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Elites vs.Elites
For the last eight years, Silicon Valley’s recent MAGA converts have convinced themselves that the civil service and the intelligentsia it represents [the cultural elites] are the real elite that runs America, first as the Deep State undermining Trump in his first term, then in the actual seat of power under Biden. Now they [tech/financial
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You say you want a revolution…
Remember the quaint lyrics from the Beatles song? Those were the good old days when the countercultural Left were the revolutionaries. Where are they now? Well, mostly defending the Technocracy that they wanted to overturn then. Be that as it may, from my pov what seems to be missing in most media coverage of what
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Rescuing Aristotle.4a
A short addendum to yesterday's post: I came across an article in Compact this mornng entitled "The Roots of Right-Wing Progressivism" that supplements what I was trying to say yesterday. My point is not that the demos, i.e., populist sentiment, in its choosing Trump was correct or wise in the usual sense of those words–clearly
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Rescuing Aristotle.4
When [Christopher] Lasch wrote that the “old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action,” he was expressing something nearly identical to the account of a “crisis of authority” or “crisis of hegemony” put forth by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci: a period when
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Oligarchs vs. Populists
Newsflash! Democrats are Very, Very Upset. Flummoxed that they have no Procedure for dealing with Trump administrative coup. Hold press conference to spout talking points about rule of law, saving democracy, and fighting back. Disengaged electorate shrugs. Maybe that's unfair. The Dems might yet figure something out. But it's really not in their DNA to
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Why Utopian Thinking?
[I thought a break from Hart might be welcomed by some, and so I thought that revisiting an essay I wrote a week before the election might be useful to provide some context. This essay seems to have more cogency now after the election than before it, and perhaps it helps readers to understand why
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Rescuing Aristotle.3
Q: So what's at stake for Hart in his writing of All Things Are Full of Gods? A: The overthrow of the mechanistic-materialist metaphyiscs that provides the underlying logic and justification for the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Q: Is that all? A: No. He wants to replace it with a well-reasoned alternative metaphyiscial imaginary that will provide
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Rescuing Aristotle.2
Because this is a blog and not a book, a certain amount of repetition is necessary to remind people among all the other stuff they're consuming, what's going on here and what makes it different. Clearly it's not for everyone, but I've got enough encouragement from readers to keep it going. There are plenty of
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Rescuing Aristotle.1
Why do science-minded, fact-based people continue to imagine the cosmos and the stuff that makes it up as Galileo and Darwin did, rather than as Bohr and Heisenberg did? It's understandable, I suppose, because it's easy enough to imagine the Galilean/Darwinian cosmos, and not so easy to imagine it as Bohr and Heisenberg. The first
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After Trump: What is ‘After the Future’ About?
If you have never read it or are new to After the Future, it might be worth your while to read my "About" statement. It's a good succinct (for me) statement of purpose. But today, just a short reflection to put all that in the context of today's big event: I don't know about you,