My new site will be live soon at dmkgll.com! Please join me there.
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Still working…
Work and family takes up more and more time these days but the new blog is coming. Thanks to people who have checked in.
This URL will redirect to the new one likely or I’ll just keep this up as a static site and republish all my old stuff here for the memories.
Let me know: derekmagill@gmail.com.
Still in progress
Still working on moving a decade and more worth of archived material over to the new site. Updates soon though!
Moving blogs
This blog is moving to a new domain! I’ll post soon where it is. Thanks to the hundreds of thousands of readers I’ve had over the last few years.
All the content will be archived on the new site in the future.
It will get better for you
I had a conversation with a 21 year-old friend in Austin recently about how old he’ll feel when he’s my age (25) and how worried he is about the next few years.
It struck me during the conversation how much I felt the same at that age and how differently I feel now. 25 is shaping up to be one of the best years of my life. I’m calmer, more focused, better positioned, and happier than I’ve ever been.
I feel younger now at 25 than I did at 21. Big mistakes you make eventually become comical lessons and even good memories in a way and what’s left is just excitement for your future and the realization that you never needed to worry that much at all.
From Aeschylus in the Orestia:
Zeus has led us on to know,
the Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
there comes a violent love.
From Knights of the Old Republic 2:
Vrook: “You were deafened.
“Kreia: “At last, you could hear.
“Kavar: “You were broken.”
Kreia: “You were whole.”
Zez-Kai Ell: “You were blinded.”
Kreia: “And at last… you saw.“
From Donnie Darko:
I promise, that one day, everything’s going to be better for you.
From The Fountainhead:
I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain.
It turned out I should have listened better to the things the people I admired had written all along.
Rand on racism
I’m working on a potential talk about the false promises of the alt-right — specifically, how parts of its veneer might be appealing to a libertarian student (anti-interventionism for example) but how beneath its often whitewashed marketing are some really ugly, evil things.
- Abuse of women
- Total control of markets, trade, and movement of individual people
- Racism
On that last point, I was looking today for some quotes to work with and I again just returned to Rand on the topic.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”
“Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).”
I don’t know whether or not I’ll end up giving the talk but it would be a fun break from my usual stuff and some annoying personal experiences recently have made it much more exciting to talk about.