When I try to set down my thoughts of late I find myself more influenced by the telephone conversations I have had than I am by the discussion occurring on the Internet. A very loose paraphrase of something my brother said to me today. He has been dedicating himself more strongly than I have to challenging oppression for some time now.
"I'm not taking this as hard as you guys are. I'll still be able to do the work I need to do.
"Look, we've both worked really hard for a long time to fuck up our lives, and the system's response to that has been to keep giving us more and more despite that. We're Too White to Fail.
"I'm going to keep taking what they give me and using it to oppose them."
The idea of playing Aaron on behalf of the minorities that straight white men refuse to listen to is a tempting one, even though in the real world I'm the one with a speech impediment. However, I recognize that in general, the people who are most threatened by Donald Trump's ideology don't really want or trust a straight white man to speak for them. They want people to listen to what they have to say. So go do that.
The habits of my old life are creeping back in. As much as I'd like to define myself as someone who used to have a favourite brand of sour cream, I still have a favourite brand of sour cream.
Yet this week has left me forever changed. I am reaching out to more people despite my fear. I am speaking out more strongly in defense of my beliefs. For that matter, my core beliefs and principles have been fundamentally changed by what we've gone through this week.
My wife told me today that she'd feel better about me when we could have a conversation about something other than politics. Honestly, though, I'm already doing that. I'm back to finding silly and strange things to make me laugh, and I'm laughing harder and longer about them than I did before. I'm listening to music again, eating proper meals again. Inside I still know how much we've all lost, but having not lost myself, I continue to be myself.
Per my introduction, I created this blog to "chronicle my experiences and emotions over a particular period of time". I now believe I have done so.
The last post you see on most blogs is the author insisting they haven't given up. I'm declaring this blog finished, so I'll probably be back.
Stay strong. Stay afraid. Keep being there for the people who need you, and don't compromise your beliefs.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
A qualified apology.
More recriminations. More anguish. Some people are throwing around epithets like "collaborationist" and "quisling" against those who only want to talk and to understand. And by "some people" I mean me.
That's not a fair or helpful thing of me to do. We all have to deal with things in our own way. There is no master plan. We are all making this up as we go along, doing the only things we can think to do. For some of us, the only thing we can think to do is to reach out to the people who voted for Trump, to seek to be understood and to understand.
So the first thing I want to do, is I want to apologize, and the second thing I want to do is that I want to explain why I said what I did, even though I was wrong to do so.
I have said in the past that people who voted for Trump are not people that I can, personally, forgive or compromise with. That my first and overriding priority is to protect those who are being threatened by Trump voters, and secondarily to protect the values which Trump voters threaten. I have declared people I know who voted for Trump dead to me.
These are harsh words. I do not say them out of blind hatred. I have searched in my heart for a way to forgive, to trust, to respect Trump voters. And I have not been able to find any way. I do not mean to say that no way exists, but that if someone comes to me seeking reconciliation, I cannot advise them as to how that reconciliation can be effected. I cannot think of anything they can do that would restore my trust or my respect for them.
But these words and beliefs are only the words and beliefs I need. I do not seriously expect everybody to share in them. I do have concerns and fears for those who choose to try and build bridges with Trump voters.
When you talk to somebody who voted for Trump, you are, in all likelihood, talking to someone who simply does not have the moral principles necessary to be a decent and trustworthy human being. They have gone through their entire life without learning these principles from their church, from their school, from their parents, from anybody.
So when you choose to try and help by talking to Trump voters, please understand that you are choosing a very difficult task. It is not enough to simply change their vote in the election- since they are morally rootless, this will not be difficult at all. What you will also need to do is something many others have tried to do, but have not succeeded in: You will need to teach them right from wrong. Stay strong. Do not be discouraged.
Please also keep in mind that you will have to be strong yourself. Your beliefs and your values will be put to the test, and some people who wish to do this may need to spend time building their own character before they are able to be of help this way. If you are the sort of person whose values are focused around one issue, any issue, be it abortion or economic justice, to the exclusion of human rights, you are vulnerable. You need to recognize this.
That's not a fair or helpful thing of me to do. We all have to deal with things in our own way. There is no master plan. We are all making this up as we go along, doing the only things we can think to do. For some of us, the only thing we can think to do is to reach out to the people who voted for Trump, to seek to be understood and to understand.
So the first thing I want to do, is I want to apologize, and the second thing I want to do is that I want to explain why I said what I did, even though I was wrong to do so.
I have said in the past that people who voted for Trump are not people that I can, personally, forgive or compromise with. That my first and overriding priority is to protect those who are being threatened by Trump voters, and secondarily to protect the values which Trump voters threaten. I have declared people I know who voted for Trump dead to me.
These are harsh words. I do not say them out of blind hatred. I have searched in my heart for a way to forgive, to trust, to respect Trump voters. And I have not been able to find any way. I do not mean to say that no way exists, but that if someone comes to me seeking reconciliation, I cannot advise them as to how that reconciliation can be effected. I cannot think of anything they can do that would restore my trust or my respect for them.
But these words and beliefs are only the words and beliefs I need. I do not seriously expect everybody to share in them. I do have concerns and fears for those who choose to try and build bridges with Trump voters.
When you talk to somebody who voted for Trump, you are, in all likelihood, talking to someone who simply does not have the moral principles necessary to be a decent and trustworthy human being. They have gone through their entire life without learning these principles from their church, from their school, from their parents, from anybody.
So when you choose to try and help by talking to Trump voters, please understand that you are choosing a very difficult task. It is not enough to simply change their vote in the election- since they are morally rootless, this will not be difficult at all. What you will also need to do is something many others have tried to do, but have not succeeded in: You will need to teach them right from wrong. Stay strong. Do not be discouraged.
Please also keep in mind that you will have to be strong yourself. Your beliefs and your values will be put to the test, and some people who wish to do this may need to spend time building their own character before they are able to be of help this way. If you are the sort of person whose values are focused around one issue, any issue, be it abortion or economic justice, to the exclusion of human rights, you are vulnerable. You need to recognize this.
Re: the Democratic minority
I don't spend much time thinking about how the Democrats in Congress should respond to this, because I'm not sure they have any more power than I do, and I am more focused on what I should do right now than I am on what I want other people to do on my behalf. Ask not, etc.
But if Keith Ellison is looking for suggestions - and I honestly think he has plenty of really good ideas on his own - here's what I would like to see.
The DNC should create a clear, strong platform, one based on principles and not realpolitik, and Democratic members of Congress should introduce legislation to enact those principles. Affirm human rights protections. Regulate the energy industry. Raise taxes on the rich. Provide relief for the poor and for displaced workers. Repeal Obamacare and enact single-payer. (We can stop defending Obamacare now. Regardless of all of the good things it accomplished, it was corporate welfare for big insurance companies, and that was why it failed.) That none of this legislation will pass is of no relevance. What is important is that we clearly show what we believe and that we are willing to act on it given the opportunity.
But if Keith Ellison is looking for suggestions - and I honestly think he has plenty of really good ideas on his own - here's what I would like to see.
The DNC should create a clear, strong platform, one based on principles and not realpolitik, and Democratic members of Congress should introduce legislation to enact those principles. Affirm human rights protections. Regulate the energy industry. Raise taxes on the rich. Provide relief for the poor and for displaced workers. Repeal Obamacare and enact single-payer. (We can stop defending Obamacare now. Regardless of all of the good things it accomplished, it was corporate welfare for big insurance companies, and that was why it failed.) That none of this legislation will pass is of no relevance. What is important is that we clearly show what we believe and that we are willing to act on it given the opportunity.
Fear is a Man's Best Friend
I have reached the point where I am grateful that I still wake up every morning shaking. I consider it a gift.
For months and months, I prayed for the pain to stop. Now I am praying that it will continue. I need it. I need it as a reminder to tell me what I need to do.
What we need to do is not something that we can program an app to tell us. We can't set an alarm to tell us to protect the rights of the oppressed.
We can tie a string around our finger. We can turn to Mecca five times a day. We can wear a safety pin. I wear a safety pin, but I also wear my fear, which is a safety pin that pierces my skin at all times.
For months and months, I prayed for the pain to stop. Now I am praying that it will continue. I need it. I need it as a reminder to tell me what I need to do.
What we need to do is not something that we can program an app to tell us. We can't set an alarm to tell us to protect the rights of the oppressed.
We can tie a string around our finger. We can turn to Mecca five times a day. We can wear a safety pin. I wear a safety pin, but I also wear my fear, which is a safety pin that pierces my skin at all times.
Is Donald Trump a Typical Republican?
There's this argument that's going on for a while about how to treat Donald Trump. It's a little inside baseball, but I think it's still a meaningful and important question so I want to talk about it a little. To quote a friend on an internet message board I hang out on, it's the question of whether Donald Trump, as a Republican, is an aberration or a culmination.
In other words, when we talk about Donald Trump, do we talk about him as a unique and unprecedented threat to democratic values, or do we the emphasize the many points of continuity between Trumpian politics and the basic operating procedures of the post-Eisenhower Republican party?
Both perspectives are basically valid ones, and each perspective has its advantages and its disadvantages. My feeling is that the "culmination" argument is oriented towards contextualizing and correcting the damage done by Donald Trump's political career to America, and towards working to prevent something similar from occurring again. The perspective is most helpful at a time when Donald Trump himself no longer presents a threat. Now is not that time.
President Donald Trump will be the most dangerous man on the planet, and our overriding duty as dissenters will be to protect anybody he tries to hurt, and beyond that to limit or, if possible, prevent any damage he may attempt to cause.
On election day, Donald Trump was the most widely hated presidential candidate in recorded American history. We should do our utmost to ensure that, when he is inaugurated, he becomes, and remains, the most widely hated president in American history. Nothing he does should be accepted uncritically.
I'm not talking about a smear campaign. I'm not saying every time the guy takes a piss we should all mob up and start loudly telling everybody that that was clearly the WORST LEAK IN AMERICAN HISTORY. I am talking about denying him the patina of assumed goodwill that has, traditionally, come with the office of President. His actions have disqualified him from ever deserving the benefit of the doubt from us.
In other words, when we talk about Donald Trump, do we talk about him as a unique and unprecedented threat to democratic values, or do we the emphasize the many points of continuity between Trumpian politics and the basic operating procedures of the post-Eisenhower Republican party?
Both perspectives are basically valid ones, and each perspective has its advantages and its disadvantages. My feeling is that the "culmination" argument is oriented towards contextualizing and correcting the damage done by Donald Trump's political career to America, and towards working to prevent something similar from occurring again. The perspective is most helpful at a time when Donald Trump himself no longer presents a threat. Now is not that time.
President Donald Trump will be the most dangerous man on the planet, and our overriding duty as dissenters will be to protect anybody he tries to hurt, and beyond that to limit or, if possible, prevent any damage he may attempt to cause.
On election day, Donald Trump was the most widely hated presidential candidate in recorded American history. We should do our utmost to ensure that, when he is inaugurated, he becomes, and remains, the most widely hated president in American history. Nothing he does should be accepted uncritically.
I'm not talking about a smear campaign. I'm not saying every time the guy takes a piss we should all mob up and start loudly telling everybody that that was clearly the WORST LEAK IN AMERICAN HISTORY. I am talking about denying him the patina of assumed goodwill that has, traditionally, come with the office of President. His actions have disqualified him from ever deserving the benefit of the doubt from us.
"Worse than Trump"
I don't address most of the usual post-election squabbles and recriminations because I think it serves to create a misleading air of normalcy. I do not think that engaging in politics-as-usual is appropriate in the wake of one of this country's historically great failures of politics-as-usual.
But I do want to address Mike Pence, and I think the things people say about Mike Pence point to a certain failure of differentiation, as well as a failure to recognize the unique threat to democracy Donald Trump poses. People say that Pence is "as bad" as Trump or "worse" than Trump, and I don't think that's a meaningful statement because I consider the two categorically different.
Mike Pence was my governor for four years. I didn't like him at all. I didn't agree with his policy positions. He had the support of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress statewide, and he used that power to push through some fairly socially regressive legislation. He pushed through legislation against women, he pushed through legislation against the LGBTQ community, I'm pretty sure he pushed through legislation against workers' rights (though most of the damage there had already been done by previous administrations).
And those of us who were not happy with this worked within the political process to stop him. After he came heavily under fire from the business community for his legislation stripping LGBTQ protections, he backtracked on it, which is something, I will note, that Pat McCrory, who signed similar legislation in North Carolina, did not.
So I didn't like him, I disagreed with pretty much all of his policies, I didn't vote for him for governor, and I certainly wouldn't have voted for him for President. But if he was President now, if he had been elected over Hillary Clinton in an election as fair and free as the election we have gone through, I would not be reacting to him the way I am reacting to Trump.
I would, I think, be playing my part in the usual post-election squabbles and recriminations. I would be complaining about third-party voters, and about bad polling, and about the electoral college and the ineffective campaign Clinton ran and all of that other horse-race stuff.
And I would be working to build bridges the way all the politicians say to do after every election. The equivalent of a friendly post-game handshake. I would be rolling my eyes at my conservative relatives who voted for him rather than declaring them dead to me.
Because electing President Pence over President Clinton would be a repudiation of Obama's policies and of Clinton personally. Electing President Trump over President Clinton was a repudiation of the principles and values which have been the core of this country since its inception. A President Pence would delay or reverse progress. The election of a President Trump forecloses the possibility of progress under our current system.
To me, the single scariest thing about Trump is what you see when you look at him through a historical-critical lens, the people who say the kinds of things he said when running for office, and the kinds of things those people do when they reach office. And people who don't have a historical-critical understanding are not going to see that. You compare him to Hitler and they say "Oh, pshaw! Everybody gets compared to Hitler," and they're right. You compare him to Mussolini, and they have no idea who that is.
Mike Pence does not require us to change our values. You can respond to Mike Pence the same way you would respond to Sam Brownback, or George W. Bush, or Dennis Hastert, or Ronald Reagan. There is a continuity between them. We can disagree with them, we can say that they present a certain threat, but Trump requires us to re-examine our assumptions about what America is as a country and who we are as humans.
There is an upside to this, which is that by going through this process of examination we better become able to confront those injustices which we blind ourselves to, or write off as the cost of our freedoms.
More significant, though, is the downside, which is that those of us who fail to respond to this challenge to our implicit values - which will inevitably be most people - are at risk of losing entirely the protections afforded by those values, as the systems into which those values are encoded come under attack.
So no, I don't think Mike Pence is "as bad" as Donald Trump.
But I do want to address Mike Pence, and I think the things people say about Mike Pence point to a certain failure of differentiation, as well as a failure to recognize the unique threat to democracy Donald Trump poses. People say that Pence is "as bad" as Trump or "worse" than Trump, and I don't think that's a meaningful statement because I consider the two categorically different.
Mike Pence was my governor for four years. I didn't like him at all. I didn't agree with his policy positions. He had the support of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress statewide, and he used that power to push through some fairly socially regressive legislation. He pushed through legislation against women, he pushed through legislation against the LGBTQ community, I'm pretty sure he pushed through legislation against workers' rights (though most of the damage there had already been done by previous administrations).
And those of us who were not happy with this worked within the political process to stop him. After he came heavily under fire from the business community for his legislation stripping LGBTQ protections, he backtracked on it, which is something, I will note, that Pat McCrory, who signed similar legislation in North Carolina, did not.
So I didn't like him, I disagreed with pretty much all of his policies, I didn't vote for him for governor, and I certainly wouldn't have voted for him for President. But if he was President now, if he had been elected over Hillary Clinton in an election as fair and free as the election we have gone through, I would not be reacting to him the way I am reacting to Trump.
I would, I think, be playing my part in the usual post-election squabbles and recriminations. I would be complaining about third-party voters, and about bad polling, and about the electoral college and the ineffective campaign Clinton ran and all of that other horse-race stuff.
And I would be working to build bridges the way all the politicians say to do after every election. The equivalent of a friendly post-game handshake. I would be rolling my eyes at my conservative relatives who voted for him rather than declaring them dead to me.
Because electing President Pence over President Clinton would be a repudiation of Obama's policies and of Clinton personally. Electing President Trump over President Clinton was a repudiation of the principles and values which have been the core of this country since its inception. A President Pence would delay or reverse progress. The election of a President Trump forecloses the possibility of progress under our current system.
To me, the single scariest thing about Trump is what you see when you look at him through a historical-critical lens, the people who say the kinds of things he said when running for office, and the kinds of things those people do when they reach office. And people who don't have a historical-critical understanding are not going to see that. You compare him to Hitler and they say "Oh, pshaw! Everybody gets compared to Hitler," and they're right. You compare him to Mussolini, and they have no idea who that is.
Mike Pence does not require us to change our values. You can respond to Mike Pence the same way you would respond to Sam Brownback, or George W. Bush, or Dennis Hastert, or Ronald Reagan. There is a continuity between them. We can disagree with them, we can say that they present a certain threat, but Trump requires us to re-examine our assumptions about what America is as a country and who we are as humans.
There is an upside to this, which is that by going through this process of examination we better become able to confront those injustices which we blind ourselves to, or write off as the cost of our freedoms.
More significant, though, is the downside, which is that those of us who fail to respond to this challenge to our implicit values - which will inevitably be most people - are at risk of losing entirely the protections afforded by those values, as the systems into which those values are encoded come under attack.
So no, I don't think Mike Pence is "as bad" as Donald Trump.
Uniquely unqualified.
I'm rolling around in my head my previous statement that Donald J. Trump is morally unfit to hold the office of President of the United States of America. It is a bold statement, and there are many ways to challenge it.
For instance, if my contention is that Donald J. Trump is _uniquely_ unqualified to hold the office he was elected to - and, give or take the marginal case of Andrew Jackson, this is my contention - by what empirical and objective test can he be so disqualified? It's not like our Presidents are a gallery of saints. He lies? Every politician does. It's basically part of the job description. He mistreats women? We had a President who took one of his slaves as a concubine, and we put his face on a fucking mountain. He disrespects minorities? Yeah try just about EVERY PRESIDENT EVER.
The answer I have right now is a surprising and ironic one. We have a President-Elect who spent a great deal of time publically questioning whether our sitting President was a legitimate US citizen. This President-Elect also belongs to a party some of whose members have advocated, as a policy measure, the ending of American citizenship as a birthright.
I contend that, on the day Donald J. Trump was elected President, he was not capable of passing a naturalization test to become a citizen of the United States of America. I further contend that his inability to meet this minimal qualification disqualifies him from the position of executive leader of the United States of America. He cannot possibly meaningfully conform to the oath he will make to uphold a Constitution he does not understand.
I don't think this is an argument as to moral unfitness. So I do think I was wrong to argue that Donald J. Trump is morally unfit to hold the office he was elected to, because I can't support that argument to a standard I am personally satisfied by. And of course it's not a particularly strong legal argument, because I just made up out of thin air a new rule with no precedent or explicit basis in the Constitution or in law.
Well, I mean, I don't want to underestimate lawyers. Somebody very clever might be able to make a legal case by, for instance, saying that the Oath of Office is legally binding and that Trump's ignorance makes him legally incompetent to swear that oath. I wouldn't place money on it, though.
But mostly it's that I think it's a sensible argument, and a valid argument, and me personally I really need a reason to dissent other than that the guy scares the ever-living shit out of me.
For instance, if my contention is that Donald J. Trump is _uniquely_ unqualified to hold the office he was elected to - and, give or take the marginal case of Andrew Jackson, this is my contention - by what empirical and objective test can he be so disqualified? It's not like our Presidents are a gallery of saints. He lies? Every politician does. It's basically part of the job description. He mistreats women? We had a President who took one of his slaves as a concubine, and we put his face on a fucking mountain. He disrespects minorities? Yeah try just about EVERY PRESIDENT EVER.
The answer I have right now is a surprising and ironic one. We have a President-Elect who spent a great deal of time publically questioning whether our sitting President was a legitimate US citizen. This President-Elect also belongs to a party some of whose members have advocated, as a policy measure, the ending of American citizenship as a birthright.
I contend that, on the day Donald J. Trump was elected President, he was not capable of passing a naturalization test to become a citizen of the United States of America. I further contend that his inability to meet this minimal qualification disqualifies him from the position of executive leader of the United States of America. He cannot possibly meaningfully conform to the oath he will make to uphold a Constitution he does not understand.
I don't think this is an argument as to moral unfitness. So I do think I was wrong to argue that Donald J. Trump is morally unfit to hold the office he was elected to, because I can't support that argument to a standard I am personally satisfied by. And of course it's not a particularly strong legal argument, because I just made up out of thin air a new rule with no precedent or explicit basis in the Constitution or in law.
Well, I mean, I don't want to underestimate lawyers. Somebody very clever might be able to make a legal case by, for instance, saying that the Oath of Office is legally binding and that Trump's ignorance makes him legally incompetent to swear that oath. I wouldn't place money on it, though.
But mostly it's that I think it's a sensible argument, and a valid argument, and me personally I really need a reason to dissent other than that the guy scares the ever-living shit out of me.
"We've survived"
I recognize that people want to be positive and encouraging, and I think that is a good thing. At the same time, I feel it is also very important that we be honest with ourselves and with each other, that our hope is not false hope. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here what happens when false hopes are dashed.
So with that in mind, I am not reassured by those who tell us that "we've survived worse". First and most importantly, success - and we'll just define survival here as a success state - in the past is no guarantee of success in the future. The argument is fundamentally invalid. Logic 101.
Secondly, and I thank my friend Lilith for bringing this to my attention, saying that "we survived" does a grave disservice to those many of us who did not. It renders their suffering and their death irrelevant. We need now to learn from their struggles, not to dismiss them.
When faced with a crisis, I do not believe it is broadly helpful or appropriate to point out all of the things we have survived in the past. Reliving past victory celebrations distracts us from the task at hand and it encourages us to be complacent, to encourage the sort of magical thinking that tells us that good always triumphs over evil. Even the people who literally write magical fantasy stories aren't this lazy. The One Ring doesn't just pick itself up and throw itself in the fires of Mount Doom.
So with that in mind, I am not reassured by those who tell us that "we've survived worse". First and most importantly, success - and we'll just define survival here as a success state - in the past is no guarantee of success in the future. The argument is fundamentally invalid. Logic 101.
Secondly, and I thank my friend Lilith for bringing this to my attention, saying that "we survived" does a grave disservice to those many of us who did not. It renders their suffering and their death irrelevant. We need now to learn from their struggles, not to dismiss them.
When faced with a crisis, I do not believe it is broadly helpful or appropriate to point out all of the things we have survived in the past. Reliving past victory celebrations distracts us from the task at hand and it encourages us to be complacent, to encourage the sort of magical thinking that tells us that good always triumphs over evil. Even the people who literally write magical fantasy stories aren't this lazy. The One Ring doesn't just pick itself up and throw itself in the fires of Mount Doom.
Out to lunch.
Went out to lunch with my wife today. I have had pretty bad social anxiety lately so going out to lunch is kind of a big deal for me. Even more than that I decided we should go out to the local pizza chain instead of pubs like we've been going to lately. Signs I'm not cut out to be an alcoholic: I get sick of beer the way some people get sick of salad. "Ugh, more beer? I've had beer four nights this week!"
A little more scary than usual for me, though, because this is the same place a couple months back I went to and got seated next to a couple Republicans loudly spewing out all sorts of awful lies. I had to ask for the server to move me to another table. Felt awful about it at the time. Wouldn't faze me a bit now.
Anyway everybody was talking politics which is to be expected but I was able to tune most of it out and my wife and I just talked about silly pop culture ephemera. The server complimented me on my shirt, but I don't know if he was talking about the safety pin or he was just a Doctor Who fan.
"I watched Bill Maher's show this week. He suggested that people upset about the outcome should move to swing states that went red in this election. What do you think about that?"
"I don't have a problem with Bill Maher moving to Ohio."
"I don't think he's going to move to Ohio."
"Gee."
"But do you think it's a good idea?"
"I'm not going to judge people for doing whatever they feel they need to do."
"That's not what I asked."
"This isn't a math equation for me. This is about values. I think it's perhaps easy for Bill to say that from where he sits, that he perhaps underestimates how hard it is for us to live and for us to hold on to our values under red state conditions."
A little more scary than usual for me, though, because this is the same place a couple months back I went to and got seated next to a couple Republicans loudly spewing out all sorts of awful lies. I had to ask for the server to move me to another table. Felt awful about it at the time. Wouldn't faze me a bit now.
Anyway everybody was talking politics which is to be expected but I was able to tune most of it out and my wife and I just talked about silly pop culture ephemera. The server complimented me on my shirt, but I don't know if he was talking about the safety pin or he was just a Doctor Who fan.
"I watched Bill Maher's show this week. He suggested that people upset about the outcome should move to swing states that went red in this election. What do you think about that?"
"I don't have a problem with Bill Maher moving to Ohio."
"I don't think he's going to move to Ohio."
"Gee."
"But do you think it's a good idea?"
"I'm not going to judge people for doing whatever they feel they need to do."
"That's not what I asked."
"This isn't a math equation for me. This is about values. I think it's perhaps easy for Bill to say that from where he sits, that he perhaps underestimates how hard it is for us to live and for us to hold on to our values under red state conditions."
Saturday, November 12, 2016
"Stupid" rears its ugly head.
The "stupid" thing keeps rearing its ugly head.
People look at Donald Trump's appearances on television, the things he says, and shake their heads in disbelief. Is this guy an idiot? Does he know the first thing at all about what it takes to be President?
No and yes, respectively. Donald Trump is not stupid. He is not some illiterate country bumpkin from Brooklyn. (I mean, come on. Illiterate country bumpkin from BROOKLYN? Listen to yourselves.) On the other hand, he does have a nearly total lack of knowledge about our political institutions and how they work, including the office of the Presidency.
If you think this makes him less dangerous, you are fooling yourselves.
Yes, this means he will be extremely reliant on his advisors. Advisors of his own choosing. We can see who he has chosen to guide him so far. Is this your hope? That the country will not be run by Donald Trump, but by Steve Bannon and Alex Jones?
Your trivia for the day: The word "unready" in the name of the king we call "Aethelred the Unready" is a poor translation of the Old English word "Unraed", which means "ill-advised".
People look at Donald Trump's appearances on television, the things he says, and shake their heads in disbelief. Is this guy an idiot? Does he know the first thing at all about what it takes to be President?
No and yes, respectively. Donald Trump is not stupid. He is not some illiterate country bumpkin from Brooklyn. (I mean, come on. Illiterate country bumpkin from BROOKLYN? Listen to yourselves.) On the other hand, he does have a nearly total lack of knowledge about our political institutions and how they work, including the office of the Presidency.
If you think this makes him less dangerous, you are fooling yourselves.
Yes, this means he will be extremely reliant on his advisors. Advisors of his own choosing. We can see who he has chosen to guide him so far. Is this your hope? That the country will not be run by Donald Trump, but by Steve Bannon and Alex Jones?
Your trivia for the day: The word "unready" in the name of the king we call "Aethelred the Unready" is a poor translation of the Old English word "Unraed", which means "ill-advised".
Negotiations.
I'm trying to get my analytical mind and my emotions to work together. They're not natural allies. My emotions scream at me "Run! No, Fight! No, Run!", and in the meantime my analytical mind says things like "Huh, that's interesting, what if we move the one..."
For most of my life, my analytical mind has treated my emotions with disdain. You know, pipe down, that's crazy talk, I'm trying to get some important work done here. At best any negotiation is not oriented towards a common good: No, you can't shave all the hair off one side of your body. This is the twentieth time you've asked me that today. Christ, how am I ever going to finish this Dostoevsky paper due tomorrow? Well... I guess it can't do any harm. If I let you do it, do you promise to leave me alone for a while? Sigh... fine, go ahead. My reason has not negotiated with terrorists, but I sure as hell have negotiated with terror.
Without my emotions ever having to say "See, I told you so", my analytical mind has started treating my emotions with respect. Respect means we can work together, not merely bargain with each other in bad faith.
I feel like it's important to figure out how we're different from them. For a lot of people, it's going to be very important, a foundational identity principle, to have things they can point to in order to emphasize our differences. If someone finds that necessary, okay. Me, I don't eat meat just because Hitler was a vegetarian.
What I'm doing is going back through stuff they did that I said "Oh, man, that will never work," because it was out of joint with the way I viewed the world, and re-evaluating. This was not a blind shot in the dark, this was the culmination of a strategy the Republican party has been pursuing at least for my entire lifetime, and to those people who say we need to learn more, we need to understand, this is where I am starting.
Our politics are, out of necessity, the politics of fear. We are all terrified, and we will remain so. But our goals are not the same as theirs, so though we use fear, we cannot use it in the same way. For our part, we cannot use fear when it undermines our values. For their part, fear, in coalition with hatred, are their core values. I can hear them sneering at what I've said right now. "The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules."
Today we are not abandoning our rules. Today we are making new rules for ourselves, because what we are going to need going forward is different from what we thought we needed as recently as last week. Today we treat our fear and our rage with the respect and honor they deserve.
For most of my life, my analytical mind has treated my emotions with disdain. You know, pipe down, that's crazy talk, I'm trying to get some important work done here. At best any negotiation is not oriented towards a common good: No, you can't shave all the hair off one side of your body. This is the twentieth time you've asked me that today. Christ, how am I ever going to finish this Dostoevsky paper due tomorrow? Well... I guess it can't do any harm. If I let you do it, do you promise to leave me alone for a while? Sigh... fine, go ahead. My reason has not negotiated with terrorists, but I sure as hell have negotiated with terror.
Without my emotions ever having to say "See, I told you so", my analytical mind has started treating my emotions with respect. Respect means we can work together, not merely bargain with each other in bad faith.
I feel like it's important to figure out how we're different from them. For a lot of people, it's going to be very important, a foundational identity principle, to have things they can point to in order to emphasize our differences. If someone finds that necessary, okay. Me, I don't eat meat just because Hitler was a vegetarian.
What I'm doing is going back through stuff they did that I said "Oh, man, that will never work," because it was out of joint with the way I viewed the world, and re-evaluating. This was not a blind shot in the dark, this was the culmination of a strategy the Republican party has been pursuing at least for my entire lifetime, and to those people who say we need to learn more, we need to understand, this is where I am starting.
Our politics are, out of necessity, the politics of fear. We are all terrified, and we will remain so. But our goals are not the same as theirs, so though we use fear, we cannot use it in the same way. For our part, we cannot use fear when it undermines our values. For their part, fear, in coalition with hatred, are their core values. I can hear them sneering at what I've said right now. "The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules."
Today we are not abandoning our rules. Today we are making new rules for ourselves, because what we are going to need going forward is different from what we thought we needed as recently as last week. Today we treat our fear and our rage with the respect and honor they deserve.
Rotten fruit.
Last night for the first time this week I was feeling like a normal human being. I could not feel the knot at all, though I admit to not looking for it very hard. My mouth ulcers (largely psychosomatic) weren't bothering me as much. I looked at something funny that had nothing to do with politics and I laughed and laughed. The stuff I wrote was political, but it was also more lighthearted and silly than I'd been able to come up with in a while, writing for pleasure more than writing as catharsis. I started wondering if maybe I didn't have more to contribute than reporting on my howls of pain.
I only had one beer, and even then it was just as a food pairing. I felt tired rather than spent. Sleep did not come easily, but it came.
At 4 AM I woke up shaking again. That answers that question. I'm not even to the point of having nightmares to write about. Just symptoms.
I got a good six hours of sleep. Six hours is a clinically normal and healthy amount of sleep, but not for me. I come from a family of people who sleep a lot. When I'm healthy I sleep somewhere between eight and ten hours a day.
Moving on.
I have always been the sort of person who struggles with religion. I was raised to believe that "good Christians" do not curse God to his face for being too merciful. I have grown to believe that God will forgive me for this. We forgive when we are not threatened, we forgive when we are not afraid. We cannot threaten God, and the God I have constructed, with much help from others, in my mind, that God does not feel fear.
The God I believe in does feel pain, every hurt of every human, more deeply and acutely than we do. The God I believe in is not a remote monolith. Jesus wept. And in this way I can still believe.
I will not be going to church tomorrow. The church I go to, I am pretty sure tomorrow they will be talking about God's message of love and forgiveness and healing. And that is God's message, but right now I do not think I can stomach it. I am hearing the message of the Jesus who cursed a fig tree to never bear fruit again, the Jesus who said... no, wait. I can't quote that verse. They will say I am a terrorist for quoting the Gospel.
So I struggle. But I do not struggle with my faith because of "Christians who voted for Trump". Because I do not believe such a thing is possible.
Look, I'm on dangerous ground here. I don't want to start another fucking holy war. We've had far too many of those over the years, and this is to the eternal shame of humans and of Christianity itself.
At the same time, I have ask myself: What are the fruits of our commitment to what we term "theological diversity"? Some of these fruits have been wonderful, sweet and succulent and divine. But, I am sad to say, most of the fruit has been rotten. What is known as "Christianity" in America is dominated by those who preach avarice, hatred, and ignorance in the name of Christ.
I call out to God for justice, and in return he asks me what I know of justice. I am rebuked.
These people who we refuse, on principle, to call heretics, who we pretend are our "brothers and sisters in Christ", do they defile God's name? Very well then, they defile God's name. We all do, in our own ways, and we forgive and are forgiven as God has taught us. Do they defile God's people? Yes. They do. This we cannot continue to tolerate.
Many Christian leaders have shown strength in this time. Many have spoken out strongly against the ideals Trump stands for. Their followers have ignored them, and so these leaders must still be judged. That they have spoken up in a time of crisis is commendable, but that they have failed to instill in their followers the values of Christ is their failure. We may forgive them as we ask God to forgive us, but let us not now continue to repeat their failures.
To be a Christian is to sin. Constantly, all the time, we sin. We fail to live up to our beliefs. I hold that the "Christians" who voted for Trump are not failing to live up to their beliefs, they are fulfilling them. Because those beliefs are avarice, hatred, and ignorance. Those are not Christian beliefs, and Christians do not preach them.
I only had one beer, and even then it was just as a food pairing. I felt tired rather than spent. Sleep did not come easily, but it came.
At 4 AM I woke up shaking again. That answers that question. I'm not even to the point of having nightmares to write about. Just symptoms.
I got a good six hours of sleep. Six hours is a clinically normal and healthy amount of sleep, but not for me. I come from a family of people who sleep a lot. When I'm healthy I sleep somewhere between eight and ten hours a day.
Moving on.
I have always been the sort of person who struggles with religion. I was raised to believe that "good Christians" do not curse God to his face for being too merciful. I have grown to believe that God will forgive me for this. We forgive when we are not threatened, we forgive when we are not afraid. We cannot threaten God, and the God I have constructed, with much help from others, in my mind, that God does not feel fear.
The God I believe in does feel pain, every hurt of every human, more deeply and acutely than we do. The God I believe in is not a remote monolith. Jesus wept. And in this way I can still believe.
I will not be going to church tomorrow. The church I go to, I am pretty sure tomorrow they will be talking about God's message of love and forgiveness and healing. And that is God's message, but right now I do not think I can stomach it. I am hearing the message of the Jesus who cursed a fig tree to never bear fruit again, the Jesus who said... no, wait. I can't quote that verse. They will say I am a terrorist for quoting the Gospel.
So I struggle. But I do not struggle with my faith because of "Christians who voted for Trump". Because I do not believe such a thing is possible.
Look, I'm on dangerous ground here. I don't want to start another fucking holy war. We've had far too many of those over the years, and this is to the eternal shame of humans and of Christianity itself.
At the same time, I have ask myself: What are the fruits of our commitment to what we term "theological diversity"? Some of these fruits have been wonderful, sweet and succulent and divine. But, I am sad to say, most of the fruit has been rotten. What is known as "Christianity" in America is dominated by those who preach avarice, hatred, and ignorance in the name of Christ.
I call out to God for justice, and in return he asks me what I know of justice. I am rebuked.
These people who we refuse, on principle, to call heretics, who we pretend are our "brothers and sisters in Christ", do they defile God's name? Very well then, they defile God's name. We all do, in our own ways, and we forgive and are forgiven as God has taught us. Do they defile God's people? Yes. They do. This we cannot continue to tolerate.
Many Christian leaders have shown strength in this time. Many have spoken out strongly against the ideals Trump stands for. Their followers have ignored them, and so these leaders must still be judged. That they have spoken up in a time of crisis is commendable, but that they have failed to instill in their followers the values of Christ is their failure. We may forgive them as we ask God to forgive us, but let us not now continue to repeat their failures.
To be a Christian is to sin. Constantly, all the time, we sin. We fail to live up to our beliefs. I hold that the "Christians" who voted for Trump are not failing to live up to their beliefs, they are fulfilling them. Because those beliefs are avarice, hatred, and ignorance. Those are not Christian beliefs, and Christians do not preach them.
Phony.
Like my best friend when I was eight, I'm having to re-teach myself the use of language. There are certain words commonly used in a strictly metaphorical sense that would no longer be understood that way where I to use them.
We can't, for instance, speak any more about "fighting for what we believe in", which is an extremely common rhetorical turn of phrase. We do that, and the next time some dumb-shit self-proclaimed "anarchist" who thinks Guy Fawkes was a comic book character punches a cop it winds up on us somehow.
Similarly, in America for the past fifty years (thanks LBJ) there has apparently been a war on against every damn thing imaginable, up to and including the Country Music Awards. Not only are we necessarily _not_ at war, but we can't safely make any comparisons to war, or to anything that happened during the course of one. I imagine myself as one of those sorts of parents who won't let their children play with toy guns. "We don't use the 'w' word in this household, Bobby."
Ehh, it's fine. Maybe it'll teach me to be a better writer. Maybe I'll start using fewer cliches and lazy analogies, and all those historical allusions are more clever than they are useful for anything.
In a lot of ways we are consciously indebted to the tactics the Republican Party has employed over the course of the last generation, both because they have proven effective and because they are the ones setting the rules of discourse. This does not, however, mean being blindly imitative. I personally think it would be stupid and wasteful to turn up the paranoia machine to the extent that they did to us. We do not need to exaggerate in order to create a constant atmosphere of fear and distrust. That's going to be the new regime's job. All we have to do is loosen the iron grip they're going to attempt to hold on it.
Fear spreads. Tell someone to be afraid of someone or something else often enough, persuasively enough, and they will start to also be afraid of you. Basic Pavlovian psychology. You become associated with the fear response. You think Churchill lost the election after winning World War II (whoops) just because he was a shitty campaigner?
So we let them take the lead. Donald Trump isn't President yet, hasn't done anything yet, and after 18 months of working tirelessly and ineffectually to persuade everyone I know that Trump presents a serious and unacceptable threat to human rights and to America's Constitutional principles and traditions, I'm ready to take a break. The cheap heat regularly churned out by outrage factories like Occupy Democrats is of absolutely no use to us. We reject and spurn it. Stuff like Harry Reid's executive summary of the obstacles any person of conscience faces in attempting to work with the future Trump administration are much more helpful.
Because people I know keep talking about "healing" and "building bridges". I'm not convinced spewing out the same meaningless glad-handling everybody trotted out after the last two elections is going to accomplish anything more than it did in 2008 or 2012. I think if you want to build trust you should perhaps consider cutting back on the empty words and focusing on saying things you sincerely believe, whether or not those things have been focus-group tested to win friends and influence people.
I believe we should spend this time, rather than continuing to focus on building our outrage against Trump, or pretending to make peace with him or his supporters "for the good of the country", on helping and supporting each other. Protect those who need protection, learn how to shut down or avoid bomb-tossers and learn how to not sound like a bomb-tosser, work to forgive each other for all the stupid shit we're inevitably going to thoughtlessly say to each other.
We can't, for instance, speak any more about "fighting for what we believe in", which is an extremely common rhetorical turn of phrase. We do that, and the next time some dumb-shit self-proclaimed "anarchist" who thinks Guy Fawkes was a comic book character punches a cop it winds up on us somehow.
Similarly, in America for the past fifty years (thanks LBJ) there has apparently been a war on against every damn thing imaginable, up to and including the Country Music Awards. Not only are we necessarily _not_ at war, but we can't safely make any comparisons to war, or to anything that happened during the course of one. I imagine myself as one of those sorts of parents who won't let their children play with toy guns. "We don't use the 'w' word in this household, Bobby."
Ehh, it's fine. Maybe it'll teach me to be a better writer. Maybe I'll start using fewer cliches and lazy analogies, and all those historical allusions are more clever than they are useful for anything.
In a lot of ways we are consciously indebted to the tactics the Republican Party has employed over the course of the last generation, both because they have proven effective and because they are the ones setting the rules of discourse. This does not, however, mean being blindly imitative. I personally think it would be stupid and wasteful to turn up the paranoia machine to the extent that they did to us. We do not need to exaggerate in order to create a constant atmosphere of fear and distrust. That's going to be the new regime's job. All we have to do is loosen the iron grip they're going to attempt to hold on it.
Fear spreads. Tell someone to be afraid of someone or something else often enough, persuasively enough, and they will start to also be afraid of you. Basic Pavlovian psychology. You become associated with the fear response. You think Churchill lost the election after winning World War II (whoops) just because he was a shitty campaigner?
So we let them take the lead. Donald Trump isn't President yet, hasn't done anything yet, and after 18 months of working tirelessly and ineffectually to persuade everyone I know that Trump presents a serious and unacceptable threat to human rights and to America's Constitutional principles and traditions, I'm ready to take a break. The cheap heat regularly churned out by outrage factories like Occupy Democrats is of absolutely no use to us. We reject and spurn it. Stuff like Harry Reid's executive summary of the obstacles any person of conscience faces in attempting to work with the future Trump administration are much more helpful.
Because people I know keep talking about "healing" and "building bridges". I'm not convinced spewing out the same meaningless glad-handling everybody trotted out after the last two elections is going to accomplish anything more than it did in 2008 or 2012. I think if you want to build trust you should perhaps consider cutting back on the empty words and focusing on saying things you sincerely believe, whether or not those things have been focus-group tested to win friends and influence people.
I believe we should spend this time, rather than continuing to focus on building our outrage against Trump, or pretending to make peace with him or his supporters "for the good of the country", on helping and supporting each other. Protect those who need protection, learn how to shut down or avoid bomb-tossers and learn how to not sound like a bomb-tosser, work to forgive each other for all the stupid shit we're inevitably going to thoughtlessly say to each other.
Woke dad.
I pretty often second-guess the stuff I choose to put up here. Like, you know, nobody really wants to hear my corny "woke dad" schtick, do they? If I was lucky enough to have been able to, at some point, say something real and powerful and true, am I discrediting those words by not knowing when to shut the fuck up?
When I was eight my best friend didn't look both ways before crossing the street and was hit by a car. He suffered severe neurological damage. When I found out nobody knew for sure whether he was going to live or not. That was a very tough five minutes for me. As soon as my mom told me that he was going to pull through, I started making all kinds of awful, tacky jokes about what had happened. My mom was horrified. She told me that was totally inappropriate.
I don't think it was. That was my way of dealing with the tension and the horror and the hurt. What I said didn't do any harm. It didn't trivialize the suffering he had to go through, which was severe, or the effort of his having to relearn everything he knew. My best friend was alive, and I was happy.
I think it's important for us to be able to continue to express joy, even if the way we go about it is corny and trivial.
When I was eight my best friend didn't look both ways before crossing the street and was hit by a car. He suffered severe neurological damage. When I found out nobody knew for sure whether he was going to live or not. That was a very tough five minutes for me. As soon as my mom told me that he was going to pull through, I started making all kinds of awful, tacky jokes about what had happened. My mom was horrified. She told me that was totally inappropriate.
I don't think it was. That was my way of dealing with the tension and the horror and the hurt. What I said didn't do any harm. It didn't trivialize the suffering he had to go through, which was severe, or the effort of his having to relearn everything he knew. My best friend was alive, and I was happy.
I think it's important for us to be able to continue to express joy, even if the way we go about it is corny and trivial.
Gig review.
Last night I was fortunate enough to see the group Anti-Trump. It was a really good show.
For those of you who don't know the story behind the group, a brief rundown: They're the group that used to be known as "America", but when they went bankrupt this shady so-called "businessman" named Donald Trump bought up the rights to the name and tossed them all out on their ear, then put together a new group to tour under the name. The group members were so mad about it that they put together their own group called Anti-Trump, and those are the people I saw last night.
The band currently touring as "America" are a total bullshit band, and all the real fans of America know it. After going out and buying up the name he doesn't even play any of their old hits, just a bunch of really crappy new material. To make it even more insulting, when he does play the old stuff it's the really shitty old stuff nobody likes, stuff like "HUAC" and "Operation Wetback". Anti-Trump are really embarrassed about that stuff, and retired that material from their set ages ago.
Anyway, the group currently going out and playing as "America" is a fraud and it's depressing that they're headlining stadiums with their bullshit material while Anti-Trump can't even book a proper gig, because Donald Trump sued them for "copyright infringement" and "defamation" and got some bullshit injunction against them, so all the shows they play are illegal underground gigs.
Anti-Trump has pretty much all the original principles of America, except for Slavery but who gives a fuck, nobody likes that asshole anyway, and they play all the cool shit that the fake "America" won't even touch like "Freedom of the Press" and "Civil Rights Act of 1964" (as well as its sequel number, "Civil Rights Act of 1965"). And these aren't just a bunch of old, out-of-touch farts. They really do the material justice. Hearing this stuff played in this underground club, well, it touched me in a way it never did when I saw them playing the stuff under their own name.
The group is working on some really good new material, too, like "Single-Payer Healthcare". I know a lot of fans complain that one is really derivative of an old number Canada did decades ago, but I don't even care, it just sounds so damn good when they do it. And anyway Canada doesn't have anything as awesome as their other new number "Black Lives Matter", which is absolutely pure America. Not to put down Canada. They've done some really cool stuff too, it's just that I grew up with classic America, and they're always going to feel like _my_ group, you know?
Anti-Trump don't have a website or an official tour schedule or anything, but if you get a chance you really owe it to yourself to check them out, particularly for anyone who is disappointed with the fake (Trump) group calling itself "America" right now. Anti-Trump are totally super awesome.
For those of you who don't know the story behind the group, a brief rundown: They're the group that used to be known as "America", but when they went bankrupt this shady so-called "businessman" named Donald Trump bought up the rights to the name and tossed them all out on their ear, then put together a new group to tour under the name. The group members were so mad about it that they put together their own group called Anti-Trump, and those are the people I saw last night.
The band currently touring as "America" are a total bullshit band, and all the real fans of America know it. After going out and buying up the name he doesn't even play any of their old hits, just a bunch of really crappy new material. To make it even more insulting, when he does play the old stuff it's the really shitty old stuff nobody likes, stuff like "HUAC" and "Operation Wetback". Anti-Trump are really embarrassed about that stuff, and retired that material from their set ages ago.
Anyway, the group currently going out and playing as "America" is a fraud and it's depressing that they're headlining stadiums with their bullshit material while Anti-Trump can't even book a proper gig, because Donald Trump sued them for "copyright infringement" and "defamation" and got some bullshit injunction against them, so all the shows they play are illegal underground gigs.
Anti-Trump has pretty much all the original principles of America, except for Slavery but who gives a fuck, nobody likes that asshole anyway, and they play all the cool shit that the fake "America" won't even touch like "Freedom of the Press" and "Civil Rights Act of 1964" (as well as its sequel number, "Civil Rights Act of 1965"). And these aren't just a bunch of old, out-of-touch farts. They really do the material justice. Hearing this stuff played in this underground club, well, it touched me in a way it never did when I saw them playing the stuff under their own name.
The group is working on some really good new material, too, like "Single-Payer Healthcare". I know a lot of fans complain that one is really derivative of an old number Canada did decades ago, but I don't even care, it just sounds so damn good when they do it. And anyway Canada doesn't have anything as awesome as their other new number "Black Lives Matter", which is absolutely pure America. Not to put down Canada. They've done some really cool stuff too, it's just that I grew up with classic America, and they're always going to feel like _my_ group, you know?
Anti-Trump don't have a website or an official tour schedule or anything, but if you get a chance you really owe it to yourself to check them out, particularly for anyone who is disappointed with the fake (Trump) group calling itself "America" right now. Anti-Trump are totally super awesome.
Life with the Lions (1969).
Trying to keep it light, folks. Please don't bite my head off for this one.
As a Christian, I have to admit that I am a little bit excited to see Donald Trump becoming President. All of my life, people have been reading me stories from the Bible telling me about how dangerous it is to be a Christian and how we are constantly under threat of being persecuted. I thought that I must be a very bad Christian indeed, because nobody ever seemed to have any interest in persecuting me for my beliefs.
This made me a little sad, because even though the Bible told me that being persecuted was horrible, they also made it sound really exciting and glamorous and said that God really super-duper loved anybody who suffered in His name. But it seemed like everybody in charge of countries realized that whenever a government tried to persecute the Christians, the Christians wound up getting the better end of the deal.
Eventually, I am ashamed to say, I lost hope. I thought nobody was ever going to sentence me to a long prison term for practicing my personal beliefs.
Donald Trump being elected President changes all that. For the first time in my lifetime, we will have a political leadership that I can really believe might persecute me for trying to follow what Jesus says to do in the Gospels. For the first time in my life, I feel like a real, honest-to-God Christian.
As a Christian, I have to admit that I am a little bit excited to see Donald Trump becoming President. All of my life, people have been reading me stories from the Bible telling me about how dangerous it is to be a Christian and how we are constantly under threat of being persecuted. I thought that I must be a very bad Christian indeed, because nobody ever seemed to have any interest in persecuting me for my beliefs.
This made me a little sad, because even though the Bible told me that being persecuted was horrible, they also made it sound really exciting and glamorous and said that God really super-duper loved anybody who suffered in His name. But it seemed like everybody in charge of countries realized that whenever a government tried to persecute the Christians, the Christians wound up getting the better end of the deal.
Eventually, I am ashamed to say, I lost hope. I thought nobody was ever going to sentence me to a long prison term for practicing my personal beliefs.
Donald Trump being elected President changes all that. For the first time in my lifetime, we will have a political leadership that I can really believe might persecute me for trying to follow what Jesus says to do in the Gospels. For the first time in my life, I feel like a real, honest-to-God Christian.
"You're not crazy! You're AWESOME!"
That's very kind of you to say, but I'm not saying it to put myself down- I really am seriously mentally ill (depression and anxiety). If I told you I had diabetes, would you try to dispute my statement? :)
I feel like the first person in history who's been diagnosed by a layperson over the Internet as being completely sane. :)
Heaven and Earth.
One of the many, many dangers of the future Trump regime, in my view, will be the erasure of the distinction between dissent and sedition. Though we are peaceful dissenters, we are going to hear a lot more of the word "sedition" in the times to come, and so I want to take a little time to address it pre-emptively.
Questions of sedition seem to generally boil down to the question of the state's monopoly power over political violence. A terrorist, for example, is a non-state actor who believes that they have a moral imperative which legitimizes their use of political violence.
When opponents of Trump are accused of sedition - which we will be - we will need to understand on what grounds we are so accused.
The opposition to Trump, as a foundational principle, holds that non-state actors do NOT have any grounds for political violence. Our position, which will be used as grounds for persecution, is rather that the Trump regime does not possess the authority to perpetrate political violence, on the grounds that Donald J. Trump is inherently unfit to wisely exercise this power. The fact that his election occurred fairly and legitimately under the principles set forth by the constitution is not relevant. The fact that his unfitness to exercise political violence has not been determined by US court of law is not relevant. Our argument is not a legal argument, but a moral argument.
The state, under the control of Donald J. Trump, has, essentially, every legal right to use those powers to commit moral outrages. Our argument is moral because every legal recourse has been removed from us. Each individual must, of his or her own accord, decide whether he or she shall support the moral and ethical principles this country was founded on, or whether he or she shall support the institution that bears the country's name, but is shorn of its founding principles.
Basically we're Anderson, Wakeman, and Rabin and they're the guys who have the legal right to call themselves Yes. If you feel like you can make the argument that "Heaven and Earth" is in any way acceptable as a Yes album, by all means, be my guest, but don't be surprised when the rest of us treat you as openly delusional.
Questions of sedition seem to generally boil down to the question of the state's monopoly power over political violence. A terrorist, for example, is a non-state actor who believes that they have a moral imperative which legitimizes their use of political violence.
When opponents of Trump are accused of sedition - which we will be - we will need to understand on what grounds we are so accused.
The opposition to Trump, as a foundational principle, holds that non-state actors do NOT have any grounds for political violence. Our position, which will be used as grounds for persecution, is rather that the Trump regime does not possess the authority to perpetrate political violence, on the grounds that Donald J. Trump is inherently unfit to wisely exercise this power. The fact that his election occurred fairly and legitimately under the principles set forth by the constitution is not relevant. The fact that his unfitness to exercise political violence has not been determined by US court of law is not relevant. Our argument is not a legal argument, but a moral argument.
The state, under the control of Donald J. Trump, has, essentially, every legal right to use those powers to commit moral outrages. Our argument is moral because every legal recourse has been removed from us. Each individual must, of his or her own accord, decide whether he or she shall support the moral and ethical principles this country was founded on, or whether he or she shall support the institution that bears the country's name, but is shorn of its founding principles.
Basically we're Anderson, Wakeman, and Rabin and they're the guys who have the legal right to call themselves Yes. If you feel like you can make the argument that "Heaven and Earth" is in any way acceptable as a Yes album, by all means, be my guest, but don't be surprised when the rest of us treat you as openly delusional.
A sickening rush.
Reading over what I've written while de-identifying it to post here gave me a sickening rush. I avoid reading my own writing. It usually turns out to not be as good as I thought it was when I was writing it. I feel differently about the things I've been writing lately.
I don't understand it, really. I have, maybe to an extent I was not fully aware of, a reputation for being "the crazy one". Once it became clear what was happening, it seemed like everybody's first question was "Is Xiphoid OK?"
And people seem to be... surprised at what they find when they check up on me. I'm shaking, I'm terrified... and I feel like I've been spitting straight fire. The stuff I've felt for so long but been afraid to say, the terror I haven't wanted to invoke, I'm putting it all out there and people are _thanking_ me for it. Telling me how brave I am. Me, a scared full-grown man.
I'm doing what I'm doing because it makes me less afraid. Because writing feels normal in a way nothing else does.
It doesn't give me peace. I long for peace, for that sense of inner calm and centeredness in the world, but it's always been elusive for me. Something I feel for a moment before it passes. I never seem to reach a state of true equilibrium, no matter how much cheesy new-age music and soft rock I listen to.
That knot in my gut, I just keep pushing, pushing to the center of it. I'm not there yet, but I can feel better what it is. I'm not going to push through and find the eye of the hurricane. I'm not going to find peace at the center. I'm going to find a molten core.
That's what's at the heart of our world. Hurricanes, no matter how terrifying they are to us, they skim over the surface. The center of our world is heat and liquefying pressure.
So I keep writing, I keep doing things that people call me "brave" for doing, and I'm very glad of it.
I don't understand it, really. I have, maybe to an extent I was not fully aware of, a reputation for being "the crazy one". Once it became clear what was happening, it seemed like everybody's first question was "Is Xiphoid OK?"
And people seem to be... surprised at what they find when they check up on me. I'm shaking, I'm terrified... and I feel like I've been spitting straight fire. The stuff I've felt for so long but been afraid to say, the terror I haven't wanted to invoke, I'm putting it all out there and people are _thanking_ me for it. Telling me how brave I am. Me, a scared full-grown man.
I'm doing what I'm doing because it makes me less afraid. Because writing feels normal in a way nothing else does.
It doesn't give me peace. I long for peace, for that sense of inner calm and centeredness in the world, but it's always been elusive for me. Something I feel for a moment before it passes. I never seem to reach a state of true equilibrium, no matter how much cheesy new-age music and soft rock I listen to.
That knot in my gut, I just keep pushing, pushing to the center of it. I'm not there yet, but I can feel better what it is. I'm not going to push through and find the eye of the hurricane. I'm not going to find peace at the center. I'm going to find a molten core.
That's what's at the heart of our world. Hurricanes, no matter how terrifying they are to us, they skim over the surface. The center of our world is heat and liquefying pressure.
So I keep writing, I keep doing things that people call me "brave" for doing, and I'm very glad of it.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Healing?
I absolutely agree that we have to address the underlying causes, as many as we can. A lot of the policies that, for instance, Bernie has advocated, I think they would go a long way towards addressing the very real hurt and pain that Trump voters have gone through.
But what I don't think we need is more anthropological studies of "The Trump Voter". I don't think we need to do any more research, any more than we need to do "more research" on anthropogenic climate change. You need to do what's right for you, but my feeling is that our to-do list is long enough and that we should start trying to implement solutions to the problems.
I don't think we can meaningfully communicate bilaterally with a Trump voter. They're not listening to us. They're not going to learn anything from us. Even if we act directly on their behalf, they are going to oppose us, if not immediately then certainly the second some loudmouth demagogue starts telling them that we actually want to kill their entire family.
If you really don't understand what's going on in this country, and you think the only way you can learn is to talk to them, that the only valid source of information is primary sources, please, by all means, go ahead. My priority is, and will remain, to act to protect the people they are threatening, regardless of _why_ they are making these threats, and secondarily to protect myself and my values.
You are right to say the planet is burning. You can talk to the fire, but I am going to try and put it out.
But what I don't think we need is more anthropological studies of "The Trump Voter". I don't think we need to do any more research, any more than we need to do "more research" on anthropogenic climate change. You need to do what's right for you, but my feeling is that our to-do list is long enough and that we should start trying to implement solutions to the problems.
I don't think we can meaningfully communicate bilaterally with a Trump voter. They're not listening to us. They're not going to learn anything from us. Even if we act directly on their behalf, they are going to oppose us, if not immediately then certainly the second some loudmouth demagogue starts telling them that we actually want to kill their entire family.
If you really don't understand what's going on in this country, and you think the only way you can learn is to talk to them, that the only valid source of information is primary sources, please, by all means, go ahead. My priority is, and will remain, to act to protect the people they are threatening, regardless of _why_ they are making these threats, and secondarily to protect myself and my values.
You are right to say the planet is burning. You can talk to the fire, but I am going to try and put it out.
Re: "Shaming" Trump voters.
This is not shame, this is accountability. Voting for Trump is an evil act, it is an attack on our most cherished values as humans, and those of us who had the moral strength to _not_ vote for Trump need to hold them responsible for their actions. We need to stand together and work to protect those values, because if we do not, we will lose them. I would rather lose my life.
Re: Outreach.
Personally, I have concluded that Trump voters, and only Trump voters, are an absolute dead loss. Could some of them be "won over" to vote Democratic in the next election (assuming the continued existence of free and fair elections)? Oh, absolutely. I definitely know people who voted for Obama and Trump.
But I have to ask, what's more important to me, numbers or values, and my conclusion is that it's values. We've had a Democratic party that tried to be everything to everyone and wound up being nothing to anybody. We can approach this as a statistical problem and gobble up every word Nate Silver has to grace us with, or we can learn to lead.
Anybody who voted for Trump, _particularly_ if they also voted for Obama, _particularly_ if they identify themselves as "not racist", has demonstrated a critical inability to live up to the courage of their convictions. And as long as that situation exists, it is a waste of time for us to try to appeal to them knowing that they'll turn on us for the next asshole with a bullshit slogan.
Now, if we want to teach them to have values, hell yes, that's worth doing. But the only way we can do that is to have values ourselves.
But I have to ask, what's more important to me, numbers or values, and my conclusion is that it's values. We've had a Democratic party that tried to be everything to everyone and wound up being nothing to anybody. We can approach this as a statistical problem and gobble up every word Nate Silver has to grace us with, or we can learn to lead.
Anybody who voted for Trump, _particularly_ if they also voted for Obama, _particularly_ if they identify themselves as "not racist", has demonstrated a critical inability to live up to the courage of their convictions. And as long as that situation exists, it is a waste of time for us to try to appeal to them knowing that they'll turn on us for the next asshole with a bullshit slogan.
Now, if we want to teach them to have values, hell yes, that's worth doing. But the only way we can do that is to have values ourselves.
Re: Media treatment of protesters.
Guys, this is how it goes, this is how it always goes.
There are a lot of us, and we're not monolithic, and the vast majority of us say over and over again, no violence, no violence, no violence, but everybody's mad, a lot of people are mad, and we don't have control over people's minds, we can't ensure that nobody who hates Trump will ever do anything bad ever again. And when somebody does something like that, we'll say "they don't speak for us", and they'll say "we speak for them", and who do you think the media are going to believe?
We don't have control over the "optics", we don't have formal power structures backing us up, and a lot of people are going to ask us to do the impossible and then blame us when we can't.
There are a lot of us, and we're not monolithic, and the vast majority of us say over and over again, no violence, no violence, no violence, but everybody's mad, a lot of people are mad, and we don't have control over people's minds, we can't ensure that nobody who hates Trump will ever do anything bad ever again. And when somebody does something like that, we'll say "they don't speak for us", and they'll say "we speak for them", and who do you think the media are going to believe?
We don't have control over the "optics", we don't have formal power structures backing us up, and a lot of people are going to ask us to do the impossible and then blame us when we can't.
Priorities.
I'm not really super concerned about economics right now. I've been a capitalist for the last several years on the grounds that I figured capitalism would do the best job of protecting freedom and protecting human rights. I'd gotten, really, to the point where I had concluded that capitalism was a more decisive and powerful force in the West than the nominal governmental structure of democracy, and I didn't really have much of a problem with that.
Well, if I'm going to give capitalism credit for its successes (the so-called "long peace", the near-total eradication of the lowest forms of poverty), I've also got to assign blame for its failures, and I'm counting this as one of them. That said, I don't judge capitalism as harshly as I judge democracy right now. With democracy, it's kind of a "You had ONE JOB!" kind of thing. The job of capitalism is not to ensure human rights or to ensure freedom. It's to create wealth. Freedom and human rights are kind of "nice to haves" under capitalism. They're generally convenient.
What we don't know yet is how capitalism and, more importantly, capitalists are going to react to what happened today. In the recent past, many capitalists have used their power to forcefully advocate for human rights. I think we may perhaps see a "struggle for the soul of capitalism", which seems weird because my basic assumption is that capitalism is soulless and amoral. But the results of that struggle will, I think, to a large part determine the long-term survivability of capitalism.
You know, I wasn't a big fan of the inherent inefficiencies of centrally planned economics, but I tend to be a little more upset about the Gulag and the Holodomor. Nobody wants to starve, but from where I am now the economic system or theory that can convince me it will do the best job of supporting human rights is the one that's going to have my support.
Hope you're paying attention, Mark.
Well, if I'm going to give capitalism credit for its successes (the so-called "long peace", the near-total eradication of the lowest forms of poverty), I've also got to assign blame for its failures, and I'm counting this as one of them. That said, I don't judge capitalism as harshly as I judge democracy right now. With democracy, it's kind of a "You had ONE JOB!" kind of thing. The job of capitalism is not to ensure human rights or to ensure freedom. It's to create wealth. Freedom and human rights are kind of "nice to haves" under capitalism. They're generally convenient.
What we don't know yet is how capitalism and, more importantly, capitalists are going to react to what happened today. In the recent past, many capitalists have used their power to forcefully advocate for human rights. I think we may perhaps see a "struggle for the soul of capitalism", which seems weird because my basic assumption is that capitalism is soulless and amoral. But the results of that struggle will, I think, to a large part determine the long-term survivability of capitalism.
You know, I wasn't a big fan of the inherent inefficiencies of centrally planned economics, but I tend to be a little more upset about the Gulag and the Holodomor. Nobody wants to starve, but from where I am now the economic system or theory that can convince me it will do the best job of supporting human rights is the one that's going to have my support.
Hope you're paying attention, Mark.
The right thing.
I want to be absolutely, unambiguously clear about what I said in my last post, what I wrote about the test and that we passed it. I want to talk about what I mean by "we", I want to talk about who, exactly, has done the right thing here.
If you voted for Hillary Clinton, you did the right thing.
If you voted for Gary Johnson, you did the right thing.
If you voted for Jill Stein, or for Bernie Sanders, or for Vermin Supreme, you did the right thing.
If you stayed home, you did the right thing.
We are not to treat any of these people as more right, as more meritorious, than any other. We are not to browbeat each other, to blame each other for what happened. Donald Trump did not get elected President by people who did not vote for him, and it is both intolerant and disrespectful to claim as such.
The question is not whether any or all of us did "enough". The question is what we will do now, and how we will do it.
[A friend of mine made the suggestion that substituting "You are not to blame" for "You did the right thing" would be more accurate. I concur.]
If you voted for Hillary Clinton, you did the right thing.
If you voted for Gary Johnson, you did the right thing.
If you voted for Jill Stein, or for Bernie Sanders, or for Vermin Supreme, you did the right thing.
If you stayed home, you did the right thing.
We are not to treat any of these people as more right, as more meritorious, than any other. We are not to browbeat each other, to blame each other for what happened. Donald Trump did not get elected President by people who did not vote for him, and it is both intolerant and disrespectful to claim as such.
The question is not whether any or all of us did "enough". The question is what we will do now, and how we will do it.
[A friend of mine made the suggestion that substituting "You are not to blame" for "You did the right thing" would be more accurate. I concur.]
[Trigger Warning]
Checking in with myself to see how I'm doing.
I'm still sleeping fitfully and irregularly. I can't remember my dreams. I wake up shaking a lot of times, not shaking the way I was Tuesday night, just more... quivering, maybe.
I'm trying to get back to eating real food. For most of the past couple days I've been living off cookie bars and beer. Certainly it hasn't helped any but I really don't care or feel any guilt.
The self-medication hasn't been as extreme as I feared it might be. I've been having two bottles of Newcastle Brown a day, in the evenings. From that I get a few hours where I'm relatively calmer, and I get to sleep a bit more easily. I'm doing more damage to myself with the cookie bars.
When I'm not shaking I'm very aware of this deep, hard knot in the pit of my stomach. I spend most of my hours working on unraveling it. It's an obstruction.
If you've been reading along you've seen this work and helped me with it. I'm proud of what I've written over the last couple days, particularly given the state I've been in. This morning I don't feel quite as confident, quite as inflamed. Writing this is harder work, is more effort.
I don't feel like I can talk about where I am without talking about where I've been this year. I haven't said anything about it here. I love you all, I care about you, but the Internet is not a good place, it is not a supportive place, so I have held back.
You're still the people I care most about, the people I've known the longest, the people who are most important to me. I'm going to talk about it here.
The therapeutic models personalize depression and anxiety. They focus on the internal life of the individual. There's good reason for this. I believe one can't effectively address these illnesses without a strong focus on the individual.
At the same time, the way I was feeling was never the result of an individual pathology. I felt the way I did just as much because of what I saw in the world around me as I did because of what was going on in my head. I spent a lot of my treatment fighting against the implication that this was just about me.
Some of the despair I am seeing expressed by other people now is despair I have felt, myself, over the past several months and remained silent about.
For much of this year, I was suicidal. That's a hard thing to say. When someone you love talks about killing themselves, it's a hard and immediate punch in the gut. I have just punched all of you in the gut, you who have spent the last week, the last year, being beaten so hard already, and I am so, so sorry for it.
I need to tell you this to tell you about what's different now. I have not thought about hurting myself, about killing myself, since Monday. Suicide is banished from my life as firmly and decisively as everyone who voted for Trump is. And everything I say, everything I have said over the past days, you need to read in the light of my unshakable and fanatical opposition to all forms of violence.
I feel like I need to tell you about what it was like for me, being suicidal. About why I wanted to kill myself, because without doing so I can't tell you how I have fought those feelings.
I would look around the world, and I would see the people of the world, I would see how they acted, and what they said. The same thing we have all been seeing. And I said, if this is the way the world is going to go, if this is who we are as people, I want no part of it. I did not want to continue to be part of this world. I did not hate myself. I did not think I was worthless. I was in severe pain, intolerable pain. I don't want to start getting into the purple prose to describe it. It was bad, and I wanted it to stop. I saw no hope, and I saw no alternative.
And now things are even worse. I spent so long in fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now it has, and it's a boot, and it's fallen on our faces.
So why do I feel stronger? Why do I feel less despair?
Because we have been tested, and because we have not been found wanting. Many were, our relatives, people we thought were our friends. What we did was DIFFICULT. If it was easy, everybody would have done it. I have spent much of this year as a basket case, as a howling lunatic, and at the moment of truth I was able to do what so many people our society deems "respectable" were not.
We all feel a sense of enormous loss. But what is it, precisely, we have lost? We have lost our friends. We have lost our family. We have lost the country that was our home. We have lost our dignity, we have lost our respect.
We have not lost our principles. We have not lost _ourselves_. We have not won, but we have SURVIVED, and we will, we must, continue to do so.
The world needs us. People need us. They cannot count any longer on the protection of institutions. They cannot count on the protection of the law. What I have said in the past, when I talk about law, is that we are a nation of laws, but we are, more importantly, also a nation of people.
Now we are only a nation of people. We exist only for each other, and nothing else. We are the only protection there is, the only safety for millions upon millions of Americans.
We have been tested, and have not been found wanting. We are needed. We are WORTHY.
I'm still sleeping fitfully and irregularly. I can't remember my dreams. I wake up shaking a lot of times, not shaking the way I was Tuesday night, just more... quivering, maybe.
I'm trying to get back to eating real food. For most of the past couple days I've been living off cookie bars and beer. Certainly it hasn't helped any but I really don't care or feel any guilt.
The self-medication hasn't been as extreme as I feared it might be. I've been having two bottles of Newcastle Brown a day, in the evenings. From that I get a few hours where I'm relatively calmer, and I get to sleep a bit more easily. I'm doing more damage to myself with the cookie bars.
When I'm not shaking I'm very aware of this deep, hard knot in the pit of my stomach. I spend most of my hours working on unraveling it. It's an obstruction.
If you've been reading along you've seen this work and helped me with it. I'm proud of what I've written over the last couple days, particularly given the state I've been in. This morning I don't feel quite as confident, quite as inflamed. Writing this is harder work, is more effort.
I don't feel like I can talk about where I am without talking about where I've been this year. I haven't said anything about it here. I love you all, I care about you, but the Internet is not a good place, it is not a supportive place, so I have held back.
You're still the people I care most about, the people I've known the longest, the people who are most important to me. I'm going to talk about it here.
The therapeutic models personalize depression and anxiety. They focus on the internal life of the individual. There's good reason for this. I believe one can't effectively address these illnesses without a strong focus on the individual.
At the same time, the way I was feeling was never the result of an individual pathology. I felt the way I did just as much because of what I saw in the world around me as I did because of what was going on in my head. I spent a lot of my treatment fighting against the implication that this was just about me.
Some of the despair I am seeing expressed by other people now is despair I have felt, myself, over the past several months and remained silent about.
For much of this year, I was suicidal. That's a hard thing to say. When someone you love talks about killing themselves, it's a hard and immediate punch in the gut. I have just punched all of you in the gut, you who have spent the last week, the last year, being beaten so hard already, and I am so, so sorry for it.
I need to tell you this to tell you about what's different now. I have not thought about hurting myself, about killing myself, since Monday. Suicide is banished from my life as firmly and decisively as everyone who voted for Trump is. And everything I say, everything I have said over the past days, you need to read in the light of my unshakable and fanatical opposition to all forms of violence.
I feel like I need to tell you about what it was like for me, being suicidal. About why I wanted to kill myself, because without doing so I can't tell you how I have fought those feelings.
I would look around the world, and I would see the people of the world, I would see how they acted, and what they said. The same thing we have all been seeing. And I said, if this is the way the world is going to go, if this is who we are as people, I want no part of it. I did not want to continue to be part of this world. I did not hate myself. I did not think I was worthless. I was in severe pain, intolerable pain. I don't want to start getting into the purple prose to describe it. It was bad, and I wanted it to stop. I saw no hope, and I saw no alternative.
And now things are even worse. I spent so long in fear, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now it has, and it's a boot, and it's fallen on our faces.
So why do I feel stronger? Why do I feel less despair?
Because we have been tested, and because we have not been found wanting. Many were, our relatives, people we thought were our friends. What we did was DIFFICULT. If it was easy, everybody would have done it. I have spent much of this year as a basket case, as a howling lunatic, and at the moment of truth I was able to do what so many people our society deems "respectable" were not.
We all feel a sense of enormous loss. But what is it, precisely, we have lost? We have lost our friends. We have lost our family. We have lost the country that was our home. We have lost our dignity, we have lost our respect.
We have not lost our principles. We have not lost _ourselves_. We have not won, but we have SURVIVED, and we will, we must, continue to do so.
The world needs us. People need us. They cannot count any longer on the protection of institutions. They cannot count on the protection of the law. What I have said in the past, when I talk about law, is that we are a nation of laws, but we are, more importantly, also a nation of people.
Now we are only a nation of people. We exist only for each other, and nothing else. We are the only protection there is, the only safety for millions upon millions of Americans.
We have been tested, and have not been found wanting. We are needed. We are WORTHY.
Re: The advisability of reading "doomsday articles".
"Don't panic" is as good advice now as it's ever been, but so many unlikely things have happened this year that I'm not going to discount anything on the grounds that it seems unlikely.
I've seen a lot of my friends talking about nuclear apocalypse. to me that seems ludicrous. At the same time, I'm not in a position to argue that it's not going to happen. A man who has amply demonstrated himself to be profoundly emotionally unstable is going to have the legal ability to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
Now, i'm not going to worry about it, because what the fuck would be the point? If it happens it happens. Our best opportunity to keep it from happening was on Tuesday. There are plenty of other things we can and should do.
For me, the value of reading the dire articles (and writing my share of dire stuff) is because humans are extraordinarily resilient creatures. We are just amazingly, amazingly adaptable to all sorts of changes. We may have a couple sleepless nights, but by and large, we roll with them.
I feel like it would be comparatively easy for me to allow trump's america to become a new normal. To bitch and complain about trump as if he were any other shitty politician. To talk about the ground game instead of about beliefs and values.
I'm more afraid of this than I am of anything Trump might do.
I've seen a lot of my friends talking about nuclear apocalypse. to me that seems ludicrous. At the same time, I'm not in a position to argue that it's not going to happen. A man who has amply demonstrated himself to be profoundly emotionally unstable is going to have the legal ability to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack.
Now, i'm not going to worry about it, because what the fuck would be the point? If it happens it happens. Our best opportunity to keep it from happening was on Tuesday. There are plenty of other things we can and should do.
For me, the value of reading the dire articles (and writing my share of dire stuff) is because humans are extraordinarily resilient creatures. We are just amazingly, amazingly adaptable to all sorts of changes. We may have a couple sleepless nights, but by and large, we roll with them.
I feel like it would be comparatively easy for me to allow trump's america to become a new normal. To bitch and complain about trump as if he were any other shitty politician. To talk about the ground game instead of about beliefs and values.
I'm more afraid of this than I am of anything Trump might do.
Eggshell-walking.
Eggshell-walking is... not a new experience for me. I feel like I'm doing a little bit of it now. We're all tense, a lot of us are enraged, a lot of us are grieving, and we're recovering from the immediate shock but we have suffered, continue to suffer, a lot of long-term hurts. And when we speak out of our grief, out of our hurt... it's something we need to do, but it's challenging, it's often threatening. Sometimes we lose friends we'd rather keep.
I've lost a lot of friends over the course of this year, and right now I'm working hard to make new ones. That's the most important thing to me right now. But it is hard, because there is a lot we don't agree on. We don't have a lot of monolithic views.
In some ways I do credit the feel-good speeches people like Colbert and Obama have been making, even though I don't interpret them in the same way they do. Everything they about how we should treat other people I wholeheartedly believe and endorse when it comes to everybody in this country who did not vote for Trump. We need to be tolerant, forgiving, constantly be open to reconciliation, when it comes to all non-Trump voters. We can't afford that luxury with Trump voters, but let's not confuse the necessary hatred we have to carry for them with normal or appropriate human behaviour.
And having said that it's not always up to us. Whether we call it "eggshell-walking" or whatever, it's exhausting, it's tiring, and sometimes we do our best and we still wind up denounced. That's hard. That's hard for us to forgive, being wronged in that way. But I would argue we need to do it, accept the consequences, just or not, and carry on.
I've lost a lot of friends over the course of this year, and right now I'm working hard to make new ones. That's the most important thing to me right now. But it is hard, because there is a lot we don't agree on. We don't have a lot of monolithic views.
In some ways I do credit the feel-good speeches people like Colbert and Obama have been making, even though I don't interpret them in the same way they do. Everything they about how we should treat other people I wholeheartedly believe and endorse when it comes to everybody in this country who did not vote for Trump. We need to be tolerant, forgiving, constantly be open to reconciliation, when it comes to all non-Trump voters. We can't afford that luxury with Trump voters, but let's not confuse the necessary hatred we have to carry for them with normal or appropriate human behaviour.
And having said that it's not always up to us. Whether we call it "eggshell-walking" or whatever, it's exhausting, it's tiring, and sometimes we do our best and we still wind up denounced. That's hard. That's hard for us to forgive, being wronged in that way. But I would argue we need to do it, accept the consequences, just or not, and carry on.
"Love and forgive and move forward"
"Love and forgive and move forward"? Well, two out of three ain't bad.
The people who want us to forgive, who think that it is imperative for us to forgive... what will they do when we refuse?
The people who want us to forgive, who think that it is imperative for us to forgive... what will they do when we refuse?
Re: Elitism.
I've certainly been called an elitist in the past, and I've accepted the label gladly. I was, after all, a BBS warez d00d when I was 15.
Today, though? Today I do not. We do not ask for government by the "best", the smartest, or the most educated. We ask only conformance to the barest minimum of social standard.
I don't need the President to be the "best". I ask only that the President be a person I can hold a five minute long civil conversation with on some issue of national importance. That is not "elitism".
Today, though? Today I do not. We do not ask for government by the "best", the smartest, or the most educated. We ask only conformance to the barest minimum of social standard.
I don't need the President to be the "best". I ask only that the President be a person I can hold a five minute long civil conversation with on some issue of national importance. That is not "elitism".
Strictly advisory.
OK, next point. Strictly advisory. It's a big ask. Can we lay off the demeaning nicknames? Yeah, I know, folks like their microaggressions, but honestly, it makes us look worse than it makes him look. Beyond that, I can't think of anything you can possibly call him that is more demeaning, insulting, and demoralizing than "President-Elect Donald J. Trump".
I'm just not sure referring to the man as a "giant orange cheeto" is going to further the goal of restoring respect for human dignity as a core value of our society. That's all.
I'm just not sure referring to the man as a "giant orange cheeto" is going to further the goal of restoring respect for human dignity as a core value of our society. That's all.
Re: "negotiation".
Yeah, not down with "negotiate" either. I am not willing to "negotiate" on human rights. My response to "negotiation" on these issues is this: You give us everything we want, and then you will command your supporters to run away. Those words.
Crazy talk.
California is talking about seceding. If you've been on this earth for any length of time, you probably roll your eyes when any North American locality starts saying stuff like this. It's pretty much the definition of crazy talk.
Which is exactly why you can't ignore it. This is CALIFORNIA we're talking about. This is the state that elected a killer robot from the future as governor. California is the state that runs their entire government by plebiscite.
I don't see why there wouldn't be a referendum on this come next election. I also don't see why this referendum wouldn't pass.
A general reminder that a lot of things that seemed crazy last year are now firmly in the realm of the possible.
Which is exactly why you can't ignore it. This is CALIFORNIA we're talking about. This is the state that elected a killer robot from the future as governor. California is the state that runs their entire government by plebiscite.
I don't see why there wouldn't be a referendum on this come next election. I also don't see why this referendum wouldn't pass.
A general reminder that a lot of things that seemed crazy last year are now firmly in the realm of the possible.
"Not really racist".
Re: That Cracked article claiming that we should be tolerant of Trump voters because most of them are not really racist:
I disagree in the strongest possible terms with this point. I believe that in some ways, the Trump voters who are "not racist" are worse than the white supremacists. Somebody who votes for Trump and believes what he says.. they are unquestionably evil, but they have the courage of their convictions.
The Trump voters.. I am not dismissing their anguish, their suffering, the betrayal they have suffered, but none of that excuses what they did. The people who go out and listen to Trump say the things he has said and then say "Oh, he didn't really mean that" - what else will they excuse? Is there anything they will NOT excuse?
No. No, there is nothing they will not excuse. That is what makes them the greatest enemy, because they claim to be "good Americans", they claim to have certain beliefs, and they betray those beliefs at their earliest convenience.
Those of us who have not betrayed our beliefs cannot, in good conscience, forgive those who have, because in doing so, we privilege them over our own beliefs.
I disagree in the strongest possible terms with this point. I believe that in some ways, the Trump voters who are "not racist" are worse than the white supremacists. Somebody who votes for Trump and believes what he says.. they are unquestionably evil, but they have the courage of their convictions.
The Trump voters.. I am not dismissing their anguish, their suffering, the betrayal they have suffered, but none of that excuses what they did. The people who go out and listen to Trump say the things he has said and then say "Oh, he didn't really mean that" - what else will they excuse? Is there anything they will NOT excuse?
No. No, there is nothing they will not excuse. That is what makes them the greatest enemy, because they claim to be "good Americans", they claim to have certain beliefs, and they betray those beliefs at their earliest convenience.
Those of us who have not betrayed our beliefs cannot, in good conscience, forgive those who have, because in doing so, we privilege them over our own beliefs.
The Wisdom of Solomon.
Two women brought a case before Solomon the Wise. They had with them a baby, and each woman claimed that the baby was hers.
Solomon the Wise looked at the women, and said that the only fair thing to do was to cut the baby in two and give each woman half.
"OK," said one of the women.
"Sounds good to me," said the other.
"Shit," said Solomon, whose reputation for wisdom may perhaps have been overstated.
Solomon the Wise looked at the women, and said that the only fair thing to do was to cut the baby in two and give each woman half.
"OK," said one of the women.
"Sounds good to me," said the other.
"Shit," said Solomon, whose reputation for wisdom may perhaps have been overstated.
Aleatoric Fury.
I am still operating on very little sleep, but I'm now at the point where I feel like I can start to address my rage, our rage. Unfortunately I actually started doing so last night. (Sorry, Mom.)
Starting from myself is the only thing I have a right to do. Who am I mad at? What does it mean?
My answer is anybody who voted for Trump. They are the ones who bear full responsibility for what has happened. This is not to say that there are not other contributing factors, other people I have varying levels of disappointment in, but their actions do nothing to lessen the responsibility of every single voter who concluded that Trump would be an appropriate President of the United States.
I will be slightly petty here and take out my frustrations on allies I disagree with, taking care to emphasize that I mean no malice here and that I believe it is far too early for anybody to propose One True Way to go forward dealing with this.
I see some people suggesting that this aberration, horrible as it is, is not a fundamental one. That many of the people who voted for Trump did so for many reasons, are malleable, and can be persuaded of their folly. I agree, to an extent, with their assessment of Trump voters, but I disagree with the "pendulum" allegory so popular in American politics. We do not speak of a pendulum of state, but of a ship of state.
In this light, the statements of Obama and Clinton are right and appropriate. It is the responsibility of the captain to go down with the ship. Mind you, it is not so responsible for them to imply that the ship is not sinking, and I will not be adhering to their chastisements for me to stay on board.
I've gotten away from what I said I was going to talk about. The rage. It's easy for a lot of people to see this anger, this rage, as imitative of our adversaries. I frequently am asked the question, "What's the difference between you and them?"
And this, in all honesty, is somewhat of an insulting question. It's redolent of the Dawkinite interrogator who will, in all sincerity, ask what the difference is between Thomas Aquinas and Helena Blavatsky, and because they're not very subtle, go on to ask, well, aren't they both just superstitious fools making claims they have no evidence for?
More infuriating is that if you ask someone on each side what the difference is, we will have the same answer: We're right. Which the interlocutor will typically respond to with an arrogant smirk, because the question was less of an honest attempt at discourse than a crude rhetorical trap.
There are two things wrong with this trap. The first, and lesser objection, is that many of our beliefs are based in objective fact. Somebody who is concerned about anthropogenic climate change is concerned because of the tremendous weight of scientific evidence warning of the danger. Someone who is _not_ concerned about climate change bases their belief on a web of provable lies and flat-out delusions. There is simply no possible equivalence here.
The second, and more serious objection is that it is foolhardy and dangerous to take the position that all beliefs which are not empirically verifiable are morally equivalent. I can no more prove my belief in universal human rights than an alt-righter can prove their assertion in the moral superiority of the white race. Despite this, these beliefs are not morally equivalent. I am not a philosopher. I do not believe that I personally NEED to defend my belief in universal human rights to you, or to anybody, on a philosophical basis, or that you, that anybody, has standing to judge me or to dismiss my belief on the basis of my refusal to do so.
There is a lot of talk... the blame stuff. We can say, you know, the people responsible are the people who voted for Trump, but we want to know who these people are. We do not want to go to war with a faceless abstraction.
However, beyond the fact that the vast majority of them are white, we can make no generalizations. We have a secret ballot. Even if we were so inclined (and frankly some of us are), we are not in any position to be running an inquisition. If you voted for Trump, and after having done so you choose to hide your face in shame, if you keep your action a secret, you are safe from us.
In fact if you are a Trump voter I recommend you pursue precisely this course of action. Because we will never, ever forgive you for what you have done.
And when I talk about the need to rebuild, the need to re-create that which we have lost- if you are a Trump voter, you have no right to participate in this process. Even though I hate you, even though I am angry at you and will never forgive you, I do not say this out of anger or hatred. You had ample opportunity to observe what kind of person Trump was and to properly evaluate his fitness for the Presidency. Hence, as a voter for Trump, you have provided incontrovertible evidence that you do not have the sound moral judgment or reasoning necessary to participate in the creation of a just society. This is a purely pragmatic judgment based on your actions.
Beyond that, there is the hatred. The enemy have assumed for years that we hate them, and have behaved accordingly. They have, through persistence, managed to make their beliefs into reality. I have seen many people over the past day expressing, in so many words, the belief that the only good Trump voter is a dead Trump voter, expressing the hearty desire to bury them (in the sense that Khrushchev originally meant).
I disagree with those people that believe Trump voters should be most afraid of Trump. I think that Trump voters should be more afraid of us. Not because we are violent. Our rage is not mindless destruction. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I say this as a fundamental tenet, as a defining characteristic of Us: No matter what your beliefs, if you firebomb a Republican headquarters you are just as much Them as if you burn a church. We are not going to raise an army. We are not going to fight you in the streets.
But- but- barring that, we will do absolutely everything, everything we can, to stop you, to defeat you. We will take everything from you, every power from your life, every ability you might ever have to harm another human being. You thought you had nothing to lose. You were wrong.
Actually just insert a Doctor Who speech here. Enraged David Tennant. That's basically us. That's who you're up against. None of us are nearly as clever as Doctor Who, but we are every bit as angry, and there are a hell of a lot more of us. And it's not like we're facing off against the Master or anything, someone who would wave her hand and vaporize all of us. You elected a fucking Sontaran president.
Anyway you'll probably get really sick of the righteous speeches after a while. We're not going to stop you by bloviating you to death. I'd be all Bond Villain here and tell you exactly what we're going to do, what our master plan is, but we don't have one. Again, David Tennant. We honestly have no idea what we're going to do, what exactly we're capable of, and it's going to be just as much a learning experience for us as it will be for you. Face our aleatoric fury.
Starting from myself is the only thing I have a right to do. Who am I mad at? What does it mean?
My answer is anybody who voted for Trump. They are the ones who bear full responsibility for what has happened. This is not to say that there are not other contributing factors, other people I have varying levels of disappointment in, but their actions do nothing to lessen the responsibility of every single voter who concluded that Trump would be an appropriate President of the United States.
I will be slightly petty here and take out my frustrations on allies I disagree with, taking care to emphasize that I mean no malice here and that I believe it is far too early for anybody to propose One True Way to go forward dealing with this.
I see some people suggesting that this aberration, horrible as it is, is not a fundamental one. That many of the people who voted for Trump did so for many reasons, are malleable, and can be persuaded of their folly. I agree, to an extent, with their assessment of Trump voters, but I disagree with the "pendulum" allegory so popular in American politics. We do not speak of a pendulum of state, but of a ship of state.
In this light, the statements of Obama and Clinton are right and appropriate. It is the responsibility of the captain to go down with the ship. Mind you, it is not so responsible for them to imply that the ship is not sinking, and I will not be adhering to their chastisements for me to stay on board.
I've gotten away from what I said I was going to talk about. The rage. It's easy for a lot of people to see this anger, this rage, as imitative of our adversaries. I frequently am asked the question, "What's the difference between you and them?"
And this, in all honesty, is somewhat of an insulting question. It's redolent of the Dawkinite interrogator who will, in all sincerity, ask what the difference is between Thomas Aquinas and Helena Blavatsky, and because they're not very subtle, go on to ask, well, aren't they both just superstitious fools making claims they have no evidence for?
More infuriating is that if you ask someone on each side what the difference is, we will have the same answer: We're right. Which the interlocutor will typically respond to with an arrogant smirk, because the question was less of an honest attempt at discourse than a crude rhetorical trap.
There are two things wrong with this trap. The first, and lesser objection, is that many of our beliefs are based in objective fact. Somebody who is concerned about anthropogenic climate change is concerned because of the tremendous weight of scientific evidence warning of the danger. Someone who is _not_ concerned about climate change bases their belief on a web of provable lies and flat-out delusions. There is simply no possible equivalence here.
The second, and more serious objection is that it is foolhardy and dangerous to take the position that all beliefs which are not empirically verifiable are morally equivalent. I can no more prove my belief in universal human rights than an alt-righter can prove their assertion in the moral superiority of the white race. Despite this, these beliefs are not morally equivalent. I am not a philosopher. I do not believe that I personally NEED to defend my belief in universal human rights to you, or to anybody, on a philosophical basis, or that you, that anybody, has standing to judge me or to dismiss my belief on the basis of my refusal to do so.
There is a lot of talk... the blame stuff. We can say, you know, the people responsible are the people who voted for Trump, but we want to know who these people are. We do not want to go to war with a faceless abstraction.
However, beyond the fact that the vast majority of them are white, we can make no generalizations. We have a secret ballot. Even if we were so inclined (and frankly some of us are), we are not in any position to be running an inquisition. If you voted for Trump, and after having done so you choose to hide your face in shame, if you keep your action a secret, you are safe from us.
In fact if you are a Trump voter I recommend you pursue precisely this course of action. Because we will never, ever forgive you for what you have done.
And when I talk about the need to rebuild, the need to re-create that which we have lost- if you are a Trump voter, you have no right to participate in this process. Even though I hate you, even though I am angry at you and will never forgive you, I do not say this out of anger or hatred. You had ample opportunity to observe what kind of person Trump was and to properly evaluate his fitness for the Presidency. Hence, as a voter for Trump, you have provided incontrovertible evidence that you do not have the sound moral judgment or reasoning necessary to participate in the creation of a just society. This is a purely pragmatic judgment based on your actions.
Beyond that, there is the hatred. The enemy have assumed for years that we hate them, and have behaved accordingly. They have, through persistence, managed to make their beliefs into reality. I have seen many people over the past day expressing, in so many words, the belief that the only good Trump voter is a dead Trump voter, expressing the hearty desire to bury them (in the sense that Khrushchev originally meant).
I disagree with those people that believe Trump voters should be most afraid of Trump. I think that Trump voters should be more afraid of us. Not because we are violent. Our rage is not mindless destruction. I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I say this as a fundamental tenet, as a defining characteristic of Us: No matter what your beliefs, if you firebomb a Republican headquarters you are just as much Them as if you burn a church. We are not going to raise an army. We are not going to fight you in the streets.
But- but- barring that, we will do absolutely everything, everything we can, to stop you, to defeat you. We will take everything from you, every power from your life, every ability you might ever have to harm another human being. You thought you had nothing to lose. You were wrong.
Actually just insert a Doctor Who speech here. Enraged David Tennant. That's basically us. That's who you're up against. None of us are nearly as clever as Doctor Who, but we are every bit as angry, and there are a hell of a lot more of us. And it's not like we're facing off against the Master or anything, someone who would wave her hand and vaporize all of us. You elected a fucking Sontaran president.
Anyway you'll probably get really sick of the righteous speeches after a while. We're not going to stop you by bloviating you to death. I'd be all Bond Villain here and tell you exactly what we're going to do, what our master plan is, but we don't have one. Again, David Tennant. We honestly have no idea what we're going to do, what exactly we're capable of, and it's going to be just as much a learning experience for us as it will be for you. Face our aleatoric fury.
External libraries.
A friend asked me to download his calculator program. I told him there was already a calculator program that came with Windows, and he said he didn't care, his was better. So I downloaded it, and I clicked "2+2". And it came back "22".
I told him his program had a problem with addition. He checked the code and he got back to me and said "Oh, no, the library I linked in for mathematical operations handles addition that way. It's a completely legitimate and valid result."
I tried to impress upon him that 2+2 did not, in fact, equal 22, that it equalled 4, but he was not having it. "Who am I to second-guess the person who made those libraries? I mean, sure, I could easily fix the code for the addition function, but who knows what else it might break?"
He also pointed out that if you typed in "0+1" it would return "1", which _is_ in fact what "0+1" is, so obviously there was nothing at all wrong with his program.
Later I found out his program gave me a virus and I had to reformat my hard drive.
I told him his program had a problem with addition. He checked the code and he got back to me and said "Oh, no, the library I linked in for mathematical operations handles addition that way. It's a completely legitimate and valid result."
I tried to impress upon him that 2+2 did not, in fact, equal 22, that it equalled 4, but he was not having it. "Who am I to second-guess the person who made those libraries? I mean, sure, I could easily fix the code for the addition function, but who knows what else it might break?"
He also pointed out that if you typed in "0+1" it would return "1", which _is_ in fact what "0+1" is, so obviously there was nothing at all wrong with his program.
Later I found out his program gave me a virus and I had to reformat my hard drive.
The preferred method of fixing a broken system.
The preferred method of fixing a broken system is not to change the input until you get a result you feel comfortable with.
BBC Enterprises, 1978.
OK, it's 1978. We're Sue Malden. Let's take a look in the vaults and see what's missing. All the things that oh you know I was sure we had it somewhere but it turns out we lost it some time back without really noticing.
Direct democracy is a dead loss. Globally, a complete dead loss. For it to function effectively it requires both a populace knowledgable about the principles underlying democratic governance and a commitment to comity which provably does not exist right now. Democracy is now a product, shorn of all meaning and significance.
Ironically enough, this also kind of screws the pooch on capitalism. The entire historical basis of capitalism's accomplishments has been free trade. Free trade is dead. The Eurozone is dead. London, the banking capital of the world, is dead. Future employment will mainly consist of poor people scamming other poor people for the benefit of supremely amoral rich people- not much of an extrapolation, we're already most of the way there. We are now significantly less likely to be replaced by robots in the immediate future.
Speaking of which, futurism. I'm kind of really glad to get rid of this, to be honest, because technofuturists annoyed the fuck out of me. The hell with futurism, we don't even have a present. We can stop talking about "post-scarcity", because we're heading for massively increased amounts of resource scarcity in the foreseeable future. The only "singularity" we're heading for is nuclear apocalypse.
Having said that, even with everything thrown out the window... Nuclear apocalypse is not an inevitability, I'll say that, even given that a self-evidently mentally unstable megalomaniac has his hand on the nuclear button of what was, until recently, the world's biggest superpower. I'm not saying that we shouldn't _worry_ about mass nuclear death, but there's some chance it might not happen.
Contrast: environmental apocalypse. Oh, yes. Science is on the chopping block, particularly climate science. Neo-lysenkoism is the official order of the day. The plus side, I guess, is that the impending climate catastrophe won't actually do much to destroy the existing political, social, and economic order, because we've actually managed to beat Mother Nature to the punch. Well, go humanity.
Honesty in government. I can't see this sticking around much longer. When you have a President who campaigned for and was legitimately elected President on the basis of complete and utter lies, saying that government ought not to be corrupt is about as plausible as saying we all ought to have hoverboards.
Let's see. The media is completely dead. All the magazines and newspapers should probably just close up shop right now. If you're a journalist, you should find another line of work. Let's call a code on free speech as well. A guy whose campaign was largely predicated on threats of violence against the media is not exactly going to be a staunch protector of the First Amendment. On top of that, when you have two sides with a mutual refusal to acknowledge each other's legitimacy, you know, we stop thinking of this as a right worth fighting to protect.
We all thought there would be violence. No matter what side you were on, violence seemed inevitable. Well, we were wrong on that. Just like the Communists, when the time came, we gladly relinquished our ideals without putting up a fight. The only violence we're going to have is legitimized political violence. Which, let's be honest, we already have. Police can kill black men based on the color of their skin with impunity. It's not going to get worse, because the white majority politely overlooks what's already there. The justice system is facing the same fate as the other pillars of democracy.
Corollary is that private firearm ownership will almost certainly remain legal in the US. Because, again, there's not going to be a mass organized, armed resistance movement. It's OK to have a situation where somebody uses legally purchased firearms to commit a terrorist mass murder and nobody says boo about limiting people's right to bear arms. These things happen, you know. So sad. You would have thought that ban on Muslims would have stopped this sort of thing.
The impending ban on abortion will likely prove about as effective on the War on Drugs. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd be pretty upset about Roe v. Wade being overturned, but given that the rule of law has basically been rendered meaningless I can't see myself getting too upset over it.
One World Government is certainly out the window. Yes, yes, I can hear some of you applauding from here, though I confess I really have no idea why. Mass balkanization, I think that's going to be the order of the day. The only government left that could plausibly rule the world is China, and they don't seem to be terribly interested in ruling us barbarians. The idea of a World War III, of course we're all afraid of it, but the notion that anybody would sign a Triple Entente, and even if they did, that nation-states would _comply_ with their treaty obligations, is a little hard to credit at this remove.
We will see a lot more Syrias, I think. All over the world, localized genocides will be on the increase. The 20th century world order was not really that effective at preventing or stopping these genocides in the first place, so I'm not sure I'd count that as a "loss". We'll just stop talking about our moral obligations in Rwanda or wherever.
Thinking about it... this isn't so much a triumph of straight up fascism, or totalitarianism. This is a triumph of Third World political structures. The United States is now a banana republic. Probably Britain, too. The great powers of the capitalist age... I'd get sentimental if I didn't have to live through it.
What's the worst thing for me about this, the loss of the concept of universal human rights, the loss of the notion of humanity as a species rather than a series of ethnic tribes, barely even registers on this. It's no wonder that we never had class warfare like Marx predicted. We never got beyond being tribes. We never actually developed what Marx thought was a "class consciousness".
Perhaps because the notion that we ever believed in human rights was, looking back, the greatest illusion, the unsustainable lie. A figment of our collective imagination. How do you make universal human rights real? Do you kill for it? No? Oh, I see, billboards and television ads. Maybe an Internet browser plugin, maybe a smartphone app. Did we honestly believe that? That billboards and television ads could elevate us, that we could "fix" human nature? This elaborate Bismarckian charade of subliminal carrots and sticks, it was to transform us into cherubim? It was going to make us _sane_?
Direct democracy is a dead loss. Globally, a complete dead loss. For it to function effectively it requires both a populace knowledgable about the principles underlying democratic governance and a commitment to comity which provably does not exist right now. Democracy is now a product, shorn of all meaning and significance.
Ironically enough, this also kind of screws the pooch on capitalism. The entire historical basis of capitalism's accomplishments has been free trade. Free trade is dead. The Eurozone is dead. London, the banking capital of the world, is dead. Future employment will mainly consist of poor people scamming other poor people for the benefit of supremely amoral rich people- not much of an extrapolation, we're already most of the way there. We are now significantly less likely to be replaced by robots in the immediate future.
Speaking of which, futurism. I'm kind of really glad to get rid of this, to be honest, because technofuturists annoyed the fuck out of me. The hell with futurism, we don't even have a present. We can stop talking about "post-scarcity", because we're heading for massively increased amounts of resource scarcity in the foreseeable future. The only "singularity" we're heading for is nuclear apocalypse.
Having said that, even with everything thrown out the window... Nuclear apocalypse is not an inevitability, I'll say that, even given that a self-evidently mentally unstable megalomaniac has his hand on the nuclear button of what was, until recently, the world's biggest superpower. I'm not saying that we shouldn't _worry_ about mass nuclear death, but there's some chance it might not happen.
Contrast: environmental apocalypse. Oh, yes. Science is on the chopping block, particularly climate science. Neo-lysenkoism is the official order of the day. The plus side, I guess, is that the impending climate catastrophe won't actually do much to destroy the existing political, social, and economic order, because we've actually managed to beat Mother Nature to the punch. Well, go humanity.
Honesty in government. I can't see this sticking around much longer. When you have a President who campaigned for and was legitimately elected President on the basis of complete and utter lies, saying that government ought not to be corrupt is about as plausible as saying we all ought to have hoverboards.
Let's see. The media is completely dead. All the magazines and newspapers should probably just close up shop right now. If you're a journalist, you should find another line of work. Let's call a code on free speech as well. A guy whose campaign was largely predicated on threats of violence against the media is not exactly going to be a staunch protector of the First Amendment. On top of that, when you have two sides with a mutual refusal to acknowledge each other's legitimacy, you know, we stop thinking of this as a right worth fighting to protect.
We all thought there would be violence. No matter what side you were on, violence seemed inevitable. Well, we were wrong on that. Just like the Communists, when the time came, we gladly relinquished our ideals without putting up a fight. The only violence we're going to have is legitimized political violence. Which, let's be honest, we already have. Police can kill black men based on the color of their skin with impunity. It's not going to get worse, because the white majority politely overlooks what's already there. The justice system is facing the same fate as the other pillars of democracy.
Corollary is that private firearm ownership will almost certainly remain legal in the US. Because, again, there's not going to be a mass organized, armed resistance movement. It's OK to have a situation where somebody uses legally purchased firearms to commit a terrorist mass murder and nobody says boo about limiting people's right to bear arms. These things happen, you know. So sad. You would have thought that ban on Muslims would have stopped this sort of thing.
The impending ban on abortion will likely prove about as effective on the War on Drugs. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd be pretty upset about Roe v. Wade being overturned, but given that the rule of law has basically been rendered meaningless I can't see myself getting too upset over it.
One World Government is certainly out the window. Yes, yes, I can hear some of you applauding from here, though I confess I really have no idea why. Mass balkanization, I think that's going to be the order of the day. The only government left that could plausibly rule the world is China, and they don't seem to be terribly interested in ruling us barbarians. The idea of a World War III, of course we're all afraid of it, but the notion that anybody would sign a Triple Entente, and even if they did, that nation-states would _comply_ with their treaty obligations, is a little hard to credit at this remove.
We will see a lot more Syrias, I think. All over the world, localized genocides will be on the increase. The 20th century world order was not really that effective at preventing or stopping these genocides in the first place, so I'm not sure I'd count that as a "loss". We'll just stop talking about our moral obligations in Rwanda or wherever.
Thinking about it... this isn't so much a triumph of straight up fascism, or totalitarianism. This is a triumph of Third World political structures. The United States is now a banana republic. Probably Britain, too. The great powers of the capitalist age... I'd get sentimental if I didn't have to live through it.
What's the worst thing for me about this, the loss of the concept of universal human rights, the loss of the notion of humanity as a species rather than a series of ethnic tribes, barely even registers on this. It's no wonder that we never had class warfare like Marx predicted. We never got beyond being tribes. We never actually developed what Marx thought was a "class consciousness".
Perhaps because the notion that we ever believed in human rights was, looking back, the greatest illusion, the unsustainable lie. A figment of our collective imagination. How do you make universal human rights real? Do you kill for it? No? Oh, I see, billboards and television ads. Maybe an Internet browser plugin, maybe a smartphone app. Did we honestly believe that? That billboards and television ads could elevate us, that we could "fix" human nature? This elaborate Bismarckian charade of subliminal carrots and sticks, it was to transform us into cherubim? It was going to make us _sane_?
A world of dreamers.
That speech by Dr. King. It's a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason. Dr. King was a visionary. He was inspirational. Maybe I'm a little bit jealous.
Most of my life, when I've talked to other people about my ideas, when I've shared with people my dreams, they nod politely as if I was showing them my buboes, and then suggest I seek mental help. I listen to them. I'm not some sort of sane man in an insane society. I don't believe I have all the answers.
And as a result, dreamers scare me a little bit. Because my dreams are mad. But I don't think that people reject them because the dreams are mad. Some of them aren't even mad, not really. I think they reject them because _I'm_ mad, and because, even worse, I know it.
I sometimes wish that this world wasn't a world of dreamers. I sometimes wish that people listened to the functionaries instead of the visionaries. I wish you could change the world not by telling people what you wanted, but by telling people how we could get there.
I wish we were not haunted by nightmares as we are.
Most of my life, when I've talked to other people about my ideas, when I've shared with people my dreams, they nod politely as if I was showing them my buboes, and then suggest I seek mental help. I listen to them. I'm not some sort of sane man in an insane society. I don't believe I have all the answers.
And as a result, dreamers scare me a little bit. Because my dreams are mad. But I don't think that people reject them because the dreams are mad. Some of them aren't even mad, not really. I think they reject them because _I'm_ mad, and because, even worse, I know it.
I sometimes wish that this world wasn't a world of dreamers. I sometimes wish that people listened to the functionaries instead of the visionaries. I wish you could change the world not by telling people what you wanted, but by telling people how we could get there.
I wish we were not haunted by nightmares as we are.
"Self-defense".
I guess it's not good for me to be using the word "self-defense" in describing certain actions I take. I think it's probably true, in a technical sense. I am afraid, most pressingly, of blinding myself to the danger. Of quiet acceptance. I am a white man. I belong, by some vague trick of ancestry, to the tribal mob one can see screaming for people's heads with great regularity on television. I am afraid of blinding myself because most white men have done exactly this. They have convinced themselves somehow that a violent demagogue with no self-control and no understanding of or respect for the political institutions of our country would be the most fit leader of what was once quaintly called the "free world".
That could be me. Ethnic majorities everywhere have contracted, why and how we still can't for certain say, a sickness, a sickness of the spirit. It is somewhat like what it must have been living in the world in the time of the plague. People you have known for all your life, people you thought were perfectly healthy, are suddenly violently ill. We can't even begin to understand why. Were they possessed by demons? Were we cursed by God for our wickedness? We mock those poor sufferers for their superstition, for their ignorance, but when you're living through it, it seems as good a guess as any.
That could be me. Ethnic majorities everywhere have contracted, why and how we still can't for certain say, a sickness, a sickness of the spirit. It is somewhat like what it must have been living in the world in the time of the plague. People you have known for all your life, people you thought were perfectly healthy, are suddenly violently ill. We can't even begin to understand why. Were they possessed by demons? Were we cursed by God for our wickedness? We mock those poor sufferers for their superstition, for their ignorance, but when you're living through it, it seems as good a guess as any.
Silver linings dept., continued.
I've made two new friends in the last 24 hours. I'm happy about that. The last few months have been this slow winnowing process, of throwing out people I couldn't have in my life anymore, and it's good to not be as isolated. If anybody has any more friend recommendations I'm happy to hear them. It's hard times. We're going to need each other.
That America is dead.
I think now, in this time, it seems very scary, like anything is possible. It seems like 9/11 writ large. We have a lot of the same fears. When they attacked New York and Washington, we didn't know what would be next, if there would be a next.
I don't think the damage is going to be to cities or to buildings. This was a remarkably non-violent election, given the circumstances. I was on pins and needles for months wondering if this would be the day things would explode.
It never happened. About the only casualties are our beliefs, our values, our principles as a country.
Speaking for myself, the cities... yes, the cities are better, but here I feel besieged, surrounded by an army of angry white people who don't believe in human rights, who don't believe in the rule of law. When you have that situation, I don't think that's a "swing state". That phrase, to me, implies some common ground, some notion of mutual benefit, and that America is dead.
We're not ever going to change these people's minds. We're not ever going to be able to persuade them how foolish and destructive they're being.
We need to make a society for ourselves. A society people will look up to, will want to be part of. Because we can't make a society for everybody. We've failed to do that.
So I'm heading for where there are more of "us" than there are of "them".
I don't think the damage is going to be to cities or to buildings. This was a remarkably non-violent election, given the circumstances. I was on pins and needles for months wondering if this would be the day things would explode.
It never happened. About the only casualties are our beliefs, our values, our principles as a country.
Speaking for myself, the cities... yes, the cities are better, but here I feel besieged, surrounded by an army of angry white people who don't believe in human rights, who don't believe in the rule of law. When you have that situation, I don't think that's a "swing state". That phrase, to me, implies some common ground, some notion of mutual benefit, and that America is dead.
We're not ever going to change these people's minds. We're not ever going to be able to persuade them how foolish and destructive they're being.
We need to make a society for ourselves. A society people will look up to, will want to be part of. Because we can't make a society for everybody. We've failed to do that.
So I'm heading for where there are more of "us" than there are of "them".
Re: Blame.
Recriminations. Scapegoating. People want to know who to blame for this. People want to know how this could happen.
I don't think knowing would help. It's not my focus right now. There are probably going to be some very interesting books written about this period of history later. The historians will have lots of primary sources to work from. They're going to know things we don't know now, we can't understand now, they're going to be able to make sense of it and learn from this disaster.
What bothers me is that they're all based on certain assumptions, you know, about the way the world is and the way the world should be, and we're at a point right now where really, all bets are completely off. All of our past assumptions have been called into question. We are going to have to rebuild them.
And we can't even truly assess the extent of the damage yet. I'm more or less on the side of "total". You know, we don't even know, really know, what happened yet, let alone why it happened. It's fairly evidently awful, and I'm willing today to stop there. I don't want to get into any more detail than that.
Except on the personal level. This is going to be devastating to millions of different people in millions of different, intensely personal ways. My brother was working on trying to open his own bar. That's pretty much out the window now. Not going to work out. Reminds me of my great grandfather. He worked his way up at a grocery store and wound up buying the store. In 1929.
I've talked to my great-aunt about it, because she lived through it. Everybody reacted to the depression in different ways. Some people gobbled up all the real estate they could and threw people out of their homes. My great-grandfather, he gave away the food he had in his store. Nothing else to do. Nobody had money to afford it. Was he going to just let the food go bad and spoil? That would be stupid.
That's my heritage. That's where I come from.
Whether or not it's true, my emotional reaction is as if everything is gone, the world I grew up knowing, that world exists only in memory. But memory, and the stories we tell, they are really powerful things. When we choose to rebuild, where do we start?
And I start with human rights. I may have to change the words I use. The idea of human beings having "fundamental worth and dignity" sounds like a cruel joke today, a twisted and repellent lie. How long can we mouth words we don't believe?
So, we are animals. Perhaps less than animals, because animals show no malice. And maybe this is something we can aspire to.
[Note: It was subsequently pointed out to me by my more scientifically informed friends that the more intelligent animals are perfectly capable of malice. Particularly bottle-nose dolphins.]
I don't think knowing would help. It's not my focus right now. There are probably going to be some very interesting books written about this period of history later. The historians will have lots of primary sources to work from. They're going to know things we don't know now, we can't understand now, they're going to be able to make sense of it and learn from this disaster.
What bothers me is that they're all based on certain assumptions, you know, about the way the world is and the way the world should be, and we're at a point right now where really, all bets are completely off. All of our past assumptions have been called into question. We are going to have to rebuild them.
And we can't even truly assess the extent of the damage yet. I'm more or less on the side of "total". You know, we don't even know, really know, what happened yet, let alone why it happened. It's fairly evidently awful, and I'm willing today to stop there. I don't want to get into any more detail than that.
Except on the personal level. This is going to be devastating to millions of different people in millions of different, intensely personal ways. My brother was working on trying to open his own bar. That's pretty much out the window now. Not going to work out. Reminds me of my great grandfather. He worked his way up at a grocery store and wound up buying the store. In 1929.
I've talked to my great-aunt about it, because she lived through it. Everybody reacted to the depression in different ways. Some people gobbled up all the real estate they could and threw people out of their homes. My great-grandfather, he gave away the food he had in his store. Nothing else to do. Nobody had money to afford it. Was he going to just let the food go bad and spoil? That would be stupid.
That's my heritage. That's where I come from.
Whether or not it's true, my emotional reaction is as if everything is gone, the world I grew up knowing, that world exists only in memory. But memory, and the stories we tell, they are really powerful things. When we choose to rebuild, where do we start?
And I start with human rights. I may have to change the words I use. The idea of human beings having "fundamental worth and dignity" sounds like a cruel joke today, a twisted and repellent lie. How long can we mouth words we don't believe?
So, we are animals. Perhaps less than animals, because animals show no malice. And maybe this is something we can aspire to.
[Note: It was subsequently pointed out to me by my more scientifically informed friends that the more intelligent animals are perfectly capable of malice. Particularly bottle-nose dolphins.]
Grief is very private.
I see a lot of people taking off. Grief is very private for a lot of folks. And Facebook, you know, is the problem, or at least a big, big piece of it, it's right, it's natural to try and get away. I'm a private person, but I guess I do things differently. I need to give voice to what I'm feeling, I need to work it out on a screen, and for some reason I need to share it, even if only two or three people see it. So I'm grateful for anybody who does read the stuff I'm going to be posting. I hope it helps you, and I'm sorry if it doesn't.
Focusing on emotions. Paradoxically I feel like, as a chronically mentally ill person, I'm better equipped than some to deal with everything that's going on right now. I have a pretty refined palate for anguish. Everything I'm feeling, I've felt before. All the fear I have, I've had before.
But it's so much more intense. It's so overwhelming. Yeah I've felt all of these things before but I've never really known how to cope with them. How to feel all this and still function, and still put one foot in front of the other.
I try to cope by making concrete plans. A lot of my plans are grandiose and impractical and even when they aren't I just have a hard time following through on them. And even if they were... it's different for everybody, this overwhelming pain is in some sense _not_ a shared pain because we all experience it differently.
I'm experiencing it a couple different ways myself. Sometimes I want to run and hide, but there's nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Sometimes I want to stand and fight, and that feels better, but I don't know who to fight, I don't know how, I don't know that fighting would be anything different from this torrent of destructive rage we've been living through.
I'm really afraid of becoming the problem. We don't choose our feelings, we don't choose what happens to us, but we choose, to some extent, how to react to them. So no talking points, no reasoned explanations, no eloquent righteous fury.
I feel awful, possibly more awful than I've ever felt in my life, and I don't know what to do about it. (Possibly not more awful than I've ever felt. We have a way of burying the things we don't want to remember.)
You know, for months, I go to therapy, and I say the same thing over and over again. I say that I want the hurting to stop. And it doesn't. There's no reason to it. There's no purpose to it. I've spent long sleepless nights cursing God, cursing this earth and all the people on it. I know according to Job or whatever you're not supposed to do that, it's supposed to be bad, but I feel like it's been time well spent.
I wonder if maybe I just can't be an alcoholic. I've always worried about it, because my family history, because I do really like drinking. I just don't know if I can drink like alcoholics do, to numb the pain. I'm thinking about getting drunk, and I realize, you know, I don't want to. I'd rather write. Isn't that fucked up? Who ever heard of a writer who'd rather write than drink?
I come closest to crying when I laugh. I don't know why that is.
Anger and sadness, they mix together very strongly in me. When I'm sad it comes out as anger, a lot of times. But I have... I have kind of a fatalistic view on anger. My therapist pushes me on this. My therapist suggests without directly saying so that I don't fight hard enough for myself. And I explain over and over again what I've learned, what I think I've learned, that anger just feeds on itself, that what I want is peace and anger has never, ever brought me that.
And I just don't feel it. Oh, sure, I have hatred in my heart, lots of it, but it's a cold, numb hatred. A detached hatred. All these people... I feel pity for them. It's not like they win and we lose. It's they lose and we lose too. It's absurd, it's farcical, it makes me want to write all kinds of pseudo-philosophical gibberish which I won't because it doesn't matter.
What I want now is not peace, is not for things to be OK, because the quickest way to get there right now is for me to learn to lie to myself better. For me to say "Oh, that victory speech was so nice, maybe he won't be so bad after all," to try to forget the trauma like we all want to. Hell, I don't even necessarily want to be able to sleep at night. I've had plenty of great, restful sleep in my life.
What I want is simply to be able to _function_, to be able to live my life. I'm not now, I haven't been for a while now. I'm not going to be able to do it, I don't think, until I dig to the bottom of this pile of hurt, until I find out something to do with it.
If I'm writing a lot, if I have logorrhea, it's because when I'm writing, when I'm saying these things, I feel... I feel in control of my life. I feel like if I keep typing, maybe I'll accidentally turn out Hamlet. Nobody would know. Writing is not a social activity. But for so long, I've been afraid, so afraid of writing because it seems like a gateway to madness and dissolution. Because I wanted just to lead a normal life.
No normal anymore, folks. That option's off the table. The demons aren't just flying around loose in my head anymore.
Focusing on emotions. Paradoxically I feel like, as a chronically mentally ill person, I'm better equipped than some to deal with everything that's going on right now. I have a pretty refined palate for anguish. Everything I'm feeling, I've felt before. All the fear I have, I've had before.
But it's so much more intense. It's so overwhelming. Yeah I've felt all of these things before but I've never really known how to cope with them. How to feel all this and still function, and still put one foot in front of the other.
I try to cope by making concrete plans. A lot of my plans are grandiose and impractical and even when they aren't I just have a hard time following through on them. And even if they were... it's different for everybody, this overwhelming pain is in some sense _not_ a shared pain because we all experience it differently.
I'm experiencing it a couple different ways myself. Sometimes I want to run and hide, but there's nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide. Sometimes I want to stand and fight, and that feels better, but I don't know who to fight, I don't know how, I don't know that fighting would be anything different from this torrent of destructive rage we've been living through.
I'm really afraid of becoming the problem. We don't choose our feelings, we don't choose what happens to us, but we choose, to some extent, how to react to them. So no talking points, no reasoned explanations, no eloquent righteous fury.
I feel awful, possibly more awful than I've ever felt in my life, and I don't know what to do about it. (Possibly not more awful than I've ever felt. We have a way of burying the things we don't want to remember.)
You know, for months, I go to therapy, and I say the same thing over and over again. I say that I want the hurting to stop. And it doesn't. There's no reason to it. There's no purpose to it. I've spent long sleepless nights cursing God, cursing this earth and all the people on it. I know according to Job or whatever you're not supposed to do that, it's supposed to be bad, but I feel like it's been time well spent.
I wonder if maybe I just can't be an alcoholic. I've always worried about it, because my family history, because I do really like drinking. I just don't know if I can drink like alcoholics do, to numb the pain. I'm thinking about getting drunk, and I realize, you know, I don't want to. I'd rather write. Isn't that fucked up? Who ever heard of a writer who'd rather write than drink?
I come closest to crying when I laugh. I don't know why that is.
Anger and sadness, they mix together very strongly in me. When I'm sad it comes out as anger, a lot of times. But I have... I have kind of a fatalistic view on anger. My therapist pushes me on this. My therapist suggests without directly saying so that I don't fight hard enough for myself. And I explain over and over again what I've learned, what I think I've learned, that anger just feeds on itself, that what I want is peace and anger has never, ever brought me that.
And I just don't feel it. Oh, sure, I have hatred in my heart, lots of it, but it's a cold, numb hatred. A detached hatred. All these people... I feel pity for them. It's not like they win and we lose. It's they lose and we lose too. It's absurd, it's farcical, it makes me want to write all kinds of pseudo-philosophical gibberish which I won't because it doesn't matter.
What I want now is not peace, is not for things to be OK, because the quickest way to get there right now is for me to learn to lie to myself better. For me to say "Oh, that victory speech was so nice, maybe he won't be so bad after all," to try to forget the trauma like we all want to. Hell, I don't even necessarily want to be able to sleep at night. I've had plenty of great, restful sleep in my life.
What I want is simply to be able to _function_, to be able to live my life. I'm not now, I haven't been for a while now. I'm not going to be able to do it, I don't think, until I dig to the bottom of this pile of hurt, until I find out something to do with it.
If I'm writing a lot, if I have logorrhea, it's because when I'm writing, when I'm saying these things, I feel... I feel in control of my life. I feel like if I keep typing, maybe I'll accidentally turn out Hamlet. Nobody would know. Writing is not a social activity. But for so long, I've been afraid, so afraid of writing because it seems like a gateway to madness and dissolution. Because I wanted just to lead a normal life.
No normal anymore, folks. That option's off the table. The demons aren't just flying around loose in my head anymore.
Re: Despair.
Go ahead and despair. You've got plenty of reason to. Mourn what you've lost, what we've lost, what the world has lost.
If you're thinking about drinking, and you're in recovery- getting drunk is not going to make you feel better. There's no amount of alcohol you can consume that is going to numb the hurt.
If you're in danger of hurting yourself or others, get help. Try and be patient with the people whose job it is to help, because they're probably pretty overwhelmed right now. You're far from the only one having these thoughts.
Do what you have to do to stay alive. Beyond that, fuck everything else. Nothing in the world is more important than your sorrow right now.
If you're thinking about drinking, and you're in recovery- getting drunk is not going to make you feel better. There's no amount of alcohol you can consume that is going to numb the hurt.
If you're in danger of hurting yourself or others, get help. Try and be patient with the people whose job it is to help, because they're probably pretty overwhelmed right now. You're far from the only one having these thoughts.
Do what you have to do to stay alive. Beyond that, fuck everything else. Nothing in the world is more important than your sorrow right now.
"It's not 1860."
Comment I saw tonight. True, absolutely true. Nobody is talking about seceding from the Union except for Texas, which is the Quebec of America and which we've all learned to safely ignore. But since I'm obviously not sleeping tonight... how isn't it 1860?
The Civil War didn't magically spring into being the second Lincoln got elected President. It was brewing, brewing since the first days of the American Republic.
The Civil War was a fight over slavery. Over whether black men and women were people or property. This was insoluble by any other means in America. Other nations ultimately concluded that they were people and had some fierce arguments over tariffs or something and that was the end of it. After a certain point- there's plenty of room for disagreement on what point that was but my personal bias is 1828- that became impossible in America.
And if we have second American Civil War, there's not just one similar issue, not one that's going to inflame the passions and lead to the division of all American institutions, not just political but religious and economic and social, along geographic borders.
Lincoln, Lincoln wasn't even on the _ballot_ in a lot of Southern states. Nobody was going to vote for him. What percentage of the vote did Clinton get in Georgia? In Texas?
So that's the number one reason you can't have another civil war. Because while the population is deeply and irreconcilably divided, that division does not take place along geographic lines.
Can you have a civil war on the issue of trade? On purely economic grounds? I guess we may be set to find out. Because I think what we will see is that now, for the first time, you really have a bilateral level of distrust and hostility between factions to where they just can't peacefully coexist. There is no room for democracy the way things currently are, only for tyranny of the majority. I "have difficulty respecting" Trump voters. I can't live with them, can't work with them, can't socialize with them. And, you know, maybe that is going to pass with time, but I'm not about to put money down on it.
I think what's more likely to happen is that you're going to see more and more formal codification of the differences between factions. You know, sure, I'm a vanguardist on this. But over time, perception becomes reality. This mutual distrust, this mutual hostility, will ossify. Neutrality will cease to be an option.
The Civil War didn't magically spring into being the second Lincoln got elected President. It was brewing, brewing since the first days of the American Republic.
The Civil War was a fight over slavery. Over whether black men and women were people or property. This was insoluble by any other means in America. Other nations ultimately concluded that they were people and had some fierce arguments over tariffs or something and that was the end of it. After a certain point- there's plenty of room for disagreement on what point that was but my personal bias is 1828- that became impossible in America.
And if we have second American Civil War, there's not just one similar issue, not one that's going to inflame the passions and lead to the division of all American institutions, not just political but religious and economic and social, along geographic borders.
Lincoln, Lincoln wasn't even on the _ballot_ in a lot of Southern states. Nobody was going to vote for him. What percentage of the vote did Clinton get in Georgia? In Texas?
So that's the number one reason you can't have another civil war. Because while the population is deeply and irreconcilably divided, that division does not take place along geographic lines.
Can you have a civil war on the issue of trade? On purely economic grounds? I guess we may be set to find out. Because I think what we will see is that now, for the first time, you really have a bilateral level of distrust and hostility between factions to where they just can't peacefully coexist. There is no room for democracy the way things currently are, only for tyranny of the majority. I "have difficulty respecting" Trump voters. I can't live with them, can't work with them, can't socialize with them. And, you know, maybe that is going to pass with time, but I'm not about to put money down on it.
I think what's more likely to happen is that you're going to see more and more formal codification of the differences between factions. You know, sure, I'm a vanguardist on this. But over time, perception becomes reality. This mutual distrust, this mutual hostility, will ossify. Neutrality will cease to be an option.
Election night diary.
Finished off half a bottle of wine during the day to take the edge off. Around 7:30 decided I should get a nap. Those four decisive hours are the worst for me. Uncertainty is pretty awful.
I woke up around 11, asked my wife how it was going. I told her we'd get through it, and then started shaking uncontrollably for about half an hour. Sometimes I can work myself up into a panic, sometimes I lose control of my thoughts and freak myself out, but that wasn't how it was this time. It was just a pure physiological response. I'm not sure I've ever experienced anything like it, and I have a long history of both mental illness and polypharmacy.
Tried talking through it with friends but that didn't get very far. What I wound up going back to was a talk I had with my friends earlier in the week. I wanted to try and be prepared for the worst. It was an interesting talk.
Even though all my friends oppose Trump, people are in a lot of different places when it comes to what he means, what dangers he poses. I guess it's not so surprising when the candidate himself ran on a platform pretty much wholly composed of lies to be uncertain as to what he actually represents.
How you view Trump says, really, a lot about who you are, about what your values are, and this applies just as well, if not more, to those who oppose him. The particular lens I view Trump through is twofold: First, a historical-critical perspective, and second, a racial perspective.
I'm a white man. Of the two, the historical-critical perspective scares me more. When I look at Trump, I don't try to psychoanalyze the man, to see who he is as a unique individual. I don't try to look too deeply at the electorate, though certainly that's a pretty important factor. When I look at Trump, I try to look at similar figures throughout history.
And those parallel figures, the people who say the kind of stuff Trump says during a similar time in their political careers, you know, they're pretty scary.
Yes, Hitler is one of them. Some people get mad when I say Hitler, because he's a super-loaded historical figure. It's kind of paradoxical- everybody agrees the North Korean state is the worst country in existence today, and that tends to smooth over disagreements and arguments. Most everybody agrees that Hitler was the worst leader in history, and yet even in death he starts more fights than anything.
He's reduced to this sort of one-note caricature. Like Hitler is the Holocaust, which was, apparently, a unique and unrepeatable circumstance in a lot of people's minds. I'm not saying Donald Trump is going to start building death camps. But at the same time, I'm not going to be so irresponsible as to ignore the clear and unambiguous historical parallels.
And, you know, it's not just Hitler, if Hitler gives you a problem. Some people like talking Mussolini. You can talk Putin. You can talk the guys who tried and didn't make it, like Huey Long. The point is this: If you compare Trump to any populist dictator in world history, he's pretty unambiguously more similar to them than he is to any past major-party Presidential candidate in American history. He's not the first racist President in our country's history, but he's just not anything at all like Woodrow Wilson. He's not the first extremist candidate in our country's history, but he's not anything at all like Barry Goldwater.
And some people think that, you know, the American system is strong, it's robust, we can _control_ him. But that's what people who acquiesce to dictatorships _always_ believe. The system was designed to prevent a man like him from achieving office in the first place.
I've been thinking long and hard about next steps. I am absolutely, unshakably convinced that this is not OK. This is not going to be OK. The only thing I'm more sure of is my total opposition to violent resistance. And the Trump opponents who are saying it's going to be OK... I understand why they're saying that. We're not all on the same page about this. Whatever gets you through the night, I think. On one level.
On another level, it does bother me. I have this deep-seated distrust of ready compliance, of easy acquiescence. Most of the time inaction is a pretty easy stance to take. I'm not going to vote because they're both corrupt. Well I voted for Clinton but we have to respect the Will of the People.
And this notion, the concept of the Will of the People, this is a myth! It is an absolute myth. We are not one nation. Most Trump supporters have known this for years and years. They do not live in the same reality as those of us who, reluctantly or enthusiastically, support Clinton, think she would make a good President.
In Marxist thought there's this concept known as "heightening the contradictions". I pretty strongly reject this. I think this is sort of a luxury of those who are not actually threatened by whatever the enemy ideology happens to be. If you are black and you try to "heighten the contradictions", you got shot dead, on camera, and your killer walks. Maybe he gets a medal. "Heightening the contradictions" is a crock.
But that doesn't mean I'm not willing to pick a side. When I was younger, sure. I was very much a "can't we all just get along" kind of person. Trying to thread the needle, trying to get people to see that we're not as different as we seem to be.
Now is not the time for that. That Dante passage from the Inferno I posted earlier today, the one JFK and RFK paraphrased- it speaks to me. It speaks to me deeply. Now is a time for choosing. Not yesterday. Today. Yesterday's election was not our last choice. It was an opening statement on a new era of America. It is...
No, no, I'm getting highfalutin and rhetorical. No speeches. No speeches, action, action and justifications for that action.
If we want to make a difference, we have to work together. If we want to work together, we have to be together. In flesh and blood, we have to be together. And we starts with me, and with my wife, and with the choices we make in our personal lives.
One of those choices is that we need to move away from Indiana. Not to Canada. Not, you know, fleeing the country. Even if I wanted to run, there's no escaping the second-order, the third-order effects. America is a behemoth. There are a lot of bad things that could happen, and being in Canada is not a particularly good safeguard against most of them.
To Oregon. I have friends in Oregon. That's the most important factor. The personal factor. Moving to a strange city where you don't know anybody, it's hard. Being alone, it's hard.
Beyond that, Oregon, at least the Western environs of it, is not Donald Trump's America. America is not one nation. America is not one people. But we still have free movement, and those of us who can afford it, and my wife and I fortunately can... we can choose which America to live in. It has no overriding leader, no President or king or central committee. You know, "Stronger together" still means something to me, and I hope to many, many others. It maybe just didn't mean what certain people thought it meant.
I woke up around 11, asked my wife how it was going. I told her we'd get through it, and then started shaking uncontrollably for about half an hour. Sometimes I can work myself up into a panic, sometimes I lose control of my thoughts and freak myself out, but that wasn't how it was this time. It was just a pure physiological response. I'm not sure I've ever experienced anything like it, and I have a long history of both mental illness and polypharmacy.
Tried talking through it with friends but that didn't get very far. What I wound up going back to was a talk I had with my friends earlier in the week. I wanted to try and be prepared for the worst. It was an interesting talk.
Even though all my friends oppose Trump, people are in a lot of different places when it comes to what he means, what dangers he poses. I guess it's not so surprising when the candidate himself ran on a platform pretty much wholly composed of lies to be uncertain as to what he actually represents.
How you view Trump says, really, a lot about who you are, about what your values are, and this applies just as well, if not more, to those who oppose him. The particular lens I view Trump through is twofold: First, a historical-critical perspective, and second, a racial perspective.
I'm a white man. Of the two, the historical-critical perspective scares me more. When I look at Trump, I don't try to psychoanalyze the man, to see who he is as a unique individual. I don't try to look too deeply at the electorate, though certainly that's a pretty important factor. When I look at Trump, I try to look at similar figures throughout history.
And those parallel figures, the people who say the kind of stuff Trump says during a similar time in their political careers, you know, they're pretty scary.
Yes, Hitler is one of them. Some people get mad when I say Hitler, because he's a super-loaded historical figure. It's kind of paradoxical- everybody agrees the North Korean state is the worst country in existence today, and that tends to smooth over disagreements and arguments. Most everybody agrees that Hitler was the worst leader in history, and yet even in death he starts more fights than anything.
He's reduced to this sort of one-note caricature. Like Hitler is the Holocaust, which was, apparently, a unique and unrepeatable circumstance in a lot of people's minds. I'm not saying Donald Trump is going to start building death camps. But at the same time, I'm not going to be so irresponsible as to ignore the clear and unambiguous historical parallels.
And, you know, it's not just Hitler, if Hitler gives you a problem. Some people like talking Mussolini. You can talk Putin. You can talk the guys who tried and didn't make it, like Huey Long. The point is this: If you compare Trump to any populist dictator in world history, he's pretty unambiguously more similar to them than he is to any past major-party Presidential candidate in American history. He's not the first racist President in our country's history, but he's just not anything at all like Woodrow Wilson. He's not the first extremist candidate in our country's history, but he's not anything at all like Barry Goldwater.
And some people think that, you know, the American system is strong, it's robust, we can _control_ him. But that's what people who acquiesce to dictatorships _always_ believe. The system was designed to prevent a man like him from achieving office in the first place.
I've been thinking long and hard about next steps. I am absolutely, unshakably convinced that this is not OK. This is not going to be OK. The only thing I'm more sure of is my total opposition to violent resistance. And the Trump opponents who are saying it's going to be OK... I understand why they're saying that. We're not all on the same page about this. Whatever gets you through the night, I think. On one level.
On another level, it does bother me. I have this deep-seated distrust of ready compliance, of easy acquiescence. Most of the time inaction is a pretty easy stance to take. I'm not going to vote because they're both corrupt. Well I voted for Clinton but we have to respect the Will of the People.
And this notion, the concept of the Will of the People, this is a myth! It is an absolute myth. We are not one nation. Most Trump supporters have known this for years and years. They do not live in the same reality as those of us who, reluctantly or enthusiastically, support Clinton, think she would make a good President.
In Marxist thought there's this concept known as "heightening the contradictions". I pretty strongly reject this. I think this is sort of a luxury of those who are not actually threatened by whatever the enemy ideology happens to be. If you are black and you try to "heighten the contradictions", you got shot dead, on camera, and your killer walks. Maybe he gets a medal. "Heightening the contradictions" is a crock.
But that doesn't mean I'm not willing to pick a side. When I was younger, sure. I was very much a "can't we all just get along" kind of person. Trying to thread the needle, trying to get people to see that we're not as different as we seem to be.
Now is not the time for that. That Dante passage from the Inferno I posted earlier today, the one JFK and RFK paraphrased- it speaks to me. It speaks to me deeply. Now is a time for choosing. Not yesterday. Today. Yesterday's election was not our last choice. It was an opening statement on a new era of America. It is...
No, no, I'm getting highfalutin and rhetorical. No speeches. No speeches, action, action and justifications for that action.
If we want to make a difference, we have to work together. If we want to work together, we have to be together. In flesh and blood, we have to be together. And we starts with me, and with my wife, and with the choices we make in our personal lives.
One of those choices is that we need to move away from Indiana. Not to Canada. Not, you know, fleeing the country. Even if I wanted to run, there's no escaping the second-order, the third-order effects. America is a behemoth. There are a lot of bad things that could happen, and being in Canada is not a particularly good safeguard against most of them.
To Oregon. I have friends in Oregon. That's the most important factor. The personal factor. Moving to a strange city where you don't know anybody, it's hard. Being alone, it's hard.
Beyond that, Oregon, at least the Western environs of it, is not Donald Trump's America. America is not one nation. America is not one people. But we still have free movement, and those of us who can afford it, and my wife and I fortunately can... we can choose which America to live in. It has no overriding leader, no President or king or central committee. You know, "Stronger together" still means something to me, and I hope to many, many others. It maybe just didn't mean what certain people thought it meant.
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