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- When Trump says, that it’s wrong for me to be, ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ he’s right. The ad hominem that Trump is a pathetic creep doesn’t actually make him wrong. And unfortunately, Trump will win himself and Republicans a lot of votes by saying exactly what our founding documents already say — innocent until proven guilty — and Democrats will lose a lot of votes by being too politically cautious to say so. And yet it is not a matter of politics — it is purely legal and logical.
- False accusations of sexual violence have been used to justify other forms of violence, particularly racial violence. A rape accusation was often used to justify lynchings in the Jim Crow south. I am not implying anything by this — it’s just to say that we need to deal with the full complexity of contemporary issues, which includes examining the historical roots of our values, laws, and social psychology.
- The more we care about images — the more we care about our image — on the internet, the less we care about what we do in the world; our love of images reduces our real world ethical sensitivity. We learn to act one way on camera and another way off of it.
- The goal of Stalinism — to give one example of a totalitarian government — was to destroy the life of the Russian mind, the intellectual life of Russia, to stop thinking all together: and millions died for it. American-designed technology puts a cessation to authentic thinking, to our intellectual lives, without the need for political repression: no one has to die here. We will only see real, wide-spread…
