some things Jonathan Korman thinks are interesting
Henry Fudge’s essay Degeneracy Is A Symptom is bleak and clarifying. Consider what it means to be a young adult in a developed economy, and consider it across the same three stages. In the hedge stage of being alive (call it 1955 to roughly 1975 in the Anglosphere), a median wage covers the median life. You leave school, you get a job, you find a partner, you buy a house at three or four times…
I shoulda assembled a linkpile of resources long ago. For now, just one key one: Nothing moves the needle A reflection on how mainstream news media have been compromised … and why even when they do report what is happening it does not shape our poltics as it once did. Its reflection on Russian disinformation is particularly good, neither under- nor over-stating its relevance: ⋯ Russia’s Internet…
I keep needing a short explainer. What democratic socialism means As Hobbes teaches , government emerges from the need for an explicit agent maintaining the social order. Public institutions ensure people’s security through military defense and criminal justice, resolve conflicts through law and courts, and adjudicate standards like weights & measures, among other things. Democracy asserts that…
As one among many seeing a need (and opportunity) for big ideas to enable American reconstruction after this long, terrible moment, I have been daydreaming about what a new Constitutional order could look like. I don’t have any real expertise in comparative government, so I offer this as a playful-but-not-frivolous provocation. If you do not like these ideas, I keep an index of thinking about…
This morning, President Trump threatened to commit massive genocide in Iran. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS ? We will find…
the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times assembles several useful commentaries. (It has a good reference to Romney bitterness .) See also Campos’ Exception from The paradoxical limits of Murc’s law : If the government is shut down, that is because…
For now this is just a disorganized stub index. I keep needing resources about housing policy, so I’m going to start racking them up here. Ned Resnikoff A policy wonk I like. Dissent | Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate Debunking a lot of silly left-NIMBY arguments. The Nation | A YIMBY Theory of Power A response to criticism of the Abundance YIMBYs. Roosevelt Institute | There Is No Housing…
I have an unwholesome interest in scams. Not because I romanticize them; because I cannot imagine devoting that level of effort when one could do something useful instead. A call from a boiler room One day back in the 20 th century I got a cold call from a young lady working in a boiler room somewhere. She had an Exciting Offer for me. She talked through her script with earnest, clumsy enthusiasm.…
Rescuing a classic from linkrot: Republic Dogs By Nathaniel Daw Copyright 1994 and all that. [ Thrasymachus is tied up in a chair. Socrates is brandishing a gun in his face. ] Thrasymachus : Don’t kill me, man! Socrates : Are you finished, fucker? Thrasymachus : Look, look, man, you can have my ten yoke of oxen. My virgin daughters? My pomegranite orchard? Socrates : You like pomegranites? Shit,…
I am generally skeptical of breathless “AI” boosterism. LLMs have given us some astonishing surprises in the last few years, and we can expect more surprises over the next few years at least, but it is preposterous to see artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. LLMs have differently-shaped strengths and limitations from familiar proceedural computing systems, but the contrasts with what we…
I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans. Ones I have seen Raiders Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11 / 12 / 13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and…
Capturing a Bluesky thread from Matthew Sheffield. Kai Ryssdal asks : Fight and help win a world war. Establish a global order that cements your national power for 80 years. Blow it all up. What am I missing? This is literally what I've been writing and podcasting about for years. I was planning to do an essay on this, but here's a [Bluesky thread]. The main reason is psychology. Due to…
A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie. What’s campism , you ask? In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what. It’s the…
Looking at covid, flu, et cetera, my sweetheart & I are trying to live a virus-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing. Indoors Just as one doesn’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, we are wary of folks who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days. Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we…
I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously as a thinking process, neither more nor less different from electrical engineering than film theory differs from medical diagnosis. Contrary to what some esotericists and most civilians imagine, when doing divination using tarot cards (or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts, or whatever) one need not believe that the Cosmos…
I’m overdue to keep a link to this great telling of one of my favorite stories: the RMS Carpathia rescuing surivors of the wreck of the Titanic . Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His…
Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify what is…
We have no choice but to think big. The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an…
Iris Meredeth offers “wank” as a useful term of art : Our society clearly has an issue with a whole family of bad-faith speech acts: outright lying is an obvious problem and bullshit, as defined in Harry Frankfurt’s text on the matter is a pressing concern in our political climate. However, none of them quite capture what’s going on here, which can perhaps be described as speech that aims to…
After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente: no big new government policy moves to correct injustices no public expressions of overt bigotry Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem…
Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right. The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler. We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point: That critique of…
I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance. One must start from the recognition that 95% of criticism of social justice advocacy culture is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice … and that 95% is not 100%. There are…
Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says : Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself. Kelly is smart about this sort of thing . I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse , I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny,…
I don’t entirely love Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi — it works for me, though I recognize that it is messy — but I consider its capstone to Luke Skywalker’s story not just the best thing in John Williams’ opera cycle but even so good that it retroactively improves Luke’s story in the original IV - VI trilogy. Rescuing some thoughts from X/Twitter and elsewhere: For one thing, it keeps the…
I have a headcanon that Robert Redford’s characters from Three Days of the Condor , Captain America: The Winter Soldier , and Spy Game are all the same guy — and also appears in Sneakers , if you understand that he is played not by Redford in that film but by Sidney Poitier. After the events of Condor , the Rockefeller Commission subpoena’d the documentation which Joe Turner provided to the New…