Category What I'm reading

• What I'm reading: solitude and lies

  Ned Resnikoff, You'll Never Think Alone Again:

  What I’m really worried about is less an active plot than the terminal erosion of those habits of mind and cultural practices that sustain a mass democracy. We’ve arguably been in real trouble on that front since before Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. We wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump and the present crisis without televised infotainment’s anti-democratic properties and potentialities. But reality TV and cable news look primitive when compared to devices that promise to fully replace your internal dialogue.

  John Plotz, Public Books, 'Lying in Politics': Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

  In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.

  Posted 27 May 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: Qualifications Piñata

  Timothy Burke, Dispatches from the AI front:

  The punishing accumulation of bullshit work processes within the academy and the disconnects between them and the core labor of faculty. Visions of austerity slamming into teaching and scholarship while administrative ranks grow seemingly without end. It all has led to many students at large universities feeling as if the university and its curriculum is little more than a credentials pinata to be whacked until it gives up the candy, and GPT is only the best and biggest stick ever provided for that purpose.

  Ferdinand Mount, LRB, The Tongue Is a Fire:

  We need, I think, to get some feel for the pre-modern landscape of public speech to understand the huge distance we have travelled. The pre-moderns were painfully aware of the potency – and the perils – of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary sentiment, ‘the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones,’ is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  Posted 13 May 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• What I'm reading: the bazaar is open for business

  Jacob Weisberg, The Lucky One (NY Review of Books)

  On screen and facing the public, he was a conviction politician. But behind the scenes—as with the arms for hostages trading—the bazaar was open for business.

  Ronald Reagan has been a central figure in my reading lately. Rick Perlstein's Reaganland, and the above review of Max Boot's biography, which I think I'll get to soon. Reagan seems to be a central figure also in our current affairs; a world-historical reactionary with a sunny show on his face of American virtue---in which he fully believed---covering over a core of pragmatic transactionism. Reagan's America is the one that endures into the post-Cold War: sunny in speech, dirty in acts, religious and sordid, a dynamic culture in a gerontocratic and ossified political system.

  Like everyone else I have been shocked at the United States' rush under its current President to withdraw from its commitments and alliances. Call it a pair to the moral shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a moment of sheer clarity, about what the world is and what Australia's part in it is (very little). I don't think we're ever going to see those submarines, no matter what promises are on paper. But the shock is I think less at the unexpectedness than from, in the philosopher's phrase, being at last compelled to face, in sober senses, the real conditions of American realism and transactionalism in the way it treats other countries and its friends.

  Reagan's habit of telling stories about American exceptional virtue was based on genuine belief. His practice of acting according to interests, rather than values, was what made him significant. This present moment was always there and the shock of American cynicism is just our own recognition---we knew all along.

  Posted 7 March 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more