The Conservative Paradox
From the 1881 founding statement of the American magazine Freethinker: “The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in…
The New Sexual Divide
We still fail to appreciate just how revolutionary an invention the Enlightenment ideal of equality was, and how profoundly it transformed every sphere of life. Those changes concerned far more…
The Logic of Conspiracy
The conspiracy narrative surrounding 9/11 can be divided into three levels. The first level might go like this: The Israeli intelligence service was actually responsible. Mohamed Atta was in fact…
The Revolutionary Illusion
Last time, I wrote here about the tragedy of the left. It is a phenomenon in which a combination of passionate concern for the oppressed, various logical fallacies, and imprecise…
Tragedy of the Left
The phenomenon I call the tragedy of the Left combines a passionate commitment to liberating the oppressed with extremely poor analytical abilities. Originally noble intentions end exactly as one might…
The Power to Educate
The educational system of communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s is not coming back, so there is little point in debating whether its return would be desirable. No one…