Madness for Decivilization
Mental hospitals emerged at a time, Foucault argued, when the state was seeking to impose rational order on societies.
Michael Shellenberger
· 14 min read
History
A collection of 357 posts
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Powerful Anti-Racist Book. So Why Doesn’t the Left Love It?
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
Jerry Barnett
· 14 min read
The Canadian Historical Association’s Fake 'Consensus' on Canadian Genocide
The campaign to label Canada a genocide state isn’t an isolated phenomenon, but is playing out as part of a larger effort to destroy any publicly displayed symbol of national pride.
Christopher Dummitt
· 11 min read
The Subversive Simone Weil—A Review
Chastising the followers of Marx for ignoring workers’ actual experiences, Weil was almost a nominalist, and she awaited insights, as opposed to going in search of them.
Seamus Flaherty
· 8 min read
The Philologist, the Iraqi Girl, and Me
The comrades worked together, ate together, read together, showered together, used the latrine together, sang together to the sound of accordions late into the night.
Edward Grossman
· 18 min read
The Ear Whisperers
Machiavelli’s clear preference was for an advisor to be principled, believing in his advice and stating it clearly, but not importunate.
John Lloyd
· 12 min read
A Toast to Randolph Bourne
There is much we can learn from Bourne, not only from his joie-de-vivre, his ideas about cultural diversity and disability, but perhaps most of all, from his toughness, his willingness to criticize associates.
Russell Jacoby
· 7 min read
Historical Racism Is Not the Singular Cause of Racial Disparity
The popular vision of race in America seems to be incapable of breaking the gridlock that places the fate of black Americans in the hands of white society and then condemns that society to the wasteland of history.
Samuel Kronen
· 26 min read
The Strange Rehabilitation of the Black Panther Party
Isn’t it a little late for the rehabilitation of the Black Panther Party (BPP)? After all, the organization that first caught the public’s attention in 1969 was already in its death throes by the early 1970s, beset by internal splits, criminal prosecutions, and violent faction-fighting. Yet, five decades
Ronald Radosh
· 18 min read
Blessed Are the Sense-Makers
Years from now, if anyone looks at a line graph (in the OED or Google dictionary) tracking the frequency with which a word is mentioned in print, they may notice the current affinity for the word “narrative.” An already overworked word (by virtue of its abstractness), it is now almost
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 11 min read
The Prophet of Dystopia at Rest: Margaret Atwood in Cuba
Canada has never supported the US embargo, and the countries’ good relations are for many Canadians a symbol of our independence.
Yvon Grenier
· 13 min read
The Route to Re-Enchantment
Moving from Cain and Abel to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, with some Egyptian myths thrown in, he reconnects his young audience to the religious tradition that was always theirs to inherit, but from which they have been estranged by their modern education.
Harrison Pitt
· 9 min read
Why Fake News Flourishes: Emitting Mere Information Is Easy, But Creating Actual Knowledge Is Hard
Digital media, by contrast, had hardly any paying customers and lured advertisers with fleeting “impressions” and “engagement,” launching a no-holds-barred race to attract eyeballs.
Jonathan Rauch
· 9 min read
Tocqueville and Us
People joining a political movement don’t usually consider its logic or consequences; they react to an injustice or grievance.
Eric Clifford Graf
· 9 min read
Why Is the Society for American Archaeology Promoting Indigenous Creationism?
The most expansive interpretations of NAGPRA’s provisions now serve to place Indigenous oral traditions, which typically include religious stories, on equal footing with traditional forms of scientific evidence such as DNA analysis.
Elizabeth Weiss and James W. Springer
· 16 min read