My daughter loves My Little Pony. So does this guy. And that, apparently, is a problem. Grown men are not supposed to like the same things as young girls. The guy—though Gawker has done a story on him, he remains anonymous—is a dad in his late 30s. He calls himself “a fairly big fan.” He made the picture of one of the show’s characters the background image on his desktop. He talked to the boss’s 9-year-old daughter about the show. His co-workers, and the boss, got freaked out. According to the guy, the boss told him that “it’s weird and it makes people uncomfortable that I have a ‘tv show for little girls as a background.’” Now he’s been fired. After talking […]

In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously argued that one of the hallmarks of Nazism was the supremacy of the police over the military, even in—especially in—occupied territories. Nothing quite signaled totalitarianism’s obliteration of the distinction between the domestic and the international, its aspiration to world rule, as this. Above the state and behind the facades of ostensible power, in a maze of multiplied offices, underlying all shifts of authority and in a chaos of inefficiency, lies the power nucleus of the country, the super-efficient and super-competent services of the secret police. The emphasis on the police as the sole organ of power, and the corresponding neglect of the seemingly greater power arsenal of the army, which is characteristic of […]

The defeat of the recall effort in Wisconsin has, understandably, troubled the waters on the left. Everyone from Ezra Klein to Doug Henwood to Josh Eidelson is trying to figure out what it means. I’ve been doing the same, though I’m still not sure. So I put the question to my Facebook friends.  Lots of folks participated in the discussion: bloggers like Aaron Bady and Seth Ackerman, political scientists like Scott Lemieux and Alan Ryan, journalists like Doug, and labor experts like Gordon Lafer, Stephanie Luce, and Nathan Newman. The discussion was kicked off by my posting Klein’s observations on FB, and everyone took it from there. • • • • • • Corey Robin Here are some sobering thoughts […]