I didn’t know much about the Barbie movie before going to see it. In fact, I was not even planning on seeing it or aware that it would be something I would be interested in. But as many people I know poured in to see it, and as much discourse emerged, I accepted an invite to go check it out last weekend. This film has attracted lots of commentary from conservative or anti-woke centrist reviewers. Within this camp are first what one may deem the passionate haters. Under this view, Barbie is a woke and gratuitously man-hating feminist manifesto. I will write how I can see why it is interprete ..read more

The Cold War popularized the term “totalitarianism” in the academy, which essentially served as a catch-all word that equivocates Nazism and communism. It is deployed by the left today, but is also a favourite of the right, and essentially serves to portray big government as something necessarily fascist. This is amusing to me, because I think the popularization of the term was a fundamentally leftist-intellectual phenomenon that would later evolve into something else conservatives despise: wokeness. Read more ..read more

I’ve been trying to articulate how I view the connection between the modern day left, its politics, why academia politics appeal to college-aged youth, and why today’s left is massively alienating to the rest of society. But I suppose that is what a Substack is for - to try! It is hard to sum up neatly what exactly is the underlying philosophy in the humanities and social sciences, but the best I can offer is this: things are not what they seem. I will call this the underlying mantra. Once you understand that this is what underlies the teachings and research in these departments, you will begi ..read more

“The individual is both a given and a goal of liberalism. It is a given, but one that is often unaware of its identity as an individual. All forms of collective identity: ethnic, national, religious, caste, and so on impede into an individual’s awareness of his individuality. Liberalism encourages the individual to become himself; that is, to be free of all those social identities and dependencies that constrain and define the individual from the outside […] As for what the purpose of this freedom [from ties, identifications, and restrictions on individual will], liberals remain silent. To as ..read more

It’s just me today approaching the issue of a boom in copyright lawsuits in the music industry. In light of these lawsuits, I ask: is copyright law serving artists the way it’s supposed to? To find out, we need to think about what the purpose of copyright law is and whether it is fulfilling or stifling this purpose. To do so, I look philosophical theories of property and apply them to musical copyright to help us reason through this problem. This is a project for my intellectual property law class that I took this semester at UBC under Professor Jon Festinger. Thank you to Professor Festinger ..read more

Image: ICC-CPI International criminal justice is partly motivated by outrage. We read about shocking actions of leaders worldwide and feel prompted to take action that expresses moral indignation towards it.[1] There is a basic instinct that those who do morally outrageous things ought to be punished for what they have done, and that they cannot continue to act with impunity. In international criminal law, this means that state sovereignty does not spare a state’s leader from justice: the ICC will intervene if a state is unable or unwilling to investigate serious crimes.[2] On the other hand ..read more

I don’t read much of the New York Times, but came across this piece making the rounds entitled “Diet Culture is Unhealthy. It’s Also Immoral.” Because this piece concerns two things that have been very present in my life (philosophy and diets), I felt compelled to share some thoughts the article prompted. Not all these thoughts are responses to claims in the article directly, but rather just some things and trends it got me thinking about. (Getty Images) Establishing the benefits of a healthy weight I want to start by talking about a trend I see in fat activism. It’s in this article, and it’s ..read more

A tension exists between the right of private individuals to bind themselves to agreements as they see fit without government restriction and the public concern with stronger parties to a contract taking advantage of weaker parties. We may call this the tension between freedom of contract and protection of weaker parties. This tension is particularly brought out in contracts between a layperson and a sophisticated commercial actor. It is also brought out in contracts between a worker and his employer, which was the case in Heller v Uber Technologies Inc 2020 SCC 16 [“Uber”]. An authority on th ..read more

Nayirah al-Sabah giving a false testimony to congress From liberal feminists comparing Bernie Sanders to an abusive ex-boyfriend to emotional police meltdowns about police brutality videos, victim and trauma-oriented language is the new way to advance a political position.  This shift is not entirely new, but it is gaining predominance for two reasons. First, psychological terminology has entered mainstream thought and parlance as we are having more open conversations about how poor mental health negatively impacts peoples’ lives. In other words, it has expanded our vocabulary. Second, t ..read more

Everyone has a funny story about the time their parents first caught them drinking. For me, I was in high school. My mom called my Jido (grandfather) to come talk to me because she didn’t know how to deal with it. My Jido was always the man with a glass of wine in his hand and a fully stacked bar in his basement. I thought it was hilarious that my mom was getting my Jido of all people to give me what I thought would be a stern talking to about drinking. My Jido picked me up in his sturdy Volvo on a rainy Saturday morning. Whenever he would drive, he would always request that I sit in the fron ..read more