Category Quick Posts
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Laudato si'
232. Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. Thus, a community can break out of the indifference induced by consumerism. These actions cultivate a shared identity, with a story which can be remembered and handed on. In this way, the world, and the quality of life of the poorest, are cared for, with a sense of solidarity which is at the same time aware that we live in a common home which God has entrusted to us. These community actions, when they express self-giving love, can also become intense spiritual experiences.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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Updates
I HAVE FINALLY UPGRADED the theme and CSS of this blog to something that is actually workable and viewable on a phone. Once in every decade seems about right for that kind of thing. Gentium remains an incredibly cool typeface and you should use it. Also updated is the About page which has additions accruing on top, hiding the old, an archaeological stratum on top of another, like a midden pile slowly growing over a mound of generational garbage, and that is an image I think as appropriate to this website as any there'll ever be.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Intellectual synonyms, and warrior seppuku
Branko Milanovic: 'Do You Want To Be A Synonym?'
I read a part of a book (I definitely could not stomach the whole book) of another famous economist that could have been written in 2000: the same clichés, the same authors, the same discussions interspersed with, for good measure, a mention of Trump here and there. Nonsense on stilts in today’s world.
It makes you realize that intellectual influences are so crucially dependent on time.
Kiran Pfitzner: 'A Modest Proposal For Restoring the Warrior Ethos'
Pete Hegeseth has pledged to restore the warrior ethos to America’s military. The warrior ethos traditionally demands self-destruction as compensation for failure. The Japanese example is the most well-known, but it was also expected for honorable Romans to fall upon their own swords rather than suffer disgrace. If Hegseth wants to preserve his own honor and adhere to the warrior ethos, then there is a clear course of action open to him.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: China
Long Ling, 'Diary: In the new Beijing'. London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 April 2025
For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’
Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025
How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.
The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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Theme
THE BLOG HAS A default theme for now, by popular demand.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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Language Models
THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.
Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Commonweal vs. Branko Milanovic
A Sick System: On the killing of a health insurance CEO, by the editors, Commonweal
Americans are suffering too much, dying too soon, and going broke in order to prop up a completely unnecessary but very profitable industry. The time has come for us to begin phasing it out. The only questions should be how fast to do so and by what means: we could add a public option to Obamacare’s individual insurance market; we could gradually lower the eligibility age for Medicare or allow people to buy into Medicaid. But until we change direction, the problem will just get worse, leading to more despair and to more acts of rage. It is right and necessary to condemn such acts, but we no longer have a right to be surprised by them.
To be young, perchance to dream by Branko Milanovic, on Vojinović's The political ideas of the Young Bosnia
'A feeling of pride and fear mounted in him. Then another commotion, more yelling, disorder, running: nothing has happened they were shouting now: his Majesty was unharmed, a fiendish and dilettantish attempts on his life has failed. People began to slowly trickle back home. He thought of doing the same. But perhaps it was not good to be seen running away right now. It may be suspicious. He walked into a pastry shop. Should he take a baklava or a millefeuille? He decided for the latter even if it was more expensive. He realized that the money was in the same pocket with his pistol, moved a little away from the crowd and carefully took out 12 hellers. He counted them one by one. He had very little money. Like all 19-year olds he liked cakes. Somebody yelled again; cries became stronger and closer. He left the millefeuille after the first bite and walked three or four steps out of the store. There right in front of him was a stopped car, with His Majesty and the wife, berating the driver. He touched the pistol as if to make sure it was still there. Then he took it out…'
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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The Cheapo Stuff Wins
DEAR EDITORS,
“WHY IS Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.Letters to the Editor: The Cheapo Stuff Wins (Nplusone)
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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Locations
TWITTER HAS BEEN BOUGHT, and will become, presumably, Elonian, meaning heroic, disorganised, and centred on the self-image of its owner above any function. As it, and other highly-centralised social media ‘places’ appear to be at inflection points of utility, perhaps we can find other smaller and disaggregated places to be.
I post at aus.social, put pictures up at flickr, and at instagram (though rarely). And I aim to blog here more frequently…
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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Try It For A Change
MODERN WAR, IN ITS present shape, calls for the sort of initiative that arises from democracy. That is, I believe, the principal meaning of this book...
---Tom Wintringham, 'English Captain', 1939
Posted | Author Liam Hogan