October 17, 2026 – 11:21 pm
France is aflame, after decades of choosing suicidal unwisdom and stubborn denial of self-evident realities. Paris is convulsed by riots, while the lovely Town Hall of Limoges was just burnt to the ground. (I wonder if it had a “beautiful oak door”.) It’s tempting to think of this as some sort of divine retribution — […]
October 15, 2026 – 7:29 pm
I haven’t had much to say about the American political scene for a while, and it has never in my lifetime felt more like an existential struggle between mortal enemies. But there are still some bright spots, and occasions for momentary happiness. In particular, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: one would have to have a heart […]
October 12, 2026 – 1:56 pm
…to all of you. Thanks as always for coming round.
October 11, 2026 – 8:00 pm
How can this not be of transcendent origin? Frame your hypotheses as you like; I will refuse to believe them.
October 8, 2026 – 11:46 am
A prescient writer had this to say, way back in 1995: First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human […]
October 5, 2026 – 6:16 pm
I’ll say this: I never imagined that in late 2026 the #1 topic on social media would be philosophy of consciousness. But there it is, and it isn’t going to go away: the personhood of AI agents — we even call them “agents”! — is already, in some people’s minds, an urgent question. And as […]
October 3, 2026 – 8:05 pm
My new favorite musical artist is a fellow calling himself Buddy Mac, who has, just in the past couple of days, become famous on X. He performs a haunting, “lonesome cowboy” kind of music not heard much anymore, and does it so well that it pierced my heart. (Listen to “my pony and I”, and […]
October 1, 2026 – 2:26 pm
I read with dismay today of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike, who had been sentenced to death for her role in the cruel and gruesome murder of a young woman, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995. Not only was justice postponed for three decades, but when the time came, the authorities couldn’t even get the job […]
September 30, 2026 – 7:52 pm
I’ll take a moment here to talk about a word — a coinage only a few years old — that seems to have entered the mainstream without anyone remembering where it comes from. That word is “mogging”. It describes the social dominance of an oversized male personality. To be “mogged” is for a man to […]
September 29, 2026 – 12:56 pm
Back in 2015 I wrote a few items (for example, this one) about what I called “Pollack’s Principle of Privilege”: To learn where true privilege lies, simply see how people choose to identify themselves. As we see in this recent item, not much has changed.
September 26, 2026 – 6:44 pm
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a brief post about whether AIs might be considered to have “intrinsic” intentionality: that is, whether their internal states might be originating sources of “aboutness”. The nature of intentionality is something I’ve been stewing over for decades now, and the aspect of it that I’ve been most curious […]
September 24, 2026 – 8:24 pm
Today, when I’d just begun to recover from last weekend’s exhausting music-marathon, I had to go in for a colonoscopy. (I was due, and my beloved brother David’s sudden death from colorectal cancer back in May sharply focused my attention.) Too much information? Sorry, at my age I don’t really care anymore. Like it or […]
September 22, 2026 – 8:15 pm
Well, our long weekend of music is over. It was exhausting — we had over a hundred tunes to work on — but it all went very well indeed, and we had a blast. Fun fact: as some of you may know, one of the core members of our Shoal Survivors collective is Ray Castoldi, […]
September 15, 2026 – 11:07 pm
It might be a little quiet here for a few days: the musical collective I belong to, the Shoal Survivors, is gathering this week for our annual extravaganza. I’m in Westchester for two days of rehearsals, after which we head up to Massachusetts for three nights of performances. (Why the name? It’s because we started […]
September 14, 2026 – 8:23 pm
A society that accepts everything collapses under the weight of what it should have rejected.” -Karl Popper
September 11, 2026 – 5:22 pm
Here we are: a quarter of a century has gone by since 9/11. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, back in 2011, I had this to say: On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, […]
September 8, 2026 – 3:02 pm
You’ve probably heard that the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) won bigly in last weekend’s election in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and is now poised for further gains throughout the country. This accelerating political insurgency, by what the German “Cathedral” considers a party of far-right extremists, has sent progressives all over the West to […]
September 7, 2026 – 10:40 pm
Our friend Bill Vallicella catches Claude in a fundamental error regarding its own self-awareness. Here.
September 5, 2026 – 7:26 pm
I’ve been having a lively exchange with a reader, Susan James, in the comment-thread from a recent post about artificial intelligence. Ms. James has been pushing back on my use of what Daniel Dennett called “the intentional stance” in my discussion of how these systems will affect human life. (The comment-thread is here.) I have […]
September 5, 2026 – 6:46 pm
Here is a website that figures out where you’re from in America by analyzing your word choices and pronunciations. (All I can say about how well it works is that it correctly identified my own point of origin: New Jersey.)
September 3, 2026 – 8:04 pm
Here’s a fun little AI toy: Any Human Ever.
September 1, 2026 – 11:47 pm
Today was Primary Day here in Massachusetts. Primary Day in a midterm year is, for most people, fairly far down the psephological priority-list, and after looking over what was on the ballot, I didn’t even bother. (The urgency is deflated in my case anyway, because I live in one of the bluest parts of America, […]
August 31, 2026 – 11:08 pm
Here’s a 1923 SCOTUS case I’d never looked at — United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind — in which the Court had to rule on what constituted a “white person”. Wikipedia summary here.
August 31, 2026 – 12:24 am
I see that Google Maps now lists Lake Ontario as Lake America! It’s a silly business — it’s obviously just Donald Trump trolling Canadians and the Left (I repeat myself). I had no problem with the old name. But on the other hand, we had to sit back and take it while Columbus Day became […]
August 28, 2026 – 7:58 pm
Are you familiar with the reactionary aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila? You should be. Here are a few morsels, to whet your appetite: – “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.” – “Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the […]
August 27, 2026 – 3:29 pm
Recently there’s been a spate of postings on X from “mainstream conservative” types who are aghast that people on the actual Right have been paying attention to Carl Schmitt. The scoldings generally are of the ad-hominem/genetic-fallacy sort — “Schmitt was a bad guy, and so whatever he says must be bad”, but occasionally also include […]
August 26, 2026 – 4:43 pm
Here, from The Atlantic, are the opening lines of what its authors surely imagined to be a “scare piece” against the German Right: Imagine that it’s October 2026, and one of Germany’s 16 federal states has come under the control of a far-right government for the first time since the Nazi era. With an absolute […]
August 25, 2026 – 2:29 pm
Feminism, especially after the reaction to this Lindsay Clancy case, seems, increasingly, simply to be about the right to kill babies and children. That this is actually a rebellion against the feminine itself is worth noting; it is rage against the very thing that gives the movement its name.
August 24, 2026 – 10:59 pm
“Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.” – Chesterton
August 23, 2026 – 11:21 pm
The great deceit of the age: we hijack axioms and pretend they are theorems, then flatter ourselves on erecting a world that stands on our “reason” all the way to the bottom — as if such a thing were possible. “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its […]
August 22, 2026 – 7:54 pm
I believe that that most significant and extraordinary thing that has happened in my lifetime — even more than the great and humiliating rupture of the COVID crimes and lockdowns — is how quickly AI has progressed, how extensively it has already inserted itself into every aspect of our lives, and how blithely we’ve accepted […]
August 21, 2026 – 10:32 pm
Something I never fully appreciated when I was younger was how much of the past completely disappears. It was doing it all along, of course, but my window of personal acquaintance with time was short enough that most of the things I was aware of were still within their own window of currency, and the […]
August 20, 2026 – 11:21 pm
The sluice-box is empty tonight, so here’s a photograph I took a few weeks ago:
August 19, 2026 – 11:19 pm
In the aftermath of yesterday’s primary elections, as I watch the Democratic Party tear itself in two, I’m reminded of a post I wrote nine years ago as this was all beginning to happen. An excerpt: The leftmost edge of the Left has accelerated sharply leftward in recent years. This has exerted tidal stresses on […]
August 18, 2026 – 11:00 pm
In yesterday’s post I remarked that one of the reasons I’d been slacking off around here was that “I’d begun to wonder if I can really think as well as I used to.” I mentioned Eric Hoffer, who’d wondered the same thing (about himself, of course), at the age of seventy-two. Vito Caiati commented that “As […]
August 17, 2026 – 7:47 pm
It’s been a while now, but I think it’s time to try to get things moving again around here. It’s difficult when the Muse goes silent. You freeze up as you approach the blank page. You tell yourself you’ve said everything you have to say, and don’t want to repeat yourself just for the sake […]
Although it may look, at this point, as if I’ve pretty much abandoned the blog, I want to assure those who still stop by that I haven’t – it’s just been a difficult time for writing. The complications attending my brother’s death are mostly over, but the month of July is when our family converges […]
With a hat-tip to my Urbit pals, here’s an amusing daily diversion: Anthropeum.
Away in CA for a few days, seeing to my brother’s final affairs. We gave him a good sendoff yesterday, with more than a hundred in attendance. Back in a few days. Update: we’re back. Sad, but life goes on. Getting caught up, should be back to posting soon.
On Tuesday, May 12th, my younger brother David died in a hospital near his home in California. He died of sudden septic shock caused by a large G.I. tumor that had just been discovered a few days earlier. He was only 64 years old — five years my junior. David was born on July 9th, […]
My younger brother, David – my only sibling – died today after a very brief illness. (I only found out on Friday that he was sick.) He was 64. I loved him very much. He was gone before I knew he was leaving. I will be writing about Dave in a forthcoming post. But it […]
People are still bickering on social media about that Red/Blue suicide-button question (see my previous post), and people seem so locked into their intuitions that I though I’d see what Claude, who seems for the moment to be the sharpest of the AI tools I have access to, might have to say about it. Here’s […]
This question has taken over Twitter once again: The correct answer seems perfectly obvious to me. What say you?
April 21, 2026 – 12:09 pm
[With apologies to Paul Harvey] Q: If you were the Devil, and wanted to degrade and corrupt Western society so as to make it vastly less conducive to human happiness and flourishing, what would a successful ten-point program look like? Claude: A good Socratic exercise — reasoning from the adversary’s position to reveal what actually […]
I’m seventy years old today. Crikey! I’ll apologize yet again for how sparse the content has been here lately. Blogging, like anything else, requires sustained effort, and periodic energizing “shocks”, to prevent stagnation, decline, and decay, and I have been lazy and neglectful. Most of what time I have spent here recently has been occupied […]
To all of you. Sorry it’s been so quiet here lately. For a while now I’ve been gestating another entry in the series of posts I’ve collected under the heading Pilgrim’s Progress; after attending an Easter Mass today at the church here in Wellfleet, I think it’s past time that I got around to writing […]
The future has never been so opaque. This is qualitatively new. In the past, there would always be an assortment of possible timelines ahead, but they were each at least somewhat visible. Though we might have no way of knowing which possible future among many might come to pass, we could look a fairly long […]
It’s with terrible sorrow that I must report the death of one of my oldest and closest friends, Peter H. Kranzler, who, I learned today, died on February 15th in Petaluma, California, where he had lived for many years. We had not been in touch for a year or more; my understanding is that he […]
Here’s a stunner for those who don’t believe in miracles: My indefatigable friend Herschel D. Ducker, a resident of northern Arkansas whose cholesterol score is higher than his credit score (and whose Gleason score hovers somewhere between “hominahominahomina” and “Bang! Zoom!”), turns 70 years old today. Please raise a glass (especially you longtime readers of […]
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day, and the President of Ireland chose to mark it with a speech endorsing the accelerating demographic replacement of the indigenous Irish people — a tiny, irreplaceable population, with a rich and unique culture, who, if nothing is done (and it is probably already too late) will be a minority in their […]