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| Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar. © Christian Marquardt/Getty Images |
From RT:
The country’s foreign minister has said religious persecution is “impossible,” given constitutional guarantees on freedom of faith - Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar
John Maier has an amusing post on UnHerd. He opens with this:
Twenty years ago this year, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his influential book On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter, a well-known social menace, is an individual who, unlike the liar, holds forth with complete indifference as to whether he is speaking truly or falsely. He just speaks: in a manner recklessly detached from the facts. As other philosophers quickly noticed, however, bullshit is a diverse category, one with many prototypes. In his own contribution to the blossoming field of bullshit studies, the Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested that much 20th-century French critical theory should be thought of as a different species of bullshit in virtue of its “unclarifiable unclarity”. David Graeber famously speculated that, within the modern economy, entire professions and activities constituted a kind of “bullshit”. If these manifestations of bullshit have anything in common it is perhaps that in each some clearly functional ideal — truthful communication, clear writing, meaningful employment — is flagrantly undermined, while the appearance that it isn’t is deceptively sustained.
He goes on at some length. I didn't read it all. This paragraph was enough for me.
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| Claire "High Pockets" Phillips |
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| Claire Phillips standing in front of her nightclub, Club Tsubaki, during its early-1940s heyday in Japanese-occupied Manila. (Image: Binford & Mort) |
We heard that a guy we know was a fan of the Seattle Mariners baseball team and they were in the playoffs, so we started watching them. They beat the Detroit Tigers in a series of five games in the ALCS (American League Championship Series), and then lost to the Toronto Blue Jays in the ALDS (American League Division Series). So then we watched the Blue Jays play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. The Dodgers won the series last night in the eleventh inning of game seven.
Mostly it was just baseball: pitches, balls, strikes, hits and runs, but there were a surprising number of oddball incidents like,
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| United States President Donald Trump shows an interior rendering of the new White House ballroom in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2025 [Aaron Schwartz/EPA] |
The first honest American president by Eric Reinhart
Trump’s shameless corruption is not a deviation from American history but its fulfilment.
Every era of American government has had its scandal. Trump’s innovation is to make scandal itself a governing philosophy. Although it is tempting to see the Trump regime’s corruption – its open profiteering, its use of the state as an instrument of vengeance and self-enrichment – as a perversion of American democracy, the truth is more unsettling: it’s a mirror. The difference between Trump’s era and those before it is not the presence of corruption, but its visibility and the nation’s collective incapacity to feel scandalised by it.
For decades, corruption in the United States was moralised as a deviation from an otherwise legitimate system. From the rail barons and company towns of the 19th century to the revolving door of Wall Street and Washington in the 20th and 21st, American capitalism has always depended on the conversion of public office into private profit. When politicians became lobbyists and habitual inside traders, when corporations wrote legislation, when government bailouts were given to bank executives and political donors, when hospital executives grew rich on public subsidies while their workers and patients sank into precarity, the mechanisms of corruption were disguised as professionalism, efficiency, or expertise. The neoliberal order taught us to equate virtue with success and to see moral worth in market value.
