Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got?
I'll tell you:
You had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you,
and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
Let me set up before your thoughts, good friends,
On supposition; which if you will mark,
You shall perceive how horrible a shape
Your innovation bears.
O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears,
And your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven
You'll put down strangers
kill them
cut their throats
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip in like a hound.
Say now the king
(as he is clement, if th' offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
Why, *you* must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs,
and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you
What would you think
To be thus used?
This is the strangers’ case;
And this
your mountainish
inhumanity.
____________
"The Stranger's Case," William Shakespeare
Sir Thomas Moore: Act II Scene 4
"What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust."
My book is about the tradition of American supremacy & the ways it shapes all of our lives, sabotages our natural shared society in order to steal all value from it for a few, makes others pay its unnaturally high costs ... and what we can do about it. armoxon.com/books/very-fin…
I find it useful to begin with art—with the idea that humans are art. The idea that to be a human is to be a unique expression of unsurpassable worth, whose worth is natural and inherent.
Focusing on this truth makes it easier to spot supremacy's anti-human lies.
These laws are *foundational*—literally, present at our founding. Our founding lies are: 1. We are not related to one another; a rejection of society 2. Life must be earned; a rejection of the humanity of others 3. Violence redeems; a rejection of one's own humanity
Well I'm given to understand that today & for a VERY limited time, our nation's political violence party is shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.
(link to essay in thread)
I'm kidding, of course. They've already decided who is to blame. It's the same culprit they hold at fault for every other real and imaginary problem in their lives: Everybody except them.
I think we all know the news by now. Yesterday in Pennsylvania, a gunman took some shots in the direction of the former president—the adjudicated rapist, 34-time convicted felon, insurrectionist, and daily fomenter of political violence, Donald Trump.
LOST is streaming on Netflix—an excellent time to revisit the show, using the viewing guide I'm publishing in my newsletter (link in thread).
Many think the story isn't coherent. I think it was. My lens is the one the show itself suggests: a dialectic of observation and belief.
This dialectic isn’t too tough to detect. There’s even an episode called “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” In a dialectic, the opposing ideas operate in concert with one another. While these ideas are oppositional within the artistic work, they aren’t opposites.
The main reason I want to do this is as an investigation of story—particularly an investigation the way I look at story. LOST is story that lends itself very well to investigation of how story does and doesn’t work.
I've been thinking of American conservatism—which has proved itself irreducible from American fascism—in terms of burdens.
I find burdens an apt metaphor, because christian fascists claim to worship a Jewish rabbi from antiquity named Yeshu ben Yosef (Mr. Jesus if you're nasty).
Interesting thing about young Mr. Jesus: He was very sharp-tongued with the politically influential religious hypocrites of his day. There's a whole chapter of him reading them the riot act, calling them whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers and blind guides etc etc.
It's a real hum-dinger that ends with Mr. Jesus saying he doesn't really see how any of them are going to escape being condemned to hell, and you should check out the whole thing, but today I just want to think about his open salvo, which is an amazing tee-shot.
I want to dig into this, since my book VERY FINE PEOPLE comes out tomorrow, and it's in large part about precisely this sort of polemic trickery in service of bullshit apologia of supremacy.
There's a slight of hand at the start that catapults us into the massive lie.
Let's do the slight of hand, first. The article presupposes to answer the question "Did Trump call Neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'?
This is savvy if what you want to exonerate the comments, because it answers the wrong question, and dismisses the right one.
What Trump said is that there are "very fine people on both sides."
That would be the side counter protesting against the Nazis who organized a pro-Confederacy protest.
And then the side full of Nazis and those who found common cause with Nazis.
THE HUMAN PROBLEM
Last week an image went viral online. It was generated by a computer from the classic movie 12 Angry Men. It added no value, and it was being used for no good reason.
It's a perfect encapsulation of where our dominant cultural narrative has brought us.
It's my belief that things that provide positive value to humans are good, and that those who make good things should be compensated for it.
I also believe that people should have access to good things whether or not they can pay. It's the reason I love libraries, for example.
This strikes me as an appropriate way to organize society, provided that we believe society is meant to benefit humans rather than money, and that humans—being inherent generators of value and of limitless potential value—deserve the fruits of society even if they can't pay.