In the context of the riots in the greater St. Louis area, many people are asking what happened to the friendly police officers that were celebrated in the propaganda reels of the mid 20th century. The first thing that happened is that they never really existed, because characters on film are not real people. Although it’s a little facetious to state it, it could use re-stating, because people tend to confuse real characters with fictional ones. The second thing that happened is that rounds of riots and terrorism, blotted out in history with Martin Luther King-worship, ended the legal regime […]

One of the most common habits of internet discourse is to leap into attacking someone, something, or an idea without taking the time to understand that person, thing, or idea. On the internet, all that you can see is some text and some attribution to an avatar. That avatar may or may not be related to a human being. The moderating factors that, in ordinary human communication, encourage people to be polite and considerate, don’t exist in the digital ocean of strangers emitting signals to one another’s computers. When you take the time to engage fully with a book or […]

It’s becoming gradually more obvious that we’re living in a time when the official society is becoming less dependable and predictable. Unlike most other modern states, for some brief decades, the United States government was able to make and fulfill a number of financial and social promises to its citizens and to fulfill them to the general satisfaction of its dependents. While there were many unintended consequences that came from programs like the raft of Great Society initiatives and Social Security, the government has been able due to some extraordinary circumstances to pay its checks on time with a little […]

In today’s universities, criticizing people with minority sexual practices is enough to get you expelled. Even tenured professors are not immune from the speech codes restricting anything that might be construed as negative towards this protected class. Meanwhile, anyone can have a free hand in attacking the conventional mores of straights. If anything, the administration and the professoriat encourages critiques of traditional sexual practice as oppressive towards women. This set of rules flows down into the culture, as college graduates move on to work in newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and movies. Themes that portray queers as angels and straights as […]

Not so long ago, a family needed to keep its private papers in file cabinets and cardboard boxes. Accounts needed to be penned in. Checkbooks needed to be balanced, because online banking didn’t exist and ATMs were often distant. While telephones existed, the capacity to record calls in bulk on a mass scale was not yet created. If your private conversations were going to be recorded, someone either had to get a subpoena, have a connection at the phone company, or physically tap your line. Over the last couple decades, there has been a concerted push to put more human […]

Until the last few centuries, religion, and particularly shared religion, was seen as critical to the maintenance of civilized society. Bringing up the mystical element that pervades religion tends to turn off the ability of secular readers to think about it, so this short essay will stick towards the strictly secular benefits of religion. The first advantage of most religions is that they are easy to understand and based in symbolism and ritual. This makes them accessible to people who are not literate, or who are literate but only in the basic sense of the term. All religions provide some […]

Part of what makes post-war culture unusual is the emergence of the widespread taboo against death. The development of antibiotics, vaccines, prenatal care, and advanced obstetrics has greatly reduced infant mortality. The regular occurrence of the death of an infant or child in the family has been all but eliminated, in part thanks to antibiotics but also because of increased sanitation, more reliable transportation, heating, and cooling technology. Over time, as people have become less directly familiar with death, risks that might result in death have become more morally suspect than they were in the past. Even wars with relatively tiny […]

Since the institution of the all-volunteer military in 1973, young American men have been under far less pressure to be prepared for military service than they had ever been before. Whereas before, the state needed manpower to be militarily ready, after, it ceased to become important within its own view. At the same time, with the left gaining more effective authority, ‘aggression’ — particularly male aggression — became seen to be a sort of pathology, except among racial minorities, in which it is seen as an unfortunate result of History. Whereas before, men were seen as domestic, local, national, and […]