Stand Your Ground laws are my favorite example, it literally creates a State of Nature forcefield around anyone who feels like popping off a few shots at the unfortunates who still live in a society. Video game shit. The second Florida passed that, I knew there was no turning back.
As usual this articulates our present moment. It also brings to mind a quote from an insane smalltime Ohio politician, regarding 2020 mask mandates: "Your freedoms stop at the end of my nose," a perversion of "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins."
This is all true as far as it goes, and simultaneously outside the realm of gun-toting (which of course affect everyone) we have a country where the norm is to be hemmed day-to-day by a wide range of rules, sensical and non-, public and private, many of which most of the population is quite on board with.
Not to make any kind of horrid argument about the inner pain of shooters; I'm thinking about everyone else. It's just such an odd dichotomy as to make me wonder how we think about them together. Do we clamp down hard everywhere the NRA's grubby fingers don't reach as a means of compensating? Like, most of modern airport security theater was imposed in the five years after Columbine. (Yes, I'm sure racism is part of it.)
Of course in the war of all against all, nothing says every combatant is an individual. Thinking about the "family" dentist that justifies charging extortionate rates because "I have to protect my family first."
This is really very poignant stuff, summarizes and builds on a lot of things I’d thought about separately but not together. I sort of want to hear it read aloud, or read a comic based on it (like Nate Powell’s work, for example here:
I think Margaret Thatcher did an act of magic, or 'magick' if you must.
The late Terry Pratchett had a character with whom he seemed generally to agree, that is Death, aver that Justice were a (to use the translation of 'Max Stirner'ʼs word) 'spook in the head', but it were fundamentally important to people, and that other important things were as well spooky. A Monty Python's Flying Circusʼ sketch featured a tower block created by hypnosis in whose belief its happy tenants were wise enough to continue….
This post really resonated with me! I'm reading The Magic Mountain now and it's interesting to see some parallels of Hans Castorp's libertarian young life and his 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' death.
Excellent, as always. I have wondered if it is the obvious dysfunction and unrepresentative nature of American democracy that makes this worldview make more sense to people. I’m in Canada, where we have a lot of guns, media that are almost entirely American, and pretty much the normal percentage of fucked-up people. But we have much less of this; not just fewer mass shootings, but also much less of this default to violence. Both the federal government and I think all the provinces (even Alberta) have also changed their ruling parties in the last ten years.
I grieve these deaths with you but I don't think you understand the extent to which Franklin's Join, or Die, is not the solution but the original anti-social logic at work. Hume, in a letter to Smith, describes Franklin as terribly factious: he means divisive. For Franklin, Americans were too constitutionally divided to kill enough people and take enough land: they needed a better and more local killing-and-dispossessing project. Unity, but a very factious form of it.
Essentially, reduce it to a series of Power Point bullets, give each statement a positive twist and you have the unwritten but blatantly obvious republican party platform.
Stand Your Ground laws are my favorite example, it literally creates a State of Nature forcefield around anyone who feels like popping off a few shots at the unfortunates who still live in a society. Video game shit. The second Florida passed that, I knew there was no turning back.
This is exactly how it feels. The only message people in power are capable of delivering is "you're on your own."
As usual this articulates our present moment. It also brings to mind a quote from an insane smalltime Ohio politician, regarding 2020 mask mandates: "Your freedoms stop at the end of my nose," a perversion of "Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins."
A tour-de-force portrait of the prevailing psychosphere.
Needs to be said.
I share your despair, John.
Next week, I'll have a positive, four point plan for solving all of these problems.
But right now, it feels overwhelming.
Very good. I'll remember this one. For some reason, made me recall Gary Wills short essay after Sandy Hook. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/12/15/our-moloch/
This is all true as far as it goes, and simultaneously outside the realm of gun-toting (which of course affect everyone) we have a country where the norm is to be hemmed day-to-day by a wide range of rules, sensical and non-, public and private, many of which most of the population is quite on board with.
Not to make any kind of horrid argument about the inner pain of shooters; I'm thinking about everyone else. It's just such an odd dichotomy as to make me wonder how we think about them together. Do we clamp down hard everywhere the NRA's grubby fingers don't reach as a means of compensating? Like, most of modern airport security theater was imposed in the five years after Columbine. (Yes, I'm sure racism is part of it.)
Of course in the war of all against all, nothing says every combatant is an individual. Thinking about the "family" dentist that justifies charging extortionate rates because "I have to protect my family first."
This is really very poignant stuff, summarizes and builds on a lot of things I’d thought about separately but not together. I sort of want to hear it read aloud, or read a comic based on it (like Nate Powell’s work, for example here:
https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/ )
I think Margaret Thatcher did an act of magic, or 'magick' if you must.
The late Terry Pratchett had a character with whom he seemed generally to agree, that is Death, aver that Justice were a (to use the translation of 'Max Stirner'ʼs word) 'spook in the head', but it were fundamentally important to people, and that other important things were as well spooky. A Monty Python's Flying Circusʼ sketch featured a tower block created by hypnosis in whose belief its happy tenants were wise enough to continue….
This post really resonated with me! I'm reading The Magic Mountain now and it's interesting to see some parallels of Hans Castorp's libertarian young life and his 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' death.
Excellent, as always. I have wondered if it is the obvious dysfunction and unrepresentative nature of American democracy that makes this worldview make more sense to people. I’m in Canada, where we have a lot of guns, media that are almost entirely American, and pretty much the normal percentage of fucked-up people. But we have much less of this; not just fewer mass shootings, but also much less of this default to violence. Both the federal government and I think all the provinces (even Alberta) have also changed their ruling parties in the last ten years.
I grieve these deaths with you but I don't think you understand the extent to which Franklin's Join, or Die, is not the solution but the original anti-social logic at work. Hume, in a letter to Smith, describes Franklin as terribly factious: he means divisive. For Franklin, Americans were too constitutionally divided to kill enough people and take enough land: they needed a better and more local killing-and-dispossessing project. Unity, but a very factious form of it.
Essentially, reduce it to a series of Power Point bullets, give each statement a positive twist and you have the unwritten but blatantly obvious republican party platform.
A really good one, John. Thanks.