Together or Separately

Together or Separately

The legacy media propaganda machine is currently mobilizing for a two minutes hate against Dr. Jordan Peterson. Apparently the good doctor went on the Beeb to point out some basic facts about economics and human psychology that your average high school student used to take for granted. The journo they…
January 25, 201843 Comments

A Metaphysic of Beauty

A recent debate on Twitter about whether "good" science fiction is a matter of subjective taste or objective value reminded me of this essay I wrote a few years back. It's remained unpublished until now. Is there such a thing as an objective standard of beauty? Some people insist that…
March 16, 20179 Comments
Reminder: There’s No Voting Our Way out of This

Reminder: There’s No Voting Our Way out of This

[Note: this post was originally published on 12/18/2015. In light of recent events, it seemed expedient to repost it.] A previous post on how the tide is turning against legacy media and its Leftist bias drew commenters who rightly observed that I offered no solutions for the current political crisis.…
July 5, 20163 Comments
Applied Rhetoric: Fun with Trolls

Applied Rhetoric: Fun with Trolls

A close friend and I were discussing the relative merits of dialectic and rhetoric the other day. He spoke of the invective bafflingly spewed against Christians since the Muslim terrorist attack in Orlando and mentioned debating fellow members of certain online communities on the subject. When I advised him that…
June 20, 20168 Comments
Fandom Is Dead. Long Live Fandom!

Fandom Is Dead. Long Live Fandom!

If you change the medium, you change the message. Philosopher of communication Marshall McLuhan argued persuasively that advances in media, regardless of content, can incite dramatic, culture-wide effects. A best selling print book can reach millions of people, but turn that book into a hit movie, and you increase its…
January 28, 2016
A Discussion of Sci-Fi Soul Swapping

A Discussion of Sci-Fi Soul Swapping

The perennial subject of mind/soul-swapping as portrayed in science fiction recently came up at John C. Wright's blog. Reader Kevin Stuart Lee kicked things off. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the metaphysics of mind transfer. Does that tenet of the singularitarians and transhumanists assume materialism? If so,…
December 24, 20154 Comments
Why Oligarchs Love Equality

Why Oligarchs Love Equality

In a perfect followup to my post on why Liberalism inevitably leads to tyranny, Murray Rothbard presents a devastating explanation for why egalitarianism is always championed by elitists. Rothbard begins by debunking the modern idea of equality. For 'equality' means 'sameness' — two entities are 'equal' if and only if…
December 21, 20155 Comments
There’s No Voting Our Way out of This

There’s No Voting Our Way out of This

A previous post on how the tide is turning against legacy media and its Leftist bias drew commenters who rightly observed that I offered no solutions for the current political crisis. Right up front, let me point out that I'm a schlock hack SF writer who is unqualified to propose…
December 18, 2015

Bradford Walker on Risk and Failure

Writer Bradford C. Walker posted an insightful criticism of "success culture" over at his blog that I deem worthy of signal boosting and comment. Failure has consequences. You have to survive to learn from it, and you have to survive such that you can recover in a timely manner so…
December 3, 2015
First Principles

First Principles

Photo by Andrew Dunn Civilized society is governed by time-tested principles. Refined over years; sometimes centuries, by trial and error, these rules have laid the foundations of luminous lives, legendary careers, and vast empires. One such venerable convention applied to rules themselves is that the most important rule comes first.…
November 17, 2015