Category: Politics
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history is constantly being re-animated, re-mixed, and re-heated
Dang, how have I missed out on reading Aaron Z Lewis before now? Please excuse the following long stream of lengthy excerpts, but there’s too much good stuff here to pass by… Each subculture has an implicit understanding of its “ideological conversion funnel”. This phrase, borrowed from digital marketing, refers to the stages that people…
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it takes a village to hate a capital
An excerpt from a chewy Will Davies longread about WhatsApp at Teh Graun from a few weeks back: WhatsApp is certainly an unbeatable conduit for circulating conspiracy theories, but we must also admit that it seems to be an excellent tool for facilitating genuinely conspiratorial behaviour. One of the great difficulties when considering conspiracy theories…
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the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly…
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the victim is now imagined in the absence of its denials
Some cheery theory from Brad Evans… Giorgio Agamben has been disagreeable on so many points. But his autopsy of the present has led us to one distinguishable truth. As the providential machine of liberalism gasps its final cold breath, the new age, the new normal that has already arrived is a global techno-theodicy. An age…
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they refuse to engage with the roots of the problem
Scientists, public intellectuals, and journalists bemoan denialism, but have no solutions to offer apart from urging us to fight harder not to get sucked into an ocean of misinformation. This is because they refuse to engage with the roots of the problem, which cannot be addressed by doubling down on the denial that there are…