The US in general and its PMC elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the human kittens this week and pay for school supplies and still have enough left over to make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The PMC cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry.
One thing we need to hang onto was said by the great John Berger shortly before his death at 90 - 'I am always surprised at just how bad tempered and angry I can get'. I used to hate myself for it. Now I realise it is what has kept me going. The tygers of wrath ARE wiser than the horses of instruction....(sometimes). It is emotional responses in the end that make you kick against stupidity. There is so much that is mediocre and stupid that we grow accustomed to ignoring it when we should be angry.
Those who complain about a writer being too pessimistic have been maleducated. They don't give a damn about your opinion and experiences. You are just another product to be consumed for a dopamine squirt. So do they expect you to just make some shit up so they can feel all warm-N-fuzzy inside? Aureliennnnnnn tell me a feel-good bedtime story.
Here's what they need to be reading so they understand how they got this way. Call is self exploration.
*The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure*
By - Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt
"The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.
This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization.
This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity.
This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
Aurelian, I've been reading your essays for two years now. At first I was quite impressed with your realistic take on things. However of late are think you are tending to windy over-generalization. In this essay, for example, it's not until the nineteenth of thirty-seven paragraphs that you discuss a historical (though counterfactual) circumstance for the first time: the way British politics could have developed from the mid-1970s onwards. Until that point, my eyes were glazing over. More specifics please, but less length.
What a great article, the points of which I agree entirely. As crazy as the world is today I always remember “things that can’t go on have a tendency to stop”. It is fascinating to watch.
It won't be so fascinating to watch when it does stop, as nature generally does not provide buffers, especially as we have seen to it that any potential buffers are being destroyed wholesale.
Starting civilisation again from the ruins will be much more difficult, as all the low-hanging fruit of easily procured ores have all been exploited, and the rest of the natural world of essential life decimated or in fact destroyed.
@aurelien2022: An interesting article. I think the political leaders of Europe are presently developing a new system of eliminating the competition from populist parties. Romania has been the test case.
Mr. Georgescu was successfully eliminated from the competition after a Presidential Election he was poised to win was cancelled. A new election was organized and a bonafide member of the ruling EU establishment was conveniently elected new President of Romania.
Meanwhile, Germany is still testing whether it is possible to ban AfD for "extremism". All seems to be moving forward for the PMC
“I could leave this job if I wanted to, but I am unwilling to face the consequences,”
Not really the case. It is very often a fact that the consequences make the action suicidal or at least unthinkable. For example, if you left your job in an economic depression the consequences might be that you and your family could unavoidably starve. Or if you are cowering in a bomb shelter, there is not much to do but continue cowering until the attack stops. The consequences of ceasing to cower and expressing your 'freedom' might be to get blown to bits. So this 'there is always something we can do' is very often not true at all. Of course it is probably a survival quality to look at each situation to consider if there is something which can be done, but often there is realistically nothing, and a more appropriate course is to come to terms with that fact.
There is something peculiar about "freedom" and the system of "rights" (not really "natural rights" oir such that philosophers of old have thought, but something much more expansive and pernicious set of rights, perhaps one might say the "rights to be."). The latter insists that we have a right to be "comfortable." We want to have X, Y, and Z, and do so "rightfully." We also think our worldviews should be respected as "right" as a matter of "rights," or, one might say, "the right to be right." Freedom, on the other hand, is built on risk. Dostoevsky famously said freedom means being able to say 2x2 = 5. But if you do, you have to face the Grand Inquisitor and the associated consequences, for example.
Ironically, this idea seems to have been lost to the Anglophone (and apparently, the Western) world: the wrong of the INGSOC that Orwell famously captured in 1984 was to insist that 2+2 = 5 and force that on the populace. "Freedom" meant being able to say 2+2 = 4...but if the Big Brother says, like Dostoevsky's Grand Inqusitor, 2+2 = 4 and forces it on the populace's face forever with the heel of the boot, does this mean "freedom"? This was apparently a problem that bedeviled the Englightenment thinkers from the beginning--this was, according to literary historian Robert Darnton's work, a common trope in the 18th century French writings deriving from the Enlightenment--not the big and famous work that we remember, but the "popular" versions that have been lost to history: they usually involve some "unreasonable" and "unelightened" people who stubbornly object to the Enlightenment who "naturally" get "put away" in some fashion.
I tend to think this is why the people who consider themselves righteous are the most dangerous people out there (Dostoevsky certainly thought so, in his other writings.). I reckon that these people really do believe that they are saying 2+2 = 4 and this entitles them, if they come in posession of real power, to arbitrarily throw away anyone who says otherwise. As it were, people who are knowingly "falsifying" history are not quite so dangerous. The people who are "correcting" history are the really dangerous people.
They explain it by the fact that civilisation made survival of individuals almost independent of their mental abilities. Today we probably got to a point when intelligence actually lowers chances of survival. The civilisation have provided many easy ways to thrive that do not require intelligence.
For a biologist, we are living in good times when many survive thus accumulating biological diversity. When good times end, this diversity will be tested against reality and much of it will die out. So naturally, we will get back to reality, but it will cost us much
A dissertation at the scope that matters, raking over the time-line, past to present, ...but what a conclusion: individualism is dead, the individual does not scale to the 1000 GPU, to the global scope.
The individual is local, the enemy is global. ...the individual has net negative value.
Outliers are squeezed between the ignorance of the most, and the mad self-destructive dominance of the few.
Surviving as an individual depends on one’s connection with “reality” and being awake as opposed to woke. Those of us who are awake will make the right decisions when the time is right. As for the rest…..
Prioritising emotionally feel-good actions over logical, viable policies while avoiding accountability (rabidly); safety over freedom, government provision over self reliance and family, being "nice" instead of courageous and virtuous....sounds like the feminization of politics. We've overreacted the worse male tendancies with the worst female ones.
Easy times made for week men, which brings the hard times to remake stronger men.
"the only way we will survive as individuals, and so help to preserve any kind of society, is to acknowledge and make use of the freedom we have, even if that’s uncomfortable." speaking of doing something that will make you uncomfortable, some have decided to do just that.
Hunger Strike!
Students and faculty at Stanford University announce they are joining the nationwide campus hunger strike movement to protest attacks on academic freedom and complicity in the Gaza genocide.
If ever there was a moment that demands civil disobedience, it is the hour of genocide.
An urgent ask from Stanford SJP is to sign and circulate the Drop the Charges petition https://actionnetwork.org/forms/supportstanford12?source=direct_link& which demands that the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office drop the felony charges brought against twelve Stanford University students and alumni following their participation in a protest advocating for Stanford’s divestment from corporations implicated in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
There is a certain unconscious irony that in the above article Aurelien's line : "One of Sartre’s lesser-known books is a psychological and philosophical study of the poet Charles Baudelaire." has an embedded link under the word "books" that leads not to a site where you can purchase Sartre's book but to the official Apple website in French (https://www.apple.com/fr/). Poor Auralien has now been click-jacked and monetized. The good news is that he is now attractive enough to the world of commerce that he is worth being assaulted and raped (am I allowed to use that bit of humor?)
Fascinating discussion - the only thing I think worth adding (or maybe it's a whole essay) is the next step after you decide that you are going to try and live more authentically. Moving from "you're not helpless" to "here's a few positive steps" might be worth doing as even if the system is collapsing there's lots of people trying to navigate the collapse without much guides.
(And even the older guides aren't necessarily much use since unlike the 19th century we are in an age of regress rather than progress)
Something I wrote a long time ago:
These people don't live in The Real World.
The US in general and its PMC elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the human kittens this week and pay for school supplies and still have enough left over to make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to provide for it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The PMC cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry.
One thing we need to hang onto was said by the great John Berger shortly before his death at 90 - 'I am always surprised at just how bad tempered and angry I can get'. I used to hate myself for it. Now I realise it is what has kept me going. The tygers of wrath ARE wiser than the horses of instruction....(sometimes). It is emotional responses in the end that make you kick against stupidity. There is so much that is mediocre and stupid that we grow accustomed to ignoring it when we should be angry.
Those who complain about a writer being too pessimistic have been maleducated. They don't give a damn about your opinion and experiences. You are just another product to be consumed for a dopamine squirt. So do they expect you to just make some shit up so they can feel all warm-N-fuzzy inside? Aureliennnnnnn tell me a feel-good bedtime story.
Here's what they need to be reading so they understand how they got this way. Call is self exploration.
*The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure*
By - Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt
"The generation now coming of age has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.
This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization.
This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity.
This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
Aurelian, I've been reading your essays for two years now. At first I was quite impressed with your realistic take on things. However of late are think you are tending to windy over-generalization. In this essay, for example, it's not until the nineteenth of thirty-seven paragraphs that you discuss a historical (though counterfactual) circumstance for the first time: the way British politics could have developed from the mid-1970s onwards. Until that point, my eyes were glazing over. More specifics please, but less length.
What a great article, the points of which I agree entirely. As crazy as the world is today I always remember “things that can’t go on have a tendency to stop”. It is fascinating to watch.
It won't be so fascinating to watch when it does stop, as nature generally does not provide buffers, especially as we have seen to it that any potential buffers are being destroyed wholesale.
Starting civilisation again from the ruins will be much more difficult, as all the low-hanging fruit of easily procured ores have all been exploited, and the rest of the natural world of essential life decimated or in fact destroyed.
@aurelien2022: An interesting article. I think the political leaders of Europe are presently developing a new system of eliminating the competition from populist parties. Romania has been the test case.
Mr. Georgescu was successfully eliminated from the competition after a Presidential Election he was poised to win was cancelled. A new election was organized and a bonafide member of the ruling EU establishment was conveniently elected new President of Romania.
Meanwhile, Germany is still testing whether it is possible to ban AfD for "extremism". All seems to be moving forward for the PMC
"There is always something we can do."
“I could leave this job if I wanted to, but I am unwilling to face the consequences,”
Not really the case. It is very often a fact that the consequences make the action suicidal or at least unthinkable. For example, if you left your job in an economic depression the consequences might be that you and your family could unavoidably starve. Or if you are cowering in a bomb shelter, there is not much to do but continue cowering until the attack stops. The consequences of ceasing to cower and expressing your 'freedom' might be to get blown to bits. So this 'there is always something we can do' is very often not true at all. Of course it is probably a survival quality to look at each situation to consider if there is something which can be done, but often there is realistically nothing, and a more appropriate course is to come to terms with that fact.
There is something peculiar about "freedom" and the system of "rights" (not really "natural rights" oir such that philosophers of old have thought, but something much more expansive and pernicious set of rights, perhaps one might say the "rights to be."). The latter insists that we have a right to be "comfortable." We want to have X, Y, and Z, and do so "rightfully." We also think our worldviews should be respected as "right" as a matter of "rights," or, one might say, "the right to be right." Freedom, on the other hand, is built on risk. Dostoevsky famously said freedom means being able to say 2x2 = 5. But if you do, you have to face the Grand Inquisitor and the associated consequences, for example.
Ironically, this idea seems to have been lost to the Anglophone (and apparently, the Western) world: the wrong of the INGSOC that Orwell famously captured in 1984 was to insist that 2+2 = 5 and force that on the populace. "Freedom" meant being able to say 2+2 = 4...but if the Big Brother says, like Dostoevsky's Grand Inqusitor, 2+2 = 4 and forces it on the populace's face forever with the heel of the boot, does this mean "freedom"? This was apparently a problem that bedeviled the Englightenment thinkers from the beginning--this was, according to literary historian Robert Darnton's work, a common trope in the 18th century French writings deriving from the Enlightenment--not the big and famous work that we remember, but the "popular" versions that have been lost to history: they usually involve some "unreasonable" and "unelightened" people who stubbornly object to the Enlightenment who "naturally" get "put away" in some fashion.
I tend to think this is why the people who consider themselves righteous are the most dangerous people out there (Dostoevsky certainly thought so, in his other writings.). I reckon that these people really do believe that they are saying 2+2 = 4 and this entitles them, if they come in posession of real power, to arbitrarily throw away anyone who says otherwise. As it were, people who are knowingly "falsifying" history are not quite so dangerous. The people who are "correcting" history are the really dangerous people.
Interesting fact from a different angle. Anthropologists say that average human brain size has shrunk from 1455 to 1344 (or 1304 depending on the research you find) in the past 10K years, in the age of civilisations https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full
They explain it by the fact that civilisation made survival of individuals almost independent of their mental abilities. Today we probably got to a point when intelligence actually lowers chances of survival. The civilisation have provided many easy ways to thrive that do not require intelligence.
For a biologist, we are living in good times when many survive thus accumulating biological diversity. When good times end, this diversity will be tested against reality and much of it will die out. So naturally, we will get back to reality, but it will cost us much
Yes. However, there is no evidence that brain mass correlates to intelligence.
African Gray parrots can learn to talk.
A dissertation at the scope that matters, raking over the time-line, past to present, ...but what a conclusion: individualism is dead, the individual does not scale to the 1000 GPU, to the global scope.
The individual is local, the enemy is global. ...the individual has net negative value.
Outliers are squeezed between the ignorance of the most, and the mad self-destructive dominance of the few.
Surviving as an individual depends on one’s connection with “reality” and being awake as opposed to woke. Those of us who are awake will make the right decisions when the time is right. As for the rest…..
Prioritising emotionally feel-good actions over logical, viable policies while avoiding accountability (rabidly); safety over freedom, government provision over self reliance and family, being "nice" instead of courageous and virtuous....sounds like the feminization of politics. We've overreacted the worse male tendancies with the worst female ones.
Easy times made for week men, which brings the hard times to remake stronger men.
"the only way we will survive as individuals, and so help to preserve any kind of society, is to acknowledge and make use of the freedom we have, even if that’s uncomfortable." speaking of doing something that will make you uncomfortable, some have decided to do just that.
Hunger Strike!
Students and faculty at Stanford University announce they are joining the nationwide campus hunger strike movement to protest attacks on academic freedom and complicity in the Gaza genocide.
If ever there was a moment that demands civil disobedience, it is the hour of genocide.
You can read more about this moral stance here:
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/05/hunger-is-our-weapon-against-injustice/?ml_recipient=154375676232730169&ml_link=154375611833386238&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-05-14&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation
An urgent ask from Stanford SJP is to sign and circulate the Drop the Charges petition https://actionnetwork.org/forms/supportstanford12?source=direct_link& which demands that the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office drop the felony charges brought against twelve Stanford University students and alumni following their participation in a protest advocating for Stanford’s divestment from corporations implicated in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Appreciate your thoughts, sensible sense-making. You're starting to look like a Parent Figure LOL.
There is a certain unconscious irony that in the above article Aurelien's line : "One of Sartre’s lesser-known books is a psychological and philosophical study of the poet Charles Baudelaire." has an embedded link under the word "books" that leads not to a site where you can purchase Sartre's book but to the official Apple website in French (https://www.apple.com/fr/). Poor Auralien has now been click-jacked and monetized. The good news is that he is now attractive enough to the world of commerce that he is worth being assaulted and raped (am I allowed to use that bit of humor?)
Fascinating discussion - the only thing I think worth adding (or maybe it's a whole essay) is the next step after you decide that you are going to try and live more authentically. Moving from "you're not helpless" to "here's a few positive steps" might be worth doing as even if the system is collapsing there's lots of people trying to navigate the collapse without much guides.
(And even the older guides aren't necessarily much use since unlike the 19th century we are in an age of regress rather than progress)