Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.
This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.
It’s hard to disagree that we all need to be part of a vast network of moral resistance. The damage to our society that the Project 2025 government is busily doing is pure, punch-you-in-the-fucking-face fascism in action. Opposition to such bullying, lying and flagrant disregard of law would seem to be a bipartisan effort, except to tens of millions who respond to the reasonable fear and insecurity that accompanies powerlessness by following a strongman who have no qualms about bullying. The bully, they feel, will protect them, so they revere him and justify his bullying as part of a larger plan that humans cannot comprehend. The face eating leopard will never eat their faces, they believe, because they faithfully worship the mighty predator.
We must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance, as Reich says. It is our only hope to save our professed, widely shared values about justice, human equality and the inherent dignity of every individual. These values are under determined attack by literal American fascists who believe in an inalterable hierarchy of unaccountable power and privilege for superior citizens. The frustrating question is “how, exactly, do we organize and participate in this desperately needed vast network of moral resistance?”
I have been trying to find a way to get directly involved and have so far come up with very little, outside of signing up for, and donating to, my local Democratic organization. This is part of our dilemma as Americans. We are programmed, from birth, by thousands of hours of ads viewed in our earliest years, to be avid consumers. There is a seductive illusion of freedom created by the vast variety of consumer items we have the complete liberty to choose among (assuming we can afford to buy them). This phantom freedom also creates a childlike dependence on the cool things we can buy at retail superstores and other, less tangible, shiny objects sold to us by hucksters.
Our politicians? They need millions of dollars to run for federal office, and that money doesn’t come cheap, most of them feel they have to take it from whoever offers it to them, if they are going to win elections. We wind up with Chuck Schumer and company as the compromised Opposition party whenever Republicans are in the majority. The Democratic party can’t condemn an American ally for starving a besieged, captive population in an area that ally is constantly bombing. Desperately hungry people, lined up for food, are shot dead by an occupying army on a daily basis. But the Democrats corporate and lobbying sponsors would be furious about an official Democratic party condemnation of these war crimes by a beloved American ally. So Amy Klobuchar condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza, decries the forced starvation of the victims of Israeli policy, and two days later smiles in a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the US to show that he can come visit his allies with impunity.
This is what decency and civilization demand. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it. It’s why, at a moment when the forces of fascism are so organized, well-funded and gleefully defiant in their sadism, terrorism (masked ICE squads accountable to nothing but unelected American Nazi Stephen Miller) and contempt for our experiment in democracy (which has allowed them to legitimately take power, as Mr. Hitler did back in 1933)
On Thursday, Trump’s loyal, cowed and bullied senators, who have already voted for cloture rather than allowing any further debate about Emil Bove III, their boss’s cynical pick for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court (the cadaverous looking, bullying, morally repellant Bove has never been even a traffic court judge) will likely have the votes to put a man currently the subject of contempt of court proceedings into lifetime office as a judge. The contempt proceeding against Bove has been delayed for months by a temporary restraining order (which usually last a week or less) granted by Noemi Rao, rabid Federalist Society federal appeals court judge crazed in her assertions of illimitable Trump Executive Power and her vigilance against “usurpation” of such power) allowing Trump’s lickspittles to put Bove onto the one man short list to replace Alito or Thomas.
How do we organize and participate in a moral movement to stop that, by Thursday? The war against fascism is a war of attrition, and we all have to keep doing our part to protect values we all believe in, values under attack by a lawless regime fueled by bullying, death threats and the thrill that unaccountable sadism inspires in millions of our fellow citizens. God bless these United Shayyyyysh.
That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Musk’s AI creation, Grok, recently expressed religious veneration for the greatest human/deity in history, Adolf Hitler. Hitler famously said “conscience is a Jewish invention”. I don’t know if Mr. H. was right about that, I do know that iron-willed repression of conscience was necessary for the men originally tasked with the liquidation of Jews, men, women and children, and others deemed undesirable by Mr. Hitler. Members of the einsatzgruppen, the death squads, regularly developed drinking problems, suffered nightmares and mental breakdowns after shooting countless civilians in the head and forcing locals to bury the dead in trenches. They had a high burnout rate and had to be replaced regularly, which (along with the bullets needed for battles everywhere) was one impetus for a mechanized Final Solution.
Part of the far-right’s (not very coherent) critique of “wokeness” is that it is empathy run amok, turning victims of the “woke virus” into performatively empathetic weak prey animals unaware of the true Darwinian nature of the world where only the ruthless can triumph morally. The New York Times published a brilliant op ed by Jennifer Szalai on the Christian right’s condemnation of empathy as practiced by most of the rest of us. An excellent discussion, with some great insights from, and into, my hero, Hannah Arendt. Not surprising that Hannah made an excellent contribution to Jennifer Szalai’s analysis of this perverse Christian nationalist condemnation of empathy.
Here’s a taste:
The Death of Thinking
The death of thinking, in fact, was what Arendt worried about in her work on totalitarianism. When she reported on the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, what struck her was his “thoughtlessness.” At one point Eichmann declared that “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts” — a claim that was particularly outrageous to Arendt, who elsewhere wrote about Kant’s concept of the “world citizen.” Such citizenship was not, she maintained, a matter of “an enormously enlarged empathy” but something more rigorous: “One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”
Click on the image below for the piece, gifted to you by The New York Times, which owns it, I’m just providing them a free ad.
Hannah Arendt pointed out that Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann’s inability to speak, except for cliches, revealed his inability to think. Language is an indispensable tool for discussing and understanding the world around us. Fascists deliberately distort and oversimplify language. This destruction of language is an essential part of destroying the ability to think critically. Critical thinking, like Critical Race Theory, is a deadly threat to would-be tyrants. Here’s a small, insignificant example of the blurring of language in the service of a point of view.
A MAGA podcaster interviewed Kash Patel, just before he became FBI director, Kashyap wearing a grey T-shirt with K $ H in large letterboxed letters, over the words “Fight with Kash”.
Interviewer: “You say the FBI has Epstein’s list. They’re sitting on it. That doesn’t seem like something you should do. You’re protecting the world’s foremost predator. That seems like an evil thing, regardless of who may be embarrassed in the release of that list. Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast, in human history?”
Kashyap Pramod Patel: “Simple. Because of who’s on that list.”
I was surprised to learn that Kashyap wasn’t always a revenge-fueled man of infinite ambition. In fact, back in the day, the upper caste Indian Hindu, son of an immigrant from Uganda whose family tree is traceable back 18 generations in Gujarat, was kind of woke. Wikipedia informs us: Patel attended Garden City High School and his senior-year quote was “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason”, by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Make of that what you will. Patel has obviously evolved a long way from his quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend Abraham Heschel days.
To set the record straight on language, though. Words have specific meanings and uses. Losing nuance is a step toward incoherence, especially dangerousin an age where a solid 40% consider passionate incoherence superior to a reasoned factual argument, for purposes of moving masses of confused people to concerted action. This solid incoherence embracing 40% owns most of the guns in America.
The words pedophile and pederast are not interchangeable, though both describe adult men who sexually prey on often unwilling underaged victims. These fuckers have very specific tastes. Epstein and his guests were powerful, lust-crazed monsters who did terrible, lifelong damage to many vulnerable, groomed, underaged young women and girls, but I’ve never heard it alleged, except by a MAGA podcaster, that serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein was a pederast.
Not that it makes much difference to the abused boy or girl. If you’re raped as a child, do the sexual predilections of your rapist really matter?
Words and nuance do matter, though, especially in this incoherent age of MAGA and its worldwide analogues. Incoherent, fervently believed rationales for doing things generally lead to bad endings for everybody involved.
More on FBI director Kashyap Pramod Patel, from his most recent incarnation (from Wikipedia):
This is from Steve Bannon’s ad for a movie, based on a book by Kashyap Pramod Patel that contains a partial enemies list, produced by Steve Bannon:
From Steve Bannon and the visionary team behind “Clinton Cash”, this groundbreaking film will leave you on the edge of your seat. “Government Gangsters,” based on the best-selling book by Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, pulls back the curtain on the sinister world of corrupt bureaucrats, government officials, and their media accomplices, as they conspired to bring down a sitting President, Donald J. Trump, and all those who support him. This explosive film uncovers the depths of deceit and manipulation they employ daily, betraying the very system they vowed to protect. “Government Gangsters” is not just a film-it’s a revelation that will forever alter your perception of government. May we never need another film like this.
In our age of the internet in your pocket, personally selected content (based on our harvested, analyzed online and conversational preferences) clamoring for our attention, when most of us are staring at smart phone and computer screens many hours a day, comment exchanges sometimes take on the aspect of a real conversation.
You can read long comment threads under many YouTube videos, on Substack and everywhere else online and the back and forth is sometimes a great discussion, adding depth, appreciation and interesting background that the original video or piece didn’t include. Those discussions enhance the original, make it more meaningful. It is impressive how well-informed on certain subjects some people are. Many people are moved to write detailed comments on posts and interact in extended, informative back and forths with other commenters. We’re living in a digital age of instant digital comment and response, at a time when face to face social interaction is in decline.
An honest talk about a compelling topic is always a great thing. The alternative to commenting is not commenting, which the large majority of people do most of the time when it comes to online reading or viewing. A reader’s silence has no inherent meaning, the significance of silence can only be seen in context. Silence as the answer to a question directed at someone has a much different meaning than silence as the natural tendency of most readers after reading something. On the other hand, “no comment” as the final comment on something of concern, has an unmistakably critical ring.
I very rarely get comments on this blahg or even a like or dislike (I don’t use ‘social media’ outside of this). I write here frequently as part of a daily writing practice and a way of keeping track of my thoughts, events, interesting things I’ve read or seen, music, moods, ideas, a recipe. If at some point I recall a great lecture I heard about how Adverse Childhood Experiences [1] can cause harmful changes in the actual DNA of the grown up version of that child, I will have posted about it here and be able to easily find it to send to the person I was talking to about it. I will be able to quickly locate Steven Zipperstein’s brilliant Pogrom, for example, Shoshana Zuboff’s genius mapping of the terra incognita of the Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has swallowed and digested us all is here.
I sometimes think of this enlightening and obvious NY Times headline I took a screen shot of at some point, a year or two after the worst of the recent mass death event, the Covid-19 pandemic. It explains a lot.
Many of those infected with Covid-19 that the virus did not kill are suffering the long-term effects of the disease, effects still not completely understood by science. Millions have also been broken in various ways by the terrifying prolonged traumatic experience of a highly contagious, international mass death spreading invisibly throughout human populations everywhere. Recall how frightful the early days of the outbreak were, before the vaccine, before we knew how to protect ourselves and each other, and how much insane behavior occurred, particularly here, in the United States, where our death toll, because of this insanity, was the largest of any nation, and close to the top of the per capita Covid-19 death list worldwide [2]. Imagine the effect on young children and adolescents, a mental health crisis rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed. Suck it up, you insane little bastards!
The human race, across the globe, has been recently mass traumatized by the pandemic and the effects are demonstrated in mass behavior worldwide. We have all been traumatized by it, few have escaped the effects of this long communal terror and all of the other strong feelings this terror evoked. When people are freaked out, people we don’t like can quickly take on the aspect of monsters, inhuman in their greed, stupidity, anger, sorrow, hypocrisy, whatever it is that distorts them into purely destructive beings without any redeeming feature.
I got a rare comment the other day, to my post about Kristi Noem’s lying about Senator Padilla being wrestled to the ground because he was “lunging at” her and hadn’t identified himself as a Senator (he had). In the course of it I wrote, describing the selective, irrational, often counter-factual, lying arguments of MAGA officials: This is a basic principle of all psychopaths: win the argument by removing context, deprive the other person of their right to do anything.
I had a long comment applauding this essential bit of truth and then running with it. The comment quoted numerous writers and thinkers I’d never heard of and included a link to a post written by someone who’d sent a critical comment to the British Medical Journal that the BMJ had declined to publish. Clicking the link to a blahg and starting to read the unpublished comment, it made sense that a scientific journal would decline to publish it, but official science’s refusal to publish it was cited as proof of science’s complicity in the worldwide conspiracy of deadly psychopaths. The comment continued into vaccine skepticism (with quotes and links) and conspiracy theories based on the coordinated actions of a worldwide cabal of undisclosed psychopaths.
I don’t dispute that many, probably most, CEOs, the leaders of the American Psychiatric Association, the far-right political activist billionaires who have waged a long war against “majoritarian tyranny” and the “administrative state”, those who embrace obvious lies for political advantage (99% of Republicans in Congress) are likely psychopaths, or, pragmatically obedient to psychopaths. That’s a different belief than, say, the antinatalist position that since we are not asked to consent to our own births (a tricky proposition, as even antinatalists must concede) that we are born involuntarily, into a life of pain, which gives us a moral obligation to liberate others about to be born without any choice in the matter [3].
The online world is an impossibly massive psychic battleground where intelligent, useful theories and idiotic and destructive ones are given equal weight by tens of millions worldwide, depending on how they hit individuals emotionally. Content moderation is something we routinely do in our daily lives, such as when confronted by advocates of the theory that powerful blood-drinking child raping cannibals like Tom Hanks control the liberal elites and the Deep State that persecutes White Christian Men.
For years YouTube posted links under sketchy videos, alerting viewers that the content contradicted known facts and should be viewed in that light. The owners of youTube have recently agreed with Trump/Musk/Thiel (three famous, extremely powerful psychopaths) that content moderation should be relaxed. You will, presumably, no longer have a corrective link under a January 6 riot video purporting to show that every rioter was a liberal, communist, FBI provocateur or Antifa supporter dressed as MAGA nation, that MAGA was completely peaceful and engaged only in “legitimate political discourse” and that all of the 1,600 rioters pardoned by Trump are owed large settlements for wrongful prosecutions and convictions. Same for the insane RFK Jr.’s claims about medicine, vaccines, toxic water, government bureaucracy, science, research, cancer, child malnutrition, etc.
As a matter of kindness and respect I wanted to post the guy’s long, gnarly, problematic comment and reply sympathetically to what I agreed with. As a matter of online responsibility, I couldn’t figure out how to do it without a bit of content moderation, which I would have applied to the sections about Covid, vaccines and so on. In the end, I’ll never know if the long, detailed comment was from a person or generated by AI (it was suspicious to me that there was no link or identifying information about the person making the comment, which was forwarded to me by WordPress).
We humans are really on our own out here.
[1] Apparently the CDC website/DOGE bots have not gone over and combed out this page, last updated 10-4-24. I suspect the current boss, floridly insane former long-time heroin addict Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make short work of this webpage, if it ever comes to his attention. Here’s a screenshot for posterity:
[3] Antinatalism or anti-natalism is the philosophical value judgment that procreation is unethical or unjustifiable. Antinatalists thus argue that humans should abstain from making children. Some antinatalists consider coming into existence to always be a serious harm. Wikipedia
“Wokeness” is a baby’s insult, like cooties, for use by adult-aged childish people who prefer a sophisticated sounding synonym for “poopy head” to use against those they hate for making them feel insecure, bigoted, stupid and inferior. Nice to see they’re giving the merch away for free, if you can believe any come-on by the cynical hucksters who ruthlessly exploit their innocently faithful believers.
The tyrannical style is sickening to observe, exhausting to read about and stains the history of the world with the suffering and blood of the meek, but it is something essential to recognize, mobilize against, defeat or get away from. The tyrant is concerned only with power over others and there is no consideration for them outside of being the one in charge of everyone around them. This personality type sees life as a brutal competition that inevitably involves combat to the death. They never back down, not to reason, appeals to decency or anything but superior force. If you can’t safely get away from them, you literally have to club them unconscious to end the senseless war, and then get away from them.
Being a tyrant is not a healthy or helpful way to go through life, of course, human evolution and all progress has been based on cooperation, increased understanding developed by groups working toward common goals. There is nothing healthy or useful about a tyrant, except to others as monstrously disposed to domination and selfishness as the tyrant himself. One tyrant is always useful to another tyrant, if they can find mutual benefit in an alliance.
These motherfuckers appear in every walk of life. They are domineering colleagues, abusive parents, faithless partners, treacherous playmates. They appear as corrupt public servants, mobsters, executives, bosses who take pleasure in demoralizing and humiliating employees, surgeons who blame their patients for not asking for the proper tests prior to harmful surgery.
There is, sadly, no shortage of these twisted creatures in our toxic society where everything is for sale, every interaction monetized for maximum profit, They are, many are duped into believing, the “winners” among us, because they “rule.”
You eventually learn that such creatures are always created by tremendous damage done to them before they had anything to say about it. There is a genetic component, to be sure, you can see the brain scans of a certain type, drowned in certain hormones in the womb, emerging devoid of empathy, connection or the capacity for regret. If you add to this genetic code mistreatment by caretakers, particularly traumatic violence, or continual fear and humiliation, you get your adult tyrant, or serial killer, or simply someone who cannot stop themselves from raging whenever they feel defied. Disagreement of any kind is seen as defiance to them, and will not be tolerated.
You may never discuss what happened, they don’t care what happened, it never happened. They live in a present where if they are not 100% in control, and acknowledged as your superior, there will be rage until you comply. The irrationality of these formidably insane fuckers makes any kind of meaningful conversation impossible. You will hear them angrily insist on plainly ridiculous things. If you produce evidence that what they are saying is not based on anything real they will forcefully counter that the lack of evidence for proof of their position PROVES that evidence has been hidden and that you are lying. It is sickening to be locked in a dispute with one of these sick fucks.
My advice is avoid them at the first sign of irrational insistence. It never gets better, it only intensifies until you finally react with anger. When you do: trial by combat, usually against at least 10 to one odds. Violence, of one kind or another, is the only thing these twisted souls are capable of when their claim to perfection is not accepted.
It’s impossible to keep in mind during a time of traumatic upheaval like our present moment in history — very few people are strictly good or irredeemably evil. Few people are undeniably good almost all the time, we think of them as highly evolved, wise, enlightened, righteous, bodhisattvas, saints. Few people are relentlessly evil, we think of them as dangerous psychopaths. All the rest of us are between these extremes, on a spectrum we move along according to our emotions. All of us are quite good sometimes, even exemplary although, when we feel victimized and completely justified, cruel, ruthless and unforgiving.
If you’re cruel and ruthless at times, does that make you an evil person? It depends on a lot of things. There is a time to be ruthless in this rough world we live in, sad to say. But as a permanent attitude, a tiny minority of us are ruthless all the time just as very few can be at our best in every moment. We aspire to be the best we can be in every moment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” A very tall order for the average earthling, because forgiveness always depends on the specific circumstances, and a sincere apology landing just right, but it states a great aspiration — a readiness to listen and forgive, which is a beautiful thing. It requires not hardening your heart against people who have done you wrong, if they sincerely try to make amends.
Hatred and division have actually been monetized, you can buy stock in lucrative corporations (like Palantir) that specialize in mining and analyzing personal data for the use of those who seek to exploit existing prejudices and make people hate and fear each other. Personalized messages influence millions to see the “other” as inhuman and evil. AI can also easily be harnessed to this task, dividing people by removing elements like nuance and context that make humans compassionate and replacing it with relentless algorithms that make AI conform to the creators of AI’s money-driven, bottom line, black and white, good/evil worldview.
We are divided by the calculated, constantly repeated, transactional lie that some people, people like us, are good, and other people, people like them (fill in hated group) are evil. This lie is the creation of evil people, which is then magnified by millions of sometimes fine and sometimes shitty people who are neither evil nor good all the time, repeating it widely to people who agree, often just to be agreeable. The lies that enflame our division are all promoted by algorithms that monetize engagement. Engagement is driven by fear, lust, agitation, need for confirmation, isolation, anger, outrage, etc. Now fear, hatred, outrage and the lies that drive them can be instantly spread to hundreds of millions, like a pandemic.
I think of the klansman, acting out of a reflex to protect a helpless toddler, diving into a river to save a drowning child. I imagine him in that moment acting out of human instinct, not stopping to think the kid might be black or a member of some other group he hates. Maybe it’s the Anne Frank good in me, seeking the good in someone otherwise hateful to me, but I think humans defaulting to their higher human impulses happens more often than we are aware. What unites us as vulnerable humans is far more powerful than what divides us, things that are mostly lies anyway.
The genius of homo sapiens, the self-named Wise Ape, is our ability to organize on a massive level based on abstract beliefs (granted often irrational, destructive ones). No other animal is able to build cultures of millions of its own and harness that organized mass to radically change the actual planet we live on. Humans are capable of the greatest things ever done, as well as the most atrocious. Almost none of us are Good and very few of us are Evil. There has to be some path to keeping this in the front of our consciousness as we move through these dangerous times.
Also today [May 5], at a meeting to announce that Washington, D.C., will host the 2027 National Football League draft, Trump confirmed that he suddenly decided to announce he was reopening Alcatraz because the word sounded strong. “It represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is uh, I would say the ultimate, right? Alcatraz. Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies…. Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz and just represented something, uh, strong having to do with law and order. We need law and order in this country. And so we’re going to look at it. Some of the people up here are going to be working very hard on that, and, uh, we had a little conversation. I think it’s gonna be very interesting. We’ll see if we can bring it back. In large form, add a lot. But I think it represents something. Right now, it’s a big hulk that’s sitting there rusting and rotting, uh, very, uh, you look at it, it’s sort of, you saw that picture that was put out. It’s sort of amazing, but it sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable, weak. And it’s got a lot of it’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting. And I think they make a point”
I grew up in a home where incoherent positions were taken regularly by our parents during our nightly standoffs at the dinner table. I was told over the years, with no uncertainty, that at three days old I silently declared myself an implacable enemy of my innocent father. My parents, both highly intelligent and well-educated, believed this to the day they died, eighty years later. As a result of this kind of mind-numbing idiocy, from two otherwise smart people, I have a lifelong intolerance for incoherence, particularly when it is being asserted as a fact you’d better goddamned believe, because I insist it’s true.
Spirited debate is sometimes necessary to resolve a disagreement. This process is not always easy or fun. But with good faith we can often thrash out solutions to difficult problems by producing arguments that persuade the other person to consider their position from another angle. This ability to reason a way to compromise is what enables democratic government to function. It stems from mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect and a recognition of objective reality that serves as the baseline for discussion and negotiation. It is the ability to reach consensus, and the logical methods used, that tyrants attack with everything they’ve got. The main weapons of tyranny are incoherence, fear and violence.
Incoherence is absolute, rigid, brazen, unblinking, it never changes its tune. Compromise is never possible when faced with an incoherent position defended to the death. The project of those who argue incoherently is total domination. As a matter of logic, it is impossible to reason with somebody who is rigidly irrational. If they offer no proof of something baseless that they insist is true, and they insist it’s true loudly and proudly anyway, you will never find common ground on anything.
This is the dilemma we find ourselves in today as Americans. One of Charles Koch’s most respected Libertarian thinktanks, The Heritage Foundation (author of Project 2025), maintains a database of election fraud going back to 1982. The documented incidents of voter fraud comprise a microscopic, statistically insignificant fraction of all votes cast. Even Bill Barr, as despicable and bellicose a Christian hypocrite as you will find anywhere, called MAGA claims of massive voter fraud bullshit.
Still, you will hear endless claims of widespread voter fraud used to support various voter suppression schemes in every state controlled by a gerrymandered MAGA legislature. If you can’t win at the ballot box, make an incoherent, but relentless argument, about the need to defeat widespread fraud. Anyone inclined to believe that Blacks, Muslims, Asians, college students, city dwellers, college students, naturalized citizens, gay people, environmentalists, humanists, atheists, those manipulated by Jewish practitioners of the Great Replacement “theory”, enemies of the anonymous, all-seeing Q, child blood drinking pedophiles, etc. commit voter fraud in massive numbers does not need proof. That there is a database, even if it has only 1,200 cases of fraud out of a billion votes cast, is enough to convince them.
It seems to me there are two basic kinds of people in society. One needs, above all, honest, mutual conversation, they are open to changing their minds in light of new information from a trusted source. The other kind is willing to accept lies, no matter how absurd, if there is something to be gained — money, membership in a group, prestige, power, being on the “winning team” — and they tend to be rigidly faithful in their beliefs. Black and white thinking characterizes this second type, a certainty that makes logic irrelevant. This kind also demonstrates a willingness to do whatever must be done to feel part of something greater than themselves.
I’ve heard this incoherent style called the dance of rage. The part of the brain that processes logic and can put things into cause and effect sequence is disabled if the anger center is inflamed. If you need to be right, above all else, you will fight to the death with any weapon that comes to hand. You may not be able to win a debate based on what actually exists, but there’s nothing stopping you from insisting on something that clearly doesn’t exist until the other person’s head simply explodes. If you can’t make the other person’s head explode, physical violence is your next best option, provided you have the numbers on your side.
You can’t reason with someone whose mind is closed. You may be able to find common ground, with enough skill and persistence, since we are all humans and have similar basic needs. Common ground is great, but often not enough to move the needle much. When you see that someone is prepared to assert incoherent talking points in order not to be wrong, that’s a pretty good sign it’s time to smile, wink and say goodnight.
There are some people who reveal an ugly side of themselves, often at the worst time for you. You cannot unsee the ugliness of contempt once it reveals itself to you. It’s human nature to make excuses for that person, if we love them, but once an ugly pattern emerges, with the insistence that only you are to blame for any bad feelings, wishful hoping will not change the person you are making excuses for or your relationship with them.
Just because you love dogs, and dream of having an affectionate lapdog, that love doesn’t turn the fish struggling in your lap into a dog. The fish will always die, no matter how many beautiful, friendly fish you try this with.
I had a childhood friend I haven’t seen for many years at this point. He called periodically and we spoke calmly about things in our lives. The reason we don’t see each other anymore is that in spite of provoking me to anger every time we met, for years, he refused to acknowledge this, instead insisting that I have a problem with my temper.
We all have a problem when we lose our temper, but that is another story. We do not all provoke our closest friends every time we get together with them. We also don’t all reflexively fight to deny that we are doing anything bad to anybody, ever.
I urged him several times over the years, if you see me start to get upset, hear my voice tighten, see my muscles tense and my face redden, pump the brakes and let’s change the subject for a while. He doesn’t know how to do this. It’s not his problem. It is mine, as he always reminded me. So, in the end I finally did what I needed to do not to be provoked by someone who can’t help himself. I stopped pretending this handsome fish was a cuddly lapdog.
He is, sadly, unable to view his actions, and the actions of others, with the same clarity. To him we were still friends, somehow, because I took his calls and we talked on the phone once in a while. I always like talking to people, it is one of my favorite things to do.
I like comparing notes on what we’ve learned over our aging lives. He listened as I recited hard lessons I’ve had to learn. This made him feel close to me, that I was always honest with him, and talked in a relaxed, nonjudgmental way. I didn’t mind talking to him, but that’s a much different thing than us being friends.
Friends comfort each other during painful times. Friends ask good questions when they don’t understand something. Friends extend the benefit of the doubt when the other one is off kilter, gently find out what’s wrong, how they can help. Friends accept responsibility when they hurt their friend. Friends make sure that ill-feelings do not fester in their dear ones. Friends are responsive, and honest, when a friend expresses unhappiness with the way things are.
Not all friendships can always be saved, though some can. No friendship can be saved if one friend is always blamed for any conflict, unless the blamed person is a masochist.
If I tell you a sad story of death, with a terrible lesson I reluctantly had to learn, and you reply that it was a beautiful story of life, with an inspiring lesson that is the opposite of the lesson I described, what can I possibly say, without being dishonest, that will make us friends again?
gratuitousblahg 