Gongol.com Archives: December 2020
December 7, 2020
The trouble with anarcho-libertarianism
The fatal flaw in anarcho-libertarianism is that liberty is a component of the superior matter of human dignity. There are cases where government intervention, carefully limited by law, advances the dignity of the individual even though it comes at a cost to pure "liberty".
Bill Gates: "I expect that we'll have about six vaccines approved by the first quarter"
The approach of funding and pursuing multiple vaccines at once and pre-ordering giant volumes of doses looks like it may well pay off in a substantial way for humanity. Gates is a great advocate for taking off the blinders and firing in all directions when trying to take down a big problem. As he said once to Rolling Stone (about climate change, but certainly applicable to the Covid-19 situation): "[W]e have a real problem, and so we should pursue many solutions to the problem. Even the Manhattan Project pursued both the plutonium bomb and the uranium bomb -- and both worked!"
Widely-known staff members were let go, among many more who weren't household names. A byproduct of relentless waves of media layoffs is that all of the incentives force journalists and commentators into "personal brands", even when they would rather contribute to great teams. This isn't good for our institutions, and is emphatically not the fault of the journalists.
The ground he broke was in the sky, but it was a tremendous lift nonetheless
