Sublime

the more ordinary people are able to produce, the more powerful people can confiscate.

Russia still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives.

Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real or imaginary.

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differe

Russia: see their actions in favor of “traditional families”, and Richard Hanania’s piece on Russia the “Great Satan in the Liberal Imagination”.

flailing bureaucracies, populist opportunists, nor all-powerful dictators

In his book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe wrote that ‘unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.’

The gaze of the state intensifies—but the state may find, to its surprise, that its subjects command many of the same capabilities, and are gazing right back upon it.

Si des personnages puissants souhaitaient votre arrestation, vous étiez arrêté. La loi n’avait aucune importance. Sergueï, lui, avait 36 ans, et il était sorti de l’adolescence à une époque où les choses avaient commencé à s’améliorer. Il voyait la Russie non telle qu’elle était mais telle qu’il désirait qu’elle fût. Et pour cette raison, il ne com