Sibylla Bostoniensis

What do you mean by "toxic content/appearance paradigm"? Do you think the separation of content from appearance is a bad idea, or that HTML/CSS doesn't do it well, or something else?

If you don’t care what happens to other people — if you only care about yourself — why would you care to live in a democracy?

Because non-democracies typically are really unpleasant to live in?

I read the article, and I really disagree with your thesis. [...] I think you're fetishising empathy here. As much as I like and approve of empathy, I don't think it's as remotely as necessary as you propose it is here. There are perfectly good paths of enlightened self-interest that lead to preferring democracy.

I find it incredibly disturbing that people allegedly on my side of the political fence don't understand that. You don't need to feel bad for others or care authentically about their suffering to prefer to live under a democracy. All it takes is understanding that "no justice, no peace" isn't just an empty slogan. Tyranny and fascism and totalitarianism don't just make people unhappy, it makes them riot, rebel, become corrupt, and vulnerable to even more fascism.

The evidence for this is writ large on the US today. As voter suppression becomes more and more effective and the US becomes less and less democratic, those in whom power is concentrated use it to enrich and further empower themselves at the expense (quite literally) of more and more of the citizenry, who find themselves plunged in to precarity and poverty, and with a rising resentment at how unfairly power is not shared with them. Nothing about this has made the US a more agreeable place to live for most anyone. Instead it has made US culture worse in just about every way. Half the country thinks fascism is the answer to their discontent, the other half are bracing for the second coming of the Third Reich.

One doesn't have to feel for others not to want to live like this – to not have to worry about getting shot, to be able to afford to buy a home, to be able to leave abusive and exploitative employers for better options, to be able to afford to have children.

It scares me that liberals and those farther left don't seem to understand this. Democracy is not a sentimental affectation, adopted out of fellow feeling. It's a pragmatic solution for how not to have a society plunge into civil war and languish in crippling poverty and collapse into Hobbesian state of nature.

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

In a moment like this it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it was a part of and even a relatively late entry to.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was something historians and critics of the time called the post-war liberal consensus. It was not liberal in ways we’d recognize today. Indeed, it wasn’t liberal in many ways actual liberals of the time recognized. But it did represent an important level of elite consensus about state intervention in the economy and openness to a more restrained version of the American state created by the reformist periods of the first half of the 20th century.

Though what was then sometimes called “the race question” was “complicated” and not something that could be resolved overnight, there was also in elite opinion a general assumption that the South’s system of legalized apartheid was a source of embarrassment and something from the past that the country had to outgrow, even if not any time soon. (Just as is the case today, what is actually more properly called cosmopolitanism was sometimes misportrayed as liberalism: a general belief in pluralism, values tied to cities and urban life.)

I mention all this because, in the early 1950s and 1960s, what we now recognize as the embryonic modern conservative movement could rightly sense that there were assumptions embedded in elite culture that viewed certain of their core values and aims as backward, retrograde, archaic. When the early founders of modern “movement” conservatism looked at America’s elite consensus, they saw a set of assumptions and beliefs embedded in many elite institutions that ran counter to their aims and values. And they were not totally wrong.

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s they set about trying to build a series of counter-institutions, ones that wouldn’t, in their mind, have their sails angled permanently toward the winds of liberalism. One key moment in this story was the founding of The Heritage Foundation in 1973. Heritage was founded to be the counter to the “liberal” Brookings Institution. But Heritage was never anything like Brookings, even though in the D.C. of the ’80s and ’90s they were routinely portrayed as counterpoints — one representing liberalism and the other conservatism. Brookings was mainstream, stodgy, quasi-academic. Heritage was thoroughly ideological and partisan. In practice it was usually little more than a propaganda mill for the right. This pattern was duplicated countless times. The “liberal” Washington Post was matched by The Washington Times. Fox News, which didn’t come along for another generation, was not so much the answer to CNN as to CBS News, the iconic broadcast news organization of the first decades of the Cold War.

What we see today in Fox News is most of the story: a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. [...]

Here we get to the nub of the issue. Because this is not the entirety of the story. One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against [...] None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

So how do we get from this elemental misunderstanding to the raw and casual lying of the Fox of today? Well, that’s the thing: we don’t. Both were there from the very start. It’s all but impossible to disentangle the culture clash, the inability and refusal to really grasp what these institutions were, and the more open culture of propaganda, lying and mendacity. They’re fused together so tightly that getting your head around the relationship between them is more a matter of meditative absorption than anything that can be processed or explained discursively.

[...]

Some of you are asking, "But, for how long? How long do we have to live like this?" If you're asking the question, the answer is "forever".

• 0. Intro – You are here
• 1. Population
• 2. COVID-19
• 3. Climate Change
• 4. Climate Change, II
• 5. Conclusion

[...] A moment of maximum danger could arise if the Kremlin does something that Western leaders may not expect: blend nuclear threats with religious rhetoric. This outcome is not predetermined, but it is more likely than ever before. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russian identity, domestic politics, and national security has grown immensely. Putin has introduced religious conservatism into Russia’s national ideology and used religious analogies to discuss security issues. He has framed this war in historical, almost transcendental terms. And Russia’s state-church nexus is most visible in the military—especially within the nuclear weapons complex.

[...]

Nuclear Holy War

[...]

The world has entered the nuclear realm against the backdrop of a three-decades-old nexus between the Russian Orthodox Church, the country’s defense establishment, and its nuclear forces—a phenomenon known as Russian nuclear orthodoxy. The latter is a metaphor for a widely circulating public belief, which Putin himself shares, that in order to preserve its traditional national values and Orthodox character, Russia needs to ensure it is a strong nuclear power (and vice versa). In 2007, for example, Putin publicly remarked that nuclear weapons and Orthodoxy are the two pillars of Russian statehood: the first the main guarantor of external security, and the second the principal source of the nation’s moral-spiritual wellbeing. Not everyone in Russia’s establishment has fully subscribed to this mystic notion. But Russia’s defense elites have generally bought into a mix of nationalism, militarism, and conservative philosophy. Unsurprisingly, the Russian Orthodox clergy that work within the military have penetrated all levels of command within the nuclear triad and positioned themselves as a guardian of the state’s strategic potential.

Putin’s religious and philosophical views, meanwhile, have become integrated into his geopolitical vision and policy choices. The Kremlin occasionally offered messianic and religious framing for its war goals in Crimea and in Syria, and it literally parachuted clerics along with troops into combat zones. There is a similar state-church nexus in the current war. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has sought to publicly distance himself from the operation. But the Kremlin frames the invasion as the liberation of Slavic brothers, and several days before the first bombs fell, the patriarch delivered a sermon on “the return of the prodigal son.” On the third day of war, he referred to the conflict in Ukraine and asked God to save the historical Russian lands—Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine—from internal enemies and the external forces of evil (without explicitly mentioning the operation). He also thanked the commander of the Airborne troops, an elite part of the Russian military currently fighting in Ukraine, on his 60th birthday, for contributing to Russian national security.