Canada’s intellectual culture is now like a barren soil that struggles to give life to even the simplest flora. They’re just not that smart. We make too many right wing cranks, self-help charlatans, blood-thirsty reactionaries, insipid centrists, and third-rate Hayekians. But which are our worst? We invite our new friends from the Harbinger Media Network …
Note: Hey all, We’re on break this week as we rest up and prepare for more top-notch programming, so this week’s episode is a rebroadcast of one of our favourites. It’s stardate 99040.01 and lead producer Jay Cockburn is temporarily taking over command of Darts and Letters for an episode. This week we enter the …
Why are there so many war games? They exploded in popularity post 9/11. Maybe you’ve played some of them. Or all of them. SOCOM: US Navy Seals. Call of Duty. Battlefield. Splinter Cell—and the entire deep library of Tom Clancy games. There’s plenty more, too. This ain’t just a story about the free market and …
If you eat, use a cell phone, connect to the internet, open a bank account, down a pint, or pick up a prescription in Canada, you’re probably experiencing the country’s familiar brand of oligopoly and monopoly. It’s arguably worse than the US. We’re basically three corporations in a trenchcoat. This arrangement means we unfortunately have …
You can’t have a functioning democracy without a trusted media. That fact explains the state of U.S. democracy, at least in part. The United States has the lowest rate of media trust in the industrialized world, with just under a third of respondents in a 2020 Reuters poll saying they trust the media they consume. …
We’ll save the Moby Dick puns for the episode itself, but suffice it to say that sinister game developers are on a whale hunt. This episode is about the sophisticated psychological tactics they use to hunt and capture their prey. Free to play mobile games as glorified slot machines, in-game purchases even for triple-A titles, …
Right wing money in academia is pervasive and influential. Libertarian-minded billionaires like the Kochs and their partners have funded scholars and think tanks across the US, and similar things go on in Canada too. The money shows us that the right spends it because they care about education. Maybe not in the classic way—higher learning, …
Programming note: It’s Major League Baseball postseason and Darts and Letters is (coincidentally) on a break this week. In honour of the playoffs, we’re running one of our favourite episodes — one fit for the season. America’s national pastime is being taken over by a woke mob and a global communist cabal. So say the …
There’s a foreign policy intellectual blob that serves as the architects for empire. They’re at academic departments, quasi-academic think tanks, and places like the RAND Corporation–famously lampooned in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation. These boring calculator men are part of why we have forever war. These people are part of a long tradition that …
Canada’s federal election is over. And if you were expecting a boring, uninspired contest followed by a return to the status quo, you weren’t disappointed. Zombie politics shuffles along trailing dead ideas and dead dogmas. On this episode, host Gordon Katic sits down with independent journalist, author, and podcaster Nora Loreto for a wide-ranging conversation …