A timeless, heartbreaking tale spotlighting the fragile human spirit's quest for love and self acceptance among a tangled web of wealth and status. The allure to join the proverbial "party" proves so powerful that morals, integrity and hope for an honest (or satisfying) existence are not only unattainable, but undesirable.
About the Creator
Merrie Sanders
Writing for fun and as an escape from the everyday. After all, what is life for if not to create?
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Frasier
What do you get when you send an intelligent but egoistic man to live with his blue-collar, curmudgeon father and eccentric live-in physical therapist? Throw in an equally neurotic and clinically competitive brother, and you get a superb exemplification of the phrase "Do as I say, not as I do."
By Merrie Sanders2 years ago in Critique
Standing While Falling
Quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche "He who wrestles long with monsters should beware lest he himself become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Man is not destroyed by suffering, but by the meaning he makes of it."
By LUCCIAN LAYTH6 days ago in Critique
Angry People Click More: The Economics of Manufactured Dissent
(Ideas from the book The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent, Routledge, 2024) Abstract This article examines the formula ‘angry people click more’ as a core logic of contemporary online media and as a structural transformation of propaganda in the digital age. It argues that the defining feature of the current attention economy is not only the circulation of misinformation, but the systematic deployment of openly implausible claims designed to provoke moral outrage and sustain profitable engagement cycles. The analysis links Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year ‘rage bait’ to earlier lexical markers of epistemic crisis such as ‘truthiness’ and ‘post-truth’, and situates this trajectory against the older ‘manufacture of consent’ model of Herman and Chomsky. While classical propaganda in totalitarian and mass-media systems sought ideological unity through censorship and the Big Lie, the emerging Propaganda 2.0 model, articulated by Peter Ayolov, monetises anger by manufacturing dissent and deliberately populating the public sphere with absurd, polarising narratives. The article interprets this dynamic through the allegories of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and Václav Havel’s greengrocer, showing how the move from fearful silence to permanent online rage changes both the psychology and political economy of propaganda. Drawing on Evgeny Morozov’s critique of fake-news moral panics, Frances Haugen’s disclosures about Facebook, and the documentary The Social Dilemma, it concludes that anger has become a tradable asset and that blatant lying has shifted from an authoritarian instrument of control to a market mechanism in a global ‘free trade in slogans’.
By Peter Ayolov4 days ago in Critique
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For only being fifty words per the requirement, this really does let you know all you need to know about F. Scott’s work. Whether you’ve read it before and seen both versions of the film, or you’re just now discovering this piece of classic literature, you understand what you’re getting yourself into.