Inspired by the presentation of the Vagina Monologues, a Claremont McKenna College sophomore, Jordan Bosiljevac, a self-described queer woman of color, recently unleashed a broadside targeting California’s new “Yes Means Yes” law. In it it she opines that “Consent is a privilege, and it was built for wealthy, heterosexual, cis, white, western, able-bodied masculinity.“ My favorite line in the op-ed, however, was the following: “For me, and many others like me, consent isn’t easy. Yes doesn’t always mean yes, and we misplaced ‘no’ several years ago.“ Rarely does one see so clear an admission of such low agency. If, by her own admission, […]

When many modern graduates receive their certificates of education, there tends to be a sense that they’ve actually learned very little. As people make their way through the ‘real world’ outside academia, it usually also becomes more apparent that what they learned in the classroom has little relation to the real world. Many academic theories, models, and methods are entirely self-referential. Even in the supposedly practical fields of technology and science, many academic disciplines are divorced from their industrial applications, making it so that any training in school will prove to have been useless at achieving its stated ends. Much […]

There have been active wars in Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria over the last year, and wretched chaos in Libya. China is up to something in the South China Sea to route around USG patron concerns. Russia was sanctioned, had their currency attacked by the USG system, endured a weak attempt at a color revolution, and recently enjoyed the USG admitting defeat in Ukraine. Anything going on in Thailand? It has been a year since the coup, and not a peep has emerged from Thailand. The pushback on democratic evangelism will start at the edges with Thailand’s coup being an early sign. Not […]

The old nationalism was a territorial nationalism. The ingroup didn’t just have ethnic and cultural ties; they were connected to a region. The Jacobins, who birthed modern French nationalism, tied it into the expansion of the State (and the Revolution) under the Republic and Napoleon. Similarly, the German volk is inconceivable without a German heimat. Modern Western identitarianism – responding to mass immigration – promotes territorial integrity and advocates tightening the borders. This focus on reclaiming control over incoming populations is a rational response, given failed policies based on ideological commitments to open borders and ideas of a “global community”. […]

One of the perennial weaknesses in leftist thought is its utopianism. Good old vanilla Marxism is the model here, especially considering how many contemporary ideas about social justice are intellectually derivative of it. The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles, you see. All the miseries, the frustrations, the wars, the peregrinations, the tragedies of this great ongoing pageant can be attributed to those struggles. Even its triumphs, too, are tainted by the fact that they were erected on the bent backs of the laboring classes. Injustices and exploitation all the way down. In the Marxist […]

Meis mortuis digitis algentibus licet tibi narrationes nostrum avorum rapere. In Rome of old, it is said, there once nearly befell a great catastrophe. A great chasm opened up in the Forum and grew ever wider day by day, threatening to engulf the entire city. The Romans tried to fill up the pit with earth, but this did not even slow its expansion. In despair they consulted an oracle, who said that the Romans must cast into the pit that which made their city great, and so they gathered up gold and silver, swords and armor, horses and oxen, anything […]

In 376 A.D., the Goths found themselves on the wrong side of the Danube. Across the river lay the Roman Empire, an old enemy of the Germanic peoples but one with which they could negotiate. Behind them rode the Huns. Valens, the eastern Roman emperor, agreed to allow the Goths to enter the Roman Empire and to provide food for them on the condition that they serve as soldiers (foederati) in the Roman army. The deal was fair and satisfactory to all concerned. All, that is, except the officials responsible for providing the food to the Goths. According to the […]

  Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion. People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful. It is perhaps possible to regard it as sin for a worm to nourish such thoughts, but not for a human being, who is created in the image of God… That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak […]

In the movie 300, King Leonidas makes an offhand remark that has generated some controversy. He refers to the Athenians contemptuously as “boy-lovers,” imputing effeminate homosexuality among the Athenians in sharp contrast to the soldierly masculinity of the Spartans. It’s a harsh put-down, one that certainly matches the tone of the film, but has the unfortunate disadvantage of being completely false. It can be fun to watch 300 and pick out the various classical references scattered throughout. For instance, the Spartans’ military application of the double-reeded flute shown while Leonidas and his band are marching to Thermopylae is attested by […]

It’s time to revisit gentrification here at Social Matter. The odd part of this phenomenon is that many of the people who are most aggressive in re-settling old, run-down cities destroyed by misguided policies are also usually some of the most ardent fanatics for Civil Rights. Part of the reason for this is that everyone who goes through any kind of modern schooling in the US learns to venerate Civil Rights activists from the 20th century more fervently than any other figures. American schoolchildren probably need to write more essays about Martin Luther King than they do about people like […]