Better than blogs, not academic, but not for anyone with an IQ under 80.
“Christopher Hitchens once asked why women aren’t funny and got hissed off the stage. Two decades later, Gareth asks a harder question: has women’s entry into politics — and their near-total capture of the Democratic Party — actually made politics better, or just swapped one set of blind spots for another? From Thatcher to Kamala Harris, Kabul to Kentucky, this is not the column the Women’s Month calendar was expecting.”
Solomon Asch proved people will deny their own eyes to agree with a room full of strangers. Two decades later, most of the world did exactly that over masks, lockdowns and Fauci — and pretended it was science. Gareth goes back through the psychology of conformity, from Asch’s line experiments to information cascades, to ask why courage is so rare and the herd so comfortable.
Ugly people are probably not evil, but I’ve met enough people to suspect ugliness and moral failure occasionally share a bathroom. Before the professional victims have a panic attack, relax. I am obviously joking. Mostly. I’m not talking about people who lost the genetic lottery and ended up looking like they were assembled like Mr Potato Head in a collaboration between Stevie Wonder, Helen Keller, and Andrea Bocelli. Most of us are fairly average-looking.
South Africans are preparing for another election season, which means the country is once again drowning in slogans, promises, outrage and manufactured certainty. Every party insists it has the answer, and every manifesto reads like a glossy brochure nobody will read about a future nobody fully believes in. Every politician suddenly rediscovers potholes, unemployment and corruption a few months before asking for votes.
The internet promised humanity infinite knowledge. Instead, it often feels like we accidentally built an industrial-scale landfill for attention, entertainment and distraction. Artificial intelligence has accelerated this problem dramatically, and for the worse. Every day now, millions of images, videos, essays, songs, presentations, advertisements and opinions are generated instantly by people who previously lacked either the ability, patience or imagination to create them. Social media feeds are filling with synthetic motivation, synthetic beauty, synthetic expertise and synthetic emotion
The next global order may emerge quietly, through negotiation, trade and technology rather than tanks rolling across borders. For decades, most of us have understood geopolitics through inherited twentieth-century frameworks: capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism, Left versus Right, East versus West. The mainstream media still packages international affairs this way because conflict is easy to market and ideological storytelling is emotionally satisfying.