Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

There’s a group of people I used to hold in contempt, for whom I now feel a higher degree of respect and sympathy. I’m talking about Bigfooters, or “Squatchers,” or whatever you want to call the folks who passionately hunt for the elusive cryptid. I owe them an apology.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not a believer. In fact, I’m an obstinately skeptical person by nature. If I were walking through an old Civil War cemetery at night and suddenly saw a mustachioed Union commander standing before me, my first thought would be that…

When Andrew Yang bowed out of the 2020 presidential race, I was fairly ambivalent. As a supporter who had volunteered for his campaign, I obviously felt a bit sad that he would no longer be on the debate stage. But at the same time, I never had any real expectations that he would become the next POTUS.

Yang was a political dark horse whose candidacy was mostly about injecting fresh ideas into the Democratic Party. In that sense, he was successful. …

An obscure political philosophy that deserves a second chance

I’ve become a pretty anti-nostalgic person. Proclamations that “things were better in the good old days” tend to be both factually wrong and socially harmful. This is true in politics and in other areas of life (do you really miss having to rewind VHS tapes, or do you just miss being a kid?). 21st-century problems require 21st-century solutions. That said, there is one old idea that never really got its due which might be well-suited to our current climate.

Georgism, named after American economist Henry George, began as a political philosophy…

In much the same way that a virus will mutate over time to increase its immunity against various treatments, so too do bad internet arguments.

Realizing how quickly the “big tech censorship” narrative crumbles under scrutiny, some defenders of Donald Trump and the “anything goes” social media app Parler have refined their case. Sure, they say, it’s not technically a First Amendment issue. The government isn’t trying to censor anybody (in fact it’s the head of government being booted in this instance). But it’s still a free speech issue, insofar as letting these big companies set and enforce their own…

There’s a growing disconnect between the more academic definitions of “Left” and “Right,” and what these labels are commonly understood to mean. If you ever attended a university and took an intro-level Poli-Sci class, you were probably taught that the political Right supports things like free markets, fiscal restraint, and property rights, while the Left tends to support more government intervention in the economy. But as is often the case, academia may be a bit out of touch with the real world here.

Even before last week’s armed insurrection on Capitol Hill, the American Right’s relationship with the free market…

After a week of surprising victories followed by (sadly less surprising) chaos and violence, there has been some renewed speculation about the future of the Republican Party and the American Right more broadly. Following the election, the conventional wisdom had been that while President Trump was on his way out, the authoritarian populist movement he invigorated was here to stay. After the attempted violent overthrow of the government on January 6th, however, some are clinging to hope that maybe the GOP will finally distance itself from Trump and his ilk. I’m hopeful but pretty skeptical.

Victimhood is a huge part…

It’s almost become a cliché to state that we are living through unprecedented times. As Covid-19 continues its merciless resurgence, and the soon-to-be former president desperately tries to overturn a democratic election in what can only be described as a dictatorial coup attempt, it’s understandable that many of us would like to simply take a break from politics, unplug and unwind over the holidays as we hope for a return to relative normalcy under the incoming Biden administration.

Yeah… that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Ousting the orange authoritarian was a big deal — an incredible amount of needless human…

There’s a term that originally comes from the field of social psychology, but has since been co-opted by right-wing internet people. The term is “virtue signaling.” It’s typically used to mean something like “political correctness,” or the act of being sanctimonious about a particular social issue so that one can feel morally or intellectually superior to others. While I can see why some people might find this kind of thing annoying, I tend to worry much more about the opposite extreme, or what I guess you’d call “malice signaling.”

This is the act of being the most obnoxious, mean-spirited jerk…