Tag Archives: politics

Retailcore: Music, Atmosphere, and the Politics of Pleasantness: A White Paper on Retailcore as a Genre, Its Audiences, and Artist Incentives

Posted on January 1, 2026 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Retailcore is not merely background music played in stores; it is a recognizable aesthetic genre shaped by commercial space, emotional regulation, and the economics of attention. This white paper examines retailcore as a cultural form, the varied ways … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Formation and Its Failure in Contemporary Society

Posted on December 31, 2025 by nathanalbright

Modern societies are increasingly marked by dysfunction in attention, self-regulation, moral reasoning, vocational stability, civic trust, and interpersonal responsibility. These failures are often attributed to individual psychological weakness, political polarization, or the disruptive effects of technology. While each of these … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Declaratory Act as a Structural Error in Parliament’s Management of Colonial Discontent

Posted on December 30, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The Declaratory Act (1766) was intended by the Parliament of Great Britain to restore authority after the repeal of the Stamp Act. Instead, it entrenched colonial suspicion and accelerated a pattern of mistrust. This white paper argues that … Continue reading →

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White Paper: A Biblicist Framework for Engaging the Political Nature of Contemporary Life Without Partisan Capture

Posted on December 29, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Contemporary life is unavoidably political. Questions of authority, justice, coercion, property, family, speech, education, war, and welfare permeate daily existence. Yet Scripture nowhere authorizes believers to subordinate moral reasoning to secular ideological systems—whether partisan, nationalist, revolutionary, technocratic, or … Continue reading →

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Church of God, Musings | Tagged , , , , | 15 Comments

White Paper: Irony at the Edge: A Typology of Ironic Ages and Their Relationship to Civilizational Crisis

Posted on December 28, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Periods that elevate irony, ambiguity, and complexity to cultural ideals often coincide with moments of advanced institutional strain. This paper proposes a typology of “ironic ages”—historical phases in which societies celebrate detachment, layered meaning, and skepticism toward moral … Continue reading →

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White Paper: From Sincerity to Irony: When, How, and Why Criticism Came to Distrust Emotional Openness—and What This Shift Is Not

Posted on December 28, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Over the past century and a half, Western critical culture has undergone a marked transformation: emotional sincerity and openness, once regarded as indicators of moral seriousness and artistic authenticity, came to be viewed with suspicion, while irony, ambiguity, … Continue reading →

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Visibility Without Power: Lead Singers, Band Identity, and the Paradox of Unequal Equality

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary This white paper examines a recurring paradox in popular music groups: lead singers who are the most visible, recognizable, and commercially symbolic members of a band nevertheless report feeling structurally unequal within those same bands. Using Peter Cetera … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Analytical Value of Minor Powers: Why Comparative Analysis Must Include the Small, the Marginal, and the Overlooked

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Historical, political, and institutional analysis has long privileged the goals and achievements of major powers—empires, great states, dominant institutions, and hegemonic actors. While such focus is understandable, it is analytically incomplete. This white paper argues that examining the … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Post Office Horizon Scandal: Legal and Moral Implications—and What It Teaches About Technology Management

Posted on December 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive summary The UK Post Office Horizon scandal is a canonical failure of socio-technical governance: an accounting system (Horizon, supplied by Fujitsu) produced apparent “shortfalls,” and those shortfalls were treated—organizationally and legally—as proof of human dishonesty rather than as a … Continue reading →

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Invisible Culture and Everyday Power

Posted on December 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Power is often imagined as loud: uniforms, proclamations, police lines, ideological slogans. Yet some of the most durable forms of power are quiet, ambient, and rarely named. They operate not through command but through expectation, not through force but through … Continue reading →

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