Helmintholog

It was disillusioning enough that Bush could steal an election last time. But if he actually wins this one squarely, what on earth is the point of democracy? The justification of democracy has always been that it is a mechanism of error-correction. Rather than a way to pick the right leaders, it is a way to ensure that the wrong ones can be held to account; and a leader more wrong than George W Bush is an almost logical impossibility.

Re-electing Bush would be like re-electing Anthony Eden — which leads to a thought experiment: what would have happened had we won at Suez? Would the world have been better or worse?

Among English intellectuals today, nostalgia for the Habsburgs is the touchstone of an anti-American mind. (brought about by finishing John Gray)

is clearly doing Barlow good. there’s a lovely quote here:

TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.

Not that there’s anything wrong with setlists selected by a hallucinating mob, of course…