Category: society
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Nigerians know MAGA means “fool”
I was watching the most recent episode of Trafficked with Mariana Van Zeller. It was about Nigerian scammers (Black Axe) that lure people with promises of enormous inheritances to come to an African country—in this case, Mozambique. There they are sent on with a suitcase of “gifts” which, in this case, was heroin. Mariana found…
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Why Capitalism (1): The Pre-Capitalist West
The development—creation and evolution—of Capitalism was hardly preordained. But it is too easy to look backward and conclude that where are now was inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. So why then? The question warrants a look at conditions leading to the birth of capitalism. We will eventually need to dedicate time to capitalism’s evolution to…
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Religious About Capitalism
This piece was completed in 2018, before the pandemic. The other essays in the serialization of “Capitalism as Religion” are descendants of this essay. It’s contextualizing references—Brexit and Trump—are a little stale. Also, its argument tilts very heavily to defining religion for the first half of the essay, all in service of the argument that…
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The Hypocrisy of Freedom/Fredum and Religion
The word “freedom” has been drained of any worth. There was a time when it was a foundational article of constitutional republics and democracies the world over. There was a time that young men died in the name of freedom from genuine fascist tyranny. There was a time that the fight for freedom from a…
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Lab Leaks and Red Herrings
Since 2020, I, like everyone else in North America, have been treated to a regular though slowly diminishing force feeding of “news” about the “Lab Leak” source for the COVID pandemic. At first, when it was novel (like the Coronavirus underlying the pandemic), it made me wonder. Today, it makes me wonder—about the people obsessing…
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Easily digestible conspiracy and pseudo-insight: strong misdirection?
Misdirection. A few days ago something exploded over the Kremlin. It was such an elaborate pantomime of an attack that only the willful, gullible, or compelled would not make common league with the conspiracists to consider the whole episode remarkable bullshit. That Russia immediately took to its airwaves and any other channel that would sustain…
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“Everybody Lies” — But normalizing it is wrong
Politicians lie. Trump lies. Criminals lie. But now I’m repeating myself. The point is that lying is human and it wouldn’t be central to every single ethos since the species became social if it weren’t. The quotation, however, come out of the mouth of fictional doctor Gregory House—itself… a lie, of a sort. Oh the…
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Let’s Think This Through: Do we really want to destress teenagers?
The Ontario government may be open for business but it’s not helping prepare Ontario youth for the working world. One example is the move to eliminate final exams as a requirement to pass any courses. Apparently final exams take too much of a toll on the teenage psyche. The mothers at the table next to…
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Transparency demands are transparently opaque
What good is transparency if what it reveals is at best meaningless and at worst combustible?
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Asymmetric policy action: cars and drivers
I would offer to write a brief piece for Policy Options, The Walrus, or some other such magazine but have no desire to spend the time documenting the self-evident, which will be obvious later, just to appear “well researched.” Instead, I’ll write here and content myself with distributing the link. Here’s the premise. Governments of all sorts…
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Is that really what the technology is for?
New Year’s eve… Like many, many people apparently, the lovely and talented Mrs. G and I skip the parties and go straight to the movie theatre. Often following Chinese buffet dinner, but that’s another matter entirely. There is 30-40 minute opportunity to observe people in action. And what I saw made me sad. There, four…
