Category America

• Methodism

  THE IDEOLOGICAL BASIS TO the American tariffs, and to whatever else the hell they seem to be doing to their economy and society, has a long-standing history.

  Posted 6 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Burger

  AMERICA EXISTS AT MANY levels. It's a real nation of people with geographic territory and a federal State, it's the constantly self-referenced ideal of constitutional self-government, it's the religious-liberal experiment of shining lighthood and the city on the hill, it's a historical tradition of progress and of dynamism. It also exists of course as a culinary-industrial tradition admired and imitated around the world, for example by Khrushchev, who ate a hot dog and declared it 'good, but not enough'.

  Posted 2 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Kings

  MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.

  Posted 20 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Fighting

  THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.

  Posted 10 January 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Hobbes

  WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.

  Posted 3 December 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• Role models

  IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.

  Posted 11 November 2024 | Author Liam Hogan