Quote of the week
Trump’s electoral fiction floats free of verifiable reality. It is defended not so much by facts as by claims that someone else has made some claims. The sensibility is that something must be wrong because I feel it to be wrong, and I know others feel the same way. When political leaders such as Ted Cruz or Jim Jordan spoke like this, what they meant was: You believe my lies, which compels me to repeat them. Social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president.
The New York Times
On humanity and racism
What sort of community is envisioned by the first-person plural ‘we?’ What do ‘we’ within this community hold in ‘common’ and how is that holding-in-‘common’ socially and politically organized? And what is meant by ‘humanity’ and its corollaries: ‘the human,’ ‘humanism,’ ‘humane?’ The anti-racist invocation of ‘our’ ‘common’ ‘humanity’ is evidence of a belief in – or more likely a longing for – a state of being that is deeper than and anterior to the imposition of race. If ‘we’ are all ‘human’ after all, then surely racism and racist violence are illegitimate; it will not do for one ‘human’ to oppress, exploit, torture, kill another.
