The Post-Partisan Emporium

DEAR MARXISTS WELCOME TO THE NEW CLASS WAR The Evolved Psyche I’ve earlier made the case for not confusing the current context of runaway managerial liberalism as Marxism or communism (see,  here ). The argument there was that these were historically specific and situational phenomena. Assuming their particulars can be directly applied to the present moment was to miss the uniqueness of the moment and risk a dangerously miscalibrated strategy. Having said that, though, does not imply basic axioms of Marxism (sheered of their misguided Hegelian hagiography and teleology) do not remain valuable tools for social analysis (as I’ve also explained  elsewhere ). The core political concept of 19th century Marxism was the dialectic of class conflict. The idea was that two classes eventually would, and under capitalism had, come into a conflict which could not be resolved under the existing conditions. Given the context of the 19th century, it was understandable that Marxists would see the confl

The Time of Our Time James Howard Kunstler Let’s face it: most people will not read Justice Alito’s carefully crafted arguments about what the constitution says or doesn’t say about abortion, or the meaning of “ordered liberty” through our history. We do not live in history. We live in the time of our time. And, until just recently, this has been a time that discarded former modes of conduct between men, women, and children as inconvenient to the presumably greater project of self-actualization. To  be-all-that-you-can-be  is a stirring notion, and it seemed to work nicely within the colossal techno-industrial armature of the past century, with all its inducements to thrive personally, at least for the comfortable elites who pulled the levers of that system — though not so much for those below caught in the gears, who produced children despite all the novel means for avoiding it. For the fortunate, motherhood became just another “no” box to check off, while fatherhood merged into the o

Parasocial Dunbar Hacking The Information Wars Part VIII Mathew Crawford " We can't have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on ." -Alexander McCall Smith Dunbar's number  is a theoretical limit, often quoted as 150, of the number of meaningful relationships humans can manage in our large-ish primate brains (or neocortices). The idea originated with Professor  Robin Dunbar  and is consistent both with observed prehistoric tribal sizes and a progression of primate group sizes among primates. We might find pygmy marmosets, with among the smallest of primate brains, hanging out in troops of just 4 to 15. Adorable little troops. Maxim Bilovitskiy, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons About a decade ago I stepped away from my office for a meditative

The End of the Dream John Michael Greer There are times when the winds that shape the future blow strong enough to be heard over the jabber of everyday life, and this is one of those times. For a while now I’ve been mulling over a handful of often-repeated comments on this blog, and I find that if I look through them, into the landscape of ideas that structure them, it’s possible to glimpse some of the driving forces behind the history of our era. The comment that set off this most recent period of reflection came a couple of weeks ago. The person who wrote it complained that he’d tried to follow the advice I’ve offered for some time now—“collapse now and avoid the rush”—by trying to organize an intentional community up in the Italian mountains.  His project fell flat when unobody else wanted to join.  Having related this story, he proposed that other readers of this blog join with him to create “a meaningful, synergistic community.” I’m embarrassed to say that I lost my temper and yel