Because the deep roots of the current Goth movement are in the Gothic fiction that Horace Walpole (theoretically) kicked off with The Castle of Otranto, and not really connected to the ancient Goths.
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This is well worth the time, if you’re interested in one theory of how academia got to where it is today…
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Published July 17, 2011, as the Syrian Civil War kicked off.
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Coming from a billionaire who has benefited from the current system, this might sway the opinion of those who idolize wealth and power (for example, family members, co-workers, etc., who won’t shut up about how great our economy is):
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I can’t stand the “capitalist/socialist” framing. It is such horseshit, cherry-picking talking points developed 150 years ago and strawmanning the shit out of them. What “capitalism” is is just the Peter-Principled aristocrats and mob bosses fighting each other over the spoils created by democracy and free markets.
“Socialism” is just their smear of democracy. “Success” is what they call the theft of wages and consumer surplus. “Efficiency” is their rebranding of the artificial scarcity of private monopoly.
This guy’s analysis comes from the typical Wall Street framing of bad culture, bad education, etc. that Galbraith takes down in The End of Normal. Restating this conventional wisdom doesn’t actually count as a useful contribution.
The problem is that capitalists typically don’t know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don’t know how to grow it well.
Oh fuck you. “Capitalists” can’t grow their feudal crusade for margin without tearing down each other. You are a zero-sum actor who only creates opportunity for yourself. Democracy creates actual new possibilities while maintaining opportunity and preserving needed resources. But by all means, call that Maoism.
Fuck this guy. The only thing that makes this a read is that it reinforces my understanding of billionaires as blinkered, useless, yet loathe to give up their pile of badly managed resources.
So yeah, he wants leadership at the top, one billionaire to rule them all, and in the bullshit, bind them. Bipartisan in the sense of maintaining the billionaire veto over all policy. KPIs to allow the billionaires to justify continued theft and mass murder. Privatization of all cultural functions through philanthropy. Tax and punish the little people who don’t measure up. And with power preserved for the rich, somehow our fiscal and monetary policies will… continue as they have been.
This is just an attempt at turd-polishing and both-sidesing when it’s the rich funding the unhinged right and fighting democracy by turning human survival into team sports. And somehow an extra “bottom line” will work. How does this dumbshit propose to make his slate of KPIs something his fellow dumbshit thieving mass murderers will pay attention to?
They’ll ignore his KPIs and seize power, just like Trump, Koch, House of Saud, etc.
Grrr.
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This is a series of longreads, and well worth the time:
Christ, I hate these long form essay hagiographies that are full of breathless praise from both the author and the endless people that the author and subject meet over the course of the interview (or from other contexts)…
Uncritical nonsense.
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Reminds me of the situation when Veliskofky’s Worlds In Confusion Collision* was published. Immense praise but, really, the book was just full of shit.
*I stole that from Asimov’s scathing essay of that name of the latter book. Someone needs to do the same here.
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Yeah, I try to keep an open mind, but the silicon valley embrace of the school of big history has me very skeptical of it, in general. Not that we don’t want to try and understand the long haul of history, it’s just that in how it’s often practiced is in the service of a more teleological historical narrative that flattens for too much complexity for my taste.
And the way the article was written was incredibly off-putting. It was nothing but a hagiography aimed at making the subject seem like a self-made genius, and ignoring the very real problems facing academia for the rest of us proles.
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The 2nd half of the essay talks about a reconciliation study between teenaged Palestinians and Israelis.
Freud’s quest for light echoes the ancient Greek ‘know thyself’. But I am also reminded of an old Talmudic verse, probably dated from the same era as Socrates: ‘If you meet the devil, shine on it the light of knowledge. If it is stone, it evaporates; if it is metal, annihilates.’ What a triumph to the human spirit is the belief that the hardiness, nastiness and ‘stone-ness’ of our nature can be overcome by the ‘light of knowledge’.
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