If you have a time capsule to fill, you could do a lot worse than to print out some of the crowing about a woman Thor and a black Captain America. The glee with which these changes have been met, contrasted with the bleak state of structural change and economic justice, will tell you pretty […]

Here’s some things I said in my post yesterday: “Class is real and important but it’s not the same as gender and race and those are important to.” To which I would say… well, yeah! Is there a stereotype of socialists who say “it’s not about race” or similar nonsense? Sure. Such people are stupid […]

So with the arrival of the World Cup at last, I want to endorse the virtues of liking a sport just as much as you want to and when you want to. I am a classically casual American soccer fan: I watch the major international tournaments like the World Cup, the Euro Cup, the Confed […]

If you repeat “mocked raped threats” or “minimized rape” or whatever on Twitter enough times, people on Twitter will believe it’s true. Because people are dumb. So: you must keep insisting on the truth. Here is what Amber A’Lee Frost  actually wrote: “And I just don’t think the diminutive label of ‘bro’ should be used […]

So I’ve been meaning to write something in response to conservative dweeb Kevin Williamson’s dweeby screed against Laverne Cox for dweeb magazine The National Review, but Jacob Bacharach pretty much beat me to it: the Internet bravely rushed in to declare that scientifically she is. “He doesn’t understand the complexity . . .” And we were […]

I appreciate the many responses to my piece on traditional masculinity. The hate mail was interesting, in the way that hate mail is always interesting. A few emails and many, many comments that I refused to unleash from the filter were illustrative, and not just in their many creative spellings of the word “faggot.” They […]

Sometimes you just kind of can’t wrap your mind around it all. I mean  just look at recent stuff. Thomas Piketty’s book provides a mountain of empirical evidence that wealth grows faster than income and that wealth inequality tends to get worse over time. Gregory Clark shows that wealth persists within particular families for as […]

There’s a lot not to like about this David Frum piece concern trolling Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reparations essay. For instance, Frum asks as a hypothetical “If African Americans are due payment for slavery and subjugation, what about… Japanese Americans, interned during World War II?,” apparently unaware that we already did that. But here’s one that I […]

So I argued recently that traditional masculinity has to die. Although I’m friends with some traditionalists, and I think that there are strains of traditionalism that really exemplify a politics of caring that is quite rare, I am generally antagonistic to traditionalism writ large. Tradition inevitably puts constraints on the free expression of human behaviors that […]

The video “confession” of Elliot Rodger, the man responsible for last night’s attack on UC-Santa Barbara, is one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever seen. In particular, I am struck by what a performance it is. Even in his full-blown twisted revenge fantasy, this person is putting on an act. If I didn’t know how sickeningly […]