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Category

Ideology

In order to understand and evaluate claims about artificial intelligence, we need a satisfying theory of mind that can account both for the intelligent capacities of human beings and those of actual and possible beings that are significantly unlike us. 
We must find a way to sweep the CCP authoritarian regime into the waste pit of history. If we don’t do this, humanity will suffer without end alongside the Chinese people.
What will bring about lasting reform in healthcare is not violent political protest but a revolution at the heart of healthcare whereby we rediscover its connection to the common good.
Even if Catholic postliberalism is no longer the intellectual avant-garde, populism is poised to shape the next few years of American politics.
Those of us who think the stakes in our cultural conflicts are high, whichever side of those conflicts we are on, frequently find ourselves furious. But what are we angry about? Our responses to that question have to do not just with the latest news, but with deeper intuitions about the nature of the human person and its relation to the moral life of our society.
Reviving a public Christianity in those parts of the country that are not yet entirely lost is the only plausible alternative to America’s continued decay into a brutal neo-Marxist tyranny. Jews who wish to avoid this calamity should seek an alliance with nationalist and conservative Protestants and Catholics.
Catholics can nurture their own friendships with serious adherents of other denominations and faiths. We can collaborate on projects to improve our neighborhoods and broader society. We can learn from each other in dealing with the many challenges of running a godly household today, from the sublime to the mundane. Wherever possible, and to the extent that our respective traditions permit, we can pray together to our common Father—for His blessings on our country, at least.
Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
If the purpose is to change the world, not merely to describe it, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claims, then here we see something of what that means: the critique of religion is not simply for the purpose of demystifying or disenchanting the world. Rather, it is part of changing the world, of tearing down the illusions by which men and women shield themselves from having to face reality.
Gen Z's turn toward church may be unexpected, but it is actually rooted in the most natural drive of all: a desire for marriage and family. Young men are looking for truth and responsibility—and, ultimately, meaning. For most men, throughout history, a primary source of meaning has been marriage and children.
The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
When it comes to children’s health, ideology should never override evidence. Children who are distressed about their biological sex need evidence-based care that facilitates their journey to adulthood, keeping them mentally and physically intact.
Ideology replaces respect for the dignity of the human person with celebration of a new humanity required for its perfected social and political order.
The attraction of subjecting oneself to ideological thought, then, is a new form of something very old: the desire to escape the limitations and uncertainties of the human condition of knowledge and action by availing ourselves of a greater-than-human power.
This moment, among other things, may call for something as banal as looking around, embracing and underscoring the figures and images that capture what is enduringly good about normal American life.
Conservative political action can, in fact, be a bulwark of counterrevolution. This is why Whittaker Chambers was a “conservative of the heart,” even if he did not consider himself a “conservative of the head.” In the final analysis, he was a witness to the permanent things.