Commonplacing

    If you pretend this isn’t real, it’s very exciting.

    – Laurie Kilmartin on “Have I Got New for You” (U.S.), s. 2, ep. 4, March 8, 2025.

    Sometimes you got to Ukrainesplain shit to people.

    – Roy Wood Jr., “Have I Got News for You,” season 2, episode 3, youtu.be….

    Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

    – Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” (1940)*

    * Quoted in Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor Books, 2002), 21.

    The one who deals the blow forgets.
    The one who carries the scar remembers.
    – Haitian proverb*

    * Quoted in Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism (St: Martin’s, 2022), front matter.

    Shit is Getting Conspiratorially Dark

    “Senior U.S. Official to Exit After Rift With Musk Allies Over Payment System” (Wasington Post) https://archive.ph/omS67

    Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide.… The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies…

    This Musk business is getting increasingly dark. Democrats and Republicans should fight this, except there aren’t any Republicans in government anymore.

    Valuing loyalty over expertise and allowing violence to become an end in itself can result in a deprofessionalized and demoralized military, especially if misguided wars end in defeat.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), concl.

    Democratic heads of state often see their departures from office as an opportunity to build on their leadership legacy. The authoritarian regards the end of being adulated by followers and controlling everything and everyone as an existential threat.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen (Norton, 2020), chap. 10.

    Strongman regimes … turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture, or sexual assault.…

    Rulers who come into office with a criminal record … have a head start. They know that making the government a refuge for criminals who don’t have to learn to be lawless hastens the ‘contagion effect.’ So does granting amnesties and pardons, which indebt individuals to the leader and make blackmailers, war criminals, and murderers available for service.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 7.

    Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

    Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

    At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.

    Hitler had been in his early twenties when he made an important discovery. He felt most alive when losing himself in something he found sublime, like a Richard Wagner opera or the sound of his own voice.

    – Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), chap. 1.

    We sometimes describe aggressors as “brainwashed” by propaganda that dehumanizes their victims, so much so they are “hypnotized” into committing atrocities. But what if the “dehumanising” propaganda rather legitimizes cruelty, makes it ordinary, and the aggressor sees the victims' humanity all too clearly?

    – Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.

    Did the [Ukrainians'] Russian relatives really “believe” [that the Bucha atrocity was fake]? That’s the wrong question. We are not talking about a situation where people weigh evidence and come to a conclusion but rather one where people no longer seem interested in discovering the truth or even consider the truth as having considerable worth.… Polls in Russia concluded that Putin’s supporters thought that “the government is right, solely because it is the government and it has power.” Truth was not a value in itself; it was a subset of power.

    – Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 4.

    We often wonder why people follow leaders who are wildly self-centered, greedy, and hateful. But that can be the very essence of their power: they allow their followers to indulge in their most cruel and hateful impulses, even as they foster the illusion that they are part of a noble and courageous spiritual mission.

    – Peter Pomerantsev, How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler (PublicAffairs 2024), chap. 2.

    🙃 Unprecedented times?

    It’s like being killed by a bear. Lots of people have been killed by a bear, and so that’s not at all unprecedented. But in this case, the bear is wearing a thong and he beats you to death with a dead, wet owl. The problem and outcome are the same – bear attack, death – but somehow, it all feels so, so much stupider.

    – Chuck Wendig, “How to Write Words and Make Art in This Dire Era of Clowns and Cowards,” terribleminds.com.

    The opening paragraph of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a doozy:

    Lost in the shadows of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there—the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat.

    Considering the $16.1 billion in contracts the federal government has handed to SpaceX since 2003, the interests of SpaceX and the agencies counting on the company to fulfill the nation’s space policy goals are increasingly aligned. “We call it agency capture,” says [Jared] Margolis. “Agencies are not there to protect the public; they’re there to promote the businesses that they regulate, in a lot of ways.”

    “Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover” by Abby Vesoulis, Mother Jones, January/February 2024 issue, American Oligarchy.

    Good and healthy societies do not require to be ruled by terror. This is not to deny that terror is an enormously effective means of creating a menacing machine. The shrewd exploitations of fear is an ancient means of ruling. But it is also a dangerous way of ruling. For one thing, it cuts the rulers themselves off from reality. In a society where no one can complain, no one knows the depths of resentment ready to flare up once the opportunity comes.

    – Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1939), 11.

    …The only thing more vexing than being a Trump critic is being a Trump ally.

    Jonathan Martin

    House Speaker Mike Johnson announces that male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump may continue to use the men’s bathrooms.

    Radley Balko

    🏳️‍⚧️ From the Church of Sweden via @transworld.bsky.social:

    God, today on Transgender Day of Remembrance, I want to remember everyone who doesn’t get to be called by their right name, everyone who is hated so much that it leaves an imprint on their soul, everyone who needs a place where they can breathe, and where they can be themselves. Amen.

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