Tag: Politics
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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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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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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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Stop the cap. Everyone knows what “woke” is.
We have now reached peak bullshit. When asked in a recent interview for El País if the reelection of Donald Trump meant “the woke is broke,” Judith Butler responded, “I don’t even know what the woke is. It’s just a slur that the right wing uses.” This is the bleeding edge of rhetorical acumen, folks,…
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Is Finding a Purpose for Losers?
The Bourgeois Man Makes His Case. Going by the title, you might assume that this book would be some religious self-help text about strengthening one’s faith. You’d be wrong. Published in the aftermath of WWII, The True Believer is instead an attempt to describe the psychology of the individual member of a mass movement, any…
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To the Little Black Girl in the Bottom Left-Hand Corner of That Horrifically Cringey Biden Clip
I started this essay some months ago without much idea of how I would end it. I had some idea of what I wanted to say, but there was something missing, and this prevented me from finishing the essay for a long time. But sometimes, the universe seems to rise up and place the answers…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Leave Centrism
For the record, I can recall a time when I too enjoyed flaunting my lack of allegiance to either Right or Left, my freedom from “ideologies,” and my commitment to individualism. Don’t hate me, I read “Self-Reliance” at a young age and it made probably more of an impact than it should have. I saw…
The Barking Years 