On Lovecraft and Contemporary History [Updated]

[…]

The Atlantic Looks Forward to America’s Next Authoritarian

This post is a discussion on and response to Tufekci’s “America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent”.

I said four almost exactly four years ago that it wasn’t Trump people needed to worry about but what came after. On this Tufekci and I agree – but not much more. I shall begin with a […]

Down The Rabbit Hole: Congressional IT Scandal

Great swathes of the internet are aflame with news about Imran Awan, his family, and their various entanglements with the halls of power and law enforcement. The interest is most noticeable among the right-wing alternative media, but there are representatives of both the so-called “mainstream media” and internet conspiracists circling the fringes of this […]

Perspective

With regret I must (re)-revisit the Presidency of Donald Trump. As I have a lot of sympathy for Trump critics, it is also with regret that I must criticize them. This time I do so because I’m worried that the criticisms of Trump are often counterproductive, being so fantastical as to hurt the credibility of […]

Cringing in the New Year

People across China are celebrating Spring Festival (春节) today, which naturally involves huge transportation bottlenecks this week as millions return home or visit relatives for the highly auspicious occasion. It’s the Year of the Fire Rooster, according to the Chinese zodiac. This will be easy for us to remember here in the States, thanks to […]

Union Protectionism

In my previous essay I argued from historical political trends that the Democrats’ pro-union, pro-immigration ideology was not a particularly tenable one:

What I am saying here is that the Democratic Party is the party of unions, but unions and immigration are historically contentious partners at best. To be immigration maximalist while dismissing nativist concerns […]

Retrospective, Prospective, Perspective

Trump is to be our next president. Has the shock worn off yet? Maybe it’s beginning to, maybe not, but one week later I’m ready to offer my opinion on what happened and what everybody should do about it.

What happened is very simple: Trump won the electoral college and lost the popular vote by […]

Utterly Predictable

Not the election. My response to the election will be coming shortly, but it’s taking a while because it’s long. Unlike that future post, I am not going to attempt to be politic or diplomatic here, because I have been watching this issue for 15 years, and I am sick and tired of being right […]

FreeForum!

Some of you may have already noticed the new button in the website menu: FreeForum.

This is EI’s (first!) summer project.

Inspiration first struck when I found a list of the hundreds upon hundreds who had filed with the Federal Election Commission to be candidates. The project truly began when I realized six more months […]

Securing Security

As some of my readers may already know, there was a bunch of bombings in Brussels last weekend which the Islamic State took credit for. Two of the explosions occurred in an airport. Because, unfortunately, terrorists aren’t totally incompetent idiots, these two went off before the security checkpoint. It’s much easier than trying to get […]