Sneakily taking the hinges off the doors of perception
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| ur handwriting sux |
It’s September 13th, 2014. Literally; the bulk of this post is a lightly revised version of my initial review, which I cheekily declared would be its TARDIS Eruditorum entry without really considering how I’d feel about that three and a half years later. (Answer: I have some regrets, mostly about providing a satisfying experience for my Patrons, but I figured out how to address them.) Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum.
While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem ...
The glue which gums Rothbard’s libertarianism, with its supposed veneration of personal liberty, to the politics of tyranny (white supremacy, anti-semitism, etc) is the baked-in project of conservatism, according to Corey Robin: the defence of privilege and hierarchy which is, or feels itself to be, threatened.
Libertarianism, via its ideological justifications for the hierarchy of employees and employers (as worked out in Hayek, for instance, in a passage we looked at), is also a general theory of capitalist hierarchy. It full-blooded libertarianism (which nonetheless takes its cues from the more polite and measured coded-savagery of Hayek) tells a story of supermen and parasites. Rand – much mocked as if she is a uniquely bizarre irruption - is just an idiosyncratically unhinged, pathological, and libidinous version of this. It’s a form of panglossianism, in that everyone gets what the deserve – or at least the best any world is capable of affording them (in general). Hierarchy thus isn’t just something apologised for – it is something rhapsodised. It isn’t just unavoidable – it’s actively good. Laudable. A mark of civilisation (in the moral sense). Libertarianism fetishises commodity relations to the point where it makes its politics from an aesthetic category error ...
For all that the Capaldi era marks a golden age for the series, it also marked a heavy decline in the show’s mass popularity. This was, contrary to paranoiacs on GallifreyBase, not a precipitous decline into crisis—the revived series has still never gone below 30th place in the weekly rankings, which puts its cultural footprint in the general vicinity of the Letts and Hinchcliffe eras. But this is still quite the falling from being the biggest show on television. And the fall is visible outside of ratings. The merchandising explosion that peaked around Series 5 had well and truly dried up by now, with only a handful of action figures for the Capaldi era ever filtering out. (So far as I can tell, Bill never even got one.) The rush of shorts that accompanied all of the Matt Smith seasons and peaked with Night of the Doctor abruptly stopped. Even the tie-in novels, which had released at a rate of at least six a season since the show’s debut, dwindled to three per year. This is admittedly still three more novels than Line of Duty or Call the Midwife put out in a year (although Broadchurch turns out to have ...
‘Return of the Irrepressed’, my overview of Rothbard, will probably return next week. It occurred to me that I should get more specific in my response to Rothbard, as I have been with Hayek and Böhm-Bawerk. So I decided to critique something of his in detail. Here’s what happened. My Patreon sponsors got advance access to an earlier draft. Sorry about the length. I would have broken this up into several posts but it’s too unitary for that.
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In his essay on conservative thought, Karl Mannheim argued that conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of subordinate to superior. Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics, however, conservatives have had “a sound enough instinct not to attack” it. Instead, they have made freedom the stalking horse of inequality, and inequality the stalking horse of submission. Men are naturally unequal, they argue. Freedom requires that they be allowed to develop their unequal gifts. A free society must be an unequal society, composed of radically distinct, and hierarchically arrayed, particulars.
- Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind
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One of the things that has always driven institutional racism is the notion that ...
Eruditorum Press is delighted to bring you a guest post from the esteemed Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies, which easily the most intelligent and erudite voices in media criticism and indeed any field working today. You can read their output on their Twitter feed.
As the director of the Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies, I know a thing or two about pseudo-academic nonsense. I am not talking about the beloved Institute, of course, we are 100% serious about our work and hold ourselves to extremely high standards.
No, I’m talking about other academics. Especially Toronto-based professor Jordan Peterson, who has in recent months became a media sensation.
When I first set out to write this piece, I expected to be penning a vicious takedown. But after watching hours and hours of videos, I remain in awe at Peterson’s accomplishment.
Never before have I encountered such a complex, intelligent, and daring work of satire. This “Jordan Peterson” character is the most cutting-edge performance art I have ever encountered. No sincere leftist commentary has ever exposed the link between seemingly banal conservativism and borderline-fascism in such an easily understandable way. This one-man-show is the bumbling Canadian answer to Laibach. As an ...
There is possibly no relationship in Garfield that better exemplifies the classic “Love/Hate” dynamic than that between the titular cat and The Dog Next Door. Much as he does in his other work relationships in the strip, Garfield dutifully clocks in to go over to Jon's neighbour's yard and get violently and angrily barked at by their dog. Absurd, yes, but how many of us work eight (or twelve, or eighteen) hour days in a job where we're only disrespected and demeaned? Some people are particularly unlucky enough to have a boss who seems to do nothing but scream and verbally abuse them. Those sorts of people might as well be a dumb, vicious guard dog with an explosively hair trigger temper.
But Garfield does still have an amiable relationship with The Dog Next Door. His design shows him to be a friendly chap when he's not on the clock, and he and Garfield have shown on multiple occasions they can get along just fine if they want to. Indeed, I think they not-so-secretly enjoy the unique relationship they share: They will speak of love and hate as if they're interchangeable emotions (and in ...
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| As absurd conceits in Doctor Who go, the fact that Clara can spontaneously grow several feet of hair ranks among my favorites. |
It’s September 6th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” with Maroon 5, Sam Smith, and Taylor Swift also charting. In news, a poll showing majority support for Scottish independence sends just about everybody into one sort of frenzy or another. And a massive cache of nude photos hacked from celebrities’ iCloud accounts, most notably and vocally including Jennifer Lawrence, hits the Internet. (Lawrence eventually offers the entirely sensible response that “anybody who looked at those pictures, you're perpetuating a sexual offense. You should cower with shame.”)
While on television, the inauguration of what we might call late Gatiss. This is not a term or concept we think about as much as late Moffat. Part of this is simply a matter of volume—pinning Robot of Sherwood as the commencement of Gatiss’s late style is, in terms of episode count, equivalent to declaring that Moffat hit late style with The Eleventh Hour. But more of it is simply a general disinclination to treat Gatiss with the sort of seriousness ...
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| We all float down here, Georgie… no government to hold us down, you see… |
With thanks to @gerofalltrades for creating this post’s accompanying cursed image for me.
This article has been amended to remove an inaccurate claim that Reason magazine gave Milo's book Dangerous a flattering review. I got them mixed up with Skeptic magazine. My bad. Sorry. BTW, for interest's sake, the review in Skeptic was written by Dr. George Michael who received his degree from George Mason University.
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Whereas many of today’s libertarians and ‘classical liberals’ like to present their doctrine as somehow above or beyond the left-right divide (even as they enable fascists and agree with everything they say), Rothbard indulged in little such pretence. He was cynical and opportunistic. He was inconsistent and incoherent. But he wasn’t confused. For him, libertarianism was, essentially, a reiteration of what he called ‘the Old Right’.
For more on this, see a flatulent, blithering essay he wrote in 1992 called ‘A Strategy for the Right’. You can read it at LewRockwell-dot-org. I won’t link to it (because, while the SPLC might not come right out and say it, as far as I’m concerned ...