Life Amidst Chaos
A cartoon, a translation, a debate, and a supersonic flight.
During the old Cox & Forkum days, John Cox used to have a running joke that someday we would ask him to label a character “antidisestablishmentarianism.” After writing a post with just that title, I e-mailed John and had him work up the illustration above, with the suit-clad antidisestablishmentarianist fending off both an old hippie (on the left, of course) and the QAnon shaman (on the right).
I added it at the top of the original article, but I thought you’d want to see it here.
Also, my piece calling for Europe to become a great liberal democratic power has now been translated into Hungarian and published at a Hungarian individualist’s blog. If you know enough of the language to read it, which I don’t, check it out.
I’ll admit that I rely on the advantage of being a native English speaker and therefore being able to reach an educated audience in a very large portion of the world without learning a second language. This advantage is really very remarkable. If you look at this chart of the world’s most-spoken languages, you’ll notice that not only is English the most-spoken language, it is unusual in having many more non-native speakers than native speakers. It really is becoming the global lingua franca—unless the world’s largest English-speaking country screws it up (which we are currently attempting).
That said, I am going to be trying to push this piece more actively to a European audience, because it’s no use sending this message about Europe only to my own, mostly American audience. Claire Berlinski has already cross-posted it at The Cosmopolitan Globalist with this introduction: “I wish I could publish this letter in bold type, above the fold, on the front page of every newspaper in Europe.” So I’m going to see if I can get a wider readership for it and would appreciate advice from any of my European readers.
In the meantime, I wanted to announce that I will be participating in a debate over Israel’s policy in Gaza at mid-day on Monday at the Romney Institute at Adrian College in Michigan. That’s about halfway between Detroit and Toledo, so if you’re in the area, and if you can take a break in the middle of the day, come see it.
No points for guessing which side of the debate I’ll be taking, but there are some interesting nuances on this issue—including the history of the term “genocide,” and also the weird, backward way people approach the issue in the first place.
I don’t have a link, so here’s the poster for the event.
Finally, I wanted to draw your attention to something that’s been happening quietly behind the scenes and was recently announced. For a while, a group of mostly Eastern European young intellectuals have been doing a terrific job with the Ayn Rand Center Europe, which has been rapidly expanding its promotion and education on Ayn Rand’s ideas overseas—not just in Europe but, through a series of seminars called “John Galt Schools,” to Africa, Asia, and South America. You may remember them as the people who hosted the first and so far only actual debate on “open” versus “closed” Objectivism.
But for precisely that reason, they started chafing at certain restrictions about who they could talk to or invite to their events. So I am pleased to report that they are now under the aegis of The Atlas Society, as The Atlas Society International. A chunk of my own work for TAS has now been moved over to supporting them by giving talks (remotely, for now) for their widely dispersed events.
This is one of the things that gives me hope for the world, even in these difficult times: the expansion of pro-reason, pro-individualist ideas as a truly global phenomenon.
Here’s one last source of hope. Among our philosophical squabbles and even amidst political chaos, significant scientific and technological progress continues. Check out the flight of Boom Technology’s XB-1 demonstrator, which on January 28 flew at Mach 1.1 to become the first privately developed aircraft to break the sound barrier.
The most interesting detail is this: Boom didn’t boom. The company has refined its methods to reach supersonic speeds at a higher altitude, which prevents the sonic boom from being heard or felt at ground level—which could help overcome objections to supersonic flights over the mainland United States.
Life still asserts itself amid the chaos.
Some welcome good news!