Category What I'm reading

• 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 21 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: corporatism and corruption

  Dan Davies, Corporatism with a flat cap:

  Either this cosy arrangement of mates, backhanders, off the books work and quiet words is the reason that nothing gets done in this town. Or … it’s the method by which everything gets done. If we want to think of an international analogy, do we look at some post-Soviet backwater where nothing gets done without blat, or some rapidly modernising part of China where everything gets accelerated by guanxi?

  Me, in this blog, earlier:

  Relationships of patronage and support, which are other names for corruption and nepotism, reward other virtues and talents than the ones our society values. Older, crookeder systems reward qualities like loyalty, attention to the needs of the institution, a strong sense of collective identity and goals, staunch support within groups and teams, talent-spotting and career development by superiors and bosses, protecting one's mates, and task orientation (just 'getting things done') as opposed to process orientation (making sure things are accountable). Those things aren't to be sneezed at either.

  Posted 17 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Golfing Nero and the American Delian League

  'Presidents and Golf', Mary Beard, TLS Blog

  In other words, this story is not merely a jibe on the megalomania of the emperor. It’s raising the question of how the autocrat impacts on the traditional structures of the state, any state. Nero, after all, didn’t declare himself victor. He was declared victor by the usual authorities. What does that say about us, we should ask? Who dares to stand up to the emperor and say he hasn’t won?

  'The American Delian League', War by other means

  Any adversary of the United States can very easily see—like Brasidas once did—that the entire imperial project that the Trump Administration is engaging in could collapse in on itself by the clever act of peeling off our allies from us with nothing more than the promise that they could be free.

  Posted 9 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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 2 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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 1 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Eschatology and newspaper cabinets

  Paul Musgrave, How My Brain Rotted

  Over the past twenty years or so, the adult world that I was brought up to expect—a world featuring travel agents, newspapers, and the nightly news—has been more or less deposed, replaced by a creeping goo of permanent adolescence in which everything is social media.

  Timothy Burke, Apocalypse Now

  They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.

  Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times.

  Posted 13 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Defector

  DEFECTOR IS A MODEL for what journalism should be; sport and politics, and independently and worker-owned.

  David Roth, 'Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government'.

  They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.

  Posted 6 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Mob Rule

  Mob Rule, by John Ganz

  The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.

  What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.

  Posted 17 January 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: Anglofuturism and uncouth

  Richard Jones, Soft Machines:

  I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.

  Dave Karpf, UNCOUTH, 4 December 2024:

  I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.

  A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.

  Posted 4 December 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• What I'm reading: William Davies

  William Davies, Owning Towards Death, Finance and Society

  These brief allusions suggest that if work (or labour or production) were to lose its pivotal position in the justification and organisation of capitalism, the result would be profoundly disorientating. Firstly, it would risk a legitimation crisis for capitalism, should work appear to become disconnected to reward, property or ‘social mobility’. Whether or not capitalism has delivered these outcomes to workers, its moral crisis potentially stems from a breakdown in the public normative conventions which justify hard work and industry, and thereby allow individuals to achieve moral status, recognition, or security through their labour. Secondly, it would risk a kind of existential crisis for individuals, bringing them face to face with the arbitrariness and potential pointlessness of their lives, once notions of ‘career’, ‘earnings’, and ‘merit’ lose their grip on individual life courses and personal development. Instead, individuals may be forced to confront economic activity as nothing other than a flow of time.

  Posted 18 November 2024 | Author Liam Hogan