If you push for an end without understanding the means, then you don't get what the end means.

It is I think now 54 years since the founding executive director of the UN Environment Programme opined “We have ten years to avoid a catastrophe". Since then… 📈Global population has more than doubled 📉Extreme poverty has fallen from nearly half the world to less than 1 in

Sounds koo-koo, I know, but sometimes, SOMETIMES, the enemy of your enemy is not actually your friend.

It's well known that the powerful people of the Weimar Republic didn't want poor people to have any more than one or two wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks to buy eggs. They were far too evil to allow them infinite wheelbarrows full of Deutshmarks.

🧵 1/14: Just days after Paul Ehrlich (the man whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted billions would starve) passed away, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate the scientist who proved Ehrlich and other doomsayers spectacularly wrong. Meet Norman Borlaug, the Iowa farm

I don't know if the rest of the world is aware that in France during Covid, people had to write down or print an authorization that allowed them to go out, no further than one kilometer and no longer than one hour, an authorization that was granted to them by... themselves. You

"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I shovelled the instruments of winter around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless button nose that lay at my feet. Happy birthday!!" - from Mary Shelly's Frostkenstein

Anyone have any insight on why the Woke Right and the Communists are all saying exactly the same thing now?

Just crossing 12 million streams yesterday, it's one of my most popular & may be one of the most popular avant garde classical pieces on Spotify, though you wouldn't necessarily know that to hear it. https://t.co/UC7jquGklw

On the other hand, people who only rent glass houses can throw as many stones as they can get away with.

Jan. 12: U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese says she's silent on slaughter of Iranian protesters because Iran is beyond her Palestinian areas mandate, to which she's “rigorously dedicated.” Feb. 28: Albanese immediately condemns U.S. and Israel for “massacres” in Iran.

Michel Foucault visited Iran in 1978 and praised its budding theocratic revolution as a site of resistance against the liberal-capitalist West he hoped to subvert. One reason why the usual suspects are still supporting the Iranian regime. I have a lecture on Foucault's

If you see complex issues as strictly black and white, you completely miss out on the fact that they’re actually avocado and puce.

Many people claim the moral high ground on poverty. They give speeches, hand out aid, and feel good about themselves. Meanwhile, the people who actually reduced poverty by creating businesses and fighting for economic freedom get called heartless. It is easier to look

Many on the far Left and Right didn’t erupt into open Jew-hatred until Israelis were massacred on 10/7. Now many of those same voices have lurched into open contempt for Iranians just as tens of thousands of Iranians have been slaughtered. Apparently, nothing makes you more

The right has to face facts. You don’t fix illiberalism by importing it into the statehouse and then pouring it into public universities. You don’t defend free speech by building a viewpoint-discrimination regime and calling it “reform.” And you don’t get to wave away the

Has anyone in the “Free Palestine” community yet explained why their freedom fighters massacred tens of thousands of Iranian civilians?

In 1958, Mao decreed that peasants should abandon farming to make steel in backyard furnaces. Village committees, terrified of appearing counter-revolutionary, reported wildly inflated grain harvests while actual crops rotted unharvested. The "steel" produced was worthless scrap,

At least nobody's feelings were hurt.

One of the most fascinating psychology studies ever is David Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places." Healthy people faked a single symptom to get admitted to psychiatric hospitals, and once labeled "mentally ill", everything they did was interpreted as pathology. Normal