How Trump Made the Fantasy Real. The Capitol Hill riot tore the veil between the right’s dreamworld and reality. nytimes.com/2021/01/09/opi…
What I find interesting is that Right and Left share the fantasy. The Right lives the fiction that it is working to overturn the system, the Left actually believes it. They both move to a fictional world, of coups, conspiracies, resistance, etc. Both insist it is the real world
“Under a Democratic administration, there will be attempts to deploy law enforcement like ghostbusters crossed with pre-crime units, trying to prevent the very-online from impinging on the real.”
Is it orientalist to speak of fundamental differences in the way different cultures think about the world? No, it is not. In fact, those who are ready to dismiss this possibility out of hand are the real orientalists. The Black Box: A Theory of China brunomacaes.substack.com/p/the-black-bo…
There is a fascinating example (assuming I have it right) of what I discuss above: 空心. This would literally be “sky mind”. A mind like empty sky, what in the West would be called consciousness, but 空心 you can directly experience through meditation, not a metaphysical concept
A bit of history: it was actually the EU that pushed Beijing to have a deal in 2020 as part of its toughening up on China since 2018. One could argue things have changed, but formally it’s a Chinese concession, not the opposite
Remember also that the EU made a wager in 2018 that it could get better results than Trump using its own methods. Many in DG Trade feel it worked and difficult to back away from triumph. In sum: a really critical moment for EU as a global power
.@jakejsullivan tweet raising eyebrows in Brussels: people will insist the EU negotiates its own trade and investment deals...