Lately I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about toxic masculinity and its destructive effects on individual men, and by extrapolation on society in general.
But what is it?
Bad Gun and Four Bears
The Mandan, as a nation of people, were hit by numerous waves of smallpox and cholera, whooping cough, measles, and pivotally, epidemics of Norwegian rats that came in on riverboats. At first, the Mandan and Hidatsa, who had never seen a brown rat, were entranced and even happy to have the rats, because they ate the deer mice that had long plagued their earthen lodges.
Dispatches From The Wasteland — No. 2
• Chemical atrocity. The Syrian government allegedly unleashed another chemical attack on its own people last weekend. Russia is warning of “most serious consequences” if the U.S. strikes Syria over the attack. Get the feeling that we’re walking along the crumbling edges of an abyss? From the New York Times: BEIRUT, Lebanon — Dozens of Syrians choked to […]
A Relic Of The 18th Century
“…Demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.” — Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens I have been naïve. My temperament has always bent toward seeking common ground — the Willie Nelson ethic of bringing the cowboys and the hippies together. I have opined multiple times in the newspaper […]
Come and Take It
A bill disarming citizens is precisely the kind of nonsense one would expect to be issued from a group of people whose own solutions have been ineffectual since their inception, whose entire history is steeped in fraudulent claims of divinity, by unconscionable wars, slavery, and assassinations, and whose only real purpose from the outset has been to control the minds, bodies, and coffers of others by the precise application of fear backed by the threat of annihilation or eternal damnation.
The Radical Underground — All Foco’d Up — Part II — The Right
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutions to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. Eric […]
First Person Shooter, Act Two
For long-term thinkers, the most alarming part of our failure to have the right conversation about the causes of predatory mass killings is that our civil liberties are put at risk. The seductive anodynes put forth by short-term thinkers require that law-abiding citizens sacrifice their own freedoms in a well-meaning but clearly improbable effort to stuff the predator genie back into the bottle.
The Radical Underground: All Foco’d Up — Part I: The Left
I see a bad moon rising I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and lightning I see bad times today — John Fogerty The “bad moon” Creedence Clearwater Revival songwriter and frontman John Fogerty saw on the rise in the fall of 1969 would become an eerie, unsettling Blood Moon as the tumultuous ’60s became the pervasively violent and […]
The Gorgon’s Stare
At the current pace of development and disenfranchisement of the human mind, one might be forgiven for wondering at what point a modern version of the Luddites packs a van full of explosives and attempts to drive it through the gates of Google, or Apple, or Intel.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
This proclivity to study drama rather than its origins — prevalent I think — is one result of our metamorphosis from a nation of can-do optimists with a healthy suspicion of government into a nation of miserable cynics who ironically embrace the influence and beneficence of government no matter the cost.
She Was With The Russians, Too
I went home with a waitress The way I always do How was I to know She was with the Russians, too? — Warren Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” During one of the 2012 presidential debates, incumbent president Barak Obama shanked his opponent Mitt Romney with a well-prepared and well-deployed line: “Gov. Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaida is […]
It’s Not The Apocalypse
Rome was not built in a day, nor did it fall suddenly to a horde of screaming, blue-painted savages. Some scholars argue that Rome never really “fell” at all, at least as we imagine the “Fall of Rome.” Instead, the Empire slowly succumbed to its own weight and rot, like an old drunk with a three-pack habit and […]
