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.
Trump
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.
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.
Expertise, Meritocracy, Pseudo-Intellectualism, and the Problem of Testimony
The vast majority of what people “know” about any given subject they only know because someone told them, or they read it in a book or online, or heard someone talk about it online. The point being, we get our knowledge from what philosophers call the testimony of others. This worked out well in our hunter-gatherer past, when a member of a tribe knew everyone else in the tribe. Person A knows that person B is someone capable of or knowledgeable about X, and so person A can trust person B with telling them about X.
In much larger societies, such as in modern nation states, many, if not most, of the people we run into online and in our daily lives will be strangers, or at the very least not people we are intimately familiar with. This means that much of what we are told comes from strangers, who are usually themselves relaying information they were told from yet other strangers. Since we don’t know if these strangers know what they’re talking about, humans have come up with various means of lending their testimony legitimacy and trustworthiness.
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.
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?
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.
Sam Harris and Trump Derangement Syndrome
I’ve said before that I don’t usually like to talk about the news-of-the-day stuff here. I like to make posts that, even if someone stumbles upon it a few years from now, they’ll still find it relevant, or at least interesting. Here I’m going to talk about the recent controversy about Sam Harris and his alleged Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. The reason is that, like it or not, Donald Trump’s ascendancy to leadership (even messianic) status among conservatives, Republicans, and right-wingers is going to have a long-reaching effect within the United States. And, since the U.S. has such a large place on the world stage, this is also something that will have far-reaching effects throughout the rest of the world as well.
New American Religion: The Church of MAGA and its Messiah QAnon
When considering the religious aspect of the fanatical MAGA mob and their QAnon conspiracies, I can’t help but be reminded by Kierkegaard‘s leap of faith. Just as Abraham was told to do something heinous in the name of God, and despite the fact that nobody would understand why Abraham had done it, he must still do it.
Why I Voted Third Party
During these declining days of the U.S. Empire, everything has become politicized. People demand political participation, if not full on activism (for their preferred positions, of course), from celebrities, corporations, and family members alike. The politicization of everything is, of course, a prelude to totalitarianism: your every action has political implications, and therefore you must always be virtue signaling, demonstrating your loyalty to the cause. My own deep-seated cynicism about politics has been a blessing and a curse. And it’s also why I voted third party.
Is the Flu as Bad as COVID?
It seems the idea that COVID is only as bad as the Flu is becoming popular again. Is this true? Let us look at some numbers.
Amy Coney Barrett, Mitch McConnell, The Supreme Court, The Senate, The 2020 Election: The End of the United States?
COVID-19 is yesterdays news. The number 200,000 is too large, it becomes abstract: those aren’t people, they’re just a number – a statistic rather than a tragedy. Now we can enjoy the bread and circuses of (national) politics while the tent collapses around us: the election is less than 6 weeks away and a liberal judge inconveniently died. Amidst the politically-motivated hagiography being heaped onto the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump has put forth his own candidate: Amy Coney Barrett. For many, this is beyond the pale.
Language Games, Assimilation, and Accommodation: Using Wittgenstein and Piaget to Understand Epistemic Disunity
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously talked about language as an interconnected assemblage of language games that make up a world-picture. A world-picture are all of the assumptions, norms, and grounds that a community holds as certain, and from there certain propositions in the language games the community employs will be either true or false. While I somewhat disagree with Wittgenstein’s conclusion that the truth criteria of any proposition is its proper usage within a language game, rather than the proposition’s correspondence with reality, I think his analysis gives a good framework for examining the epistemic disunity in the culture of the west.
Simple Answers for Contentious Issues
The news these days often cover issues that, for some reason or another, leave people either angry and hateful toward one another, or furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation. Here I will give some simple answers to these thorny issues.
Anthropomorphized Intangibles
Imagine a terrorist group infiltrated your country. For my hypothetical, I am going to use the U.S. since that is where I live, but this thought experiment could apply anywhere. Imagine it is known by everyone – you, your friends and family, your government – that this terrorist group exists, but nobody knows who is in it. This terrorist group is very secretive and good at keeping theirs and everyone else’s identities a secret.
Coronavirus aka COVID-19 aka SARS-CoV-2
If you have not yet heard of “the” Coronavirus you must not be paying attention. However, knowing about it does not necessarily mean you are informed about it. There seems to be a lot of misinformation regarding this disease. Perhaps here I can make things a little more clear.
Syria, Kurds, and Trump
I’m not a news site, so hopefully most people reading this aren’t just now learning that U.S. president Donald Trump ordered U.S. troops pulled back from the northern border between Syria and Turkey. This was done at the behest of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Here I would like to set a few things straight and give my opinion on the whole situation.
My Endorsement for U.S. President: Tulsi Gabbard
Edit (Feb 4, 2026): this did not age well.
I consider myself a classical liberal, which in the U.S. is more strongly aligned with libertarians than with Liberals. I voted for the Libertarian candidate in the last two elections, after voting for Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004 (those elections were before my conversion to being more libertarian leaning). That being said, I am prepared to vote Democratic again in this election as long as Tulsi Gabbard is the Democratic candidate. Here is why.