Please try to find the words, James. You're an empathetic and effective communicator and someone must articulate & channel what so many fear and feel but struggle to voice. Between anger and grief is a knowledge that this man remaining where he is for the US & the world is literally insupportable.

Lucan mystery finally solved

It's a position that betrays such an extent of paranoia, fearfulness and lack of confidence and self-belief that you wonder how from his point of view he manages ever to step out his own front door. Perhaps he doesn't!

Pernicious rubbish ofc. What's interesting, even if one is able to perform the mental contortions and concessions necessary to take this seriously as an 'argument', is it's a self-defeating one which intrinsically implies 'Western civilisation' is fatally brittle and incapable of adaptation/

Waw! this really grabs me tbh 😋

by questioning if this itself is a poem
or
(rather!)
an antipoem aping the indifferent, noisy, opaque, dark
ground whence true poetry figures forth like a comet -
do I practice
or merely pastiche
critique
(doodling over a doodle as it were
tonguing an absent flute)?

It would be interesting to know from an anthropological perspective if Inuit or other peoples who live in places where snow is omnipresent or very common react in the same way.

A great question. I don't know, though, I'm tempted to seek an answer in aesthetic/ phenomenological rather than evolutionary terms. Snowfall dramatically transforms our given world in ways that unlike darkness or sunlight is novel. Dogs & very young children tend to get excited for instance/

Mahmood's discourse isn't only ethically wrong (and ofc deeply harmful in the short term) but delusional. Her reasoning is scientifically and philosophically out of kilter with reality//

Nothing but 'us' as a global pulsation of pain and joy, already fatally compromised in our us-ness by microplastics in our brains, retreating glaciers, species collapse and gas emissions redrawing what loose boundaries even that us-ness ever laid claim to/

a would-be thief of my/our flourishing who therefore must somehow be blocked, sent away, disposed of. Pragmatically, opposing this species of it *must* involve rejecting human Othering in its entirety - yes, a massive challenge, but at least aspirationally - no country, no State, no threat even/

This is not to imply an opt-out from the most vigorous opposition to her pernicious proposals on their own grounds. I'm simply struggling to point out a dimension that tends to render that very debate or fight problematic - an unquestioned assumption that there will always be a foe, a taker/

In tandem, more than high time nations big & small began acknowledging their existential redundancy & failure of very idea of nationhood. Work actively towards self-dissolution, ideally multilaterally but unilaterally if not poss. Eschew all pretence of 'defence' & 'security' on national level.

No immigration controls, absolute global freedom of movement (a pragmatic version of this amounts to accepting the inevitable given demographic and climactic impacts but it would be nice for society as currently constituted to pre-empt and positively celebrate cosmopolitanism)... 1/2

Many, many. Huxleysaurus, Aristosuchus, Brontosaurus, Camarasaurus (Joseph Campbell e.g.), Changyuraptor (Jung Chang), Crichtonsaurus (obv.), Philovenator (Caryl Phillips e.g.), need I go on? Nicholas Lezard is a near miss.

She's spot on. He's stunningly, heartbreakingly poor, and it in fact takes very little recalibration of 'poverty' to see this and know it. (That isn't to suggest the purely monetary aspect is anything but criminal & scandalous ofc)

one in five is extraordinarily depressing all the same!