Miscellany

Folio Installments

If you are committed to writing, and writing, and writing, day after day, in public, in a kind of literary intestinal bypass approach to authorship, then from time to time, for most of us quite regularly, you are going to say things that you or an editor would never leave to stand in a book or other traditional form of writing. Yet the opposite of what Sullivan says is also obviously true: Blogging is protection against making a total fool out of yourself because it’s a protection against any symbolically total or definitive statement at all. I don’t need to delete my foolishness. The next post, or the one after that, or the one after the one after the one after the one after the one will do it for me.

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Derbyshire’s Children

Since John Derbyshire brought his family into it, I feel free to imagine a response on the part of his child – in effect to mark the transition via adolescent resistance on the way to autonomous adulthood. “Why should I follow what you advise, father? So I can grow up to live a life as morally impoverished, as safe from the risky vitality of others, as immune to hope, as yours?”

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Chomolungmous Shit Mountains Within

the truth of the search for intelligibility might be in that search for intelligibility, not in any “clear” “particular” “inteilligibles” yielded by some finally successful reading. Because this type of observation, once uttered, strikes us as unutterably banal – we habitually turn immediately to any other content.

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inimitously

I had wanted to write the following: it is their own inimitous ardency, rather than peace, that transfixes them. Yet I discover that “inimitous” is not considered to be a word.  I find that somewhat unfortunate, but I’m not sure

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What the Truth-Seeker Finds – Homeland’s Finale

Truth destroys the truther, because self-annihilation is on some level what he or she was truly seeking all along, and, within the fictional narrative, is the same thing.

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China crashing, Brazil and India to follow suit

China faces an epic deleveraging hangover, like the rest of us.

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Newt: The Establishment Nightmare That Could Come True

Conservative activists have a different view of the risks and opportunities of 2012 than either establishment pooh-bahs or the pundits. What looks to some like a winnable-or-losable general election looks to ideologues like the best chance in decades to replay 1964 and repeal the Great Society and the New Deal.

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Dreaming of an O landslide

If this tantrum lasts through the election, and if 2012 is for the Republicans what 1984 was for the Democrats, then finally our polity stands a chance of functioning again. The Tea Party will be dead and buried.

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The Neoconolist Conspiracy

Look: there’s nothing wrong with making strong arguments against those with whom you disagree. But when you call them anti-Semites and when you argue that there should be a campaign to isolate, defame and get rid of them, you have gone over into the kind of bullying that is inimical to an open society.

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Birth of a Nation

Europe is on the path toward becoming a federal country, and can work fine without the British. But what kind of future does Great Britain have without the Continent and without the euro?

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