Bruno Latour, ‘I am interested in Europe as an ecological problem’ (2019):
This is the present drama: it is the brutalization of today’s politics that lets people know that the models offered to them are impossible, while simultaneously they feel that globalization is coming to an end.
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Tony Judt, ‘The Way Things Are and How They Might Be’, London Review of Books (2010):
However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.
We have had six, seven generations of leaders who came to power exclusively by political manoeuvring, which is historically very unusual. It’s like inbreeding: there are no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.
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Sam Knight, ‘What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?’ The New Yorker (2024):
What was less forgivable, in the end, was the cuts’ unthinking nature, their lack of reason. In the fall of 2013, a staffer named Giles Wilkes, who worked for a senior Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition, became alarmed by projections that showed ever-reducing government budgets. “I don’t wish to paint the picture of the British state as too chaotic and heedless and amateur. But I was wandering around in 2013 and 2014, saying to people, Does anyone know what this means for the Home Office or the court system, for local authorities and the social-care budget?” Wilkes said. “Nobody was curious.” Wilkes is now a fellow at the Institute for Government, a nonpartisan think tank. “It was very obvious in real time,” he told me. “There wasn’t a central function going, Hold on a mo. Have we made sure that we can provide a decent prison estate, a decent sort of police system?”
And so stupid things happened.
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Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024):
He “admired” the Ayatollah Khomeini, and as for his opinion of me, “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much.” He hadn’t read more than “a couple pages” of my work, but he had seen me lecturing on YouTube, and concluded that I was “disingenuous.” “I don’t like people who are disingenuous like that,” he said, somewhat opaquely. Disingenuous like what? He did not elaborate.
“I wanted to murder him because he was disingenuous” would be an unconvincing motive if one were to use it in crime fiction, and my strongest feeling, after reading his remarks, was that his decision to kill me seemed undermotivated.
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Adam Curtis, Interview with Jacobin (2023):
The similarity between Moscow in 1988 and London today is that everyone knew the elite was looting society. Everyone knew that those in charge didn’t know what to do about it. But they also knew that no one, including themselves, had any idea of any alternative. And that is very similar to today. We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be. This particular juncture in history is quite interesting. Historically, there have typically been alternative ideas waiting in the wings. However, in the current context, we seem to be lacking such alternatives, which strikes me as exceedingly peculiar.