I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’/
I saw a white ladder all covered with water/
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken/
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children…
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Patti Smith Sings “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Ceremony
Si Vis Bellum, Part 1: “Militarism” and “Interventionism”
The un-clarity or confusion, or confusion of confusions, regarding the meaning of these two terms is typical of this historical moment, which in one sense can be thought to have simply befallen us, having never been willed into existence by anyone, but in another sense can be viewed as the predictable and desired product of choices made over the course of at least two or now three presidential elections, in as self-conscious a manner as a mass democratic system is able to undertake.
Peter Sloterdijk: On Democracy’s Discontent- Die Zeit
The “People,” as constituted by 59 million Trump-voters (a bit more than 20 percent of the population of 320 Million), have decided to follow the message disseminated by the Republican publicity machine: The solution can be found only in incompetence. …
Omar Ali (@omarali50): Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke? – Brown Pundits
[A]ll the other alternatives (most of them much stronger in “real-life” material terms than any Muslim country or party) like Great Russian Nationalism and its Orthodox Christian backstop, Chinese nationalism with Confucian and fascist characteristics, nascent Japanese nationalism, Hardcore…
Alex Ross: The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming – The New Yorker
At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day, when…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Politics Tagged with: Alt-Right, Clinton, Germany, Trump
Bret Stephens: The System Didn’t Work – WSJ
The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root…
Joschka Fischer: Goodbye to the West – Project Syndicate
The new course Trump will chart for the US is already discernible; we just don’t know how quickly the ship will sail. Much will depend on the opposition (Democrats and Republicans alike) that Trump encounters in the US Congress, and…
Jonathan Chait: The 2016 Election Is a Disaster Without a Moral – New York Magazine
The alliance of Trump’s corruption and Paul Ryan’s social Darwinism presents Democrats with the simplest messaging challenge any opposition party has faced in memory. The most unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling managed to very, very narrowly beat…
Robert Bateman: The James Mattis I Saw Behind Closed Doors – Esquire
I think I know what Mattis is trying to do by accepting this position, and it is not because he supports Mr. Trump: Mattis is sacrificing himself. He knows that this will not end well, but he’s doing it in…
Comments on “Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke?”
History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.