I was born in Canada but I’ve lived in the United States for most of my adult life, and I became an American citizen a few years back. Over the years, it’s been interesting to note the changing role that Canada has played in my imagination. For instance, during the Trump years, Canada served as an imaginative escape. If things here ever got really bad, I knew that my Canadian citizenship would provide my wife and I a means of escape. However, over the past few days, as the reality of the Biden administration becomes clearer, I find myself imagining Canada in a new way: Canada is where I’ll go when I finally give up on America.
Read MoreI recently delivered the Julia Watkin Memorial Kierkegaard Lecture at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College. A recording of the lecture is available here:
Read MoreWith everything that's been going on these days, you wouldn't think that the National Parks’ Facebook page would be among the most depressing, but it is. I usually love seeing posts of peoples’ National Park vacation pictures and hearing about their trip plans - they're gorgeous pictures and the trip plans give me inspiration for future trips. But these days, it's served as an almost constant reminder of how this country is failing to take this pandemic seriously.
Trips to National Parks are hardly the idyllic vacations you might imagine, as many of our National Parks are extremely crowded, as are the bordering towns. And this is to say nothing of the human contact people have at busy park locations, ranger stations, gift shops, restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, campgrounds, and so forth. Moreover, people travel from far and wide to visit the parks, either via long road trips or by airplane, so that seeing these Facebook posts is like watching the virus spread in real time.
Read MoreSince the 2016 election, media outlets have been reporting on the problem of conflict of interest, and there’s no surprise why: this president is riddled with them. However, almost without fail, the media misinterprets their nature. Worse yet, it’s as if they’re intentionally misinterpreting them in order to diminish their significance.
One prominent example is the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C.
Read MoreIn New York City, one of the comparisons being made is between the response to COVID-19 and the response to the BLM protests. In the case of COVID-19, the city (and the state) proved themselves largely inept, and despite months of advance warning, they acted much too late. However, when it came to the BLM protests, the entire city was shut down in anticipation of protests that were still largely prospective, imposing an 8 pm curfew and transforming the city into a police state. In other words, when it came to a public health threat that's been known for months, the city was only capable of acting ineffectively and after the fact, but when it came to stifling potential, future rallies for racial justice, the city was capable of acting swiftly and in anticipation of a forthcoming “threat.”
This comparison speaks to the way that the American state—at both the city, state, and national level—has increasingly abdicated any role in providing for the public good while instead seeing its role as primarily that of providing “law and order.”
Read MoreOver the past several years, one of the better novels I've read was Roberto Bolaño's 2666. It’s also perhaps the only book that has ever given me nightmares. But it did, night in and night out, for weeks on end. And I was recently reminded of this experience. And the reason I was reminded of it was because Bolaño understood something of the difficulty that we will all face in trying to convey a sense of this political moment to future generations.
Read MoreI have very little faith in the mainstream media. However, I have to say that after watching the recent interview between Mika Brzezinski and Joe Biden, Mika comes off quite well and Joe quite poorly. I’d encourage you all to watch it.
If you do watch it, I think it's clear why Mika comes off so well: she basically hammers Biden for 20 minutes about Tara Reade. Biden offers what seems to be definitive denials time and again, but Mika doesn't accept them, and she continually reformulates her questions in order to keep the pressure on Biden. She only relents when the interview time us up.
The brunt of Mika's questions revolve around two points, and the reason she is so unrelenting is because Biden is evasive about both of them. In the case of the first set of questions, his evasiveness is quite obvious, and he comes off poorly. However, in the case of the second set of questions, the evasiveness is less obvious, but I think they help reveal a larger and unfortunate truth.
Read MoreThe United States is often seen (and often sees itself) as a highly litigious society, ready to launch frivolous lawsuits for any and every reason. And there is some truth to this. However, having lived most of my life in another country, I've come to a different conclusion. The United States is not litigious by its nature, but its litigiousness is the consequence of the complete and long-standing failure of its government.
Read MoreI don't think that this is a particularly novel idea, but the more I think about it, the more the recent bailout seems magnitudes worse than anything we've seen before.
We're likely going to see unemployment at levels that will rival those of the great depression. This is a tragedy in itself, but what might be worse, is that as a result of decades of tax cuts for corporations and the rich, working class and middle class income tax plays a disproportionate role in funding government services relative to other forms of taxes. In other words, in other countries, taxes on the wealthy and on corporations constitute a much higher percentage of total tax revenue, but here, decades of tax cuts have meant that the tax burden falls overwhelmingly on average people. That is, average Americans shoulder the burden of funding the government. Consequently, the massive loss in jobs means a huge decrease in tax revenues, because the super-rich and corporations don’t really pay taxes..
Read MoreIn these times of quarantine boredom, I thought I’d share a sample chapter from my recent book, The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Penn Press is currently having a 40% off Spring sale with promo code SPRING20-FM.
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