Thanks! I do think that both reactionism and conservatism have the same epistemic orientation, however, the latter believes that current systems should be overturned w great caution.

This is not what reactionaries believe. They want to destroy present institutions in pursuit of an imaginary past.

Hi Jeff, actually there are links in the original podcast RSS feed but perhaps Spotify stripped them out.

You can see all of the links at the original: plus.flux.community/p/renee-good...

Yes. The argument is an example of a false dilemma, which is one of the most common logical fallacies.

It's shocking how few people know what the fallacy of the excluded middle is, either formally or informally.

Ah yes, Richard Epstein, the guy who said covid would be over within a month.

That would be nice, but SCOTUS Republicans seem to decide cases randomly and without regard to legal precedent or law.

I don't think that he did, thankfully for the universe.

Yes, he had that as a plot point in many of his latter novels. Editors were not reining him in at the end so he was showing where he really was.

Also, his history is wrong. The "barbarians" who invaded Rome did so during the Empire, not the Republic.

"For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses w/o limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader – the barbarians enter Rome."

He described the right's politics in his final novel, an ode to incest entitled To Sail Beyond the Sunset:

"Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state."