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Cultists vs. Careerists
The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans are cultists, and the Democrats are careerists. The first are true believers, which can be admirable if what they believe in is true and noble, but it becomes cult-like when what they believe is fundamentally delusional. And what they believe is a kind of crude
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Is This How American Democracy Dies?
Andrew O'Hehir lays out the situation in an interesting post last week: But for the political and media castes allied with the failing two-party system — who have viewed the deluded and deplorable masses with a mixture of pity, contempt and anthropological curiosity — this decay must be denied or minimized, depicted as a transitory
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Cautiously Optimistic for a Change
I knew Trump would create a mess, but I didn't think he'd be this self destructive while, so far at least, not doing that much damage to anyone else. It's possible that he'll find a way to recover, but it looks less plausible with every passing day. Trump, like all national politicians, has to know
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Quote of the Day: Zadie Smith
If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all
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Thoughts on “Fargo” by the Coen Brothers
“One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast, prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman,
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Thinking about Pottersville
I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen–the real story is about Dark
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Random Thoughts on the Election
This election proves that outlier candidates can win against the machine when people are riled up. I therefore strongly suggests that Bernie probably had a better chance of winning than HRC did in this cycle. Hillary lost this election because she was the Mitt Romney of 2016. As Romney was not a channel for angry conservative
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The Spirit of the Times
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur, it is a technical label. . . . [Decadence] implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time,
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Reading Taylor’s ‘A Secular Age’
Introduction Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case. Among intellectuals it’s arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that while there have always been
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Getting After the Future
I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns. By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common