"...When Mrs Bevan was invited to a reception for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Trinity College, Wittgenstein screwed up his face upon seeing her coat, fetched a pair of scissors, and snipped off two buttons. After the operation..it looked much more elegant."

Being John Malkovich... watching Ripley's Game, something about Malkovich smashing a fellow crooks skull with a poker rang a faint bell. Then his repeated cry of Meaning? Meaning? Meaning? gave it to me: Ludwig W. & logical positivism! The infamous poker wielded under Karl Poppers nose. Highsmith must have been at King's not the LSE.

Ludwig remains more trendy than Karl but we may need Karl's ideas as tyranny returns.

"In [The Open Society] I proposed replacing the Platonic question 'Who shall rule?' with a radically different one: 'How can we draw up the constitution in such a way that we are able to get rid of the government without bloodshed?' This question places the stress not on the mode of _electing_ a government but on the possibility of _removing_ it," Karl Popper

Exactly: Under Stalinism once a department or a minister is in place, only death can remove them. Capital has the great virtue of bankruptcy as a removal device. And in USA the two term limit is a blessing. A Son of a past leader usurping an election with his brother's help is a nasty dynastic tendancy.
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