Nasty Denouements

A dozen years ago, I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and that provoked a lengthy peripheral interest in the problem of using legalisms to deal with the unexpectedly nasty monsters that occasionally crop up in humanity. As a moral nihilist [*] the nazi elite seemed tractable to me: they were just a bunch of power-drunk assholes who managed to gain power over a country with a great military, and they went on a great rampage, doing whatever got them off.

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I Don’t Think John Oliver is “Funny.”

What he’s doing is a bit more important than comedy. In my opinion he’s a better version of John Stewart, who was sometimes distractingly funny. Oliver, unlike Stewart, has never managed to get Tucker Carlson even the least bit cancelled, whereas Stewart went into the belly of the beast and revealed him to be such a helpless hack that Crossfire was, actually, cancelled. Oliver’s funny, to be sure, but I worry that he’s mostly funny to my demographic: nerdy ageing white guys.

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