When We Are All Made Equal…
When it comes to cautionary dystopian tales, most of us know the biggies. Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm (the latter proffering up this blog's name) are the gold standard. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is another classic. More contemporary writers have put forth...
One Idiot…
Ever read something so stupid, you press the palms of your hands to your face in frustration? Fortunately, the Internet provides. Because I feel that frustration on a near-constant basis, I've collected a stash of face-palm memes, and offer them as appropriate...
Happy Independence Day!
When was the last time you read the Declaration of Independence? The whole thing, not just the second paragraph? It's not long - 1334 words. Should take you 5 minutes or so. 5 minutes wee spent, on the 244th anniversary of its ratification. Feel free to chuckle at the...
Always OPM
Were I tasked with offering one lesson about politics, whether it be to a group of wide-eyed high school sophomores, an over-educated class of grad students, or a conglomerated mass of voters from all over the political spectrum, it would be this: It's always about...
Policing Incentives Matter
That incentives matter is a core kernel of debate between libertarians and Lefties (ok, and everyone else). They matter in police reform, and they explain why politicians have an incentive to maintain the status quo on the chronic problems they are elected to address....
A Nation of Chamberlains
I caught a chunklet of an Internet conversation the other day, wherein a couple obviously left-leaning (and intersectional) commenters offered a perfunctory dismissal of Thomas Sowell (and Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson, because Black Non-Liberals are all the same,...
On the Permanent Progressivist Revolution
The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. The process and the way it manifests About a month ago, I was requested to put together a longer piece on the process I can summarize by term "permanent progressivist revolution". I was spoilt for...
Special Revelation and Social Justice
On my current reading list is a series of essays by libertarian writer George H. Smith on freethought and liberty. The ninth such essay discusses Deism, a form of religious belief that rests on a view of God as a non-interventionist "clockmaker." One of the tenets of...
The Wrong Priorities
The race debate prompted by George Floyd's killing rages on, with the protestors coalescing around a "Defund the Police" mantra, and their antipodes twisting pretzels in order to rebut the assertions of 'systemic' police racism. Just as I found the phrase "Defund the...
Who Needs Big Brother?
The American system of government has been described as a "great experiment," given how radically different it was from how the world operated at time of its inception. It was a huge success and inspired many imitators. That was a couple hundred years ago. Since then,...
An Honest Officer “Speaks”
A police officer friend of mine (then a paramedic, now NYPD) and I used to debate policing inside and out during our shifts together as a paramedic team. He was a law school graduate and an intellectually honest adversary. At the risk of treating him as a...
Corrupting the Moment
The BLM movement, which has emerged as the "voice" of the George Floyd protests, has chosen to embrace the mantra "Defund The Police" as its remedy to the problems and factors that have resulted in unjustified killings of civilians by law enforcement. As I recently...
Coercion is Useless
As I read this long but interesting essay on arguments for and against religious persecution in history, I flashed back to my college and post-college gamer days, specifically a running gag I had with a friend. In the Dungeons and Dragons milieu, clerical characters...
Sloppy Slogans and Real Reforms
Regular readers should, by now, be familiar with the reforms that we've proposed in the wake of George Floyd's death-by-cop. These reform proposals are by no means unique to this blog, of course, but the more of us that repeat them, the more chance that they'll be...
I’ve Known Many Chauvins
George Floyd's killer, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, has a history that reminded me of an incident and individual from my days working as a paramedic for the FDNY in Brooklyn. My partner and I were dispatched to a developing riot. As we turned across Surf...
Twitter’s Apparatchiks
I recently read a mea culpa, posted on social media, by someone who food-blogs. Apparently, his lack of messaging regarding the George Floyd incident and the Black Lives Matter movement was deemed a punishable lack of support. In other words, his failure to comment...
Lockdowns, Riots, and 30 Round Magazines
The riots (and more germanely, the looting) that have come to dominate the George Floyd story have added to a societal paradigm shift initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. People's easy complacency about daily life is being shattered, and replaced...
Goldilocks Policing
I have friends in the NYPD who describe to me constantly being approached by "youths" that make a finger gun at them and say something like "turn your back on me, piggie, and see what you get." A lot of the cops have strapped on extra guns ("better to be tried by 12...
Liberty, Order, and Chaos
As the George Floyd protests continue to be overshadowed by the looters, rioters, and the simply violent, people who are used to splitting everything into the standard left-right divide are cherry-picking their culprits. Progressives are blaming white supremacists,...
The Cost of Blind Solidarity
A good friend, former law enforcement, sharp as a razor, and eminently reasonable, shared this yesterday. It's a solid condemnation of those who are engaging in "safe-at-home" virtue signaling while accepting or even condoning the very real carnage and destruction...
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