Footnotes and Scare Quotes

This piece by @martyrmade contains introduction and post-piece commentary by Tom Woods, and it captures  my  feelings so well. Don’t judge the misled while refusing to acknowledge the synchronized rot of the institutions that failed them: On Twitter an account called @martyrmade went on a Tweet barrage a few days ago, and I think it's worth reading. Glenn Greenwald, who even though he's on the Left is far more serious than most people in the Official Libertarian world, describes this Tweet thread this way: " This is an absolutely brilliant exposition on the underlying mindset, grievances and motivations of Trump/MAGA supporters. It's not as cathartic as screaming Racist and Fascist but much more illuminating. Don't agree with every particular, etc. etc., but hope everyone reads this." It's long. But you won't stop reading, I promise: I think I've had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to e...

Sharing this opinion piece because I think it captures the scene so well.   Over the past several months I’ve been working on fully internalizing the idea that two people can disagree drastically on politics without either of the two people involved being stupid (or poorly influenced, or badly motivated, or whatever). A lot of it came down to accepting a difference in people’s order of priorities when good principles conflict with each other.  Unfortunately, we as Americans can’t easily scratch that itch and have that kind of uniting self-reflection when our media leads the way with a tribal, self-loving, disconnected, selective devotion to non-questioning and an amazing propensity to ask the wrong people what their opinions are. 

 I'm sharing here a chapter from the book I referred to earlier. Thousands of observations on the "front lines," so-to-speak. And he drew these conclusions in 1999. 

A few weeks ago I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I definitely would recommend it, and I have a lot of respect for a man or woman who steps up and dedicates their life to helping fix something wrong. Someone who decides to be a stone catcher. It is a problem when justice depends on how good your lawyer is, to say the very least. I don’t accept some of the claims sprinkled in the book, expressed as a matter of obvious fact when in reality they are his opinion or interpretation. But the respect and admiration remains.  Having read Hillbilly Elegy in the same year (also a major endorsement), I am now devouring the following book written by a psychiatrist in the slums of Britain. He has had thousands of patients in the hospital and prison where he works, and he has collected his many observations in it, topic by topic, all related to what turns the lower class into a lower caste. Just as compelling and heartbreaking as the first two books, with thousands of observed lives to back i...

How you can cover up an outbreak, hoard supplies and information, export faulty supplies made by slaves, simultaneously invade Hong Kong, and come out on the other side smelling like a rose. From the International Federation of Journalists. https://www.ifj.org/fileadmin/user_upload/IFJ_-_The_Covid_Story_Report.pdf

Not surprising, but worth noting... https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2021/05/10/this-email-is-on-background-with-quote-approval-492792

 Michael Crichton (yes, that one) made an observation almost twenty years ago. He described something he coined as the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: " Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect [...]  Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate ab...