It’s interesting to see where Bernhard Henri-Levy is headed:
On Jeremy Corbyn:
‘He is that “pilgrim of peace” shown in shocking videos, dug up by the British press this summer, meditating at gravesites in Tunis, at least one of which being that of an organizer of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
He is that easy-going politician who has welcomed as a major donor to his campaign the same Ibrahim Hamami who, after years as a columnist for Hamas’ official newspaper, became an advocate for the knifing of Jews in Israel.’
Andrew Sullivan had a decent piece on Corbyn’s rise through the Labor party in Britain.
It’d be nice if the satirical impulse currently hovering over the safe targets (Christians, corporations, white men) were unleashed upon religious restrictions as found in Islam, the excesses of feminism, or say, a certain shabby, itinerant socialist preacher wandering the global countryside in search of his oppressed People.
It’d be even nicer if a lot of people with relatively [little] meaning in their lives weren’t looking to cartoons, comics and children’s books to be the sole source of meaning. Or at least, that many ‘thought-leaders’ didn’t end up policing the cartoons, comics and children’s books they once enjoyed and now claim to be sacred and meaningful.
It seems there are taboos, here.
Converting important information channels into ideological echo-chambers is unsurprising given human nature (Twitter), I suppose, but converting laughter into ceaseless ‘explanation,’ artists into ‘celebrities’ and art blurbs into entire careers is a deeper offense.
How do you avoid getting sucked under muddy waters?:
One way is to go in the direction of nihilism, or the freely associative, and surrealistic:
That, too, has its dangers.
Perhaps we simply aren’t ready for Henri-Levy’s more libertine, radical, French liberalism, which he displayed by coming over in the spirit of Tocqueville and pissing on the sides of our highways. Why, he even helped Obama and Hillary Clinton pursue a course of action in Libya.
As previously posted:
-Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism And Truth’
–Repost-‘Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?’
–Land Art Links Along A With A Quite Modernist W.S. Merwin Poem
–William Logan At The New Criterion: ‘Pound’s Metro’…Monday Poem: ‘A Pact’ By Ezra Pound
More On Nietzsche’s influence-Part of Bryan Magee’s series:
Nietzsche directed his thought against Christian morality, secular morality (Kantian and utilitarian), was quite anti-democratic, and anti-Socratic Greek (the beginning of the end).
Quote found here at friesian.com (recovering Kantian idealism and moving in a libertarian direction):
‘Oddly enough, it is the intellctual snobbery and elitism of many of the literati that politically correct egalitarianism appeals to; their partiality to literary Marxism is based not on its economic theory but on its hostility to business and the middle class. The character of this anti-bourgeois sentiment therefore has more in common with its origin in aristocratic disdain for the lower orders than with egalitarianism.’
Related: From Darwinian Conservatism: Nietzsche-Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?
A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy..A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection…
Dinesh D’Souza And Daniel Dennett at Tufts University: Nietzsche’s Prophesy
Youtube-‘Week 2 Leo Strauss-The Three Waves Of Modernity’..From The Selected Writings By And About George Anastaplo: ‘Reason and Revelation: On Leo Strauss’
The classical liberal tradition…looking for classical liberals in the postmodern wilderness: Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”… From George Monbiot: ‘How Freedom Became Tyranny’…Looking to supplant religion as moral source for the laws: From The Reason Archives: ‘Discussing Disgust’ Julian Sanchez Interviews Martha Nussbaum.…