I believe in democracy, but real democracy, not democracy as we see it even in its highest forms in the real world. The democracy that I believe in entails that the people themselves should be the actual deciders of how they’re governed, and that they have authority over their representatives to actually enforce their decisions….
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There’s an age-old problem that people continually run into when trying to influence people and the world for the better: the dynamic between systems and character.i Poorly-designed political, social, educational, and economic systems will yield people of poor character, possessing questionable values, which will make it hard to accomplish good and needful things. As such,…
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I periodically encounter the idea of the Social Contract being employed to justify something or other, some government policy or some informal opinion. However, when it’s employed in this way, such ideas strike me as commonly failing to do what the speaker intends largely due to the errors to the way they understand and attempt…
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There appears to me to be a lot of confusion surrounding our concept of Rights, and much of this seems to me to have to do with a failure of understanding and communication, both individually and collectively. Because there seems to me to be a great deal of imprecision when people refer to Rights, with…
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I wish I could remember where I first heard of Matthew Arnold. I recall encountering a long quotation from what is likely his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy,1 when reading another book and being drawn to it. (I thought it was quoted in Albert Camus’ The Rebel.2 However, I found from its re-read that…
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I’m certainly no fan of AI art.i To most concisely capture my opinion on the matter, you can borrow the sentiment I’ve repeatedly seen circulating on social media, attributed to one Joanna Maciejewska: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do…
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I decided to once again take a hiatus from book reviewing, but I inadvertently chose a difficult book to end on: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise.1 While I think I did well within the confines of a 150 word review to as clearly as possible express the truth as I knew it, I also…
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I’m a huge Kazuo Ishiguro fan, so you can probably imagine how excited I was when I found out a new book of his was out. The prospect of actually reading Klara and the Sun1 got me to agree to write a book review in The Walleye again after so long away. I figured that…
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I suspect that this is going to be a difficult argument to make, especially since it feels wrong to me, untrue, on some level. And so it not only takes a lot for me to break through these feelings to arrive at the actual logic that leads me to the idea, but I also suspect…
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