2025-07-04
malachite
Daniel Muñoz reviews Just Policing by Jack Monaghan. After a discussion justifying the existence of the police, the bulk of the article is about to what extent the police should be able to exercise discretion in law enforcement. It’s interesting, because this is the major disagreement in the two primary Chinese political philosophies, Confucianism and Legalism1. Given the nature of the current Chinese governance system, presumably we don’t want to explicitly draw inspiration from them. But there’s an idea that I’m playing with, in that when you’re trying to improve a system, a good approach is to rotate between a first and third-person perspectives, switching between hill-climbing and system design as you get blocked. Insofar as common-law is an execution of the former strategy, looking into how Asian societies think about these things might not be a terrible idea. On that note, reading this interview between Kitten and Simon Laird, it occurs to me that the dissident right represents exactly this kind of transition, moving the battlefield to the realm of abstract ideas.
Ethan Ludwin-Peery on the relationship between science and metaphysics. It seems to me that he’s correctly identified that scientists should pay attention to metaphysics, but for the wrong reason. As far as I’m concerned, metaphysical discussions generally not worth participating in, and their conclusions are pretty suspect. But the questions they try to answer are worth paying attention to, because those are the ones that people want answered so badly that they are willing to pay attention even to people just making stuff up.
Sarah Constantine and Lily Clayton on what should fall under anti-aging research. It’s interesting because people reskinning their projects and ideas to take advantage of a sector with too much money is a thing, but for anti-aging specifically, relative to the scope of the problem there is way too little money available. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any problem with diverting that extra money to something like oncology (since that could lead to improvements in understanding the immune system), and biomarker manipulation (which could lead to finding better biomarkers)
Dynomight reviews the effects of blue-light blocking on melatonin production and sleep quality.
There’s a funny quote in the review that says there is “a view, often left implicit in discussions of policing, that Monaghan calls legalism”.