The best of intellectual conservative thought, every Thursday
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CATEGORY: HISTORY(27 min)
General lack of knowledge
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It’s impossible to tell the story of our world without telling the story of war. Conflicts between nations have shaped every age and every country on every inhabited continent. Yet today, many institutions have dropped the ball on teaching military history to their students, depriving them of a vital piece of education.
Victor Davis Hanson, winner of ISI’s 2022 Conservative Book of the Year award for The Dying Citizen, pens a reminder of military history’s importance in The New Criterion. He says that without studying this topic, the U.S. has already fallen into blunders
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that could have otherwise been avoided.
Among these U.S. military blunders is the complete surrender to social justice movements and woke ideology that has led to a “fetishization of ethnic and racial identity,” according to Hanson. He argues this will deprive the armed forces of their wartime effectiveness
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and of excited new recruits.
Hanson then overviews several predictions that could have easily been made about events in the past few decades, such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukraine’s successful resistance. Human nature, Hanson reminds us, doesn’t change.
Read the entirety of Hanson’s plea right here.
Read Now
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CATEGORY: TECHNOLOGY(17 min)
Into the metaverse
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While some in America deliberately avoid studying human nature, others are attempting to change it for the better. Unfortunately, like most efforts to bring our kind to utopia, a new technology-driven movement will also have little success… and some dangerous side effects.
For City Journal, John Ketcham analyzes the metaverse
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, a longtime goal of tech companies most notably highlighted by Facebook’s rebranding as Meta. The object is to create a place where virtual and augmented reality allows people to “be” anywhere they want to be “with” anyone they want.
Ketcham frames this push as a sort of re-creation effort; one that seeks to establish a utopian “place” where people can be their very best. But Ketcham reminds us of the numerous issues with this mindset
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, starting with the fact that utopia is unachievable as long as human beings are flawed.
Ketcham also points out that the metaverse will in fact lead to more harm than good, such as widespread instant gratification, the degradation of human relationship, and a complete loss of self-control.
Discover more of Ketcham’s warning here.
Read Now
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Apply to one of our many programs.
Weaver Fellowships for Graduate Students
Need money for grad school? We provide fellowships of up to $15,000 to outstanding graduate students who intend to teach.
Hundreds of alumni of ISI’s graduate-fellowship program
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now teach in colleges and universities across the country. Former ISI graduate fellows serve as professors, provosts, and even presidents.
The application deadline for the 2023–24 academic year is January 20, 2023.
Apply Now >>>
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Honors
Imagine gathering with top undergraduates from across the nation for an in-depth, weeklong (and all-expenses-paid) summer conference exploring the conservative intellectual tradition, where you can experience opportunities like:
learning from, being mentored by, and forming friendships with leading professors from many different colleges across many disciplines
being invited to exclusive weekend seminars
building lifelong relationships with like-minded, intellectually curious students
joining an alumni network that includes scholars, authors, government officials, journalists, attorneys, judges, and more
That’s what the ISI Honors Program is all about.
The application deadline for the 2023 Honors Program is February 3, 2023.
Apply for our Honors Program >>>
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Because our student editors and writers are bravely bringing conservative ideas to their campuses, we’re highlighting their efforts here.
Red and Green Affair
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via Empire State Tribune
Debating Abortion
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via The Free Pack
CATEGORY: DEBATE(VIDEO)
Death and data
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With these new advances in technology come a host of ethical challenges and dilemmas that have tested what humans are willing to tolerate. But technology has not advanced—and will not advance—to the point where death is no longer an issue. For millennia, one of the greatest goals of scientists, inventors, and theorists has been to find out a way to defeat death.
But should death even be treated as an enemy in the first place?
In a 2019 debate from our ISI archives, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel takes on neurology professor William Hurlbut from Stanford University over that very question. This debate may shift the way you view death in relation to today’s technological advances, and you can watch the entire event right here.
Read Now
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Thought of the Day:
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
- Peter Theil
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