Paul Berman on slogans
“Bad faith is when you don’t like the truth so you lie about it. Then you lie about having lied about it. You might even convince yourself that in lying about lying you’re not lying. That’s bad faith. It’s a twisted consciousness. We’re seeing a mass movement for a twisted consciousness.”
Heather Cox Richardson on the Second Amendment
“The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.”
Precedented
From today’s installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American: “This is the first time in history a former United States president has been indicted, although it is worth remembering that it is not new for our justice system to hold elected officials accountable.” Including a number of Illinois governors.
Word Matters on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
Scrupulous or even cursory reading of “Politics and the English Language” reveals, again and again, that the Merriam-Webster editors’ criticisms of the essay have no basis in the essay. Orwell deserves better than he got in the podcast Word Matters.