Henry Farrell doesn't like The Dark Knight Rises.

Moreover, it’s a specifically anti-political notion of politics. Max Weber, who thought long and hard about how to resolve an ethic of Nietzschean self-realization with the everyday realities of politics emphasized that the true political vocation lay in the reconciliation of heroic ends with the often sordid realities of political struggle and bargain-making.

And somehow Max Weber's politics is better. The perversity of people who criticize others' politics because they know their own politics are pure.

He links to Jacobin. For discussion of those idiots go here, and here.
The best answer to the shallow hypocritical bourgeois left-liberalism of Jacobin is the equally bourgeois left-liberalism of Jadaliyya.

Henwood: "There's a Marc Jacobs boutique in Ho Chi Minh City??"

In 100 years a group of earnest right-thinking bourgeois left-liberals will start a journal and title it "Hamas".

I haven't seen the new one but The Dark Knight is one of the best films of the last decade, and the first scene is brilliant.


I defend free speech because it keeps us honest. Liberal defenders of the market as a corrective to assumption never seem to imagine themselves capable of the laziness they take for granted in the rest of us. Designers of perfect systems for imperfect people always seem to give themselves the benefit of the doubt. The market is only one model of adversarialism; it requires an equally structural adversary. And Christopher Nolan is a more intelligent more interesting and more honest man than Farrell. A comment on the CT thread: "Why is it that the culture of late capitalism yearns to return to an idealized Middle Ages?”. The author is smart enough to mention Harry Potter but not smart enough to note the general intellectual fixation on fantasy. The writers at Crooked Timber read those books for pleasure. Nolan has a better understanding of the present because he has a better understanding of himself; fantasy isn't only his habit it's his subject. Again recent, so more a reprise than a repeat. And since Henry again declares his fanboy love (perfect timing) I'll repeat my repeats: Klub Kid Kollectivity: I'm alone. I'm everyone. We live in an anti-humanist age.
In for a penny, in for a pound.