No. 11: State exams, fuzzy language, and war with China

Borges/Dante/Erasmus/Hobbes/Marx/Orwell/Smith/Thucydides/Virgil/Whitehead

Here's some things people have been writing:

Marx says that growing proletarian misery is the seedbed of revolution. In fact, it’s rising expectations that are driving labor movements. thefp

Whitehead’s thought from An Introduction to Mathematics that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them[the operations]”, presages cryptocurrency adoption struggles. lopp

Hobbes thought a stable society needed iron-fisted rule. Smith thought instead that self-interest could get the job done, and indeed today’s society owes more to Smith’s thought. Unanswered was (and is) whether such a society is desirable. Bernard Mandeville’s satirical Fable of the Bees explores this question by examining the link between prosperity and vice. chicagobooth

Orwell’s famously railed against using words to disguise reality in Politics and the English Language. Tom Cotton, a U.S. Senator, said the Department of Defense’s embrace of far-left gender ideology would astonish Mr. Orwell. breitbart

Augustine, Erasmus, Borges, and their ilk are more prominently on the Classic Learning Test (CLT) than on the more traditional SAT and ACT exams. Florida’s state universities now let students submit results from any one of the three tests in their application. nytimes

Virgil is a guide through the nine circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno, and a porn actress named Niki does the same for Jake in Hardcore, a 1979 film by Paul Schrader. newyorker

Thucydides’s trap (which came up in No. 9) is the subject of the eponymous “Thucydides Trap Project” at Harvard. They’ve marked 16 instances where a rising power threatened a ruling power; 75% of the time it ended in war. belfercenter