The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Holy Irony! Israelis Wailing at the Roman Fort Laurent Guyénot In 70 AD, Herod’s Temple was leveled to the ground by the Romans, fulfilling Jesus’s prediction for this “den of thieves” (Mark 11:17): “There will not be one stone left upon another that will not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). Whether Jesus really said that, or the prophecy was attributed to him in hindsight, the person who included it in his gospel in the early 70s AD would not have put it in those terms if it had been proven false. The utter destruction of the temple is confirmed by another eyewitness, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. The words he ascribes to Eleazar, the Jewish commander at Masada, around 73 AD, make clear that nothing was left of the city but the Roman fort: Where is this city that was believed to have God himself inhabiting therein? It is now demolished to the very foundations, and it has nothing left but that monument of it preserved, I mean the camp of those [the Romans] that hath destroye...

  An Anti-Civilisation Critique of The Dawn of Everything Certainly, our distant ancestors were far more rational than we give them credit for, but it was their irrational quality that distinguished them from the automatons which followed. Written by Darren Allen. David Graeber was, like  Noam Chomsky , a rationalist, democratic, technophilic socialist who appropriated the radicalism of anarchism in order to distance himself from the conspicious futility of the professional leftism he embodied. He uncritically supported democracy (and was unable or unwilling to accept that it tyrannously subordinates individuals), he was uncritical of standard leftist causes (such as anti-racism, and other tools of management), he had no real interest in genuine anarchist revolt (continually focusing his ‘activism’ through statist party politics), he was uncritical of professionalism (firing potshots at every job conceivable in his book  Bullshit Jobs , yet curiously reluctant to attack d...