The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Thanks to BrahmaFear for recommending this article... Acting As If It Weren’t Really So Edward J. Curtin, Jr.     Laughing on the bus/Playing Games with the faces/She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy/I said, “Be careful his bowtie is really a camera” –  America  by Paul Simon Only people who listen to the chorus of reliable alternative media voices warning of the quickly growing threat of nuclear war have any sense of the nightmare that is approaching.  Even for them, however, and surely for most others, unreality reigns.  Reality has a tough time countering illusions.  For we are cataleptically slow-walking to WW III.  If it is very hard or impossible to imagine our own deaths, how much harder is it to imagine the deaths of hundreds of millions of others or more. In 1915, amid the insane slaughter of tens of millions during WW I that was a shocking embarrassment to the meliorist fantasy of the long-standing public consciousness, Freud wrote: It is indeed impossible to ima

  Staying Sane in the Land of Lunatics Manufactured madness or rule by insanity DONALD JEFFRIES When I was a young rebellious lad, I discovered the works of Dr. Thomas Szasz. I devoured his books  The Manufacture of Madness  and  The Myth of Mental Illness.  While working at the hospital, I would quote from them to the more interesting patients on the psych ward. This usually just happened to be the more attractive female patients. As Dr. Szasz noted, any of us can look “crazy” under a microscope. If you’re early for an appointment, the psychiatrist will label you “anxious.” If you’re on time, you’re too “anal.” If you’re late, you’re “rebellious.” I’ve met people whom I considered perfectly normal, but when they told me they’d spent time in a mental hospital, I instantly looked at them differently. It’s like being accused of child abuse. You may be perfectly innocent, but the allegation will always hang over your head. Once you’ve been labeled “mentally ill,” it’s hard to “prove” you’

  European Mutiny at the Illiberal Order ALASTAIR CROOKE The mutiny has arisen because many in the West see only too clearly that the western ruling structure is an illiberal mechanical ‘control system’. I have been writing for some time that Europe (and the U.S.) are in a period of alternate revolution and civil war. History warns us that such conflicts tend to be extended, with peak episodes which are revolutionary (as the prevailing paradigm first cracks); yet which, in reality, are but alternate modes of the same – a ‘toggling’ between revolutionary peaks and the slow ‘slog’ of intense cultural war. We are, I believe, in such an era. I also have suggested that a nascent counter-revolution was slowly gathering – one defiantly unwilling to recant traditionalist moral values, nor prepared to submit to an oppressive  illiberal  international order posing as  liberal . What I had not expected was that the ‘first shoe to drop’ would occur in Europe – that it would be France that would be