Category What I'm reading
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What I'm reading
Thea Riofrancos: Populism Without The People
POPULISM IS THE SHADOW of representative democracy. Again and again, populist movements emerge and come to thrive in the gap between the promise of collective sovereignty and the disappointing experience of politics as usual.
The Last Psychiatrist: The Maintenance of Certification Exam as Fetish
Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren’t cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted— because that’s the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time “cheating”, what real learning could be done? None. So—- why bother with an exam at all? Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning occurred— and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own identity. “Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college.” First of all, they weren’t. Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system to this?
David Roth: This is all Donald Trump has left, (thanks to @hamonryen on twitter)
Like many in his generation, Trump has mistaken the end of his life for the end of the world.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading
Catherine Zimmer: THE BINGEWATCH: “WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF DYNASTIES”
Despite its internal incoherence, Dynasty is part of a narrative that, no matter how ridiculous the premise, has the vicious coherence of history. Connecting the dots leads right to here and now, where virtually no one wants to be.
Nicolas Hausdorf: The decline of the Imperial Aesthetic
With the territorialization of the future by techno-deterministic dystopia, of the countryside by suburban sprawl, of imagination by social networked quantifiable mimetic desire, the past becomes the only available outlet, a promise of infinite space to be selectively appropriated and colonized as a retreat from the ugliness of the present.
Jacobite magazine really runs the gamut from broadly trad-reactionary, to accelerationist, to impenetrable right-critical philsophy, and I honestly don't know which one this fits into. From a heritage perspective, you'd respond to it by saying yeah, the reason modernist architecture is culturally significant is precisely because of these social effects, and de gustibus non est disputandum, anyway; 'taste is not a matter of deliberation'? As the famous wordsmith said, Explain yourself dopey.
Matthew Walther: Principles for Dummies
Probably you can imagine what it does for the reader’s expectations when he discovers less than a tenth of the way through a book called Principles that its author has no principles, not even ones governing the use of the word.
Every now and then it's refreshing to read a review article so damning that it leaves scorch marks on the wall behind you. This one is spectacular.
Posted | Author Liam Hogan