No point in me commenting much on Gaza. [Obviously I was, elsewhere] The links are on the right.

The silence of self-important liberal leadership is par for the course. But the silence or near silence of academics who claim to bring a higher intellectualism to the public sphere, or at least to the world, is always frustrating. Technocrats know what they know and can arrange it in new ways, but it takes a generational shift and crisis to change knowledge itself. And then decay sets in again.

Most people are incurious by desire but flexible in behavior. Technocrats worship incuriousness. Openness interferes with technical mastery, which becomes a mastery of form. That what is built fails as representation is less important that the building of it. Liberalism isn't kitsch, but it allows for the defense of kitsch in cases that require it to defend the dreams of liberalism. Israel is kitsch. Ideological late modernism is kitsch.

Language is an open representational form. It's less important to build a new one than to learn to use the one we have.