Category: politics

Working sucks I guess

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Check this out: I expect most people to react to a video like this with derision, but not me – I think it says a lot about expectations, efficiency, and more than anything, sex. I can hear the boomers seething now that a young person would dare complain about all of their waking hours spent away from the places and things they would prefer. I can even hear younger generations echoing them, because the first response to a complaint is to make a comparison – to think how much better that person has it than you, and you never complained.…

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Beyond Profits, The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 7

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Some interesting effects occur when a company grows large and powerful or even hegemonic in a given market. You can expect it to exploit the lack of competition and raise prices for consumers, and perhaps also exploit labor with low wages if it is the sole employer in a given labor specialty or geographic location. This inverse is called a monopsony, a single-buyer situation. However, for the purposes of the arts, the corporation becomes not just an economic force but a cultural force, and that draws certain people to it as well as allows for an approach to production that…

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Politics and the Alternate Utility of Time

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Next time you turn on the news, click to open an article, or read a long post/Twitter thread on politics, consider what else you could be doing during that time. Time, after all, is the one resource you can’t get more of. Unlike economies of trade, it is a zero-sum game. The concept of alternate utility in economics deals with how resources are best used. For instance, a piece of land could be used to grow 100 units of corn or 80 units of rice. Another plot could produce 30 units of corn or 50 units of rice. If corn…

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Materialism and Gnosticism

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Check out a great thread by author (and attorney) Alexander Palacio: It’s odd that the extremes of materialism (in the philosophical sense, the belief that only the material is real and of consequence) end up in the same place as Gnostic heresy in denying the importance and reality of the body. According to the materialist, you ARE your body, there is metaphysically no separate spiritual “soul” that ascends to heaven or goes anywhere else. Thus one would think that the body is, therefore, the only thing that can be sacred because it is all humans are. However, the disregard for…

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A Propagandized View of Debt and Forgiveness

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Certain issues have been so heavily subject to political messaging that normally rational individuals will be unable to hear arguments outside the frame established by propaganda. Debt is one of these, and for some, the messaging surrounding the concept runs so deep that they will, during the context of the topic, forget the normal meaning of words. “Student debt forgiveness,” as the name should imply, involves the forgiveness of debt. And yet, church-going Americans who have a firm grasp of the forgiveness offered by God through Christ, suddenly forget its meaning entirely any time you mention student loans. They immediately…

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Gun Violence: Illness and Incompetency

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There have been three mass shootings recently – one each in New York, California, and Texas – and the familiar swirling, impotent talking points of the left regarding “gun control” are once again being parroted by all the talking heads, the gist being that these things wouldn’t happen if only we could get rid of the guns. This is neither feasible nor desirable, and the causes are different than the left would have you believe, but before I explain that, let me turn aside to point out a few things. First, two of the recent shootings will be memory-holed because…

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Silent Scream

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For those reading in the future, there is a good chance that Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court of the United States decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, will be overturned by the same court populated by different people. An opinion draft was “leaked” by someone within the court, and now crowds are gathering around the houses of justices, attempting to intimidate them into changing their minds. This is the biggest domestic political event in my memory – bigger than Obamacare, bigger than Clinton’s impeachment, bigger than Donald Trump’s election. In fact, God may have placed Donald Trump in…

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Conceptual Inertia

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Inertia: objects in motion will stay in motion; objects at rest will stay at rest. I don’t blame my parents for sending me to public school, and I don’t blame the baby boomer generation for abandoning their children to the system. They assumed that the institutions and culture that they experienced remained intact and unaltered; there was never an assumption that in the years between 1970 and 1980 education in America would be totally converged into politicized indoctrination camps. There was never an assumption that universities would become value sucks whose certifications gave no economic security. Of course, you have…

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A Propagandized View of War

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A viewer asked me about Starship Troopers on Saturday’s stream. I’ve done several videos on the book and movie, and written at least one article about it, but it keeps coming up. That’s probably the power of Heinlein’s ideas, but again, I want to push back a bit. Before that, let me sum up: Starship Troopers (the book) is known for its ideas. There’s not much story there, and I don’t care for it as a result. It’s not a great story by Heinlein. Lots of the ideas are in pop culture, primarily “power armor” and the “bug hunt.” But…

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The Wages of Sin… And Student Debt

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“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” Who is responsible for the fall of man? If you want to have a fun discussion in Sunday school (or anywhere where people know the fundamental creation stories of Abrahamic faiths), pose this question, and see where the debate goes. Very obviously, Adam and Eve are both responsible for the sin they committed by eating the forbidden fruit. Otherwise, they would not have been cast from the Garden of Eden and incurred the debt of sin which is fulfilled in death. But the snake is also present and were it not…

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