Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
This is to my mind the essence of right-wing thought: a political ontology that through such subtle means allows violence to define the very parameters of social existence and common sense.
David Graeber • The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Suddenly, processes as disparate as the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure, the standardization of language and legal discourse, the design of cities, and the organization of transportation seemed... See more
James C. Scott • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting.
Timothy Snyder • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Backed by state power through records, courts, and ultimately coercion, these state fictions transformed the reality they presumed to observe, although never so thoroughly as to precisely fit the grid.