Little Sympathy to Squander: the American Left & 9/11

. (Tenth in a series) The antipathy to the U.S. voiced in the Guardian, on Question Time, from Baudrillard and Zizek – not merely despite 9/11, but in political sympathy with it, if not advocacy of it – found voice in the U.S. too. No small amount of it emanated from The Nation, perhaps the […]

The Tea Party Bolsheviks & the National Debt

An important point to remember about Bolshevism is that it was not an ideology, but a method. The ideology was Marxism. Adjusted to circumstance and extended as Leninism, it was Marxist-Leninism. Bolshevism was about how they pursued the revolution and how they ruled after it. The name itself, which means “majority,” contrasted with the minority […]

Darkness at Noon, Today

The challenges to Enlightenment Humanism come from all sides. In the U.S., on the Right, a fundamentalist rejection of modernity has led to an increasing, unreasoned disbelief in the scientific method and the process of rational inference from its results. It rejects any conception of the human without GOD, even as it rationalizes varied forms […]

People Give Themselves Away

They do. They really do. Once they cross a certain psychological border of irrational – but always rationalized – bias in their thinking about a subject, and it thus emerges as a kind of fetish, they give themselves away. They can’t help themselves. Often, the clues are subtle, though hardly hidden, and they are frequently […]