Activity

[...] Once the PRC was established, the first generation of CCP leaders and cadres were always mindful of rural society, though this did not mean they were socially protective of it. The countryside was systematically exploited for industrial development, and little serious thought was given to the…

[...] to put it in the Nietzschean terms which are appropriate here, the ultimate difference between radical-emancipatory politics and such outbursts of impotent violence is that an authentic political gesture is active, it imposes, enforces a vision, while outbursts of impotent violence are fundam…

The same, of course, applies to Nazi Germany, where the spectacle of the brutal annihilation of millions should not deceive us. The characterisation of Hitler which would have him as a bad guy, responsible for the deaths of millions, but none the less a man with balls who pursued his ends with an i…

Second lesson: it is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life. [...] Towards the end of Andrew Davis’s The Fugitive, the innocent persecuted doctor (Harrison Ford) confronts his colleague (Jeroen Krabbé) at a medical convention an…

The big argument of anti-(death-)penalty advocates is the arrogance of punishing other human beings, or even killing them. What gives us the right to do this? Are we really in a position to judge? The best answer to this is to turn the argument round. What is really arrogant and sinful is to assume…