The New Far Right International — perhaps we might call it the International Fascist Tendency? — is making headlines worldwide. While Russia has some claim to be its HQ in the Western world, the movement has a presence in most “advanced” nations. It’s a global phenomenon. Its factions network with…

Well, by now everyone’s heard about it and everyone’s talking about it. In Lewiston, Maine (Maine!) an angry white man (yet another one) — with an online history of engaging with far-right content and an IRL history of mental illness — used an AR-15 (yet another one) to murder 18…

English is a lot like a rambling old mansion that has been added on to ad hoc, over generations upon generations… so that every possible architectural style and material can be found somewhere. And I love it for that. I love it for its irregularities and inconsistencies and vermiform appendices……

Preface: Ingredients of this essay include Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside (a very interesting book, by the way, which I highly recommend) — and the unnerving US TV series Mindhunter (docudrama about the FBI team who pretty much invented psychological profiling). One of the characters in the series made an offhand…

[Note: the following essay is satire. Let me repeat that loudly: this article is not real. This is not a real newspaper story. Got that? Good. These days, it seems we need to draw these distinctions clearly. I don’t usually indulge in satire — as my readers will know—not really…

In the last couple of years the US Far Right seems to be suffering from a full-blown gender panic attack. Their outrage at any deviation from “Leave it to Beaver” family roles and gender models is apparently boundless — and punitive — and puzzling. The so-called “party of freedom and…

Elon is not the only right-leaning member of the online chatterati experiencing a frisson of existential fear as he contemplates “wokeness.” Even here on Medium, the Woke Scare of the Early Twenty-First Century pops up now and then. For example, I engaged a while back with the author of a…

Karl Popper is famous for a number of publications and ideas, but the one that has lodged most firmly in my head over the years is what is called Popper’s Paradox or The Paradox of Tolerance. It goes like this: if a society is so dedicated to tolerance and freedom…

Okay, so the whole world now knows that Elon Musk, King of Impulse Control Issues, tweeted a sleazy tabloid allegation about the attack on Paul Pelosi on Saturday, by a hammer-wielding assailant, in Pelosi’s SF home. Musk later deleted the tweet, but not before half the Internet had taken a…