Commonplacing
From my experience in fascist countries, I have come to one conclusion. Rules of democratic fair play should be reserved for democrats. Decencies of liberalism should be reserved for liberals. But the only way to treat a fascist is to treat him the way he intends to treat you—first. That means hitting him below the belt before he has a chance to hit you below the belt.
– Frances Fineman Gunther (ca. May 1934 in Vienna), quoted by Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 8
When we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future….
But as we sat down at our desks, we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around.
– “The boys in our liberal school are different now that Trump has won,” The Guardian, November 15, 2024.
This news has hit me harder then any stupid cabinet announcement.
The principle that a commander has an obligation to punish war crimes by his subordinates is not a progressive development of the law promoted by the advocacy community. Instead, the duty to punish stands out as an ancient legal norm interwoven into the domestic law of the United States and which the United States has incorporated into international legal instruments.
I’m nostalgic for the days when you could tell the difference between a message announcing a Cabinet appointment and a trollish shitpost.
“Idiocracy,” dir. Mike Judge (2006) 📽️
One of the great prophecies of human history—practically a holy text at this point.
From Chicago, John [Gunther]’s editor sent a request for “more diversified” articles: “The whole paper has been loaded with anti-Hitler copy for two weeks.” The time had come, his editor insisted, “to write about something else besides the infringement of personal liberty.” The Daily News was laying itself open to the charge of bias; the news columns shouldn’t be used “for the advocacy of a cause.” . . .
According to a columnist for the Montclair Times, [H. R.] Knickerbocker had gotten himself “quite excited” about Jews and failed to depict the German perspective. His reports were “hearsay,” they were exaggerated, they could scarcely be believed. “There must be two sides to the question."
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
The fact that Trotsky, Mussolini—and Goebbels, too—had all started as journalists created its own sort of dynamic with the correspondents. The politicians liked turning the tables, deploying the reporter’s bag of tricks to their own advantage: turning on the charm, trading information without giving too much away, polishing the quotations attributed to them. For their part, the reporters put themselves, at least imaginatively, in the politicians’ shoes. I want power . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
How wretched it was to think that one’s own fate depended on what some farmer in Iowa felt—or more to the point, how he voted. Still, if Herbert Hoover could be got rid of, if FDR prevailed . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 6.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
– Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, November 3, 2024.
Looks like pieces of my old “Commonplacing” tumblelog were saved by the Wayback Machine too. I see quotes that meant something to me in 2009.
In the name of civilization, rebellious villages would be burned to the ground.
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 3.
Written in connection with one of her protagonist’s reporting on the Syrian Rebellion in 1926.
We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday 2024), Epilogue, “Decouple, De-Risk, Rebuild”
Autocracy is a political system, a way of structuring society, a means of organizing power. It is not a genetic trait. Particular cultures, languages, or religions do not necessarily produce it. No nation is condemned forever to autocracy, just as no nation is guaranteed democracy.
Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday, 2024), chap. 1.
. . . It was their relationship with media, with televisions, radios, books, blogs, which helped them to re-imagine themselves over and over.
Peter Pomerantsev, This is Not Propaganda (2019), part 6
In This is Not Propaganda (end of part 2), Peter Pomerantsev writes of his Russian family, based in Kyiv, becoming stateless in the late 1970s. The KGB had accused his father, Igor, of “circulating defamatory fabrications, regular listening to hostile broadcasts and contacts with foreigners.” They recommended he emigrate.
In many ways Igor was lucky. He had the semblance of choice. The [KGB] major had made it clear that if he stayed, he would have the full seven years in prison and five exiled in the Soviet provinces to face. If he had been a Ukrainian-language poet, [Pomerantsev continues, Igor] would have been locked up immediately. Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outside the cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
The Kremlin switches messages at will to its advantage, climbing inside everything: European right-wing nationalists are seduced with an anti-EU message; the Far Left is co-opted with tales of fighting US hegemony; US religious conservatives are convinced by the Kremlin’s fight against homosexuality. And the result is an array of voices, working away at global audiences from different angles, producing a cumulative echo chamber of Kremlin support, all broadcast on RT.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, last section.
“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, section: “The Call of the Void”.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
So that’s Perplexity’s real innovation here: shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.
Elizabeth Lopatto, “Perplexity’s grand theft AI”, The Verge, June 27, 2024.
The Republican Party’s divorce from the rule of law is complete.
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
Any general machine can be misused by any malign actor with ill intent. The pursuit of failsafe guardrails in AI will prove futile, for it is impossible to predict every bad use that anyone could make of a machine that can be asked to do anything. That is to say, it is impossible to build foolproof guardrails against us, for there are too many fools among us.
Jeff Jarvis, “Demote the Doomsters”, Buzz Machine, May 21, 2024. via @[email protected]
Death Wish for Their Soldiers
I can’t shake these lines from Stasik’s “Lullaby for the Enemy” about Ukraine’s Donbas:
You wanted this land
Now mix with it
You are my land now
Sleep, sleep, sleep . . .
I’m guessing that “earth” would be another translation option.