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Quote of the Day: Peter Wehner
I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen
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Hit Man’s Postmodernist Tropes
Probably a good idea to watch the movie Hit Man, now streaming on Netflix, before reading this post. Glen Powell is something of a thing lately. He's not just a heartthrob actor, but also gets credit for writing the script for, which seems to give him some intellectual chops because the movie is covertly a
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AI Is Eating the World
If you feel your brain start to pretzel up inside your skull, then you are getting the full experience of the generative-AI revolution barging into your industry. This is what disruption actually feels like. It’s chaotic. It’s rushed. You’re told it’s an exhilarating moment, full of opportunity, even if what that means in practice is
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Two Books Worth Reading: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ and ‘The Hollow Parties’
I don’t think there’s any question that the Liberal Order is in crisis, but understanding why it’s in crisis isn’t very clear, especially to Liberals who take it for granted. I want to spend the time running up to the election this fall trying to understand this better. Two new books are useful in thinking
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Quote of the Day
Ever since the “Stop the Steal” campaign in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the relentless barrage of election lies from Donald Trump and his allies have been like a river carving a gorge out of a mountain, dramatically reshaping the land long after the water itself has passed. Conspiracy after conspiracy appears, roars across
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The Trump Conviction
“He’s a symbol of fighting back against this government corruption, the deep state, the bureaucracy and all the rest.”–Mike Johnson The key word in Johnson's quote is 'symbol'. He may be that for a lot of people, but he's a symbol like the confederate flag is a symbol–representing a fantasy of revenge and resentment. Trump
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Originality vs. Novelty
[Note: I thought that my posting this essay I wrote in 2020 inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. would be a good follow up to the last two posts here and here. Although McGilchrist does not reference Kristeva or Baudrillard, he is
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Genotext, Phenotext, and the TCM
Why should those alerted to the emptiness of desire not commit violence with indifference, after the path of the Bhagavad Gita? Žižek refuses that path, just as he rightly refuses the mainline Buddhist renunciation of desire as obliterating our humanity every bit as much as the abolition of sexual difference or transhumanist submission to artificial
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It’s the Nihilism, Stupid–2
A crucial moment in the development of modern left-wing culture arrived some time in 2013, when Ta-Nehisi Coates, reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, realized that he didn’t believe in God. “I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice,”
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Religion in the TCM
I saw this article this morning by Derek Thompson today in the Atlantic. I thought it was a fitting follow up to my posting of the third Cathedral lecture yesterday — And America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans developed a new relationship with