As mentioned in the previous post, which is about something else entirely, I was delighted by a 41-year-old essay in the New York Review of Books by Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli’s The Prince, a piece that kind of bowled me over. Berlin makes a case for where he thinks Machiavelli is coming from morally: Is …
Tag Archive: Politics
Feb 17 2013
Me vs. the Western Canon
As part of a recent initiative of mine to read a bunch of the foundational classics that I’d so far missed, I finally got around to reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, maybe about a year ago. Though it’s something that has had a tremendous impact on political thought for centuries, I had somehow managed not to …
Feb 14 2013
The Bodies of Those Who Happen to Be in the Way
Ta-Nehisi Coates on our perpetual state of war: The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist …
Jan 26 2013
The Home of Lost Causes and Nostalgic Lunacy
Gary Wills, a conservative, shakes his head at his native South: This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution. No part of the country …
Jan 24 2013
John Kerry, Goddamn Class Act
A young protester interrupts his confirmation testimony, and he says, yeah, that’s what I was here to do when I got here. Word up, sir. Hat tip to Weigel.
Jan 23 2013
Toby (3 Years Old) Assesses the 2012 Presidential Race
My three-year-old boy Toby and I were talking about presidential politics in the car this morning, like we do. (While his baby sister Phoebe said, “RaaaUUUuUuurrrrRRrgh.”) We were looking back at the 2012 election, and Toby has drawn some interesting conclusions. He often asks whether such-and-such a politician “did a good job,” and this time, …
Jan 21 2013
The Realizable Good Before the Unrealizable Perfect
Andrew Sullivan, reacting to the president’s second inaugural: Over the years, I’ve never let go of that understanding of conservatism’s core truth – that all politics ends in some version of failure, that we cannot change and should not want to change the whole world over night, that constant failure is integral to human life …
Jan 19 2013
Played at Once by Cynics and Crazies
I just ate up this essay by Benjamin Kunkel at n+1. Chiefly it diagnoses the two main political strains with their corresponding pathologies (Republicans/conservatives are psychopaths and Democrats/liberals are neurotics, and I just can’t argue with that) but I found this encapsulation of the practice of politics to be troublingly spot-on: A tricky thing about …
Jan 18 2013
Gun Culture, Running Roughshod
Josh Marshall speaks up for the legitimacy of the opinion of folks who hate guns: It’s customary and very understandable that people often introduce themselves in the gun debate by saying, ‘Let me be clear: I’m a gun owner.’ Well, I want to be part of this debate too. I’m not a gun owner and, …
Jan 09 2013
This Tumblr is a BFD
Whatever’s bothering you, however crappy you’re feeling, this Tumblr will make you feel at least a little bit better. Unless you’re a bad person. (Hat tip to Moglia.)
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