Category Archives: Politics

Political philosophies, ideologies, strategy, tactics…

The Marriage of Equality and Inequality – 2: Unsympathetic

The traditionalists do not just believe that the word “marriage” should be taken to refer to the union of a man and a woman, and they do not admit of a distinction between a popular or common usage and a legal one: They insist, over and over if rarely with explanation, likely under instruction by pollsters and spin-sters, that marriage is between a man and a woman. State and the law, they believe, should reflect this primary denotation, not merely because a one-to-one correspondence between common or traditional usage and the law is preferable in the abstract, but because the heterosexual union is biologically and organically the basis of human life, making any attitude towards it other than reverence both inhuman and morbid, all the more ominous as a principle of the state. Continue reading

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The Marriage of Equality and Inequality – 1: Bigotry

The bigot is the individual whose beliefs are so contrary to the fundamental commitments of an egalitarian culture that they are not and cannot be worthy of serious discussion, but only of scorn and ridicule – or, for those whose political sensibilities are still impaired by remnant sympathies, of mandatory confession, self-criticism, and disassociation. Continue reading

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The Marriage of Equality and Inequality (Prologue)

Marriage, and essentially monogamy, is one of the absolute principles on which the ethical life of a community is based; the institution of marriage is therefore included as one of the moments in the foundation of states by gods or heroes. Continue reading

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what must be heard

“was gesagt werden muss”/”what must be said,” Guenter Grass’s un-poetic poetic response to current events involving Germans, Israelis, Iranians and all of the rest of the world, is dominated, and justified, by a recognition emerging from geopolitical facticity, by that murderously coercive course of the world that Adorno juxtaposes to art: The wheel of historical fortune has turned in such a way that the national heirs of Nazism (of the genocidal) are supplying delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction (weapons of genocide) to the heirs of Zionism (and of genocide).
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Derbyshire’s Children

Since John Derbyshire brought his family into it, I feel free to imagine a response on the part of his child – in effect to mark the transition via adolescent resistance on the way to autonomous adulthood. “Why should I follow what you advise, father? So I can grow up to live a life as morally impoverished, as safe from the risky vitality of others, as immune to hope, as yours?” Continue reading

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Sarah Queen of Cons

It turns out that Palin’s reported possible/impossible misunderstanding about the difference between Queen and Prime Minister was already a for her typically borderline schizophrenic hallucination of a deeper and insuperable truth. By the time she was asked to join the the wrong team representing the wrong choice and destined to lose, the Free World had already begun to acclaim the rightful claim to its constitutionalized monarchy, under the rules of a game that is less a game than a secularized religion whose liturgy neither is nor can be easy to change. Continue reading

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