“North Korea is unique in having a dead man as head of state: Kim Jong-Il is the head of the party and the army but the presidency is held in perpetuity by his deceased father, which makes the country a necrocracy or mausolocracy as well as a regime that is …
Read More »George Orwell’s list
“Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” George Orwell, Politics and the English language (1946) In 1998, the Daily Telegraph broke a story titled “Socialist Icon Who Became An Informer”. The article spoke of George Orwell, …
Read More »Darwin: Heritage and Misunderstandings – Morality, Irreverence, Eugenics
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…” Charles Darwin, The life and letters of Charles Darwin (1887) In Victorian England an idealized view of nature was dominant, where …
Read More »First you laugh, then you cry – The ambivalence of Michael Moore
“The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.” Jacob Burkhardt In 2002 Michael Moore earned worldwide fame with Bowling for Columbine, winning an Academy Award for best documentary by making a polemic against the right to bear arms in USA and accusing his fellow-countrymen of having a deeply …
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