politics
Nobody voted for it. Nobody even had the chance to cast a ballot or have a say. Its "designers" have never been elected and hardly anyone knows their names. Our "leaders" seem to think democracy is a bit of a drag to their plans for humanity&
science
Chairman Mao put it bluntly: power comes from the barrel of a gun. The world's power is held by those with nuclear weapons. The Second World War was ended with them and created two superpowers. To be the world's most powerful superpower, you need the world&
screenwriting
We all know it when we see it. Audiences are experts in sensing – and ignoring - the intentions of writers and filmmakers when they attempt to surreptitiously program their perception of reality. Stalin became fascinated with it and made the industrial capture of the art form a top political priority.
In 1798, Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he theorised the notion of a catastrophe occurring due to population growth exponentially outpacing agricultural production. In the 60s and 70s, Neo-Malthusianism took off with books such as The Limits to Growth, and China&
academia
You'd be forgiven for not knowing who these two people were, and there's a reason you don't. These "fathers of the Sexual Revolution" form the intellectual and supposedly moral basis of modern thinking around gender and sexuality. However, if you take a
communism
From the Black Liberation Army to Womens' Liberation to the Gay Liberation Front to Black Lives Matter, all rights movements have co-opted tactics linking back to the Soviet Union to achieve their goals: manipulating language, demanding "justice" for injury, pathologising detractors, infiltrating institutions, suppressing dissent, indoctrinating children,
los angeles
So you did it. You transplanted from somewhere else far away to the glittering City of Angels on the sunny west coast; full of wonder, bluster, and hopey-changey stuff. You read three hundred Reddit threads and fetishistic digital blog articles about the 10 things you need to know, only to
screenwriting
Composers who write sheet music publish it as an original literary work to a library catalogue, and record labels purchase the rights to make a sound recording of it in the form of up-front payment and/or royalties. Is there any reason producers shouldn't operate as record labels,
women
"Do today's global protests have anything in common?", asks the BBC in a November 2019 article. The answers they suggest are inequality, corruption, political freedom, and, in the last image, climate change. They seem to "miss" one wildly obvious observation: young women exhibiting deranged
academia
Outlawing Critical Race Theory and other "divisive concepts" in the education system is a welcome step, but it doesn't address the much bigger problem underneath. "Divisive" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", intellectually-speaking: Galileo and Darwin were divisive; debates divide at the
religion
Liberationism, n: A gnostic pagan Millenarian religion centred on the worship of the self, and its place in a hypothetical transhuman utopia achieved through collective abandonment of social conventions. The 60s and 80s were an orgy of self-congratulatory "liberation" back to primitive existence in the pursuit of escapist
film
Art is not about activism; drama is not about deconstruction; stories are not sociology; plots are not about propaganda or "power dynamics"; arcs are not "analysis"; ideas are not ideology; teleology is not "theory"; juxtaposition is not about "justice"; characters are not