Gheorghasbord: Yin

Got a selection of odds and ends for you over the next few days. Gonna do a bit of yin-yanging, if you will. Even if you won't. Not stopping me. 

Today, we'll start with the bleak, the dark, the cowardly buffoonery that's helping to enable it.

Sarah Kendzior is a journalist, author, and researcher. She's studied and written extensively on the rise of Donald Trump and his coterie of ghouls - and the cultural conditions that enabled it. She writes a newsletter on Substack, and posted a beautifully stark piece yesterday, which included the following thought: 

A government shutdown was always the goal. The premature ending, the stripping for parts, the theft without pretense of duty. The open abandonment of the public good. The apathy at abandonment and the avarice in apathy. The slaying of seasons, the torture of time, the collapse of chronology: when promises turn to premises and premises to pixelated dust. There is honor in real dust: this is not that.

When you are ruled by a technocratic death cult, the concept of leverage changes. A general strike does not pose the same threat to the powerful when their goal is to destroy the national economy. A protest does not have the same impact when officials are devoid of shame. A spectacle does not hold the same power when AI lies are generated with a whisper to a soul-stripping robot. A vote is an illusion when elections lack integrity. Calling your representative is a grim farce when your representative serves transnational oligarchy — and sells it American sovereignty.

We'll follow up that softly-whispered damnation with a more forceful condemnation from Ta-Nehisi Coates. Speaking at an event in Minneapolis, Coates offered this measured and typically cutting critique of the institutions and individuals whose cowardice has defined this era:

@mikosataylorcoaching Just saw Ta-Nehisi Coates live in Minnesota and y’all… his words were a balm to my soul. No fluff. No filter. Just truth. 🖤 “You don’t have to fix it all—you just have to be human where you stand.” That part. 🎤 Thank you @StKates + The O’Shaughnessy for this space. 📚 Support Black authors. Listen when they speak. Share their work. #TaNehisiCoates #msp @St. Catherine University #SupportBlackAuthors #BookTok #BlackWritersMatte ♬ original sound - Mikosa Taylor | Business Coach

I might've chosen any one a dozen other fucking things to close with, but here's one that gives us tragedy and comedy in equal measure. Last week at a protest in Oakland, an ICE agent appears to have shot a tear gas canister into the face of local minister Jorge Batista, the aftermath of which you can see below (there's video, but it's not a fun watch).

A different angle of the confrontation reminds us that ICE and its agents aren't some unbeatable monolith. Rather, they're largely undertrained, scared, and overmatched. See, as an example, what certainly appears to be the urine stain on the shooter's pants, right where it would be if one were to piss oneself in fear.

We're gonna beat these losers. Because there are more of us than there are them, and because the cause of righteousness will bring more and more people to it as time goes on. In the meantime, keep calling out their cowardice, disgraceful un-Americanism, avarice, and general goddamn weirdness.