Category: Politics
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two abysses in a staring contest
The title of this post is how I described my experience of one of this week’s Internet Discourses to a friend of the show. I was not referring to the the Gaza discourse, as Sam Kriss is doing in the piece I’m about to excerpt from. But I might as well have been. You people…
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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…
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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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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…