Crispin Sartwell

1 week ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

American prisons are great institutions, detaining millions and beefing up regional economies. We’re justly proud of them. As we lost factories to China and Vietnam, we gained prisons, our new industrial system. At this point we hold about 1.8 people in domestic prisons and jails. That's a lot, but I'm sure you'll agree with Pam Bondi and me that jailing people is desirable for its own sake, no matter what process, if any, leads to that outcome.

2 weeks ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

Almost from the first day of the second Trump administration, one of the primary goals has been to dismantle or entirely remake the Kennedy Center, the very impressive if (I speculate) unbeloved block of marble across the street from the Watergate, on the shores of the Potomac about a mile from the White House. I grew up near there, and I remember when it was built. My mom thought it was hideous.

3 weeks ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from removing migrants to prisons in El Salvador without due process. The justification for sudden deportations into nightmare conditions was cooked up by appealing to the Alien Enemies Act, a vestige of a late-18th-century political conflict between President John Adams and his rival Thomas Jefferson. More widely, it was a conflict between their political parties, the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans.

3 weeks ago | everydayanalysis.co.uk | Crispin Sartwell

Crispin Sartwell2 hours ago6 min readSocrates is Not Who Agnes Callard Wishes He WasCrispin Sartwell18 April 2025There is no doubting the centrality of the figure of Socrates, as depicted in Plato's dialogues, to the history of Western philosophy. We might think of it as analogous to the role of Confucius in Chinese thought combined with the role of Jesus in Christianity: a great thinker, a charismatic teacher and model, and a martyr to the truth.

1 month ago | splicetoday.com | Crispin Sartwell

As a teenager in the 1970s, at the tail end of the 60s liberation movements, I regarded myself as a revolutionary and capable of violence in the service of social transformation. In particular, I called myself a “militant ecologist” and destroyed some construction equipment that was tearing up the woods near my house to put in some houses. A small cohort of the like-minded and I made threats toward my school (Alice Deal Junior High in DC), demanding an end to compulsory attendance and grading.