US foreign policy

Against Political Panglossianism

by on September 13, 2010 @ 4:02 am · 1 comment

in Anti-Statism, Vulgar Politics

I offer to readers a term of my coinage: polidicy.

I construct it as “theodicy” was constructed, and I do so in the spirit of the copycat. A theodicy is a vindication of divine goodness in the context of the existence of evil. It is an important theological concept, and you will find theodicies embedded in most understandings of Providence, and nearly everyone who believes in a deity has some sort of theodicy in tow.

Polidicy, then, is a vindication of a state or government body in the context of its own obvious crimes. Most people who are loyal to some state and pretend to possess a moral sense, or conscience, have some polidicy in their head, some set of excuses for why the state’s many crimes do not amount to a moral case against the state as such, and how, even, the state can be said to be “basically good.”

[Keep reading…]

{ 1 comment }

Gingrich the Compulsive Mosque-Baiter: Reveling in Weakness

by on September 6, 2010 @ 12:40 am · 1 comment

in Democracy, Imperialism, The Right, Vulgar Politics, War

Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer and disciple of New Age futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, makes a singularly unlikely Crusader. Yet apparently at some point in the past year or so Gingrich looked in a mirror and saw Don John of Austria looking back at him.

An epiphany of that kind would explain Gingrich’s perverse determination to depict the contrived controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a contemporary Battle of Lepanto. A more reasonable explanation would be that Gingrich, one of the most penetrably insincere figures in American politics, is trying to distill irrational populist resentment into a propellant for a presidential campaign.

[Keep reading…]

{ 1 comment }