How Not To Think About History
The problem with Glenn Reynolds and the other contributors to the Instapundit blog is that they're intellectual welterweights at best. Reynolds is a transhumanist who used to talk a lot about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, not so muich lately, probably because like the melting of the polar ice, it was supposed to happen but hasn't. He's also a libertarian, which is a different way of saying he's an Ayn Rand cultist. I've never been able to find out if he has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies. The other day I ran across a link on that site to an odd essay purporting to explain what's happening, “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century” , which is actually just a link to yet another essay, the sort of thing they love at Instapundit. The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the ninete...