We are in a new era of colonization: cultural colonists have taken over our institutions, and the result is every bit as dramatic, if not yet as violent, as the colonial expansion into the New World that took place centuries ago. In this solo episode, I develop an extended analogy between the conflict of natives and settlers, and the current fight for ideological, and sometimes literal, dominance.

This episode elaborates on an analogy mentioned at the beginning of the interview with Katie Herzog. See Episode 10 of The Filter for that interview. Much of the material here is based on talk I gave about a year ago. Hope you enjoy.

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Pete Quiñones, host of Free Man Beyond the Wall, talks about the decline of the American empire, whether we should cheer on collapse, and how to prepare for life in the coming dim age. Among other things, we discuss: The pros and cons of collapsitarianism, which failed state will we most closely resemble, and chaos vs uncertainty during the zombie apocalypse.

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The Filter interview with Matt Welch. Matt is a journalist, author, and podcaster. He’s an editor at large at Reason Magazine, the author of a book about Libertarian Politics and one about the not-so-libertarian John McCain, and he’s part of the thoroughly entertaining Fifth Column podcast.

Topics discussed in this episode:

~ Staying sane in a time of panic

~ Learning as we learn, and consequence free living

~ Why you should always blame New York

~ The narrow space for non-partisan thought

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A conversation with Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. Andrew is the author of a number of books on topics such as Bayesian Data Analysis, how stats should be taught, and voting patterns in politics. Our conversation topics included:

• Forking paths in data analysis
• To what extent to prior beliefs determine study outcomes
• Data integrity in the era of COVID
• Unreliable friends and modeling uncertainty

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Discussion with guest Katie Herzog. Topics include:

– Cancel culture swarms on Twitter, and the need to use it anyways
– Honor culture and reputational contageon
– School mascots, statues, and mob action
– Obligatory mention of Robin DiAngelo

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Solo show about why our brains no longer work.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)
I begin this episode of The Filter with some questions. For you. Have you found, over the past few years, and especially over the past few months, that your brain doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be at comprehending the world around you? Do you feel not just overwhelmed by how much is happening, and by how much new information you have to make sense of in such a short time, but that your very ability to reason about your world seems to be under assault.

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This episode focuses on the our coming Augmented Reality dystopia.

Image from HYPER-REALITY (2016), by Keiichi Matsuda.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)
This episode is a followup to a previous episode, on the Simulation Hypothesis. You don’t need to listen to that episode first, but I’d recommend it. It’s a good episode. Among other ideas, I present a way that, even if the world outside us right now is 100% real, even if we don’t live inside anything like a computer simulation, there are forces that will push us to build an all encompassing simulated world, or some kind of virtual overlay to our existing world, and it will almost certainly be driven forward by a desire to control and manipulate.

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Discussion with guest Jesse Walker about paranoia and panic in the age of the pandemic.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

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