Wednesday, August 26, 2026
"Fascism with a Human Face"
"I would contend that what they illustrate is a truth that we should have understood a very long time ago: that Communism is Fascism - successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown - that has, largely, failed.
''I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies - especially when their populations are moved to revolt - but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.''
- Susan Sontag, in a February 1982 speech
[Photo by Egor Myznik at Unsplash]
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
Modern Times
Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people to say things they believe to be true. Totalitarians want to force people to say things they believe to be false.
- Robert P. George
First Paragraph
Her name is Ana Alvarado, and she's having a bad day. She spent all week preparing for a job interview, the first one in months to reach the videoconference stage, but the recruiter's face barely appeared on-screen before he told her that the company has decided to hire someone else. So she sits in front of her computer, wearing her good suit for nothing. She makes a half-hearted attempt to send queries to some other companies and immediately receives automated rejections. After an hour of this, Ana decides she needs some diversion: she opens a Next Dimension window to play her current favorite game, Age of Iridium.
- From "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" - a short story in Exhalation by Ted Chiang
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