Jun 29, 2024
Alexander: Hello and welcome to the first Presidential debate of 2024. Based on the remarkable popularity of the previous debates I moderated (2016, 2020, 2023), I’ve been asked to come here again and help the American people learn more about the our two candidates - President Joseph Biden, and former president Donald...
Jun 29, 2024
I think I got the original post slightly off.
I was critiquing Sam Kriss’ claim that the best traditions come from “just doing stuff”, without trying to tie things back to anything in the past.
The counterexample I was thinking of was all the 2010s New Atheist attempts to reinvent “church, but secular”. These...
Jun 29, 2024
I had been living in Japan for a year before I got the idea to look up whose portraits were on the banknotes I was handling every day. In the United States, the faces of presidents and statesmen adorn our currency. So I was surprised to learn that the mustachioed man on the ¥1,000 note with which I purchased my...
Jun 23, 2024
I.
A: I like Indian food.
B: Oh, so you like a few bites of flavorless rice daily? Because India is a very poor country, and that’s a more realistic depiction of what the average Indian person eats. And India has poor food safety laws - do you like eating in unsanitary restaurants full of rats? And are you condoning...
Jun 23, 2024
I.
Steve Kirsch is an inventor and businessman most famous for developing the optical mouse. More recently, he’s become an anti-COVID-vaccine activist. He has many different arguments on his Substack, of which one especially caught my eye:
He got Pollfish, a reputable pollster, to ask questions about people’s COVID...