It isn't Nixonland, but 1) it's still pretty good at describing how one senator (Frank Church) fought the rise of the military/industrial/intelligence/surveillance state and 2) it DOES have a blurb by Rick Perlstein and 3) some interesting accounts from the time when an antiwar Democrat could be elected AND RE-ELECTED to the senate from Idaho.
Did somebody say corn puddin? Schmigadoon season 1 on Apple+ is a delightful homage to golden age musicals. Season 2 focuses on the 70s repertoire. So fun!
Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds is a documentary about meteors from Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. I always geek out over meteorites in rock shops and loved this movie but I'm a big fan of Herzog's documentaries including his singular narration. The photos of micrometeorites were astounding.
I get like that as well. There’s a terrific Rock Shop on the Oregon coast at the small town of Yachats, we’ll drive up their just for coffee or lunch and a dog run on the beach. I love to browse. I can’t afford anything there but it’s wonderful. Then did you ever get to see “Meteor Men” a couple of guys. One from the US the other from the UK meteor hunting. They found one that made then over a million clams. Then they take them to a uni lab to find the history of them. Wandering to places like the Atacama Desert. It comes up now and then on Discovery I believe.
Anyone interested in the Oscar nominees. I have seen Holdovers, Past lives and Killers of a flower child so far. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/23/oscar-nominations-2024-the-full-list
I saw Oppenheimer and Anatomy of a fall in the meantime, both really good movies. The selection is going to be tight.
The Topology of Violence, a short (120 page) book of political theory by the man who is probably Germany's leading philosopher at the moment, Byung-Chul Han (or who will be Germany's leading philosopher should Jurgen Habermas ever get around to dying). Hegel writes "Representational thought {i.e. political theory defending representative democracy/Republicanism in the old sense) often imagines the state is held together by force; but what holds it together is simply the basic order which everyone possesses." It is not the threat of violence or negative sanctions alone that stabilize the legal system. Violence doesn't stabilize anything. It doesn't provide a stable foothold. In fact, widespread violence is a sign of internal instability. A legal system that could be propped up with violence would be very fragile. Only compliance with the legal system can provide stability. Violence makes an appearance at the moment with "stabilizing" factors disappear completely from the legal system."
SCORECARDS, SCORECARDS, GET YOUR SCORECARDS HERE! YOU CAN'T TELL THE NUTCASES WITHOUT YOUR SCORECARDS!!!! Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, a survey of the thinkers behind the people who are lining up behind the likes of non-thinkers like Donald Trump in order to bolster the access to power edited by Mark Sedgwick. Divided into three sections devoted to four "Classic" thinks of the early to mid-20th century (Oswald Spengler, Ernst Junger, Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola) "Modern" thinkers (Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Paul Gottfried, Patrcik Buchanan, Alexander Dugin, Jared Taylor "Bat Ye'or) and "Emergent" thinkers who are heavily online and whose ideas are seeping into the discourse: Mencius Moldbug, Greg "Hitler is Cool with Me" Johnson, Richard Spenser, Jack Donaovan and Daniel Frieberg. Definitely worth a look. Like I said, the politicians running on anti-Liberal platforms have no clue who these people are . . . but some of their supporters are projecting these ideas onto those politicians.
Infocracy by German philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Trump, the first Twitter president, fragmented his politics into tweets. His politics is determined not by a vision but by viral information. Infocracy promotes success-oriented, instrumental forms of action and leads to the spread of opportunism. The American mathematician Cathy O'Neil observes correctly that Trump acts like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm that takes only reactions of the audience into account. Temporarily stable convictions or principles are scarificed in favor of quick and short-lived power gains. (19) As we lose the dimension of the other, so we luse the discursive dimension of communication. Society disintegrates into irreconcilable identities without alterity. Instead of discourse, we have identity wars. As a result, society loses what is held in common; it even loses its public spirit. We no longer listen to each other. Ilistening is a political act insofar as it is what brings people together as a community in the first place and makes discourse possible. It founds a we. A democracy is a community of listeners. Digital communication, that is, communication without community -- destroys the politics of listening. We end up hearing only our own voices. That is the end of communicative action. (33) Conspiracy theories resist attempts at fact-checking because they are narratives that, despite their fictional character, provide a basic framework through which their adherents perceive reality. In this way, they are factual narrations. In a conspiracy theory, fictionality turns into factuality. What matters is not factuality n the sense of the facticity of truth, but the narrative coherence that makes the theory credible. (54)
War For Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right, a book which in its American edition is subtitled "Inside Bannon's Far Right Circle of Global Power-Brokers, by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum. Damn fine book. These are the people who are likely to staff a second Trump term (the ones who use words like "Reich" in Trump tweets, etc.) and one thing that's worth keeping in mind: the most influential people Teitelbaum follows are NOT Christians. Indeed, most of them are profoundly anti-Christian (this is going to result in a major bitch slap for the Evangelicals who are backing Trump. What are these people all about? Racism is just a smaller, even peripheral piece of the full scale opposition to modernity that Traditionalism tries to encompass. But when I consider the stories that I followed, and the prospect that individuals inspired by Traditionalism may have a say in shaping the future of world politics, it isn't any one issue -- race, gender, religion -- that most unsettle me, but one of Traditionalism's overarching features. The time cycle {the belief that history runs in cycles}. The will to fight on behalf of eternity rather than to imagine a better, brighter future. That's how you tell a real Traditionalist apart from someone who is merely conservative . . . it's the difference between someone who believes we live in a time of destruction, who maintains that the crumbling of institutions is something to be celebrated and the well to build something grand is the cause of a wicked fool. . . . What does it mean if a critical mass of world leaders have been advised by thinkers with a goal of disassembling everything, who value stillness over progress, who want our universe brought into alignment with what we were rather than what we dream we could become I was always wondering why these guys, who quote philosophers and political theorists whose works are not super easy to read, whose works argue against materialism on behalf of the spiritual, get behind an illiterate vulgarian like Trump. It's because they want to take charge of the time cycle and bring about the end of the era. Incidentally, from the viewpoints of traditionalist philosophers, that's not cool: God or Brahma or Vishnu or whomever is in charge of the time cycles, not us. So you have people who, if they paid attention to what they are reading, would know that they are trying to play God. Which is doing it wrong. And which is incredibly dangerous.
All of Us Strangers: 2023 film streaming on Hulu. I watched this last night and can't stop thinking about it. It's beautiful and haunting with amazing performances from the actors. The main character is confronting a lonely existence as a work from home gay man well into middle age in a seemingly empty high rise apartment in a socially dislocated post-covid London. Written and directed by Andrew Haigh based on the 1987 novel, Strangers, by Taichi Yamada.
It has my favorite actor in it - Andrew Scott. He's simply brilliant in everything he's done (especially as Moriarty in Sherlock). If you get a chance to see "A Dark Place" with him playing someone on the Autism Spectrum who gets involved in trying to solve a crime, it's well worth a watch.