nico kokonas

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as ... See more

Noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality are not enough. The kinds of policies and interventions that benefit people often sound bad. Those that hurt people often sound good.

The point is rather that we should be highly suspicious of people and movements that depict themselves as escaping human nature's self-serving and competitive instincts or propose societal transformations that rely on our collective ability to escape them. And more generally, we should be sceptical of any narrative endorsed by those on the left or ... See more

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo

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A characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo , to create ex nihilo . In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed. Such change would be impossible if we

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But for me, for now, the friction is what I’m looking for. I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combinin... See more

Allow me to pair this line of thought with an observation Chris Gilliard made a couple of months ago regarding an app that promises to “take care of your meals each week with increasing relevancy and minimal input from the user.” “Really weird,” Gilliard noted, “how tech companies are all promising to offload your decision making so you can ha

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