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‘Are politics regressing to premodern forms? Did they never really progress beyond them? It is possible to read too much into these rallies and rituals. But when a man is legally murdered by having bricks thrown at his head, in a country as recently advanced as Brunei, I think we will have our answer.’

The decision to kill gays as a matter of state policy, however abortive and hedged, is not one that lends itself to charitable interpretation from those who consider themselves broadly liberal. And indeed I find all these hedges as risible as they are sincere. They sound like cognitive dissonance: loyalty to a religion and to a sovereign, mixing uncomfortably with a cosmopolitan moral sense that says killing gays means killing gays, and is abhorrent under any circumstance…

But the Sultanate of Brunei is, by the standard of, say, Saudi Arabia (let alone the Islamic State), liberal.

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Excellent writing by Graeme Wood, in which, with a nod toward “the King’s touch,” he invokes the weird premodern/postmodern mix of many countries.

Margaret Soltan, June 20, 2019 7:44AM
Posted in: democracy, good writing

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