Yeah, I remember that, and how his rant was obviously incoherent and meaningless when assembled together in the same format as any other essay.
Garland says to me “Twitter is bullshit,” not “I am a smart guy who deserves your attention.”
So, this Eric Garland person is just more noise? Twitter is for noise, which is why I just can’t get into it at all.
I’m still pretty sure that bigotry during the Enlightenment was a rationalization of commercial endeavor going back to the Reconquista. Just like the Democratic Party’s bigotry now isn’t coming from well-considered economic and political analysis, just like liberalism doesn’t logically mean cannibal-fuckface-libertarianism…
Racial and religious bigotry are two sides of one coin, and it’s definitely a coin. That coin is always and ever, at its root, devoid of reason, not based on exploration, gives only lip service to theory and development and debate. It’s not an era, it’s a war. THE endless war of theft of land and goods and labor.
I still say the Romantics were more generally focused on developing the stupid memes of bigotry than the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment gave us stupid memes in support of the kinds of wars that had to be justified at that time, just like the majority of every group of public intellectuals or court thinkers before or since. It also gave us analytical tools and wider perspectives, from Locke and Hume and Paine and the Paris salons and the rest (breathe) that we use to reframe the stupid memes of bigotry to reject them. More recent intellectual movements have been similar mixed bags of tools.
The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we are individually going to decide use the tools to resist the rich and check them or get entrained into their team sports derby twittershitshowdowns.
Yup.
The only folks who ever thought Garland was anything other than an idiot were centrist Dems. The left was mocking him from the moment he appeared.
He was the male Louise Mensch, and both of them were early warnings that the establishment Dem response to Trump was not going to be sensible or effective.
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Twitter is a strong demonstration of Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is bullshit. But there are Jewels amongst the trash.
Thread on the Portland protests:
Just noticed a new Crash Course series on one of my old majors…
