Category: General
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you trick yourself into thinking that it’s true
John Higgs, in his most recent newsletter, begins by mentioning a piece he wrote for The Big Issue proposing that the super-rich be put in prison, and comparing it to the political notion now known as limitarianism (which is pretty much the same idea, just without the prison bit). Typically modest, Higgs discounts any possibility…
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a pattern we are doomed to repeat
Dave Karpf is doing sterling work on what we might call the uppermost archaeological layer of paleofutures—to the extent that the various vague plans I had to write more in this direction have been shelved pretty much permanently. Leave it to the person with the headstart and the bit between their teeth, you know? There…
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tools to cudgel or flatter
Bit of a callback here to last week’s post: Addressing the vacuity of the words fascism and democracy, [Orwell] wrote “the word fascism has no meaning except insofar as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Calling something a democracy is not very different except that “we are praising it.” Fascism is reduced to meaning not good…
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09JAN23 / accessions
Moore & O’Neill’s League omnibus: somehow the institution never got around to acquiring this one, nor even reading it? It was mentioned at Eruditorium Press a few weeks back, it was there on the shelf, and the department did what the department does. Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time: because all sorts of people—including the sort of…
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you can never step in the same blog twice
I think I’ve known this for a while, and I dare say it’s been obvious to many others for even longer, but I finally hit on a concise formulation of it, and wanted to get it down for my own benefit as much as for any other reason: The reason it’s hard to (re)start and…