None of this matters. People get worked up about these things that frankly do not matter and then it gets plastered all over social media as people look for the newest thing to be outraged by. They are outraged, because their outrage is profitable to the people who work to influence their emotions.
Read MoreSo that happened. By “that” I mean an attempted coup happened – it occurred as I was putting together a slate of book reviews, and honestly I didn’t have the bandwidth to really do anything about it.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth, but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.
Read MoreThe “media”, if it wants anything, wants as much of your attention as it can effectively extract for the lowest investment possible. More than any conspiracy theory about bad actors, more than any lie about modifying people’s behavior, more than anything else, this should be recognized as the root of the problem.
Read MoreIn short, Hawley is conflating the moderate position – “defund the police” – with the more radical position of “abolish the police.” These two policy positions are different, and while a number of police abolitionists view defunding as a good first step, there are also many people who support defunding without supporting abolition. Conflating the two is thus a way of discrediting the moderate position.
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