Image source How wonderfully constituted is the human mind! How it resists, as long as it can, all efforts made to reclaim it from error! —Angelina Grimké In last month’s post on Chinese attitudes towards Hong Kong I had cause to mention Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier’s book The Enigma of Reason. At some point […]
Though strange to us it seemd At first, that Angel should with Angel warr, And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet So oft in Festivals of joy and love Unanimous, as sons of one great Sire Hymning th’ Eternal Father: but the shout Of Battel now began, and rushing sound Of onset ended […]
Image Source This post will be a bit parochial for readers outside of Taiwan. But let us jump in anyway. Ko Wen-je is a fairly popular mayor of Taipei. He is independent of any party—or at least he was until earlier this month, when he announced he was creating a new political party of his […]
With Darwin came the realization that whatever traits humans share as a species are not gifts of the gods but outcomes of biological evolution. Reason, being such a trait, must have evolved. And why not? Hasn’t natural selection produced many wondrous mechanisms? —Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, The Enigma of Reason (2017) The number of […]
Felix Fenon, At La Revue Blanche (1940)Image source. It is a common observation that internet life and real life don’t really match. Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is a 21st century Weimar Republic. But spend time talking with neighbors and friends in the flesh and you find that this […]
Image source ខ្មាសល្ងងទើបចេះ ខ្មាសក្រទើបមាន Shame of ignorance leads to knowledge; shame of poverty leads to wealth. —Khmer Proverb Earlier this week I was grousing on twitter about books like Ursuala Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, or Ian Banks Culture series. The obvious connection between all […]
Image source. François Bougon’s book, Inside the Mind of Xi Jinping is excellent. It is accessible to those who have but a cursory interest in China, yet does a better job of describing the actual motives and ideology of Xi Jinping than the vast majority of writing about the man in more wonkish publications. It […]
Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is gargantuan. Really. This intellectual history clocks in at over 760 pages. It narrates various theorists’ attempts to discover and describe the principles of strategy over the last few centuries of Western thought. Freedman covers many definitions of the word ‘strategy’ but never settles on any one of them: the […]
Image source “Closed politics cannot be a permanent feature of Chinese society…. We can cooperate with the emerging China of today, even as we work for the democratic China of tomorrow.” —Robert Zoellick,Deputy Secretary of State [2005]. “Since the Vietnam war, the U.S. has more often chosen the strategy of ‘winning without a war.’ This […]
Flappers playing mahjong. Image source. Last week’s post, “If You Were to Write a History of 21st Century America, What Would It Look Like?,” asked what a 21st century version of Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s might look like. Here is how I described the book in that post: […]