Oof. We’ve fallen so far, so fast.

They bought votes and still lost.

“I insist on being shocked. I am never going to become immune. I think that’s a kind of failure to see so much of it that you die inside. I want to be surprised and shocked every time.”
― Toni Morrison

Cartoon depicting cookie monster outside cookie factory with a spokesperson saying, "Let me assure you that as an unpaid 'special factory employee' Mr. Monster stands to personally gain nothing from this work.

How is this working out

I blame dystopian fiction for the expectations I am seeing. Ironically, those books largely come after 50 years (or more) for a reason. You think the revolution is immediate because that's when you're brought into the story. But if the fall took decades, the revolution also took decades.

The Peace of Wild Things Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I read this on dark days for a little solace.

I don't think people realize how complicated the federal government is and how much institutional knowledge matters and how it's currently being run by people who are just like "Fuck it, that sounds fun"

Unfortunately the stuff that most people are consuming online to distract themselves from politics (or because they don’t care about politics at all or think politics are going swimmingly) is also a covert pipeline designed to make them more conservative. Lifestyle, entertainment, pop culture, etc

Something Elon, Trump and Zuck all have in common is a desperate need to be liked and the most repellent personalities imaginable. They seek power because it's the only way to get people to associate with them

stopping the flow of HIV drugs to poor countries and demanding that foreign doctors stop distributing the meds already sitting in their clinics is so evil it is hard to wrap my head around. one day when when this is all history i will struggle to forgive anyone who voted for him

no pressure Bills, it’s just that you’re America’s last and only hope in a terrible joyless world that would be made worse with another Chiefs super bowl

Wow, it's almost like Trump is enacting a radical, incredibly unpopular agenda that he never mentioned or explicitly denied during the campaign, and the Democrats and press are so mentally committed to servile accommodationism that they're pretending he has a sweeping mandate for that agenda!

Feel deep in my bones that the backlash to all of this is going to be enormous. Not sure how it will manifest and when it will explode into view, but confident it’s coming.

Meijer is the best!

one day when this is all over — and it will be — i will personally never forget the people, famous or otherwise, who jumped on board with fascism because it was the easier thing to do at the time

Word of the day….