Category: Opinion

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Opinion

Thoughts on Christian Zionism

I got the urge to write this particular blog after taking a gander at an Al-Jazeera documentary about Christian Zionism. It’s made me think harder about the link between religion and politics, and my own perception of the situation. It’s challenged how I see the Christian influence on the decisions being made by these Zionists, but not totally overturned it. It made me realize that my critique was shallow and that it needed to become more sophisticated. Now, I’m not going to achieve that right here, but this will be a baby step.

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Opinion

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause

I’ve written a blog giving my thoughts on the book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I posted it over at Journal of Cogency rather than here because it’s a longer piece, and it being on politics meant I could justify adding it there. Check it out; the prose is a bit messy but I hope the points are constructive.

Palestine: A Virtuous Cause on Journal of Cogency

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Opinion

Value and Control of the Military

I’m about 3 & ¾ chapters into Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money and I started having outside thoughts about it, so I took some time to glance at some other material and now I’m going to ramble about my thoughts for a bit. The issue I’m trying to get at right now is the implications of the monopoly of violence on the institution of money. To try and make sense of this, I looked at some writing about civilian control of the military; I don’t think I will take any direct insights, nor am I really ready to critique any of that literature, but it did get me thinking in a useful way.

If we take the phenomenon being studied here as being “value and its relation to the civilian control of the military”, then there are two questions we need to answer. First, what is the connection between value (as in money) and control of the military? Second, is there any value (as in moral weight) in civilian control of the military? Please don’t misunderstand; here I am specifically not equating money and moral weight, but I didn’t want to sit down and dig out better words for the two “values” here. What I will say is that I think understanding these two distinct concepts will provide some insight into how money operates as a social agent.

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Opinion

Fief, Province, and Monopoly

Studying money is very hard. I’ve looked at a few different attempts to define it and I have skimmed through Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money. His answer to the question implied in the book’s title is complex and I don’t grasp it well enough yet to explain it. One thing I do understand, however, is that he believes that the value of money is primarily determined by society. I agree with this wholeheartedly. But as far as the social mechanics of this interaction, I don’t know that I will find the answer laid out in Ingham’s work. I might find it elsewhere, or I might have skipped over it and I’ll find it when I make another pass through the work.

I say that by way of introducing this blog’s topic, which is finding (or creating) a distinction between monopoly, province, and fief as subdivisions of a state. What I’m interested in is how money works as part of the state-society’s machinery of coercion. To understand that better, I wanted to understand how the economy is broken up from the sense of power relations. The decision to subdivide territory and establish regional administrations, and the type of regional administrations established, are all questions that are deeply tied in with the economy, even though they are not classically economic concerns.

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Opinion

Top Ten Mid-Level Big Hitters: Stoner Rock

Finally, here’s a lighter topic: music. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while but just took the time to start now. I want to talk about songs by lesser-known bands that still really hit for me. That’s the idea behind “mid-level big hitters”: a mid-level band (both in popularity and appeal of their music) who produces a song that’s way better than it has any right to be.

I get that this framing is kind of condescending, but I’m using it because this is how I think about a lot of these. It’s not that it’s a backhanded compliment (remember, the only thing you can really do with the back of your hand is slap someone with it), it’s that I think the fact that these songs are examples of a band kind of pushing past their normal limits. It’s not just that these are the bands’ best song; as I say in the write-ups (which I did before writing this intro portion), these songs are better than the best songs of a lot of more talented bands.

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Opinion

A Bias on Money and Coercion

I know I said that I was going to blog on a lighter topic today but I got a bug up my ass and I want to talk about money. More to the point, I want to get down some ideas about what I want to investigate in regards to money. My main interest is how money works as a method of persuasion-cogency-coercion. The reason I’m writing this is actually because I’m not finding a lot of literature on this already. I’m hoping that by laying out what I’m looking for, it’ll help me investigate further. And if it gives you any ideas on where I might look, let me know!

One process or phenomenon that I’m especially interested in looking into is what I call “financialization.” This probably already does have a name but I haven’t discovered it yet. What I will say is that this financialization is not financialization as typically thought of. I’m not talking about the creation of credit instruments right now. When I say financialization, what I mean is the process by which more things become accessible by (and in some ways interchangeable with) money.

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Opinion

The Case for Taking Over the Democratic Party

I swear I’ll try to do something lighter next time, but right now I want to talk some politics. I want to make a case for the socialist left to try taking control of the Democratic Party in America.

This isn’t my first, best, most ideal path forward. I would like a new party to form in this country, one which isn’t beholden to the old ones which have brought so much misery to America and to the world. So what I decided to do was take a look at the times in which the two-party orthodoxy in the US has been challenged.

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Opinion

Deep Waters

The thing about blogging, if that’s what I’m doing, is that I have to do it in the middle of the day. I can’t save it for later. And that’s a lot of why I haven’t done it that much, I don’t always hang onto things that I want to talk about in this medium. But I’ve got a bit of time and something on my mind so let’s talk.

If you’ve followed me on social media for a while, and if your timeline isn’t too cluttered, you’ve probably seen me doing a thread on an argument before. Not an argument thread, but a thread about an argument which is taking place somewhere else. It’s typically me breaking down how I think things went, devices I think worked, when people overextended, etc. A kind of post-game report.

If you don’t really know me, you might assume that what I’m doing is gloating, and there’s a little bit of that. But these aren’t like popular threads and I don’t do them with the expectation that other people are going to be interested. That’s why you will very rarely see me do that other popular move: arguing by quote tweeting. If I quote tweet it’s generally because someone has said something particularly absurd to where I’m not even taking it seriously. Much more often, you’ll see the other person quote tweet and then I’ll follow them with a regular reply. I don’t need an audience, though I don’t reject one; my arguing style is not sneaky, so there’s nothing to hide.

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Opinion

Anti-Intellectualism on the Left

I just want to write about a trend that I have noticed on the “online left”, one which is probably common through all of the history of leftism, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc., but which is really striking me recently. I don’t know how long I will write but I need to put this into a space which is different than the one where I usually talk, and maybe having to slow down will help me come to more useful thoughts.

The trend I’ve noticed is anti-intellectualism. I could be specific and say “anti-academia” because that is how it usually manifests, but I believe that it is just garden variety anti-intellectualism.

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Opinion

Religion in TTRPG Fantasy

Ganymede pouring Zeus a libation (Attic red-figure calyx krater by the Eucharides Painter, c. 490–480 BCE)
Ganymede pouring Zeus a libation

I recently watched a video that I’d had on my watch later for a while, so we’re here to talk about religion in fantasy worlds. Well, specifically, religion in fantasy roleplaying games which involve interacting with the gods. Seems like I’m narrowing it pretty hard off the bat, but it’s necessary. See, the video I watched was “Do Fantasy Pantheons Make Sense?” by the YouTube channel The Grungeon Master, and he says that this is common across all fantasy. I’m not sure that’s true. It is common in D&D, however, and in many other fantasy RPG settings that take tropes from D&D, so I want to talk about this in terms of worldbuilding.

There’s a lot that I agree with The Grungeon Master on, and the video articulated a feeling that I don’t think I’ve done a good job putting across before. Specifically, why is it that D&D-style polytheism feels so alien to people who have studied ancient polytheism like that of Greece or the Norse countries, or who are affiliated with modern polytheism like in Hinduism or various folk, regional, and new religions. Grungeon lays out several points (not in this manner, I’m paraphrasing here) which I think are important to fleshing out the dissonant feeling that tabletop polytheism gives.

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