Benjamin Cain

1 week ago | medium.com | Benjamin Cain |Ben Ulansey

How urbanites and ruralists opt for different escapes from nature’s grim realityAmericans are what Europeans felt they could become if they got to start over. America was the “New World,” as Europeans called it when they rediscovered that land in the fifteenth century. Of course, those lands were already occupied, but not by an implacable imperial power known as Christendom.

2 weeks ago | medium.com | Benjamin Cain |Ben Ulansey

The antisociality of social media, and the flight to authoritarian regimes“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”― Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google“Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.”― Robert A.

1 month ago | medium.com | Benjamin Cain |Ben Ulansey

A superficial clash between explanations of Trump’s second presidential termHow much of Donald Trump’s second term as president follows from his metastasized personality disorder, and how much can be attributed to the anarcho-capitalists, billionaires, and grifters who mean to exploit Trump as their frontman so they can impose Project 2025 on America? Luckily, there’s no need to choose between those explanations since they fit together like a hand and glove.

1 month ago | medium.com | Benjamin Cain |Ben Ulansey

Empathy as a balm for our common haplessnessI still remember the first time a moral quandary resonated with me. I was in high school and taking a public bus back home at the end of the day’s classes. Normally, I found that these buses would lumber along so slowly that it was hard not to fall asleep while sitting in one. But this time, the driver was either late, in a bad mood, or incompetent, and he drove like he was in a car chase in an action movie.