The United States of America was founded as republic. It does not recognize that members of a hereditary aristocracy have formal legal power to make laws or command other persons, or any personal legal rights and privileges. America has social classes, based on wealth and income. Sociologists recognize 6 classes: Upper Class or the SuperRich; …
A Wulfrunian is a resident of Wolverhampton in the English midlands, once an industrial town in the English Black Country. In the 19th century, many Irish immigrants to England lived and worked there. The English journalist and writer Sathnam Sangera notes in his 2021 social history book EmpireLand: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain that …
Energy Transitions by Vaclav Smil, published in 2010, is short. Reading it took time. The book is a narrative survey of some studies of changes in the way humans have used energy to perform work. Humans and animals convert biological mass (food) and heat and light from the sun into chemicals that grow into muscles …
Rupert Sheldrake still believes in and writes about parapsychology. Mr. Sheldrake had an experience in the late 1970s and became convinced that he had recognized something important about the relationship between ideas and reality. At points, Sheldrake takes the posture of a pragmatist like William James. But where James was soft on conversion expeiences and …
Joe Bageant was a journalist who wrote about how America misunderstood its white working class. He said in an inteview with the BBC in 2008 that white working class “rednecks” have political power, and were tending to conservative populism. Bageant’s comment on the financial crisis of 2008, Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball almost predicted the …
In the Marginal Revolutions blog, the economist Tyler Cowen mentioned American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America as a partial explanation for support for the candidacy of Donald Trump among American working class and middle class voters in the midwest in the 2016 American elections. I found a …
Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore’s Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one’s moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the ‘ribbon culture’. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting …
The National Post has been publishing a series of articles titled “Beyond Belief”. A piece by Charles Lewis or Charlie Lewis (not the Charles Lewis of 60 Minutes and the Center for Public Integrity) titled “The Trouble with Mary”, featured at AL Daily, discussed the psychology and semantics of “belief” and “faith”. Lewis found a …
The Golden Compass has been criticized for its negative presentation of organized religion. Its principal critic its the American Catholic League, a conservative body that speaks for conservative and traditional elements in the Catholic Church in America. The League says that the movie, like the books, promotes atheism, but their grievance appears to me to …
Another piece of reportage and ideas served up by AL Daily. Christine Rosen writing in the New Atlantis on Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. This proves topical as I have signed up on Facebook, using some of the message and communication resources. Rosen’s work is pretty good – her essay on cameras, photography and …