Julien Charles “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” Albert Camus On John Steppling’s Aesthetic Resistance podcast, guest Varun Mathur posited that we are witnessing – on a global scale – an event …
Edward Curtin Etymology – from Greek, etymos, true, real, actual (the study of roots) Life is full of slips. Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful …
John Steppling If you want to deprive citizens of freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and the right to family life, there should be written reasons. They ask the department why they can hardly find such anywhere since the intervention was introduced in March. It is a mystery that hardly any Norwegian journalists have thought …
John Steppling “There is no question that most television is a waste of time. The people connected with it realize how bad programming is and go ahead with their shows as cynically as possible. Producers are turning out programs that literally make me sick. TV seems to re-infect itself each year, using the same approach …
John Steppling “it’s the proper morning to fly into Hell.” Arthur Miller (The Crucible) “One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner.” Emil Cioran (On the Heights of Despair) Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I wrote about it here. …
John Steppling Some books demand slower reading than others. Ed Curtin’s new book is such a case. But then this assemblage of essays, many published elsewhere, is a corrective to the growing intoxication with technology, with the surveillance and the policing it is being used for, and to what Jonathan Crary wrote about in 24/7, …
If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been called a conspiracy theorist. Also you’ve been derided and shamed for questioning the “science” of the Covid debacle. The idea of science is now a badly corrupted idea. In a nation, today, (the USA) which in educational terms ranks 25th globally in science skills and reading, and well below that in math; all one hears is a clarion call to science.
John Steppling “European Left-wing political scientists find difficult to understand that the colonial contradiction is at the heart of our present, they think it’s a conceptual error, something anachronistic, that the joyful postmodernity – the one that delivers their Macs to them at home – has gone beyond all that, and that Trump or Bolsonaro …
The pandemic is fetishized and much like the climate alarmism associated with Greta and The Guardian paper, there is a curious fetishized and cultic response in much of the population. And it is the latent masochism of the already terrorized. It also feels like a faint cry of Puritan angst, a call to piety. This is a very American sensibility, this punitive moralism.
Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
— Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello
