Interpersonal politics

I should have been a fucking diplomat (or maybe an advice to the lovelorn columnist).

Dear C:

In answer to your question [“whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness?”]: rachmunnis is mercy, empathy, decency, kindness. Forgiveness is a close relative, in fact, rachmunnis is sometimes translated as forgiveness.

This impulse to act with love, to move past hurt, to nurture someone else, after sitting with their uncomfortable feelings, is the heart of relations between humans who care about each other. Rachmunnis is easier to recognize than to consistently practice.

Humility and self-awareness are essential parts of being an empathetic person. You have to be willing (and able) to put yourself in someone else’s place in order to resolve problems, to forgive each other and show love instead of clinging to righteous anger that always escalates when conflicts are never resolved.

When someone tells you that you’re hurting them, and you insist they’re being oversensitive, overthinking it, making unfair accusations, making you uncomfortable and so on, you are showing the opposite of rachmunnis. If you do this once in a while it means you’re having a bad day, you weren’t yourself, and it’s not hard to overlook.

If you reflexively get angry and intransigent when someone tells you that you’ve hurt them, you’re not capable of rachmunnis. Forgiving a person who lacks rachmunnis is folly. It’s not true forgiveness, for one thing; it’s an empty gracious gesture that guarantees ongoing future harm. Forgiving without a real apology means you agree to swallow repeated spoonsful of shit every time the other person feels bad about anything.

What happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness in our case is that I’ve told you, over and over, and in writing several times — writing you tell me is clear, stylish and easy to understand — that it’s impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge fault. You continue to act like you can’t understand this.

Your son is a very neurotic person, he’s also very angry. He can only express his anger passively, and he has never conceded any kind of fault to me — or anyone else — as far as I know. He’s too insecure to admit he’s ever been wrong about anything. He’s too neurotic to express regret for anything he’s ever done, no matter what the cost to himself might be for not being able to do so.

In the end, for reasons you know well, I stopped trying to fix things with people who can’t even acknowledge anything is broken. For your part, you once seemed to understand this — telling me I had enough aggravations with my medical challenges without worrying about trying to be friends with R. Now you’re intent on forcing me to forgive a very aggravating person, because it pains you that I am such a fine person and your son only wants to be friends with me.

Can you forgive someone who accuses you of something his angry wife made up, angrily confronts you about it, eye twitching, telling you, before he even informs you what he’s accusing you of, that he’s not sure you can continue to be friends because of the viciousness of what you’ve supposedly done? Instead of showing anger, you answer him like a friend and try to help him with his problem, instead of walking away after the aggressive, ridiculous accusation. He never has to thank you for being a good friend or express the slightest regret about falsely accusing you or threatening you with the loss of an old friendship?

To be put on the defensive by a person like that, after years of asking him to stop passive aggressively provoking me, is intolerable. Yet, as even R will probably admit, I acted like a friend, treated him as a friend, did my best to help, seeing him in such a painful position. To be told years later, many Yom Kippurs [the day when Jews are traditionally required to make amends with those they’ve wronged] come and gone, that, for a series of frankly senseless reasons, I have to forgive him, even if his rabbi/therapist can’t make him see the need to honestly try to make amends with someone he claims to love and admire, is intolerable. Him lying to you about having apologized to me “a dozen times” – the disgusting icing on an excrement cake.

If you still can’t understand whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness, read the enclosed.

(which is slightly less diplomatic, I add, diplomatically.)

The evil we are all facing

May1

Although I resisted believing in the existence of evil for many years, today its existence is undeniable. Evil walks brazenly among us. It is embodied in a system where basic human rights of citizenship, won only after a century of sacrifice and bloodshed, can be taken away at the stroke of a pen by six true believers, their unappealable decision perversely disguised as a constitutionally protected take on human equality. There is nothing wrong with cheating, and violating laws, they rule, if it keeps your party in power, no matter what the inferior majority wants.

The evil we are up against in 2026 is impossible not to see, and like most evil, it depends on constantly lying in order for its blinding truths to prevail. To a malignant narcissist who will say whatever is necessary to never be wrong, always be perfect, and have everything they claim taken as infallibly true — constant lying and righteous rage are necessary to prop up the grandiose vision of those who are damaged beyond repair. Insistence on the reasonableness of incoherence is necessary to force incoherent decisions on others. If you can do it with an affable smile, so much the better for your side.

The Age of Reason was an aspiration, a return to the pursuit of classical wisdom abandoned, during centuries of Christian intolerance and a slavish devotion to blind faith in God’s unknowable will, the long sleep of Reason known as The Dark Ages. The light of Reason, it was believed by those enlightened few who embraced the notion of a world guided by knowledge based on shared human experience and demonstrable facts, would soon illuminate the darkness and lead mankind to a better destiny than irrationality, oppression and death by sword and fire to all “heretics”.

Those who have much, and want everything, insist violently on their right to it all. They will not tolerate any of this Reason shit, if it conflicts with their need to dominate and control everything, and to be exempt from all law. For most of history these literal motherfuckers have ruled the rest of us. And to rule without being pitchforked by those they screw, they must peddle an irrational, counter-factual narrative, destroy the critical faculties of the populace (defund the Department of Education, for example) and cancel the right of expression of those who would expose their fundamental, destructive incoherence.

Burn the books, burn the libraries, burn the satirists, burn those who object to torturing our enemies, our neighbors, burn, baby, burn — Jesus loves a good fire to purge sin from the world (according to his most determinedly perverted followers). Burn the law enforcers, if they threaten you or your allies. Burn anyone who objects to burning people!

This insanely punitive pro-conflagration politics will not go down well with most people, unless they are already insane with rage. All this burning of our neighbors makes no sense, except through the lens of violent fury. That’s what advertising/propaganda is for. Keep them enraged with constantly repeated inflammatory lies and they will cheer the burning of those they hate, or, equally good, they will tune out entirely. Incoherence, insisted on, is the message. Lying is essential to the selling of every ugly enterprise.

I get PTSD from something like the Federalist Society Six declaring the other day that the party they belong to, and the power-crazed ideological movement they believe in, may stay in power by any means necessary, and by every means available. What is the legal rationale for striking down a law that finally brought a measure of justice to millions of citizens denied the right to vote for a century? We have the power, The End. Can the recent decision to finish off the Voting Rights Act be rationally justified? Who cares? We have the power, we finally struck down the last of that hated law that gives inferiors the right to elect their representatives, there is no further appeal and fuck you, what are you going to do about it, cuck?

I get PTSD because I have lived the personal version of this kind of politics. Throughout my childhood, in the little nuclear family I grew up in, I was generally blamed for the anger of parents who couldn’t control their anger. Almost five years ago I watched our closest friends, at each other’s throats for days on end in a beautiful rented vacation house, and afterwards, it was all my fault.

It was my fault because instead of saying, during a particularly insane moment close to the end of our holiday, after tensions between this long married couple escalated to an unbearable level, “goddamn it, fuck.. are you all insane?” I stopped myself and said instead “goddamn it, fuck… face,” while looking at my own partner, who although she’d just annoyed me, was as helpless as I was in that moment. I had utterly shocked them by violating their sacred marriage contract never to call each other names — prolonged silence, glaring, passive aggression, making nasty comments about each other, threats of violence were all fair game — but name calling? That was intolerable! They both agreed about that 100%.

Nothing unites enraged people like a common enemy, and that enemy was now me. My name calling in a moment of frustration, even if I immediately apologized for it, even if my apology was sincere, was something they could never forgive, as was my inability to forgive them for blaming me for something that was entirely my fault alone — and the way I had destroyed a beautiful vacation near Woodstock.

I see our political moment the same way. A compulsive liar is the Leader and anyone on the right who wants power must get it through him (in the original German this was called the Führerprinzip — all power flows directly from the Führer). To be eligible for power the applicant must demonstrate the ability to lie, to attack anyone questioning their lie, to be eternally brazen and always on the attack. Nothing can ever be the fault of someone who can never be wrong. What is hard to understand about that?

That, in a nutshell, is the evil we are up against in this perilous moment. An unreasoning need to be superior that yields to nothing, not reason, mercy, common decency or any humane impulse. The pure, unfiltered will to dominate, no matter what the cost, is the engine of evil. To this end they use lies to turn benefit of the doubt into suspicion, friendship to enmity, love to hate, a willingness to empathize into a desire for violent retribution.

How well will we swim through the sea of blood these fucks have no hesitation to flood the land with? I am breathing deeply today, writing, refining, remembering to relax my breath, as the top of my head feels ready to blow off. We must remain cool and rational for the grim fight ahead. At this point, there is no doubt that we are fighting evil and we have no choice but to continue.

86 47, yo

fourth assassination attempt against Mr. Trump!!!

Totally, totally normal, you traitorous cucks!

Apr25

President Trump has long been the “decider” in the closely held family business he inherited from his successful, psychopath father. He has bankrupted every business venture he ever went into, or had them closed down for corruption, fraud and abuse — like Trump University or the Trump charity. The guy is a blustering con artist who nobody in his employ has ever said no to. There have never been consequences for anything he’s ever done. The spoiled bully he was as a child is the same special guy running the most powerful country in the world. Falling asleep at a recent televised meeting, during a boring presentation about numbers, a more tactless person than I might call him Sleepy Don.

His niece Mary put it perfectly — he’s the weakest man she’s ever known, his genius is consistently finding people even weaker than him. This weakness in his inner circle must always include a non-existent moral compass. Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Pete Kegsbreath, MAGA Mike Johnson, Kashyap Patel, Todd Blanche, Tulsi Gabbard, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Hung Cao, Michael Cohen, the list goes on and on. The soul-dead opportunists riding the MAGA train all know the key to Trump’s inner circle is eternal public deference to the big guy’s desperate, sucking vacuum of an ego. Trump can’t be wrong, has never, ever been, so if he is wrong, forcefully, angrily defend how right he was to do whatever stupid or evil thing he’s just done. Then smirk defiantly for the cameras, threaten to sue, prosecute, imprison, and wait for the moment the bus rumbles by, the one you will inevitably be thrown under, when the time comes.

Is this a surprise to anyone?

A classic asshole, whatever we may opine about his psychiatric condition or how the abuse he endured as a child warped him into the destructive, compulsive liar, with a taste for killing (double tap strikes on fishing boats, a girls’ school in Iran, firing squads for federal executions, yo), who now controls 5,000 nuclear warheads. Sometimes, as they say, a schmuck is just a schmuck.

**Same ear, two years later**. **A miracle.**

And in shocking breaking news, truly shocking, who would ever imagine such a thing at such a time?

Great lesson on the Strait of Hormuz

Apr21

David Feldman, in his incomparable style (I started to say ‘inimitable’, but his distinct delivery isn’t hard to imitate), uses maps to lay out the supreme idiocy of Trump and Hegseth’s loud assertions that they won the war against Iran overwhelmingly and are only negotiating now to… uh, they completely and utterly won, decisively, destroyed Iran’s ability to wage war with unprecedented lethality and violence in the name of all that is holy (and the bossy f-ing pope be damned), which is why they have agreed to a ceasefire and are negotiating terms with a nation that, whenever it wants to, can stop all oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is clearly the lügenpresse [1], the lying globalists who control mass media (you know who he’s talking about…) lying about the most perfect war, more perfect, even, than Mr. Trump’s perfect call asking Ukrainian president Zelensky to “do him a favor” if he wanted the arms shipment Congress had already approved for Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion. The stinking rat who made that secret phone call public, and lied about the transcript, which was perfect (PERFECT!), is going to get prosecuted pursuant to Tulsi Gabbard’s referral, and that will happen toot sweet, says Kashyap Patel, who will now be subject to being deposed in the idiotic defamation case the angry asshole brought against The Atlantic for smearing his good name (I know, what good name?). It’s all the fault of the lying goddamned commie mass media that needs to be brought to heel, clearly. These public servants are all perfect, the most perfect ever to serve this good nation. PERFECT YOU SICK FUCKING LYING TREASONOUS MANIAC BASTARDS!!!!!

[1]

Incoherence is perfect for assholes

Apr17

Think of it from the asshole’s point of view. If you need to win an argument (because losing, which includes any kind of compromise, is unbearably humiliating to you) and the facts are not in your favor — FUCK THE FACTS. Seriously, just keep a straight face, an aggressive stance, attack your opponent and make any noises you like, grunts and squawks are fine.

Keep doing this, never pause, never back down. The other person will eventually grow frustrated, if you are arguing about something important — say human rights in a democracy (I just typoed demoncracy, which seems to fit our moment with the antichrist-in-chief). When their frustration explodes, or they walk away, frustrated, you merely smile and make a mocking little dog sound as your friends applaud.

As long as you cater to the emotional cravings of those you control, people also desperate to be right, who, if in danger of being proved wrong, prefer killing you to admitting fault, incoherence is perfect.

You can’t argue successfully against an incoherent assertion. Incoherence is immune to persuasion of any kind. It is self-contained, self-proving and self-reinforcing.

When Donald Trump was an adolescent millionaire (his father paid him $200,000 a year from birth, his salary as president of various fake corporations dad set up to avoid taxes) his psychopath [1] father intercepted a carton of switchblades his son had delivered to the house. Donald’s plan was to arm his schoolyard gang with these knives and rule the elite private school his parents sent him to. His parents decided that a few years in a military academy would be good for the young bully’s discipline and “make him a man” of some kind. We see how well that plan worked.

Trump claims to have loved the hierarchical life at the military academy where he specialized in bullying the younger cadets. There was a new crop of these young, pampered chumps every fall for Donald to torture with his winning personality. Then, after graduation, proudly dressed in a splendid military uniform, bone spurs, unfortunately, kept him out of uniform for the rest of his life.

More than sixty years later, the dude is unchanged. He bullies everyone around him, except when someone stands up to him directly. No mere box of switchblades this time, Tomahawk missiles, nuclear weapons, enraged toadies and lickspittles competing daily to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him, unlimited dark money to prosecute his thousands of lifelong grudges against every kind of enemy imaginable. He now claims the legal right to illegally defund programs Congress funded, endangering and torturing millions and costing countless lives (poor people, disposable) and to have his underlings commit cold blooded murder and get away with it.

He’s not crazy to believe these things since his 6-3 Leonard Leo majority granted him extraordinary criminal powers in the aptly named Trump v. United States. The party line ruling granted him the right to commit criminal acts, and pardon any criminal, if he can claim he did the crime as part of his core duty to advances his/their agenda. He has replaced the Department of Justice with the Department of Retribution, his gigantic glaring face adorns its building.

I think of my own father, a soul with many gifts and the most decent of impulses, helpless against the many traumas of his early life. Whipped in the face by his mother from the time he could stand, growing up in what he always called grinding poverty, legally blind until the age of ten, when FDR’s program for the poor gave him his first pair of glasses to correct 20/400 vision, he considered himself the dumbest kid in his little town, even at the very end of a distinguished life.

We argued many times over the years about whether people can change in any meaningful way. I contend we can, and always made the case. He insisted people cannot change in any fundamental way and that all forms of therapy only support a delusion. I learned only recently that we were both right, and both wrong. Many people can change, if their pain makes the need to change urgent enough. Many people can never change, no matter how acute their pain becomes. If you can’t be wrong, there is nothing to change.

Donald Trump is an example of the kind who can never change. He is the perfect avatar for the interests he represents — entitled psychopaths [1] who created an ideology of “liberty” (which requires unreasoning faith to believe) and a massive propaganda machine to promote their right to own and control everything.

There is no good argument for why some should have 100,000,000 times what starving children and their struggling parents have, why children should go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country in human history. There is no conceivable moral argument for that. Even Charles Koch’s beloved Institute for Humane Studies never successfully made a moral case for starving poor children.

And so, an incoherent, demonstrably false fable — makers vs. takers — the rich make the economy move for everybody, and what trickles from their pathologically greedy lips makes fine soup for the rest of us. Booted and spurred, most of them from birth, to ride the backs of anyone less deserving than they are (in the fine image Jefferson stole from a Scottish rebel about to be hanged), these creatures found their avatar in a man willing to do anything, including bark like a pet dog pursued by hungry, imaginary Haitians, to never lose.

Are we tired of winning yet, America?

[1]

Convert to Catholicism knows way more than the pope

Apr15

As every American school child knows, morality is not the concern of the American president. The president’s job is not to model or otherwise influence good or bad behavior, it is to dictate American public policy. Which makes him… a dictator? Hey, the pope was good with Mussolini and Hitler, he signed a peace treaty with them, why not the American version? Perhaps JD ought to pray on that, to God, not Peter Theil, before he opens his vapid mouth.

Ah, for Christ’s sake…

Apr13

Until Trump there was never a stable genius president who attacked numerous foes daily. Not sure an American president has ever attacked the Pope, (possibly during the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when hatred of Catholics raged) but this president is undeniably special. Heather:

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

source

Murderous maniac threatens genocide

Apr7

Try not to be upset that our president has threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demand that Iran drop its defensive posture after refusing to unconditionally surrender, in spite of literally thousands of bombing raids against it in recent weeks, is not immediately met.

You have to see it from Trump’s point of view — he’s upset because the world still doesn’t take him seriously as a major league mass murderer. What does a strongman have to do to earn his place alongside the all-time greats? He’s killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that’s chump change to members of the strongman Hall of Fame. He needs a big kill to get the cred as a killer for the ages that he has sought since childhood.

Checking to get the insane bastard’s genocidal quote right, AI gave the first result (I forgot to add “-AI” at the end of my search) I got this:

The auto-generated answer “may contain inaccuracies,” as the psychopathic monetizers of incoherence, fear and hatred — the masters of the universe — inform the users at the bottom of the partially accurate answer. The president’s statement reflects, it’s plain to see, “escalating tensions and the potential for severe military action.” AI does not reflect any kind of psychotic break from reality, not derangement, dementia, a desire to commit war crimes, an inability to back down, ever, stemming from childhood trauma and an overwhelming terror of more humiliation. “Escalating tensions.” you understand, between reality, which has a famously anti-Trump bias, in fact, hates and vilifies all Christian white men, and … the violently acted out prejudices of terrified, enraged white Christian men, as well as Mr. Trump himself.

Look, if an American president, surrounded by sycophantic, militant white Christian Protestants, (including a Secretary of War who believes there’s no such thing as a stupid war crime), can’t make a little Easter joke in a menacing social media post threatening mass killing and sarcastically praising Allah, what is our freedom really worth? Others have a right to hate that freedom, but, you have to admit, it’s pretty incoherent to insist on your right to freedom while denying a Nazi’s right to the same freedom, right? The freedom of the top of the top 1% to do what benefits them is so precious and inviolable, in an incoherent schema, that the lives of a couple of billion poor people don’t amount to a hill of beans. Fair is fair. Be a billionaire or shut the fuck up.

You have to like the symmetry here. Trump promises oil executives that if they give him a billion for his campaign he’ll take care of them once elected. Then he cuts all the renewable energy projects funded under Biden. Then he drops bombs on a country whose predictable defensive move is to close the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil prices up and with oil prices, most other prices. Win-win, if you’re an oil billionaire. Charles Koch may privately hate the vulgar, incoherent, criminally insane Mr. Trump, but he sure is good for the bottom line.

Insane terrible two year-old as the most powerful man on the planet

Apr6

Below is Dan Rather’s clear analysis of the deadly box Trump has placed himself (and all of us) in. I’ve been at a loss to explain my recent level of anxiety to myself, this — starting with a photo of a woman walking through a bombed out section of Tehran — puts some of my anxiety into pretty good perspective. After watching the excellent Nuremberg the other night on Netflix — the story of how the nations that defeated Nazism began creating a body of international law to prevent another such threat to life on earth — to see our own country in the hands of creatures so similar to the soul-dead men on the docket at the world’s first war crimes trial, makes my skin crawl. It is horrifying to know that the U.S. is now the single greatest threat to life on the planet the world has ever known. Because we have an enraged victim of lifelong epic fury as our Unitary Executive, manipulated by a cabal of determined “ideological” psychopaths with unlimited wealth and power. Here’s Dan:

Wars are chaotic. They’re unpredictable — hence the phrase “the fog of war.” That fog has descended on the war in the Middle East. There are some people who believe Trump’s war is going well. But the consensus of opinion right now is that the battle is going poorly for the United States and Israel.

You have to wonder if anyone is telling the president the truth. Because his version of what will happen if the war continues much longer differs wildly from that of experts in the region. If we think gas prices are high now, just wait.

It boils down to this: Donald Trump is trapped. As of this writing, there is no good option to end this conflict.

The U.S. walks away — as Trump has threatened — and the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control. No one in the region likes that scenario.
The U.S. bombs Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, which is a war crime. Iran retaliates, likely targeting energy resources around the Middle East, while retaining a sizable portion of its missile stockpile.
Trump launches a ground war, which could be long, bloody, and expensive.

Any of the above scenarios could lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.

By the tone of his tweets, Trump’s frustration with the options is boiling over.

the rest is here

Could be, Grey Lady? Bombing civilian targets like water desalination plants, power plants, infrastructure like bridges and girls schools, all calculated to terrorize and kill masses of noncombatants, ARE war crimes.

Easter message from the chairman-for-life of the (billionaires only) Bored of Peace

Apr5

There is no proof that the president is insane, demented, gravely ill, so traumatized early in life that his worldview is irremediably dark, childishly selfish, that his only motive is retribution, but the evidence continues to mount. Easter Sunday he posted this message to the people we have “eviscerated”, the evil Iranian regime and all the Iranian people. No time like Easter Sunday for the leader of white Christianity’s mightiest army to threaten the enemies of Christ with massive war crimes. Open the fuckin’ straits or I’ll commit so many war crimes against you scumbags they’ll be shooting the Flintstones, live, in Tehran.