Mission Creeps

I got a thickish mailing today from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The envelope trumpeted that “You won’t believe what younger Americans think about socialism.”

To my surprise and delight, the return envelope was postage prepaid. I just live for moments like that!

But before giving them an eyeful/earful, I went online. To my surprise, this Foundation was “authorized by a unanimous Congressional Act (not created with dark money from [rhymes with Broke Mothers]) , which was signed as Public Law 103-199 by President William J. Clinton on December 17, 1993.” (Hyperlink added)

I was incredulous that Congress had unanimously authorized, and President Clinton signed, authorization for a group to “educate” against the risk of some 2020 Democrat Presidential hopefuls. I was right.

Here appears to be the “authorization” Congress gave:

The National Captive Nations Committee, Inc., Is encouraged to create an independent entity for the purpose of constructing, maintaining, and operating the memorial [to honor victims of communism].

Public Law 103-199 Section 905(b)(1)(B). That’s it. You can read it yourself at the link above.

My late, honorable father objected strenuously when an “ad hoc” group he had joined continued operating for purposes beyond it’s original ad hoc purpose, and he was right to do so. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation should:

  1. be ashamed of itself; and
  2. be censured (or something) by the U.S. House (you know the Senate won’t do it).

The Foundation’s propaganda will be returned to them, at their expense, in their kind envelope.

I’ll bet lefties get equivalent missives, but mine come from the right. I brought that on myself. The blatant trafficking on a good name and a Congressional mandate that has been stretched beyond the breaking point was just too much for me.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

My preferential option

There was a time in my childhood when I just assumed that there was a nameless “they” who somehow would “not let you print” dirty words. I don’t recall what words I thought were dirty enough to fall under the ban, but judging from the podcast on the fight to publish Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which battle was fought during that phase of my childhood (1957), I wasn’t far off the mark.

The prosecutor had a slam-dunk case, since Howl not only included the f-word, but associated it with a human anatomical feature more commonly associated with scat than with eros, and to complete the trifecta celebrated repeated explorations that and another orifice with a series of men. Oh: the poet was a man, too, in case you didn’t know.

Remarkably, despite a disconcerting Judge assignment for the bench trial, the criminal defendants were able to capitalize on a recent Supreme Court precedent to get a ringing acquittal. That summary leaves out a ton of fun, colorful and diverting details.

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Things have changed somewhat in the last 62 years. There has not been even one prosecution of a poem, successful or unsuccessful, during that interval. There’s almost nothing, poetic or not, that “they” don’t let you print, in a prior-restraint sense, and there’s not even that much they can punish you for publishing after you’ve done the dastardly deed.

But that’s not the end of the story. We now have NGOs to serve as censors. The 800 pound gorilla, Amazon.com, may refuse to sell it after you’ve printed it.

The “it” here is not “dirty words,” but the entire written œuvre of one Joseph Nicolosi, one of whose theories aggrieved our  most potent interest group — the group given to alternate uses of bodily orifices. I know he aggrieved them, and I assume that their ire had something to do with Amazon’s decision to make Nicolosi an un-person.

Poof! Gone! (Well, maybe they sell your book if you vilify him, but none of his books.)

For all I know they’ve banned other heretics, damn them.

And that’s why I now have a preferential option for Barnes & Noble, which I visited this afternoon to acquire my “deluxe hardcover commemorative facsimile edition of” Howl, including the City Lights branding (along with a larger volume of poetry and an earlier-in-the-day ebook).

You, too, can make Barnes & Noble your preferential option. There’s even a free Nook app for your smartphone or pad, and a list of ebooks that’s nothing to snort at. There’s nothing wrong with other online options or with making your local indie bookstore your preferential option for tangible books, either.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Mother Nature winds up

I have a sinking feeling that Mother Nature is gearing up to show us, yet again, that it’s not nice to try to fool her or to abuse her. The toll could be billions.

I’m not just talking about climate change. I’m talking about the moving human pieces, and the pushing-back human pieces, too.

Like this: the global south gets hot first; its residents mass-migrate north; authoritarian personalities in the north are mightily alarmed. Mayhem ensues.

Did I just accidentally paraphrase Camp of the Saints? It’s not a rhetorical question. I think mass-migration is a key element of that profoundly racist (I’m relying on Rod Dreher for that characterization) book.

Instead of just wondering, I looked it up: Dreher says the feckless official response to mass-migration was a key plot element in Camp of the Saints, too, and I’m not sure that climate change was the migration’s impetus. But those are indifferent details, aren’t they?

We’ve got feckless governments galore, and our choices seem to be between authoritarian and feckless. And if we got the happy medium of resolute government blocking excessive immigration, the agent of death would be heat and famine — the poor dying for our sins again, but not so directly as by armed anti-immigrants. (I’m not hyperlinking to Camp of the Saints, by the way, because I only looked at it once on Amazon and now Amazon bombards me with unwanted offers of various right-wing books.)

We could use a deus ex machina about now, couldn’t we? Or ex anywhere.

I’d say I’m waiting to finish Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism for my final judgment, but I never reach certainty on such complex things.

Final Judgment isn’t mine, anyway. It’s, uh, “Mother Nature’s.”

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Blue-Collar Lifeworks

  1. Keep Craft Alive
  2. SkillsUSA

H/T Kevin D. Williamson (possible paywall). See also Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft.

That is all.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

The Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College

Because of the forces first unleashed by [the] liberal project vested in the nation, we can’t simply rely on laissez-faire as a secret recipe for strengthening our families and communities.

I mean, do we really think today that leaving the field more open to Google and Facebook and Amazon and Pornhub is going to lead to a revival of the homely virtues portrayed in a Normal Rockwell painting?

I live in the state of Indiana, and I can tell you: our government tried to protect our religious liberty, and it was the corporations that came in and threatened our economic destruction. And that should be fought ….

Patrick Deneen at the National Conservatism Conference (starting at 15:34).

It occurred to me  few days ago, before I listened to Deneen’s talk, that preening progressive corporate bullies are the Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College.

Granted: flyover country has, by the Founders’ design, disproportionate political power, via the Electoral College and the United States Senate.

But the coasts have disproportionate economic power by draining young brains from the rest of the country.

And what sorts of things do they do with their disproportionate economic power, including the opinion-molding power of Hollywood?

They build single-party states like California (with the nation’s highest poverty rate despite huge economic output) and cities like San Francisco, “‘entertainment machines’ for the young, rich, and mostly childless,” designed (in effect) by Richard Florida, where normal families can’t afford to live (“the median home value is at least six times the national average”), procreation has largely ceased, and homeless addicts litter the sidewalks with their paraphernalia, their bodily wastes, and themselves — collateral damage of our economic hubris.

Not that there’s no collateral damage elsewhere, of course. A lesson of 2016, I think, is that there’s lots of it, and it’s electorally consequential. If Donald Trump is the answer, we’re asking the wrong question, but he’s at least partly a consequence of collateral damage in the economy, which almost no other candidate in either party even noticed.

They also sell cultural fads that, to borrow a tired liberal trope, are “on the wrong side of history” because they’re the fruits of insane ideologies that humanity will not long endure.

For instance, transexual “girls” shattering athletic records, walking away with gold medals, and at least in microcosm making mockery of the goals of Title IX.

Or take “from ‘Bake my cake! to ‘Wax my balls!‘” Yeah, it’s British Columbia, but the legal regime down here is all ready to accommodate a monster like “Jessica,” thanks to creative re-purposing of laws against sex discrimination, sold to courts and regulators by the best lawyers and lobbyists money can buy.

In this light, I’m particularly disinclined to apologize for the Electoral College and Senate to progressives who want all the power, economic and electoral.

Indeed, I’m flat-out grateful that we prole breeders can keep the progressives from undue dominion, forcing the nation to think a bit longer before rushing over a cliff, by going to the polls.

I can even, for a moment, understand the “paybacks are hell” thrill of “owning the libs.”

Somebody, though, really, really needs to come up with a better approach than tit-for-tat.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

“Now what?” How about National Conservatism?

This morning, I sincerely suggested that there’s no sense in my (or anyone’s) mere rehearsing and re-rehearsing the core evils regularly reflected in our President’s rhetoric, even on the pretext of a new Presidential utterance confirming that he does, indeed, spout racism, xenophobia and misogyny.

This is not more of that.

I read later today a sort of answer to Damon Linker’s question “now what?”, via Bradford Littlejohn, who I admire, but who was a mere auditor, then reporter, of the answer.

[A]lthough I have poured myself into the project of retrieving resources for bold and faithful Christian citizenship for the past ten years, although I have outwardly pooh-poohed counsels of despair and helmed an organization committed to renewing Christian public witness, rather than retreating behind ecclesiastical strongholds, when I’ve been honest with myself, I’ve always said with Boromir, “It is long since we had any hope.”

I suspected that we were entering the twilight years of the American republic, that my children would grow up into a world much darker, more solitary, nastier, and more brutish than I had, and my task was simply to (to quote another favorite Tolkienism) “fight the long defeat” with as much boldness and faithfulness as possible—and build, if perhaps, networks of knowledge and friendship that could survive the dark days ahead.

This pessimism was only in part due to the aggressive crusade against nature and reason that has infected progressivism in the West, and the weakness, corruption, and amnesia in the church. It was also because it seemed clear to me that America lacked—and perhaps had long lacked—a genuine conservative movement in any historically meaningful sense.

But at the National Conservatism Conference this week, I realized for the first time that whatever the virtues and vices of Trumpism, the election of Trump in 2016 had had the effect of a violent earthquake—reducing the previous political categories and expectations to rubble and leaving the field incredibly open to build and think something new. Of course, in such a landscape, gangs are prone to roam and loot, extremism is apt to breed, and our worst impulses can be given free rein. There is no guarantee that anything genuinely constructive can come out of such rubble. But this week at least gave me hope in the possibility.

Based on my reading in preparation for my May trip to the Republic of Georgia, the comment about gangs, looting, and extremism made me think “My gosh! He just described the Republic of Georgia, 1990-2003! And, yeah, it does kind of fit what’s going on in America right now.”

But in 2003, Georgia had its “Rose Revolution” and order was restored in what has become a stable Christian democracy, despite some economic problems. So there really may be some hope.

I’ll let you read Wilcox for a fairly detailed account of what seemed to transpire at the Conference, but one anecdote stood out to me as pretty solid proof that this is Not Your Father’s Conservatism (nor mine).

One hallmark of the conservative “fusionism” of the last 60 years or so has been economic libertarianism, a/k/a “laissez-faire.” A realist might well say (I have no doubt that they do) that “laissez-faire” is a myth, and the reality is an economy designed to serve certain interests, and to disserve others.

The National Conservatism Conference seemingly is ready to drop the pretext, to expel the Libertarians (or at least put them on a short leash), and to entertain (gasp!) explicitly outome-oriented, non-neutral stuff like, for instance, a national Industrial Policy:

[T]he most memorable session of the conference was probably the Monday night public debate between Oren Cass (author of The Once and Future Worker) and Richard Reinsch on the resolution “America Should Adopt an Industrial Policy.” Although excellent arguments were put forward on both sides, Cass’s affirmative ultimately carried the day, 99 to 51—this was not your father’s conservatism. The crucial moment in the debate came in during the section for speeches from the floor, when J.D. Vance [author of Hillbilly Elegy and a growing presence in conservative circles] came up to the microphone and said:

“Near where I live in Silicon Valley, there are neuroscientists paid by Facebook who are hard at work developing horrible apps to addict your children’s brains. Just down the road, there are neuroscientists paid by the National Institutes of Health who are working just as hard on finding cures for dementia. The first group earns about twice as much as the second group. In my mind, this debate is over the question, ’Are we OK with that? And if we’re not, is this a political problem that demands a political solution?”

mic drop

(Emphasis in original) Sohrab Amari should be pleased.

Note that there likely is no shortage of progressives who likewise “are not OK with that,” at least so far as brainwashing children goes. So the political realignment which I’ve been predicting (it’s hardly rocket science to predict realignment at my high and vague level of generality, folks) could become very interesting and barrier-shattering. (Can you say “strange bedfellows”?)

Littlejohn’s account of the Conference is far and away the most positive I’ve seen yet, and if he were wet behind the ears I’d discount it pretty deeply. But he’s not.

Still, one criticism is captured in the “optics”: “Elite Insurgents at the Ritz” (read the articles linked there, too).

Another was that “(Sniff!) They didn’t invite me and I’m more expert than who they did invite so it’s all a set-up funded by the Usual Shadowy Opinion-molders.

Still another is that Josh Hawley was the only headliner who was an officeholder, the rest being authors, academics, pundits and such. (Can you say “Václav Havel”?)

Points taken.

I think we’re still fairly far from seeing a proof of concept, but with “the field incredibly open to build and think something new,” and with this “something new” fitting America better than the policies of the Robespierre “Squad” of zealous Democrat freshmen, we might see it as soon as Donald Trump finally stands down.

One can hope.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Life goes on — and maybe gets better

I have been enjoying Jake Meador and the other young folks who write for Mere Orthodoxy for several years now, as it accelerates its publishing pace and the breadth of its author pool.

I can’t say for sure I’ve encountered Bart Gingerich more than once before, and that one encounter was at Mere Orthodoxy, too. Now I’m recommending another article from him, this time for orthodox Christians who are feeling anxious about their future in a world where the new civic religion, Pride, forces itself on one and all for the full month of June, and where woke capital guard against excessive virtue the remaining 11 months as well.

Young Gingerich’s message is twofold:

  1. We’ve lost on the sexual revolution, humanly speaking, for an indeterminate future. Get over it. We have plenty of rot in our own church environs to occupy us for the duration.
  2. We are not helpless economically against the predations of woke capital. There are things we can and should do.

Excerpts:

Be Holy

In a certain sense, our current “post-Obergefell moment” presents an opportunity to take stock of ourselves as American Christians. With such an important battle for sexual morality lost, now is a time to turn our focus and attention to things matters of holiness afflicting the Church. In being so focused on the homosexuality issue and the political fights that took place in legislatures and court rooms, I fear many Christians have ignored other pressing matters of holiness that are just as deleterious to the Church and to the nation at large.

Having a fulsome Christian sexual ethic that is enforced consistently across the board in our ecclesiastical contexts makes our teaching on LGBT issues credible to up-and-coming generations. But the main motivating factor for us to pursue sexual holiness corporately is because it pleases the Lord. So let us not waste our Obergefell; let us recommit ourselves to holiness.

Be Strong for Others

This is an old maxim from the days of chivalry: might for right. In this case, I have economic might in mind. I beseech those in the Church who are talented and enterprising: consider bulking up to provide shelter to the brethren …

This is not to say that enterprising Christians should not pursue old stand-bys: the trades, contracting, real estate, farming, and more. The goal, as Pastor Chris Wiley says in his excellent little book Man of the House, is to acquire productive property …

This is part of what it means to be strong for others … [W]ith ownership comes liberty. This is why political concerns still matter. Lawsuits against Christian bakers, photographers, and more will have a big effect on other Christian business owners. But many decisions on this front have been encouraging, making self-employment and ownership of productive property a desirable alternative to laboring for a progressive institution.

… [A]cross the board, this is likely going to involve making households productive again. No longer will households be simply centers of recreation, which is where we find ourselves today thanks to the Industrial Revolution and other shifts. The homeplace will once again be the workplace, and that will be a good thing …

Be Anxious for Nothing: Love One Another

At the heart of the previous section and this one is this: no one is going to starve. Plenty of vitriol in Christian reactions to the LGBT+ agenda has been fueled by disgust for homosexual and transsexual promiscuity and its effect on our families, communities, nation, and world. But there is also a desperation apparent in the rhetoric and activism that springs from a fear for survival, both materially in terms of livelihood and spiritually in terms of the Church’s continued existence in the United States. I would like to tackle the former fear first: no one is going to starve.

… If things continue on their current trajectory in the United States (and that is a big “if,” for history if full of surprises), the individualism and isolation that has become so typical of the American Church is going to come to an end due to necessity.

Bart Gingerich, Traditional Christians in America Post-Obergefell: Now What?

This is serious analysis. I’d paraphrase part of his “Be Strong for Others” as “stop thinking about jobs and start thinking about vocations.” And I’d also note that this vision for economic well-being at a more intimate scale than that of the progressive corporations is essentially Distributist.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

The Antifa Spirit in America

Three related items deserve memorialization:

First, the beating-with-impunity of journalist Andy Ngo by antifa thugs in Portland. Portland police are AWOL; most or all left-of-center condemnations blame the victim, too:

[T]o insist that we call antifa fascists’ only plays into antifa’s own infantile game of seeing fascism everywhere. We can say antifa is censorious, authoritarian and intolerant without having to call them fascists.

But the main problem with singling out antifa idiots for particular opprobrium is that it overlooks the utterly mainstream role antifa plays these days. These people are best seen as the violent enforcers of political orthodoxy, the masked footsoldiers of an elite wounded and dizzied by the votes for Trump and Brexit. It is not remotely coincidental that antifa in its modern incarnation came into its own in the aftermath of these two electoral earthquakes — it is because it embodies … the fury of a bourgeoisie that has found itself rejected by voters.

Brendan O’Neill, Andy Ngo and the Violence of Political Correctness (emphasis added).

Second, Amazon, which got its start in books, has begun retrospective woke corporate book-burning. I will be less inclined now to buy Kindle books and strongly more inclined to buy paper books from other sources.

If you say “Joseph Nicolosi was a crackpot and his quack theories have harmed people,” Rod Dreher has a few words and phrases for you:

Third, Brett Stephens musters still more damning evidence:

According to last year’s Hidden Tribes” report on U.S. political polarization, Around two in three Americans feel that there is a pressure to think a certain way about Islam and Muslims, as well as about race and racism.” Similarly, a 2017 poll by the Cato Institute found that 58 percent of Americans, most of them conservative-leaning, believe the political climate prevents them from sharing their own political beliefs.”

The data confirm what one hears and experiences anecdotally all the time: In the proverbial land of the free, people live in mortal fear of a moral faux pas. Opinions that were considered reasonable and normal a few years ago are increasingly delivered in whispers. Professors fear their students. Publishers drop books at the slightest whiff of social-media controversy. Twitter and other similar platforms have delivered the tools of reputational annihilation (without means of petition or redress) into the hands of millions, so that no comment except the most private is entirely safe from the possibility of instantaneous mass denunciation.

If the House of York had fallen to the Lancastrians as quickly as corporate and academic America has capitulated to Woke culture, the War of the Roses would have been over in a week.

I’m writing this column on the eve of July 4. But the country I’m describing each year seems to feel the spirit of 1776 less and the spirit of 1789 more. Armed with the truth,’ Jacobins could brand any individuals who dared to disagree with them traitors or fanatics,” historian Susan Dunn wrote of the French Revolution. Any distinction between their own political adversaries and the people’s enemies’ was obliterated.”

Today’s Jacobins don’t have the means, but they do have the will. Look at what happened to gadfly journalist Andy Ngo when he tried to report on radical counter-protests in Portland and ended up being violently assaulted by Antifa protesters. Antifa is not typical, but the yes, but” excuses progressives have offered for Ngo’s assault hint at how readily those progressives would embrace violence if circumstances allowed.

Brett Stephens, Robespierre’s America (emphasis added).

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

Patriarchy is dead

Giant media companies like Disney, Netflix, and Warner Media have threatened to cripple Georgia’s film industry if its residents don’t bend the knee and betray their pro-life convictions. And just last Monday, the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement organized by the pro-abortion lobby and signed by the CEOs of hundreds of companies saying that legal protections for unborn babies are “bad for business.” How disgusting is that? Caring for a little baby is “bad for business.”

Now, I get why outfits like Planned Parenthood or NARAL would say babies are “bad for business.” Abortion is their business, after all, and they’re just protecting their market share. But what about those other CEOs? Why do they think babies are “bad for business?”

Perhaps because they want their workers to focus single-mindedly on working—not building a family and raising children. All these politically correct CEOs want company men and women, not family men and women. They’ll support your individuality and self-expression just so long as you stay unattached and on the clock.

You couldn’t find a more perfect example of this than &Pizza, one of the companies whose CEO signed the pro-abortion ad. &Pizza doesn’t even offer paid maternity leave to all its employees ….

Tom Cotton, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital

All the Handmaiden’s Tale regalia seems curiously oblivious to our current reality, where women are not forced to conceive and bear children, but “empowered” by their self-interested corporate masters to be barren – or else.

Cultural Marxism?

When I was a conservative Protestant 20+ years ago, I and others developed the bad rhetorical habit of labeling any liberalizing trend we disliked as “Secular Humanism” at work. That term was used every bit as imprecisely as the journalistic “fundamentalist” so often applied to us.

Today, many conservatives, both religious and secular, have developed a verbal tic of calling everything they dislike “cultural Marxism.” I rise to my own defense to note that (a) “cultural Marxism” has no home in my mental framework and (b) at least secular humanism was something that actually existed (and still exists, as does religious humanism of which I’m an adherent), whereas I’m not sure that there exists anything corresponding to the epithet “Cultural Marxism.”

My skepticism was reinforced last evening as I listened to an Orthodox Christian giving a talk at a symposium held at a Russian Orthodox monastery recently. His overall thesis (don’t essentialize the sexual passions) was attractive, and probably could have been stated in just a few minutes. But he was allocated 20 minutes, so he recounted his version of how sexual passions came to be essentialized, and Cultural Marxism kept popping up.

At one point, he said this:

The idea of individual customized sexual identities and rights to the same paradoxically grew from western legalistic tendencies, originating in the emphasis on Original Sin in the west, and the desire to replace in the Church the laws of the fallen western empire.

The type of disembodiment we see in current secular sexual ideology, based on a twisted version of that earlier western sense of natural law, oddly reflects the materialism of both Cultural Marxism and capitalism. Their common ethos encourages us to be what we will, what we conceptualize, to break down boundaries of organic physical form and mortal limitation by technology.

In this lies a utopianism ….

Immediately, the coin dropped. There’s nothing “odd” about materialism producing similar idiocy in Marxist bogeymen and our beloved-but-straying capitalist bretheren and sisteren: Indeed, one could as well describe all the baneful developments attributed to a conspiratorial-sounding “cultural Marxism” to the late-stage eventuality of consumer capitalism — with neither so much as one tin hat nor one hypothesis about smoke-filled rooms (in the Frankfurt School, presumably).

I’m going to be reading and listening critically hereafter to see if my new hypothesis fits the facts, as I don’t think the Cultural Marxism trope has fully run its course yet.

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You can read my more impromptu stuff at Micro.blog (mirrored at microblog.intellectualoid.com) and, as of February 20, 2019, at blot.im. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.