January 2011
12 posts
“I don’t know anything, have no expertise… If there comes a point when I...”
– —Paul Krugman on Egypt
Yes, we shouldn’t speak about stuff we don’t understand.
Last night George and I were watching footage of the Cairo protests. At one point, a man went running across an open space and was suddenly kneecapped by a bullyclub-wielding police. George laughed and said, “That guy’s pretending to be a bad guy. The good guy pretended to knock him down.” Obviously, George was interpreting the scene from the insufficient background of an...
“In the best global economy we can imagine, the countries with the largest GDP...”
– Ezra Klein
“As I was awakening to the willful racial self-blinding of white Christianity, I...”
– “Outlaw” Christian writer, Reynolds Price, 1933–2011 | via Joanna Brooks
Watch“Ever been to an Irish wake? I’ve never been sadder and laughed harder in my life. And I got news for you guys, ‘Amen’ ain’t far from ‘Whoo-hooo!’”
“Imagine if Palin had come out and said, “My initial response was to defend...”
– Ezra Klein
“You know, Sarah Palin just can’t seem to get it, on any front. I think...”
– James Clyburn
what he *is*
So much energy is being used in order to define the Tucson shooter. He’s a leftist, a rightist, a Tea Partier, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-semite, etc. And then there’s the super-category of insane, which has the wonderful property of absolving all social and political positions/movements.
Thanks in part to certain comments from a certain Professor Herring, I’m much more...
WatchSlavoj Žižek, “God without the Sacred.”
Watching this talk before going to Manhattan recently, I was struck by how nice it was below ground where the subway station was called “World Trade Center,” while above ground folks said, “Ground Zero.” Of course, “WTC” has got its own ideological baggage, but not nearly that of “GZ.” This...
“Economic thinking has its own reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with things. The political is considered immaterial, because it must be concerned with other than economic values. In sharp contrast to this absolute economic materiality, Catholicism is eminently political.”—Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form