Beyond the Feed - 27 July, 2025
A weekly newsletter covering ideas, culture and society
1. The Crescent and the Guillotine
Paul Friesen, Minority of One
Paul Friesen’s article warns that Western countries are becoming too tolerant — so tolerant that they are starting to tolerate even ideas and practices that are deeply against freedom and basic rights. He uses the Maldives as an example: from the outside, it looks like a holiday paradise, but in reality, it’s a strict religious state where no other religion is allowed and dissent is harshly punished. Friesen argues that if Western societies aren’t careful, they could slowly head in the same direction by failing to stand up for their own values.
The author backs up his case by giving examples of how, in the name of multiculturalism and not wanting to offend anyone, Western institutions sometimes accept or ignore illiberal practices. He cites things like sharia arbitration in Britain, schools with intolerant teachings, and the reluctance to criticize extremism because of fear of being called “racist” or “Islamophobic.” According to Friesen, this “tolerance” can actually lead to the erosion of freedom and safety for everyone.
Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful.”
This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.
He calls for the West to remember its core values: freedom of speech, true pluralism with boundaries, and the courage to speak out against repression, rather than surrendering these values out of guilt or fear. The central warning is clear: tolerance shouldn’t mean letting go of your own principles, or soon there will be nothing left to tolerate.
2. Understanding the Post-Internet Irony World Through Himesh Reshammiya
Anurag Minus Verma, The Culture Cafe
Anurag Minus Verma explores how the internet has transformed our relationship with pop culture, using Himesh Reshammiya as a lens. He reflects on the late 2000s, a time when openly enjoying Himesh’s music in middle-class circles came with social penalties and was considered a guilty pleasure at best. As Orkut faded and the internet’s influence exploded, Anurag observes that “taste” moved online, and so did the performance of irony.
He shows how the rise of meme pages, ironic fandoms, and internet humour blurred the lines between mocking, genuinely enjoying, and “performing” affection for things once dismissed as cringey or lowbrow. Bollywood B-films, “bad” music, and faded stars like Himesh, Bobby Deol, and Emraan Hashmi became online cult icons, not because fans suddenly rediscovered artistic merit, but because sharing, mocking, and ironically celebrating them became a bonding ritual. Pages like “Himesh Doing Things” and memes labeling celebrities as “Lord” were of course never about sincerity, but about the freedom to celebrate with detachment, to belong without real emotional labor.
So irony, followed by post-irony, becomes essential for survival. Especially in a time like ours, where meaning, logic, and coherence seem to be in permanent breakdown. Irony, in that sense, is also a form of ideology where it allows us to say everything while believing nothing.
Or perhaps Irony is our collective placebo. We know it’s fake, we know it doesn’t heal but without it, the pain might become visible.
According to Anurag, this irony-fueled culture is both liberating and unsettling. It allows people to enjoy “cringe” content without shame, but also makes it hard to distinguish real feelings from performative ones. Irony, he argues, is now a kind of internet spirituality — ritualistic, repetitive, sometimes comforting, but also hollow. The act of enjoying becomes secondary to the act of being seen enjoying. In the end, he suggests, this cheerful numbness — the e-feeling of always being in the loop and posting joy, real or not — is perfectly suited to the digital age, even if we forget where sincerity ends and performance begins.
3. There's definitely something here
Palash, A Bigger SPalash
Palash reflects on his 15-year journey in Mumbai and develops a personal theory about “home.” For him, home isn’t about comfort or perfection, it’s about learning to accept and reconcile with its pain and flaws, which in turn makes it truly your own. He draws a parallel between this uneasy peace and the unique character of Mumbai: a city that constantly challenges, frustrates, and tests its residents, yet manages to inspire fierce loyalty and belonging.
Palash begins with stories of discomfort as a newcomer — stifling humidity, social prejudices while apartment-hunting, the relentless pressure of crowded roads and high rents. But even as the city makes life hard, he discovers the everyday kindness and helpfulness of ordinary people, especially migrants trying to make a life in Mumbai. It’s this “kindness by default,” he argues, that sets Mumbai apart and binds its people together across backgrounds.
I discovered a new aspect of the city - kindness by default. This is a very common experience for someone who moves into the city. Ask anyone. I have long wondered what the city has to do with it. Because it’s the same people everywhere - we, Indians. But for some reason, people behave differently here. Those autowallas, like most autowallas here, were not native Maharashtrians. They were migrants, as most autowallas in Mumbai are. So it’s not the people, it’s the city.
That was the first time I felt that there’s probably something here.
He explores how ambition and hard work form the backbone of the city’s culture, shared by both the old-money rich and new arrivals, all part of a cycle where struggle is valued rather than hidden. Despite the city’s endless obstacles and chaotic pace, striving and resilience become shared values, a kind of trauma-bonding that connects everyone. Ultimately, Palash says loving Mumbai, like loving home, means making peace with its hardships, not expecting comfort. The messy, noisy, damp arrival from the airport doesn’t feel inviting but it signals belonging. “There’s definitely something here,” he concludes, suggesting that Mumbai’s magic lies in this very process of reconciling with its pain and finding a deeper sense of home within it.
4. On Being Fundamentally Unemployable
The Candid Clodhopper
The essay offers an interesting critique of modern work culture through the lens of those who simply cannot, or will not, conform to traditional employment. The author introduces the concept of being "fundamentally unemployable," not due to laziness or bad habits, but because something essential about who they are makes them incompatible with the demands of contemporary jobs. This isn't about people who struggle to find work; it's about those whose very nature rebels against the modern employment structure.
The author argues that modern jobs demand two fundamental sacrifices that some people cannot make: surrendering their time to employers regardless of actual productivity, and tolerating endless "bullshit"—meaningless, soul-crushing work that produces nothing of lasting value. Drawing contrasts with traditional craftsmanship (blacksmiths, architects, cathedral builders), the author mourns how modern employment has transformed dignified, creative work into corporate compliance and participation in what David Graeber famously called "bullshit jobs." Where previous generations built cathedrals and lasting structures, today's workers install drywall in chain restaurants.
It is no secret that most jobs are bullshit—indeed it’s been a meme for quite some time. At best, bullshit jobs are devoid of meaning and plagued by monotony and malaise; at their worst, they’re all of that in addition to being grossly immoral and deleterious in terms of their effect on individuals and society. Such jobs demand a sacrifice of human dignity, morality, creative potential, and time that could be spent much more meaningfully. Generally speaking, it doesn’t matter to employers what the best way of doing something is nor does it matter to them what the right thing to do is; rather, the company has policies for that and employees are expected to police themselves—or be policed by the “human resources” department—according to company policy. It doesn’t matter if the policies are bullshit, as bullshit is part of the job itself: they’re called “bullshit jobs” because the work itself is bullshit. Sometimes it’s bullshit to the extent that it is simply and completely unnecessary work, other times it is bullshit in terms of an ersatz or undignified quality. Most modern white-collar work is completely unnecessary; if they’re not outright scams like finance and insurance, they’re little more than adult daycares: HR departments staffed with women to keep them from becoming mothers, tech firms satiating nerds with six figure salaries to keep them from becoming men.
The Candid Clodhopper's central thesis is that our culture has conflated "work" with "jobs" and "career" with "climbing the corporate ladder," obscuring possibilities for meaningful work outside traditional employment. For those who refuse to dedicate half their waking hours to producing particle board mediocrity, the solution isn't despair but creativity — finding work that honours both their God-given talents and materials from Creation itself. The fundamentally unemployable, rather than being society's misfits, might actually be its most faithful guardians of human dignity and meaningful labor.
5. Scapegoating the Algorithm
Dan Williams, Asterisk
Dan Williams argues that the widespread belief that social media platforms have caused America’s deep epistemic crisis (marked by polarization, mistrust of institutions, misinformation, and conspiracy theories) is overstated and not well supported by evidence. He contends that many of these challenges existed long before social media, have deep historical roots, and are primarily driven by broader political realignments and cultural divisions, especially the “diploma divide” separating less-educated conservative voters from more-educated liberals. Williams emphasizes that social media, while not harmless, mostly reflects and sometimes accelerates existing divisions rather than causing them.
To make his case, Williams draws on a broad range of historical context, showing that political ignorance, conspiracy thinking, and elite disinformation have long plagued American society. He highlights that political polarization began increasing decades before social media’s rise due to party realignment and media fragmentation. He cites scientific research, including large randomized field experiments, demonstrating that altering people’s social media exposure has minimal effects on their political attitudes or behaviours. Williams also explains that people actively select information that fits their beliefs, meaning correlations between social media and misinformation often result from user choice, not platform algorithms. He concludes that focusing blame on social media oversimplifies a complex, multi-faceted crisis rooted in enduring social and political factors beyond any single platform or technology. Read here
The Death of the Post-Left
Oliver Bateman, Compact
Oliver Bateman’s “The Death of the Post-Left” examines how the short-lived “post-left” movement—born out of pandemic-era frustration with both mainstream liberalism and right-wing culture wars failed to become the real class-based populist force it aspired to be. Emerging from leftist disillusionment, especially following Bernie Sanders’s 2020 defeat, the post-left was composed of contrarian commentators and activists who rejected identity politics and sought to recenter economic class as the central issue. Drawing inspiration from Marxist critics of liberal diversity, the movement positioned itself as uniquely equipped to challenge elite power, but quickly found itself fragmented, drifting either rightwards or folding back into the liberal mainstream.
The post-left had valid structural critiques, but was unable to transform these into stable institutions or alliances, as the two-party system gave it no path to power. Instead, we got a dynamic of polarization. The left-liberal establishment dubbed anything outside mainstream identity talk as bigotry, fueling resentment that found a home on the right. The post-left’s contrarian energy became an identity of its own, but most of its members drifted steadily rightward under the gravitational pull of higher-profile conservative media. The resulting reconfiguration has left pre-existing partisan divides intact, give or take a few details. The system triumphed; the post-left lost.
Bateman argues that the post-left’s core weakness was its lack of robust institutional support or a true labor base: its rhetorical radicalism could not translate into organizational power or durable alliances. In practice, the movement was often a staging ground for leftists transitioning to the right, as the absence of labor institutions left them vulnerable to being absorbed into conservative media and culture wars. Attempts to forge alliances with populist right figures (including during Trump’s second term with overtures toward labor and tariffs) ultimately only reinforced old partisan divisions and GOP orthodoxy. Bateman concludes that, in the face of globalized capital and rigid two-party dynamics, the post-left’s lack of real organizational muscle meant its moment was fleeting — its valid critiques overwhelmed by entrenched polarization and economic structures that rhetorical subversion alone could not dent. Critiques of left hypocrisy, he suggests, became another waystation on America’s endless ideological journey, leaving the political landscape fundamentally unchanged. Read here