“To do so, he tells President Trump’s life story in the cinematographic style of Citizen Kane, incorporating the iconic snow globe, the campaign poster, and even the mysterious word (‘Rosebud’) that is central to Orson Welles’ masterpiece.”
“Importing these ideas into your sense of self—to think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative—is irrational and corrosive. It is a recipe for error.”
“A civilization that worships at such altars is one that no longer believes in itself, that considers itself irredeemably guilty, sinful or evil…”
“This is the thing about moral panics—while threatening, they can be illuminating.”
“One of the first lessons my students of undergraduate literary studies learn about text analysis is to distinguish between internal and external communication.”
“With that in mind, what I want to do below is to advance a proposal that, I think, lets everyone concerned out of this conundrum gracefully.”
“This puts me in a strange position as someone who can be unequivocally categorized as a victim and yet who has always had a difficult time seeing myself as one.”
“In polarized times, think of the other person as an individual and not member of the other group.”
“Indeed, Michael Scharf reports that ‘Milošević saw himself as a modern-day Abe Lincoln, employing force in a valiant effort to hold his crumbling Yugoslavia together.’”
“This is why Peterson genuinely believes in Dostoevsky’s eminent saying in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Without God all things are permitted.'”
“For this reason, Borges’ short story reveals that the human mind is intelligent precisely because it does not recollect too much.”
“Since the response to the letter was far from boring, two things can be asserted. First, a growing minority no longer believes free speech to be valuable. Secondly, those who do believe in free speech no longer believe that it is fully operational.
“As we move forward in the present struggle, where the question of race and religion becomes an endemic part of our theaters of division, we must strive to reject the retributive impulse and embrace what Martha Nussbaum keenly called the ‘rational faith.’”
“This is an attempt at a social, cultural, and political revolution.”
“Something very similar—and, only slightly less surreal—is currently happening in the Republic of Croatia.”
