Limited, Inc.

It is sort of like Comedy of Errors - if it were staged in a butcher shop. Apparently if you chose to intervene in a chess game by knocking black players off the board, the white side will gain. This is coming as a great shock to D.C. Nobody loses in the political elite. Oh sure, you lose an election, but this just allows you to pluck a desireable job in lobbying or wall street and buy a bigger house. It is a world of up and up!Meanwhile, the US effort is premised on the ide a that when a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it didn't fall. So, we watched 3000 to 10000 ISIL "terrorists" decisively defeat an Iraqi army of 500000 armed with 30 billion dollars of US military equipment and benefiting from five years of training. What does this mean? Why it means we put our fingers in our ears and go nah nah we can't hear you. Then we pump some stateless "freedom fighter" group up with 10 million dollars and weapons captured in Libya and they will just

Marx is not often pointed out to aspiring writers for his imitable work in publicizing his masterpiece. However, the correspondence of Marx and Engels, in 1867 and 1868, is filled with strategies for making Capital known on a broad scale – from Engels suggestion that Marx should take seriously the idea of a “portrait” in the Leipzig Illustrated Paper to the campaign of reviews meant to pump the book. Among the letters is one that is quoted extensively by Schlomo Avineri in his essay trying to prove that the connection between  Marx and Darwin came about as the result of a hoax. Avineri cherrypicks a bit in this essay: Marx, who was no biologist, was alternatively impressed by Darwin and scornful of the way he took Malthus’ method and applied it to nature (I should say, from comments of Darwin’s this is what Marx took Darwin to be doing, although of course the issue is more complex than that). Still, it gave Avineri the chance to quote a quite amazing letter in which Marx pens a revi

As every sentient human adult (and especially department secretaries) knows, intelligence doesn’t exclude stinkerhood. Many are the geniuses who are also stinkers. I think these remarks are pertinent to the latest round in the Heidegger controversy. There is a suprisingly good essay about this in the current NYRB by Peter Gordon .  With the publication of the black notebooks, we have even  more evidence that Heidegger was a Nazi all through the Hitler years. Of course, Lowith back in 1935 proclaimed that Heidegger’s “lean” towards naziism was no temporary aberration, done for the sake of the university. To that kind of special pleading, I think we can all say: suck my cock! But of course in a genteel and philosophische way. The black notebooks apparently add more proof to the case that Heidegger was also a provincial anti-semite as well. Case closed. Of course, the Heidegger controversy has its political coloring. The same people who use Heidegger’s Nazi-hood to hit deconstru