Social Matter

For almost two months now, a “pro-democracy” movement has been besieging the prosperous city-state of Hong Kong. On September 27th 2014, Hong Kong’s high school and college students gathered in a square next to the government buildings calling for open democratic elections and the resignation of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. The Hong Kong police in turn cracked down on them with pepper sprays and teargas. The next day, the students went out again – this time occupying and blocking Harcourt Road, a major road in Admiralty, one of the busiest commercial districts in Hong Kong. The protesters came […]

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. […]

Face to Face with Race is a compendium of personal accounts which together forms a lucid set of social and racial observations detailing Close Encounters of the Minority Kind. From the start, I found it to be a unique addition, in that it squares the circle by presenting first-person narratives without courting the usual sort of I Shot Myself In The Foot Because I Sound Crazy rhetoric only voiced on obscure blogs or newspaper comment sections with broken grammar and spelling–at the wrong place, at the wrong time. The book is around 200 pages long and has 14 short stories, each with […]

The left has conquered all of its opponents, despite ferocious resistance and uncountable deaths among their enemies. It must pursue an unconventional conservationism in order to defend the territory that it has seized. After centuries of steady gains, the left now finds itself on the defensive From a disenfranchised minority of authors, it has won control of world-striding governments, gained influence over billions of people, and built durable institutions around its ideals of equality. Kings and patriarchs have been killed and toppled. Those who were low have been made higher. The revolution has deposed the old aristocracy, and it’s difficult […]

You there. Yes you, with the old book that made your professor squirm. Guessing a Dead White Man wrote that? Yeah, I thought so. I see you’ve wandered outside of the ballroom. You know, all the most respectable people in town are in there. Oh, you noticed it’s on fire too? Glad it wasn’t just me. I know, I know: everything seems to be going to shit and you’re trying to figure out how to turn it all around. I’d like you to do something. Listen closely and repeat after me: We don’t deserve power. Nope, I’m afraid your good intentions mean […]

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 […]

Deontology is out, teleology is in. The non-aggression principle (NAP) has been a staple of libertarian theory since its moderation iteration with Murray Rothbard, and while it has considerable use in user-user interactions within the system, it’s a fragile bit of political technology when employed in system-user interactions. I’ve talked a little bit about rights, teleology, and non-aggression before, but I don’t know that I’ve delved deep enough into this particular libertarian hang-up. And it is a hang-up. It’s sometimes bizarre what sort of governance strategies and prohibitions on state action libertarians or anarcho-capitalists will justify to themselves through this device—browsing […]

Conservatives, especially serious conservatives, will usually say that they believe in returning America back to the principles of the Constitution, with respect to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. In the American context, this is a conservative doctrine, being that it hopes to conserve at least the legal (if not the social) form that the country set out to promote. This is typically phrased with reference to notions of clearly demarcated natural rights, festooned with quotes, and, if on a TV documentary, with a baritone voice-over. The problem is not so much with the traditionalist impulse that motivates American conservatives, but with […]

The descent of Ferguson into chaos, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the arrest of yet another black mayor on corruption charges might lead one to question whether or not civilization in America can be salvaged. One commenter threw out “Rebel’s Guide to the Collapse of an American City,” which, if taken at face value would suggest that all American cities are doomed to become mega-Camdens, or worse American Port-Au-Princes. The commenters on the article largely agreed, lamenting that their city centers were stolen by mobs of rampaging blacks. From where I sit, however, the forces of civilization are fighting back […]

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 […]