Welcome back, loyal fans! Having previously taken two feminist analyses of Disney films to task, we now turn our attention to a more recent gem, namely the chapter “My Little Pony, Communalism and Feminist Politics”¹, written by someone named Kevin Fletcher. Once again, I will quote from the text in question and offer commentary.

Mr. Fletcher writes:

The backstory to MLP: Friendship is Magic’s episode “The Return of Harmony” (2.1 and 2.2) appears to be informed by a feminist impulse (defined here as an orientation to a future without patriarchy): Princess Celestia and Princess Luna dethroned Discord, the spirit of…

Last year, Anarchist YouTuber NonCompete published a video discussing neoliberalism which, though I am not a neoliberal, struck me as a cavalcade of foolishness. The worst part of the video, in my opinion, is the segment concerning Thomas Hobbes. It is unsurprising that an anarchist should take a dim view of a philosopher who developed one of history’s most popular legitimations of the state. Still, NonCompete does a poor job of criticising Hobbes, and mostly makes himself look silly in the process. …

Recently, there has been an orgy of anti-white racism in the USA. The following is an enumeration of some examples, accompanied by a brief commentary.

On 21 May 2021, USA Today reported that Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot had declared that

she [would] grant one-on-one interviews to mark the two-year anniversary of her inauguration solely to journalists of color.

This seems a shockingly racialised way of choosing whom to grant an interview, especially coming from a mayor, who, as such, should represent all the inhabitants of her city. In justification, the mayor commented that Chicago’s journalists were disproportionately white. While this…

The general interest they garner has grown;
The papers debate their pretensions -
Deservedly so: these protesters have thrown
A tantrum of epic dimensions.

They claim to oppose some mysterious "fash",
Aid women’s and gays' liberation.
Their true aims are red as a furious rash,
The envy of every carnation.

To vent their resentment, their faces afoam,
At builders, producers, employers,
They go re-enacting the sacking of Rome;
They play the barbaric destroyers.

They swarm like mosquitoes, their faces effete,
Their writings pretentious and hokey,
Their speech a sententious and comical bleat,
Their patron saint blistering Loki.

Each rally can…

Cancel culture, having risen today to unexpected prominence, is nonetheless nothing new. As long ago as 1979, Joseph Epstein remarked:

Was Shakespeare absolutely

sound on the women question? Dante, was he not strangely quiet on the subject of blacks? Cannot ample evidence be found to prove the works of Pushkin to be anti-ecology? …

This essay is an answer to an article in “War on the Rocks” by Arnold R. Isaacs claiming that “U.S. journalists didn’t lose the war, celebrate the enemy, or vilify American soldiers”.

In the article, Isaacs seeks to counter “[t]he common claim […] that Vietnam war reporters in general sympathized with the Communist side, saw U.S. troops as war criminals, and contributed to the American failure by critically undermining public support at home”. Of course, this amounts to immediately shifting the goalposts from a discussion of “U.S. journalists” in general to one of just war reporters, so let us avoid…

Recently, there was an article published in “Common Sense with Bari Weiss” in which Katie Herzog interviewed a psychologist named Aruna Khilanani. Dr. Khilanani had given a presentation at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind”, in which she had discussed, inter alia, her longing to “unload[…] a revolver into the head of any white person that got in [her] way”. Reading the interview offered an enlightening glimpse into a deeply hateful way of thinking, and taught me some interesting things. Firstly, there was “a method to the madness”: there were…

A recent interest in Norse mythology has led me to the question how good the Old Norse religion, of which Norse mythology is, of course, an expression, is as a guide for individual and social life.

At first glance, the Old Norse religion seems fundamentally at odds with the modern world. Indeed, an unambiguously negative element in Norse religion, by modern standards at any rate, is its mysticism. It does not appear to encourage rational exploration or invention in any significant measure. Historian David Landes writes, in an attempt to discover the roots of the exceptional success of Western Civilisation:

…