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McCarthy’s Echo Chambers: The Lines Are Increasingly Social

McCarthy’s Echo Chambers: The Lines Are Increasingly Social

by | Aug 7, 2018 | ,

After the election of Donald Trump, I wrote a piece for the Libertarian Institute called “Avoiding the Abject Misery of Internet Political Dialogue”. It was my response to the increasingly uncivil discourse that I was seeing on social media, among friends and acquaintances. I even began explicitly following many people I know that I disagreed with profoundly on a wide variety of topics, in order to keep myself out of the echo chamber of opinion which I believe many including myself had settled into. My hope was that I could help to follow my own advice and make the discourse more civil....

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Latvian Capitalism

by | Apr 4, 2017 |

I was walking around near our building, we live in a building amongst some of the Khruhchoyovka, the Soviet-style apartment buildings in Riga, when I saw something that made me begin thinking about the nature of aging and living in a free market economy. To set the scene a little bit more, Riga is the capital of Latvia, a small country along the Baltic Sea that borders Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, and Estonia. Contrary to popular belief in the West, these types of buildings were much sought after in the former Soviet space. There was a lack of quality housing after WW2 left these countries...

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Understanding the Ron Paul Moment, Ten Years On

by | Feb 14, 2017 | , ,

“Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.” ― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War “They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” ― President George W Bush, 2001 “And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the...

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Avoiding the Abject Misery of Internet Political Dialogue

by | Feb 7, 2017 | , ,

The use of the internet by more and more people to participate in the political culture of this country and worldwide has made more extreme and radicalized nearly everyone who engages in it. People with whom you’d seldom have an interaction with in your every day, walking around life are suddenly in your social media stream, which is, for better or worse, the new physical “body”. Reactions to invasion of social media space with unwanted political dialogue provoke the same kinds of reactions as a physical assault in people, complete with physical reactions on the part of both participants....

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Phil Brown

Phil Brown currently lives in Riga, Latvia. He went to Miami University in Oxford, OH, where he studied Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs, and lived in Germany for four years. He offers editorial commentary about topics relating to liberty, specifically foreign policy and culture.


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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

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From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...

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