Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had—if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarfs” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards and storage for…
“’Authorship’ – in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity – was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the “books” they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was nearly their own. They…
”Indeed, when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. The body can…
“But how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan? […] To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone. Fortunately, the…
“A few banal fantasies float across white evangelicalism. It seldom tires of arguing over hell, substitutionary atonement, or biblical inerrancy, and it never misses an opportunity to judge women or non-heteronormative sexuality. But if my claim is that white evangelicalism (as a political project) is quite recent, then I’m also claiming these older ideas are…
“The answer to bad speech, we are told, is more speech. The only way that tired bromide could be true, though, would be if it were possible for the bad speech to be definitively rejected through reasoned argument. That is to say, free speech can only be the solution if the result of the ongoing…
“The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home…
“To threaten the primacy of meat in the American diet is to threaten a pillar of what it means to be a free American.” The above quote comes from a great article in The Nation by Eamon Whalen titled How Red Meat Became the Red Pill for the Alt-Right. The article gives a fantastic history…
“Like all misers he had a constant need to pit his wits against those of other men, to mulct them of their crowns by fair legal means. To get the better of others, was that not exercising power, giving oneself with each new victim the right to despise those weaklings of the earth who were…
“Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary statement of Pelagian freedom appears in an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, in a passage written by former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 1992, in a case called Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, he wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s…