Over at the Washington Examiner I have a book review out of Timothy Brook’s The Great State: China and the World. Brook is a well regarded historian whose past work has focused on both the Ming Dynasty and on early 20th century China. This book is a popular history that narrates episodes from the Yuan Dynasty […]
The folks over at Reason magazine have published an essay by Daniel Drezner titled “There is No China Crisis.” The essay is a long and meandering piece of apologia for the old DC model for dealing with China. I’ve written about this model and its failures before (especially see the posts “Give No Heed to […]
Two weeks ago I appeared on Titus Techera’s podcast Post-Modern Conservative to talk with him about my article for the National Review, “Learning the Wrong Lessons From Reform Conservatism” and the blog-post that went with it, “Conservatism’s Generational Civil War.” Our discussion was fruitful and wide ranging: over its course we discussed various intellectual currents […]
There is a school of international relations theory that advocates judging the relations of states absent speculation on the intentions and plans of its statesmen. As leaders have an incentive to lie and their intentions can never really be proved one way or another, it is best for the analyst to refrain from mind-reading altogether. […]
As February turned to March I realized I needed a better understanding of epidemics and disaster response. It was clear to me then that the coronavirus was going to blow up in my own country, that I was going to be voicing opinions about it, and that in consequence I had a responsibility to inform […]
Image Source I have a new essay out in the National Review which extends some of yesterday’s thoughts on the limits and attractions of the “common good” conservatism to a new topic: the generational divide that currently divides thinkers on the American right. The Sanders/Biden primary has drawn attention to the parallel phenomena on the […]
A screenshot of a “Girls Do Porn” video uploaded by a pseudonymous user. An American court charged “Girls Do Porn” with sexual trafficking, but these videos are still uploaded on to Pornhub by anonymous users every day (I found this video after about 30 seconds of googling and took a screen shot of it on […]
image source Today I came across an article three decades old, penned by Simon Leys in 1990. Leys is reviewing Laszlo Ladany’s The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985: A Self Portrait, a book I have not read but will pick up now. Ladany made his name publishing a newsletter that analyzed the goings-on […]
Over at Gene Expression, Razib Khan has up an interesting post that compares and contrasts the genetics of South Africa’s Afrikaner population with New England whites: Afrikaner ancestry is overwhelmingly Northern European. But as you see in the PCA above they are notably African and Asian shifted when compared to their potential ancestral populations (I […]
Image Source The United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why this is so. Ian Easton explains the PLA’s view: The Course Book on the Taiwan Strait’s Military Geography is a restricted-access […]
