If you’re like me, which let’s face it, no one is but if you’re like me, then chances are you probably didn’t know a lot about Japan or her history from going to school, watching documentaries and general media. In the west as far as popular culture is concerned, Japanese…

This will be, and I admit this, one of my more tangential pieces of writing. BUT, in fairness, I do some of my best thinking this way. I decided once again to read what is possibly one of my favorite books, namely Red Road From Stalingrad by Mansur Abdulin. It’s a great historical memoir from the great patriotic war, written by one of the Soviet Union’s most accomplished war heroes. Inside the book, we don’t just learn…

So now that Afghanistan is independent, a lot of people discuss what to do about them. The taliban has established an emirate government which practices Sharia law. I’ve actually studied some things about Sharia law, and it’s a lot less scary than people think it is. Does it have flaws…

I think one rather amusing thing about the evangelical phenomenon in the US, is how, in a rather ironic turn of events, it has become one of the most aggressive forces against theocracy. People always say that evangelicals use theocratic law and that it is unconstitutional and contradicts organic legal…

I think that everyone, literally everyone, from the smallest of fungal spores gently drifting through the air, to the most morbidly engorged of American schoolchild making their way through a cargo container full of oily chicken, will agree with me when I say that the word drama has lost its…

One thing people talk about a lot is values, and values are very interesting to me. In Europe of course, we have European values. When discussing this topic, people can be prejudiced. So to clarify, European values are not exclusively European, nor are they anything except an ideal, like any…

Lumpen is an old Marxist term, that in many ways is somewhat antiquated, because Marx didn’t really understand what he was looking at when he spoke of the Lumpenproletariat. In social democracy, the word for Lumpen is Residuum. In capitalism, the word for Lumpen is the underworld. It comprises criminals…

One thing which people seem obsessed with is the idea of Cartesian subjectivity, and the epistemology of perspective based truth. To bring you up to speed in case you’re new to philosophy: Rene Descartes was probably the inventor of simulation theory, he was the first to ask “But what if…

As strange as it may seem, I kind of hate writing. There’s just something so miserable about what it’s become. Anyone can be a good writer, the talent to it is simply to learn how to combine sincerity with articulation. And yet, at the same time, these skills are more…