There were even laws about grief. About the sound itself. In Ireland, under British rule, keening — the high, unrestrained mourning wails led by women — was banned. In parts of ancient Greece and Rome, women were prohibited from public displays of grief at funerals, their voices considered too destabilizing, too disruptive to civic order. Power has... See more

And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: fake versions of the roots we are looking for. Identity politics, newly rigid racial labels, extreme forms of nationalism, endlessly multiplying genders, and ‘identities’ constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far right or the ‘diversity’

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Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 2024 book, Stolen Pride. The left-behind find themselves trapped in what she calls “a pride paradox,” a bootstrap mentality where they tend to blame themselves rather than the corporations and government laissez-faire that left them high and dry. “Doubly blocked, they become vulnerable to structural shame,” and more

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