Matthew Sheffield
matthew.flux.community
Matthew Sheffield
@matthew.flux.community
🟦 Writing and editing @flux.community
🟦 Host, Theory of Change podcast
🟦 Former TV producer and pollster
🟦 As seen in NYT, WaPo, NBC, NPR, Variety ...

New book: What Republicans Know https://flux.community/book/what-republicans-know
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.
January 18, 2026 at 2:51 AM
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...
Renee Good and the problem of other minds
Watch now (80 mins) | A recording from Matthew Sheffield and Virginia Heffernan's live video
plus.flux.community
January 18, 2026 at 1:56 AM
Yes. The argument is an example of a false dilemma, which is one of the most common logical fallacies.
January 17, 2026 at 10:46 PM
It's shocking how few people know what the fallacy of the excluded middle is, either formally or informally.
January 17, 2026 at 10:05 PM
Ah yes, Richard Epstein, the guy who said covid would be over within a month.
January 17, 2026 at 8:54 PM
That would be nice, but SCOTUS Republicans seem to decide cases randomly and without regard to legal precedent or law.
January 17, 2026 at 7:00 PM
I don't think that he did, thankfully for the universe.
January 17, 2026 at 3:40 AM
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.
January 17, 2026 at 2:35 AM
Also, his history is wrong. The "barbarians" who invaded Rome did so during the Empire, not the Republic.
January 17, 2026 at 2:34 AM
"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."
January 17, 2026 at 2:01 AM
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."
January 17, 2026 at 2:00 AM