Wednesday, March 02, 2005
(10:44 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Request
I mentioned this in passing last night, but I strongly recommend the Wealth Bondage post entitled "How to Write like a Liberal Sack of Garbage". Here is a taste:They have read all the right post-Enlightenment books, but the message of aporia, or the hermeneutics of suspicion, the darkness of bare life beyond reason and justice, while duly noted and commented upon at length, did not penetrate to the core, where style is the man. They are good men and open men still, untouched by the knowledge that grows from the Tree of Good and Evil. They take for granted, as their patrimony, what is now passing away, the liberal tradition of tolerance, of our respective rights to be wrong. They will murmur a mild reproof, only after long consideration, and hedged round with diffident apologies for their self-assertion. They will set a better example all the way to gallows. (May we all.) Not for them the raised voice; the strong rebuke, rather an awkward silence, or a fair minded account, ending in no conclusion, ranged against those who engage - literally - in torture and the repeal of the laws protecting us from it.No hedging, no second-guessing: I regard this post as the best blog post I have read.
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So Darwinian Selection will weed out those unfit to survive under our changed conditions of Terror coming and going. May the candid, among them my liberal friends, survive if only because they are deemed harmless dupes, on the irrefutable evidence of their blogs.
One is reminded of Tim Burke's piece on the parallels between our time and Weimar Germany.
UPDATE: Richard Pope of CPROBES has a post on the related topic of hope. (He is "RIPope" from comments.)
ANOTHER UPDATE: I have changed the little "submission policy" in the upper right to reflect what has been my unstated policy from the beginning -- I'm not going to invite you to post something here that you have already posted on your own blog. I'm sure some complaints could be levelled against such a policy, but The Weblog your blog is a jealous blog -- I intend the guest blogger policy first of all to be about increasing the quantity of good material available here, and only secondarily about promoting your blog. If you have written something good at your own blog and want me to link to it, I can most likely do that, but unless your piece is something so amazingly great that I'm awed and humbled that you would even consider posting it here -- yeah, probably not going to cross-post something from your blog.
Please don't take it personally if I have turned down your post on these grounds -- the first person to fall victim to this unstated policy was Angela, whom I love dearly and whom I later specifically begged to become a member of this blog.
