(no subject)

There are few things more American than populist elitism: the belief that you are somehow separate from the ultra-nationalists or the globalists who really express the popular sentiment, that your deduction of conspiracy theories give you an advantage over the sheeple, or that your unique perspective of something shiny in history gives you an advantage. The idea that most of the "other Americans" are uniquely and world-historically stupid, that YOU are the one leads us out of the Idiocracy of the current, is believed by all parts of the US political spectrum.

(no subject)

So I have been studying Shi'i Islam closely in the past few weeks. It has been instructive as I have been asked to revisit analytic Marxism (which empties Marxism out of particularist methodological claims) and the Pop the Left conceptual explanations. In some ways, one sees patterns in the way ideological movements operate both in current class society but also before it.

(no subject)

Rhetoric is more than a tool or handmaiden of ideology--in fact, the moralizing force of words often creates the fractures in the very ideological frameworks it wishes to serve. Remember that when thinking banal sloganeering is just opportunism.