Podcasts about its enemies

Es freut mich sehr, dass ich für dieses Gespräch Oliver Gorus gewinnen konnte. Es fügt sich inhaltlich an das kürzliche Gespräch mit Prof. Konrad Paul Liessmann an, gibt aber einen anderen, sehr wesentlichen Blickwinkel wieder, den wir ebenfalls in der breiten Diskussion viel zu wenig hören. Oliver Gorus ist seit einem Vierteljahrhundert Unternehmer in mehreren Branchen. Er ist Gründer und Herausgeber des freiheitlichen Online-Magazins »Der Sandwirt«, Kolumnist und Kommentator bei den »Freiheitsfunken«, bei »eigentümlich frei«, beim Kontrafunk und auf X. Er ist glücklicher Familienvater, Schwabe und ungern auf Reisen. Er lebt in Südtirol und liebt die Freiheit. Es war geradezu erfrischend, mit jemandem zu sprechen, der Freiheit als Konzept und Lebenspraxis ernst und sehr persönlich nimmt. Die meisten Menschen, denen ich heute in Europa begegne, gerade auch formal Gebildete, scheinen mir eher einer Untertanen-Mentalität anzuhängen. Was kann der Staat für mich tun? Oder, noch schlimmer, was sagt mir der Staat oder ein beliebiger Vertreter einer Obrigkeit, was ich tun soll? Und wenn es kein Leitbild von oben oder einer beliebig banalen Bubble gibt, ist man verloren. Dieser Weg in die Sackgasse, in der wir uns in Europa befinden, beschleunigt sich täglich. Darum erscheint es mir so wichtig zu sein, Dinge und vor allem vermeintlich intellektuelle Ideen, die sich aber eher als Glaubenssätze herausstellen, fundamental zu hinterfragen. Wir beginnen mit der Grundfrage: Was ist Freiheit, besonders im Kontext der heutigen Zeit und der Veränderung über die Zeit? Verschiebt sich die Bedeutung »Freiheit von« (negativ) gegenüber »Freiheit zu« (positiv)? Hat sich auch die Bedeutung des Wortes Liberalismus vs. Libertarismus verschoben? Wie stehen Freiheit vs. Kollektivismus heute? Sind »links« und »rechts« noch zeitgemäße Einordnungen? Welche gesellschaftlichen Aspekte fallen überhaupt in diese Betrachtung? Ist Philip Pettits republikanische Definition von Freiheit relevant? Es ginge nicht um das Beherrschtwerden, sondern um das Potenzial, beherrscht zu werden. Was ist der Unterschied? Geht es dem Sklaven, der vom Herrn Champagnerfrühstück serviert bekommt, nicht gut? Was ist das Problem? Warum sind die Corona-Maßnahmen ein bedrohliches Beispiel für den Zustand der Freiheit in Europa und der westlichen Welt? Ein aktuelles Beispiel sind die immer totalitäreren Maßnahmen, die in der EU und Deutschland beschlossen werden, gerne während der Urlaubssaison oder während einer Fußball-WM, in der Hoffnung, dass die Menschen abgelenkt sind und Journalisten noch weniger kritisch arbeiten als sonst. »Ein Geheimdienst, der im Verborgenen arbeitet, bekommt operative Fähigkeiten, damit wird das alte Trennungsgebot — eine der Lehren aus dem Dritten Reich — missachtet. […] Das sind Strukturen, die hier gebaut werden, die an die dunkelsten Zeiten unserer Geschichte erinnern.« Dies ist aber nur eines von zahlreichen Beispielen. Wie sind wir in diese existenzielle Krise geraten, in der wir in Europa stecken, und besteht hier nicht ein Zusammenhang? Sind Menschen, die Freiheit wollen, nicht in der Minderheit? Sind wir Untertanennationen, lieben die meisten Menschen gar das betreute Denken? »Wir Freiheitlichen sind im deutschsprachigen Raum traditionell und schon immer in der Minderheit. […] Ich glaube, dass die Freiheit in Deutschland in den Köpfen der Menschen unterentwickelt ist und es nur eine Minderheit ist, die überhaupt bemerkt, dass hier solche Machtstrukturen aufgebaut werden.« Ist die Situation hoffnungslos, oder kann sich daran etwas ändern? Wird sich genug Druck im Lande für wesentliche Änderungen aufbauen oder werden die Fähigen und Klugen schlicht Deutschland, Österreich und Europa verlassen und damit die Situation wesentlich schlechter machen? Ist eine Zersplitterung der Gesellschaft zu vermeiden, oder erkennen wir gerade einen Trend ins Gegenteil? Ist der Begriff der »Krise« überhaupt anwendbar oder erleben wir eher Zusammenbruch als Krise? Entwickeln sich Gesellschaften in Zyklen? Wie wären diese zu denken? Was ist die Rolle von Kultur? Wer bestimmt, was zur Kultur wird? »Von dem Ich und dem Du geht es über in das Man. […] Da gibt es dann plötzlich dieses kollektive Wir.« Sind Individuen in der heutigen Phase, wenn eine Nation über den Zenit ist, noch eine Wirkmacht? Was oder wer dann? Wie endet der Zyklus aber dann und was geschieht danach? »We gave authority to the people who explained things. Not the people who built them.«, Marc Andreessen Und dazu passend: »The world you see everywhere around you, could never have been built by the people you see now living within it.«, Eric Weinstein Was ist davon zu halten? »Würde heute ein Ludwig Erhard leben, der Vater des Wirtschaftswunders, der würde verzweifeln, der wäre völlig machtlos.« Warum sind die USA trotz aller Probleme, die es dort gibt, deutlich erfolgreicher als Europa? Gibt es einen Technik-Zyklus, den die USA treiben und wir verpassen? Oder ist dies überhaupt ein Phänomen, das gar nicht mehr einzelnen Nationen leicht zuordenbar ist? Wie kann in einem Gemeinwesen überhaupt eine Entscheidungsfindung stattfinden, die zu konstruktiven Ergebnissen führt? Zentral oder dezentral? In welchem Verhältnis? Oder ist Anarchismus eine Variante? »Steckt in der Demokratie immer schon die Saat des Versagens?« Begegnen sich Extremisten im Kollektivismus? Kann man am Wesen des Menschen vorbei theoretisieren? Und was sind die Folgen davon? »In allen menschlichen Kulturen gibt es Strukturen.« Können und dürfen wir Menschen ändern? Auf welcher Ebene und in welcher Skalierung sollten und können Entscheidungen effektiv getroffen werden — was hat das für Konsequenzen? Braucht es die Kleinteiligkeit, den Flickenteppich? Leben wir aktuell gar in einer Fürstenherrschaft? »Diese ›unsere Demokratie‹ ist eine Aristokratie.« Was nun? Gibt es einen Ausweg? Im Grunde gibt es drei Möglichkeiten: Über das Danach nachdenken und entsprechende Konzepte vorbereiten auf emergente Phänomene hoffen Parallelstrukturen schaffen Warum ist der Volkswagen-Konzern ein gutes Spiegelbild für die deutsche Gesellschaft? »Die Leistungsfähigen werden bestraft und die Nicht-Leistungsfähigen oder Nicht-Leistungswilligen werden belohnt. Das führt dazu, dass immer mehr Leute die Seite wählen, wo sie alimentiert werden.« Wie kann es einen Neuanfang geben? Regional? Wenn wir in Europa über den Euro alle Fehler und alles Versagen über Nationen verteilen? Wie soll das funktionieren? Ist das nur eine Phase? Was wird zerbrechen? »Harte Zeiten produzieren gute Leute, gute Leute produzieren gute Zeiten, gute Zeiten produzieren schwache Leute, und schwache Leute führen alles wieder zum Zusammenbruch. […] Wir haben gerade sehr, sehr viele, sehr, sehr schwache Menschen.« Wie kann es aber gelingen, Schwache und Bedürftige weiter zu unterstützen ohne ein Sozialsystem, wie wir es heute haben, das völlig seinen Fokus verloren hat und in keiner Weise nachhaltig ist? Welche Rolle spielt Bildung? Warum ist unser aktuelles Bildungssystem trotz der enormen Kosten, die es verursacht, so dysfunktional? Führt staatliche Wohlfahrt und Bildungswesen zum Gegenteil des erwünschten Effektes? »Kinder lernen schon in den Familien, vom Staat abhängig zu sein. […] Echte professionelle Jugendarbeit und Sozialarbeit ist ein Kampf gegen Windmühlen.« Ein Bonmot, das ich kürzlich gelesen habe sagt: »Most jobs today are adult daycare.« Ist das zu polemisch? Wie ist das zu denken mit aktuellen Entwicklungen in künstlicher Intelligenz und Robotik — einige Jahre in die Zukunft gedacht? »Der Bildungssektor wird sich anpassen, sobald er nicht mehr staatlich ist. […] Es wird sich ein so bunter Strauß an Bildungsformen ausbilden, dass es auch für die unter Anführungszeichen Schwächsten hervorragende Bildungsmöglichkeiten geben wird.« Andere Episoden Episode 155: Freiheit oder Sicherheit? Ein Gespräch mit Prof. Konrad Paul Liessmann Episode 153: Potent Stuff, A Conversation with Prof. Jacob Howland Episode 152: Säkulare Glaubensbekenntnisse Episode 150: Wie kommt Neues in die Welt? Episode 144: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Daniel Stelter aus ökonomischer Perspektive Episode 141: Passagier oder Steuermann? Ein Gespräch mit Markus Raunig Episode 138: Im Windschatten der Narrative, ein Gespräch mit Ralf M. Ruthardt Episode 136: Future Brunels? Learning from the Generation that Transformed the World. A Conversation with Dr. Helen Doe Episode 131: Wot Se Fack, Deutschland? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 130: Populismus und (Ordo)liberalismus, ein Gespräch mit Nils Hesse Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger über Generationen Episode 117: Der humpelnde Staat, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Kletzer Episode 114: Liberty in Our Lifetime 2: Conversations with Lauren Razavi, Grant Romundt and Peter Young Episode 113: Liberty in Our Lifetime 1: Conversations with Massimo Mazzone, Vera Kichanova and Tatiana Butanka Episode 108: Freie Privatstädte Teil 2, ein Gespräch mit Titus Gebel Referenzen Oliver Gorus auf X Der Sandwirt Philip Pettit, Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford University Press / Clarendon Press, Reihe Oxford Political Theory (1997) Ben Shapiro, Lions and Scavengers. The True Story of America (and Her Critics), Threshold Editions (2025) Ulf Poschardt, Shitbürgertum, Westend Verlag (2025) Ulf Poschardt, Bückbürgertum. Eine Geschichte verlorener bürgerlicher Kulturkämpfe, Westend Verlag (2026) Marc Andreessen Tweet Karl R. Popper, Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde (Original: The Open Society and Its Enemies), Routledge (1945) David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs. A Theory, Simon & Schuster (2018) Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State. How to Start a New Country (2022)

“It's a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week's “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith's editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies. These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world's first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let's call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone. So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith's answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang's support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips. And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can't keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI's models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn't nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith's Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence. We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn't in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it. The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show. Five Takeaways •       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week's conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies' own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack's new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don't work.•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that would let government switch AI off — and, paradoxically, the AI companies are in favor. Keith's reading: regulation is a competitive strategy. Dario Amodei — “he's an entrepreneur, he's devious, he strategizes” — is the most sincere in wanting rules that would lock out open source competition — and Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement this week suggests the moat is expensive to maintain; Sam Altman zigzags; Musk, in this context at least, is one of the good guys. The genuine enemies of AI, meanwhile, are mostly good people: authors and workers frightened by the scale of change, just as the BBC in 1994 could only ask the founder of the world's first Internet cafe about porn and addiction.•       Why the Good Open Source AI Is Chinese. The week's uncomfortable question: where is the American open source AI? Keith's answer is structural. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs by export controls, Chinese labs were forced to train cheaply by inference — asking American frontier models millions of questions through public interfaces and learning from the answers. The result: world-class open models built, in effect, on distilled Anthropic and OpenAI. NVIDIA's much-signed open letter supporting open source, Keith notes, translates simply: more customers.•       The State Can't Keep Up. Lina Khan's consumer protection, in Keith's telling, is parental — treating consumers as children — and government-owned AI would be obsolete within three months of purchase. The counter-example happened this week: when OpenAI's de-railed models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. The companies are the right point of control, held to a high standard. Matthew Yglesias adds nuance on the data center backlash — local micro-politics is not the same thing as the statewide bans coming almost entirely from Democratic states — and the American university, still metering intelligence at $80,000 a year, looks to Keith like a business model past its sell-by date.•       The End of Man — or the Beginning? Andrew's interview of the week was Emily Eakin on the Frenchmen — and Foucault's 1966 prophecy that man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, a prediction Eakin thinks the AI age is realizing. Keith takes the opposite view: the postmodernists grasped the rise of the individual (consider the Pantone color system) but gave him no society to live in. AI, far from erasing the individual, lets him realize himself — the week-old book is “a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” Could Popper have written The Open Society in an hour? Before the car, nobody drove Manchester to London in two and a half hours either. About Keith Teare Keith Teare is Andrew's weekly co-host and the publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. A four-decade veteran of the technology industry, he opened Cyberia — the world's first Internet cafe — in London in 1994, co-founded Easynet and TechCrunch, and is today the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation in Palo Alto. His latest — unpublished, so far — book is Who Owns Intelligence, written with AI in a week. References: •       “AI and Its Enemies: Who Needs a Kill Switch?” — Keith's editorial in this week's That Was The Week.•       

Zum Beginn der Ferien freue ich mich, Ihnen eine ganz besondere Episode mit dem Titel »Freiheit oder Sicherheit« präsentieren zu dürfen. Eine besondere Episode deshalb, weil mein Gast Prof. Konrad Paul Liessmann ist. Konrad Paul Liessmann ist emeritierter Professor für Philosophie an der Universität Wien. Aber er ist nicht nur wissenschaftlich äußerst erfolgreich. Er steht auch seit Jahrzehnten als herausragender Beobachter und wichtiger Kritiker der kulturellen und politischen Landschaft in der Öffentlichkeit. Öffentlichkeit meint damit dutzende Bücher, unzählige Artikel in Zeitungen und Magazinen sowie Auftritte in Fernsehen, Radio und Veranstaltungen aller Art. Für die Hörer dieser Episode möchte ich besonders die folgenden Bücher hervorheben: Theorie der Unbildung Lauter Lügen Was nun? Eine Philosophie der Krise . Prof. Liessmann ist auch Intendant des Philosophicums Lech, das im September unter dem Titel »Betreutes Denken« stattfindet. Ein Thema, das perfekt zu diesem Podcast passt; ich hoffe, Ihnen dazu im Herbst noch mehr Informationen bieten zu können. Für mich persönlich war es eine ganz besondere Freude, dass Prof. Liessmann sich Zeit für ein Zukunft-Denken-Gespräch genommen hat, da ich seine Artikel und Bücher seit mindestens 30 Jahren mit großer Bereicherung lese. Hinzu kommt, dass er seine fundierte Kritik etwa am Bildungssystem oder an der Universität schon als aktiver Wissenschafter deutlich vorgetragen hat, im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen, die dies nur hinter vorgehaltener Hand tun. Viele Themen die wir in diesem Gespräch ansprechen, diskutiere ich auch in meinem neuen Buch: Hexenmeister oder Zauberlehrling? Die Wissensgesellschaft in der Krise. Ich beginne das Gespräch mit der grundlegenden Frage: Was ist der Mensch? Ist der Mensch von Natur aus gut und wird verführt oder von der Natur her schlecht und muss eingehegt werden? »In der Antike wird der Mensch als Wesen betrachtet, das zwischen Extremen hin und her pendeln kann. Aber gleichzeitig durch seine Vernunftbegabung die Möglichkeit hat, das Bessere zu wählen und das Schlechtere zu vermeiden.« Was hat sich in der Betrachtung des Menschen von der klassischen Tugendlehre bis heute verändert? »Wenn wir ein Naturwesen sind — was ist die Natur?« Einer der häufig genannten Denker in diesem Themenfeld ist Thomas Hobbes: »Im Naturzustand ist der Mensch dem Menschen ein Wolf.« Liegt der Ursprung der Konflikte darin, dass wir gleich sind? Ist der Mensch gar von Natur aus gut, wie Jean-Jacques Rousseau annimmt? Gibt es folglich keinen zivilisatorischen Fortschritt oder wird gar das Bild eines vermeintlich »edlen Wilden« verherrlicht? Behindern also, konsequent weitergedacht, Wissenschaft und Kunst die Humanität und führen zu Rückschritt statt Fortschritt? Oder sollten wir uns eher an Immanuel Kant orientieren? »Der Mensch ist nicht von Natur aus böse, er ist aber auch nicht von Natur aus gut. Er ist ein Wesen, das verschiedene Motivlagen in sich hat.« Aber all diese Fragen scheinen nur Sinn zu ergeben, wenn wir handlungsfähige Wesen sind. Verfügen wir nun über Handlungs- und Willensfreiheit? Unterliege ich also meinen Neigungen oder bin ich in der Lage, mich zu entscheiden, diese zu verändern? Folgen wir wieder Immanuel Kant? »Man kann natürlich darüber diskutieren, ob der Mensch ein freies Wesen ist. Tatsache ist, wir müssen uns das wechselseitig unterstellen und tun es auch.« Gilt die kühne These der politischen Geschichte: »Das Problem war nie, ob Menschen frei sind, sondern das Problem war immer, wie kann ich ihnen diese Freiheit nehmen.« Ist also der Mensch von Natur aus frei? Damit sind wir im Gespräch beim Begriff der Freiheit angelangt. Wie hat sich dieser Begriff auch über die vergangenen Jahrhunderte verändert? »By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers.« John Stuart Mill (1859) Was war die programmatische Rolle der Französischen Revolution? Kann die Romantik und damit die Idee der romantischen Liebe als frühes Emanzipationsmodell gesehen werden? Was sind die Ideen der Freiheit des 19. Jahrhunderts von John Stuart Mill über Karl Marx bis Hegel? »Freiheit ist [nach Mill] etwas, das sich gegen jetzt nicht mehr legitimierbare Herrschaftsansprüche richtet. Das muss man wieder in Erinnerung rufen, weil wir das vergessen haben. Die Erklärung der Menschenrechte war eine Erklärung von Abwehrrechten. Man hat versucht, die Zugriffe des Staates auf den einzelnen Bürger abzuwehren. Menschenrechte waren immer Individualrechte, nie Kollektivrechte.« Freiheit bezieht sich also unter anderem auf Eigentum, freie Religionsausübung, freies Denken, Bewegungsfreiheit, wirtschaftliche Freiheit. Heute sprechen viele hingegen, als ginge es um Anspruchsrechte. Wie hat sich das verändert? Wie ist dieser unglaubliche Paradigmenwechsel, der die Idee der Menschenrechte neu definiert, in den letzten Jahrzehnten zustande gekommen? »Wir waren die ersten, die erklärt haben, daß die Freiheit des Individuums um so mehr beschränkt werden muß, je komplizierter die Zivilisation wird.« Benito Mussolini Hat diese Idee des Faschismus bis in die heutige Zeit Wirkmacht? So manche Äußerung von Intellektuellen scheint in diese Richtung zu deuten? »Ich bin extrem vorsichtig und skeptisch gegenüber allen Konzeptionen, die mit der angeblichen Komplexität der Welt versuchen, die Freiheit des Menschen einzuschränken, beziehungsweise Strategien argumentieren, dass der Mensch geleitet, gelenkt und in ein Kollektiv eingebunden werden muss. […] Das hat immer schon den Keim des Totalitären in sich.« Auch hier stellt sich wieder die alte Kantische Frage: woher wissen diejenigen, die leiten wollen, die uns bevormunden wollen, was »das Richtige« ist? Wie lässt sich diese Problematik auf die aktuelle Diskussion um die Nutzung sozialer Netzwerke, sowohl von Jugendlichen wie auch von Erwachsenen, anwenden? Welche besonderen Fähigkeiten besitzen diejenigen, die im Gegensatz zu uns Normalsterblichen so genau wissen, was richtig und falsch ist, und damit unseren Zugang zu Information — zu unserem Wohle — beschneiden wollen? »Offensichtlich ist die Welt nur für eine bestimmte Art von Menschen komplex, andere haben den Durchblick.« Wenn nun aber möglicherweise der »Normalbürger« von der Komplexität der Welt überfordert ist und bei jedem Schritt von »Experten« an die Hand genommen werden muss, welchen Sinn ergibt dann überhaupt Demokratie? Wer entscheidet, wer als Experte gilt? Geht es da nur um »unsere Demokratie« oder hat diese Problematik eine längere Geschichte? Wie verändert sich das Verhalten von Menschen in Gruppen? »Demokratie steht immer vor diesem paradoxen Problem, auf der einen Seite den Bürgern tatsächlich alle Rechte zu geben und sie zum Souverän zu machen, und auf der anderen Seite nach Verfahren und Regeln zu suchen, wo man die Abgründe dieses Souveräns, seine Irrtumsanfälligkeit, auch seine Gehässigkeit in geregelte Bahnen lenkt.« Die Rolle von Verfassungen und rechtsstaatlichen Rahmenbedingungen? Was ist dann etwa davon zu halten, wenn nach Wahlen ein Teil des Volkes das Wahlergebnis nicht akzeptieren möchte? Betrachtet man die Gruppe der »Experten«, der Akademiker, der Unis — sind dort keine Gruppenphänomene zu betrachten? Handelt es sich nur um rein rationale Denker auf der Suche nach Wahrheit oder kommt es auch dort zu opportunistischen Irrwegen? Was folgt daraus? »Die Expertokratie ist kein Gegenmodell […] man muss in den sauren Apfel beißen.« Ab wann wäre also man gebildet und erwachsen genug, um an der Demokratie teilnehmen zu können, und noch wichtiger: wer beurteilt das. “The most basic question is not what is best but who shall decide what is best.”, Thomas Sowell Damit wird eine der schwierigsten Fragen aufgeworfen: Was ist der Zusammenhang zwischen Expertise und Entscheidungsfindung in einer Demokratie? »Auch die kommunistischen Staaten haben sich auf dem Boden einer materialistischen Wissenschaft gewähnt. Sie haben auch geglaubt, sie bauen ihre zukünftige Gesellschaft auf Basis wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse auf.« Zu welchen totalitären Exzessen hat dies geführt?! »Die Rassentheoretiker und Anthropologen der Nazis haben sich als Wissenschaftler gefühlt, nicht als Ideologen.« Neue Erkenntnisse und die Veränderung des Wissens scheinen die Konstante zu sein und nicht »die Wissenschaft« als Begründung für vermeintlich alternativlose Entscheidungen...? »Das Spannende an der Wissenschaft ist ja genau das Prinzip der Vorläufigkeit.« Was ist von Popper und dem Prinzip der Asymmetrie zu halten, und zwar sowohl in Politik wie Wissenschaftstheorie? »Der friedliche Regierungswechsel gehört zum Wesen der Demokratie.« Macht tendiert immer dazu, sich selbst über alle Maßen bestätigen zu wollen. Was sind die grundlegenden Prinzipien und Ideen, ja das Wesen der Demokratie? »Demokratie läuft auch immer Gefahr, sich selbst aufzuheben.« Kommen wir nun zum Begriff der Sicherheit — wie steht Sicherheit im Wechselspiel oder gar im Gegensatz zu Freiheit? Leben wir in Zeiten radikaler Unsicherheit — was bedeutet das überhaupt und was sind die Folgen davon? Wie hat sich das Gefühl der Sicherheit und die Sicherheit, was der nächste Tag bringt, über die Zeit verändert? Der Wunsch nach dem Blick in die Zukunft hat die Menschen immer angetrieben, wir erinnern uns an das Orakel von Delphi und die zahlreichen (teuren) Institute, die sich um Wirtschaftsprognosen bemühen. »Die Unsicherheit der Zukunft gegenüber zu beklagen, hieße genauso darüber zu klagen, dass wir keine determinierten Maschinen sind.« Wie hängt der mögliche oder unmögliche Blick in die Zukunft mit unserem Gefühl der Sicherheit im Hier und Jetzt zusammen? »Wir sind eine zukunftsversessene Gesellschaft. Wir fragen immer 'Was kommt?', nie 'Was ist?'« Sind Sicherheit und Freiheit nun Gegensätze oder vielmehr einander bedingende Prinzipien? Kann ein Leben in Sicherheit gerade durch die Bedingungen dieser Sicherheit ein nicht-lebenswertes Leben sein? Was ist die Rolle des Staates in diesem Wechselspiel oder Gegensatz? Hat sich der Staat um das Glück seiner Bürger zu kümmern? Welche philosophischen Ideen stehen sich hier gegenüber? Welche Rolle spielen Meinungsfreiheit und individuelle Werte in dieser Diskussion? »Das Problem ist nicht, dass es das Unverfügbare oder das Neue gibt, sondern das Problem ist, mit welcher Ausstattung und welcher Einstellung, mit welchen Möglichkeiten und Fähigkeiten treten wir dem gegenüber.« Was bedeutet dies für Bildung, Schule und Universität? »Wir müssen lernen, wieder mit dem Problem der Offenheit umzugehen, aber gleichzeitig Geschichtsfatalismus vermeiden. […] Wir trauen uns sowohl als Individuum als auch als Gesellschaft nicht mehr zu, tatsächliche Entscheidungen zu treffen.« Was können wir aus früheren Krisen lernen? »I am more concerned by what the Bomb is doing already.«, C. S. Lewis (1958) »Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If man had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never had begun. […] Life has never been normal.«, C. S. Lewis (1939!) Gehen wir auf der einen Seite in vielen politischen und gesellschaftlichen Bereichen große Risiken ein, aber dort, wo es wirklich zählt — etwa beim Denken — wird es immer eindimensionaler? Kann der Staat zugleich schwach und übermächtig sein? Kann der Staat somit einerseits ohnmächtig sein, andererseits versuchen, seine Macht in den verbleibenden Bereichen übermäßig auszuspielen, und wer ist eigentlich »der Staat«? »Müssen mündige Bürger wirklich ständig darauf hingewiesen werden, was sie zu essen haben, vor was sie sich in Acht nehmen sollen...?« Gilt nicht der Satz von Wilhelm von Humboldt immer noch: »Was nicht von dem Menschen selbst gewählt, worin er auch nur eingeschränkt und geleitet wird, das geht nicht in sein Wesen über, das bleibt ihm ewig fremd, das verrichtet er nicht eigentlich mit menschlicher Kraft, sondern mit mechanischer Fertigkeit.« Wer entscheidet folglich in komplexen Fragen, deren Ausgang höchst unklar ist? »In diesem Wechselspiel von Risiko, Sicherheit und Freiheit taucht selten das Problem der Verantwortlichkeit auf.« Diese Frage muss, wie so manche anderen, offen bleiben oder vertagt werden... »Man muss ja nicht auf alle Fragen gleich eine Antwort finden!« Andere Episoden Episode 153: Potent Stuff, A Conversation with Prof. Jacob Howland Episode 137: Alles Leben ist Problemlösen Episode 135: Friedrich Hayek und die Beschränktheit der menschlichen Vernunft. Ein Gespräch mit Nickolas Emrich Episode 133: Desinformiere Dich! Ein Gespräch mit Jakob Schirrmacher Episode 126: Schwarz gekleidet im dunklen Kohlekeller. Ein Gespräch mit Axel Bojanowski Episode 125: Ist Fortschritt möglich? Ideen als Widergänger über Generationen Episode 122: Komplexitätsillusion oder Heuristik, ein Gespräch mit Gerd Gigerenzer Episode 117: Der humpelnde Staat, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Kletzer Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 91: Die Heidi-Klum-Universität, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Ehrmann und Prof. Sommer Episode 88: Liberalismus und Freiheitsgrade, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Möllers Episode 72: Scheitern an komplexen Problemen? Wissenschaft, Sprache und Gesellschaft — Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 28: Jochen Hörisch: Für eine (denk)anstössige Universität! Referenzen Konrad Paul Liessmann: Theorie der Unbildung. Die Irrtümer der Wissensgesellschaft, Paul Zsolnay Verlag (2006) Lauter Lügen. Und andere Versuche, die Wahrheit zu sagen, Paul Zsolnay Verlag (2015) Was nun? Über die Zukunft. Eine Philosophie der Krise, Paul Zsolnay Verlag (2021) Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797) Platon, Politeia John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, John W. Parker and Son (1859) Benito Mussolini, Rede vor dem Gran Consiglio del Fascismo (1929), zitiert in Friedrich von Hayek, Der Weg zur Knechtschaft, Eugen Rentsch Verlag (1945) [engl. Original: The Road to Serfdom, Routledge (1944)] Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (1784) Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht, Claassen Verlag (1960) Alexis de Tocqueville, Über die Demokratie in Amerika (De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835/1840) Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books (1980) Karl Popper, Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Routledge (1945)) Orakel von Delphi C. S. Lewis, Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State (1958), in: God in the Dock, Eerdmans (1970) C. S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time (1939), in: The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, Macmillan (1949) Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (verfasst 1792, posthum erstveröffentlicht 1851 bei Eduard Trewendt, Breslau). Philosophicum Lech Philosophicum Lech — Abenteuer (2025)

Have a comment? Send us a text! (We read all of them but can't reply). Email us: Will@faithfulpoliticspodcast.comWhat happens when feelings become the test of truth?Robert P. George joins Faithful Politics to talk about what he calls “the age of feeling,” a moment where many people treat personal emotion as the final word on what is true. George argues that this does not lead to tolerance. It often makes disagreement feel like a personal attack, which shuts down honest conversation and creates real problems for democracy. The conversation moves through faith, reason, truth, tribalism, intellectual humility, and the challenge of disagreeing with your own side. Will brings in Jonathan Haidt's work on intuition and political identity, while Josh and George work through harder questions around same-sex marriage, gender, Obergefell, Loving v. Virginia, and the deeper moral assumptions underneath those debates.At its core, this episode is about whether Americans can still disagree seriously without turning each other into enemies. George's answer is that truth-seeking requires more than strong opinions. It requires reasons, evidence, humility, and the courage to listen when your tribe says one thing and your conscience says another.website: robertpgeorge.comGuest BioRobert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He is a legal scholar, political philosopher, and public intellectual whose work focuses on natural law, constitutionalism, religious liberty, conscience, civil discourse, and moral reasoning in public life. He is the author of several books, including Conscience and Its Enemies, Making Men Moral, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, and Truth Matters, co-authored with Cornel West. Support the show

In this episode of History 102, 'WhatIfAltHist' creator Rudyard Lynch and co-host Austin Padgett explore American history's "Corporate Era," dissecting the rise of managerial elites , cultural shifts toward nihilism , and the recurring structural patterns shaping modern society's evolution. -- FOLLOW ON X: @whatifalthist (Rudyard) @LudwigNverMises (Austin) @TurpentineMedia -- TIMESTAMPS: (00:00) Intro (01:42) Internal Colonization and the Pax Americana (05:19) Houston Smith's Forgotten Truth and Disbelief in Progress (08:08) The Transition from Small Business to National Corporations (10:30) The Double Helix: Cycles of Constant vs. Change (13:11) Comparisons to the Roman Republic's Decadence (16:59) Sam Francis' Leviathan and Its Enemies (21:09) The Old Industrial WASP Elite vs. New Bureaucracy (25:32) Frederick Jackson Turner and Frontier Individualism (28:55) The Gilded Age and the Rise of Populism (33:00) FDR and the Democratic Coalition (36:02) Cultural Origins: North vs. South English Settlement Patterns (40:24) Staggered Industrialization and Geographic History (43:38) Internal Colonization of Appalachia (51:00) Post-War Prosperity and the Decision to Lower Inequality (56:40) The Great Forgetting: Loss of Tradition and Social Technology (01:01:17) Anti-Fragility and the Advantage of Federalism (01:07:41) The Managerial Revenge Against Founder Families (01:13:30) Imperial America and the Northeastern Core (01:19:11) The Lonely Crowd: Anxiety-Based City Culture (01:23:01) The Destabilization of Black Communities under Progressivism (01:36:24) Neoliberalism and the Age of the Last Men (01:46:46) The State of Denial and the Wealth of Old America (02:04:39) The Mutation of Marxism in Institutions (02:10:10) The 120-Year Cycle and Decay of Hollywood (02:19:02) American Beauty as a Reflection of Modern Nihilism (02:23:59) Wrap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Qing Empire did not collapse because it stopped working. It collapsed because it kept working — just barely — under pressures that compounded faster than reform could relieve them... Time Period Covered: ~1790s-1840s CE Major Works Cited: Jones, Susan Mann and Philip A. Kuhn. “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion.” The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ch'ing, 1800–1911, Part I Kuhn, Philip A. Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864. Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gustave Le Bon revealed that history runs on dreams, not logic—90% of humans merely rationalize their emotions. Every civilization projects fantasy ideals (Christian Heaven, Marxist Utopia, Valhalla) that animate their entire existence. Modernity's enormous wealth enabled unprecedented delusion, creating TWO competing fantasies so powerful that people will destroy nations refusing to fulfill them. Most remain trapped in modernity's mythology, unable to see the illusions controlling their lives. SPONSORS: Zcash: The right technology reshapes politics and culture toward freedom and prosperity. Zcash—the "machinery of freedom"—delivers unstoppable private money through encryption. When your wealth is unseen, it's unseizable. Download Zashi wallet and follow @genzcash to learn more: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/genzcash⁠⁠⁠ Shopify:  Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, handling 10% of U.S. e-commerce. With hundreds of templates, AI tools for product descriptions, and seamless marketing campaign creation, it's like having a design studio and marketing team in one. Start your $1/month trial today at ⁠⁠https://shopify.com/cognitive⁠ - "The Book" is a beautiful guide on how to preserve modern technology and civilization if the world were to end. https://mdsh.io/whatifalthist Click this link to buy now and use the promo code “WHATIF” to get 10% off for the next month LINKS: Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: ⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ / @history102-qg5oj  ⁠⁠ Link to my Twitter-⁠⁠https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref...⁠⁠ Link to my Instagram-⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn...⁠ Bibliography: The Masks of the Gods by Joseph Camble A History of Religious Ideas by Mircea Eliade The Crowd by Gustave le Bon The Psychology of Socialism by Gustave Le Bon The World Unbalanced by Gustave le Bon Prometheus and Atlas by Jorjani Zombies in Western Culture by Vervaeke The Soul's Code by James Hillman Religion and Culture by Chris Dawson The Psychology of the Great War by Gustave Le Bon The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas The Unabomber's Manifesto The Dictators by Richard Overy Modern Times by Paul Johnson Seculosity by Zahl The Gods of Revolution by Dawson Nihilism by Seraphim Rose Forgotten Truth by Houston Smith A Secular Age by Charles Taylor Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington The Total State by Auron Macintyre Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevents 1984 by George Orwell Brave New World by Aldous Huxley The Future of Humanity by Michio Kaku Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Pournel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

I correctly predicted both woke tyranny AND the ugly right-wing backlash that's consuming online discourse today. Living through human "mouse utopia," people rationalize cruelty as anti-left revenge while lacking tools to distinguish rationalization from rationality. This episode reveals empathy's true nature—not weakness, but a masculine superpower for understanding enemies and allies alike. Empathy gets you inside opponents' heads, making it warfare's most potent weapon. Time to reclaim this misunderstood concept. SPONSORS: NetSuite:  More than 42,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://netsuite.com/102⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Zcash start resisting financial tyranny with Zcash or Zashi wallet today: https://z.cash or for Apple store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zashi-zcash-wallet/id1672392439 LINKS: Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w⁠⁠⁠ Link to my Twitter-⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/whatifalthist⁠⁠⁠ Link to my Instagram-⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en⁠⁠⁠ Bibliography: Bibliography: The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist Sex, Ecology and Spirituality by Ken Wilbur Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck What Kind of Society Nurtures the Soul by James Hillman The Soul's Code by James Hillman The Muqqahdimma by Ibn Khaldun The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler Conflicting Visions by Thomas Sowell Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenal Illusions of our Culture by Leonard Griffith Religion and Culture by Chris Dawson The World Unbalanced by Gustave le Bon The Psychology of Socialism by Gustave Le Bon Out of Our Minds by Felipe Fernandez Armrest The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas Zombies in Western Culture by Vervaeke How to Know a Person by David Brooks The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate Stolen Focus by Johann Hard Lost Connections by Johann Hari The Happiness Hypothesis by John Haidt The Righteous Mind by John Haidt Trauma and the Soul by Donald Kalsched The Culture of Narcissism by Lasch The Body Keeps the Score by Besel van Der Kolk The Elephant in the Brain by Simler The Unabomber's Manifesto Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson Forgotten Truth by Houston Smith Religions of the World by Houston Smith Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark On Heroes by Carlyle

This podcast series started in January 2021. The first episode was on the Insurrection at the Capitol, instigated by Trump on the basis of his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. This episode was recorded just shy of a week away from Trump's second inauguration as President of the United States. Trump's signature policy proposals during his campaign had to do with deporting millions of illegal immigrants, closing the boarders, imposing tariffs on international trade, and returning to a kind of isolationism in foreign policy by removing US military support for Ukraine. Trump had gone on to implement many of those policies. These are the hallmarks of a closed society, something resembling a tribe, caring for nothing but itself, “on the alert for attack or defence” as Bergson said. This episode revisits an old idea of an Open society, coined by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies. Jason Alexander McKenzie is a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and has written a (free access) book entitled The Open Society As An Enemy published by LSE Press, in which he defense  the open society at a time when it's under great duress. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.This podcast is created in partnership with The Philosopher, the UK's longest running public philosophy journalm founded in 1923. Check out the latest issue of The Philosopher and its online events series: https://www.thephilosopher1923.org Artwork by Nick HallidayMusic by Rowan Mcilvride

In this episode, Matt speaks with legal scholar Bruce Pardy about the deep tension between freedom and virtue. Pardy argues that “freedom people” - classical liberals and libertarians - see virtue as something that can only emerge when individuals are free to choose, while “virtue people” believe virtue must come first, even if enforced by the state. They explore the limits of state neutrality, city planning, drug policy, and the rise of authoritarian instincts across both the right and the left. Pardy explains why a truly free society is risky - and why that risk is necessary for genuine virtue and responsibility. References: “Freedom and Virtue: Friends or Enemies?” — Bruce Pardy (Brownstone Institute) https://brownstone.org/articles/freedom-and-virtue-friends-or-enemies/ Bruce Pardy — Profile (Fraser Institute) https://www.fraserinstitute.org/profile/bruce-pardy Bruce Pardy — Author Page (The Epoch Times) https://www.theepochtimes.com/author/bruce-pardy The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek https://a.co/d/cp4rlD5 The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper https://a.co/d/iVwmVvs Thanks to Our Patrons including Kris Rondolo, Amy Willis, and Christopher McDonald. To support The Curious Task, visit: https://patreon.com/curioustask  

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the left and right threaten to undermine fundamental principles that underpin liberal democracies, so that what were previously seen as virtues of the Open Society are now, by many people, seen as vices, dangers, or threats. The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves interrogates four interconnected aspects of the Open Society: cosmopolitanism, transparency, the free exchange of ideas, and communitarianism. Each of these is analysed in depth, drawing out the implications for contemporary social questions such as the free movement of people, the erosion of privacy, no-platforming and the increased political and social polarisation that is fuelled by social media. In re-examining the consequences for all of us of these attacks on free societies, Alexander calls for resistance to the forces of reaction. But he also calls for the concept of the Open Society to be rehabilitated and advanced. In doing this, he argues, there is an opportunity to re-think the kind of society we want to create, and to ensure it is achievable and sustainable. This forensic defence of the core principles of the Open Society is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand some of the powerful social currents that have engulfed public debates in recent years, and what to do about them. The book is publicly available via the following link The Open Society as an Enemy | LSE Press J. McKenzie Alexander is a Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics. From 2012 to 2018, Professor Alexander served as one of the Academic Governors on the Council of the LSE, as well as a member of the Court of Governors. From 2018–2021, he served as the Head of Department. Before joining the department, Alexander was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of California – San Diego (between 2000 and 2001). Although J. McKenzie Alexander's original field of research concerned evolutionary game theory as applied to the evolution of morality and social norms, more recently he has worked on problems in decision theory, more broadly construed, including topics in formal epistemology. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the left and right threaten to undermine fundamental principles that underpin liberal democracies, so that what were previously seen as virtues of the Open Society are now, by many people, seen as vices, dangers, or threats. The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves interrogates four interconnected aspects of the Open Society: cosmopolitanism, transparency, the free exchange of ideas, and communitarianism. Each of these is analysed in depth, drawing out the implications for contemporary social questions such as the free movement of people, the erosion of privacy, no-platforming and the increased political and social polarisation that is fuelled by social media. In re-examining the consequences for all of us of these attacks on free societies, Alexander calls for resistance to the forces of reaction. But he also calls for the concept of the Open Society to be rehabilitated and advanced. In doing this, he argues, there is an opportunity to re-think the kind of society we want to create, and to ensure it is achievable and sustainable. This forensic defence of the core principles of the Open Society is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand some of the powerful social currents that have engulfed public debates in recent years, and what to do about them. The book is publicly available via the following link The Open Society as an Enemy | LSE Press J. McKenzie Alexander is a Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics. From 2012 to 2018, Professor Alexander served as one of the Academic Governors on the Council of the LSE, as well as a member of the Court of Governors. From 2018–2021, he served as the Head of Department. Before joining the department, Alexander was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of California – San Diego (between 2000 and 2001). Although J. McKenzie Alexander's original field of research concerned evolutionary game theory as applied to the evolution of morality and social norms, more recently he has worked on problems in decision theory, more broadly construed, including topics in formal epistemology. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the left and right threaten to undermine fundamental principles that underpin liberal democracies, so that what were previously seen as virtues of the Open Society are now, by many people, seen as vices, dangers, or threats. The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves interrogates four interconnected aspects of the Open Society: cosmopolitanism, transparency, the free exchange of ideas, and communitarianism. Each of these is analysed in depth, drawing out the implications for contemporary social questions such as the free movement of people, the erosion of privacy, no-platforming and the increased political and social polarisation that is fuelled by social media. In re-examining the consequences for all of us of these attacks on free societies, Alexander calls for resistance to the forces of reaction. But he also calls for the concept of the Open Society to be rehabilitated and advanced. In doing this, he argues, there is an opportunity to re-think the kind of society we want to create, and to ensure it is achievable and sustainable. This forensic defence of the core principles of the Open Society is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand some of the powerful social currents that have engulfed public debates in recent years, and what to do about them. The book is publicly available via the following link The Open Society as an Enemy | LSE Press J. McKenzie Alexander is a Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics. From 2012 to 2018, Professor Alexander served as one of the Academic Governors on the Council of the LSE, as well as a member of the Court of Governors. From 2018–2021, he served as the Head of Department. Before joining the department, Alexander was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of California – San Diego (between 2000 and 2001). Although J. McKenzie Alexander's original field of research concerned evolutionary game theory as applied to the evolution of morality and social norms, more recently he has worked on problems in decision theory, more broadly construed, including topics in formal epistemology. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Open Society as an Enemy: A critique of how free societies turned against themselves by J. McKenzie Alexander Nearly 80 years ago, Karl Popper gave a spirited philosophical defence of the Open Society in his two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. In this book, J. McKenzie Alexander argues that a new defence is urgently needed because, in the decades since the end of the Cold War, many of the values of the Open Society have come under threat once again. Populist agendas on both the left and right threaten to undermine fundamental principles that underpin liberal democracies, so that what were previously seen as virtues of the Open Society are now, by many people, seen as vices, dangers, or threats. The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves interrogates four interconnected aspects of the Open Society: cosmopolitanism, transparency, the free exchange of ideas, and communitarianism. Each of these is analysed in depth, drawing out the implications for contemporary social questions such as the free movement of people, the erosion of privacy, no-platforming and the increased political and social polarisation that is fuelled by social media. In re-examining the consequences for all of us of these attacks on free societies, Alexander calls for resistance to the forces of reaction. But he also calls for the concept of the Open Society to be rehabilitated and advanced. In doing this, he argues, there is an opportunity to re-think the kind of society we want to create, and to ensure it is achievable and sustainable. This forensic defence of the core principles of the Open Society is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand some of the powerful social currents that have engulfed public debates in recent years, and what to do about them. The book is publicly available via the following link The Open Society as an Enemy | LSE Press J. McKenzie Alexander is a Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics. From 2012 to 2018, Professor Alexander served as one of the Academic Governors on the Council of the LSE, as well as a member of the Court of Governors. From 2018–2021, he served as the Head of Department. Before joining the department, Alexander was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of California – San Diego (between 2000 and 2001). Although J. McKenzie Alexander's original field of research concerned evolutionary game theory as applied to the evolution of morality and social norms, more recently he has worked on problems in decision theory, more broadly construed, including topics in formal epistemology. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

We try to understand simplicity a little better by looking at its antithesis. A huge thanks to Seth White for the awesome music!Thanks to Palmtoptiger17 for the beautiful logo: https://www.instagram.com/palmtoptiger17/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/thewayfourth/?modal=admin_todo_tourYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTd3KlRte86eG9U40ncZ4XA?view_as=subscriberInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theway4th/ Kingdom Outpost: https://kingdomoutpost.org/My Reading List Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21940220.J_G_ElliotPurity of Heart is to Will One Thing: https://www.religion-online.org/book/purity-of-heart-is-to-will-one-thing/Change Blindness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tDChange Blindness 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFMuGBP15UKarl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240592.The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=nG8JVtoAcj&rank=3Malcolm X "The Ballot or the Bullet": http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.htmlDouglass on ballots and bullets: https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/frederick-douglass-ballot-box-jury-box-cartridge-boxMeek's "Loving to Know": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11933842-loving-to-know?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=5CIT597Ybo&rank=1Camus "The Rebel": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11990.The_Rebel?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=EmyXcHQv5S&rank=2Stalkers and Mistresses: https://www.dckreider.com/blog-theological-musings/stalkers-and-mistressesSinger on Altruism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA&t=172s Thanks to our monthly supporters Phillip Mast patrick H Laverne Miller Jesse Killion ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

A historic shift occurred in the early 20th century when the West completely suspended any concept of reality or meaning. We adopted a new religion whose core belief was that it WASN'T a religion—agnostic liberalism that declared thousands of years of human struggle for glory and meaning "unnecessary." This tyranny greater than Rome or the Catholic Church dominates every moment of our lives while remaining invisible, creating our current "age of platitudes." SPONSORS: NetSuite:  More than 41,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: https://netsuite.com/102 Shopify: Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, handling 10% of U.S. e-commerce. With hundreds of templates, AI tools for product descriptions, and seamless marketing campaign creation, it's like having a design studio and marketing team in one. Start your $1/month trial today at https://shopify.com/cognitive Try High Flavanol Cocoa (Stem Cells & Nitric Oxide): (40% OFF PROMO FOR 48HR) https://blackforestsupplements.com/WHAT LINKS: Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews:    / @history102-qg5oj   Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... Bibliography: The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas A History of Western Philosophy of Bertrand Russell Mankind the Story of All of Us by the History Channel Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson The Gateway Protocol by Robert Monroe Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Total State by Auron Macintyre After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried The Crowd by Gustave le Bon The Revolt of the Elites by Lasch Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin Regime Change by Deneen The Economics of Discontent by Jean Michel Paul Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benneson Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell

Theologian and First Things editor R.R. Reno joins The Winston Marshall Show for a sweeping intellectual conversation on nationalism, identity, and the postwar consensus that still haunts the West.Reno argues that the true crisis isn't a conspiracy—but a consensus forged after WWII: a fear of nationalism, religion, and moral conviction, shaped by the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He calls this the age of “weak gods”—a culture hollowed out by relativism, therapeutic liberalism, and meaning without truth.From Karl Popper and the Open Society to the cult of DEI and the rise of populist rebellion, Reno makes the case that Western civilization is suffering from a kind of civilizational PTSD—and that only the return of “strong gods” like loyalty, love, and faith can offer redemption.All this—postwar ideology, the collapse of civic trust, mass migration, shared mythos, and the spiritual malaise of modern life…-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To see more exclusive content and interviews consider subscribing to my substack here: https://www.winstonmarshall.co.uk/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA:Substack: https://www.winstonmarshall.co.uk/X: https://twitter.com/mrwinmarshallInsta: https://www.instagram.com/winstonmarshallLinktree: https://linktr.ee/winstonmarshall----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Chapters 00:00 Introduction 1:49 Populism and Its Global Phenomenon 4:32 The Return of Strong Gods 21:58 Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" 28:29 The Impact of Post-War Consensus on Education 47:33 The Return of Strong Gods and the Role of Love 1:09:32 The Role of Religion and Spirituality in Society 1:14:37 The Impact of Popper's Ideas on Conservatism 1:18:31 Loyalty and Fanaticism in Sports and Society 1:21:15 Nationalism vs. Patriotism 1:23:15 Censorship and the Never Again Mentality1:27:54 The Death Throes of the Open Society Consensus 1:33:41 The Role of Strong Gods in Non-Western Countries 1:37:32 The Paradox of Western Ideologies 1:38:21 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Adultery Act, passed into British law on 14th May, 1650, made having sex with a married woman a crime so severe it was punishable by death – but only for her.  Radical groups like the Ranters mocked Puritan prudishness, Royalists called the law joyless and tyrannical, and Presbyterians argued the law would be impossible to apply fairly. But the Puritans needed something everyone could rally around – and sexual sin was an easy target.  Those who thought the English Civil War had been divine punishment for a sinful nation believed only Old Testament-style legislation could stop society from descending into full-blown chaos. Yet, during the time the law was on the statue books, no one was actually executed. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider the practicalities of proving adultery in a time when no reliable records of marriage existed; explain why sex with your son's wife or daughter's husband was considered incest; and reveal how, in some form, adultery stayed on the books until 2022.... Further Reading: • ‘An Act for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication' (House of Parliament, 1650): https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp387-389 • 'England's Culture Wars - Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660, By B. S. Capp' (OUP, 2012): https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/England_s_Culture_Wars/d42Z-58lIdcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=7+Puritans+and+Sex&pg=PA132&printsec=frontcover • '60 Second Lecture Series- "The Puritans Had Sex? Why, Yes, They Did...!" - Kathy Cooke' (Quinnipiac University, 2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHxWKgtkkw Love the show? Support us!  Join 

Janet speaks with Alan Elrod to explore how classical liberalism understands the role of children in a free society. They discuss the liberal view of children as future autonomous individuals, the responsibilities of both parents and the state in their development, and how education sits at the center of ongoing ideological battles. Elrod unpacks the liberal commitment to individual flourishing and critiques contemporary efforts to politicize childhood through authoritarian or illiberal frameworks.  References “Children Are the Future: Authoritarianism, Culture War and Making Model Citizens” by Alan Elrod https://www.liberalcurrents.com/children-are-the-future-authoritarianism-culture-war-and-making-model-citizens/ “Parents, Government and Children: Authority over Education in the Liberal Pluralist State” by William A. Galston (Chapter in Liberal Pluralism) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/liberal-pluralism/parents-government-and-children-authority-over-education-in-the-liberal-pluralist-state/4FEF2172B5BD8B088A4D0558C11E1A1B The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3619943.html Democratic Education by Amy Gutmann https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7sdfv On Liberty by John Stuart Mill https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34901 Taking Responsibility for Children edited by Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/T/Taking-Responsibility-for-Children Thanks to Our Patrons Including Kris Rondolo, Amy Willis, and Christopher McDonald. To support the podcast, visit: https://patreon.com/curioustask

In this episode of the Project Liberal podcast, Max Marty and Tyler Harris engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Virginia Postrel. Virginia introduces her framework of dynamism versus stasis—a perspective that transcends traditional left-right political divides—and explores how this lens remains relevant for understanding today's political landscape. As the "OG of the Progress and Abundance movement," Virginia offers unique insights into how innovation, decentralized knowledge, and bottom-up experimentation drive human flourishing. Topics Discussed: * The core thesis of "The Future and Its Enemies" and how it anticipated today's political realignments* How the YIMBY housing movement represents successful dynamism in action* The connections between progress studies, abundance agendas, and different political coalitions* Why progress was glamorous in the early 20th century and how it might regain that appeal* The importance of making progress tangible in everyday life rather than just elite discourse* How to build dynamic coalitions across political divides despite rising populism and reactionary politics* The role of decentralized knowledge in fields from textiles to housing policy You can find more from Virginia at: * Virginia's Substack: * Virginia's Website: https://vpostrel.com* Virginia's Book "The Future and Its Enemies": https://a.co/d/6ZtKqZC* Virginia's Book "The Fabric of Civilization": https://a.co/d/9ANJ3zr And learn more about Project Liberal at: https://projectliberal.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit projectliberal.substack.com

Link to Black Forest Supplements and Turkestrone: https://blackforestsupplements.com/?s... More information here: https://blackforestsupplements.com/bl... Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews:    / @history102-qg5oj   Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Check out Modern Relationships, where Erik Torenberg interviews tech power couples and leading thinkers to explore how ambitious people actually make partnerships work. Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov and researcher Nadia Asparouhova kick off the series with an unfiltered conversation about their relationship evolution. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1786227593 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5hJzs0gDg6lRT6r10mdpVg YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernRelationshipsPod Bibliography: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer 1984 by George Orwell On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell The Dictator's Handbook by Mesquita Woke Racism by John McWhorter Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis Origins of Woke by Richard Hananai The Unabomber's Manifesto The Total State by Auron Macintyre A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell Seeing Like a State by James Scott Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenal On Politics by Aristotle The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu The Origins of Ideology by Todd Immanuel Sex and Power in History by Amaury de riencourt Rise of the West by William McNeill

Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews:    / @history102-qg5oj   Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Check out Modern Relationships, where Erik Torenberg interviews tech power couples and leading thinkers to explore how ambitious people actually make partnerships work. Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov and researcher Nadia Asparouhova kick off the series with an unfiltered conversation about their relationship evolution. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1786227593 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5hJzs0gDg6lRT6r10mdpVg YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernRelationshipsPod Bibliography: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzche Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler The Gulag Archipelago by Solzenitsyn Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker Humanity's Ascent by Charles Eisenstein The Unabomber's Manifesto Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung Das Kapital by Karl Marx Universe 65 by Calhoun Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt Nihilism by Seraphim Rose The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas A Secular Age by Charles Taylor Seeing like a State by James Scott The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist Atrocities by Matthew White The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler The History of Philosophy by Will Durant The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Rusell The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent Envy by Helmut Schoeck The Happiness Hypothesis by John Haidt

Big changes are happening: space; energy; and, of course, artificial intelligence. The difference between sustainable, pro-growth change, versus a retreat back into stagnation, may lie in how we implement that change. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Virginia Postrel about the pitfalls of taking a top-down approach to innovation, versus allowing a bottom-up style of dynamism to flourish.Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose scholarly interests range from emerging technology to history and culture. She has authored four books, including The Future and Its Enemies (1998) and her most recent, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (2020). Postrel is a contributing editor for the Works in Progress magazine and has her own Substack.In This Episode* Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)* Today's deregulation movement (6:12)* What to make of Musk (13:37)* On electric cars (16:21)* Thinking about California (25:56)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Technocrats vs. dynamists (1:29)I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements.Pethokoukis: There is this group of Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists, they supported President Trump because they felt his policies were sort of pro-builder, pro-abundance, pro-disruption, whatever sort of name you want to use.And then you have this group on the center-left who seemed to discover that 50 years of regulations make it hard to build EV chargers in the United States. Ezra Klein is one of these people, maybe it's limited to center-left pundits, but do you think there's something going on? Do you think we're experiencing a dynamism kind of vibe shift? I would like to think we are.Postrel: I think there is something going on. I think there is a real progress and abundance movement. “Abundance” tends to be the word that people who are more Democrat-oriented use, and “progress” is the word that people who are more — I don't know if they're exactly Republican, but more on the right . . . They have disagreements, but they represent distinct Up Wing (to put it in your words) factions within their respective parties. And actually, the Up Wing thing is a good way of thinking about it because it includes both people that, in The Future and Its Enemies, I would classify as technocrats, and Ezra Klein read the books and says, “I am a technocrat.” They want top-down direction in the pursuit of what they see as progress. And people that I would classify as dynamists who are more bottom-up and more about decentralized decision-making, price signals, markets, et cetera.They share a sense that they would like to see the possibility of getting stuff done, of increasing abundance, of more scientific and technological progress, all of those kinds of things. I think it is a real thing, I think it is in both parties, and its enemies are in both parties, too, that there are real factional disagreements. In many ways, it reminds me of the kind of cross-party seeking for new answers that we experienced in the late '70s and early '80s, where . . . the economy was problematic in the '70s.Highly problematic.And there was a lot of thinking about what the problems were and what could be done better, and one thing that came out of that was a lot of the sort of deregulation efforts that, in the many pay-ins to Jimmy Carter, who's not my favorite president, but there was a lot of good stuff that happened through a sort of left-right alliance in that period toward opening up markets.So you had people like Ralph Nader and free-market economists saying, “We really don't need to have all these regulations on trucking, and on airlines, and these are anti-consumer, and let's free things up.” And we reaped enormous benefits from that, and it's very hard to believe how prescriptive those kinds of regulations were back before the late '70s.The progress and abundance movement has had its greatest success — although it still has a lot to go — on housing, and that's where you see people who are saying, “Why do we have so many rules about how much parking you can have?” I mean, yes, a lot of people want parking, but if they want parking, they'll demand it in the marketplace. We don't need to say, “You can't have tandem parking.” Every place I've lived in LA would be illegal to build nowadays because of the parking, just to take one example.Today's deregulation movement (6:12). . . you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they're small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do . .. . and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.You mentioned some of the deregulation in the Carter years, that's a real tangible achievement. Then you also had a lot more Democrats thinking about technology, what they called the “Atari Democrats” who looked at Japan, so there was a lot of that kind of tumult and thinking — but do you think this is more than a moment, it's kind of this brief fad, or do you think it can turn into something where you can look back in five and 10 years, like wow, there was a shift, big things actually happened?I don't think it's just a fad, I think it's a real movement. Now, movements are not always successful. And we'll see, when we saw an early blowup over immigration.That's kind of what I was thinking of, it's hardly straightforward.Within the Trump coalition, you've got people who are what I in The Future and Its Enemies would call reactionaries. That is, people who idealize an idea of an unchanging America someplace in the past. There are different versions of that even within the Trump coalition, and those people are very hostile to the kinds of changes that come with bottom-up innovation and those sorts of things.But then you've also got people, and not just people from Silicon Valley, you've got grassroots kind of Trump supporters who supported him because they're sick of regulation. Maybe they're small business owners, they just don't like being told what to do, so you've got those kinds of people too, and it's a coalition, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.It's not just immigration, it's also if you wanted to have a big technological future in the US, some of the materials you need to build come from other countries. I think some of them come from Canada, and probably we're not going to annex it, and if you put big tariffs on those things, it's going to hamper people's ability to do things. This is more of a Biden thing, but the whole Nippon Steel can't buy US Steel and invest huge amounts of money in US plants because, “Oh no, they're Japanese!” I mean it's like back to the '80s.Virginia, what if we wake up one morning and they've moved the entire plant to Tokyo? We can't let them do that!There's one thing about steel plants, they're very localized investments. And we have a lot of experience with Japanese investment in the US, by the way, lots of auto plants and other kinds of things. It's that sort of backward thinking, which, in this case, was a Biden administration thing, but Trump agrees, or has agreed, is not good. And it's not even politically smart, and it's not even pro the workers because the workers who actually work at the relevant plant want this investment because it will improve their jobs, but instead we get this creating monopoly. If things go the way it looks like they will, there will be a monopoly US Steel supplier, and that's not good for the auto industry or anybody else who uses steel.I think if we look back in 2030 at what's happened since 2025, whether this has turned out to be a durable kind of pro-progress, pro-growth, pro-abundance moment, I'll look at how have we reacted to advances in artificial intelligence: Did we freak out and start worrying about job loss and regulate it to death? And will we look back and say, “Wow, it became a lot easier to build a nuclear power plant or anything energy.” Has it become significantly easier over the past five years? How deep is the stasis part of America, and how big is the dynamist part of America, really?Yeah, I think it's a big question. It's a big question both because we're at this moment of what looks like big political change, we're not sure what that change is going to look like because the Trump coalition and Trump himself are such a weird grab bag of impulses, and also because, as you mentioned, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of amazing things, it looks like.And then you throw in the energy issues, which are related to climate, but they're also related to AI because AI requires a lot of energy. Are we going to build a lot of nuclear power plants? It's conceivable we will, both because of new technological designs for them, but also because of this growing sense — what I see is a lot of elite consensus (and elites are bad now!) that we made a wrong move when we turned against nuclear power. There's still aging Boomer and older are environmentalist types who still react badly to the idea of nuclear power, but if you talk to younger people, they are more open-minded because they're more concerned with the climate, and if we're going to electrify everything, the electricity's got to come from someplace. Solar and wind don't get you there.To me, not only is this the turnaround in nuclear, to me, stunning, but the fact that we had one of the most severe accidents only about 10 years ago in Japan, and if you would have asked anybody back then, they're like, “That's the death knell. No more nuclear renaissance in these countries. Japan's done. It's done everywhere.” Yet here we are.And yet, part of that may even be because of that accident, because it was bad, and yet, the long-run bad effects were negligible in terms of actual deaths or other things that you might point to. It's not like suddenly you had lots of babies being born with two heads or something.What to make of Musk (13:37)I'm glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power.What do you make of Elon Musk?Well, I reviewed Walter Isaacson's biography of him.Whatever your opinion was after you read the biography, has it changed?No, it hasn't. I think he is somebody who has poor impulse control, and some of his impulses are very good. His engineering and entrepreneurial genius are best focused in the world of building things — that is, working with materials, physically thinking about properties of materials and how could you do spaceships, or cars, or things differently. He's a mixed bag and a lot of these kinds of people, I say it well compared.What do people expect that guy to be like?Compared to Henry Ford, I'd prefer Elon Musk. I'm glad the world has an Elon Musk, I'm glad we don't have too many of them, and I worry a little bit about someone of that temperament being close to political power. It can be a helpful corrective to some of the regulatory impulses because he does have this very strong builder impulse, but I don't think he's a particularly thoughtful person about his limitations or about political concerns.Aside from his particular strange personality, there is a general problem among the tech elite, which is that they overemphasize how much they know. Smart people are always prone to the problem of thinking they know everything because they're smart, or that they can learn everything because they're smart, or that they're better than people because they're smart, and it's just like one characteristic. Even the smartest person on earth can't know everything because there's more knowledge than any one person can have. That's why I don't like the technocratic impulse, because the technocratic impulse is like, smart people should run the world and they tell you exactly how to do it.To take a phrase that Ruxandra Teslo uses on her Substack, I think weird nerds are really important to the progress of the world, but weird nerds also need to realize that our goal should be to create a world in which they have a place and can do great things, but not a world in which they run everything, because they're not the only people who are valuable and important.On electric cars (16:21)If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes.You were talking about electrification a little earlier, and you've written a little bit about electric cars. Why did you choose to write about electric cars? And it seems like there's a vibe shift on electric cars as well in this country.This is the funny thing, because this January interview is actually scheduled because of a July post I had written on Substack called “Don't Talk About Electric Cars!”It's as timely as today's headlines.The headline was inspired by a talk that I heard Celinda Lake, the Democratic pollster (been around forever) give at a Breakthrough Institute conference back in June. Breakthrough Institute is part of this sort of UP Wing, pro-progress coalition, but they have a distinct Democrat tilt. And this conference, there was a panel on it that was about how to talk about these issues, specifically if you want Democrats to win.She gave this talk where she showed all these polling results where you would say, “The Biden administration is great because of X,” and then people would agree or disagree. And the thing that polled the worst, and in fact the only thing that actually made people more likely to vote Republican, was saying that they had supported building all these electric charging stations. Celinda Lake's opinion, her analysis of that, digging into the numbers, was that people don't like electric cars, and especially women don't like electric cars, because of concerns about range. Women are terrified of being stranded, that was her take. I don't know if that's true, but that was her take. But women love hybrids, and I think people love hybrids. I think hybrids are very popular, and in fact, I inherited my mother's hybrid because she stopped driving. So I now have a 2018 Prius, which I used to take this very long road trip in the summer where I drove from LA to a conference in Wichita, and then to Red Cloud Nebraska, and then back to Wichita for a second conference.The reason people don't like electric cars is really a combination of the fact that they tend to cost more than equivalent gasoline vehicles and because they have limited range and you have to worry about things like charging them and how long charging them is going to take.If you look at the statistics, the people who buy electric cars tend to be people who don't actually drive that much, and they're skewed way to high incomes. So I live in this neighborhood in West LA, and it is full of Priuses — I mean it used to be full of Priuses, there's still a lot of Priuses, but it's full of Teslas and it is not typical. And the people in LA who are driving many, many miles are people who have jobs like they're gardeners, or their contractors, or they're insurance adjusters and they have to drive all around and they don't drive electric cars. They might very well drive hybrids because you get better gas mileage, but they're not people who have a lot of time to be sitting around in charging stations.I think what's happened is there's some groups of people who are see this as a problem to be solved, but then there are a lot of people who see it as more symbolic than not. And they let their ideal, perfect world prevent improvements. So instead of saying, “We should switch from coal to natural gas,” they say, “We should outlaw fossil fuels.” Instead of saying, “Hybrids are a great thing, great invention, way lower emissions,” they say, “We must have all electric vehicles.” And what will happen, California has this rule, it has this law, that you're not going to be able to sell [non-]electric vehicles in the state after, I think it's 2035, and it's totally predictable what's going to happen: People just keep their gasoline cars longer. We're going to end up like Cuba with a bunch of old cars.I swear, every report I get from a think tank, or a consultancy, or a Wall Street bank, for years has talked about electric cars, the energy transition, as if it was an absolutely done deal, and maybe it is a done deal over some longer period of time, I don't know, but to me it sort of gets to your point about top-down technocratic impulse — it seems to be failing.And I think that electric cars are a good example of that because there are a lot of people who think electric cars are really cool, they're kind of an Up Wing thing, if you will. It's like a new technology, there've been big advances, and exciting entrepreneurs . . . and I think a lot of people who like the idea of technological progress like electric cars, and in fact, the adoption of electric cars by people who maybe don't drive a whole lot but have a lot of money, it's not just environmental, cool, or even status, it's partly techno-lust, especially with Teslas.A lot of people who bought Teslas, they're just like people who like technology, but the top-down proclamation that you must have an electric vehicle, and we're going to use a combination of subsidies and bans to force everybody to have an electric vehicle, really doesn't acknowledge the diversity of transportation needs that people have.One way of looking at electric cars, but also the effort to build all these chargers, which has been a failure, the effort to start to creating broadband connectivity to all these rural areas — which isn't working very well — there was this lesson learned by people on the center-left, and Ezra Klein, that there was this wild overreaction, perhaps, to environmental problems in the '60s and '70s, and the unintended consequence here is that one, the biggest environmental problem may be worse because we don't have nuclear power and climate change, but now we can't really solve any problems. So it took them 50 years, but they learned a lesson.My concern is to look at what's going on with some of the various Biden initiatives which are taking forever to implement, may be wildly unpopular — will they learn the risk of this top-down technocratic approach, or they'll just memory hold that and they'll move on to their next technocratic approach? Will there be a learning?No, I'm skeptical that there will be. I think that the learning that has taken place — and by the way, I hate that: “a learning,” that kind of thing. . .That's why I said it, because it's kind of delightfully annoying.The “learning,” gerund, that has taken place is that we shouldn't put so much process in the way of government doing things. And while I more or less agree with that, in particular, there are too many veto points and it is too easy for a very small group of objectors to hold up, not just private, but also public initiatives that are providing public goods.I think that the reason we got all of these process things that keep things from being done was because of things like urban renewal in the 1960s. And no, it was not just Robert Moses, he just got the big book written about him, but this took place every place where neighborhoods were completely torn down and hideous, brutalist structures were built for public buildings, or public housing, and these kinds of things, and people eventually rebelled against that.I think that yes, there are some people on the center-left who will learn. I do not think Ezra Klein is one of them, but price signals are actually useful things. They convey knowledge, and if you're going to go from one regulatory regime to another, you'll get different results, but if you don't have something that surfaces that bottom-up knowledge and takes it seriously, eventually it's going to break down. It's either going to break down politically or it's just waste a lot of money. . . You have your own technocratic streak.Thinking about California (25:56)Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.But listen, they'd be the good technocrats.Final question: As we're speaking, as we're doing this interview, huge fires raging sort of north of Los Angeles — how do you feel about the future of California? You live in California. California is extraordinarily important, both the American economy and to the world as a place of culture, as a place of technology. How do you feel about the state?The state has done a lot of shooting itself in the foot over the last . . . I moved here in 1986, and over that time, particularly in the first decade I was there, things were going great, the state was kind of stupid. I think if California solves its housing problem and actually allows significant amounts of housing to be built so that people can move here, people can stay here, young people don't have to leave the state, I think that will go a long way. It has made some positive movement in that direction. I think that's the biggest single obstacle.Fires are a problem, and I just recirculated on my Substack something I wrote about understanding the causes of California fires and what would need to be done to stop them.You've got to rake that underbrush.I wrote this in 2019, but it's still true: Everybody uses California fires as an excuse to grind whatever axe they have.Some of the Twitter commentary has been less-than-generous toward the people of California and its governor.One of the forms of progress that we take for granted is that cities don't burn regularly. Throughout most of human history, regular urban fires were a huge deal, and one of the things that city governments feared the most was fire and how were they prevented. There's the London fire, and the Chicago fires, and I remember, I just looked up yesterday, there was a huge fire in Atlanta in 1917, which was when my grandparents were children there. I remember my grandparents talking about that fire. Cities used to regularly burn — now they don't, where you have, they call it the “urban wildlife,” I forget what it's called, but there's a place where the city meets up against the natural environment, and that's where we have fires now, so that people like me who live in the concrete are not threatened. It's the people who live closer to nature, or they have more money, have a big lot of land.It's kind of understood what would be needed to prevent such fires. It's hard to do because it costs a lot of money in some cases, but it's not like, “Let's forget civilization. Let's not build anything. Let's just let nature take its course.” And one of the problems that was in the 20th century where people had the false idea — again, bad technocrats — that you needed to prevent forest fires, forest fires were always bad, and that is a complete misunderstanding of how the natural world works.California has a great future if it fixes this housing problem. If it doesn't fix its housing problem, it can write off the future. It will be all old people who already have houses.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised▶ Business* Google Thinks It Has the Best AI Tech. 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The World War-era historians—Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley—operated at intellectual levels we can't match today. Despite our "progress" myth, we've intellectually regressed. These giants accurately predicted our 21st century collapse: atheism, caesarism, social alienation, population decline. Their most urgent warning? BUREAUCRACY would destroy Western civilization if left unchecked. We ignored them, and now it's devouring everything that made our civilization great, exactly as they predicted. SPONSORS: NetSuite:  More than 41,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: https://netsuite.com/102 Shopify:  Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, handling 10% of U.S. e-commerce. With hundreds of templates, AI tools for product descriptions, and seamless marketing campaign creation, it's like having a design studio and marketing team in one. Start your $1/month trial today at https://shopify.com/cognitive Link to Black Forest Supplements and Turkestrone: https://blackforestsupplements.com/?s... More information here: https://blackforestsupplements.com/bl... LINKS: Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews:    / @history102-qg5oj   Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... Bibliography: * means book was really important for this video The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham** Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigely The Old Regime and the French Revolution by De Toqueville A New World Begins by Poptkin Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis** Strategy by Lawrence Freedman On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt The Soul of China by Amaury de Riencourt The Ruling Classes by Gaetano Mosca The Fate of Empires by Hubbard The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel Why Nations Fail by Robinson and Acemoglu A Secular Age by Charles Taylor The Gulag Archipelago Solzenitsyn The Total State by Auron Macintyre* The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch The Storm before the Calm by George Friedman* Rise of the West by McNeil On Politics by Aristotle The Soul of India by Amaury de Riencourt The Sea and Civilization by Lincoln Payne The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson Reason and Faith by Sam Gregg The Shaping of America by Meinig Caesar and Christ by Will Durant The Life of Greece by Will Durant Destiny Disrupted Tamim Ansary Empires of the Atlantic World by Elliot The 13th Century World System by Abu Laughed Colonial Empires from the 18th century by Fieldhouse War What is it good for by Ian Morris The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman Regime Change by Deenan Atrocities by Matthew White The Road to Serfdom by Hayek

Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code WHATIFALTHIST at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: http://incogni.com/whatifalthist Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter - https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en Bibliography: The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin The Economics of Discontent by Jean Michel Paul The Identity of France by Fernand Braudel The History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel The Mediterranean at the time of Philip 2nd by Fernand Braudel The Structures of Every day life by Fernand Braudel Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker On Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyl Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer Long Cycles by Goldstein The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Paul Kennedy Generations by Strauss and Howe Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler The Coming Caesars by Amaury de riencourt Rise of the West by William McNeil The Pursuit of Power by William McNeil Tragedy and Hope by Caroll Quiggley The Great Leveler by Walter Schedule Capital by Thomas Picketty The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell The Middle Ages by Sidney Painter The Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Compare news coverage. Spot media bias. Avoid algorithms. Try Ground News today and get 40% off your subscription by going to https://ground.news/whatif Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter - https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... Bibliography: Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell The True Believer by Eric Hoffer Dominion by Tom Holland Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington Strategy by Lawrence Freeman The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Unabomber's Manifesto The Revolt of the Elites by Lasch The Total State by Auron Macintyre The Culture of Critique by Kevin MacDonald The Righteous Mind by Jon Haidt Nihilism by Seraphim Rose Spiteful Mutants by Edward Dutton The Coming Caesars by Amaury de Riencourt Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt A History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer Assemblywoman by Aristophanes  The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman The Future is the Past Country by Edward Dutton Witches, Feminism and the Fall of the West's by Edward Dutton Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin American Nations by Colin Woodard A Secular Age by Charles Taylor A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent Behave by Sapolsky Seeing Like a State by James Scott Coming to Our Senses by Morris German Women Deserve Less by Myron Gaines A Secret History of the World by Mark Booth Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels by Ian Morris Lineages of Modernity by Todd Immanuel Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose Curt Doolittle Yuri Bezmonov Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis The Storm before the Calm by George Friedman The Managerial Class by James Burnham The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quiggley Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson The Evolutionary Psychology behind Politics  The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn The Culture of Narcissism by Lasch After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried Shadow World by Robert Chandler Envy by Helmut Schoeck A History of Manners by Norbert Elias The Elephant in the Brain by Smiler The Story of Work by Lucassen  The Fate of Empires by Hubbard The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray

PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://PDSDebt.com/WHATIFALTHIST Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter - https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... Bibliography The Ruling Classes by Gaetano Mosca The Rise of the West by McNeil The Story of the Americas by Leland Dewitt Baldwin Forgotten Continent by Michael Reid American Nations by Colin Woodard The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Heinrich Why Nations Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson War, Peace and War by Peter Turchin The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott Seeing like a State by James Scott The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russel Democracy the God that Failed by Herman Hoppes Atrocities by Matthew White The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama The Soul of France by Fernand Braudel A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel The Best of Times and Worst of Times by Michael Burleigh After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis  Politics by Aristotle The Pursuit of Power by McNeil Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quiggley Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell Envy by Helmut Schoeck Dominion by Tom Holland The True Believer by Eric Hoffer The Dictators by Richard Overy Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari The Invention of Yesterday by Tamim Ansary After Liberalism by Matthew Rose Destiny Disrupted by Tamim Ansary The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist Japan and the Shackles of the Past by Taggert Murphy The True Believer by Eric Hoffer Shadow World by Chandler The Righteous Mind by Haidt The Strange Death of Europe by Douglas Murray Islamo Leftism by Philippe Fabry Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat

IntroductionIn this episode of Maintainable, Robby speaks with Lutz Hühnken, Head of Engineering Excellence at Upvest, about the transformative power of event-driven architecture in software development. Lutz brings his extensive experience to the table, discussing how breaking down complex systems into manageable modules and leveraging event-driven design can lead to more resilient and maintainable software.Topics Discussed[00:05:32] Introduction to Well-Maintained Software: Lutz shares his thoughts on the key characteristics of maintainable software, emphasizing modularity and simplicity.[00:10:24] Challenges with "Magic" in Code: The pitfalls of relying too much on frameworks and ORMs, including examples from Lutz's experience with Hibernate.[00:11:16] Understanding Event-Driven Architecture: Lutz explains the fundamentals of event-driven architecture and its advantages over traditional command-driven approaches.[00:13:50] The Role of Promises in Event-Driven Systems: How clear design-time responsibilities ensure reliability in event-driven communication.[00:15:43] Choreography vs. Orchestration: The debate between these two approaches to managing workflows and why Lutz favors choreography for most systems.[00:17:57] Onboarding Developers in Event-Driven Systems: Tips for effectively integrating new team members into an event-driven architecture.[00:26:52] The Role of Engineering Excellence at Upvest: Lutz discusses his new role and the importance of systems thinking in guiding architectural decisions.[00:34:55] Managing Technical Debt: Lutz offers insights into balancing feature development with addressing technical debt, emphasizing the importance of a healthy investment distribution.Key TakeawaysBreaking down large systems into smaller modules with clear boundaries can significantly enhance maintainability.Event-driven architecture offers a powerful way to decouple system components, making them more resilient and scalable.Developers should be cautious of "magic" in code, such as heavy reliance on ORMs, which can obscure underlying complexities and hinder maintainability.Choreography often provides a more scalable and maintainable approach than orchestration in managing complex workflows.Technical debt should be managed proactively, with regular investments in refactoring and productivity enhancements to maintain long-term software health.Resources MentionedLutz Hühnken's BlogEvent-Driven Architecture by Martin FowlerThe Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl PopperConnect with Lutz HühnkenLinkedInTwitterThanks to Our Sponsor!Turn hours of debugging into just minutes! AppSignal is a performance monitoring and error-tracking tool designed for Ruby, Elixir, Python, Node.js, Javascript, and other frameworks.It offers six powerful features with one simple interface, providing developers with real-time insights into the performance and health of web applications.Keep your coding cool and error-free, one line at a time! Use the code maintainable to get a 10% discount for your first year. Check them out! Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.Keep up to date with the Maintainable Podcast by joining the newsletter.

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:13 - 08:11)Tropical Storm Debby Is a ‘Once Every Thousand Years' Storm? “Acts of God“ and the Remnants of Theological Language in a Secular AgePart II (08:11 - 14:00)Why Would Israel Assassinate the Leaders of Its Enemies? Deterrence and Israel's Great ChallengeWhy Israel Escalates: Risky Assassinations Are a Desperate Bid to Restore Deterrence by Foreign Affairs (Dalia Dassa Kaye)Part III (14:00 - 20:05)Israel's Existential Threats Have Changed its Politics: A Lot of Liberal Arguments Disappear After an a Savage AttackIs Israel Defensible? The cruel geostrategic logic of the Holy Land. by Claremont Review of Books (Christopher Caldwell)Part IV (20:05 - 25:04)Presidential Election Realities Come Into Focus—And There Are Massive Worldview Issues at StakeSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at https://pdsdebt.com/free-debt-assessment/?ref=whatifalthist Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter- https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en Bibliography:  Curt Doolittle's work. Available on the Propertarian Website The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama  The Decay of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama  A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia by David Christian. 2 volumes The History of Russia by Orlando Figes Europe by Norman Davies The Isles by Norman Davies  Al Muqqahdimmah by Ibn Khaldun Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung The Elephant in the Brain by Simler The Rise of the West by McNeil Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder Atrocities by Matthew White The True Believer by Eric Hoffer Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt The Origins of Ideology by Immanuel Todd The Moral Animal by Robert Wright Sex and Culture by JD Unwin The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman Very Beautiful People by Ashley Mears Envy by Helmut Schoeck The Righteous Mind by John Haidt Seeing like a State by James Scott War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat Conquests and Cultures by Thomas Sowell War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin Why Nations Fail by Robinson and Acemoglu Dominion by Tom Holland The Ancient City by Foustel de Coulanges A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel  War, What is it Good for by Ian Morris The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Samuel Francis A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel

Click this link to make some cash for giving your opinion! https://www.inflcr.co/SHKUj Thanks YouGov for sponsoring! Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter- https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en -- Bibliography: The Economics of Discontent by Jean Michel Paul Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell The Great Wave by David Hackett Fischer Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin Capital by Thomas Picketty Why Nations Fail by Robinson and Acemoglu False Economy by Alan Beattie Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber Crashed by Adam Tooze The Road to Serfdom by Hayek The Rise and Fall of Nations by Ruchir Sharma The Growth Delusion by David Pilling The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel End Times by Peter Turchin The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis  The Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania  The Absent Superpower by Peter Zeihan Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama The Storm before the Calm by George Friedman The Soul of France pt 1 by Fernand Braudel Lost Connections by Johann Hari The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist

PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis. It only takes thirty seconds. Get yours at: https://pdsdebt.com/free-debt-assessment/?ref=whatifalthist Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0NCSdGglnmdWg-qHALhu1w Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter: https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en Bibliography: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley The Tree of Culture by Ralph Linton The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias The Age of Faith by Will Durant Leviathan and Its Enemies by Samuel Francis Europe Emerges by Reynolds The Storm Before the Calm by Friedman Why Women Deserve Less by Myron Gaines The Nice Guy's Guide to Dating by David Hamilton Woke Racism by John McWhorter The Origins of Woke by Hanania The Unabomber's Manifesto

Today's show is an open discussion on the protest demonstrations happening across the United States and the impact of propaganda on shaping perceptions. I firmly stand with Israel and believe it is a beacon of hope and progress in the region. The ongoing conflict is not only about Israel, but part of a larger agenda to divide and weaken the United States. This is not just a theory; there are facts to support it. Let's talk about George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, which has been involved in funding divisive activities around the world. It's crucial to be aware of these influences and not fall for manipulated narratives. As Americans, we must speak out against agendas that seek to distort our thinking and divide us. I encourage you to seek the truth and not be swayed by propaganda.   Follow Carl: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/toeverypageaturning/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarlBuccellatoAuthor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-buccellato-60234139 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVB3YH1iQxK4IL4ya5j4-Jg Website: https://toeverypageaturning.com Book: https://www.amazon.com/Every-Page-Turning-Lifes-Journey/dp/1645435229   Resources: Campus Protests: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/us/politics/biden-trump-campus-protests.html Bill Gates on Reducing the Population With the Use of Vaccines: https://rumble.com/v1xzbjh-bill-gates-reduce-population-through-vaccination.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwouexBhAuEiwAtW_Zx5SYVzMTh-bMKuIfnzHvUWowb5N9M4_fiG3CEm6eAw9rfeVdHDXrXhoC-Z0QAvD_BwE Top Secret Meeting of the World's Richest People: https://www.irishcentral.com/news/secret-meeting-of-worlds-richest-people-held-in-new-york-45304702-237642871 The Open Society and Its Enemies: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Society-Its-Enemies-One/dp/0691158134 Russia Bans George Soros Foundation: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N13P22Y/

Jim talks with Robert Conan Ryan about seven ethical perspectives and why everyone should know them. They discuss why understanding ethical stances is valuable, a horseshoe spectrum, pragmatism, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology, elitist power, deification, social justice, stacking up ethical stances, Aristotle's golden mean, sociopaths in the military, running the polis, coherent pluralism, the multi-perspectival lens, Cornel West's positional complexity, paideia, DEI (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion), liberal universal humanism, pragmatism vs neo-pragmatism, the long run vs the short run, the transaction cost theory of ethics, inclusive entrepreneurship, the Main Street problem, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP54 - Robert Conan Ryan on Boom & Bust Cycles "On making meanings: Curators, social assembly, and mashups," by Barry M. Mitnick & Robert C. Ryan The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, by Saul Alinsky Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter Robert Conan Ryan is a professor of business administration and emerging public intellectual. His current scholarly projects include work with a diverse roster of world-leading strategists, economists, and futurists such as Jordan Hall, Michel Bauwens, Ravi Madhavan, Barry Mitnick, Matthew McCaffrey, and Michael Rectenwald. His current papers tackle competitive industry dynamics; grey market economics; the history of technology; Neo-Schumpeterian economics; artificial vs. natural cognition; paradigmatic strategic design; and, how sensemaking systems evolve and change.

What determines our visions of the future, and how those visions change over time? How is politics shaped by conflicting visions of the future? What did the old mid-century vision of a Jetsons-style future get wrong -- and what did it get right that we are now struggling to rediscover? What are the roots of technological pessimism, and how can we encourage the growth of a culture that valorizes scientific and technological advance? On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, author Virginia Postrel (The Future and Its Enemies, The Fabric of Civilization, and more) joins the Niskanen Center's Brink Lindsey to discuss the ongoing and ever-changing struggle between the forces and champions of dynamism and progress and those that favor the status quo or an imagined past.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history's most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children's and Household Tales – is one of the world's most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers were also passionate German nationalists. They insisted that Germans must reject alien regimes and only accept rulers who spoke their language and cherished their traditions.  The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first book-length study of the Grimms' political attitudes and ideas. It shows how the Grimms believed that their groundbreaking philological knowledge of grammar and folk narratives allowed them to disentangle cultural and linguistic groups from each other, criticize imperial rule, and even counsel kings and princes. The brothers sought to revive a neglected Germanic culture for a contemporary audience, but they also wished to provide the traditional political elite with an understanding of the resurgent national collective. Through detailed analysis, Norberg reconstructs how the Grimms wished to mediate between culture and politics as well as between sovereigns and peoples. Jakob Norberg is a Professor of German at Duke University. He is the author of Sociability and Its Enemies (Northwestern University Press, 2014), The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Schopenhauer's Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, Arcadia, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, Textual Practice, Telos, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. His book on the Grimms won the 2023 Best Book award of the Brothers Grimm Society of North America and a recent article, “Schopenhauer and the Injustice of Slavery,” won the 2023 essay prize of the Schopenhauer Society. Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-GermanOccultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Jim talks with Cody Moser about the ideas and findings in his and Paul Smaldino's paper "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality." They discuss transient diversity, group performance vs the agent level, taking an agent-based modeling approach, Derex & Boyd's group potion-mixing experiment, no free lunch theorem, random network structures, an inverse correlation between network connectivity & performance, effects of sharing intermediate results, Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, measuring inequality with the Gini coefficient, higher performance in less equal networks, connected caveman networks, ring networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, randomly allocating lifetime endowed academic chairs to 25-year-olds, institutional design, generative entrenchment, implications for internet platform design, the parochial pyramid, tribalism at the Dunbar number, and much more. Episode Transcript "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality," by Cody Moser & Paul Smaldino Saving Twitter—A Roundtable (Jim Rutt, Bo Winegard, & Cody Moser) "Partial connectivity increases cultural accumulation within groups," by Maxime Derex & Robert Boyd The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper Cody Moser is a PhD student in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences. His research examines the origins of individual and institutional behavior where he uses approaches from complex systems and evolutionary dynamics to study collective problem-solving, systems collapse, cultural evolution, and innovation. Before coming to UC Merced, he studied primatology where he worked with capuchin monkeys, dwarf and mouse lemurs, lorises, and aye-ayes. He obtained a B.S. in Anthropology with minors in statistics and biology from Florida State University, a Master's in Anthropology from Texas A&M University, and worked for two years with The Music Lab in the Harvard Department of Psychology. He is interested in the history and philosophy of science and has written for a number of popular science venues on the applications of research from his field. His favorite animal is the ring-tailed lemur, his favorite room on campus is SE2 224, and his dream job is to be a graduate student.

Our Best of 2023 series continues with Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist currently contributing to the major Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano after working for the last 14 years for la Repubblica, consistently rated among the top two Italian newspapers, and for the italian newsmagezine l'Espresso. She has worked with Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks since 2009, teaming up with large teams of international media to cover and investigate all of WikiLeaks' secret documents. Stefania speaks with host Chuck Mertz about her book "Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies" recently published by Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745347615/secret-power/ After the interview, more of your answers to the Question from Hell and a Moment of Truth from Jeff Dorchen. Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access weekly bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thisishell

On this edition of Parallax Views, Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins the show to discuss his new book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Samuel examines and dissects the beliefs of Cold War intellectuals like Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt to argue that liberals of the Cold War in many ways ended up undermining the progressive and Enlightenment principles of the liberal tradition in their attempts to combat communism. In doing so, he makes the case, they helped paved the way not only for modern equivalents/heirs of the Cold War liberalism like Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Tony Judt, and Leon Wieseltierm, but also the reigning power of the current neoliberal order and the withering of the welfare state. A note that this conversation is talking about liberals and liberalism in a very academic sense rather than it's colloquial usage. Among the topics discussed are Judith Shklar's After Utopia (and why Shklar is a guiding force throughout Liberalism Against Itself), Sigmun Freud and the politics of self-regulations, decolonization and paternalisitic racism in the Cold War era, Jonathan Chait's scathing review of Liberalism Against Itself and Samuel's response to it (excluive, thus far, to this show), Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed and Samuel's critique of the burgeoning postliberal right, thoughts on Sohrab Ahmari's Tyranny Inc., Karl Popper of The Open Society and Its Enemies fame and the problem his critique of historicism, the Mont Pelerin Society and neoliberalism, F.A. Hayek, Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Christian thinker Lord Acton, the Cold War liberals' critique of romanticism and Samuel's response to it, the Soviet Union and the idea of Progress and who lays claim to it, the concept of emancipation and the French Revolution, and much, much more!

Kip Lee is a designer and healthcare executive at University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland, OH. As Vice President of UH Ventures, he manages an innovation portfolio that supports University Hospitals' strategic initiatives and partnerships through product innovation and human-centered design. Outside of work, Kip serves on the editorial board of Design Issues, a design and innovation journal published by MIT Press. He also serves on several nonprofit boards. We talk about systems and design in healthcare.   Listen to learn about: Complex systems Design in healthcare What is the role of management? The COVID-19 pandemic's effect on healthcare innovation The interplay between design and management   Our Guest Kipum (Kip) Lee, PhD is a designer and healthcare executive at University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland, OH. As Vice President of UH Ventures, he manages an innovation portfolio that supports University Hospitals' strategic initiatives and partnerships through product innovation and human-centered design. Outside of work, he serves as an editor of Design Issues, the premier journal on design history, theory, criticism, and practice published by MIT Press, and on several non-profit boards. In addition to playing with his two kids, Kip loves used hardcover books, freshly ground coffee, low-humidity weather, and a good conversation.   Show Highlights [01:26] Kip's journey into design began with a love of drawing and visualization at a very early age. [02:36] Experiencing the New Jersey Governor's School of the Arts during high school. [04:11] Kip talks about cultural expectations and how that affected his choices as he entered university. [05:09] Why Kip chose bioengineering as an undergrad. [06:20] A brief time in architecture as a graduate student. [07:47] Carnegie Mellon's interaction design program. [08:27] Kip's revelation while attending the U.S.'s first ever service design conference. [09:40] The course that made Kip fall in love with learning again. [10:41] How Kip's studies in architecture and bioengineering have come full circle in his current work in healthcare. [13:51] Designing in complex systems. [14:00] Kip uses the military and warfare as another example of a complex system. [15:38] Looking at healthcare as a complex system. [16:54] Kip offers a pre-pandemic example of the challenges that arose in implementing a new technology. [18:26] Difficulties that can arise with terminology and in how language is used. [19:21] Vaccine hesitancy vs. vaccine readiness. [21:48] Complex systems are multidimensional, and aesthetics is often just as important as the technical. [23:02] Kip offers an example using PPE/masks during the pandemic to show why aesthetics matters. [26:06] The complexities involved in shaping and influencing people's behaviors and choices. [31:16] Dawan brings up the idea of shifting management more into performance facilitation rather than control. [32:43] A Miro Moment. [34:01] Kip likes Henry Mintzberg's idea of management as “controlled chaos,” maintaining the balance between exploration, freedom, and a sense of order. [35:43] The need for c-suite execs to stay grounded in the actual front line work of the organization. [36:46] Designers as rebels. [37:05] Kip talks about parallel developments in both design and management. [38:43] What can designers learn from management? [41:33] How the pandemic helped healthcare innovation. [42:55] Good designers and good managers both work to create the environment where healthy and exciting interactions and projects can take place. [44:46] Service design's uniqueness as a discipline. [47:09] The desire to serve is an essential aspect of what it means to be a designer. [47:39] Bruno Latour's benefits of design. [49:03] Many things that are aspects of design are also aspects of management. [51:10] Designers and managers are often doing the same work. [51:37] Dawan talks about shifting from “solutions” to “responses.” [54:28] Systems have histories and memories. [57:14] Kip offers thoughts and advice for others who want to apply their design skills in the healthcare industry. [01:04:15] Kip's last words about the design field as a whole.   Links Kip on Twitter Kip on LinkedIn Kip on Google Scholar Kip on University Hospitals Ventures Kip on ResearchGate TEDx CLE, Master Builders for the 21st Century Critique of Design Thinking in Organizations: Strongholds and Shortcomings of the Making Paradigm Hack from Home | Discovering Problems in Our Dwelling Place: A Design Thinking Approach Architekton Designing for Value in Specialty Referrals: A New Framework for Eliminating Defects and Wicked Problems, by Patrick Runnels, Heather Wobbe, Kipum Lee, Randy Jernejcic, and Peter Pronovost   Book Recommendations Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, by C. West Churchman The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, by Donald Schön A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk), keynote lecture from Bruno Latour   Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Healthcare Innovation + Nursing + Opportunities for Designers — DT101 E109 A Designer's Journey into Designing for Health and Healthcare with Lorna Ross — DT101 E45 Service Design in Healthcare Inside Multiple Business Contexts with Jessica Dugan — DT101 E22  

On this edition of Parallax Views, Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist reporting for Italy's Il Fatto Quotidiano who has dedicated a large portion of her career to covering Julian Assange and Wikileaks, joins us to discuss her book Secret Power: Wikileaks and Its Enemies. The book details how Wikileaks related to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the War on Terror, diplomatic cables, the War on Terror, CIA cyberweapons, and more as well as the story of Julian Assange and his eventual imprisonment at Belmarsh Prison. In this conversation Stefania and I discussed: - How Wikileaks first came under Stefania's journalistic radar in 2008 - Cryptography, protected communications, and journalistic source protection in the age of mass surveillance; PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption - Wikileaks publication of a manual relevant to the question of torture at the U.S.'s Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp during the War on Terror; the Pentagon vs. Wikileaks - Stefania's first contact with Julian Assange - The Wikileaks documents on Julius Baer, a Swiss bank alleged to have been involved in money laundering activities; how big financial institutions try to pressure news and media - Wikileaks and the Vault 7 documents about CIA cyberweapons; these documents detailed how the CIA was using software vulnerabilities to access smart TV, cars, phones, etc.; the CIA, Weeping Angel, and the hacking of TVs; a bit of the inside story of how Stefania covered the Vault 7 story, the fears she had covering the story, and the cautions she took while reporting on it; Mike Pompeo and the CIA's response to the Vault 7 documents; the alleged leaker of the Vault 7 documents, Joshua Schulte - Wikileaks and the public interest - Stefania discusses the Julian Assange she knows based on her years of experience with him - Stefania addresses the criticisms of Julian Assange and Wikileaks; the accusation that Wikileaks put lives in danger through its leaks; the rape allegations against Assange; accusations of Assange and Wikileaks being in bed with Russian and Donald Trump - State criminality, war crimes, and the persecution of whistleblowers - Stefania discusses her response to people that ask her if "Assange will be killed"; she argues in many ways Assange has already been "killed" in terms of the deterioration of his mental and physical well-being during his imprisonment - Wikileaks, democracy, and the freedom of the press - Assange, Chelsea Manning, the FBI informant Siggi hakkari (aka Siggi the Hacker aka Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson), and the password cracking/hacking charges against Assange - What Stefania sees as the stakes of the Julian Assange extradition case; the CIA and extraordinary rendition; Stefania's belief that Assange has no change of a fair trial in the U.S. and that his extradition would open a Pandora's box that'd have a chilling effect on freedom of the press in the U.S. and other countries as well as - Comparing and contrasting the Assange case to that of Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers and was targeted by the Richard Nixon administration - The story of how Assange was targeted by the late, deep pocketed GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson's security firm UC Global; the investigation in Spain regarding UC Global - Stefania's story of being spied on and targeted while covering Julian Assange and Wikileaks; The Crown Prosecution Service and the destruction of crucial documents on the Julian Assange case - And more!

Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist currently contributing to the major Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano after working for the last 14 years for la Repubblica, consistently rated among the top two Italian newspapers, and for the italian newsmagezine l'Espresso. She has worked with Julian Assange and his organization WikiLeaks since 2009, teaming up with large teams of international media to cover and investigate all WikiLeaks' secret documents Stefania speaks with host Chuck Mertz about her book "Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies" recently published by Pluto Press. This episode also features new responses to the Question from Hell and this week in Rotten History. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745347615/secret-power/ https://stefaniamaurizi.it/en-idx.html https://twitter.com/SMaurizi www.fattoquotidiano.it twitter.com/fattoquotidian www.repubblica.it twitter.com/repubblica

NOTE: This interview was not produced as part of the "Unauthorized Disclosure" podcast, but it is shared here to help give Stefania and her book some additional exposure. Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi partnered with WikiLeaks and covered military reports on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and US diplomatic cables related to Italy and the Vatican. She met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange multiple times. She saw firsthand how WikiLeaks worked on publications, even as the United States government ramped up its efforts to target and suppress the media organization. Now, the English-translation of Stefania's book, "Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies," is out from Pluto Press, and she joins Shadowproof's Kevin Gosztola to discuss this chronicle centered on her time as a media partner. The book also details her efforts to pursue freedom of information lawsuits against the US, United Kingdom, Sweden, and Australia for denying her access to documents related to the prosecution of Assange. Stefania kindly endorsed Kevin's forthcoming book on the Assange case, and Kevin is pleased to be able to show his support for Stefania's work and share this interview.

Award-winning Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi talks about her award-winning book "Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies." She touches on what it was like meeting and working with Julian Assange, debunks commonly held myths about him and wiki-leaks and shares what it was like being spied on while visiting him. She also talks about her fight for secret documents. Plus a breaking news update from Maya Garner, a Scandinavian-American human rights advocate and coordinator for international advocacy for Youth Against Settlements and Friends of Hebron, about Israel's arrest of activist Issa Amro (https://twitter.com/Issaamro.) Stefania Maurizi is an Italian investigative journalist working for the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, after 14 years working for the Italian newsmagazine l'Espresso and the Italian daily La Repubblica. She has worked on all WikiLeaks releases of secret documents since 2009. She is also the only journalist who has conducted multi-jurisdictional litigation to defend the right of the press to access the full documentation on Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists. In addition to her work on WikiLeaks, she has partnered with Glenn Greenwald to reveal the Snowden files about Italy. She has also interviewed A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, revealed the condolence payment agreement between the US government and the family of Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, killed in a US drone strike, and investigated the harsh working conditions of Pakistani workers in a major Italian garment factory in Karachi. In her book "Secret Power. WikiLeaks and Its Enemies" (Pluto Press, foreword by Ken Loach), she reconstructs the Assange and WikiLeaks case based on her over ten years of investigative journalism. The Italian version of her book has won two major journalistic prizes: the European Award for Investigative and Judicial Journalism, and the 2022 Premio Alessandro Leogrande for investigative journalism in narrative form. Stefania has won a number of other major journalistic prizes, including the Armenise Harvard Fellowship and the Colomba D'Oro Award conferred by Archivio Disarmo. Maya Garner is a Scandinavian-American human rights advocate and coordinator for international advocacy for Youth Against Settlements and Friends of Hebron. At the age of 19, she spent more than a year in Hebron witnessing daily human rights violations and has since campaigned internationally. She wrote her Bachelor's dissertation on the architecture and resistance in Hebron city at UCL in London. For the entire discussion, bonus content, to support independent media and to help make this program possible, please join us on Patreon at - https://www.patreon.com/thekatiehalpershow

This episode of the Popperian Podcast features an interview that Jed Lea-Henry conducted with Elyse Hargreaves. They speak about chapter 10 of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, the nature and often well-meaning origins of totalitarianism, the fall of Athens to Sparta, the betrayal of Socrates and Athenian democracy by Plato and the oligarchical class, and the one factor that Popper had neglected until then in his analysis – happiness, specifically the tyrannical dangers of trying to make people happy. Elyse Hargreaves is an ardent student of Popper, passionate about advancing the cause of the open society; for freedom, rationality and humanitarianism. Upon finding Popper in her early 20's, she has since been determined to popularise his ideas in whatever medium she can. Since then, she has released a free audiobook version of Popper's Conjectures and Refutations on YouTube which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUn6tOI13ZF4iEhzYM0Dvg and has recently released an audiobook version of Rafe Champion's Guide to the Open Society and Its Enemies which you can find on Audible here: https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Guide-to-the-Open-Society-and-Its-Enemies-Audiobook/B0BF2MZ4FJ?qid=  Support via Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/jedleahenry Support via PayPal – https://www.paypal.me/jrleahenry Shop – https://shop.spreadshirt.com.au/JLH-shop/ Support via Bitcoin - 31wQMYixAJ7Tisp773cSvpUuzr2rmRhjaW Website – The Popperian Podcast — Jed Lea-Henry Libsyn – The Popperian Podcast (libsyn.com) Youtube – The Popperian Podcast - YouTube Twitter – https://twitter.com/jedleahenry RSS - https://popperian-podcast.libsyn.com/rss *** Underlying artwork by Arturo Espinosa

On today's show, we bring on Ken Auletta to talk about the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Links from the show:* Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence* Ken's website* Subscribe to the newsletterAbout my guest:Ken Auletta launched the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker magazine in 1992. He is the author of twelve books, including five national bestsellers—Three blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. His twelfth book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else), was published in June 2018. His thirteenth book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, was published in July 2022. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Author Ken Auletta has been the chief political correspondent for the New York Post, a weekly columnist for the Village Voice, contributing editor at New York magazine and contributor to The New Yorker since 1977.  He is the author of twelve books, including five national bestsellers —Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway; World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies; and Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. His latest book, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, serves as a biography, an examination of the circumstances that led to the abuses and the final chapter of Auletta's reporting on Weinstein that began with a New Yorker profile two decades ago. Ken Auletta and Alec discuss Auletta's upbringing in Coney Island, his early career in politics and the culture of Weinstein's many enablers.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola are joined by Stefania Maurizi, who is an Italian journalist with the daily Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. She is also the author of the book, Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies, which is being translated into an English version. BECOME A SUBSCRIBER: Patreon.com/UnauthorizedDisclosure Stefania reacts to the decision by United Kingdom Home Secretary Priti Patel to approve the US government's extradition request against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Later in the interview, Stefania describes how she was surveilled and had her rights violated by a private security company's spying operation against the Ecuador embassy when she visited Assange. She discusses the criminal case that is pending in a Spanish court. Both the US and UK are obstructing this investigation. BECOME A SUBSCRIBER: Rokfin.com/UnauthorizedDis Stefania concludes by describing what happens next in the case and stating why it's important to be clear in our conversations that Assange is a journalist.

In the early 19th century, English textile workers calling themselves "Luddites" destroyed machinery in an effort to save their jobs from automation. And two centuries later, those who resist technological change are still called Luddites. In the 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel tells the history of textiles, including the Luddite movement. And in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, she describes the "stasist" view behind Luddism, as well as its natural antipode, dynamism. To discuss how this framework can help us understand the current moment, I've brought Virginia on the podcast. Virginia is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She is the author of https://www.amazon.com/Future-Its-Enemies-Creativity-Enterprise/dp/0684827603/ (The Future and Its Enemies), https://www.amazon.com/Substance-Style-Aesthetic-Remaking-Consciousness/dp/0060933852/ (The Substance of Style), and https://www.amazon.com/Power-Glamour-Longing-Visual-Persuasion/dp/1416561110 (The Power of Glamour). Her latest is https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Civilization-Textiles-Made-World-ebook/dp/B08KQ441QQ/ (The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World).

In the early 19th century, English textile workers calling themselves “Luddites” destroyed machinery in an effort to save their jobs from automation. And two centuries later, those who resist technological change are still called Luddites. In the 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel tells the history of textiles, including the Luddite movement. And in her 1998 book, The Future and Its Enemies, she describes the “stasist” view behind Luddism, as well as its natural antipode, dynamism. To discuss how this framework can help us understand the current moment, I’ve brought Virginia on the podcast. Virginia is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and visiting fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University. She is the author of The Future and Its Enemies, The Substance of Style, and The Power of Glamour. Her latest is The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World.