Saturday Commentary and Review #165

Uniparty Attack on Free Speech, Jack Dorsey Explains Himself, China, Taiwan, Xi, Putin, Ukraine, Mexican Cartels as Government Collaborators, Derek Parfit's Legacy

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

(aaaaand we’re back)

The United States of America has often been described as a “unique political experiment in the history of mankind”. This description refers to how the country’s early leadership enshrined a strong emphasis on individual rights into the USA’s DNA. Just take a look at the the first two amendments of the Bill of Rights:

First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Second Amendment
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Both of these were wildly revolutionary concepts back when they were adopted, and remain so today. Both are also incredibly controversial, with repeated efforts to erode them throughout their history.

It’s the First Amendment that makes the USA so unique in history. All societies hold certain ideas and beliefs as sacred, and blasphemy laws are enacted in order to prevent criticism of, or attacks upon, that which is deemed to be sacred. The fact that the USA has managed to preserve its First Amendment over the centuries is a huge point in its favour, because the temptation to clamp down on speech that “profanes the sacred” is a constant one.

This does not mean that free speech has a perfect score in US history, but we will not quibble for now due to the nature and constraints of this Saturday column. What I think that we can all agree upon is that all men and women seek to maximize their own individual autonomy (with the notable exception of masochists), with freedom of thought and speech the most important actions available to us in order to achieve this. No one likes being told that they cannot say something.

What we can also all agree upon is that the attacks on free speech in the USA have intensified over the years, especially since 2016. Whether it be “no platforming” on college campuses, or Silicon Valley colluding with the US security state to stifle speech in the name of “combating disinformation”, the First Amendment under attack on several fronts. What these attacks all boil down to is the simple, basic (and natural) desire to control the narrative. Free speech in its purest form is a massive hurdle to overcome for those seeking to establish narrative control. Regardless, many will try to leap over it, in the name of the common good, of course.

Those outside of power will naturally seek to appeal to free speech in order to chip away at political opposition, so as to help gain power for themselves. Once in power, those who wield it will seek to restrict the free speech rights of those challenging them. Think of the Free Speech Movement that began at Berkeley in the 1960s, and how over the decades these same types became those most adamant about denying this basic right to those who do not agree with their politics.

For some time now, free speech activism has migrated to the political right in the USA, where once it was on the left-of-centre. Unfortunately for principled free speech supporters, the political right in America has largely abdicated from this role as it has sought to restrict speech critical of Israel in the name of “countering Anti-Semitism”.

Frank Furedi

and

Arta Moeini

have collaborated on an essay in which they look at the big picture on the recent attacks on free speech in the USA and beyond, sounding the alarm for all of us to hear:

The Uniparty Declares War on Free Speech

Earlier this month, the Belgian offshoot of Antifa—with the backing of the local mayors of Brussels—attempted to shut down a gathering of National Conservatives (NatCon), whose views in support of Israel and against mass migration it considered outside the ever-nebulous “Overton Window”. This week Texas Governor Greg Abbott unleashed the might of Texas State Troopers to crack down on and arrest student protestors at the University of Texas Austin, whose anti-Israel views he similarly deems outside acceptable political discourse, namely because they contradict his stance on the Gaza War.

These two seemingly disparate episodes occurring days apart on both sides of the Atlantic are both revealing and especially alarming as they show how the Woke Left and liberal Establishment politicians like Greg Abbott and Adam Schiff are unwitting allies against free speech, ostensible opponents engaged in a multi-front assault against our civil liberties and part of the same Schmittian dialectic that characterizes our zeitgeist.

They represent competing factions in the same elite power structure and subscribe to a similar exclusionary political ideology and authoritarian tendencies: reward friends and punish enemies. Their shared goal is the erosion of Free Speech protections in Western societies, and they are all too willing to use force and intimidation to achieve it.

What will immediately spring to mind for many is the argument that those being impacted on US campuses are precisely the same lot who have been happy to restrict speech for others for decades now. The people who argue this are correct. This does not mean that shutting down this speech is wise, even if the schadenfreude is quite tasty.

Copying the left-liberals:

A similar phenomenon can be observed by the liberal establishment politicians seeking to protect the bipartisan status quo in the United States—only here the specter of the “far-right” is replaced by “hate speech” and “anti-Semitism”. Similar to the dishonest tactics employed by Antifa International or the BLM to demonize all their opponents as the “far-right” or “white supremacist”, U.S. establishment politicians justify their violent crackdowns against peaceful student protestors on the grounds of the alleged “anti-Semitism” or “racism” of dissidents.

The Establishment's push to create a false equivalency between any criticism of the state of Israel and advocating violence against America’s Jewish citizens is not a new development. It also marks the further entrenchment of Diversity and Inclusion policies usually associated with the woke progressive Left—as evidenced by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ decree that created a special category for Jewish students which parallels the Left’s penchant for conferring privileged status on the People of Color or non-heterosexuals. This is the Conservative Inc.-liberal corollary to the victimist narratives generally perpetuated by Left-liberals.

Both sides:

In instrumentalizing the specter of “anti-Semitism” or even “anti-Zionism” for more administrative controls, the woke Right has thus found a more mainstream form of identitarianism (in contradistinction with White racialism brewing on its online fringe) with which to justify its censorship regime, matching the woke Left’s gender and race-fueled cancel culture. Supposedly this charge alone is enough to strip them of their rights as American citizens, permitting state administrators to deny them the right to free speech and free assembly, recalling the brutal crackdowns against anti-Vietnam War campus protests of 1968. By weaponizing language in this way, the ruling elite (from both parties) thus dehumanizes its opponents, rejects all dissension as hateful insurrection, engages in Schmittian politics of us and them, and explicitly violates the founding principles of democratic politics.

Sadly, the ruling class’s contempt for freedom and democracy mirrors not only Antifa’s but that of the historical totalitarians of the 1930s. As the academic and defender of Antifa Mark Bray recently wrote: “Antifascists and fascists have one thing in common: an illiberal disdain for the confines of mainstream politics”. In practice, however, the woke elites’ and the liberal political establishment’s true aim is to exercise total control over language and the boundaries of mainstream politics, to the exclusion of dissenting opinions. As such, both movements fundamentally despise republican constitutional principles and regard its minority protections, a pillar of democratic decision-making, with contempt.

Frank and Arta are playing “referee” on a principled basis in their arguments, but the horse has bolted from the stable…at least in my opinion. I fear that this is a situation where “the dog barks and the caravan moves on”.

More:

The woke progressive and liberal establishment’s contempt for free speech and tolerance also echoes the sentiments expressed by Herbert Marcuse, the quasi-Marxist philosopher of the 1960s Counter-revolution. In his critique of what he characterized as “repressive tolerance”, Marcuse leaped effortlessly from denouncing capitalist cultural domination to advocating the suppression of views that he found objectionable. Indeed, he explicitly called for “the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements” that spread “aggressive policies” or “discrimination on the grounds of race and religion”. It is plain to see how the pro-Antifa Bray and the Uniparty-champion Abbott both promote the authoritarian ideals of Marcuse.

Unfortunately, Antifa’s rejection of the ideal of tolerance and free speech is widely shared by many of the dominant cultural and political institutions in America, including establishment politicians like Republican Greg Abbott and Democratic Congressmen Adam Smith and Adam Schiff. Policing speech has become common and widely institutionalized, and it is increasingly normal to censor dissenting opinions—using the pretext that they are “offensive”, constitute “hate speech”, or mask foreign propaganda. Both the supporters of Antifa and liberal establishment politicians now regularly reject our constitutionally-protected speech based on the recurrent paranoia that such discourse helps to hide hate speech, foreign election interference, or fascism.

and

The securitization of language and the mass mobilization of riot police against peaceful, albeit strange and performative, student sit-ins in American colleges shows that even the woke progressives can become a target of the wrath of the modern state when the liberal establishment comes to fear its future hold on power.

In defense of free speech absolutism:

Defending the civil liberties of all, without compromise and to its full extent, is the only way to ensure that Western societies remain true to the ideals of constitutional government. This is only possible by cultivating tolerance of alternative viewpoints as a foundational value for Western societies. Some might use the chaos and ugliness of protests or their alleged risk to public order to rationalize shutting them down. But as Aldous Huxley observed, “The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clean up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as justification for despotism.”

Europe does not have free speech, and what speech is permitted these days is being increasingly restricted by the bureaucracy in Brussels in pursuit of the maintenance of both narrative control and political power. Europe does not have a First Amendment nor a free speech tradition to appeal to. The USA does, which is why so many people admire it (at least in part), and which is why it is so important that it does not get snuffed out by partisan political actors.

---

The arrival of the internet was celebrated by many as “the democratization of speech and communication”. For a while, this was true. The early World Wide Web was indeed a Wild West of information and communication. The arrival of social media almost twenty years ago popularized the internet with the masses, mainstreamed it, monetized and sanitized it, and effectively tanked the news media business model. It also led to the reaction by governments, NGOs, corporations, etc. that ushered in our current era of censorship enthusiasm.

All of us have experienced online censorship at some point in our lives, and except in a few rare circumstances we did not appreciate it. Here we were in a new world of vast, open communication, and some stick-up-the-ass moderator would inform us that “you can’t say that”. It’s one thing to violate the rules of a forum or community, but it’s certainly a completely different thing when it’s the government colluding with NGOs, mainstream media, and big corporations coercing online platforms to limit what its users can say, or even going so far as to outright ban users on a permanent basis.

Few individuals have had to wade into these treacherous waters as much as Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey has over the years. Being both a businessman and and a tech optimist of the libertarian sort, he has often had to act against one of these two identities that he contains. He recently sat down for an interview to explain himself and his actions and the constrains that he was placed under while running Twitter.

Twitter is still a corporation. X is still a corporation. It has to make a conscious choice about the rights it grants to users, based on its policies. The fortunate thing is it's no longer a public company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model that can be wildly swayed by the whims of advertisers moving their budget elsewhere if they don't like what you're doing. So Elon made a choice, and I think it's the right choice. I think he bought it at the wrong time in the market, obviously, but the choice was, I'm just going to suffer that cost to maintain these policies that I want. And that means the advertisers have left, predominantly, and the business model is going to struggle.

You have to build up a lot more than advertising to make that model work. You have to build subscriptions, which Elon is doing. You have to build commerce. You have to base more of your model on these internet primitives that can monetize better than advertising if you're going to have policies like [Elon’s].

It's provable now, because you can see the decline from where the business was. Twitter was a $5 billion a year business. I don't know what it is now, but it's obviously nowhere near that, right? These are choices that can be made, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be the same level of business for quite some time, until you figure out a completely different model around it.

An advertising-based model requires A LOT of compromises, especially when it comes to permitted speech:

We needed a model. Facebook's model was really good. So we came up with an ad program and ran with it. And I came back to the company a year after IPO, and we were seeing a decline in growth, and that manifested in a decline in ad revenue. So our first focus was to rework the product so we were growing again, and then second was to get off this dependency on advertisement.

And when you're entirely dependent on that, if a brand like P&G or Unilever doesn't like what's happening on the platform, and they threaten to pull the budget, which accounts for like 20% of your revenue? You have no choice, and... you have no choice. If you take a stance, and they pull the budget, and the stock market sees that, the stock price goes from like 70 bucks to 30. Then you have employees leave because they can get greater value elsewhere, and that's the whole conundrum that you're stuck in.

On banning Donald Trump:

And it was also pretty reactive to what was happening in the world. I would even say overly reactive. All my tweets about the Donald Trump suspension — I said very clearly, this is right for Twitter, the business, but it was absolutely wrong for the world and the internet.

Keep in mind Mike, that's that time when, like, AWS removed Parler, and Apple took it off the app store, and it felt like this giant collusion to remove them. But [the Trump ban] was right for the business, because if we didn't act on it, we probably would have lost all our advertisers, which would affect the business and stock price. But it was wrong for the world and the internet, given the fact that we could do it in the first place. No one should be able to do that.

Jack’s personal free speech principles collided head first with his business interests and corporate responsibility.

On the US Government (and other governments) demanding censorship:

I think it was problematic, and I also don't think the people who got called out in the Twitter Files get enough credit for pushing back on government requests. The U.S. is certainly one of them. Twitter has a track record of fighting the U.S. on free speech causes, especially around transparency reports. Opening the lens even broader to other governments, we had even more fights. Tons of fights with India, Turkey, Russia, Nigeria. These are all governments that threatened arrest of our employees, raided our employees' homes, offices, asking for phone numbers and personal information for accounts that were critical of the governments. I think that was one part that's overlooked and not appreciated.

Jack’s solution to fend off demands for censorship is to pursue an open protocol approach, which he continues to do. He recently left BlueSky, the app that has become known as the “Anti-Twitter”, as he says that it is making the same mistakes that Twitter did, such as bending over to demands to ban certain users.

---

Let’s re-calibrate by checking in on the mainstream and reading what they are saying about our world, and the major threats to it at present.

Dmitri Alperovitch on the New Cold War with China

From the link above:

In December 2021, Dmitri Alperovitch famously predicted that Vladimir Putin would invade Ukraine—two months before he actually did. A veteran cybersecurity maven and former chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, the firm that uncovered the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee,  Alperovitch has now expanded his horizons, warning in a new book, World on the Brink, that China’s Xi Jinping is “likely” to invade Taiwan—and may do so as early as four years from now.  It’s a war that he acknowledges could provoke a full scale military confrontation with the United States—a conflict that in some senses has already begun in what Alperovitch describes as a new Cold War. In an interview with SpyTalk, Alperovitch explained his reasoning as well as the nature of the China threat– including evidence of recent cyber espionage attacks by a Chinese military hacking group known as Volt Typhoon that may be more alarming than anybody realized. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. 

In short: China launching an invasion of Taiwan in the near future is the main threat that we should be worrying about right now.

As you know, Michael, I was one of the first geopolitical analysts to have predicted that Putin was going to invade Ukraine months before it happened. And the reasons that I believe drove Putin to invade Ukraine—that convinced me back then that this war was almost inevitable—are exactly the same reasons that are playing out in the Indo Pacific  and which are driving Xi Jinping to want to conquer Taiwan in his lifetime. Both of these authoritarian leaders are in their early 70s, looking at the twilight of their careers, looking at their legacies, looking at their longevity and power and their own mortality. And when you look at Putin, what drove him, I believe, is a distorted view of history. He did not believe that Ukraine was a nation. He believed it belonged to Russia. He thought it was Russia's destiny and his  personal destiny to bring it back, at least into Russia's sphere of influence, if not under full occupation. The same thing you're seeing in the Indo Pacific. Xi of course believes that Taiwan is not a state.  It's also a destiny of the Chinese Communist Party to take Taiwan because of course it is unfinished business since the end of that civil war in 1949, when Mao defeated Chiang Kai Shek, but didn't fully defeat him, because he fled with 2 million nationals to Taiwan. So taking [Taiwan]  has enormous symbolism for the Chinese Communist Party to really finish off that civil war and finally complete what Xi himself calls “a rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

“They are evil authoritarians, and their strategic interests do not exist.”

This is a good business approach, btw. Lots of buyers for this in the West.

More psychobabble:

Well, in the case of both men, they're also driven by ego and they want to be the ones to do it. And it's not an accident that Putin invaded Ukraine when he did because he was looking at it again at the twilight of his career, 25 years in power, looking at how long he may stay in power, how long he may live and wanting to have that accomplishment in the history books, given to him and no one else. The same thing is how it's playing out in China. Xi is very explicit that this problem of Taiwan cannot be a transition to future generations. He says this on multiple occasions. Well, again, Xi is 70. In 2027, he is up for another election as the leader of the Communist Party, and he’s very likely to win that election for another five year term that will end in 2032, when he'll be 79. So I think in his mind, that window of likely 2028 to 2032 is going to be the opportunity for him to accomplish this long desired task…as the leader who will go into the history books, as the leader that is greater than Mao. So that is why I believe the next four to eight years are going to be very, very dangerous.

Neo-Domino Theory:

Well, let me tell you the implications. And this is not a hypothetical. I've had senior officials in Japan and other countries in the region tell me what happens in their view if China takes Taiwan from their perspective: they will start acting as if they now have a new sheriff in town.  America is kicked out of the region, America is irrelevant. And they have to accommodate them in a way that the Central Asian states, for example, have to kowtow to Russia, or the states in the Caucasus like Armenia have to be in Russia's sphere of influence. When Russia says jump, they really have to say how high and they don't have many other options. That is going to be Korea, that’s going to be Japan, that’s going to be the Philippines, not by choice but because they will have no other alternative. With the Chinese domination of that region. China will be able to set the rules of trade, the rules of security in that region. Again, 50% of the world's GDP is in that region. So by kicking America out, by dominating that region economically, and from a security order perspective, that will weaken American power. There will be a retrenchment of American power and a retrenchment of the American economy. That will be a weaker America and it will be a much more dangerous world.

“That will be a weaker America and it will be a much more dangerous world.”

This is music to the ears of the security set.

“What Is To Be Done?”

We have to make sure that Xi wakes up every single day, looks at himself in the mirror as he's shaving and says today is not the day. We have to create numerous dilemmas for him on the military front. We have to help the Taiwanese build up capabilities on that island to defend it. But we also have to do everything possible on the economic front, to make it clear to China that the consequences of a conflict over Taiwan regardless of whether we decide to come to Taiwan's aid, or not, are going to be devastating for their economy.  I advocate a policy of uni-directional entanglement. In other words, making China more dependent on us in critical technologies like semiconductors, like artificial intelligence, biotech, and others, and making us less reliant on them so that they can’t punish our own economy in areas like critical minerals, which they dominate the processing of today, in areas like green energy, solar batteries or electric vehicles that they are establishing dominance now as well. 

Here’s the kicker:

Look, TikTok is not in my top 10 list of things we should do against China, but I'm certainly supportive of [banning] it. I think that TikTok is essentially a foreign media platform that is owned by a company that is operated and influenced massively by our adversary, the Chinese Communist Party. Half the American population using TikTok is a problem.  We would never allow the main news channel of the Soviet Union to be broadcast as a major network in the United States, right? In fact, we do have laws on the books against that. You know, one of the most specific examples here is Rupert Murdoch, when he tried in the 1980s [to buy media properties in the United States]. He was prevented from doing so until he became an American citizen. So why would we let a foreign media company from an adversary country have that level of influence? 

Do I need to mention the constant harassment that foreign governments get from the USA in regards to “media freedom and human rights” whenever some state-funded opposition media outlet is denied continued funding?

“Russia is weak”:

Well, I've argued for a long time that this war is not going to be endless. All wars ultimately do end. But it's going to continue on very likely for a long time. In some ways. It's already been going on for 10 years, since 2014. And, unfortunately, it can easily go on. And this is of course, devastating for Ukraine, first and foremost, but that is a reality—that as long as Russia can keep sending men and storm trooper battalions against fortifications and lose them at astounding rates, they’re  gonna keep doing it until Putin or whoever replaces him one day decides to stop. But as I write in the book, as you point out, Russia has been defeated effectively as a force to threaten NATO. There's never been a moment in history, at least modern history, when NATO has been safer from Russia.

This is what they (the mainstream) believe.

---

I don’t think that I need to explain Mexico’s problems to any readers of this Substack, especially our American friends. The issues are many, and are very bloody as well. This has even touched upon me personally, as a very good friend of mine was shot (he survived) in a nightclub not too far from Cancun when a cartel decided to shoot the joint up to teach the promoter a “lesson”.

Trump recently suggested that he would send special forces into Mexico to deal with the cartels, but it is a silly notion as there are too many vested interests on all sides in maintaining the drug corridor across the Rio Grande. Furthermore, the Mexican government is not necessarily opposed to the existence of these powerful drug cartels on its soil, as

Samo Burja

explains:

Mexico’s Drug Cartels Are Not Competitors to the State

Since 2006, the Mexican military has participated in domestic law enforcement duties against Mexico’s drug cartels, large criminal organizations whose primary source of profit is the trafficking of illegal narcotics to the United States. Violence between the cartels over territorial and business disputes, exacerbated by the Mexican government’s more vigorous persecution of cartel leaders, has caused Mexico’s homicide rate to more than triple since 2007, reversing a previous long-term decline.1 The U.S. military now estimates that the cartels directly control around 30-35% of Mexican territory.2 Over eighty politicians or candidates for political office were killed in Mexico during the country’s 2021 midterm elections.3

Big numbers:

As of early 2024, despite the incarceration of leading cartel figures such as Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the organization he headed, the Sinaloa Cartel, remains the dominant cartel in Mexico and is also an increasingly powerful force in drug networks across the world. Its main competitor is the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and the two often engage in violent competition, alongside smaller cartels like the Gulf Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the La Familia cartel, and many more local criminal organizations. In 2017, Americans consumed $153 billion worth of banned narcotics.4 The cartels satisfy a large fraction of this demand. There are no precise estimates of cartel revenues and profits, but it is likely that annual revenues are in the low tens of billions of dollars and profits total several billion after the costs of business, including bribes. The cartels also generate revenue from other criminal activities like human trafficking, extortion, and even illegal logging.

Around the world, such criminal activities have shown to be lucrative enough and resilient enough to state persecution to fund rebellions that could topple governments. For example, the Marxist FARC guerillas in Colombia, as well as multiple generations of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan—first fighting the Soviets, then the U.S.—were funded in this way. Because of the drug war, ongoing violence, and continued influence of cartels in Mexican society, Mexico has sometimes been described as a failed state and some U.S. politicians, such as former President Donald Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, have even called for taking unilateral military action against the cartels, as was done against ISIS, the short-lived Islamist statelet in Iraq and Syria.

Cartels as collaborators with the Mexican government, rather than competitors to it:

But Mexico’s cartels are not ideologically or politically-motivated groups making the jump to crime to fund their activities. They are rather amorphous criminal groups motivated by profit-seeking, usually relying on familial and regional ties. From a business perspective, it is preferable to collaborate with the government when possible, rather than invite anarchy. Since, through bribery, the cartels represent an important source of revenue for Mexico’s elites, this interest is mutual.

As a result, the cartels are far more like junior partners to corrupt government officials rather than an independent and competing force of their own, though their allegiances have ebbed and flowed from the state level to the federal level—Mexico is a federation of united states—and seemingly back over the last sixty years. This makes Mexico’s cartels clients of the Mexican state, not its competitors, and, in turn, Mexico’s status as a client of the U.S. explains why the cartels continue to flourish and why there is unlikely to be any U.S. intervention in the near future.

Click here to read the rest of this fascinating piece.

---

We end this weekend’s SCR with a look at British philosopher Derek Parfit, and his work in rationality and ethics:

Could I Make You Eat Shit?

Like a cross between Monty Hall and Don Corleone, Parfit’s gambit was to make you an offer that you couldn’t rationally refuse. Or many such offers, really, in rapid succession. Suppose that you’re sitting on a park bench about to eat a sad little veggie burger – the A-burger – that happens to contain, say, 50 molecules of shit. That’s when Parfit swoops in, like Tarzan on a vine, and offers to replace your sad little burger with another – the B-burger – that’s just like the A-burger except that it’s twice as delectable and contains just a bit more shit. A burger with fifty molecules of shit is barely distinguishable from one with a hundred; even the world’s leading scatologists can’t tell the difference. But the B-burger is twice as delectable. You’d be crazy – irrational – to refuse. And Parfit knows it.

But no sooner do you accept the B-burger that Parfit offers you another – the C-burger – that’s just like the B-burger except that it’s twice as delectable and contains just a bit more shit. If you’d be crazy to refuse B for A, you’d be crazy to refuse C for B. And D for C, E for D, and so on, until you reach the Z-burger – the last in Parfit’s stash – twice as delectable as Y but not so as compared to A because it’s so profoundly full of shit. Welcome to Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. Enjoy your meal!  

Ironically, Parfit named the repugnant conclusion after a thought experiment whose conclusion wasn’t especially repugnant and bore no relation to shit:

“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”1

Click here to read the rest.

---

Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

And don’t forget to join me on Substack Notes!