Social Matter

This is not just an “I told you so” follow-up post, as much as I wish it could be. I wish that last Wednesday’s write up on the rhetoric surrounding Ferguson had been vindicated in every detail and that I could make this my victory lap here on Social Matter, bona fides as a modern day Jeremiah established. But I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. We soldier on. My overall prediction about the media coverage (as well as the Twitter buzz, the water cooler gossip, etc.) of Michael Brown and the riots following his death was that it would […]

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 […]

I wanted to switch gears this week and talk about something other than navigating the disingenuousness of contemporary public discourse. Thought I’d maybe try my hand at something a little less depressing. But then along came all this rioting in Ferguson, MO, and I felt behooved to comment on it. As Social Matter’s resident Southern racist, it seemed like I’d be remiss not to. You’re probably familiar with the gist of the story thus far. A young black guy named Michael Brown and a friend of his were stopped by the police on the way home from the convenience store […]

John Derbyshire once wrote about the necessity of sitting your kids down and having a talk about the black problem. In keeping with tradition, I’m broaching another uncomfortable subject: the regulation problem. But, of course, I’m not going to be writing about it as stylistically pleasing as did Derbyshire. Instead, it’s going to be a bit of a slog through. Let’s start from the sometimes-adopted-view that we should eliminate all regulation because of the positive selection effects that would occur. The idea is that the dumbs, failing to look before they jump, will over time slowly select themselves out of […]

Progressive flagellation before the altar of universal equality serves only to reinforce the hegemony of white social norms, for no other race uses public declarations of shame and guilt as a means of trumpeting social status. If progressives really wanted to tear down the system, they would eschew such implicitly white rituals and adopt foreign cultural norms. In fairness, they do, to a certain extent. Too much of it though, and they are shamed and derided for participating in cultural “appropriation”. Eating out at an ethnic restaurant is good, making money off of twerking is bad. Examining the balancing act […]

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 […]

The ongoing border crisis is all the various rotting fruits of contemporary American politics pureed together. A putrescence smoothie. It has a bit of everything, for those of you keeping a diet log at home: hydrocephalitic bureaucracies in the last fits of their dementia and government agencies selectively ignoring laws. It has NGOs diverting billions of dollars in US tax money towards initiatives hostile to the interests of US taxpayers. It has sloganeering protestors in the streets. It has militarized police making sure those protestors duly respect the boundaries of the designated “free speech zones.” There are also impotent state […]

It’s too often that we again and again come across stories of Bureaucrats Gone Wild: Yet Another Children’s Lemonade Stand Shutdown. Except for the outrage stoked by conservative news sites, and rightly so, there isn’t much thought put into exactly why we just see the same scenario blindly playing over, like a skipped record, like a tragic farce in Greek theatre. There are all sorts of structural problems bandied about, but it seems to me that the best explanation for obnoxious bureaucratic overreach is because a certain type of person is drawn to the public regulatory field, and in a […]

The world is currently burning; it’s the opening of a decade or more of conflict which will see the USA and its allies pitted against Russia and most likely China. A number of complex interlocking factors are beginning to come into play which makes this dynamic inevitable. But the question of why this is occurring is not a discussion I want to raise at present, rather, what I would like to explore is the response of the European populations of the sheltered west to the ever increasing cycles of carnage being afflicted on the greater world. While Paris is beset […]

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 […]