Contemporary political discourse is shrill. Hell, that might be it’s most characteristic feature. Shrill and nigh omnipresent. My wife complains fairly regularly that her facebook wall has devolved into links to snarky “thinkpieces” and running comment wars about them. Frequently between people who have known each other for years to boot. Fathers divided against sons and daughters against mothers, that sort of thing. Twitter’s much the same, far as I can tell. Superheated rhetoric, mutual incomprehension, acrimony. These two platforms are social media, of course, which tends to exaggerate all those phenomena. But I think it’s fair to say that even […]

Corporate America tends to create a variety of English that’s nigh-indecipherable to outsiders. Business speak. They’re notorious for it. They’ll tell you, with a straight face, that “We’ve pivoted to become a mobile-first, UXaaS company delivering paleo delight straight to consumers in half hour installments.” And presumably there are folks out there in a cubicle farm who could interpret that bit of esoterica for us. American academics do the same thing. They generate bloated jargony English as well, just of a slightly different flavor. They’ll talk about “socially-constructed subjectivities circumscribed by racial formations” or something along those lines. Once again […]

I took a few years of karate when I was a kid. Mostly because I wanted to climb to the top of my household’s hierarchy of sons (I was the youngest), and I thought a black belt would help me realize those ambitions. But it wasn’t long before I was having visions of even grander triumphs. I got a few katas down, learned some sweet moves, survived some sparring sessions, and suddenly I was a badass. I remember daydreaming about meeting a mugger “on the street.” (He would have a knife of course, which I would handily disarm just like […]

When Ferguson started making headlines back in August, I made a couple of relatively safe bets on this site and on Twitter. I bet that the evidence would contradict the cold-blooded-execution-in-broad-daylight story Dorian Johnson originally fed the media, and I bet that the media would continue to propound that story regardless. Like I said: relatively safe bets. It’s only in retrospect that we can see just how safe they were. In the wake of the grand jury decision, a tremendous amount of physical evidence, crime scene photos, witness testimony and the like has been turned over to the public. There’s […]

I’ve written at length about this before, but I take it as axiomatic that politics are tribal. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial view anymore. Politics are not a contest of disembodied ideals, or at least they’re not primarily such a contest. You don’t have the small governmenters arrayed on one side and the welfare staters on the other, or diehard constitutionalists versus loose constructionists, and the most compelling political program wins. We’re terrestrial creatures. Our loyalties and our affiliations occur on a primal level, an instinctual one, and they often precede our ideological commitments by decades of development. […]

I don’t know what the word “testimony” brings to your mind, but to me it has a very specific referent. Mostly owing to my Evangelical roots, I suppose. To me, a testimony is the story of one’s conversion to Christianity. A story about how you found Jesus, saw the light, got saved, etc. You would always hear the best testimonies whenever your church was hosting a revival. They’d put some guy on the stage who was a former meth addict or pornographer or who had been shot by his fellow gang members and left for dead in a ditch, and […]

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes the right-wing conspiracy theorist in me suspects that anti-bullying movements are CIA-funded PSYOPs campaigns to induce passivity and helplessness in the upcoming generation of American men. And then sometimes I don’t think that they’re calculated psychological warfare at all, that they actually haven’t been meticulously planned in the sub-basements of the Pentagon. But it doesn’t matter either way. They don’t have to be planned. They still work. Consider. What is the takeaway of anti-bullying campaigns for a young boy? The takeaway is that violence in all its […]

American media publishes pearl-clutching moral outrage pieces at a remarkable clip and with remarkable persistence, so keeping up with all of them is, to be honest, a bit of a hassle. Here at Social Matter we devote a few interns to the task, and even then their filing cabinets always runneth over. Here’s an excerpt from one article that’s representative of the sort of papers they squirrel away: Waytz, A. et al., “A Superhumanization Bias in Blacks’ Perceptions of Whites,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (forthcoming). A new study suggests [that] in general, black people are more likely to think […]

It mystifies me to hear the various journalists, “indie game developers,” and yapping dogs from the periphery who have arrayed themselves against GamerGate describe that movement as right wing. (Or at least it would mystify me, if I weren’t already aware of the… we’ll say “plasticity” of the English language when it’s on the lying tongues of progressive shills and charlatans and grievance mongers.) The point of confusion, of course, is that, whatever else they are, nerds are not right wing. Not collectively at any rate. In fact, I would guess that, as a group, they tend toward to the […]

Not many professors of literature lead what you would consider a glamorous life. Except for the few who get to teach whatever courses they want to, it’s pretty repetitive. They get locked into a rhythm where they teach the same classes over and over again, each time to a new group of students who ask generally bad questions and write generally bad papers. Even worse, the modern professor of literature is always on the defensive. He has to justify the study of literature to a skeptical student base and a skeptical administration as well. That is, both groups want to […]