How Games Journalism Lost Its Soul
In the first decades of the 2000s, when the violent video game debate was at its height, games journalism (aimed at an audience of avid gamers) was at the forefront…
Culture & Media
99 posts
Double-Edged Jewish Humor: The Jimmy Kimmel Show’s Chanukorn
Jewish humor is a deeply ambiguous phenomenon. Yes, it can be very funny. But the thing that makes it Jewish is the somber undertones that permeate it. Jews are trained…
Manchester City, Abraham Lincoln & True Sublime Heroism
Brazennose street in Manchester, an innocuous thoroughfare linking Albert Square and Deansgate, is home to a little known piece of Lancastrian history. There resides an unlikely but imposing four-meter-high bronze…
A Response to Portland State’s Vanguard’s Anonymous Letter.
Prof. Boghossian and co-authors’ reception of the letter. On November 9th, Vanguard, Portland State University’s student newspaper ran a very strange article written not, it claims, by students but by…
A Persian Popinjay. A Review of the Film Bohemian Rhapsody
Warning: contains spoilers. The Demands of the Narrative The film opens with a close-up of star Rami Malek’s eye, a circlet of pale blue-grey iris clearly visible around a wide…
Britain’s Social Media Problem
For people under the impression that the UK takes its civil liberties seriously, the past two years’ parliamentary debates around social media make for a frightening read. A recent spate…
Stop Stigmatizing Cultural Appropriation
Cultural appropriation. The term alone leaves many people primed for offense. Unfortunately, as a tool for policing behavior, the concept makes little sense. It implies that extant cultural differences are…
Will Declining Monogamy Lead to an Increase in Violence?
The Invention of Gender Inequality Ever since sex was first “invented” a little more than a billion years ago, it’s been the source of endless problems. For sure, it has…
Publish or Perish: Is Milton’s Paradise Lost on Academia?
Steve Fuller will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas on “Publish or Perish: The Crisis of Research Today” on Sunday, 14th October. In the original modern defence of free…
Areopagitica for Millennials
A few weeks ago, I went to the Chiltern village of Chalfont St Giles to visit a building that looks like something an illustrator would produce in a children’s encyclopedia…
Charles Darwin, Cautious Advocate of Racial Equality and Human Rights
Charles Darwin has long been recognized as one of the world’s greatest scientists and the founder of scientific biology: at the same time, and for the same reason, he has…
Feminist Frequency and the Truth About Video Games
Since 2013, the Feminist Frequency series Tropes vs Women has been an important voice in examining and reshaping how female characters are portrayed in video games. Featuring executive director Anita…
Brief History of a Twitter Spat or How Not to Argue Online
Twitter has proven an exceptionally useful platform for me. Through my activity there, I have made new real life friends and interacted with people from all walks of life and…
Who is Afraid of Cultural Marxism: What the Frankfurt School Can Still Teach Us
Today cultural Marxism, or “post-modern neo-Marxism” as it is sometimes called on days when one doesn’t care about aesthetic grace, is often invoked as a boogey man by many conservative…
[Title Redacted] or How Not to Address Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism
When initially asked about Facebook’s refusal to remove the InfoWars page, John Hegeman, head of Facebook’s News Feed, said, “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community…
Hating Whites Online: Sarah Jeong’s Tweets and Anti-White Racism
“Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” This statement, along with a number of similar postings, was tweeted…
A Brief Primer on Individualism in Western Intellectual History
As a non-Westerner, the respect and autonomy accorded the individual in the West have always intrigued me. No civilization, as far as I know, has given more scope to individual…
Lipstick, Pussy Power and Toxic Femininity
A harmful myth has been circulating recently which I feel called upon to counteract. Some have called it “toxic femininity.” I’ve seen it expressed, to varying degrees, in Jordan Peterson’s…
