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...

  Democracy, oligarchy, and demagoguery Nothing is as it seems in the midst of decadence Carlos Ramalhete Photo by  Element5 Digital  on  Unsplash In order to “save democracy”, the leading candidate in the next French elections, Marine Le Pen, had her political rights suspended. A short while ago, the same happened to the leading Romanian candidate, Calin Georgescu. The former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, also a leading candidate, also had his political rights suspended by the Supreme Court. Attempts to do the same to Donald Trump didn’t work that well, and despite a shocking case of lawfare that managed to turn one accounting trick into dozens of felony convictions, he was reelected President of the US. What do all those cases have in common? It’s not just a matter of political incumbents persecuting their political opponents. The same tale about “protecting democracy” was used in all of them for a reason. Those who support the accusers really believe that t...