Hobbes on spin and bullshit

• For Hobbes, this was existential. Over a decade before the English Civil War, he’d translated Thucydides, dwelling on the way in which the tumult of civil war tore civilisation asunder, “the received value of names” being changed at will. Thucydides depicted a society losing its hold on its own vocabulary, and so on reality itself. A prime instrument of the transformation was described in rhetoric as paradiastole — the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) gave the example of calling murder “a manly deede”, and Shakespeare illustrates it when Lady Macbeth goads her husband into murdering Duncan in his sleep: “When you durst do it, then you were a man”. We’re inured to this today from our political class. Kidnapping becomes ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’.

Nice metric century Saturday on the fixee, Pour one out for the Baltimore Bike Club’s Civil War Century Century, who’s last edition was yesterday

Tasks

• Laundry – in process
• Hair
• Peacock – done
• Article