Things have gotten steadily worse just in the past week. Trump’s goons have assaulted a US Senator. He has illegally deployed the military against American civilians. Today is a day of protest, and it’s quite possible the administration will respond with violence.
Stay calm and stay focused. Things may yet come to an armed uprising, but this isn’t the time.
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It shouldn’t be necessary to write this. The way Trump is running the presidency is so obviously hostile to liberty that libertarians should be unanimous in opposing him. Some people who call themselves libertarians, though, don’t quite get it. A few actually support him.
The Democrats aren’t good, but the issues with them aren’t as urgent. The first thing is to stop the country from sinking into dictatorship, then we can worry about excessive regulation and runaway deficit spending. Let me outline the main reasons Trump is a major danger and requires unequivocal opposition.
A lot of this will be familiar to many of you. I’m sorry that I have to belabor the obvious. Even if it’s all familiar, you might find some value in having all these items in one place.
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Narratives are a powerful thing in shaping a culture or a political movement. Narratives are patterns of explanation that turn a series of events into a story. They ascribe a consistent purpose to actions and show one event leading to another. Sometimes narratives stray from the facts, but they don’t have to. What makes a narrative is an underlying direction and a causal chain.
They’re often more powerful than facts for influencing people. Convince people of a narrative’s validity, and they’ll ignore or reject what doesn’t fit it. They’ll accept even implausible conclusions that fit with it. They’ll admire people who promote it and dislike ones who contradict it. To persuade large numbers of people, it isn’t enough to muster facts; it’s necessary to assemble them into a story.
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My mind keeps coming back to Yeats’ 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.” He wrote it shortly after World War I, knowing that nothing had really been resolved. In retrospect, we know the answer to his question, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
We also know the answer to that question today in America. We see again that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” There’s plenty of noise opposing Trump, yet too little broad-based opposition. Congress is, with a handful of exceptions, divided between the Minion Party and the Coward Party. Outrage should be building to the point of besieging the White House, but as far as I can tell, it’s declining. People’s idea of opposing Trump is to put “#Resist” into a social media hashtag.
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With Balticon coming around again, I took another look at their code of conduct. It still has some disturbing features, and I’m not going, although it’s within a day’s driving distance and will likely have a good filk program.
There is a blanket prohibition on “Slurs and derogatory comments about a person, group, or category of people.” That presumably includes, just to come up with some examples, the Chengdu con chair, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Russian army, billionaires, Neil Gaiman, and the new Pope. It will be one dull convention if no one can say anything bad about any of those people! When attendees can be accused without eyewitness testimony, it’s even worse. This isn’t just hypothetical; in 2022 Balticon used this provision to make life miserable for one of its program participants.
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