Uncategorized

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

How ‘egalitarian’ Sweden became more comfortable with wealth (Håkan Johansson & Axel Vikström, September 8, 2026, The Conversation)

While for a long time Sweden was a country with some of the world’s highest taxes, this no longer applies to capital taxation. For instance, it no longer has a wealth tax, an inheritance tax or a property tax. The ideal of egalitarianism doesn’t seem to align with patterns of wealth accumulation, especially at the very top. […]

We used Forbes and UN data and found that in 2025 Sweden ranked fourth globally, with 4.7 dollar billionaires per million people. When excluding micro-states (fewer than one million people), Sweden is outnumbered only by Singapore (9.9), Hong Kong (9.1) and Cyprus (7.3), but before Switzerland (4.6) in fifth place. It ranks much higher than some of the world’s largest economies like the US (2.7), Germany (2.1), Canada (2.0) and the UK (0.8).

It is difficult to say for sure whether changes in regulation and wealth concentration have altered cultural norms, but there are clear indicators. Younger generations are now expressing strong materialistic values. When they rank what matters in life, earning money comes second to being with friends and far more important than being with family or getting an education.

Young Swedes and adults alike dream of building a “money machine” by investing in stocks so they can exit the labour market long before retirement. This might be surprising to some, since Sweden has long been shaped by a strong work ethic, both politically and culturally.

BEER AND TREMBLING:

Country Music, Sin, and Grace: Sing Me More Songs About Jesus (Terence Sweeney, July 30, 2026, Church Life Journal)

To close, I would like to take up some holy writ from Kris Kristofferson. In his song “Sunday Morning Coming Down”—sung by Johnny Cash—the singer tells us about waking up Sunday morning depressed and hungover. He groans, “The beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.” In short, he ain’t doing too well. But he is not just hungover. He suffers from the sense that “there ain’t nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound . . . of Sunday morning comin’ down.” Soren Kierkegaard would say that the singer knows he is in despair, which puts him in a better position than those of us (including some in church pews) who do not know how far we are from God. The singer describes seeing a boy playing in the street, a father and a child, and smelling frying chicken, all of which “took me back to something that I lost somehow along the way.” What has he lost? What anyone in despair has lost. He has lost Sunday. He has lost being in relation to God and to others. Even if he looks for solutions in getting stoned, he does so in a prayer: “I’m wishin’ Lord that I was stoned.”

COMIC GOLD:

Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong: Online bigotry masquerading as a love of history in the fever swamps of Elon Musk’s X. (Bret Devereaux, Jun 04, 2026, The Bulwark)

HOMER IS BACK in the discourse on account of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, The Odyssey. The latest controversy began with Elon Musk, among others, protesting the supposed inaccuracy of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, a fictional character, who among other fantastic elements is the daughter of the god Zeus and was laid as an egg by her human mother. On X, the debate has spiraled to include renewed criticism of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, attacked for being “ideological,” which is to say that it attempted to more clearly portray the perspectives of the women in the narrative, as compared to earlier translations.

While it might seem unexpected that a 2,750-year-old poem (and a nearly decade-old translation of it) would become such a flashpoint in the culture wars of 2026, for scholars engaged in public education in the classics, it is all too unsurprising. Instead, the fight over Homer represents just another skirmish in the campaign mounted by bigoted very-online right-wing self-described “chuds” to claim Greek and Roman culture for their own fascist, or at least fascist-adjacent, ideology, which demands the exclusion of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. […]

This type of traditionalism and pining for the past that is married to a kind of thick anti-intellectualism and a worship of action and violence for its own sake is hardly new. Indeed, as the Italian scholar Umberto Eco noted in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism,” the rejection of modernity for the sake of an imagined past, necessarily paired with irrationalism and a “distrust of the intellectual world,” is a core component of fascist ideology. In turn, that anti-intellectualism serves an ideology that, as Eco notes, valorizes violence for its own sake and can only understand heroism through the prism of violence. Once we realize this, it no longer surprises us that many of the followers of these accounts appear to believe that the Homeric hero Achilles was a real historical person or that they become enraged by any suggestion that he wasn’t. These accounts and their followers have a version of antiquity, an angry child’s version, simplified and flattened down, and they are profoundly hostile to learning anything that might disconfirm their ideological beliefs.

And the ideology, it turns out, is rancid. Here it is necessary to be blunt: Many of the accounts in this space are frequently misogynistic or racist bigots, intent on using the Greek and Roman past to justify that bigotry. Learn Latin, with 187,000 followers, asks, “Can the Latin language be used as an instrument of Western supremacy?” agreeing with those who answered in the affirmative. Roman Helmet Guy, with 120,000 followers, riffed off a scene from the Lord of the Rings films and declared it “Authoritarian. Ethnic Nationalist. Romanticization of the past.” Enlisting the heroic Gondorian king in the ranks of the chuds, he added, “If Aragorn were alive today, he’d be posting ‘Look what they took from you,’” using a far-right, if not white nationalist, slogan. They are hardly alone. When user The Hellenist told his more than 30,000 followers that “Blacks should support slavery” and “Christians and Jews are who tore us apart,” he faced little criticism or repercussions within the community; Daily Roman Updates, with 266,000 followers, responded, with nihilistic irony, that The Hellenist is “one of the best posters on this app.” And when Daily Roman Updates’ own followers told him that he was “not racist enough,” Daily Roman Updates cheerfully agreed, echoing the website’s owner, Elon Musk: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

While not every account goes mask-off like this regularly, the less openly bigoted accounts in the ecosystem regularly follow, repost, and link to the more bigoted ones. The result is a radicalization pipeline in which users coming to X looking for information about antiquity are rapidly steered towards alt-right misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism.

Excluding homosexuality while idolizing Alexander and Caesar is sublime.

MOOD IS NOT ILLNESS:

The Geel question : For centuries, a little Belgian town has treated the mentally ill. Why are its medieval methods so successful? (Mike Jay, Aeon)

Today, the system continues along much the same lines. A boarder is treated as a member of the family: involved in everything, and particularly encouraged to form a strong bond with the children, a relationship that is seen as beneficial to both parties. The boarder’s conduct is expected to meet the same basic standards as everybody else’s, though it’s also understood that he or she might not have the same coping resources as others. Odd behaviour is ignored where possible, and when necessary dealt with discreetly. Those who meet these standards are ‘good’; others can be described as ‘difficult’, but never ‘bad’, ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’. Boarders who are unable to cope on this basis will be readmitted to the hospital: this is inevitably seen as a punishment, and everyone hopes the stay ‘inside’ will be as brief as possible.

The people of Geel don’t regard any of this as therapy: it’s simply ‘family care’. But throughout the town’s long history, many both inside and outside the psychiatric profession have wondered whether this is not only a form of therapy in itself, but perhaps the best form there is. However we might categorise or diagnose their conditions, and whatever we believe their cause to be — whether genetics or childhood trauma or brain chemistry or modern society — the ‘mentally ill’ are in practice those who have fallen through the net, who have broken the ties that bind the rest of us in our social contract, who are no longer able to connect. If these ties can be remade so that the individual is reintegrated with the collective, doesn’t ‘family care’ amount to therapy? Even, perhaps, the closest we can approach to an actual cure?

“NOBODY CAN THROW THE BALL LIKE CATFISH”:

Bob Dylan, American Culture, and the Songs of Baseball: The iconic singer-songwriter is, naturally, a baseball fan too. (Christopher Barnett, 3/30/26, Pitcher List)

Still, even if May 24, 2006, was unremarkable on the baseball diamond, something Hall of Fame-worthy did happen on that day. At 10 a.m. ET, XM Satellite Radio broadcast the fourth episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour.” The show first aired a few weeks earlier, and, from the outset, it featured a peculiar format: After a noir-ish introduction, beginning with the smoky, sultry lines of a female narrator (“It’s nighttime in the big city”), a series of roughly 15 songs followed. These songs were not gathered according to genre, nor were they sequenced in chronological order. Rather, they were put together thematically. For example, “Theme Time Radio Hour’s” inaugural episode was titled simply “Weather.” Its first song was “Blow Wind Blow” (1953) by Muddy Waters, and its final track was “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1928) by The Carter Family. In between, songs by guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and R&B pioneer Stevie Wonder also appeared, though, despite their respective greatness, Hendrix and Wonder weren’t the biggest stars of the show. That honor would belong to none other than the DJ himself — American singer, songwriter, poet, actor, author, and all-around cultural icon Bob Dylan.

“Theme Time Radio Hour’s” second episode centered on the theme of “Mother,” its third on “Drinking.” But Episode 4, which aired just a few hours before Sabathia’s dominant start in Minneapolis, was dubbed “Baseball.” For those who know Dylan’s work, it’s hardly surprising that he would dedicate an episode of “Theme Time Radio Hour” to the national pastime. Perhaps most famously, he and stage director Jacques Levy (1935-2004) wrote the song “Catfish” in honor of Hall of Fame pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter (1946-99), who retired in 1979 as an eight-time All-Star and five-time World Series champion. Dylan recorded the song in July 1975, right in the middle of Hunter’s first year with the Yankees — a forgettable season for the Bronx Bombers but another stellar one for Hunter, who led MLB in wins for the second time in his career. Dylan’s song, however, is less about Hunter’s on-field accomplishments than his path from small-town North Carolina to the bright lights of Yankee Stadium. Over a bluesy acoustic guitar and harmonica, Dylan juxtaposes Hunter’s rustic love of the outdoors with his newfound status as the highest-paid pitcher in MLB history. Yet, the gravelly insouciance of Dylan’s voice suggests that Hunter is worth every penny. As he sings in the chorus, “Catfish, million-dollar man / Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can.”

MORE:
Theme Time Radio Hour: The Annotated “Baseball” Episode (Fred Bals, Nov 18, 2025, Medium)

…AND CHEAPER…:

Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them (Jeff Brady, 3/12/26, NPR)

Easy-to-install solar panels that plug into a regular outlet are getting attention just as Americans are worried about rising energy costs. That’s because these plug-in or balcony solar panels start shaving off part of a homeowner’s or renter’s utility bill right away.

“A year ago, nobody was talking about this,” says Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a California nonprofit group that advocates for plug-in solar. The panels are already popular in Germany, where more than 1.2 million of the small plug-in systems are registered with the German government.

For the panels to become more widely available in the U.S., state lawmakers are proposing bills that eliminate complicated utility connection agreements, which are required for larger rooftop solar installations and, most utilities say, should apply to plug-in solar too. Those agreements, along with permitting and other installation costs, can double the price of solar panels.

THE RESENTMENT OF THE iDENTITARIANS:

Anger or Hatred?: The dark passions that threaten liberal democracy (Joshua L. Cherniss, February 23, 2026, Commonweal)

Galston’s latest book opens with a concise definition of the politics he defends: “Liberal democracy is limited democracy.” Privacy, legal rights, and constitutional procedures protect individuals from the will of the majority. Power is limited and divided. Authority is chastened: governments are the servants of those they rule, and their power is open to questioning and revocation. Following thinkers from John Stuart Mill to Isaiah Berlin, Galston links liberalism’s protection of individual conscience and pluralism to the conviction that no one side in a dispute possesses a monopoly on truth or virtue. Indeed plural, sometimes conflicting values lie at the heart of liberalism itself: it prizes both liberty and equality, while recognizing that each must be moderated to preserve the other.

Because it involves tension and balance and imposes limits on political actions that slow down, qualify, or block the achievement of desirable goals, liberal democracy is frequently frustrating. Galston has long stressed that liberalism neither expects nor aspires to produce a nation of saints but depends on citizens exhibiting certain virtues. Indeed, liberal democracy, “more than any other form of government, requires restraint and mutual forbearance,” and “comity”—a mutual respect that prevents us from seeking to completely defeat, dominate, humiliate, and exact vengeance against our opponents. Sustaining liberal democracy also calls for a “rigorous realism,” a sober sense of responsibility, and the fortitude to sustain political action despite awareness of the impossibility of complete, lasting victory over human evil. […]

The heart of Galston’s book is composed of chapters on each of the titular “dark passions.” The first two, anger and fear, are inescapable, evident in human beings from infancy onward; rare is the individual so saintly, or insensate, as to be free from them. They are also politically powerful. Galston supposes that “antipathy may…be the dominant political sentiment.” He revealingly catalogues anger’s triggers: injury, deprivation of something good, humiliation. The last is often the most enraging: loss of face can provoke more unappeasable fury than loss of property. In this regard, liberal democracy may make anger more likely. It creates expectations of being treated as equals, in contrast to earlier ages’ acceptance of “natural” hierarchies.

At the same time, the liberal tendency to view people as individuals runs up against the human proclivity for “sympathetic identification” with collectives. National injury provokes especially intense, widespread, and organized rage. Anger, furthermore, can live on as simmering resentment, which may be stirred up at any moment. Galston notes that while resentment may be justified, it also tends to exceed reasonable demands for just rectification, spawning unlimited hunger for revenge. He does not quite articulate an additional source of danger: it feels good to regard oneself as wronged, lending an element of righteousness and providing a dramatic script in which one exchanges impotent spluttering for the role of avenging hero. Furthermore, while anger is a negative emotion, for many it is preferable to grief, the other natural response to being wronged.