Journal shanen's Journal: Who says you can't handle the truth? 11
Who can't handle the truth?
YOU can't handle the truth!
And democracy is going to die for YOUR sins, too!
But me, too. I scream, you scream, we all scream at the truth. We all scream "Bloody Murder" when the wrong truth gores our own ox.
The ONLY difference is which truths make each person scream. Or, to make one of my blacker jokes, you show me a person who can't be made to scream at some truth and I'll show you a dead person. Or some kind of a saint, but probably a dead person.
Next hypothesis is about the meaning of "Do your own research". I think that almost all contemporary uses of that phrase really mean "I think you're an idiot and I can make you do what I want you to do." It isn't an honest and sincere suggestion, but rather the real meaning is "Stand by for mental boarding! I'm gonna feed you a whole lot of BS. But not just any BS. This is BS based on scientific analysis of your personal data and you are going to LOVE the flavor of this BS." In extreme cases, that's where Qanon nutjobs come from.
Nasty meme, eh? I just called you a fool, right? So go back to your favorite meme. Doesn't actually matter if it's cat videos or doomsday warnings about your least favorite political foes. Doesn't even matter if your favorite meme is true as long as it wastes your time and helps keep you away from the truths that make you scream.
"YOU can't handle the truth!"
One more thing. I opened with a big (quasi-religious) dangle about the death of the Republic and any form of representative government. The basic idea of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" was that "you can't fool all of the people all of the time". Talk about a wild goose chasing a red herring! No, it's a snipe hunt! No reason or need to fool all of the people at any time. All you need is to fool enough people one day a year. That day is called Election Day now, but I think it should be renamed as "Gullible Fools' Day". Sounds like a great excuse for a holiday with a really drunken party!
But I bet that after democracy is gone we're all going to scream for it the same way we scream for that ice cream we want so badly. Or maybe it's already dead and that's the reason so many people are already screaming so incoherently?
(Disclaimer needed. Or is it a confession? I know I'm repurposing the meme because one truth is that I never saw the movie that made the meme famous. To me it's just one of those floating memes that comes around a lot. You've probably met a stray cat like that? But highly contagious memes (and stray cats) often include elements of some truth, and this "Item" is mine for today.)
Yep (Score:2)
We're all doomed. Fascism and tribalism are on the rise and seem to be popular amongst certain groups.
Get A Handle On These (Score:2)
I’ve been thinking about things like Shays Rebellion, Adam Smith’s Sedition Act of 1798, the Federalist Papers, and why our forefathers quickly created a new republic, discarding their recently established Post American Revolutionary War’s “Confederation Congress” (they called themselves the “Continental Congress”, but historical revisionism prevails these days, so there’
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Small world syndrome? Just read about Washington's response to Shay's rebellion and those sedition laws in The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane. Want a page number? Probably around 300.
I think the current truth in America is "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%."
Related tweet of the day:
Putin : "The floggings will continue until morale improves. No? So how about more war crimes? All of my soldiers will be afraid of each other's testimony so they will fight to win!"
@ZelenskyyUa : "Shut up, Vladimir. You lost."
Bozo Putin : "Is not war crimes. Is potato."
Yeah my humor also tends to the dark side.
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Like your "current truth in America", BTW
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It's interesting if I'm wearing my historian's hat, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Yeah, I'm only a third of the way into it, but I still can't figure out where he's going.
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My take on John Keane is that he associates liberalism, the left, and capitalism with democracy as defined by the thoughts and actions around the time of the French Revolution. I think the etymology of those terms have changed since the 18th century, but that’s a whole book-long story in itself.
Referring to Trump as "35", and others more ambiguously, Keane thinks there is an imminent threat to
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I think I agree with most of your principles and some of your proposed solutions sound interesting. I've floated a number of solution approaches, but I see little traction for the big ones. Really hard to imagine a page-one rewrite of the Constitution before a sufficiently big collapse forces it to happen.
However on the topic of the Supreme Court, I have a relatively minor idea that should be easy to implement, so I'll recap it here. Take the politics out of the Court by making nonpartisan Justices more pow
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Not sure what you mean by "that club", but you reminded me of a hilarious historical fantasy book I read about Jefferson's malignant conspiracy to murder Meriwether Lewis. Unfortunately "Thomas Fleming" came up null in a search of 25 local library systems. (OPAC for academic libraries indicated he stopped writing about 30 years ago? (But I don't have academic borrowing privileges now.))
But I'm pretty sure that Keane was the source for a bunch of that sort of stuff and I wasn't shouting anything as I read it