You can't make a good show based on pure verisimilitude, pure anti-drama. But you have to acknowledge a lot of ordinary life. Most TV doesn't do that.
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
For 500 years the West patented six killer applications that set it apart. The first to download them was Japan. Over the last century, one Asian country after another has downloaded these killer apps- competition, modern science, the rule of law and private property rights, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic. Those six things are the secret sauce of Western civilization.
As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.
It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
I don't remember ever having finished a book.
Sometimes overturning brutal regimes takes time and costs lives. I wish it weren't so. I really, really do.
Zen is the fastest method I know of, aside from mysticism, of dissolving the fixations people have about spiritual practice and themselves.
One is that that's the way we started and we thought there would be more value and less confusion if the business model was just based on delivering news that's of value to Web sites.