The Politics of Violence

As Carl von Clausewitz tells us,”War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.”

And yet for some reason, this adage has largely been ignored in the context of spree shootings in America and elsewhere around the world. The mainstream media and alternative media endlessly debate on the reason for the ultraviolence present in American culture, but whether they blame mental illness, easy access to firearms, media glorification, or miscreant foreigners, everyone seems to ignore the fact that a sizable amount of spree shooters are political radicals, dissidents, or otherwise part of a marginalized political minority.

Cecil the Lion and the Manufacturing of Outrage

I would almost always avoid these types of stories, but in this case, the outrage manufactured by the mainstream media is particularly egregious. In the following article I will demonstrate that many claims made in the mainstream press about “Cecil the Lion” are both extremely embellished if not downright false. Namely that the Lion was never “internationally famous” before being killed, that his death will not cost Hwange National Park “millions” lost in revenue, that Zimbabweans themselves care extremely little about the death of Cecil (so much for him being a local celebrity), and that the story was manufactured by Conservationist groups and the media.

King Disaster’s Math Manifesto

Math and Shit

King Disaster’s Math Manifesto

This summer, rather than selling my soul to some corporate overlord and grinding myself into the dirt to make some big bucks working on Wall Street, I chose to stay at my college and do some academic research. I was assigned a mentor and we worked together to simulate the kind of project that one would take on in grad school or as a post doc. Eventually, we settled on the topic of random polytopes. Essentially, that means that you pick a bunch of points in $latex mathbb{R}^d$, take their convex hull, and see what happens. The results are the 11+ page pdf I linked at the top of this post.

I can’t say I was thrilled with the project. Due to a couple of unfortunate lapses in communication, I got stuck with a topic which I did not find particularly interesting. (From what I…

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The Politics of Truth

Sweet Talk

Give Me That Old Time Democratic Religion

I am an American. I was born here, I grew up here. I was raised to put my faith in the American democratic religion.

From a very young age, I was taught stories about the founders, and the proper moral framework in which the Revolutionary War ought to be understood. The history that I learned in school was steeped in democratic values; it was all too easy to see American history in particular as a straight line of progress of increasing enfranchisement, abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. was elevated into the same pantheon as Jefferson and Lincoln.

A citizen’s ability to participate in our national politics was depicted as both a great privilege part and parcel of being an American, and also our great responsibility.

A full exploration of this religion and its theology are well beyond either…

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Rhodesia in the Media: Disinformation and the Appropriation of Symbols

As I’m sure everyone is aware of, there was recently a violent terrorist attack perpetrated in the United States against a historically black church. This was clearly a vile, politically motivated act on the part of Roof, a White Nationalist. A classic case of agitation, Roof’s manifesto reveals he did it as an act to both inspire whites and demoralize blacks.

One thing the media has curiously latched onto is Roof’s love of Rhodesia and the Confederate States of America. In many of the pictures posted on his website (The Last Rhodesian), Roof can be seen sporting the symbols of both segregated states.

Thriving in the Kali Yuga: The Birth of Existential Traditionalism

There is, as René Guénon and various other traditionalist scholars tell us, no doubt we are living in the “age of Vice”, the Hindu Kali Yuga. As prophesied, men have become incredibly irreligious, rulers care nothing for the sacred laws, and drugs, sex, and general debauchery is viewed as the norm.

The Art of Orientalism or: What Westerners Get Wrong About Daoism

I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed yesterday, and I saw a post by the SETI Institute. As an avid fan of both science fiction and astronomy (science fact, I suppose), I almost always read what they write.

What I see is “Neil deGrasse Tyson Selects the Eight Books Every Intelligent Person on the Planet Should Read”. Now, I’m no fan of the new atheist crowd, but I read a lot, so I was curious. First of all, while his quips about the Bible, The Prince, and The Age of Reason are obviously problematic, his thoughts on the Art of War aren’t just “problematic”, they’re just plain wrong.