famous
23.09.2025 08:35
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famous
It happened to me!
Certainly a risk of mixing up soccer and basketball!
Very helpful for an American moving to the UK!
In my view, the window to *forestall* autocratization of the US political system is basically closed. We're now in the consolidation phase of a new authoritarian constitutional settlement. The question is how far it'll get (will it achieve its apparent goal of fascism?) & at what pace.
Here's why:
There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.
Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...
+1 if it's not too much trouble!
Forever evergreen
i'm reading this charles sumner speech from february 1866 and my dude is cooking
A plush Jean-Luc Picard next to a 5-pack of lightbulbs showing only four bulbs in the illustration
oh no
crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their consultants
No no you're supposed to make a terrible comic
Big personal problem for me: the stupid thing is boring.
this is as good as turning the Constitution off. If this is what congressional leaders are going to do when an executive just seizes power from the legislative branch, we do not have one.
I’ll say it again: It was a huge mistake for Congress to abolish itself.
Maybe one day we'll get together and and amend the Constitution so that it contains Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. But until then, our hands are tied.
This was great. It strikes me as very courageous to have ambitions like these at all! Might you be judging yourself too harshly in expecting more progress than you've achieved over this time scale? The products of one's first decade are surely just the first bit of the runway, no?
This is a good joke
A few words about “peaceful protests.”
1. At least 5% of people are uncontrollable assholes and will behave badly in any situation, let alone a high-tension one. So a large protest without ANYONE throwing shit, yelling slurs or for violence, etc. is likely not achievable.
/1
Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would have never begun. We are mistaken when we compare war to "normal life." Life has never been normal. Even those periods we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They propound theorems in beleagured cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss poetry while advancing on the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature. — C.S. Lewis
I've been thinking about this C.S. Lewis quote for the last few days as we head into some dark times.
If only there was an expression that would be an appropriate reaction to this kind of galling setback
generally speaking, the median voter has the memory and political knowledge of an amoeba. if you think that the coverup of Biden’s cognitive decline is going to resonate in 4 years, fine, but your explanation should be good enough to overcome basically everything we know about voters
With friends like these...
more and more people are recognizing: our system has degenerated into an overweening court pitted against an overweening presidency, with congress nowhere to be found.
www.liberalcurrents.com/the-present-...
This is gonna be four years of the dumbest motherfuckers alive painfully discovering why things worked the way they did before they broke them, then reinventing a shittier version with more nazis.
[FDR, December 7th, 1941, off-mic]
I don't really care what the "political consequences" are of fighting for the proposition that *everyone* is entitled to due process before they are removed from the United States and sent to a Salvadoran prison.
It's not really a principle if you only adhere to it when it's politically expedient.
