Tag Archives | China

The Plague Year

Commentary by , March 16, 2020

What You Need to Know About the COVID-19 Pandemic Should you panic about COVID-19? That’s a trick question, because it’s too late. All the hand sanitizer and toilet paper (which is somehow necessary for dealing with a pandemic) has already disappeared from the store shelves. Judging from the state of my local Walmart, canned soup […]

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“We’re Going to Face This Virus for Some Time”

Feature Article by , March 15, 2020

An Interview with Amesh Adalja Transcript RWT: This is Salon of the Refused, I’m Rob Tracinski. My guest today is Amesh Adalja, and he’s a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and I’m talking to him about the coronavirus pandemic. Now, the first big question, the sort of overarching question people […]

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Authoritarian Blindness

Commentary by , February 29, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Authoritarian Blindness How soon we forget the big lessons of the Cold War. There is a weirdly persistent tendency to think of dictatorships as strong, orderly, and effective, when all the evidence indicates that they are weak, chaotic, and hugely inefficient. This is not just a lesson […]

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Do You Hear the People Sing?

Feature Article by , December 27, 2019

Top Stories of the Year: #1 I have to admit that this newsletter is biased. I have a philosophical bias toward a belief in the efficacy of the good, which means that what the good guys are doing to save the world is always more important than what the bad guys are doing to mess […]

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What If the World Isn’t Ending?

Commentary by , December 9, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. What If the World Isn’t Ending? Part 1 When I attended the debate at Catholic University between David French and the nationalist conservative Sohrab Ahmari, one of big things I discovered was how deeply committed the Christians in attendance were to the notion that we are living […]

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The Triumph of the Will

Commentary by , November 26, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Trumpocalypse If Republican politicians are not moved by the evidence against Donald Trump in the impeachment hearings, we might conclude that it’s because they are looking at their voters back home and calculating that they are more likely to be re-elected if they stand by Trump. […]

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Tank Man City

Commentary by , November 19, 2019

World News Roundup Some time ago, I decided to take off last week in an attempt to get a little more rest and avoid burnout before going into the end-of-the-year rush and starting work on my new book project. It’s only a week, I thought, what could possibly happen? A lot, it turns out. To […]

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Capitalocene

Commentary by , October 24, 2019

News Roundup Editor’s Note: Check out a podcast I did as a guest of Erik Torenberg, alongside Jason Crawford, talking about the need to appreciate the achievements of capitalism, how our failure to grasp the scope of human progress distorts our thinking, plus a defense of Ayn Rand and of course a plug for my […]

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The Narrow Tribalism of “Social Justice”

Feature Article by , October 22, 2019

Is the NBA’s cave-in to China really all about the money? When LeBron James speaks up about perceived injustices here in the United States but urges silence against a foreign dictatorship that is running concentration camps, is it a case of the NBA “bowing at the altar of the almighty Chinese yuan,” as Los Angeles […]

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The Kowtow

Commentary by , October 15, 2019

News Roundup 1. Acting Secretary of Defense Kurt Schlichter At the beginning of the year, I warned about the beginnings of the Trumpocalypse. At the time, Trump had chased out some of the last few serious national security professionals in his administration through an impulsive and ill-advised announcement that he was going to withdraw the […]

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