Pop Culture
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More on Eudaemonia
[Alasdair MacIntyre seems to be having a moment, and if you want a succinct overview of his thought, David Brooks’s piece today in The Atlantic is pretty good. I’m going to get into the MacIntyre weeds later this summer as part of my longer term Utopian Thinking project. The problem with conservatives like Brooks is
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One Last, Quick Thought on ‘Mountainhead’
Some might find this movie unwatchable, and for good reason. As I said, it didn’t work for me, and it was hard to sit through. Nevertheless, it’s unwatchable for the same reason the news has become unwatchable; neither presents a reality that is untrue nor exaggerated, and neither is believable for relatively normal, sane people
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Mountainhead: Some Quick Thoughts after Watching It
I'm glad it’s a movie rather than a full, multi-season series. I gave up on Succession half way through the first season, and I would have given up on this, too, if I had to watch much more of it. That doesn't mean it fails–the writing is clever, and the humor burns–but that there's just
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Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories
I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that
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Some Thoughts on Equity Language
Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you
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Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?
Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone: The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who
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The Duttons vs. The Roys
The TV shows Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in that they are both about two powerful American overlords and their families. What's different about them is more interesting and significant. To understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. In a proxy war between the Duttons and
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Liberation to What?
The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe. –Tom Nichols Nichols' reference is