Author: Fiver
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Actually Kate, there IS a “they”
I’m not going to be gaslit about drawing hard lines in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination I’ve guess been struggling to come to grips with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Obviously there’s the gruesome reality of what happens when a bullet goes through a man’s neck, and I’ve watched those few seconds of footage…
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The Courage to Follow
Why that one line always gets me There are spoilers for a nearly 50 year old movie in this. I first saw the movie Watership Down (1978) as an early teen, and even then, it felt old. Even compared to other animated films from that period–Disney’s Robinhood (1973) or The Rescuers (1977) —Watership was noticeably…
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Red & Blue Christianity pt. 1
Understanding Progressivism and Christian Nationalism I’ve been rereading The Brothers Karamazov. This book changed my life when I read it at seventeen, and returning to its pages in a culture and at a time so different from the one in which I originally encountered them has given me a unique angle for considering the changes…
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On James Lindsay, Liberalism, and “American Realism”
For the past several months, James Lindsay has been on a crusade against something that he is calling the “woke right.” In general, I think that this discourse has produced way more heat than light, and to be truthful, if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been pretty guilty of a fair amount of that…
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Why I Don’t Believe in Being Civil
Did you want a couple thousand words on why I call people “dipshits”? No? Well, here you go anyway. This essay was originally uploaded on Medium.com under another pseudonym, which was subsequently nuked from the site when I proved to be too effective at dunking on their room-temperature IQ, hive-mind user base. It is reproduced here…
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GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
A Short Review I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is, in terms of its physical object, one of ugliest books that I have ever seen. Literally everything is wrong. The low res photo cover is trash. The paper is…well actually the paper is not bad. But most tragically, the…
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How I Found Out I Wasn’t a Conservative
Waking Up from an Illusion I suppose I must have recently finished reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. It was Arnold who gave me the awareness of culture as against “machinery.” Culture was the pursuit of the Good, of “sweetness and light” in Arnold’s words. What he called “machinery” was simply a tool used towards that…
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“I Don’t Really Care, Margaret.”
The Death of the “Politics of Moral Engagement” At the end of his book Justice, after arguing (correctly) that morally neutral government was an impossibility, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel urged liberal America to take up a “politics of moral engagement” and asked if, in a pluralistic society, it was possible to conduct our politics…
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The Body Count Discourse Is Actually Retarded
but not in the way that you think As all things in Hellworld do, it begins with a tweet. It may not need explanation, but the original post was in response to a discussion in which Ben Dreyfuss expressed his befuddlement that men even care at all about how many other men a woman has…
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Psychology vs Morality: Unpacking the Jonah Hill Situation
The individualism of modern society and the increasingly rapid and disruptive rate of social change brings about a situation in which for increasing numbers there is no overall shape to the moral life but only a set of apparently arbitrary principles inherited from a variety of sources. In such circumstances the need for public criterion…
The Barking Years 