Technology Bringing Dumb Ethical Questions to Life (Kind Of)
On self-driving cars and the “Trolley Problem,” buttons that kill random Chinese people, Sam Harris, and The Twilight Zone.
Category: Mangled Rhetoric
Duck Speeches: This Month in Mangled, Mimicked, and Meaningless Words
Political speech, as George Orwell has noted, is often not speech in the fullest sense of the word. “Duckspeak” is tribal signaling, half-consciously discharging from the speaker’s oral cavity, meant to be received in the same unthinking stimulus-reflex manner.
Brexit: Hysteria, Prejudice, and Misguided Emotion on Both Sides
Public discourse is exploding with expressions of panic and a kind of solidarity in resentment. But underneath all the scorn and anger, few substantive arguments figure into the discussion, while many of the endlessly repeated conventional points are misguided and offensive.
Satire and Free Speech
In the US, it’s irrelevant whether jokes about politicians are made by comics or politicians. In Europe, the wrong joke can land you in jail.
How to Write Your Own John Oliver Monologue
Following these steps, you, too, can easily transform a news story into John Oliver material!
Is Anders Breivik a Terrorist?
Breivik was declared “not criminally insane”, fit to stand trial, and convicted. His stated motive: to oppose “cultural Marxism” and Islam, and to bring attention to his far-right militant political manifesto. But is Breivik a terrorist?
Bullshit as Signaling
On Sunday, the @HillaryClinton Twitter account vomited two bizarre flowcharts (or something), prompting Corey Robin to pose the question: “What the fuck does all this even mean?” This is the same question I asked in my last blog post about Clinton’s plan to defeat ISIS […]
The Art of Mixing Metaphors
When Hillary Clinton outlined her strategy for combating ISIS in a speech last November, one sentence stood out for me: “But we have learned that we can score victories over terrorist leaders and networks, only to face metastasizing threats down the road, so we also have to play and win the long game.”
