“In 1509, while traveling from Italy to England, the famed Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus composed one of the strangest and most enduring works of the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) was written partly for amusement, perhaps out of a self-deprecating boredom to break up the neurasthenia that was synonymous with long-distance travel in the early sixteenth century. As a work, it was dedicated to his friend Thomas More, who would later become Chancellor of England and gain renown and martyrdom through his interactions with the Tudor monarch Henry VIII. The title itself is in homage to More, embedded in the meaning of the Greek word moria, meaning ‘folly.’ Despite its age—over five centuries at this point—its insights are as fresh and as biting today as they were in the pre-modern world.” (07/10/26)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“[T]he model of ‘liberal socialism’ developed in this study is not a fusion of liberalism and socialism, or a splitting of the difference between them. My purpose here, rather, is to defend the value of many of the principles historically associated with the liberal ideology, completely independent of that ideology as a package deal, and to advocate for their integration into any socialist model worthy of the name.” (07/10/26)
“Well, it’s plain to those who know history and the eternal truths which God established to guide and direct man on this earth. The short answer is, humans have largely ignored many of those eternal truths, and when they do, ‘whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap’. There are rules that lead to individual and national greatness, and there are rules that end in personal and collective destruction. No person or country follows either set of rules 100 percent, but whichever set a person/nation is primarily devoted to will determine his/its ultimate fate. That fate is not inevitable if the person/nation changes course, but that doesn’t currently appear to be imminent in America. And that is very sad to see.” (07/12/26)
“It was another lecture, another ordinary morning in the life of a medical intern. Upstairs, patients were being examined. Nurses were changing shifts. Families were arriving to visit loved ones. The hospital pulsed with the familiar rhythm of medicine. None of us questioned whether the building around us would still be standing at the end of the day. Hospitals are places where lives begin, where lives are saved, and where physicians are trained. We instinctively believe they are among the safest places in any city. Then the ground began to move. … Our instructor told us to stay where we were. I have never blamed him. He was trying to do what he believed was right. But there are moments when instinct speaks more loudly than authority.” (07/10/26)
“In ‘Diversity Through Freedom,’ author Adrian Bejan argues that diversity emerges naturally from freedom and decentralized action, while imposed institutional systems distort its benefits.” (07/10/26)
“Forcing a hard wedge against the country’s Shia is exactly what Israel wants, but it could imperil a wide range of US interests in the Middle East.” (07/10/26)
“In ‘Salvation by Force’ (1889), the late-Victorian English individualist (‘voluntaryist’) Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) crossed intellectual swords with the socialists of his day. In light of Zohran Mamdani’s fashionable, edgy invocation of the ‘warmth of collectivism,’ it will pay us to examine Herbert’s rejection of collectivism.” (07/10/26)
“Hossam Nasr was never under the impression Microsoft is a force for good, but says he ‘did genuinely believe it to be one of the lesser evil big tech companies’. So when he graduated with a computer science degree, he took a job there and moved to its Seattle campus in 2021. ’I sort of felt like I had to work at a big tech company,’ he recalls, ’because that was the definition of what success in my field looks like.’ To his horror, he discovered the cloud storage service he worked on, Azure, provided the Israeli military with artificial intelligence tools essential to the post-October 2023 onslaught on Gaza. He says he was unaware his labor had been contributing to the very military operations filling his social media feed with massacres at refugee camps, bombed-out apartments, and lifeless children pulled from the rubble.” (07/08/26)
“Trump reminds one of a baseball team that, after losing 1–0, claims victory because it outhit its opponent—and demands a rematch. The lesson that the rest of the world has learned seems to have escaped him. Iran’s military and its infrastructure have indeed been pummeled, but Iran has not lost the war.” (07/10/26)
