The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz John Michael Greer I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment. It’s a normal experience if you’re a blogger who doesn’t just parrot somebody’s party line. If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it wou...

  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...