Author: thedoomeddiva

How Moral Panic Hijacks Individual Autonomy

[A] human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good
and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork
orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and
juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since
this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. (Burgess)

Resisting Passivity in Rebel Without a Cause

A snapshot of 1950s America looks different to different people. An idea floats among public discourse even today that the 1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver accurately represented life in America, but the external polish of suburbia harshly conflicted with the slowly rotting foundation of “traditional” life. The Cold War took up the mantle of global tensions after World War II introduced the atomic bomb.