Enjoying free speech since 1984. Your daily dose of anti-propaganda!
Poorly formed expectations are premeditated resentments.
This piece of wisdom occurred to me recently while reflecting on the beginning of the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Our Lord performs the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish as …
I wanted to love MAGA Communism. When the movement emerged on X in 2022, it ruffled all the right feathers. It sought to meet working-class people where they were, channelling their frustrations while simultaneously dismantling the Left-wing establishment.
Predictably, the …
Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such …
Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such …
The current generation stands before a gigantic irony of history – at least if human history is considered, as it has been since the 19th century, as a history of development. It was not only the Romantic Movement’s interest in …
The past month of American politics have been utter chaos. Former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt by a matter of millimetres. Joe Biden went to Las Vegas, reportedly got Covid, and disappeared completely from public view. A day …
Even just a few years ago, there was a certain certainty about the world, about society.
Now there is only probability and it’s as if civilization has been forced to shift from a Newtonian worldview to a quantum consideration.
That …
We recently returned from a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where we spent several days after the event’s conclusion exploring this beautiful city and its environs. While there, walking Lisbon’s famed ‘seven hills,’ mostly surrounded by throngs of other visitors – …
Have the powers of gods of death been unleashed in our relatively peaceable nation?
I’m in a hip, storied, deep-blue Catskills town; I was having a restful little writer’s retreat on my own, in a miniature cottage overlooking a small …
I would like to start a conversation on the relationship between science and power. By “science” I mean the field of study (trying to figure out how the world works) and the people doing the studying (scientists, and, in an …
After a discussion of Western bourgeois confidence in work, the present and the future, as well as Henry Ford’s disdain for history and tradition in favour of the present (‘the history we make today’), Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, p. 132) …
That most perspicacious of social theorists, Zymunt Bauman – on whose work I have drawn before (see for example here) – has raised a question that has become even more relevant today than when he first posed it in Liquid …
Two decades back when the War on Terror™ was announced—you know, that thing that killed millions, cost trillions, made no one safer, and enabled the Covid fraud by giving people a crash course on how to cower and comply in …
Every so often it is a good idea to revisit our foundational concepts — that is, those important words and definitions that are commonplace in everyday discourse, which we take for granted and we think we have pinned down.
This …
Because we have a need to understand the world around us – some more than others – most people, myself included, tend to look to George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) as the right model in terms of which one …