to a shocking extent, been heretics of one form or another. I’m using “heretic” more broadly than in just a religious context, but please consider this: It’s the punisher…

“Call me pisher” is a Yiddish phrase from my youth, and it was used to instruct me in a very important lesson. (Though I hardly realized it at the time.) And since Yiddish speakers were often not particularly delicate persons, I’ll have to be a bit less than…

I regularly go on about the necessity of forming your own opinions and making stands upon them. And while I’m quite certain about that, there’s another side to such things. We are complicated creatures, after all. The more we express and defend our own opinions…

The stakes are rising.

Since the Bronze Age, human societies have been arranged around brute force. Even now, governments are monopolies of violence. More than that, the very structure of government serves one primary end: to deliver violence. All else is supplemental.

I can still remember the first time someone told me that they believed in the Calvinist doctrine of “the depravity of man.” It shocked me. To complain about human behavior I very well understood; there’s plenty of bad behavior in the world. But to flatly…

Culture has always been the antagonist of conscience. Once we see ourselves as part of a larger entity – once we identify with it – we feel a necessity to conform to it. If we don’t, we begin to lose the existential crutch that larger entities offer us. And…

A few years ago I wrote an article on status, to rather mixed reviews among the online commenters. Today I’m going back to status, “doubling down,” as people like to say these days. The proximate cause of this return to status is a set of studies I’ve been…

I believe that women are inherently as valuable as men. But I don’t believe this because of politics, I believe it because of experience. Young people are taught  that women before 1970 or so were suppressed, deprived of education and legally raped by their…