Will you live?
[A]ll death is certain. We don’t get to choose whether we live or die. We only get to choose if we live before we die.
New York
- In Grub Street, Mark Byrne took issue with a friend’s comment that the Greenwich Village restaurant Cafe Cluny is “too expensive for what it is.” “This is Manhattan: ‘Too expensive for what it is’ is written in rat’s blood on the stoops of our walk-ups,” he riffed.
Revolution
Revolutionaries ask Americans to do not simply what is bad but also what is impossible. To a revolutionary who believes in racial immanence, only a reinvention of America as we know it would suffice. Yet even then, racial immanence presents further obstacles. Any revolution would, in time, prove insufficiently revolutionary. Such is the nature of maximalist thinking. After all, the white people remaining in the theoretical new nation would have been socialized by the ancient regime into white supremacy and conditioned to uphold it at all costs. What do we do about them? There is no end to the matter—at least not one that anyone cares to identify.
Tal Fortgang, The Incrementalists and the Revolutionaries
Lighting lanterns
That’s the best we can do in life — be truthful and hope those truths become lanterns for others as they wander through the dark.
Patty Davis, paying tribute to Matthew Perry’s candor about addiction, via Frank Bruni
In a lot of ways, my blogging is striving toward such lantern-lighting — posting provocative thoughts about questions to which I may have no answers. It may be untrue that “together we can do anything,” but I believe that we can do more together than we do fussin’ and fightin’ with one another.
How to fight The Machine
How to fight back? Religion is one way. Have a family at a young age instead of wasting your life buying crap on Amazon. Become a carpenter or a welder. Keep bees.
David Samuels, Year Zero: The Age of the Machines Demands Its Own Samizdat
Heroes in their own little minds
This week, I watched videos of people literally burning Harry Potter books, like latter-day Nazis, in the cause of transgender liberation. It’s safe to say, I think, that many of these people have lost their minds — just by staying online. And they not only think they’re perfectly sane; they think they’re heroes.
Andrew Sullivan, We Are All Algorithms Now
Shorts
- Israel omitted from online maps in China amid war on Hamas in Gaza
- A professor at an esteemed college mentioned this week that when he likened the airport mob in Dagestan to a “pogrom,” not one of his students knew what the word meant. (Peggy Noonan, hyperlink added)
- Here is a truth: Anything good for cable news is bad for humanity. (Peggy Noonan)
- No man will give his life for a question mark; he will for an exclamation point! (Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who attributed it to John Paul II via Cardinal Edwin O’Brien. All this via Raymond de Souza)
- There’s a certain amount of chutzpah among Democrats to assume that it’s only the other side pursuing a culture war. (Ruy Teixeira)
- Nobody ever quite knew what to make of [Edward] Abbey, which is a status we should all aspire to. (Paul Kingsnorth)
- Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth. (George Packer in 2020)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 