Robin Carmody messaged me on FB to say he’d just been reading my le carré rereads on ilx, and enjoyed and agreed with them. Since one of my projects here is I guess to begin to centralise my boringly dispersed and rhizomatic self, I thought I’d link them here. This is the original, inset in a longer ilx thread: liveblogging Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is the same excerpted at FT (i.e. all the rest of the entertaining ilx chatter cut away). This was intended as a liveblog of a reread of Smiley’s People, except things ran away with themselves and I ended up just posting some thoughts (on an ilx thread no one else ever contributed to).
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Ramsay’s Neo-Leninist
Micro-Party Nightmares
As my friend
RT said:
“would watch”
Quick unedited notes the morning after (on just 4 hrs sleep)
1: the road-testing of the citizens united decision has not developed entirely to the 1%’s advantage
2: TRUMPBOT SMASH *trumpbot falls over on face in puddle of someone else’s vomit*
3: no one ever got rich betting against the continued stupidity of the US pundit class, but — and usually like emerson I am pro creative-transformative intuition and against the soulless bead-counting technocrat where’er he be — but Team Silver has surely helped ding the the current pundit-layer’s crappy jalopy, in a way that a mere unpredicted shock dem win would not have done
4: ratfuck report (relevant internal repug warfare): husted knew — because he could see on his master screen, the one with the knob that technologically flipped the votes — that ohio was gone beyond critical *before* the point where technological vote-flipping could be brought in to save the day; he told the Fox deciders and went home; he pointedly didn’t tell rove bcz FUCK TURDBLOSSOM
First posted at Unfogged, further thoughts at B&T (I had Caro on LBJ in mind here, and the fact that many voting machine companies are Repub-owned): note the Ranter’s response, in particular — my takeaway — the fact that all you need to depress the other guy’s voting (and voters) is for your claim to hold all the cards to be plausible. The loss of this plausibility can be the puncture in the balloon: the hole is small but it doesn’t self-heal. To over-estimate the scope of their control — I think of this as an anarchist failing, but that may just be my age and prejudice showing — is very much to hobble our own options.
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