Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Philosophy

  • in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse

    If—as seems to be the case—I am to join the ranks of middle-aged men yelling at clouds, I guess I can bear it if Adam Kotsko is in the vanguard: Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing…

  • sing swan song / remembering Damo Suzuki

    Word came over the wire yesterday that Damo Suzuki, best known as the frontman of krautrockers Can at their creative peak, had passed away. (Ten years after a colon cancer diagnosis, apparently, which puts the guy into the Wilko Johnson league of unexpected and defiant longevity.) It reminded me that I had the fortune to…

  • a general atmosphere in which a particular conclusion seems undeniable

    Building on yesterday’s post about writing yourself into (or out of) beliefs and opinions, I want to return to a piece from late last year which I keep rereading, and which I think has important lessons for us all in this year of many elections of consequence. The title is plain and forthright—“You Can’t Fact…

  • 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…

  • tools to cudgel or flatter

    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…