Sublime

the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.

It is also likely that Herbert Bentwich, a white man of the Victorian era, cannot see nonwhites as equals. He might easily persuade himself that the Jews who will come from Europe will only better the lives of the local population, that European Jews will cure the natives, educate them, cultivate them. That they will live side by side with them in

she questioned whether if we ‘accept transgender individuals’ decision to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races’.

Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratized.

No one could credibly claim that Douglass didn’t understand the issue or wasn’t taking it seriously enough. He had himself been a slave, was separated from his family, and was physically beaten in this demonic institution of slavery, yet Douglass refused to surrender his critical thinking just to appease his partners.

If boys could just realize that their gender was ‘performative’ rather than natural, they could grow up to play a greater role in social justice activities, to the ends that Laclau, Mouffe and a generation of other radicals had always dreamed of.

Few people think that a country cannot be improved on, but to present it as riddled with bigotry, hatred and oppression is at best a partial and at worst a nakedly hostile prism through which to view society. It is an analysis expressed not in the manner of a critic hoping to improve, but as an enemy eager to destroy.

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning.