Over this past weekend Epic Games, creator of Fortnite, had the wondrous idea to host a panel on race and America for the 4th of July in their flagship title. The intended effect was to unify gamers in a sense of progressive justice. The actual outcome was players jeering the act of corporate political posturing….
As digital media continues to expand, we find ourselves discovering new forms of entertainment that particularly hit that jive. A cacophony of common interests may find you tuning in to a favorite blogger, a particular hobby channel to binge for three hours, or even a Twitch streamer manages to make you look forward to that…
By Bryan McCarthy & Jon Ungerland These are, as nearly everyone has said, “strange” (or “interesting” or “scary” or “tribal”) times. Far from the initial vision of a functional Union, all-consuming discord and fracturing have become our everyday. We are screeching at each other. Climate Change. Russia. The Wall. Immigration. Abortion. Guns. Race. Gender. Speech….
Of the first Frozen movie, I probably wrote half a dozen articles. What was that magic ingredient that made it a plus-billion-dollar blockbuster, a culture-rocking achievement, a life-defining event for a whole generation of kids and their parents? That’s a huge question. You can list every ingredient you want: the amazing characters, the charmed music,…
Everything was peaches and cream for the famous drag queen and reality television star RuPaul Sunday night as his show picked up its sixth Emmy. That is, until a reporter questioned him about his team’s lack of diversity in a backstage interview. Danielle Young, a reporter for Essence Magazine, asked RuPaul if he felt that…
If you believe that fairness and what philosophers call “desert,” or deserving the benefits and harms we receive, are the most important features of a society, you’ll spend a lot of time being upset. My favorite statements of this problem are by F.A. Hayek and J.R.R. Tolkien. From Hayek (The Mirage of Social Justice, pp….
Social justice is one of those squishy terms that is not easy to define. One thing we know for certain: social justice is not the same thing as justice, an age-old idea that was the focus of such thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, and Hume. (After all, if social justice meant the…
Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been an inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on Twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis. And here from David Rizardo is a longer…
Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992) is today glorified by freedom lovers all around the world. The Austrian in a double sense—both as an Austrian citizen as well as a representative of the Austrian School of Economics, is mentioned in the same breath with the most prominent classical liberal economists of all time: right next to…
Any careful observer of American politics must be struck by the ever-expanding roster of things people have asserted rights to. But when such arguments are seriously considered, there is little to them beyond shared desires or wishes for certain things, which supposedly implies that there ought to be rights to them. From there, it is…