Thread by @jcsbimp

1) Two thinkers I greatly admire, one now sadly deceased, one still alive & wonderfully active, took tacks in political activism with which I took issue. I think of this and how it shows we can fight "on the same side" & still have reality thwart our efforts: even the best of us.

2) Robert Anton Wilson wrote fiction that opened me up like almost no other author's work could do - philosophically at least as much as artistically. But he also became a rabid anti-GWB'er to the extent that it put the lie to his claim he was post-dogmatic. He hated Bush.

3) Evidence of this is his late work, "TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution." It was, indeed, all about Bush Junior and his @GOP, and possibly had jabs at @FoxNews, even at that early time (2002). I didn't read it, because he was fulminating with fury and froth...

4) ... much as I'd enjoyed reading him describing The Amazing Randi and Carl Sagan frothily fulminating against "mysterians" in the name of CSICOP. It just didn't seem to me to be RAW at nearly his best.

5) The other hero to me, the one who's still alive and publishing great Web content - this time a specifically political journalist rather than a writer of metaphysical fiction dotted with amazing conspiracy theories - is Sam Smith of @prorev (Progressive Review).

6) His anti-Clinton content never put me off nearly as much as RAWilson's anti-Bush content. I could see and agree how anti-Progressive that establishment Democrat family could be. (I was married to a Limbaugh-loving conservative at the time - don't ask how that worked.)

7) The unfortunate aspect of that now opens itself up to me in retrospect, especially given the events of late 2016. Some of the speculation about the Clintons was of conspiracy-theory caliber, & I daresay some of it was bought by progressives, even better and more visible ones.

8) Both of these examples teach me that amazing, unconventional, insightful geniuses are human, too; that we can disagree and still make progress; that RAW's dictum "When dogma enters the brain, intellectual activity ceases" is still very true; ...

9) ... and that even a very smart, very active, very right-on-the-mark progressive can still - "but for the grace of God" - go down one of those dogmatic-brain-switching-off paths, given a very shrewd and powerful system inundating us all with information.

10) That sobers me up, but I think it can also give me (and others) hope. We'll make things better - even if the best among us sometimes seem distressingly imperfect AND susceptible to even those traps about which they so eloquently warn us.

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