Problematic Politics Quotes

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.

The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission. A more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor, such as plowing and harvesting. This gives them control of food production, which in turn translates into political clout. There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that men are stronger is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease, and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, mainly been excluded from jobs that required little physical effort, such as the priesthood, law, and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor in the fields....and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twenty-somethings are much stronger than their elders. ...Boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic popes. In forager societies, political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature. In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labor. Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression. Millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women. Women can match men as far as hatred, greed, and abuse are concern, but when push comes to shove…men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence. This is why, throughout history, warfare has been a masculine prerogative. In times of war, men’s control of the armed forces has made them the masters of civilian society too. They then use their control of civilian society to fight more and more wars. …Recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are…on average, better suited to serve as common soldiers. Yet, granted that the common soldiers are all men, does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men? That makes no sense. It’s like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton fields are all Black, plantation owners will be Black as well. Just as an all-Black workforce might be controlled by an all-White management, why couldn’t an all-male soldiery be controlled by an all-female government?

Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, toward one or the other of the very few typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom but only quest for wisdom, the evidence of all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' [quoting M. Alexandre Kojève] of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born. The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems. But the philosopher does not necessarily succumb to this danger, as is shown by Socrates, who never belonged to a sect and never founded one. And even if the philosophic friends are compelled to be members of a sect or to found one, they are not necessarily members of one and the same sect: Amicus Plato.

Men deft men mental men of loving men all men Vile men virtuous men same men from which men Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said Has each man that sees it Cry as men to the men sensate Conceptual recognition the men And their poverty speaking to the men Is about timeliness men is about Previous palpability from which The problematic politics adorable And humble especially Young men of sheepish privilege becoming Sweet new style

We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It's a passive construction. There's no active agent in the sentence. It's a bad thing that happens to women. It's a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren't even a part of it! Jackson Katz, Ph.D., from his Ted talk "violence against women: it's a men's issue

In politics, the connection between what you pay for and what you actually get is problematic at best... This is another way of asserting that your vote in the marketplace counts for so much more than your vote in the polling booth. Cast your dollars for the washing machine of your choice and that is what you get--nothing more and nothing less. Pull the lever for the politician of your choice and, most of the time (if you're lucky), you will get some of what you do want and much of what you don't. The votes of a special interest lobby may ultimately cancel out yours. As someone much wiser than me once said, "Politics may not be the oldest profession, but the results are often the same.

Within Hobbes’ depiction of the motives for conflict. . . there is a problematic in which the grave threat that human beings pose to other human beings is not constituted simply by the structures of human passions, interests, and desires, nor by the addition of a self-deceptive and egotistical desire for recognition and proof of one’s perhaps illusory power. In this moment, it is the very rationality of other humans, reason in the broad sense, understood as roughly equal to oneself in both capacity and structure, that poses such a threat

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

Healing imagery is also problematic because it implies that the damage being done is primarily emotional. The goal becomes one of "getting along" better by being nicer and more tolerant toward one another, forgiving and forgetting, living in more authentic ways. I don’t object to this goal, but it ignores the fact that a lot of the trouble doesn’t begin and end with interpersonal relations and emotional wounds. Much of it is embedded in structures of power and inequality that shape almost every aspect of life in this society, from economics to politics to religion to schools and the family. The idea that we’re going to get out of this by somehow getting to a place where we’re kinder and more sensitive to one another ignores most of what we have to overcome. It sets us up to walk right past the trouble toward an alternative that doesn’t exist and can’t exist until we do something about what creates privilege and oppression in the first place. And that is something that needs to be changed, not healed.

The most problematic among this latter group have earned the reputation of being “drop-out factories” because while they enroll many low income students, so few graduate; approximately thirty nonprofits have abysmal graduation rates of 20 percent or lower.

The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and religion, which had earlier been defeated at great cost.

There are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power. First, the statement that ‘men are stronger than women’ is true only on average, and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, been excluded mainly from jobs that require little physical effort (such as the priesthood, law and politics), while engaging in hard manual labour in the fields, in crafts and in the household.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn’t really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn’t really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre’s origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn’t post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there’s no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there’s nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there’s nothing wrong with SF getting called ‘dystopia’ when it’s marketed to teenage girls, because girls don’t read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so. It’s not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the works we think are problematic for fear of being ostracized. We need to get over this crushing obsession with niceness – that all fans must act nicely, that all authors must be nice to each other, that everyone must be nice about everything even when it goes against our principles – because it’s not helping us grow, or be taken seriously, or do anything other than throw a series of floral bedspreads over each new room-hogging elephant. We, all of us, need to get critical. Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA

Yanks didn’t beat about the bush, didn’t fill the air with polite snorts and throat clearings before coming to the point. Whatever was on their mind, they’d spit it out, like a sneeze, and while that could be problematic at times, I usually found it preferable to the alternative: No one saying what they truly felt. No one wanting to hear how you felt.

[God] tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it’s—merely descriptive. Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman’s consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic good graces of men.

Ultimately, the concept of a religious left is problematic at its core because the Bible (or for that matter the Koran, Torah, etc.) cannot be used to unequivocally defend and advance human rights. Using Fox News, Christian radio, and the Internet as bully pulpits, Christian fundamentalists have capitalized on this simple unimpeachable fact and built a political empire. They have hidden behind scripture to justify and advance a fascist agenda that has set the struggle for democracy in the U.S. back decades.

Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.

Police activism, especially in the guise of union activity, remains somewhat perplexing. The historical development is clear enough, but politically it is troublesome—especially for the left. The whole issue presents a nest of paradoxes: the police have unionized and gone on strike—but continue in their role as strikebreakers. They have pitted themselves against their bosses and the government, but represent a threat to democracy rather than an expression of it. They have resisted authority for the sake of authoritarian aims, have broken laws in the name of law and order, and have demanded rights that they consistently deny to others. (...) Police associations thus developed in relative isolation from the rest of the labor movement, while building close ties with the command hierarchy within the departments. This fact points to two related reasons why police unions are not legitimate labor unions. First, as is discussed above, the police are clearly part of the managerial machinery of capitalism. Their status as “workers” is therefore problematic. Second, the agendas of police unions mostly reflect the interests of the institution (the police department) rather than those of the working class.

So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany—all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century. There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy.

Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For

Before embarking on this intellectual journey, I would like to highlight one crucial point. In much of this book I discuss the shortcomings of the liberal worldview and the democratic system. I do so not because I believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world. While it might not be appropriate for every society in every stage of development, it has proven its worth in more societies and in more situations than any of its alternatives. So when we are examining the new challenges that lie ahead of us, it is necessary to understand the limitations of liberal democracy and to explore how we can adapt and improve its current institutions. Unfortunately, in the present political climate any critical thinking about liberalism and democracy might be hijacked by autocrats and various illiberal movements, whose sole interest is to discredit liberal democracy rather than to engage in an open discussion about the future of humanity. While they are more than happy to debate the problems of liberal democracy, they have almost no tolerance of any criticism directed at them. As an author, I was therefore required to make a difficult choice. Should I speak my mind openly and risk that my words might be taken out of context and used to justify burgeoning autocracies? Or should I censor myself? It is a mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders. Due to the spread of such regimes, it is becoming increasingly dangerous to think critically about the future of our species. After some soul-searching, I chose free discussion over self-censorship. Without criticizing the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or move beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression.

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. · Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus­lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease.

In much of this book I discuss the shortcomings of the liberal worldview and the democratic system. I do so not because I believe liberal democracy is uniquely problematic but rather because I think it is the most successful and most versatile political model humans have so far developed for dealing with the challenges of the modern world. While it might not be appropriate for every society in every stage of development, it has proven its worth in more societies and in more situations than any of its alternatives. So when we are examining the new challenges that lie ahead of us, it is necessary to understand the limitations of liberal democracy and to explore how we can adapt and improve its current institutions.

But this is not where the true corruption lies. The secret vice, already pointed out by Umberto Eco, lies in the way the media become self-referring and speak only among themselves. The multimedium is becoming the intermedium. This already problematic situation is aggravated when it is a single hypermedium — television — eyeing itself. All the more so as this tele-centrism is combined with a very severe implicit moral and political judgement: it implies that the masses basically neither need nor desire meaning or information — that all they ask for is signs and images. Television provides them with these in great quantities, returning to the real world, with utter - though well-cammouflaged — contempt , in the form of'reality shows' or vox-pops — that is to say, in the form of universal self-commentary and mocked-up scenarios, where both the questions and the answers are 'fixed'.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it! —JACKSON KATZ, PH.D., FROM HIS TED TALK “VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: IT’S A MEN’S ISSUE

It is critical to recognize that we live in an increasingly complex world - biologically, socially, politically, technologically, you name it - that holds many inherent contradictions. In the middle of this complex world are we humans, who have a natural tendency to seek coherence in what we see, feel, think, and do. When we experience conflict, this tendency intensifies. Conflict is essentially a contradiction, an incompatibility, oppositely directed forces, and a difference that triggers tension. When we encounter conflict, within the field of forces that constitute it, the natural human tendency is to reduce that tension by seeking coherence through simplification. Research shows that this tendency toward simplification becomes even more intensified when we are under stress, threat, time constraints, fatigue, and various other conditions all absolutely typical of conflict. So what is the big idea? It is NOT that coherence is bad and complexity is good. Coherence seeking is simply a necessary and functional process that helps us interpret and respond to our world efficiently and (hopefully) effectively. And complexity in extremes is a nightmare - think of Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s or the financial crisis of 2009 or Times Square during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, too much coherence can be just as pathological: for example, the collapse of the nuances and contradictions inherent in any conflict situation into simple 'us versus them' terms, or a deep commitment to a rigid understanding of conflicts based on past sentiments and obsolete information. Either extreme - overwhelming complexity or oversimplified coherence - is problematic. But in difficult, long-term conflicts, the tide pulls fiercely toward simplification of complex realities. This is what we must content with.

In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology: ‘Orwell belonged to the category of writers who write.’ And could afford to write, they might have added. In contrast they speak of George Garrett, whom Orwell met in Liverpool, a gifted writer, seaman, dockworker, Communist militant, ‘the plain facts of [whose] situation—on the dole, married and with kids, the family crowded into two rooms—made it impossible for him to attempt any extended piece of writing.’ Orwell’s writing life then was from the start an affirmation of unexamined bourgeois values. This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary: I urged him to write his autobiography, but as usual, living in about two rooms on the dole with a wife (who I gather objects to his writing) and a number of kids, he finds it impossible to settle to any long work and can only do short stories. Apart from the enormous unemployment in Liverpool, it is almost impossible for him to get work because he is blacklisted everywhere as a Communist. Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)

The institutionalized practices of excluding women from the ideological work of society are the reason we have a history constructed largely from the perspective of men, and largely about men. This is why we have so few women poets and why the records of those who survived the hazards of attempting poetry are so imperfect.40 This is why we know so little of women visionaries, thinkers, and political organizers.41 This is why we have an anthropology that tells us about other societies from the perspective of men and hence has so distorted the cross-cultural record that it may now be impossible to learn what we might have known about how women lived in other forms of society. This is why we have a sociology that is written from the perspective of positions in a male-dominated ruling class and is set up in terms of the relevances of the institutional power structures that constitute those positions.42 This is why in English literature there is a corner called “women in literature” or “women novelists” and an overall critical approach to literature that assumes it is written by men and perhaps even largely for men. This is why the assumptions of psychological research43 and of educational research and philosophy take for granted male experience, orientation, and concerns and treat as normative masculine modes of being.

Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, “Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that,” I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here. Capisce? All that being said, it was 1997. I was six years old and hadn’t quite developed my political consciousness about cultural appropriation or the colonization of the Americas and subsequent genocide of Native American people at the hands of white settlers yet. I also didn’t know multiplication, so I had some stuff to work on. What I did know was that Pocahontas was, by far, the most badass Disney princess. Keep in mind that Disney’s transgender-butch-lesbian masterpiece Mulan wasn’t released until a year later, or else I would’ve obviously gone with that (equally problematic) costume.

If someone publishes an essay, or tells a joke, or performs a play that forwards a problematic idea the U.S. government generally wouldn't try to stop that person from doing so. Even if they could. If the expression doesn't involve national security the government generally doesn't give a shit. But, if enough vocal consumers are personally offended, they can silence that artist just as effectively. They can petition advertisers and marginalize the artist's reception and economically remove that individual from whatever platform he or she happens to utilize simply because there are no expression based platforms that don't have an economic underpinning. It's one of those situations where the practical manifestation is the opposite of the technical intention. As Americans we tend to look down on European countries that impose legal limitations on speech. Yet as long as speakers in those countries stay within the specified boundaries discourse is allowed relatively unfettered, even when it's unpopular. In the U.S., there are absolutely no speech boundaries imposed by the government. So the citizenry creates its own limitations based on the arbitrary values of whichever activist group is most successful at inflicting its worldview upon an economically fragile public sphere. As a consequence, the United States is a safe space for those who want to criticize the government, but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomforting. Some would argue that this trade off is worth it. Time may prove otherwise.

What are some of the concerns regarding the penal substitutionary metaphors? Some of this debate is theological and exegetical, often centering upon Paul and the proper understanding of his doctrine of justification. Specifically, some suggest that the penal substitutionary metaphors, read too literally, create a problematic view of God: that God is inherently a God of retributive justice who can only be “satisfied” with blood sacrifice. A more missional worry is that the metaphors behind penal substitutionary atonement reduce salvation to a binary status: Justified versus Condemned and Pure versus Impure. The concern is that when salvation reduces to avoiding the judgment of God (Jesus accepting our “death sentence”) and accepting Christ’s righteousness as our own (being “washed” and made “holy” for the presence of God), we can ignore the biblical teachings that suggest that salvation is communal, cosmic in scope, and is an ongoing developmental process. These understandings of atonement - that salvation is an active communal engagement that participates in God’s cosmic mission to restore all things - are vital to efforts aimed at motivating spiritual formation and missional living. As many have noted, by ignoring the communal, cosmic, and developmental facets of salvation penal substitutionary atonement becomes individualistic and pietistic. The central concern of penal substitutionary atonement is standing “washed” and “justified” before God. No doubt there is an individual aspect to salvation - every metaphor has a bit of the truth —but restricting our view to the legal and purity metaphors blinds us to the fact that atonement has developmental, social, political, and ecological implications.

I believe that if, like me, you have privilege and are equipped with the resources and knowledge to have these conversations, it is your job to educate those who have no idea how to navigate this information, define these resources, and to challenge their own preconceived ideas. It is not solely the responsibility of marginalised people to advocate for their own rights, to explain their own oppression, or to hold hands with the very people undermining them. This is a reminder that each and every one of us has arrived at our current worldview because of people who took the time to explain things, who performed labour to educate us. We need to pay that forward, not sit on high horses. I know I am the product of the people closest to me, and that our debates and occasional conflicts are at the crux of my self-development, reflection, and empowerment. It isn’t your job to engage in harmful conversations with those committed to misunderstanding you but it isn’t helpful to demonise people whose views do not mirror your own or whose progress is slower. It isn’t effective to shut down and to turn your back on those with other worldviews once you believe you know better. We shouldn’t pull the ladder up behind us when we decided we’re in the right place. We shouldn’t be shutting up shop. This is the ultimate opportunity to use what we have learned to ensure marginalised people do not have to have these conversations. We don’t need to speak on behalf of anyone but we can direct people to resources, we can push back on problematic language and views, and we can use our knowledge and privilege for change-making. If you hold the privileges that I do, a White woman claiming to be a feminist, your fear is not enough of a barrier. I know that is a confronting statement but it is something we must interrogate. It is vital to note that there are many circumstances where breaking your silence, challenging the status quo, and speaking out pose a threat. I want to be clear that this is not a call to subject yourself to devastating outcomes, or dangerous conversations, or situations that pose a threat to your safety or security. But if the only thing standing between you and change is fear of causing your friends discomfort, or lowering the mood by calling out something that may be considered taboo, you must walk through that fear. History depends on it. Change is contingent on your voice. If you want to identify as a feminist. If you want to claim this space and that you are #doingthework, this is exactly what that work looks like. Having difficult conversations, being brave, and challenging widely held assumptions. Turning up to the protest. Putting your money toward causes you claim to stand for. Buying the book and using what you’ve learned to ensure this work does not remain the sole responsibility of the impacted, marginalised communities, but becomes something that those without lied experiences understand and advocate for. Doing all this, is more than half the battle. The next time you bookend a conversation with “it is not my job to educate you”, I think it is really important to remember that, actually, it kind of is. Your privilege means you have access to people and influence over them. You are considered by society to be more palatable in your anger, and your advocacy, and people are more willing to hear you speak to difficult topics. It is your job to educate yourself, and to use that inherent privilege to educate others, or to at least have a go. It is your job, as the feminist you claim to be, to act as a barricade for people experiencing compounding marginalisations. It is your job to educate yourself and others. It is as simple as that.

The triumph of the transsexual and of transvestitism casts a strange light, retrospectively, upon the sexual liberation espoused by an earlier generation. It now appears that this liberation - which, according to its own discourse, meant the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force, a process especially favorable to the principles of femininity and of sexual pleasure - may actually have been no more than an intermediate phase on the way to the confusion of categories that we have been discussing. The sexual revolution may thus turn out to have been just a stage in the genesis of transsexuality. What is at issue here, fundamentally, is the problematic fate of all revolutions. The cybernetic revolution, in view of the equivalence of brain and computer, places humanity before the crucial question 'Am I a man or a machine? ' The genetic revolution that is taking place at the moment raises the question 'Am I a man or just a potential clone? ' The sexual revolution, by liberating all the potentialities of desire, raises another fundamental question, 'Am I a man or a woman?' (If it has done nothing else, psychoanalysis has certainly added its weight to this principle of sexual uncertainty.) As for the political and social revolution, the prototype for all the others, it will turn out to have led man by an implacable logic - having offered him his own freedom, his own free will - to ask himself where his own will lies, what he wants in his heart of hearts, and what he is entitled to expect from himself. To these questions there are no answers. Such is the paradoxical outcome of every revolution: revolution opens the door to indeterminacy, anxiety and confusion. Once the orgy was over, liberation was seen to have left everyone looking for their generic and sexual identity - and with fewer and fewer answers available, in view of the traffic in signs and the multiplicity of pleasures on offer. That is how we became transsexuals - just as we became transpoliticals: in other words, politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings, androgynous and hermaphroditic - for by this time we had embraced, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, and were left wearing only their masks: we had become, in our own heads - and perhaps unbeknownst to ourselves - transvestites of the political realm.

Christian [historical] revisionism is integral to the Christian Right's approach to politics and public policy. If one's political righteousness and sense of historical continuity are matters of faith, what appears as fact to everyone else becomes fiction before the compelling evidence of faith. Whatever does not fall neatly into a 'Biblical worldview' becomes problematic, perhaps a delusion sent by Satan.

Using visualizations to express political positions introduces a bias into the form, thereby distancing these visualizations from their social scientific counterparts that strive to report without prejudice. From an agonistic perspective, the bias in these expressions is appropriate, not problematic. Centrality, or neutrality, is impossible in agonistic pluralism because the broad and divisive differences of positions are considered to be constitutive of the political condition (Mouffe 2005b). Bias is required to do the work of agonism.

By banning certain violent groups and allowing others, Facebook will be able to effectively determine the outcome of an election in a sovereign nation. That is, ultimately, what is so troubling about the increasing reliance by governments on corporate policies to accomplish what existing laws cannot. The US list is certainly political—and by many accounts deeply problematic—but what happens when less democratic countries start exerting authority within processes like the GIFCT? Will their definition of “terrorist” hold up in the court of international opinion? As journalist Tom Risen pointed out back in 2014: “Another hurdle for social media sites working to remove objectionable posts is that governments of the different countries where they operate can vary in their motives when pushing for the content’s removal.

The CSA regulates most of the common drugs you’ve probably heard of, such as marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, LSD, heroin, ecstasy, oxycodone, steroids, codeine, and many more. However, not all drugs fall under the purview of the CSA—alcohol and tobacco are curiously exempt from its scope, an outcome that most attribute to successful political lobbying. The CSA categorizes drugs hierarchically into one of five “Schedules” based on their potential for abuse and medical value. Schedule 1 drugs are viewed as the most dangerous, having the highest potential for abuse and lowest medical value, whereas those in Schedule 5 are considered the least dangerous. The higher a drug ranks in the scheduling hierarchy, the more restrictions and regulations apply. Bewildering to many, marijuana is classified as a Schedule 1 drug, in the same category as heroin. Perhaps even more shocking, cocaine and methamphetamine are listed one step below in Schedule 2. Yes, the CSA actually classifies meth as less problematic than marijuana, despite the fact that thousands of people overdose from meth each year and effectively zero die from marijuana.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

That particular situation was problematic enough, but it is emblematic of much larger and more entrenched questions and conflicts around who speaks for parks, who speaks for land. The claim that parks should be accessible to “all” is a performatively liberal stance, one that undercuts any agonistic claims and becomes atheoretical and depolitical in the hands of state bureaucracies. All land is saturated with stories and histories, much of it beautiful and honourable, and some awful and violent. Claiming land to be “common” or to be commonly held does not wipe history clean. We live among the accumulating ruins of colonial rationalities, and stating that parks should “benefit all” willfully ignores history and obscures the highly political choices that are being made all around us. Any claim that parks are “open to all” is a naked lie — a lie that is designed to buttress colonial rationalities.

But perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not are own, irreversibly, if not fatally. It is not easy to understand how a political community is wrought from such ties. One speaks, and one speaks for another, to another, and yet there is no way to collapse the distinction between the Other and oneself. When we say "we" we do nothing more than designate this very problematic. We do not solve it. And perhaps it is, and ought to be, insoluble. This disposition of ourselves outside ourselves seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure.

the statement that men are stronger than women’ is true only on average, and only with regard to certain types of strength. Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease and fatigue than men. There are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men. Furthermore, and most problematically for this theory, women have, throughout history, been excluded mainly from jobs that require little physical effort (such as the priesthood, law and politics), while engaging in hard manual labour in the fields, in crafts and in the household. If social power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina, women should have got far more of it. Even more importantly, there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans. People in their sixties usually exercise power over people in their twenties, even though twentysomethings are much stronger than their elders.

The United States tried to establish a modern, Weberian state during the Progressive Era and New Deal. It succeeded in many respects: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve are among the most technically competent, well-run, and autonomous government bodies anywhere in the world. But the overall quality of American public administration remains very problematic, precisely because of the country’s continuing reliance on courts and parties at the expense of state administration. Part of the phenomenon of decay has to do with intellectual rigidity. The idea that lawyers and litigation should be such an integral part of public administration is not a view widely shared in other democracies, and yet it has become such an entrenched way of doing business in the United States that no one sees any alternatives.

Just as Audre Lorde warned against using patriarchal rhetoric, patriarchal structures of organization, and patriarchal privileging of solidarity over difference to dismantle patriarchy,40 I too am reluctant to wholeheartedly claim for the feminist cause a rhetorical mode so thoroughly steeped in male domination. On the other hand, if the goal is to dismantle patriarchal structures, and if feminist trolling helps accomplish those ends, then are the means, however problematic, retroactively justified? I look forward to further research that tackles these questions, including the question of how best to theorize the relationship between trolling and global activism. For now, I remain simultaneously intrigued by and wary of the political potential of trolling—a fitting end to a project and behavioral practice steeped in ambivalence.

Traditionally, the needs of ethnically diverse consumers had been met by smaller companies—the equivalent, in movie terms, of independent filmmakers. In the seventies, Shindana introduced two Barbie-like fashion dolls: Malaika, taller and stouter than Barbie; and Career Girl Wanda, about three-quarters as tall as Barbie and as proportionately svelte. But in 1991, when Mattel brought out its "Shani" line—three Barbie-sized African-American dolls available with mahogany, tawny, or beige complexions— there could be no doubt that "politically correct" was profitable. "For six years, I had been preaching these demographics—showing pie charts of black kids under ten representing eighteen percent of the under-ten population and Hispanic kids representing sixteen percent—and nobody was interested," said Yla Eason, an African-American graduate of Harvard Business School who in 1985 founded Olmec Corporation, which makes dolls and action figures of color. "But when Mattel came out with those same demographics and said, 'Ethnically correct is the way,' it legitimatized our business." Some say that the toy industry's idea of "ethnically correct" doesn't go far enough, however. Ann duCille, chairman of the African-American Studies Program and an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University, is a severe critic. After studying representations of race in fashion dolls for over a year, she feels that the dolls reflect a sort of "easy pluralism." "I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say I'd rather see no black dolls than see something like Shani or Black Barbie," she told me, "but I would hope for something more—which is not about to happen." Nor is she wholly enamored of Imani and Melenik, Olmec's equivalent of Barbie and Ken. "Supposedly these are dolls for black kids to play with that look like them, when in fact they don't look like them. That's a problematic statement, of course, because there's no 'generic black kid.' But those dolls look too like Barbie for me. They have the same body type, the same long, straight hair—and I think it sends a problematic message to kids. It's about marketing, about business—so don't try to pass it off as being about the welfare of black children." Lisa Jones, an African-American writer who chronicled the introduction of Mattel's Shani dolls for the Village Voice, is less harsh. Too old to have played with Christie—Barbie's black friend, born in 1968—Jones recalls as a child having expressed annoyance with her white classmates by ripping the heads and arms off her two white Barbie dolls. Any fashion doll of color, she thinks, would have been better for her than those blondes. "Having been a little girl who grew up without the images," she told me, "I realize that however they fail to reach the Utopian mark, they're still useful.

The term ‘gender’ itself is problematic. It was first used in a sense that was not simply about grammar by sexologists – the scientists of sex such as John Money in the 1950s and 1960s – who were involved in normalising intersex infants.They used the term to mean the behavioural characteristics they considered most appropriate for persons of one or other biological sex. They applied the concept of gender when deciding upon the sex category into which those infants who did not have clear physical indications of one biological sex or another should be placed (Hausman, 1995).Their purpose was not progressive.These were conservative men who believed that there should be clear differences between the sexes and sought to create distinct sex categories through their projects of social engineering. Unfortunately, the term was adopted by some feminist theorists in the 1970s, and by the late 1970s was commonly used in academic feminism to indicate the difference between biological sex and those characteristics that derived from politics and not biology, which they called ‘gender’ (Haig, 2004). Before the term ‘gender’ was adopted, the term more usually used to describe these socially constructed characteristics was ‘sex roles’. The word ‘role’ connotes a social construction and was not susceptible to the degeneration that has a afflicted the term ‘gender’ and enabled it to be wielded so effectively by transgender activists. As the term ‘gender’ was adopted more extensively by feminists, its meaning was transformed to mean not just the socially constructed behaviour associated with biological sex, but the system of male power and women’s subordination itself, which became known as the ‘gender hierarchy’ or ‘gender order’ (Connell, 2005; Mackinnon, 1989). Gradually, older terms to describe this system, such as male domination, sex class and sex caste went out of fashion, with the effect that direct identification of the agents responsible for the subordination of women – men – could no longer be named. Gender, as a euphemism, disappeared men as agents in male violence against women, which is now commonly referred to as ‘gender violence’. Increasingly, the term ‘gender’ is used, in official forms and legislation, for instance, to stand in for the term ‘sex’ as if ‘gender’ itself is biological, and this usage has overwhelmed the feminist understanding of gender.

Concerns about financial influence, politics, and some problematic wording aside, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines have ended any doubt about which foods most support our health and which contribute to harmful and sometimes fatal illnesses. They establish a clear direction for restoring our nation’s health and reducing its exorbitant medical bill.

However, even though I find much of this anti-essentialist-inspired analysis compelling, I nonetheless hope to illuminate two problems that arise when this form of criticism is uncritically wielded in the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for recognition and self-determination. First, using recent feminist and deliberative democratic critiques of Indigenous recognition politics as a backdrop, I demonstrate how normative appropriations of social constructivism can undercut the liberatory aspirations of anti-essentialist criticism by failing to adequately address the complexity of interlocking social relations that serve to exasperate the types of exclusionary cultural practices that critics of essentialism find so disconcerting. Second, and perhaps more problematically, I show that when constructivist views of culture are posited as a universal feature of social life and then used as a means to evaluate the legitimacy of Indigenous claims for cultural recognition against the uncontested authority of the colonial state, it can serve to sanction the very forms of domination and inequality that anti-essentialist criticism ought to mitigate.

The central issue, therefore, is which is the party of racism and which is the party of civil rights? This question cannot be answered simply by invoking the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That movement was itself parasitic on an earlier civil rights movement that took place a century earlier. Didn’t know there were two civil rights movements? That’s because the progressives don’t say much about it. They focus on the later movement and pass over the earlier one. The earlier civil rights revolution is downplayed today because it has become politically problematic. It disrupts the progressive party line. Even in the second civil rights revolution, however, the roots of the first one are clearly apparent.

A legal system that supports it's people when they are in the wrong is problematic.

Queer Theory is dominated by the problematizing of discourse - how things are spoken about - the deconstruction of categories and a profound skepticism of science.

Papers that use queer Theory usually begin by examining an idea, problematizing it in queer (or "queering" or "genderfucking") ways, and eventually concluding that there can be no conclusions.

Almost any positive good [positive liberty] can be described in terms of freedom from something [negative liberty]. Health is freedom from disease; happiness is a life free from flaws and miseries; equality is freedom from advantage and disadvantage.. Faced with this flexibility, the theorist will need to prioritize some freedoms and discount others. At its extreme we may get the view that only some particular kind of life makes for ‘real freedom’. Real freedom might, for instance, be freedom the bondage of desire, as in Buddhism and Stoicism. Or it might be a kind of self-realization or self-perfection only possible in a community of similarly self-realized individuals, pointing us towards a communitarian, socialist, or even communist ideal. To a laissez-faire capitalist, it is freedom from more than minimal necessary political and legal interference in the pursuit of profit. But the rhetoric of freedom will typically just disguise the merits or demerits of the political order being promoted. The flexibility of the term ‘freedom’ undoubtedly plays a huge role in the rhetoric of political demands, particularly when the language of rights mingles with the language of freedom. ‘We have a right to freedom from…’ is not only a good way, but the best way to start a moral or political demand. Freedom is a dangerous word, just because it is an inspirational one. The modern emphasis on freedom is problematically associated with a particular self-image. This is the 'autonomous' or self-governing and self-driven individual. This individual has the right to make his or her own decisions. Interference or restraint is lack of respect, and everyone has a right to respect. For this individual, the ultimate irrationality would be to alienate his freedom, for instance by joining a monastery that requires unquestioning obedience to a superior, or selling himself into slavery to another. The self-image may be sustained by the thought that each individual has the same share of human reason, and an equal right to deploy this reason in the conduct of his or her own life. Yet the 'autonomous' individual, gloriously independent in his decision-making, can easily seem to be a fantasy. Not only the Grand Unifying Pessimisms, but any moderately sober reflection on human life and human societies, suggest that we are creatures easily swayed, constantly infected by the opinions of others, lacking critical self-understanding, easily gripped by fantastical hopes and ambitions. Our capacity for self-government is spasmodic, and even while we preen ourselves on our critical and independent, free and rational decisions, we are slaves of fashion and opinion and social and cultural forces of which we are ignorant. A little awareness of ethics will make us mistrustful of sound-bite-sized absolutes. Even sacred freedoms meet compromises, and take us into a world of balances. Free speech is sacred. Yet the law does not protect fraudulent speech, libellous speech, speech describing national secrets, speech inciting racial and other hatreds, speech inciting panic in crowded places, and so on. In return, though, we gain freedom from fraud, from misrepresentation of our characters and our doings, from enemy incursions, from civil unrest, from arbitrary risks of panic in crowds. For sure, there will always be difficult cases. There are websites giving people simple recipes on how to make bombs in their kitchens. Do we want a conception of free speech that protects those? What about the freedom of the rest of us to live our lives without a significant risk of being blown up by a crank? It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.

Throughout postmodern Theory runs the overtly left-wing idea that oppressive power structures constrain humanity and are to be deplored. This results in an ethical imperative to deconstruct, challenge, problematize (find and exaggerate the problems within), and resist all ways of thinking that support oppressive structures of power, the categories relevant to power structures, and the language that perpetuates them - thus embedded a value system into what might have been a moderately useful descriptive theory.

Almost every socially significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.

Thus, applied postmodernism focuses on controlling discourses, especially by problematizing language and imagery it deems Theoretically harmful. This means that it looks for then highlights ways in which the oppressive problems they assume exist in society manifest themselves, sometimes quite subtly, in order to "make oppression visible." The intense scrutiny of language and development of ever stricter rules for terminology pertaining to identity often known as political correctness came to a head in the 1990s and has again become pertinent since the mid-2010s.

At bottom, identity politics rests on problematic ideas of political authenticity and representation. These derive from the faulty premise that membership in a group gives access to shared perspective and an intuitive understanding of the group's collective interests. This leads to two related beliefs that are wrong-headed and politically counterproductive: that only a group member can know or articulate the interests of the group, and that any group member can do so automatically by virtue of his or her identity. Clarence Thomas should have been evidence enough to invalidate the premise linking group membership and perspective. Embarrassingly, people like Maya Angelou and Catherine MacKinnon initially cut Thomas slack based on the silly belief that because he's black and once was poor, putting him on the supreme court would turn out OK. The simplistic belief that any credible member of a group can automatically represent that group's interest feeds a tendency to reduce political objectives to a plea for group representation on decision-making bodies or in other councils of power. That's the Clinton trick: to accept pleas for group representation or "access" while repudiating demands for an issue-based program. The dominant elites can happily satisfy such pleas; token egalitarianism is no threat at all.

These reporting requirements are the legacy of old ways of thinking. In this view, charitable giving to nonprofits was not just a piece but almost the whole of doing good. Other types of action were cordoned off—either not counted at all (such as gifts to individuals) or seen as unrelated activities, like shopping, investing, or political engagement. While tax laws and reporting regulations still treat them as separate domains, people choose between them as comparable products for taking action. This is problematic.

American politics intervened and, in a sense, solved the evangelical identity problem—at grievous cost.

County, two-county (meso-regional), and broader regional elites and identities: …the greater gentry were in a better position to form an identity that was regional in nature than the lesser gentry because of the broader nature of their landed, marital, and personal interests; in addition, they were also the individuals who would be recruited by magnates for the influence that they could wield over their clients. It appears possible to speak of ‘county elites’: the shires seem to have been the primary foci for identification … The ‘regional elite’–comprising those involved in all counties–was small in number, being composed mostly of peers and greater gentry. While there was a significant supra-shire dimension to elites’ landholding, office-holding, and marriages, this seems to have been focused on meso-scale regions–the coupled-county units of Somerset/Dorset, and Devon/Cornwall. (p. 147) …With the principal foci appearing to be at shire and meso-regional levels, the concept of a broader south-west regional identity seems somewhat problematic. However, that said, the trans-county and trans-regional nature of the Hungerford affinity–with many of the same clients utilised in transactions concerning different shires–shows how a magnate and his circle could provide a focus for patronage that was extra-county, perhaps even regional, in scope (p.148). The principal themes of this study have been the interplay of the contemporaneous politics of the south-western elites, and long-term shire and regional identities (p. 347). …The ‘regional elite’, as seen, appears to have consisted mostly of only a small number of peers and the greatest gentry who cannot be regarded as a purely ‘regional’ elite because of their possession of wide-ranging estates on a trans-regional or national scale. The surveys of landowning and office-holding showed that, amongst the political elites, there tended to be some emphasis on the county unit; yet, while there were distinct shire elites, there were also extra-county elements to their identities. A significant emphasis seems to have been on the meso-regional communities of Somerset/Dorset and Devon/Cornwall, corroborating the earlier exploration of the region’s broader geography, economy, and culture (pp. 347–8) ... Both sets of political elites seem to have become more entwined over the period, and there was a growing region-wide dimension… (p. 348).

Interpretations of the cross in which the ministry of Jesus is unnecessary are particularly problematic and have been historically influential as the church came to give more politically ambivalent and individualistic interpretations.

The press loves a heretic, especially one who can set fire to things and then walk away to look for the next pile of kindling. It is more problematic when the arsonist is in the heart of government, but is ill informed and, worse, spellbound by a science that is barely understood by experts, let alone tourists.

Beth thought for a moment of the world that had been, of the flurries of callout posts, the texts asking her why she’d hung out with so-and-so when she didn’t she know they were problematic, that they’d broken boundaries or gaslit someone or said the word “sex” where a kid might have overheard. There had been pain in there, too. Real pain swirling through a farrago of social justice buzzwords and ruthless self-professed socialists whose politics hewed closer to Nancy Reagan than to Marx or Engels.

The new elite’s strong and passionate support for Britain’s EU membership might have been less problematic had there not been a glaring ‘democratic deficit’ at the heart of the organization. To be democratic, organizations need to fulfil three criteria; they need to give people the right to participate by casting a vote; they need to give them the right to be represented; and they need to give them the right to organize meaningful opposition and compete for control of the executive. While the EU was certainly procedurally democratic, allowing people to vote every five years and be represented in the European Parliament, it was never substantively democratic because its core executive remained out of reach for voters.

WHITE SOLIDARITY White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic. Educational researcher Christine Sleeter describes this solidarity as white “racial bonding.” She observes that when whites interact, they affirm “a common stance on race-related issues, legitimating particular interpretations of groups of color, and drawing conspiratorial we-they boundaries.”10 White solidarity requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white position and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy. To break white solidarity is to break rank. We see white solidarity at the dinner table, at parties, and in work settings. Many of us can relate to the big family dinner at which Uncle Bob says something racially offensive. Everyone cringes but no one challenges him because nobody wants to ruin the dinner. Or the party where someone tells a racist joke but we keep silent because we don’t want to be accused of being too politically correct and be told to lighten up. In the workplace, we avoid naming racism for the same reasons, in addition to wanting to be seen as a team player and to avoid anything that may jeopardize our career advancement. All these familiar scenarios are examples of white solidarity. (Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about.) The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. Seeking to avoid conflict and wanting to be liked, I have chosen silence all too often. Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player. Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do. I can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity. People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism, wherein we fail to hold each other accountable, to challenge racism when we see it, or to support people of color in the struggle for racial justice.

All forms of complex causation, and especially nonlinear transformations, admittedly stack the deck against prediction. Linear describes an outcome produced by one or more variables where the effect is additive. Any other interaction is nonlinear. This would include outcomes that involve step functions or phase transitions. The hard sciences routinely describe nonlinear phenomena. Making predictions about them becomes increasingly problematic when multiple variables are involved that have complex interactions. Some simple nonlinear systems can quickly become unpredictable when small variations in their inputs are introduced.23 As so much of the social world is nonlinear, fifty plus years of behavioral research and theory building have not led to any noticeable improvement in our ability to predict events. This is most evident in the case of transformative events like the social-political revolution of the 1960s, the end of the Cold War, and the rise and growing political influence of fundamentalist religious groups. Radical skepticism about prediction of any but the most short-term outcomes is fully warranted. This does not mean that we can throw our hands up in the face of uncertainty, contingency, and unpredictability. In a complex society, individuals, organizations, and states require a high degree of confidence—even if it is misplaced—in the short-term future and a reasonable degree of confidence about the longer term. In its absence they could not commit themselves to decisions, investments, and policies. Like nudging the frame of a pinball machine to influence the path of the ball, we cope with the dilemma of uncertainty by doing what we can to make our expectations of the future self-fulfilling. We seek to control the social and physical worlds not only to make them more predictable but to reduce the likelihood of disruptive and damaging shocks (e.g., floods, epidemics, stock market crashes, foreign attacks). Our fallback strategy is denial.

Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicians alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold necausemit did not exist.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as well as the theoreticians of SIW and fourth generation warfare, lack the political dimension with respect to the situation after the war. They concentrate too much on purely military success, and undervalue the process of transforming military success into true victory. The three core elements of Sun Tzu’s strategy could not easily be applied in our times: a general attitude to deception of the enemy runs the risk of deceiving one’s own population, which would be problematic for any democracy. An indirect strategy in general would weaken deterrence against an adversary who could act quickly and with determination. Concentration on influencing the will and mind of the enemy may merely enable him to avoid fighting at a disadvantageous time and place and make it possible for him to choose a better opportunity as long as he is in possession of the necessary means—weapons and armed forces.

[T]he word 'tolerance', which is commonly used as a positive word when it comes to 'tolerating' difference, is extremely problematic if we think about it. If you simply Google the linguistic meaning of the word, the first definition you will get is (tolerance: noun): 'to allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.' In this sense, using this word is disturbing because it suggests two things: first, the person who is doing the tolerating has the upper hand in everything, and therefore, they are kind enough to 'tolerate' others. Second, it gives those doing to 'tolerating' the right to change their mind and stop 'tolerating' others any time they please, which could perhaps lead them to commit violence against the 'intolerable'. I never understand how any native English speaker could thoughtlessly use 'tolerate' as a positive word in such situations. How could they use the same word to tell us that they 'tolerate a medication' and they 'tolerate an immigrant or another religion.' We need a culture that teaches us to appreciate, to love, and to affirm others not to 'tolerate' them.

Given my insistence on the importance of acknowledging radical negativity and of relinquishing the idea of a society beyond division and power, it will not come as a surprise that I disagree with the attempt by a group of left intellectuals to revive the ‘Idea of communism’.9 They claim that the ‘communist hypothesis’ is absolutely necessary for envisaging a politics of emancipation. They argue that the egalitarian ideal is so intrinsically linked to the horizon of communism that its future depends on bringing back such a model. They are no doubt right in refusing the widely accepted view that the disastrous failure of the Soviet model forces us to reject the entirety of the emancipatory project. But I do believe that there are important lessons to be learned from the tragic experience of ‘really existing socialism’, and this calls for a serious rethinking of some central tenets of the communist project. It would indeed be too easy to simply declare that the Soviet model represents a flawed realization of an ideal that remains to be truly implemented. To be sure, many of the reasons for which the communist ideal went astray could be avoided and the current conditions might provide a more favourable terrain. But some of the problems that it encountered cannot be reduced to a simple question of application. They have to do with the way this ideal was conceptualized. To remain faithful to the ideals that inspired the different communist movements, it is necessary to scrutinize how they conceived their goal so as to understand why those ideals could have become so disastrously misled. It is the very notion of ‘communism’ that needs to be problematized because it strongly connotes the anti-political vision of a society where antagonisms have been eradicated and where law, the state and other regulatory institutions have become irrelevant. The main shortcoming of the Marxist approach lies in its inability to acknowledge the crucial role of what I call ‘the political’. While traditional Marxism asserted that communism and the withering away of the state logically entailed each other, Laclau and I assert that the emancipatory project can no longer be conceived of as the elimination of power and the management of common affairs by social agents identified with the viewpoint of the social totality. There will always be antagonism, struggles and division of the social, and the need for institutions to deal with them will never disappear. By locating socialism in the wider field of the democratic revolution, we indicated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that the political transformations that will eventually enable us to transcend capitalist society are founded on the plurality of social agents and their struggles. Thus the field of social conflict is extended rather than being concentrated in a ‘privileged agent’ such as the working class. It is for this reason that we reformulated the emancipatory project in terms of a radicalization of democracy. We emphasized that the extension and radicalization of democratic struggles will never have a final point of arrival in the achievement of a fully liberated society. This is why the myth of communism as a transparent and reconciled society – which clearly implies the end of politics – must be abandoned.

Haidt and Lukianoff discuss this type of problematic “us versus them” thinking, and how the theory of intersectionality10 has been corrupted and interpreted to mean a power struggle between the privileged and the oppressed. In any power struggle, there is a perceived “good” and “bad” side, thus pitting us against each other before the conversation has even begun. This form of identity politics combined with microaggression training “creates an environment highly conducive to the development of a ‘call-out culture,’ in which students gain prestige for identifying small offenses committed by members of their community, and then publicly ‘calling out’ the offenders.” The authors write, “They have learned to interpret mere words and social behaviors as acts of aggression. They have learned to associate aggression, domination, and oppression with privileged groups. They have learned to focus only on perceived impact and to ignore intent.” This learned behavior of assuming the worst of intentions has had a chilling effect on freedom of speech and a supremely caustic effect on political discourse.

In a semi-secularized and rampantly pluralized world in which the hold of objective religious truth is increasingly problematic, but in which religious questions and yearnings are certainly real, mythology is a viable and not ignoble alternative to a stark choice between dogmatic religion and sheer secularism.

many liberal feminists believed their work would be largely done once women gained legal equality with men and had control over their own reproductive choices and when societal expectations had changed so much that it was no longer surprising to see women in all fields of work. This liberal approach to feminism is angrily refuted and problematized by applied postmodernists, who desperately want to return social significance to certain identity categories, so they can apply identity politics and provide a meaning-making structure for (especially racial) minorities.

Nevertheless, David Halperin attempts to define “queer” in his 1997 book, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography, in which he argues that Foucault’s idea that sexuality is a product of discourse revolutionized gay and lesbian political activism. He describes “queer” as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”8 (emphasis in original) Because the central feature of queer Theory is that it resists categorization and distrusts language, it is generally difficult to work with. Queer Theory is not only resistant to definition in the usual sense, but also to functional definitions based on what it does. Papers that use queer Theory usually begin by examining an idea, problematizing it in queer (or “queering” or “genderfucking”9) ways, and eventually concluding that there can be no conclusions. As Annemarie Jagose, the author of Queer Theory: An Introduction, puts it, “It is not simply that queer has yet to solidify and take on a more consistent profile, but rather that its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.”10 The incoherence of queer Theory is an intentional feature, not a bug.

In brief, if we do not seriously problematize diversity as practiced currently in our society, we all lose. The diverse people should take this more seriously than anyone else, because putting them at the forefront of the battlefield with low-paid jobs while making them look like they are 'stealing' someone else’s job opportunities is not worth the paychecks they are getting in the long run. It is no secret that this hoax of diversity has turned countless poor and marginalized White Americans into the biggest enemies of diversity in America. This negatively affects all diverse people who truly love and make important contributions to the American society.

The far right in Britain are using social media to recruit while the left use it to berate people for liking problematic music videos. I think a problem for the left is their essentialism: they see people as either good or bad, and the role of activism focuses on energising the good ones.

Equally worrisome was the way Trump used information from Russian affiliated sites on the campaign trail. We didn’t think it was necessarily nefarious. He just amplified evidence to buttress a viewpoint, however wild or incredible, that he wanted to insert into the debate. But it troubled us that he was willing to use what amounted to Russian disinformation in pursuit of those ends. The information wasn’t coming from CNN or FOX. It was coming from places like RT and Sputnik. Outlets that were clearly closely affiliated with Russia. Similarly, we knew that WIKILEAKS had released material that the Russian government had stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By late summer 2016, the public did too, thanks to reports in the press. But Trump and his campaign, didn’t seem to care. The stolen material was helpful to them and he mentioned it, a lot. Over the course of 2016, Trump made reference to WIKILEAKS over 135 times on the campaign trail. From a counterintelligence perspective, it was problematic that a presidential candidate would use material stolen by a hostile foreign adversary for his own political gain. From a patriotic perspective, I wasn’t just worried about a candidate relying on actors outside the US to help his presidential prospects, I was repulsed.

The Mercantilism represented by the Hamilton-Clay tradition transcends the history of the American political economy in its significance. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, France stood out for state commitment to internal improvements: in 1666, Colbert had convinced Louis XIV to finance the Canal du Midi as one aspect of the generations-long campaign to establish centralized state authority over the still-feudal French nation. Since time immemorial however, the public credit of the state had been predominantly devoted to the financing of war, whether the state was in the hands of a feudal king, an absolute monarch, a republican city-state, or the conflation of royal power circumscribed by parliamentary representatives of the propertied classes and tempered by "the mob" that emerged in Britain from 1688. The game between the financial markets and the state was played out over the terms on which the owners of liquid capital would fund the state's armies relative to the problematic likelihood of their being repaid.

Only ten years after the passage of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.

the evangelical left is an army of programmed enemies with whom discourse is quite literally pointless and whose only role is to destroy the heroes (or, as leftists would say, “protagonists,” because “hero” is a problematic term).

In the social sciences, “critical” is “geared toward identifying and exposing problems in order to facilitate revolutionary political change.”7 In other words, it implies revolution. It is not interested in reform. Hence, we do not “reform” the police; we “defund” the police or abolish them. “It is more interested in problematizing—that is, finding ways in which the system is imperfect and making noise about them, reasonably or not—than it is in any other identifiable activity, especially building something constructive.”8

Political life sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear problematic, and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate. This view does not entails that theoretical ideas are to be treated as a straightforward outcome of their social base, but are certainly to be read in terms of their wider intellectual context

However there are questions which philosophy cannot give up, which continue to be problematic even if science also asks them and provides answers to them. A question like ‘what is man?’ is in this sense a question of dual status. Science answers by slices, by levels. From a somatic point of view, genetics, anatomy, physiology, and so on are the sciences that answer this question. From a psychical point of view, psychology, neurology, psychiatry. From a cultural point of view, cultural anthropology, cultural history. From a social point of view, economics, sociology, political science, history. And after science has answered the question ‘what is man?’ in all these ways, the question remains on its feet and Heidegger comes and writes Being and Time as though the whole labour of science had been in vain.

As such dissatisfactions intensify, social order becomes more problematic and the danger increases that political leaders will seek to divert discontent by scapegoating internal or external enemies. This is how the utopian vision of neoliberals leads not to peace but to intensified conflict.

Just as the Five Tribes and others were formalizing their tribal governments and running their own programs, legal aid groups were helping nonrecognized tribes do the same: the two were on a collision course. One result was the Federal Acknowledgment Process, establsiehd within the BIA in 1978. Its rigorous criteria and evaluation process reflected the desires of the Five Tribes and many other reservation tribes to have a stringent regimen, on that protected their rights, economic resources, and overall ability to define ‘Indians” and “tribes.” Throughout these debates pulsed questions of “authenticity” and being “real” or “bona fide” Indians and tribes. While academics and unrecognized tribes questioned the ability of any party to accurately define “Indian” and “tribe,” as a practical political and cultural matter tribes and their federal allies groped toward a way to measure and define these highly problematic terms. By 1978 leaders of federally recognized tribes felt they had found the answer in the new Federal Acknowledgment Process, with many unrecognized groups agreeing that finally a way had been found to determine what group were “real” tribes.

The ambition of our initiative is to mobilise a cognitive power that we are referring to as ‘extraordinary intelligence’. As many of you – participants of the project – have been pointing out, this ambition tends to evoke considerable attraction and equally considerable resentment, or at least reservation. The objections are partly ethical and political, partly cultural and psychological. When critiqued conceptually, the phrasing also calls for a serious re-visiting of the notion of intelligence. The ‘extraordinary’ we are after turns out to be less problematic: the way we put it, it is a progressive, dynamic term. ‘Extraordinary’ does not come to mean ‘greater than’, along a pre-established scale of measurement or relative to a baseline in a population, but rather ‘greater again, and yet again’, displaying qualities that outgrow themselves. The extraordinary intelligence would then be a capability that continuously exceeds its own limits, proving to be more insightful, more far-sighted and more potent than one might normally project. But what is ‘intelligence’? Clearly, we cannot be referring here to what is captured by IQ tests. The intelligence quotient is an iconic psychometric construct and the primary feature of such measurement methods is their reliable reference to traits that are persistent – ideally throughout the lifetime of the individuals assessed. If our interest is in an ever-changing, ever-growing intelligence, we cannot be applying a measure that by its very definition seeks to trace an invariant.

The ambition of our initiative is to mobilise a cognitive power that we are referring to as ‘extraordinary intelligence’. As many of you – participants of the project – have been pointing out, this ambition tends to evoke considerable attraction and equally considerable resentment, or at least reservation. The objections are partly ethical and political, partly cultural and psychological. When critiqued conceptually, the phrasing also calls for a serious re-visiting of the notion of intelligence. The ‘extraordinary’ we are after turns out to be less problematic: the way we put it, it is a progressive, dynamic term. ‘Extraordinary’ does not come to mean ‘greater than’, along a pre-established scale of measurement or relative to a baseline in a population, but rather ‘greater again, and yet again’, displaying qualities that outgrow themselves. The extraordinary intelligence would then be a capability that continuously exceeds its own limits, proving to be more insightful, more far-sighted and more potent than one might normally project. But what is ‘intelligence’? Clearly, we cannot be referring here to what is captured by IQ tests. The intelligence quotient is an iconic psychometric construct and the primary feature of such measurement methods is their reliable reference to traits that are persistent – ideally throughout the lifetime of the individuals assessed. If our interest is in an ever-changing, ever-growing intelligence, we cannot be applying a measure that by its very definition seeks to trace an invariant.

the Constitution a threat to democracy as never before. Some of its flaws—such as the framers’ distrust of democracy in using the Electoral College to choose the president and its creation of a Senate that accords every state equal representation regardless of size—have become dramatically and dangerously problematic because of changes in demographics and national politics.

The opposition between false limitless desires which only bring suffering and the authentic spiritual desire for well-being thus appears problematic: sensual desires are in themselves moderate, constrained to their direct goals; they become infinite and self-destructive only when they are infected by a spiritual dimension. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling knew that spirituality is self-destructive in its longing for infinity, which is why evil is much more spiritual than our sensual reality. In other words, the root of evil is not our egotism but, on the contrary, a perverted self-destructed spirituality which can prompt unnecessary personal self-sacrifice.

This is clearly problematic for the BBC. A national broadcaster that no longer talks to the nation, and which is no longer trusted by much of it, has no clear purpose.