theconvivialsociety

Friendship Suffices

"If there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is."

dwarkesh.com

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents. Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career's lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici.

noahpinion.blog

America needs liberal nationalism back

I believe that in the 20th century, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States devised the single best governing ideology that any country has ever created: liberal nationalism.

3quarksdaily.com

The Achilles Heel of Trump’s Mafia-State Authoritarianism

What is different today is Trump's view that the exercise of state power is no longer in need of ideological excuses, that he possesses a king-like divine right to do as he pleases, unconstrained by norms or law, which people must simply accept as legitimate.