Every despotic power, especially a majority, tends to become absolute.
Oct 172023
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
Oct 162023
The oppressor adds insult to injury when he imagines himself oppressed.
Oct 042023
An irreducible minimum of undesirables is always with us, and the sole policy question, in many guises, is how to herd them.
Sep 272023
The enduring lessons of the First World War are how not to fight a war and why not to fight one.
Sep 192023
No exit, no voice.
Sep 052023
Revolution is for an imagined future, and revolt, on which it depends, for an imagined past.
Aug 172023
In normal times, the party offering the most extreme version of popular ideas natters pointlessly. In revolutionary times, it wins.
Aug 162023
A networked world is a legible world, and a legible world is an unfree world. We all have social credit scores now.
Aug 102023
There can be order without law, but not law without order.
Jul 202023
Every policy I support seems to threaten democracy itself.