The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Fake Lit and the Curation of History We may need to pay closer attention to the shelves in our bookshops. The construction of the pseudo-reality is entering its secondary phase: the curation of historical amnesia and myopia. John Waters The Darker Side of Bad Books There is an aspect of propaganda to which  we may be paying insufficient attention: the curation of history. Through the work of Mattias Desmet and others, we are pretty much on top of the quotidian drip of news-management, indoctrination, misdirection, disinformation and normalisation disguised as warnings about malinformation or ‘conspiracy theory’, and other delightful skills of the contemporary nudge-monger. But we forget that what is happening is intended to be for keeps. It is not, in other words, as if, when the would-be tyrants have achieved their objectives, they will call an end to the lying and brainwashing programmes, and then revert to something resembling what we remember as the way things used to be...

  Eating Your Children LINH DINH [Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand on 8/30/23] Polar bears, lions, bamboo rats, dogs and cats have all been observed eating their children. With the last three species, one must wonder if their captivity, no matter how loose or lenient, may have driven them mad. No one likes to be locked down or up. Most interesting to us narcissists are primates. Some baboons, bonobos, orangutans and macaques have also devoured their newborns, but only after these had died and disintegrated. Having lost their shapes, they were no longer there in any meaningful sense, but had become grotesque mockeries of themselves. Is your skull, hair, fingernail or eyelash still representative of you? A recent case drew international attention. At an Italian animal refuge in 2017, a Tonkean macaque carried her dead infant for 25 days. Two days after his death, Evalyne became hysterical. Seeing her reflection in a plastic door, she would stare and scream. Still, she kept caring for her b...