All articles by this author
On the takeover of the federal workforce
What is the function of demanding that the entire federal bureaucracy search itself for traces that it might be funding programs to which the Leader might object? Plainly, to dement it. Or make it paranoid, make it pusillanimous, make it humiliated, and bring to the forefront the narcs, toadies, informers, and eager collaborators who can be promoted to replace those who continue their jobs and assert the law.
February 19, 2025
There is everything to be gained from every refusal, from plain unwillingness to fall into line
There may well be normalcy again. But it lies on the other side—not in accommodation to this malevolent insanity, run by lackeys and toads. The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.
July 20, 2023
It’s always a puzzle, whether to go see aging rockers.
How they got away with it
An interesting side effect of reading the report is to feel that anyone who claims to have understood its arguments, purposes, and consequences within twenty-four or forty-eight hours of encountering it is likely untrustworthy.
October 6, 2018
Are these dark times, or are they unconscionably stupid times?
And most bizarre, I think—the moment I will not be able to forget, so utterly sincere and consistent and emotional did it seem, the emotional peak of his long, rambling statement—was when Kavanaugh told us the single thing he loves doing most in the world. Not the law (though this is the job he’s interviewing for). Not parenting (though he is a sentimentalist of kids and parents, or perhaps of himself-as-a-kid-and-parent). It was coaching youth athletics. “I love coaching more than anything I’ve ever done in my whole life.” Then a pause, and the explosion. “But thanks to what some of you on this side of the committee have unleashed, I may never be able to coach again.”
November 12, 2016
To what extremes of disobedience and resistant behavior do peaceful Americans know how to go?
It is far better to “overreact” at this moment than not to react—probably better to be wrong, before probable wrongs are done, than to wait and see. It is more important to seize hold of the abnormal, than turn violation into the normal.
Police make things visible. They enhance situations, but no one mistakes them for the main show.
Ultimately, the antipolitics of fear would deprive the person of his status as a political, even a social being.
September 27, 2011
It was kind of nice to be at a protest and, instead of marching and shouting, to be talking about ideas. It felt like the script had changed, and that was a revelation.
It was kind of nice to be at a protest and, instead of marching and shouting, to be talking about ideas. It felt like the script had changed, and that was a revelation. As 7 PM approached, my friends and I left thinking the cops would clear everyone out in no time. When they made it through the night I began to give them more credit, so I dropped off a bunch of blankets and provisions later that evening.
July 5, 2011
Nearly every great philosopher in the era of the university has said somewhere that there is no such thing as education in schools. Nearly every one of these, too, taught or lectured (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, James, Arendt), or was entangled as far as to have learned from a university, in its lecture halls and library, what philosophy would be.
July 7, 2011
Cafe. See Coffee Capital, 150–151, 161, 166. See also Cultural capital; Income Capitalism, 40, 47–48, 62, 79, 81, 166
Jonathan Franzen’s novel is a feeling-machine.
