Sublime

but there was also a selection of the books the store’s staff decided were worth a closer look, a collective act of curation.

For a shift of this magnitude to occur required the prior construction of political consent across a sufficiently large spectrum of the population to win elections. What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of longstanding practices of cultural socialization

For him, the 1990s opened onto a hyper-industrial era, not a post-industrial one, in which a logic of mass production was suddenly aligned with techniques that, in unprecedented ways, combine fabrication, distribution, and subjectivation on a planetary scale.

A guy called Red Saunders, along with a few of his friends, had formed Rock Against Racism in 1976, not just as a reaction to the racist skinheads terrorising our streets, but also in response to comments made by Eric Clapton and David Bowie. It’s extraordinary to think that back then Eric Clapton (aka God) said he agreed with Enoch Powell and that

This is more or less the argument of Roger Scruton in positioning environmentalism as a deservedly (politically) conservative cause. He writes in Green Philosophy, For the conservative, politics concerns the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems — systems that correct themselves in response to destabilizing change. Markets are homeostatic

Plato said those who tell the stories rule society and he was right.