Judging by the chaos engendered by our Orange Furor’s decree cutting off all aid to everybody everywhere, it’s a good thing our cut-rate Nazis weren’t trying to invade France. And will somebody please tell Stephen Miller that even if he shaves his head, squints malevolently, and shouts a lot, people will still know he’s a Jew, and will still find a Jewish Goebbels unseemly.
Month: January 2025
Followup
A couple of hours after publishing my previous post, I found this in my Mastodon feed. It’s the perfect response to Musk’s juvenile provocation. Così diciamo anche noi (So say we all) is the only thing I can think of to add.
How About We Deport This One?
My father was wounded twice fighting assholes like this
The Irrelevance of Precedent
What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?
What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.
The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.
Research
When the Fearful Symmetry’s shuttle silently terminated its descent, and extended its boarding ramp for him, he’d already been standing quietly at the entrance to the village for nearly an hour, a lumpy canvas duffel at his feet and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses clinging precariously to the end of his nose. As the wave of dust displaced by the shuttle’s shield envelope began rippling around his ankles, he reluctantly gave up on the pocket-sized vademecum of the prophet’s sayings a local elder had pressed on him earlier that morning, and slipping it into an empty side pocket, reached down for straps on his now thoroughly dust-coated duffel.
Squinting a little as his eyes adjusted, he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and turned toward the ramp. He’d dressed that morning as he always did, in the vest and shalwar kameeze of the locals. Only a brief metallic glint at the end of his sleeve as he hefted the deceptively heavy duffel hinted at the temporamores he was now wearing underneath them.
The villagers, who, despite their uncertainty, had remained at a more or less respectful distance from him throughout the morning, now shuffled even farther back, the men arranging themselves according to age and dignity as custom dictated, and the women, now partly under the shade of the village bus stop’s extended roof, tending to what women always tended to. The mothers and older sisters herded the younger children away from the edge of the road. The grandmothers, abandoning their furiously whispered disapprovals of a morning wasted, raised their kerchiefs against the dust that suddenly threatened to envelop them. Two teenaged boys in the middle of the road, hands resting firmly on their motorbike handlebars, glanced nervously at each other, already poised to thumb their engine starters and speed away.
He pivoted back toward the gathering as he reached the near end of the ramp, giving them a brief wave of acknowledgment, of farewell. Then he turned and walked briskly up the ramp into the waiting transport, which had begun rising even before the ramp had fully closed behind him. It paused briefly a dozen or so meters above the ground, and then, without any warning at all, disappeared with a sound not unlike a pair of very large hands suddenly clapped together.
“They weren’t exactly waiting for a bus, were they?”
“No. They were waiting for the future.”
“And you promised them a sneak peak at it? That won’t go over well.”
“It won’t disrupt the timeline.”
“And you know this how?”
“Research.”
A Pledge of Non Allegiance
With Austria now governed by Nazis, the US destined to follow at the end of the month, and Germany itself due to join both of them in the wake of its upcoming election in February, I have an announcement to make. Since there’s nowhere to go now that isn’t under threat from the Zeitgeist, it’s time to stop merely alluding to my lack of allegiances, and to publicly and formally declare myself a rootless cosmopolitan.
Yes, I know that’s what Stalin called the Jews. I can even give it to you in the original Russian: безродный космополит. (No, I don’t know any Russian I didn’t learn first from the glossary at the end of A Clockwork Orange, but we have Wikipedia now, don’t we? If nothing else, it allows us to more accurately catalog our afflictions.)
Full disclosure: I’m not a Jew, but I could easily have been one—I suspect a great grandfather of converting to Catholicism in his native Austria during the waning days of the Habsburg empire, something he seems to have done to advance his career prospects in uncertain times. Be that as it may, I’m willing to grant Stalin a bit of poetic license here, as the phrase clearly has resonances well beyond the obsessions of a single autocrat. (I doubt Donald Trump is aware of it, but Stalin was a poet laureate of brutality long before Donald stumbled into the role on idiot TV.)
So, with my apologies to the muse of history now made, I can say openly that I feel no allegiance to any current political faction, nor to any forseeable future faction, no reverence for any religion (in my view they’re all based on fear and steeped in superstition and hypocrisy), and finally, no desire to submit to hagiographies and catechisms past, present, or future. If you need help, I’m available. Whatever I can do, I will do. But if you want me to rat on my neighbor, round up people you consider undesirable and put them in camps, reeducate the children of the very poor, or otherwise kiss a vicious imbecile’s ass, look elsewhere.
Novus Ordo Seclorum
Along with many others, I’ve long thought and said as much here and elsewhere that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:
