All things considered, this is a good time to start talking about the geopolitical big picture. As I type these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war is still under way. The assault on Kyiv seems to have been put on hold so that the Russians could focus on clearing Ukrainian defenders from the Donbass region, while pitched…
Tag: politics
Slack! An Irreverent Proposal
For quite some time now, utterances from the elite classes of the industrial world have had a sidelong relationship at best to the reality that most of us inhabit. Recent weeks have seen the surreal quality of official pronouncements slam into overdrive, however. I first noted some time ago that the most difficult job in…
Reimagining Political Economy
Over the last couple of months I’ve discussed the way that contemporary industrial societies struggle under the weight of a disastrous failure of imagination. That’s among the most potent and disturbing political facts of our time. Even though the existing order of society has proven to be a miserable failure in terms of every human…
The Next European War
The notion that history has nothing to teach us is one of the most pervasive beliefs in modern industrial society. It’s also one of the most misguided. Sure, we’ve got all these shiny new technological trinkets, and we love to insist to ourselves that this means we’re constantly breaking new ground and going where no…
Potemkin Nation
There are advantages to learning about history. One of the big ones is that patterns repeat themselves across historical time, and if you know what happened just before other societies went through the important inflection points in their life cycle, you can tolerably often figure out when one of those is about to happen in…
Toward the Breaking Point
The great changes, the changes that matter, don’t always announce themselves with the blare of amplified voices or the distant thunder of cannons and bombs. As often as not they take place quietly, moving unnoticed through the crawlspaces of society, and it takes an attentive ear to subtle cues and whispers in the night to…
Conversation as Commons
A little while back I fielded yet another attempt to bully me into censoring my comments pages. It was the same schtick as always. One of my commenters had expressed a point of view to which the would-be censor objected, and rather than being satisfied with presenting an opposing point of view on the forum…
Rice and Beans in the Outer Darkness
Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you…
Strange Days Dawning
Late in 2019 I wrote a series of posts entitled “Dancers at the End of Time,” sketching out certain weird and deeply troubling shifts in the collective consciousness of our time; you can read them here, here, and here, if you like. They got about as much attention as my posts here generally do, and…
Into the Unknown Region
For most of the fourteen years I’ve been blogging, it’s been a habit of mine on the last post of the old year (or, now and then, the first post of the new one) to offer predictions for the year ahead. I won’t be doing that this year. I think it’s quite possible to predict…