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.
The octuplets were supposed to be a distraction: an oasis in the midst of the day’s gloomy news of AIG perfidy, mortgage defaults, bank closures, toxic assets, and spiking unemployment. Instead, the camera teams that camped on the lawn of the nice one-story house in Whittier, California, in the glitter of LA winter, got a living metaphor for the crisis.
If the household organization could be altered simply in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.
June 22, 2009
Punk promised physical violence, a buzzing charge, like the wish that someone would hit you in the face.
