This document could have been published by the German Nazi Party of 1933. It betrays our democratic constitutional order, threatens our most reliable allies, and makes white supremacy the cornerstone of our future foreign policy, It is nothing less than a blueprint for the creation of a fascist international. Every citizen of the United States who values the democratic traditions of this country should renounce both it and the filth it represents, shun the people who dared to write it, and drive them all from office.
Steve Randy Waldman (@interfulidity) recently wrote at BlueSky (maybe at Mastadon, too):
“Life marinated in contemporary communication technologies is neverending moral injury.”
I’m not absolutely sure I grasp the precise interpretation he wanted to convey, but his words seem to hit me like a sucker punch every time I open a browser window. I can’t help but feel complicit in all of this being done in my name.
Well said. Beautifully said, in fact. Sometimes silence is the only way to recover what’s really important about being alive. At other times, though, turning away seems like a dereliction of duty. Our technology has evolved to make every person, every event, simultaneously present to us. The result is cacaphony, and the impossibility of making moral choices at all if we’re to have any hope of retaining our sanity. We weren’t made for this.
Also…. just because…. I have gone back in your archive working my way forward from January 2025 to the present; rereading some pieces closely, loosely skimming others. There’s a lot of wisdom packed in those words, and I wanted you to know how deeply I appreciate them.
In your piece *How It Happened* published on on January 6, 2025 you closed with:
“How do I think it happened? You don’t want to know.”
Given that Ken Martin is unwilling (unable?) to release the DNC’s 2024 autopsy, I’m quite curious what you were thinking on Jan 6, ’25.
Is dread the mother of thinking? Maybe Darwin, had he lived another century or so. could have ventured an informed opinion. I have my suspicions, but I’m not yet ready to defend them before an audience of my peers. A thesis like that is always going to reveal more about the psychology of its advocate than the nature of reality, and at my age I no longer need the aggro.
But to give you a direct answer, I was thinking in the shadow of Freud’s return of the repressed. The Enlightenment freed us—some of us, at least—from superstition, but the centuries since have, I think, demonstrated very convincingly that its insights are even less capable of mastering human irrationality than were the mythologies it debunked. After WWII, and the revelations of the Nürnberg trials, the postwar order did its best to remand our demons back to the pit. A noble effort, I grant you, but an ineffective one nevertheless. We still have a lot to learn. What I was thinking last January 6, if I was thinking anything at all, was that we aren’t going to be given enough time to learn what we still need to learn if we’re to survive our present wave of mass insanity, let alone those that will inevitably follow even if we do.