‘Cramer said, “I’m not a fool.’Wolfe nodded again. 'We all feel like that occasionally.’
This dichotomy in how uncertainty can be perceived by different classes and different individuals is important to recognize, for it has always presented profound dangers for liberal democracy – a form of political organization that we moderns both adore and misunderstand in equal measure. In a rich democracy threatened by terrorism, we are surprised (but shouldn’t be) by the number of people – a majority, only a handful of years ago – who are willing to tolerate outrages like torture and assassination in order to reduce their sense of insecurity. In a poor and fragile democracy like post-revolutionary Egypt, the same mechanism operates, though it is starker and more broadly applied. The promise of a political strongman like al-Sisi is the promise to reduce the majority’s sense of risk by focusing that risk instead on a minority, transforming it both in intensity and in character; boiled down, it’s a promise to oppress the few rather than worry the many. So to the extent that the cacophony of street vendors is a sign that uncertainty remains at large, it is wholly unsurprising that the Egyptian state would sooner or later move to sweep them away.
When men use the metaphor, I can’t help but hear womb envy: ‘You can create life? I can create life, too!’ But this life, this book, is intellectual, spiritual, philosophical—the opposite of the base reality of physical reproduction.
Trumpish vocabulary
Top 13 Trumpish words:
- I
- they
- you
- Trump
- very
- great
- he
- China
- said
- me
- money
- going
- Mexico
By contrast, the top 13 Jeb-ish words:
- the
- state
- strategy
- government
- should
- create
- president
- American
- in
- growth
- of
- ISIS
- forces
— Mark Liberman at Language Log
I think you’re very very beautiful and if you ever ask me to come and read aloud to you I will.
Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne aged 25 following the death of her father King George VI on 6 February, 1952. On 9 September she will have reigned for 63 years and seven months.The record for longest serving monarch had previously been held by Queen Victoria, having reigned for 23,226 days, 16 hours and 23 minutes.
Teacher’s report
If I were an editor … well, actually, I’m not sure what I would do if I were an editor. So let me just speak as a teacher. If a student submitted this essay to me, in a freshman English composition class, say, I’d have a few concerns. My comments might go something like this:
First and foremost, I’m wondering who these people are you’re responding to — do you have any particular writers or speakers in mind? If so, it would be helpful if you quoted from them; it’s hard for the reader — especially the reader who doesn’t already agree with you — to know whether you’re representing people’s views fairly, because you don’t mention anyone in particular.
So, when you speak of people “distancing our educated selves from her simple faith,” I wonder if that’s accurate. Do people who disagree with Davis’s actions do so because they’re highly educated and she is less highly educated? It would be good to have some evidence about that, especially since you’re not contesting people’s arguments but assuming you know their motives. If they have said or written something that indicates that contempt for the less educated is among their motives, then you should probably cite that.
Similarly, when you assert that these unnamed people think that “Kim Davis is a simpleton of a Christian who should have resigned before embarrassing us Christians,” it would help if you could cite someone who has called her a simpleton (or something like that) and who have confessed embarrassment.
Moving along, and in in a similar vein, your suggestion that people who have criticized Kim Davis desire “to show the liberal gestapo that we really are for the ‘rule of law’” — do you have reason to suspect that these people want to please “the liberal gestapo”? If so, citing that evidence would be the right thing to do; otherwise people could say that you’re just making ad hominem assertions rather than substantive arguments. I also wonder whether the use of “gestapo” is your best option, given the problems that have long been associated with the reductio ad hitlerum.
You refer several times to Kim Davis’s sincerity, e.g.: “it doesn’t take much Christian thinking to see how Kim Davis can believe herself to be acting in accordance with God’s moral law which is now written on her heart as a convert.” But have Davis’s Christian critics — you seem to be addressing this only to your fellow Christians — impugned her sincerity? If so, you should cite them. After all, it’s possible to disagree with people while thinking them perfectly sincere. Also, perhaps you could explain why you have such confidence in the purity of Davis’s motives and such equally absolute confidence in the wrong motives of her critics.
Finally, near the end you accuse Davis’s critics of “wishing she would just offer a little incense to Caesar and go back to obscurity already.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but that certainly sounds like you’re accusing your fellow Christians of being idolaters — of worshipping at Caesar’s altar, or at the very least of wanting other Christians to do so; and if they’re not idolaters themselves, why would they ask other people to be? In short, this is an extremely serious, indeed quite damning, accusation, and not the sort of charge that should be made without strong evidence.
So, summing up, I think you need to go back and make clear who your targets are, provide more evidence for your claims about them, and try to stick to substantive arguments rather than ad hominem claims. As it stands, this is not passing work.
That’s what I would say as a teacher. Maybe I don’t understand the challenges of editing a magazine’s website.
You speak of ‘the curriculum [you] impose,’ but I deny that you have the right to impose anything. I am passing through this place, headed for the next stage of my life — possibly graduate education in some form or another, more probably a job — and I am paying you to prepare me for that next stage. In short, we have a business contract in which I am your client, and it is your job to serve what I perceive my needs to be, not what you may happen to think they are. It’s not as though we’re living in that long-ago age when universities were considered repositories of timeless wisdom and professors custodians of that wisdom. You faculty are employees of an ideological state apparatus in a neoliberal regime that constitutes itself by a series of implied or explicit contracts in which goods are exchanged for fees. Please stop acting like this is the University of Paris in the age of Aquinas and we’re all seeking transcendent wisdom. I control my own values and am not even interested in yours, much less willing to be subservient to them. So do the job I am paying you to do and shut up about all that other crap.