Rabbit-Holing Responsible for Some Divorces

“We really expect our romantic partners to have this shared reality — a similar view or understanding of the world to ours,” Van Duyn said. “It is much more important in romantic relationships than in other types of relationships because we are more dependent and interwoven in our day-to-day lives with our partners. Scholars have found that this shared sense of reality is really important for the success and happiness of romantic partnerships because it fosters closeness.” Partners...

 Monarchies Depend on Illiteracy

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments. And the old feudal hierarchy was justified not so much by logical argument as by what Walter Ong might have recognised as very pre-literate appeals to mystical and emotional thinking. This was what historians of the seventeenth centur...

 Statistics on Politically-Motivated Violence in the Unite...

Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.[1] In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks...

 Statistics on Politically Motivated Killings in America

A total of 3,599 people have been murdered in politically motivated terrorist attacks in the United States from January 1, 1975, through September 10, 2025. Murders committed in terrorist attacks account for about 0.35 percent of all murders since 1975. Only 81 happened since 2020, accounting for 0.07 percent of all murders during that time, or 7 out of 10,000. Terrorism is the broadest reasonable definition of a politically motivated murder because it is the threatened or actual use of illeg...

 Counterinsurgency

At its heart, a counterinsurgency is an armed struggle for the support of the population. This support can be achieved or lost through information engagement, strong representative government, access to goods and services, fear, or violence. This armed struggle also involves eliminating insurgents who threaten the safety and security of the population. However, military units alone cannot defeat an insurgency. Most of the work involves discovering and solving the population’s underlying iss...

 Undecided Voters are Uninformed and Disengaged

Many commentators have suggested that undecided voters’ opinions are better understood not as deeply held, thought-through beliefs, but as a sort of verbal Muzak. You say, of a candidate who has given many policy specifics already (and whose opponent speaks in word salad), “I need more policy specifics,” because it sounds better than “I don’t know what policies I want.” You say “The candidates just attack each other” because it sounds better than “I don’t actually know wha...

 Plasticity and Lock-In/Entrenchment of Values

Entrenchment of values creates multiple equilibria because there is a significant element of chance in which value system becomes most powerful at a particular place and time, and because, once a value system has become sufficiently powerful, it can stay that way by suppressing the competition. Moreover, the theory of cultural evolution helps to explain why the predominant cultures in society tend to entrench themselves. Simply: those cultures that do not entrench themselves in this way are, ...

 The Credo of Activism

The slogan which summarizes the demands of activism is ‘logocracy’, that is, the power of the intellect. Power to the intellect. The expression could well be translated as the power of the intellectuals. This conception of intellectuals has, in fact, become standard among left-wing intellectuals and it dominates their political manifestoes from Heinrich Mann to Doblin. [7] It is not difficult to see that this conception completely ignores the position of intellectuals in the process of pr...

 How Realities are Created

It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally sa...

 How the Human's Short Lifespan Influences Their Behavior

Humans are the most adaptable and ambitious people among the common races. They have widely varying tastes, morals, and customs in the many different lands where they have settled. When they settle, though, they stay: they build cities to last for the ages, and great kingdoms that can persist for long centuries. An individual human might have a relatively short life span, but a human nation or culture preserves traditions with origins far beyond the reach o f any single human’s memory....