Pop Culture

• Liberalism + Whatever

  There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful

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• Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien’s Quest Saga

  Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not

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• Hip to be Catholic?

  What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?”  From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova,

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• Villanelle the Bore

  And she’s also, paradoxically, less sympathetic. The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked. Now, when she does kill — out of anger and disappointment rather than a misplaced sense of duty — the

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• Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

  I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it

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• An Interesting Theory from Breitbart

  Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated. Nothing else makes

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• The Return of the Bobos

  A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful. For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the

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• Is Magic a Thing?

  I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted

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• Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

  I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to

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• Animal House and the American Right

  Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw

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