Category: Politics

Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.

Fake News is a Symptom of a Larger Problem–We are Destroying Our Own Media

Many people now believe that fake news contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. I’ve seen this issue debated a number of times around the web, and whenever it’s discussed there tends to be a great deal of conceptual imprecision. Different people have widely divergent understandings of what constitutes “fake” news. This has led many people to misunderstand what fake news is, why it exists, and what its significance is.

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Samantha Bee Doesn’t Understand the Left’s Objection to Identity Politics

I ran across a Samantha Bee clip in which Bee attacks Bernie Sanders and others members of the left who believe the Democratic Party needs to get away from “identity politics”:

In the clip, Bee explains left-wing opposition to identity politics by having a right-wing Fox news presenter misexplain the term. She then asserts that identity politics is synonymous with civil rights, claims that “white men” are an identity, and accuses the left of abandoning its principles. This is a reductive straw man argument. It collapses important distinctions in the way the left and the right criticize identity politics.

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Cuba Under Fidel Castro

When an important leader dies or leaves office, I sometimes like to write retrospective posts on their performance. There are any number of places where you can get a Fidel Castro obituary–what I’m offering is a hard look at the consequences Castro’s policies had for the Cuban people. My intent is neither to polish nor tarnish Castro’s image, but to present his government’s policies and institutions as they were.

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Leave Barron Alone

I want to talk today about Barron Trump. Do you know Barron? He’s Donald Trump’s 10 year old son. We don’t know that much about Barron, but here’s what we do know–he lives on his own floor of Trump tower, he speaks two languages (English and Slovenian), he enjoys wearing suits, and he currently attends a prep school in New York. Already, people have started going after Barron. There are people who think he should change schools in the middle of the year, and there are people calling him autistic or anti-social just because he often didn’t seem to enjoy the campaign circus. This is not okay.

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