Announcements – Gus diZerega

Michael Warren Davis’s “King of the Wild:” Getting everything wrong about Wicca is hard, but not impossible

Posted on September 6, 2022September 8, 2022 by Gus

Academically, I am a Political Scientist and a Gardnerian Witch, in both cases for about 40 years. I encountered the Craft soon after gaining my Ph.D. at Berkeley. I cut my ideological teeth as a young conservative in high school … Read more

WORKING PAPER Outgrowing Methodological individualism: Emergence, spontaneous order, and civil society

Posted on July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 by Gus

working paper – comments encouraged.

“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

Deng Xiaoping

“it depends in the end on what one’s definition of methodological individualism is.”

Bruce Caldwell

Abstract

Methodological … Read more

Strange Bedfellows: The Christian Right, Radical Islam, and the Hindu Right

Posted on June 1, 2020June 1, 2020 by Gus

Radical Islam easily finds common ground with the religious right on women’s issues. This point ultimately led Dinesh D’Souza to blame American cultural freedoms for the Islamic radicals’ legitimate dislike of us! D’Souza is an important conservative writer, biographer of … Read more

Looking Deeply: NeoPagans, Domination, and the ‘Woke’

Posted on February 24, 2020November 15, 2022 by Gus

Our community is divided over issues of sex and gender, often to the point of truly poisonous communications directed towards those with other points of view. In a way this division seems strange. Sex is a biological category. Gender is … Read more

Power, Evil, and the Crisis of Our Times: an animist view

Posted on January 31, 2020January 11, 2022 by Gus

Gus diZerega

Presented at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies, Jan. 25-6, 2020

Auschwitz guards and staff on holiday.1944

In 2013 I published Faultlines: The 60s, the Culture War, and the Return of the Divine Feminine. Written largely in 2010, … Read more

Transforming the Cultural Appropriation Debate: Pagan and magickal insights.

Posted on September 2, 2017April 28, 2023 by Gus

The common academic issue of whether or not one engages in ‘cultural appropriation’ has divided the Pagan community. I have been very explicit in my dislike of the idea, but in working out just why I dislike the concept I … Read more

Thoughts on shooting Congressmen and the dissolution of America

Posted on June 14, 2017June 23, 2017 by Gus

The attempted murder of several Congressmen and shooting of one marks another step in the progressive dissolution of the U.S. occurring before our eyes. That the shooter could have been either from the right or the left indicates how close … Read more

Why would Russia want Trump to win? And why would Trump go long with it?

Posted on November 2, 2016January 8, 2017 by Gus

In an inexplicably naïve article Brendan Gauthier at Salon argued that Russia was the only country that seemed to want Donald Trump to be president. But rather than asking why this is so, or wondering what Russia might reasonably do … Read more

Circles and Lines in “The Wolf at Twilight”

Posted on September 29, 2016June 23, 2017 by Gus

I was started along this line of thought while reading Kent Nerburn’s powerful, moving, painful and hauntingly beautiful The Wolf at Twilight: An Indian Elder’s Journey through a Land of Ghosts and Shadows. There are many levels to this … Read more

The Trance of Belief: Part I.

Posted on April 27, 2016October 15, 2018 by Gus

I have been both fascinated and appalled at how quickly mostly the political right has abandoned reason and evidence in favor of assertion and arrogance in discussing issues. Here is what I think is going on. I published it in … Read more