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Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part I
Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person.” There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we
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Rural vs. Urban and Our Techno Capitalist Future
There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside … while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy …while the bad guys live in a
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Political Correctness and the Democrats’ Tactical Idiocy
It's interesting that the New York Times, the primary vehicle for promoting elite ideological thinking in American society, ran two contrasting stories in their Daily podcast about how political correctness is playing such a divisive role in America's cultural divide. On Tuesday and Wednesday it focused on the state of the Democratic Party in Missouri
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A Post-Secular Ideology of Justice
Naivete is the great taboo for all intellectuals. At all costs avoid the appearance of it, especially in this era during which the hermeneutics of suspicion legitimates or delegitimates most of our high-level discourse. But this hermeneutics of suspicion traces back to Golden Age Athens, the Age of the Sophists there, prominnent among whom was
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Ontological Dizziness, Our Collective Madness, and a Possible Path to a Cure
Nature loves to conceal herself. Heraclitus, Frag. 10 Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having rude souls. Heraclitus, Frag. 4 Though the Logos is common, yet the many live as if they had an understanding of their own. Heraclitus, Frag 92 Crazy means not being in your right mind. I am interested in
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Our Collective Insanity
Nature loves to conceal herself. Heraclitus, Frag. 10 Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having rude souls. Heraclitus, Frag. 4 Though the Logos is common, yet the many live as if they had an understanding of their own. Heraclitus, Frag 92 Crazy means not being in your right mind. I am interested in
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Of Supermen and Last Men
From article in Seattle Times about the offers cities are making to attract Amazon's HQ2: But the most far-reaching offer is from Fresno, California. That city of half a million isn’t offering any tax breaks. Instead it has a novel plan to give Amazon special authority over how the company’s taxes are spent. Fresno promises
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Down The Breitbart Hole
From the NYT 'Magazine article "Down the Breitbart Hole", which profiles Breitbart's editor in chief Alex Marlow: To the extent that there is a coherent ideology behind Breitbart, we’ve also done a crummy job of figuring out what it is. A good place to begin is with Andrew Breitbart, whose foundational philosophy is pretty thoroughly
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Kelly and the 25th Amendment
Everybody is asking whether Kelly will be able to control Trump, and the answer is simply that he won't be able to do so, at least not over the long haul. It's abundantly clear that Trump is mentally unfit. He's Caligula in a suit. and it's hard for me to believe that a guy like
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Democrats and the Politics of Negation
Jon Ossoff’s defeat in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District election on Tuesday wasn’t just a sign that Democrats may have a harder time winning in the Trump era than they had hoped. It is a symptom of a larger problem for the party — a generational and racial divide between a largely secular group of young,