things to read: january

Happy new year! It seems absolutely silly to try writing a post this week. Here are some articles that have been on my mind lately. Please keep yourselves and your neighbors safe, everyone.

Donald Trump is waging war against human conscience, by Osita Nwanevu

Nwanevu ties together several news stories into one coherent worldview. They want to lock us all in a world where they are the only survivors.

[Stephen] Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives.

Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

The tragedy of Trần Đức Thảo, by Rory O'Sullivan

We can't truly understand what it means to decolonize if colonialism is the only way we can see the world. Trần Đức Thảo recognized that not even objectivity is neutral.

‘On Indochina’ (1946) is of more than just historical interest – Thảo does not merely argue for colonial independence, but tries to explain how the gap between the perspectives of coloniser and colonised makes it impossible to have debates on shared terms or to appreciate the other’s point of view. He refers to ‘a radical misunderstanding, which no explanation would be able to dissipate, since all expressions are understood in a sense opposed to the one in which they are pronounced.’

For the French, the so-called Annamites (as the Vietnamese in Indochina were known, and as Thảo calls them in ‘On Indochina’) were not truly French. But nor, since the community to which they had belonged was premodern and precolonial, did they fully count as a people in their own right. They were, for the average French person of good faith, in need of modernisation and proper integration into the international community. The Annamites, of course, saw the situation completely differently: they considered themselves part of a people who had been occupied and put to the service of a foreign power. ‘When one [side] says “liberty” or “progress”,’ writes Thảo, ‘the other hears “liberty-” or “progress-inside-the-French-system”, such that in order for Vietnam to be free, it must first remain inside this system, by force if necessary.’

Cis People Don’t Get Gender Affirming Care, by Woodlief McCabe

I'm sure I've made cynical statements like the ones this essay refers to! This essay is why I'll never say it again.

And allow me to address the inevitable response: “They are saying this to make conservatives mad! To point out that they are benefitting from the very thing they are trying to ban!” and let me stop you right there. They don’t care. If pointing out conservative hypocrisy worked, it would have worked, and it never has. Doing so has been the primary strategy of the Democratic Party for the last decade, and the opposition barely tries to justify it anymore. Conservatives flex their political dominance by legally enshrining a care-for-me-and-not-for-thee policy. They are not deterred when their hypocrisy is brought to light; they get off on it. You do not have a moral high ground for “admitting” your cosmetic procedure is gender affirming care. All it does for trans people is single us out and create new ways to put us in the middle of a debate we have no desire to be in.

When you say trans healthcare serves the same purpose as lip filler and cosmetic surgery and that they should be treated the same, I know you are saying they should be destigmatized in the same way. That’s lovely, but changing public attitudes over issues is nearly impossible without structural changes to the ways we interact with these things in real life.

Living in the lie, by John Ganz

There is a growing movement that says we can't even trust our own senses anymore. AI video makes it harder to know if what we're seeing is even real. The lies that dominate every mainstream news source feels like another.

You go along to get along. You pretend that fake statistics are real and fake elections are real. Everyone does it, and so you think fewer and fewer people are dissatisfied with the state of things. Again, Havel was operating in a context that was far more restrictive and oppressive than anything we are experiencing here and had taken on a certain regularity and automatism. In other words, it was a self-sustaining system. What we have here is not a system, but the effort to create one. But many people in the US are already living in the lie and are encouraging others to do so. The administration comes up with totally absurd lies; they are obscene and preposterous. They issue outlandish statements and parade their clownish idiots on TV, but what I find much more insidious and insulting is the demand on the part of some that we take them seriously or pretend that they are a government like any other. This is presented as truth, objectivity, or fairness, but it is its ultimate destruction. For instance, this is what I believed was going on with Bari Weiss’s memo. It struck me as the beginning of a system of apparatchiks who produce legitimating propaganda for a regime that openly mocks the truth. Such people can flatter themselves that they are independent and not members of “the Party,” so to speak, but they are living in a lie. They are pretending that there’s something more than issuing from the mouths of authority than obscenities and lies. I, for one, won’t play along with this stupid ritual. It poses as civility but is in reality the death of civic life.

Study Finds 80% Of Americans Lack Social Connections To Pull Off Heist, by The Onion

I had to put in a humorous one. What we need are more communities of people who need to score just one more job.

“When it comes to putting together a crew with the skills needed for a bank job or a jewel heist, a majority of Americans reported knowing just one or two guys, tops,” said lead researcher Jane Iannitello, adding that only 20% had any safecrackers in their lives, a mere 16% knew any hacker prodigies with a rebellious streak, and fewer than 5% had access to Taiwanese acrobats doubling as masters of disguise.