At least in my own siloed echo chambers, the three stories getting discussed most often as of writing this are the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, the colonial conquest of Venezuela, and the threats of conquering Greenland. A fourth undertone is that all these other stories are meant as distractions for (it is implied) the real story, which is the Epstein file release (or lack thereof). I’ll give my opinion on each of these in turn.
politics
Vince Gilligan’s “Pluribus” is a Metaphor for MAGA
Spoiler alert for season 1 of Pluribus. Also, I just finished watching the show and haven’t looked into anyone else’s hot takes, so apologies of this one has already been said. But to me, whether intentionally or not, Pluribus is a striking metaphor for Trump and the MAGA movement in the United States.
The Woke Right Did Not Start With the Woke Left
In my recent post about Donald Trump being an authoritarian dictator, I linked to an article by Jonathan Rauch discussing the woke right. The article claims that the right has gone woke because they learned this tactic from the woke left, stating:
The notion is not that the far left and far right share the same politics or goals. Rather, it is that the far right has adopted, partially on purpose but mostly through osmosis and convergent evolution, claims and strategies that parallel the far left’s.
This is incorrect. The right has been woke since at least the late nineteenth century, likely much earlier.
Why I Came to Believe the Patriarchy is Real
When someone mentions “the patriarchy” many people seem to conjure an image in their mind of men dominating women. This is certainly what I thought when I first heard people talking about this term maybe ten or fifteen years ago. Patriarchy, in this view, is a system where men sit at the top of wealth and power hierarchies while hoarding all sorts of benefits and privileges. Meanwhile, women are relegated to second class citizenship, prohibited from rising through the ranks of wealth and power hierarchies. The idea seems to be that, under patriarchy, men do not suffer or struggle while women are crushed under the weight of oppression. But then the men who hear this think “but wait, my life sucks. This can’t possibly be true!”
Patriarchy is actually quite a bit more nuanced than this. As Bell Hooks said, “Patriarchy has no gender.” Indeed, patriarchy is likely the cause of many of the struggles that men suffer. Not least of which is the male loneliness epidemic.
Common Sense for Modern America
It may not yet be politically correct to say what is about to be said here, since the long tradition of respectability politics makes it easy for the perpetrators to hide behind a façade of reasonable discourse. A well-curated program of propaganda makes what is occurring appear not as wrong, but instead gives it a superficial disguise of being right, making it easy to resort to outrage in defense of the status quo. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza?
Genocide is a legal term. Here in the United States there is a lot of hand wringing about what to call the atrocities being perpetrated by the Israeli government against the population within the Gaza strip. Is it a genocide? Or just “merely” ethnic cleansing? There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to call this one thing or another – financial and/or political incentives, but also legal ones. So, let’s look a bit at how we might clarify things.
The Trump Assassination Attempt: the State of Current Politics in the U.S.
Like him or not, July 13, 2024 is the day Donald Trump won the 2024 election. It’s a good thing that Donald Trump was not assassinated; it would have been a bad thing if he had been killed, or even wounded worse than he was. I hate the guy, but I’d hate even worse to live in a country where elections are decided by assassins (instead of the oligarchs who usually decide them). One can look back, for instance, at Japan in the early twentieth century for a country where many elections were decided by assassination. More recently, the election in Mexico was plagued by assassination. The point being, no good can come from such a state of affairs.
Is Ayaan Hirsi Ali Right About Christianity?
To the delight of many Christians and the chagrin of many atheists, the activist and (former) atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has declared herself for Christianity. Some atheists and Christians seem quick to point out that her article does not explicitly say she accepts Christian doctrine about Christ dying for our sins, resurrecting, the hypostatic union of the trinitarian God, and so on. Her article is more about politics and resisting Islamism than spreading the Good News. She does say, in the last paragraph, that she attends church, which is likely a good sign that she does accept (or is coming to accept) the Christian doctrine. But is she right to convert to Christianity?
New U.S. Constitution? A Proposal
I am born and raised in the United States, and so this post is going to take a U.S.-centric view, but the same ideas could be applied in other countries as well, especially if those countries are facing similar issues. The issues I speak of are the growing sense of political divisions and loss of trust in the government, leading to a loss of trust in the very ideas of democracy, liberalism, enlightenment values, free market economics, and civil liberties. Popular responses to this discontent takes one of two forms: the position that we need to overhaul the entire system (e.g., with a revolution), or the position that we ought to double down on what we are already doing. In this post, I would like to propose perhaps a sort of middle ground.
What is Inequality?
I’ve made a post on the question of what equality is, but what is its opposite? The obvious answer would be: the opposite of everything in the equality post. But there are more nuances to it than that.
Section 230: Should We Get Rid of it?
Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, known as the Communications Decency Act, contains the famous Section 230(c)(1), which consists of the 26 words that created the internet:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
You can see the full text of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 here (Section 230(c)(1) is on page 101). Why this is in the news lately is that a case before the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may be deciding whether Section 230(c)(1) ought to be upheld or disposed (namely, in the cases Gonzalez v. Google, LLC and Taamneh v. Twitter, Inc.).
Ukrainian War One Year Hence
It’s been about a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced. I wrote an article about the mounting tensions literally the day before Russian forces crossed the border (or, at least, the border as it was at the beginning of 2022). I made some predictions in that post, and a lot of digital ink has been spilled as people balkanized into pro-war and anti-war positions in the world outside Ukraine. Here is a bit of a retrospective on this unfortunate conflict.
“The Marxification of Education” by James Lindsay – Summary and Review
The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education by James Lindsay, independently published, (December 6, 2022), 210 pages
Is Value Neutrality Possible?
Objectivity, also known as value neutrality or impartiality, is one of the highest ideals of science. The principle behind it is that science studies mind-independent reality, i.e., that which continues to exist even if no consciousness is there to perceive or think about it. This mind-independent reality is devoid of all values – there is no such thing as “good and bad” or “useful” or “beautiful” when it comes to, say, galaxy formation or evolution by natural selection. A major criticism of science levied by critical theory is that value neutrality is impossible, even if we are to take the assumption that mind-independent reality exists and that mind-independent reality is value neutral. As such, instead of blinding ourselves to the values and biases that are inextricable from science, we ought to import the “correct” values into science (e.g., feminist science).
The Impossibility of a Successful Leftist Revolution
A hallmark of conspiratorial thinking is that even disconfirming evidence can be interpreted as confirming the theory. If, for instance, all evidence points to an election having been fair, the theorist will think “aha! That’s exactly what the nefarious conspirators would have us believe!” thus demonstrating, in their mind, the truth of the theory. The Marxist critique of ideology (which, in the Marxist sense, means that part of the superstructure in which ideas that legitimize the current economic order are engineered), and more particular the cynical ideology of Slavoj Žižek, appears to be just such a conspiracy theory.
Should We Trust the Mainstream Media?
A recent Munk Debates in Toronto on November 30 examined the topic of whether or not the mainstream news media is trustworthy (the debate is titled “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media”). Douglas Murray and Matt Taibbi took the position that the mainstream media is not to be trusted while Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg took the opposing position. You can read a transcript of the debate here. As debates usually go, nothing was really resolved, though an overwhelming majority of the audience seemed to favor the Murray-Taibbi position after the debate. As such, the question remains: should people trust the mainstream news media?
Is Capitalism Evil?
Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, famously said that “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Yet capitalism is also the bogeyman for a lot of people, especially on the left, though if you go far enough to the right there is a loss of faith in capitalism as well. Just like the libertarian capitalist acolytes can find any way to make all of society’s ills out to be the fault of the government, everyone else have come up with no shortage of ways to lay all our problems at the feet of capitalism. Such intoxicating clarity has aided in simplifying the world for a great many people. But is capitalism as evil as they say?
How Well Was COVID19 Handled? What Should We Have Done Differently?
The COVID19 pandemic saturated the news for a good eighteen months or better. Lately we don’t hear much about it anymore. If topics jawed about by the usual talking heads are to be gauged, everyone is over the whole pandemic thing. Few places still require masks and few people still voluntarily wear them. This, of course, ignores the fact that, with some six-and-a-half million people dead as a result of COVID infection, and ten times that many who got it and lived, there are a good deal of people who had their lives changed dramatically and permanently as a result of the pandemic. But now that the virus is endemic in a seemingly less pathogenic variant, it is a topic that has taken leave of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist of our modern times. Now is the time for postmortems by commentators and historians. That’s what I’m about to do here (as a commentator, not a historian).
Who is the Bigger Threat: the Right or the Left?
Here in the United States, the so-called “Red Wave” that was supposed to have crashed over our legislature and state offices on November 8, 2022 failed to transpire. Prior to the midterm election, grim warnings of rising fascism abounded. “Democracy itself”, we were repeatedly admonished, was going to be strangled by rightwing fanatics before it could die its natural death. Pair this with the dour tidings of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter and Kanye West spouting more of his increasingly deranged brand of asinine attention seeking, and the rhetoric from the left almost painted a picture of the U.S. teetering on the brink of madness, like Germany of 1933.
On the other side of the ledger, prognostications warning of the gathering whirlwind of Woke-ism and Marxism grew ever more vociferous. Schools and universities, we are warned, have been mutated and twisted into Marxist reeducation camps where children are corrupted and groomed by depraved deviants and insidious ideologues, all while leftwing censorious indignation furiously proliferates in every corner of the internet. The “Red Wave” was supposed to be a last-ditch bulwark against the rising red tide of Neo-Marxist totalitarianism. If these dire omens were to be believed, then one might be convinced that the U.S. is in the same precarious position as China in 1966.
But which of these grim narratives is true?
American Democracy
In the United States, we have our midterm elections coming up on November 8, 2022. Both “sides” of the election (the conservative and right-leaning Republicans and the progressive and left-leaning Democrats) have an alarming number of people frothing at the mouth with vitriol toward their opposing side. The other side, both argue, are an existential threat to democracy. They’re not just wrong or misguided, but nefarious and cunning. They want to harm [insert group here, e.g., children or minorities]. This is the kind of political divisiveness that heralds an inevitable plunge into authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Here is the problem, though: both sides are not exactly wrong about their opponents.