“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”
Tag: Essay
Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign
The Dueling Cases for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
A Merion West contributing writer and editor respectively make the case for each candidate for President of the United States.
The Discontents of Capitalism
“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?'”
Blues Run the Game
“Jackson C. Frank didn’t find what he was looking for in his own life, it doesn’t seem, though it may have become increasingly out of his control. He would be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which hardly partnered well with his pre-existing depression.”
Why We Should Still Read Charles Bukowski
“The author of this essay is the proud owner of 25 books, poetry collections, and short story anthologies written by the man widely recognized as the godfather of the literary movement known as ‘dirty realism.'”
Richard Dawkins Wins in the End
“Admirably, Dawkins continually made it clear that his objective was to promote a clear understanding of the world as discovered through the scientific method, and if scientific facts caused offense with anyone, then so be it.”
The Origins of a Partisan
“Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power.”
Why Postmodernism Still Matters
“Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.”
You Can (and Perhaps Should) Repeat Yourself
“And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.”
Reading Samuel Moyn’s “Liberalism Against Itself” in an Election Year
“It becomes apparent that, while not a Marxist himself, Moyn regrets Marxism’s arguable descent into irrelevance, if only because its extended dialogue with liberalism enriched the latter while spotlighting liberal failings and hypocrisies.”
The Paradox of Capitalism
“For example, how many retirees can relate to Jack Nicholson’s professional exile in About Schmidt, a film about a man trying to find purpose after a career as an actuary, when the title character returns to the office one day in a pathetic last-ditch effort to show he is still relevant?”
Darryl Cooper: Revisionist History and Misplaced Empathy
“Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward [Darryl Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on [Tucker] Carlson, not on his interview subject.”
Bruce Springsteen Turns 75
“It is just Springsteen and his sparse vocals seeming to sing out into the empty expanse of the American West and its sprawling landscapes where hope—at least until the final track—is nowhere to be found. One can feel it was recorded in winter.”
Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?
“Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.”
Why Transhumanism Is Unrealistic and Immoral
“Utopians often produce evil because their movement’s aspirations become paramount—that is, more important than avoiding acts ‘traditionally perceived as immoral.’ If enough people follow Istvan on the transhuman roller coaster, people could eventually get hurt.”