William McGimpsey: Lessons from Fiji

I recently returned from a family holiday in Fiji, where I took the opportunity to learn a bit more about that county’s fraught history of mass migration, ethnic conflict, military coups, and demographic shifts.

Fiji’s experience serves as both a warning to countries like New Zealand about the consequences of mass migration and ethnic replacement, and a learning opportunity about the types of reforms that can reverse it.

William McGimpsey: The importance of criticising your radicals

The idea of not criticising those to your right has gained traction in online circles recently. The idea has arisen in response to a real problem: for decades mainstream conservatives have disavowed those to their right in order to win the approval of the Left. This has had the effect of dividing, moderating and weakening the Right, and moving the Overton Window leftward over time. I first encountered versions of this idea being articulated on the Right by people in the orbit of Australia’s National Socialist Network. Now Millennial Woes has written an essay outlining and endorsing the idea (albeit in more nuanced form).

William McGimpsey: The Genealogy of Neutrality

This essay examines the evolution of the concept of “neutrality” as it applies to the central institutions of liberal democracies. The paper argues that neutrality is a contested concept, that over time competing conceptions of it have arisen within liberal societies, and that those societies have evolved towards an internal balance of power between them across their institutions.

William McGimpsey: Liberal Democracy's Fatal Flaw

Neutrality, Managerialism, and the Collapse of Political Community

Introduction – 2001: A Space Odyssey and the logic of breakdown

One of my favourite films is 2001: A Space Odyssey. The central drama (though by no means the only interesting or important part) is the conflict between the ship’s AI computer, the HAL9000, and the crew of the Discovery spacecraft. HAL murders the entire crew except for Ship Commander David Bowman, who manages, heroically, to deactivate HAL.

The relevant question here is why HAL murdered the crew.