The Citizens United decision and its application joining together and heightening disgust with and alienation from multiple central institutions of republican democracy – Supreme Court, the “free” media, popular elections – with some prospect of contaminating the entire political-ideological superstructure < -> triumph of our self-consciously most ardent patriots.
All successful politicians must by definition adapt to the system which in its pure form – something to be feared – is the system of empty opportunism (we hold empty opportunism to be self-evident). The figure of Mitt represents its nothingness exquisitely, but the meaningfulness of its meaninglessness would have at least as much to do with us and where we are with poor rich Mitt.
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
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.
“No ought from is” would be an is-statement fundamental to any ought. No one who believes it means it, as meaning is the ought of is, without which there could be neither belief nor who, and therefore neither being (much less nothing), nor statement.
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.
Changing the post title from”[obscenity] Siri” to “Ghost Machine,” didn’t appease the data goddess. Maybe she liked it better the other way. Maybe Siri wants to be virtually fuckable. Whatever the explanation, over the weekend and heading into today, I’ve…