Social Matter

Merry Christmas from all the editors and columnists at Social Matter! Writing will be a little spotty from here on out until the start of 2015. Enjoy friends, enjoy family, and enjoy the snow.  

Note from the author: The following was written in a very lighthearted, fun manner. Don’t take it too seriously. Once upon a time there was a village named Pompeii which for all intents and purposes was a libertarian structural utopia. Not a single voluntary transaction was de jure or de facto prohibited. The little village people were culturally in agreement with this legal arrangement. And since the culture was in the bag, the scenario was sustainable in the long-term. They simply had no interest in restricting voluntary exchange. Restriction of mutually beneficial, voluntary trade, after all, necessarily reduces value and makes […]

When the ‘baby boom’ peaked in the early 1960s and began to decline, Western governments around the world began looking for substitute citizens to address the enormous change in reproductive behavior among the native stock. Because the entire Western world was going through a similar fertility pattern, particularly with the invention and promotion of the birth control pill in 1957 (along with other contraceptives), it was not entirely possible to maintain the older national origins quota system. By 1968, the Immigration and Nationality Act went into effect, which abolished most of the old quota system, opening the US to substantial immigration […]

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 […]

Islam vs. islam seems redundant or banal. It’s neither. Rather, it’s a division which cuts through the endless, rehashed op-eds we have to suffer through every time some Muslim or Muslim-presenting individual blows up, throws acid, takes hostages, or kills. The semantics is a dream for the labyrinth operator. Smoke and mirrors allow celebrity columnists-of-the-day to obfuscate in 600-800 word bits by (1) appealing to Islam in the abstract, and (2) citing a few leaders who expertly hand-wave and disavow violence. Islam is a religion of peace, and so on. For the second point, the columnist usually throws in a […]

Terrorism is not a terribly useful term to describe what the media often calls ‘terrorist attacks.’ What they are is some combination of hostage-taking, raiding, and sabotage, usually for religious and political purposes. When an actual Muslim cleric holds up a Lindt cafe in Sydney, it requires some impressive contortions to deny that the attacks had a religious motivation, that it was not a self-styled martyrdom cloaked in the symbols of the religion. The West has come to have a lot of trouble acknowledging the religious impulse as a source of deep motivation for people. Part of this may be […]

Logic is a many splendored thing. While we frequently argue against conclusions by metaphysical reduction ad absurdum because we are most interested in disproving some popular or nonsense notion, it is also frequently worth exploring the logical derivatives of foundational or conclusive propositions to see what else may be revealed about a belief array. Careful attention to logic allows us to translate the statements made by others into more readable forms, making it easier to understand and refute. What are the logical derivations of political correctness? Leftists are typically concerned with how minorities are presented in popular media. Of course, by “minorities” […]

At first, like everyone else, you are ignorant.  Then you find your impetus that makes you ask why.  People come to this from all different vectors: gender relations, academia, politics, whatever.  You start asking why and keep asking why and eventually you uncover truth.  A lot of it.  You take the next step:  argument.  You argue in favor of the precious truth you unearthed and the precious civilizations it could build.  But when you find a person to whom all reason is ignored, all rational inquiry met with defensive snark, I suggest you take another stride in mental framework:  Pity. […]

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 […]