Monthly Archives: June 2012

On Vampires, Zombies, and Supreme Court Justices

West Wing becomes Veep. Obamessiah turns into the psychopathic janitor-in-chief. A figure like Mitt Romney – open fraud, an ambulatory non sequitur whose nonsensical emptiness is his main redeeming quality – becomes theoretically electable as Head of State and Government. The words “citizens united” come to mean “citizenship annihilated,” we wait for the economy to vote for or against itself to no known purpose, and at every crisis the mask slips away further, revealing nothing at all in the foreground, beyond it a coven of vampires (“them”) amidst a mass of zombies (“us”). To continue functioning at all, the system will have to finish discarding itself, likely to the applause of those few who even notice.

Posted in Culture & Entertainment, Featured, Politics, US History Tagged with: , , ,

note on the iron laws of irony

the religion of the blessed peacemakers turning the other cheek -> the civilization of human carnage ready, willing, able to kill the world rather than give in… the religion of noble truths of suffering, nothingness, and absolute non-possession -> crabby self-regarding egotists and hypocrites, convenient for those who’ve got theirs… secular religions of equality -> material and power-political inequality on levels never seen before… ideologies of national greatness -> national self-destruction… absolute monotheism -> absolute particularism

Posted in notes, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

An und für nichts (liberalism on drone warfare 2)

I suspect that Kotsko features himself an interesting radical rather than a mere liberal. It would seem that in this context, both liberals and radicals are “inconsequentialist.” The difference is that the liberals are committed to discussion (perhaps “at other blogs”) that goes nowhere, if without their knowledge; the radicals continually re-commit themselves to nothing – openly and consistently – that is, hypocritically.

Posted in Internet, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, War Tagged with: , , , ,

Obama vs democracy

Jonathan Chait, assessing the President’s challenge in the light of weak economic numbers, in “Springtime for Romney “:

Obama’s fallback is to go back to emphasizing the fact that he has a plan that Republicans refuse to enact. In his speech today, Obama is reemphasizing the proposals that he introduced last fall.

This opens Obama up to the charge by Mitt Romney that he simply hasn’t gotten his plan passed, so it’s time to vote in somebody else. This counterattack will probably work well: Voters, and especially swing voters, have very little understanding of how divided power works, and they tend to simply attribute all results to the president.

Leo Strauss explaining the classical political-philosophical problem with “democracy”:

…[D]emocracy, or rule of the majority, is government by the uneducated. And no one in his right senses would wish to live under such a government.

Posted in notes, Philosophy Tagged with: ,