Irish Avatar

 Seeing the reports of the race riots in Northern Ireland yesterday—in which gangs of masked men burned Black and immigrant families out of their homes, like something out of a turn-of-the-century pogrom, or the 1921 Tulsa massacre—I thought of John Berryman's words: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery."

There's something particularly heartbreaking about seeing this evil in Northern Ireland, which has known its share of violence, persecution, and oppression before, and ought to make common cause with its victims. Byron wrote in his poem "The Irish Avatar" that he could only be glad that the heroes of Ireland's freedom struggle past were no longer alive to see what the country had come to. 

Boats and Men

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy last weekend to commemorate the D-Day landings. In a tortured metaphor, he yet again echoed this administration's standard racist talking point that today's nonwhite migrants and refugees are staging an "invasion" of Western Europe. 

"Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies," Hegseth intoned. "Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Weak Suffer as They Must?

 Yaroslav Trofimov writes today in the Wall Street Journal about how the "weaker" countries around the globe seem to be putting up a surprisingly good defense to the aggression of great powers.

Back at the start of the second Trump term, Trofimov notes, the phrase on everyone's lips was the one from Thucydides: "The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must." We thought we were back in the era of naked conquest, imperialism, and social Darwinism. As Stephen Miller notoriously put it in an interview: "We live in a world, in the real world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power."

The Literary Underground

 As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set. 

Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them. 

Hegseth the Pétainiste

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy over the weekend to deliver a D-Day speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he used the occasion—ostensibly commemorating the time U.S. troops liberated Europe from fascism—to pointedly amplify the talking points of European fascists. 

Specifically, he implied that non-white immigrants to the continent are "invaders." Today, he said, "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Sacred Texts

 I am remembering why I like Walter Kaufmann so much. 

In his essays in Existentialism, Religion, and Death, Kaufmann applies the daring and untried exegetical method of simply believing that people may have actually meant what they said. 

Kierkegaard may really have been what we would now call a religious fundamentalist. 

White Racist Rule

 Well, it happened again. I fell for the mirage of the "Grand Bargain." 

When I first heard that even a conservative appeals court with two Trump-appointed judges had struck down an Alabama voting map for intentionally discriminating against Black voters, I thought: ah, here's a perfect opportunity for the Roberts court to do the right thing.