Tooze in the New Statesman: "John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism"

Realism is as old as politics. "Realism” is the bastard child of political pragmatism and liberal idealism, invented by ideological optimists who wanted to rule the world and congratulate themselves on their willingness to bear the burden. It's fundamentally European and Christian. Remember that Mearsheimer is a Kantian: it was immoral to ally with Stalin against Hitler. The pic above is at the top of the article, chosen as an image of fear and earnest moral concern. In defense of what?

The USSR post-war was not expansionist. Its policy was defensive. It was realist to see the cold war as predictable but stupid, and that backing dictators and empire to protect against democracy and maintain your own power would only result in a more popular dictatorship opposing you. Realism is knowing that power corrupts, that people are weak, foolish, vain, and easily manipulated. 

“You never beat us on the battlefield.”  “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”

The tragedy is that in the end, Nike won the war. That was predictable too.

Some realism from Raquel Welch

Sending girls like me to Vietnam to entertain the troops is like teasing a caged lion with a piece of raw meat,’ she said. ‘I’m not criticizing our boys’ thoughts or feelings one bit, I’m just telling you that I know what is going through their minds. There they are, fighting an aimless war in a foreign land where they aren’t wanted. . . . Deep down inside, I think it would be best if stars like me stayed home and the Government sent off troupes of prostitutes instead.

It's hard to find the source of the quote now. I remember hearing it as a 7 year old; my father, spitting it out in a rage. The original source in footnote is Mark Jury, The Vietnam Photo Book. I think my parents had a copy. I remember looking at the photographs of prostitutes.

Blyth

Long Thread Alert: As ever, Adam does a great job dissecting the Mearsheimer 'the west is at fault' critique.

But I think he misses one point. 

It's not just a question of agency and responsibility being dissolved by structural forces. Its also about the possibilities each perspective opens and closes. If we take Mearsheimer's line that its the West's fault...

Then there are things we can do to end this. Namely, do NATO and the EU differently = problem solved. Personally, I think this is wrong, but go with the argument...

Now, if we take the other perspective, that this a 19th Century blood and soil crusade by an unhinged dictator...

then we can't end this by our actions...Instead, the result has to be escalation with no clear exit for any side.

Ironically then, Mearsheimer's structuralism gives us the possibility of ending this, while the (probably) more accurate view contains no such path. Just sayin...

The need to moralize, in otherwise intelligent people, amazes me.  "Let us recount the sequence of events."

Tooze doubles as a well-paid tour guide for the 10%, and now he's married to his boss. Blyth makes offhand comments about the fate of his "hedge-fund friends", because he has them. Milanovic likes dining alone in our "utopia with a twist..." with "stains of human passions... lost amid the chromium gleam.". Nir Rosen thinks "some of you people take this war too personally." And all of my money, what's left of it, for now is in oil and gas. 

"It was strange. My students were all obsessed with sex....

Not the idea of sex or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

NFS means No Fucking Shit 

In a separate paper, “The existential function of right‐wing authoritarianism,” Womick, Ward and King, joined by Samantha J. Heintzelman and Brendon Woody, provide more detail:

It may seem ironic that authoritarianism, a belief system that entails sacrifice of personal freedom to a strong leader, would influence the experience of meaning in life through its promotion of feelings of personal significance. Yet, right wing authoritarianism does provide a person with a place in the world, as a loyal follower of a strong leader. In addition, compared to purpose and coherence, knowing with great certainty that one’s life has mattered in a lasting way may be challenging. Handing this challenge over to a strong leader and investment in societal conventions might allow a person to gain a sense of symbolic or vicarious significance.

Cultures armor themselves under threat. Bullies were once bullied.  "Early Childhood Victimization Among Incarcerated Adult Male Felons"  It was fucking obvious before 1998. It was obvious before I was born. It was obvious before the 20th century. It was obvious before 1789. 

"Very hard to defend a low-lying beach. Eventually people will come for you"

"Political scientists seek to understand politics, not engage in politics."

Social science is anti-historical, anti-political pseudoscience.

Liberal technocrats imagine themselves as defending democracy. If they recognized themselves as managers, as rulers, they'd understand the backlash when they do a lousy job. I'll repeat myself until I die. Technocracy is not democracy.

"the meaning of sex"  The Journal of Philosophy, mid 80s.  Told to me by Callie Angell, who was there.

I know what Mark Blyth does for a living. And he cowrote this book with a hedge fund manager.  Another reason I gave this one the Comedians tag.

Read the whole thing. It's a hoot. It's got everything,

When I search for the historical significance of Occupy Wall Street, my mind goes first not to the assemblies, the marches, or even the arrests. Rather, the first memory that arises is a 2011 meeting of the Marxist reading group that I attended from 2010 to 2018, my years in graduate school. We dedicated a session that October to Occupy, and the group swelled from its normal five or ten to a packed house, full of dozens of people trying to make sense of what was happening. (This had also happened the previous February during the Wisconsin Capitol occupation and the Arab uprisings.)

...Most straightforwardly, Occupy was the critical event in the formation of a new anticapitalist intellectual milieu. You could go to Zuccotti Park and find people arguing about policing, finance, feminism, climate—and out of this ferment, new institutions took shape and old ones changed. The New Inquiry and Jacobin both slightly predated the occupations (and perhaps anticipated them), but both gained much of their solidity from the participation of the resulting coterie. n+1 and Dissent both underwent much-heralded generational transformations, pointing them in newly radicalized directions. In 2012, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research appeared, founded by left-wing Columbia graduate students looking for a meaningful alternative to dead-end academic careers. All this, it turns out, had consequences.

...Earlier this year, a student in my office hours asked me if I knew about some radical writer. I smiled and said, “Oh sure, I met that guy once at a Verso party seven or eight years ago.” The student blinked at me—”The Verso loft? You’ve actually been there?” While it’s tempting to roll one’s eyes at such a totemic status for a party venue for the New York media-centric left—and easy to mock as an instance of an in-crowd—we ought to take its significance seriously.

Certainly, Occupy is not reducible to some number of careers in the cultural superstructure. And like any scene, this one has its narcissism, its pecking orders, its blind spots, and its abuses. But it must be acknowledged the movement of 2011 created what cultural theorist Raymond Williams would have called a “structure of feeling”: a loose system of institutions of production and reception of ideology, in which a common experience and mood could solidify somewhat into a common language, shared even among antagonists within the left.

This bit is priceless 

It is not that the individuals in this intellectual cohort were all important to the development of Occupy (with the notable exception of the writers Vicky Osterweil and Malcolm Harris, who helped bring a crowd early on with a fake promise of a Radiohead appearance). 

repeats: Blyth and David Brooks,  Osterweil, and date night at the Verso loft 

David Brooks, via Mark Blyth: "I always wondered about David Brooks ability to spend most of his time being woefully wrong and occasionally bang on. Judge for yourself which one this is. Well worth a read either way." Sven Steinmo replies, "spot on"

recent. See also, Streeck, Therborn etc

etc

The illustration made it easy, but there's not much to wonder about with Brooks. Conservatism is founded in a pessimistic reflex as liberalism is founded in an optimistic one. Pessimism allows for hypocrisy as the inevitability of weakness, or of failure.  Radical optimism was also a problem once. Revolutionary pessimism still is. Ideologies, easy answers, are always "optimistic."  

The exception is revolutionary nihilism, which is still the need for totality, even total destruction.  

Blyth in 2006. And on the pop-technocratic happy-talk 3QD. It makes sense in a way that they’d let it slip through. Popular is sloppier for worse and for better. 

Towards the end of this year, The American Political Science Review will publish its 100th anniversary issue. In researching for a submission to this centennial issue, I examined what political scientists have been saying for the past 100 years, and in doing do something very odd struck me: that the arguments that I have been having for a decade with my colleagues about the idea of a science of politics being at all possible are the same arguments that have been going on in the pages of The American Political Science Review since its inception.

Then and now, political scientists tend to fall into two camps. In the first camp are those who wear the badge of ‘scientist’ and see their field as a predictive enterprise whose job it is to uncover those general laws of politics that ‘must’ be out there. The second camp contains those who think the former project logically untenable. For years now I have tried (largely in vain) to convince my colleagues in the first camp that the idea of a political ‘science’ is inherently problematic. I have marshaled various arguments to make this case, and each of these has been met by a some variant of; ‘political science is a young science’; ‘what we face are problems of method’; and that ‘more ‘basic research is required’. Then, with ‘more and better methods’ we will make ‘sufficient’ progress and ‘become’ a science. I remain unconvinced by this line of argument, but it was enlightening to see it played out again and again over a century....

From its inception in 1906 until World War One American political scientists took ‘public administration’ as its object and the Prussian state as the model of good governance. Sampling on this particular datum proved costly to the subfield however when the model (Germany) became the enemy during World War One and the guiding models of the field collapsed. Following this debacle, political science retreated inwards during the 1920s and 1930s. One can scan the American Political Science Review throughout these tumultuous decades for any sustained examination of the great events of the day and come up empty. What I did find however were reports on constitutional change in Estonia, committee reform in Nebraska, and predictions that the German administrative structure will not allow Hitler to become a dictator.

After World War Two this lack of ‘relevance’ haunted the discipline and its post-war re-founders sought to build a predictive science built upon the process notions of functionalism, pluralism, and modernization. These new theories saw societies as homeostatic systems arrayed along a developmental telos with the United States as everyone’s historical end. Paradoxically however, just as the field was united under these common theories, they were suddenly, and completely, invalidated by the facts of the day. At the height of these theories’ popularity, the United States was, contrary to theory, tearing itself apart over civil rights, Vietnam, and sexual politics while ‘developing’ countries were ‘sliding back’ along the ‘developmental telos’ into dictatorships. Despite these events being the world’s first televised falsification of theory, once again political science turned inward and ignored the lesson waiting to be learned – that prediction in the social world is far more difficult than we imagine, and the call for more ‘rigor’ and ‘more and better methods’ will never solve that problem. Our continuing prediction failures continue to bear this out. Since its ‘third re-founding’ in the 1980s till today, political science has predicted the decline of the US (just as it achieved ‘hyper-power’ status); completely missed the decade long economic stagnation of Japan (just as it was supposed to eclipse the US); missed the end of the Cold War, the growth of international terrorism, and the rebirth of religion in politics. 

After reviewing this catalog of consistently wrong calls, a very simple question occurred to me. If political science is a science by virtue of its ability to predict, and its prediction rate is so awful, can it be a science even in its own terms? I would say that it cannot. But this answer itself begged another, and I think more interesting, question; why is my field’s ability to predict so bad? The answer to this question is not found in the pages of the American Political Science Review. Rather, it is found in how political science as a discipline, through its training, thinks about probability in the social world.

Political scientists haven’t predicted the future, but history repeats.

Throughout the Trump era, there have been understandable but misguided calls to pass a domestic terrorism law expanding an investigative dragnet around Radical White Terror. Every law needed to combat Radical White Terror already exists. Further empowering law enforcement is more likely to give the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and local police tools to target people who meant to donate money to legitimate right-wing causes and religious charities—after which, in keeping with historical practice, they will have an expanded domestic ambit to target nonwhite and left-wing groups, causes and enterprises. The very police entities that would be empowered tend to make common cause with those they ostensibly target. 

The calls are already starting. The Wall Street Journal reported shortly after the riot that President-elect Biden plans to prioritize passing a domestic terrorism law. Hillary Clinton advocated “immediately” passing “new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and tracking the activities of extremists such as those who breached the Capitol.” On The View on Monday, Meghan McCain said she was “not against sending these people to Gitmo.” But the 9/11 era, with all the reactionary forces it unleashed, helped get the U.S. here. It will never be reverse-engineered to get the U.S. out. It can only get the U.S. deeper into a democracy-draining quagmire.

No mention above of economics. New terror laws won't help, but neither will liberal moralism. Blyth is good here. Later on, less so.

Blyth is a fan of Milanovic; two smart men who've cultivated a view from a distance, interested in policy, less so in democracy. Neither have an epistemology that models change in their own opinions as an aspect of change in the world. 

The problem of monopoly and limits on free speech are problems of information. That's not a defense of a free market –markets are never free– but it's certainly not a defense of technocracy, even ruled by Blyth and Milanovic.

The fact of bougie Palestinians in the west will be the end of Zionism. Nothing else, not "enlightenment", not "reason". The feminism of men is a result of the feminism of women. Technocracy can't model that. The model of benign authority ends in decadence. "The golden age" was rotten to the core. 

Serendipity/timing. continuing in the next post.

Göran Therborn,  Dreams and Nightmares of the World’s Middle Classes, NLR,

first, and last two paragraphs.

I could quibble and say that Asia's not the South, and that the rest is fucking obvious, but the fucking obvious is hard to come by these days. Like Streeck and Blyth.

The middle class is exploding, capitalism is expanding; the question is the model.

I've inserted a pic that encapsulates one sort of American technocrat/reactionary/libertarian confusion. Immigrants are complex, self-interested and loyal, closed and open, cosmopolitan in a ways Americans will never understand. I've said it dozens of times: when I tell immigrants their children will become American idiots, they laugh. And they agree. Khachiyan is a reactionary decadent, but as an American she doesn't even know it, at least not consciously. She's a moralist, like Bannon, and she was stupid enough to take him seriously as an intellectual.

The world has been getting contradictory messages about its class structure. According to one authoritative account, it has reached a ‘global tipping point’—‘half the world is now middle class or wealthier’. This was based on figures marshalled by Homi Kharas, a former World Bank chief economist now at Brookings. More excitably, the Economist has hailed the ‘relentless rise’ of a ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ and trumpeted the arrival of a middle-class world. Yet serious scholarship also assures us of the opposite: according to Peter Temin, emeritus professor of economics at MIT, we should be concerned about ‘the vanishing middle class’. Readers could be forgiven for feeling bewildered. What is going on in economics—and in the economic sociology of the real world? This contribution will examine the varying definitions of ‘middle class’ in play and the contrasting trajectories analysed by development economists, sociologists and financial journalists across the different sectors of the world economy. It will go on to outline a rather different future for the world’s middle classes than either of the extremes suggested here. But first, a few historical and conceptual considerations may be in order, for the concept of the ‘middle class’ has long given rise to debate.

...The 2020 pandemic has therefore divided the middle class, while the gap between its upper ranks and the real bourgeoisie is widening further, due to the billions of dollars of pandemic ‘stimulus’ snaffled by the latter. Middle-class aspirations are being thwarted by a surge in youth unemployment, in both North and South. The ‘forward march’ of the Southern middle class, by whatever definition, has halted. Northern nightmares, on the other hand, are likely to continue. The frenetic preoccupation with consumption in mainstream middle-class discourse might appear frivolous in the shadow of the Coronavirus, and under the darkening clouds of climate change.

Further important questions—the processes of contemporary middle-class formation, social development and political potential—lie beyond the scope of this paper. For now, what conclusions may be drawn? First, the world can only be understood through its differences and inequalities, taking a 360-degree perspective. Failing that, the world looks very different depending on one’s vantage point; a vista from the North may look upside down from the South, and vice versa. Second, the middle class has a discursive centrality in the early twenty-first century, corresponding to that of the working class a century before. It should be read symptomatically, as an indicator of profound social change, as well as critically, as an ideology of consumer capitalism. Third, prevailing middle-class discourse is deeply—if not always deliberately—ideological, inflating out of all proportion a nebulous entity with strong political connotations—the middle class—and portraying a world of consumers without producers. Fourth, this discourse is also deceptive in absolutizing both the middle class and poverty. Poverty is always relative, the losing end of the prevailing level of unequal resource distribution; and the middle has to be in the middle of something. Finally, the emergent middle classes of the South are heading into the maelstrom of capitalist inequality, where they look set to converge with the hard-hit middle classes of the North. The covid-19 pandemic is currently shattering the middle-class dream in the South and accelerating the inegalitarian tendencies analysed above. Where this will lead is still an open question.

Bertram again.

I know you’ve all been waiting expectantly …. My book Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants? is published in the UK today by Polity Press (those of you in North America will have to wait until Wiley publish it in July). The book challenges the assumption that lies behind most debates on immigration, namely that states have a discretion to do pretty much as they like and may set their policy according to the interests of their own citizens.

The book has three chapters....

The first commenter nails it. “This sounds like a job for InnatelySolomonicBourgeoisMan.”

one repeat among others: Bertram on Wolfgang Streeck.

Compare, now, Varoufakis on Italy.

Had President Mattarella refused Mr Salvini the post of Interior Minister, on the basis that he rejects such a monstrous project, I would be compelled to support him. But, no, Mr Mattarella had no such qualms. Not even for a moment did he consider vetoing the formation of a 5S-Lega government on the basis that there is no place in a European country for scenes involving security forces rounding up hundreds of thousands of people, caging them, and forcing them into trains, buses and ferries before expelling them goodness knows where.

No, Mr Mattarella vetoed the formation of a government backed by an absolute majority of lawmakers for another reason: His disapproval of the Finance Minister designate. And what was this disapproval based on? The fact that the said gentleman, while fully qualified for the job, and despite his declaration that he would abide by the EU’s eurozone rules, has in the past expressed doubts about the eurozone’s architecture and has favoured a plan of euro exit just in case it is needed. It was as if President Mattarella were to declare that reasonableness in a prospective Finance Minister constitutes grounds for his or her exclusion from the post! 

Barrons: Italy Without the Euro Would Not Be Argentina or Turkey—It Would Be the U.K.

Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on servicing oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the U.K. is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.

Venezuelan refugees are a bigger and bigger issue in Colombia and elsewhere. Migrants from Zimbabwe are threatened in South Africa. I've heard nothing, ever, from Bertram and his ilk about the rights of Palestinian refugees, long term residents in Lebanon and Jordan, or about Syrian refugees in those states now. Bangladesh is struggling with the Rohingya. Oxbridge, or European, technocratic universalism is a form of exceptionalism.

Linked in the repeat above, Adam Tooze reviews Streeck's How Will Capitalism End? in the LRB

The weird geometry of Streeck’s Staatsvolk-Marktvolk juxtaposition points to an inconsistency at the heart of his agenda. When Streeck says he wants to put society in control he can expect general agreement. This, indeed, is pure Habermas, reasserting the lifeworld against the system. It is the boilerplate of social democracy. But the question it dodges is the all-important one: who or what is ‘the social’? The disagreement between Habermas and Streeck, put in Habermas’s terms, is whether to move up and forwards to a future cosmopolitan order, or down and backwards to the nation. But as Streeck himself asks when he has his critical sociology hat on, what about class divisions within the social, whether at the local, national or European level? In some of the best passages in How Will Capitalism End? Streeck explains that the distinction between ‘society’ and ‘economy’ that has structured the discipline of sociology, the dyad that made it possible to speak so confidently of putting ‘society’ in charge of the ‘economy’, was in fact an artefact of the peculiar class balance of the 1950s and 1960s. Streeck’s entire narrative rests on the claim that this class balance was ruptured in the 1970s. Thatcher let the cat out of the bag with her declaration that ‘there is no such thing’ as society, just ‘individual men and women and … families’. To which the response of critical theory should not be a pantomimic ‘Oh yes there is and it should be in charge,’ but to ask what configuration of social forces made it possible for Thatcher to make that claim and how might it be reversed.

Sebald. The inability to mourn, to be fully human. Streeck is trying to describe, hoping for, a normal Germany, to match Greece, Italy et al.  Tooze promotes a crap universalism.

Adam Tooze "holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute...."

Travel Partnership

New York is home, but once you are bitten the Wanderlust never dies, and Adam is a regular guide on historical and culinary tours in Europe organized by the exclusive tour operator Conley & Silvers. Our featured tour in 2017 is Wine Roads and War Stories – a luxurious trip through Champagne, Alsace and Burgundy. Plans for the future include Switzerland and the Italian lakes and historic Spain.

"The Hamptons is not a defensible position... Very hard to defend a low-lying beach. Eventually people will come for you."

Tooze deleted the travel page and then later changed it to link to a post mentioning the trip. archive.org

More from Blyth.

---

The first paragraph of Streeck's reply. Same link as above; scroll down. 

Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment (LRB, 5 January). Those of us who do not meet the demanding standards of universalist utopianism can find solace in the fact that when it comes to earthly matters, even the inhabitants of the moral high ground have in the past shown a sense of healthy pragmatism, for example by abstaining from calling for Britain to join the European Monetary Union or the Dublin or Schengen agreements, making one suspect that they, too, distinguish between different institutional constructions of Europeanism or globalism, and between different national needs and interests in relation to them.

updated, again

French ambassador to Washington, @GerardAraud: It is the end of an era, that of neoliberalism. It remains to be seen what will succeed it. https://t.co/gYrKnmapbO

— Julian Borger (@julianborger) November 9, 2016

He deleted the tweet.
I blame liberals for everything. Always.

(see the arrows and numbers on the right of the bottom graph)

When Harold Washington won his first term as mayor of Chicago, after an election in which the white vote was split between two white candidates, one of the first things he did was tour white working class neighborhoods. He walked around and said "Hey, These streets are a mess! These garbage cans haven't been emptied for weeks! We'll have to do something about that!" And he did. The locals were shocked. They never thought a black mayor would give a damn about them. Washington won his second term running against only one significant opponent.

Michael Moore in July: 5 Reasons Trump Will Win. 
Greenwald post mortem: Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit

Mark Blyth is good, again

vote trump

"In the south we let niggers live next door as long as they don't get uppity. In the north you let them get uppity as long as they don't move it next door"

added a new tag for Race. It could almost a catch-all, but I'll keep it for the greatest hits.

[They did it again in Jan]
---
Zizek makes a good comic sidekick to Blyth. No, I'm not voting for Trump.

Sandy Levinson

When I demurred, suggesting that his election would simply be catastrophic and that there was no reason at all to accept it graciously, the reasonable question was asked of me: what did I envision as the alternative? Taking up arms? A military coup? Or, as I have written several times, a secessionist movement led by Pacifica and New England (plus New York) that would reasonably state that they had no desire any longer to be part of a country that would place a sociopath in its highest office. All, to be sure, sound either fanciful or out-and-out dangerous (or, to some, lunatic). But exactly why is it less dangerous or lunatic to accept without question the legitimacy of a Trump presidency?

Leiter

America, the Dunning-Kruger nation
Yes indeed. And for thirteen years, I've been covering it under the heading "the less they know, the less they know it."

Quiggin: Recognizing racism

While tribalism (roughly, an identity politics of solidarity with “people like us”) need not, in principle, imply support for racism (I plan more on this soon), the distinction is a fine one, and has broken down completely in practice. There are at least two reasons for this:

• Political tribalism throws up demagogic leaders like Trump, Farage, and (in Australia) Pauline Hanson, whose appeal relies, in large measure on their rejection of political correctness, that is, on their willingness to appeal openly to racism. 
• The centrality of migration to current political debate, inevitably bringing race issues to the forefront. 

For the same reasons, it seems clear that overt racism is going to be a significant part of politics for the foreseeable future. Individual demagogues like Trump may (or may not) flame out, but the existence of a large base of support for overtly racist policies and politicians is now evident to all, and the agreement that kept this base from having its views expressed in mainstream politics has now broken down.

In response to this it’s necessary to recognise racism as a substantial, if deplorable, political tendency. First, and most obviously, that means abandoning euphemisms, explicitly naming racism and, even more, naming people like Trump and Hanson as racists.

"the long list of failures at Crooked Timber on questions of race" One more for for extra comedy

Three posts from the last week by Brighouse, and one linked.

1-Making a classroom discussion an actual discussion

In this post I mentioned a time that I had my small (21 person) discussion based class recorded, and then watched the video with several colleagues (and 3 students I invited who were actually in the class). Someone observed, pretty quickly, that the discussion had a kind of ping-pong feel. The students were all willing to talk (event the student who told me in the previous class that she was ok with being recorded as long as she didn’t have to speak in the discussion), but they were all just talking to me.

linked: How could a research university systematically improve undergraduate instruction?

Regular readers know that I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about improving the quality of teaching and learning in universities like mine. I believe that instruction in research institutions is suboptimal. What I mean by suboptimal is something like “quite a bit less good than it could be without large investments of time energy and attention”.

2- 50 years and one day later…
since the premiere of The Monkees. He posts a video of the credit sequence.

3- An observation and a conjecture about HRC’s health

1. Walking pneumonia is really not a big deal any more. I’ve had it maybe 10 times; it is very annoying indeed, but, normally, like HRC, I have not bothered telling anyone about it. Indeed, whereas she apparently told close friends and family, I sometimes don’t bother (its not as though anyone is going to have any sympathy—“Go get antibiotics and steroids, now, you idiot”). [1] Her failure to tell the world she has a minor ailment is not part of a pattern of secrecy. 

2. Or maybe she doesn’t even have the ailment. Could it be that there is nothing wrong with her, and this is just a rumour spread by her campaign i) to make her seem a bit more like a normal person and ii) to panic people (like the Bushes, for example[2]) who think they can sit this out without having to take responsibility for the deranged performance artist becoming President, and move them into positive action?

Levinson refers to Richard Hofstadter. repeats

repeats  Blyth's irony is the irony of self-awareness.


"If all humility is false humility then Socratic humility, as Socratic irony, is the irony of contempt. Euripidean irony is the irony of our shared burdens, and failures."