Social Matter

On Sunday, a convention of several thousand furries in Chicago was unceremoniously disrupted by an intentional chlorine gas leak. Nineteen attendees of Midwest FurFest were quickly rushed off to the hospital, complaining of dizziness. Everyone else in the building hightailed it to shelters in the surrounding area, which cleared the way for hazardous materials technicians to investigate what exactly broke up the furry dance parties. A short four hours later, the furries re-entered the building after waiting outside in the cold in the middle of the night. “A lot of people thought this was just someone pulling the fire alarm,” […]

For a brief period of time after the development of the radio, when enormous central governments carefully regulated access to airwaves and wires, a small number of media organizations came to dominate culture. Whereas in previous eras, religious organizations were the only ones with the level of capital, organization, and manpower to influence culture internationally, once the mass media came into play, those organizations supplanted religions. To the extent that modern man is a mediated person, previous generations of men were relig-iated — every aspect of their lives was understood by them in reference to their religion, whereas now, every […]

One who glances at the typical Westerner’s intellectual – an adjective I use in the loosest possible sense — diet of CNN, the BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, the Economist, the New York Times, and so forth will notice a curious process occurring to the meanings of words. Certain words and phrases, endowed with profound and widely-understood meaning long ago for the sake of sincere communication, become degraded, debased and diluted. They get used in dubious or outright wrong ways so frequently that at some point the concept or experience originally assigned to the word becomes completely forgotten. Articulating these concepts, […]

Contra the unexamined prejudice of every Cultural Marxist I have ever met, I do in fact read publications I don’t agree with. And since Salon makes the New York Times look like Chronicles, I was sure to check it the morning after Darren Wilson was spared the Cathedral’s righteous sword. Among other edifying posts (From Stuff White People Like to #NotYourShield: How irony is killing activism, Toni Morrison completely schools Stephen Colbert on the topic of racism, et. al) was one of their spectacular, and semi-frequent, round-ups of things the kept opposition has tweeted that they find mean. Right-wing’s sick […]

I should preface this article by saying that I am not a Catholic. As such, I cannot make demands of the Church with the authority of her own flock. Nevertheless, I am a staunch admirer of the Church’s magnificent contribution to the West: her rich philosophy, her awe-inspiring art and architecture, her ancient liturgy, the military victories she inspired. I consider myself an ally in her historic defence of the Western tradition against those who would see it eradicated in the name of Progress. What I write below is written as advice from a friend, which the Catholic can heed as they see […]

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 […]

Those closest to the front lines of reality bear the brunt of holiness narratives passed down from the press. Police get hit hardest for engaging in pattern recognition and enforcement. Ferguson is one example. There will be more. Even if police aren’t consciously aware, enforcement produces racial disparities. But with the press dialing up the intensity of race-war rhetoric, how long will it be until officers simply look the other way and ignore black crime? This is well within the realm of possibility. “Will this be the bullet that puts my life and my family at risk?” Forget departmental disciplinary measures. […]

The violent worldwide demonstrations provoked by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO are purportedly motivated by moral outrage over police militarization. In my previous column on this topic, “Who Curb-Stomped Officer Friendly,” I wrote: Automatic rifles, APCs, tanks, gas, drones, helicopters, and ceramic plate armor are all necessary to maintain order in a society that is disorderly, culturally chaotic, and ridden by internal political conflict. As long as the underlying conditions remain unresolved, it’s not possible to restore the historic rights that the American people expect, guaranteed to them by the legal system that they still believe to […]

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Social Matter! Today is a day off. There will be no column today or tomorrow. I’m terribly busy, and John Glanton’s wife will be stuffing his face with stuffing on Thursday while he’s doing bench presses. There may be a column on Friday, but no guarantees. Hopefully, you’re busy with family and are only tuning in today because it’s habit. It’s still a good habit, but for now, close out, shut it down. Keep away from electronics. Use this time to detox. Count your blessings. Be thankful. Enjoy family. If you’re going to propagandize, do so […]

Thanksgiving, unique among all the other official holidays of the American republic, calls back to 1621, before the revolution. The holiday has explicitly religious origins. Although contemporary multiculturalists tend to vacillate between portraying the holiday as a celebration of tolerance and decrying the pilgrims for their white, cis-hetropatriarchal Christian fascism, the older spirit of the holiday as a religious feast day tends to fall through the cracks. As Lincoln himself said when establishing the holiday: I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are […]