Alexis de Tocqueville, who a century and a half ago observed that nobles of the ancien régime “possessed annoying privileges, enjoyed rights that people found irksome but they safeguarded the public order, dispensed justice, had the law upheld, came to the help of the weak and directed public business.” But when “the nobility ceased to conduct these affairs, the weight of its privileges seemed more burdensome and its very existence was, in the end, no longer understandable.”
.. It is likely that other forces will intervene to preclude the wholesale transfer of France’s government and elite institutions to the Gulf States. Yet the Gulf State influence in Submission is not some dystopic future to be arrived at absent a course correction; it is very much part of the West’s present reality.
.. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.” The money flowing into extremist groups and human rights violations have been documented copiously, with little change in U.S. policy.
.. Some experts estimate as much as $7 trillion from the U.S. alone to the Middle East in the last four decades.
.. Gulf Arab petro-nobility donate tens of millions to elite American universities and leading think tanks. The think tanks, of course, are well positioned to directly shape U.S. policy. “It is particularly egregious because with a law firm or lobbying firm, you expect them to be an advocate,” Joseph Sandler, an attorney and expert on foreign influence, told the New York Times’ Eric Lipton. “Think tanks have this patina of academic neutrality and objectivity, and that is being compromised.”
The Self-Hating Book Critic
The death of the newspaper review meant the end of the literary authority who would declare that books by straight, white men are always the best of books. That books by the conglomerate publishing houses are the best of books. That literary culture exists only in New York City.
.. And that is what all those people on the picket line fought to save: a sexist, racist, elitist system.
.. I want to tell them: this world is not for you, you are better without it. Outside the gates, not in. This world was in fact, in part, designed specifically to keep you out. It does not want you. It will not nourish you.
.. Nobody really wants to be James Joyce, though. When it comes down to it.
.. Totally inaccessible and publishing poison, forced to self-publish with the help of two (inadequately celebrated) lesbians, thought to be a madman, and still cursed to this day. No one really wants to be James Joyce, living in borderline poverty with an insane daughter and a layabout son, quietly changing the world but very rarely, if at all, acknowledged for it. So completely out on the frontier his books were confiscated and destroyed by multiple governments.
But everyone wants to think they’re James Joyce, in their cozy teaching jobs, in mortgaged homes, writing about the same things that everyone else is writing about.
.. Anxiety’s primary function is to ready the body for action and for change. It is a complicated uprooting process, the gathering together of energy and focus so that when you decide what to do, you are able to do it.
.. Give a person absolute freedom and probably what they will do is just copy the person closest to them. The anxiety of making a decision under absolute freedom is too much to bear.
.. It’s why the Internet culture is just a copy of newspaper culture, but with a few fucks and shits thrown in.
.. Don’t think there weren’t nights where I woke up with the thought “My entire purpose in life is to help people make decisions about which books to buy; I am simply part of someone’s marketing strategy,” chilling me to the bone.
Krugman: Cranks on Top
You probably know that Mr. Rubio is proposing big tax cuts, and may know that among other things he proposes completely eliminating taxes oninvestment income — which would mean, for example, that Mitt Romney would end up owing precisely zero in federal taxes.
.. What you may not know is that Mr. Rubio’s tax cuts would be almost twice as big as George W. Bush’s as a percentage of gross domestic product
.. So when Mr. Rubio genuflects at the altars of supply-side economics and hard money, he isn’t telling ordinary Republicans what they want to hear — by and large the party’s base couldn’t care less. He is, instead, pandering to the party’s elite, consisting mainly of big donors and the network of apparatchiks at think tanks, media organizations, and so on.
In the G.O.P., crank doctrines in economics and elsewhere aren’t bubbling up from below, they’re being imposed from the top down.
What Would Scalia Want in His Successor? A Dissent Offers Clues
Justice Scalia wrote, the court “consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School.” Justice Scalia attended Harvard, as did five other members of the court. The other three went to Yale.
.. Since Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, the court, for the first time, has no Protestant member. Justice Scalia was Catholic, as are five other justices. The other three are Jewish.
.. Justice Scalia also surveyed the lack of geographical diversity on his court. “Four of the nine are natives of New York City,” he wrote.
Indeed, every borough but Staten Island was represented. Justice Scalia was from Queens. Justice Ginsburg is from Brooklyn, Justice Kagan is from Manhattan and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx.