I've been interested in the reports on Rojava. It seems clear that there are positive developments.

As for climate change, it's by now widely accepted by the scientific community that we have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene, in which the Earth's climate is being radically modified by human action, creating a very different planet, one that may not be able to sustain organized human life in anything like a form we would want to tolerate.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

Evolutionary theory has nothing to say, in general, as to whether cheating is more advantageous than cooperating. There are many circumstances in which the contrary would be true, and empirical evidence, though it exists, has little bearing on real situations.

We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people.

Desktop publishing was a big innovation that meant small groups or even poor societies could do their own publication without the capital investment in a major printing press. That's a big difference. Same is true of more advanced technologies - it can offer plenty of liberatory possibilities - can - but whether it does or not or whether it serves for coercion depends on socioeconomic decisions.

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.