Sovereign and bandit are structural mirrors, both positioned outside the law: one breaks it to stand there, the other makes it to stand there. Coram Deo, the same exception under two names. Legality cannot alter the moral being of an act; it can only license who may commit it.
Image description
Original X alt text
St. Augustine: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention… For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea?’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I'm called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you're called an emperor.’” (City of God) I once asked the scion of a venerable London crime family why he had a gun. "To fucking shoot people, silly." A brutal thug, he was nonetheless no cognitive slouch, and offered me exactly that pirate justification for his vocation. Augustine needed no reading.
@firstthingsmag This piece misses the deeper unity of Russia and the West within an anti-Christian metaphysics. Both entrust history to sovereign power and the sanctification of violence as a necessary 'path to peace.' Both generate an abomination they then cite as proof of their necessity.
Image description
Extended description
are we moving towards a new era of militarism, or a reexamination of the nature of international conflict? #LARBDeepDives 1/ "I wouldn’t bet on it being anytime soon." So much for addressing the tangible, immediate threat to planetary well-being posed by nation-state derangement and the global extinction tyranny it maniacally sustains. Subtweet: end/ So, an algorithmically-supercharged vortex of mimetic contagion and, all told, a momentum the prophets universally anticipated would inevitably deliver us to the very threshold of suicidal, planetary cataclysm. Hobbes' 'war of all against all', plus nukes. What next, then No stopping this force? Great question. An effective response? Not so much about 'stopping' an extinction tyranny defining global structures of consciousness and power and the bastard notions of legitimacy, significance and authority it militantly sustains, as much as transcending its occupying ground. Subtweet: 2/ "It has become almost morally impermissible in Western public debate to focus on the conditions for advantageous short-term peace." Clear enough. Time, then, for a planetary response transcending the ontological substrate of Western triumphalism and the reality it maintains. Subtweet: Half-assed, any evolutionary perspective which eschews the function of political theology in 'escaping the overwhelming ideological force of claims about the inevitability of 'the catastrophic present' as professional historians @nils_gilman and @moshik_temkin describe it, below.
Open original document