Virtue Ethics for the Modern Age
Scott Adams, creator of the popular comic strip Dilbert, trained hypnotist and erudite public commentator, posed what may seem like an odd question on his blog last year: “why do…
Politics
167 posts
The Water We Swim In: A Need to Look at Causes as Well as Effects.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the…
Immigration Will Not Spark a British Religious Revival
There was recent surprise in some quarters, when London was revealed as the least tolerant place in the UK in terms of LGBT acceptance and premarital sex. But a brief…
An Empirical Response to Europe’s Immigration Alarmists
The migrant crisis has been one of the greatest challenges to the EU since its inception. And its reverberations have not ceased, despite dwindling migrant inflows. In fact, Chancellor Angela…
A Conservative Case for Universal Basic Income
It hardly came as a surprise when the National Review, a leading American conservative publication, rushed to assail the idea of universal basic income (UBI for short) with its usual…
The Illegitimate President: Donald Trump and the Faking of Democracy
Men, not Laws The United States of America proudly hails no more cherished old saw of its historic political achievement than that it is a nation “of laws and not…
The Liberal Spectrum: Cultural Libertarianism to “Call Out” Culture
The term “liberal” is wide-ranging and potentially confusing. This is unsurprising considering that the label ‘liberal’ is culturally specific to the extent where it is often understood to refer to…
Christopher Hitchens’ Defense of the Enlightenment
Christopher Hitchens is my favorite writer. His books probably made up around 80% of my high school reading diet. I devoured everything he published, from his autobiography to his studies…
White Privilege: Is It a Helpful Concept?
In this article, I will argue that the concept of “white privilege” is a counterproductive way of framing concerns about anti-brown and anti-black racism in the West in general, and…
Medine Zaouiche and the Politics of Provocation
When French rapper Médine (real name Medine Zaouiche) decided to schedule a concert at the Bataclan theatre, where, in November 2015, Islamist jihadists massacred eighty-nine people, there was bound to…
The Immigration Crisis: Who is to Blame?
This was first published on inaswrites.wordpress.com. For a moment, just put yourself in this position: You’ve lived in the same village all your life—but you’ve always known that there’s a…
The Decline of Traditional Conservatism and the Rise of the Postmodern Conservative.
In a July 4 article in the New York Times, conservative icon Roger Scruton lamented “What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism.” Scruton argues that Trump largely bypasses intellectual arguments about conservatism…
Cultural Evolution and Conservative Thought
“But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as a historical institution. If he knows how it arose,…
Postmodernism vs. The Pomoid Cluster
This is an abridged and edited version of a piece published in Everything Studies. Since I’ve been active on Twitter, I’ve had front row seats to the best intellectual slapfights no…
Elon Musk, Celebrity, and the Information Age
Elon Musk was pissed off. The capo di tutti capi of this era’s visionary disrupters recently tossed his super high-end gauntlet down at the feet of the media. Musk was tweeting…
On Making by Calling and the Need for Conversation
On Twitter, Bari Weiss of the New York Times has written: “[F]ailing to draw distinctions between people like Sam Harris and people like Richard Spencer strips the designation ‘alt-right’ of…
The Worst of Liberal Absolutism
The problem is that there are also valid arguments on the other side. Only an absolutist pretends otherwise.
