All
Speaking of being ahead of the curve: there’s a new book on what’s wrong with the whole “cultural Marxism” discourse, but I showed what’s wrong with it in this 2018 blog post.
Halfway through one of my lectures [at the Kyiv School of Economics], the air-raid siren went off. We relocated to this old Soviet-era building and went two or three stories underground into a bomb shelter with huge blast doors. We continued the class. And the students were beaming. It lifted me up to see their enthusiasm, their commitment. It also reinforced something very deep about our common humanity, which is that we humans like to learn, even in a time of war.
I also couldn’t help but notice that these students had a very different understanding of safety than American students. When American students want a safe space, it’s because they don’t want to hear threatening ideas. For Ukrainian students, safety means learning without bombs falling.
‘The digital colonization of flyover states’: how datacenters are tearing small-town America apart. We’re dealing with our own version of the situation here in the Waco area. The first common thread is the contempt the techbros have for any resistance. They make no attempt to win hearts and minds; they just try to trample everyone in their path. The second common thread is their ceaseless lying about water use: a new data center about 30 miles from me denies that it will be using any water from Lake Whitney. It is, we are told, pure coincidence that the data center happens to be located on the lakeshore.
In word and deed, in speech and action, then, we utter our Amen to God. If there is a conclusion to draw here, it is this. Christian wisdom consists in letting God be God, in hearing and consenting to God's great declaration in the gospel that the time is fulfilled, the end of the ages has come, and salvation, fulfillment, peace are established in our midst. Christian wisdom consists in lining ourselves up with that truth. In one sense there aren't any great depths to the Christian life — no mystical doctrines to learn, no tricks of the spiritual life to master, no experiences to cultivate. What there is instead is the quiet, daily business of setting our hearts on what God has done for us. We are to love what God is and what God has done; we are to direct our lives toward him as our goal, and to make him our supreme delight and joy. And we are to learn that in our praises and our daily living, our chief task is this: to echo in what we say and what we do that great Yes which God speaks in his Son, and to find in him none other than the way of life. To do that is to utter the Amen through him, and to begin to live to the glory of God.
I have some questions about an article claiming that religious persuasion should be deemed a human-rights violation.
What strikes me now is not that we were careless. It is that we were able, at the same time, to be sincere. To drink and mean it. To feel genuine warmth while knowing, somewhere else in the mind, that the world had already shifted. We inhabited two realities. And we chose, as people always do, to live inside the warmer one.
When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.
Illustrations by Bruno Bamanti for an edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars: 
John Ruskin, The Kapellbrücke, Lucerne (1857)
