The Post-Partisan Emporium

Two Murders—and the Cost of Luxury Beliefs The death of two progressive activists shocked the nation. And that says everything about crime and class in America. By   Rob Henderson Ryan Carson and his girlfriend on a bench before the attack. (Via X) Recently, two high-profile supporters of “justice reform” were murdered.  At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when he was  stabbed to death  by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was  shot and killed  in his home.  And two Democratic  lawmakers  who  voted  to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime. On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was  carjacked  by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the i...

  Democracy of Violence LINH DINH [still from Stanley Kubrick’s  A Clockwork Orange , 1972] Sustained, leisurely conversations aren’t just essential to mental health, but to maintaining civility. Faced with another, one must learn how to listen, and to entertain, with proper respect, someone else’s opinions. Plus, one can’t so easily lie or make false accusations. It’s a lot harder to bullshit, in short. Lacking such encounters, society unravels. Online, a masked man can unprovokedly call a woman “a cunt” or “dink cunt,” and feels no shame, but what do you expect from barbarians? As “sulu,” “catdompanj” or “The Gimp,” etc., one can say anything, if only for much needed release. Bottled anger must be messily spilled constantly. Already, the US is in worse shape than what’s depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s  A Clockwork Orange . Watching it in a theater while still a teenager, I couldn’t appreciate its significance. What’s the point of so much gratuitous barbarity? Within the f...