The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest among an assortment of themes. Then there was this month, where three topics broke from the pack early on, a lot of people who rarely or never vote in these contests flung themselves into the fray, and all three of the leading topics got more votes than most winning topics do. Since I have the best as well as the most eccentric commentariat on the internet, I decided promptly enough that the only sensible thing to do was to do posts on all three. This week’s post, accordingly, is on the topic that nosed ahead in the final days of the contest and won the contest. Some weeks ago, in the course of the ongoing discussion of Situationism on this blog, I noted that the...

  EU Ewwww! Talk about stepping in it Radio Far Side It’s been a week of astonishing irony. Rob Reiner, a long-time and very vocal proponent of banning guns was stabbed to death. While an interesting side show, it pales in comparison to one of the great suicides in all of human history, overshadowing even Cleopatra’s asp — and history tells us she had a fine asp at that. I’m talking, of course, of the EU’s incredibly senseless and wildly reckless flying double-gainer on its own sword. Among baffling and disastrous political blunders, this one dwarfs the competition. In fact, but for Athens launching the Sicilian Expedition in 415 BC, or the USSR invading Afghanistan in 1979, it’s difficult to come up with anything more self-destructive than the EU confiscating Russia’s money. And the reason makes it all the more unhinged. This event will go down in history as one of the most monumentally stupid things any political entity has ever done. It’s going to have profound repercussions thr...

  The Sweden Syndrome A case study in euphoric national suicide John Carter In 2008,  Sweden castrated the heraldic lion of its Nordic Battle Group . While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura. Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sw...