Please forgive this post if it is misspelled, ungrammatical, or incoherent. I had surgery a few days ago. Minor. But painful. The medicated aftermath has left me as fog-brained and useless as the Iowa Democratic Party.
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I received a Patreon payout this morning and (for the second month in a row) was astounded to see that your contributions have not gone down. At least one donor even increased his monthly gift.
I announced “I’m Done” nearly two months ago and you’re still sending me money. Aside from the Patreonage, I’ve received several hundred dollars in donations by snail or PayPal.
If all this is for the hosting/domain registration fees to keep this and its sister site online, I assure you you’ve already got that covered. We’re good for several years of hosting, at least. You can stop now.
But your consistent generosity moves me greatly – and makes me wonder if you’re trying to bribe encourage me to return to blogging.
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It’s a nice thought. I felt utterly done for/by/to in December. And there’s still a fine sense of liberation in not having to face the blank page every day or two. Yet at the same time, I miss it. I miss you.
My brain felt (in the immortal words of Bilbo Baggins) “thin … stretched … like butter scraped over too much bread” by the end of last year. Then (naturally) as soon as I quit blogging, I began finding little memes I’d love to post or articles for which I had the perfect snarky comment. I found myself craving Commentariat wit and wisdom.
I haven’t been quite well (but not quite sick, either) since Christmas week, and though it’s been a drag, unwellness has given me time to read and think about many bloggable things. Oh, how many times I came this close to hitting the keyboard!
Then along came Monday night and the Great Dumbocrat Debacle.
I mean, what can you say? A caucus process as old and familiar as politics itself. A national organization that fancies itself capable of running the entire country through technocratic management. A machine that’s had years to get ready to perform its crucial role. A state party that’s known fully what’s expected of it; a national overseer whose job is to ensure and impress with its competency. A political organization that has only one job to do in all the world.
And they conduct an electoral event that goes completely Third World while the entire First World watches in gobsmacked awe. AND they conduct this monumental, multi-layered, Keystone-coppish, Marx-Brotheresque hilarously unintended comedy show … courtesy of a secret, untested app designed by former members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. Hillary Clinton’s staff!
You couldn’t make it up. You simply could not make that whole business up if you sat down to write a Hollywood farce while under the influence of several dubious street-quality hallucinogenic substances, a complete lack of talent, and gallons of cheap wine.
And there I lay, opium-dimmed, slugabed, and without a blog to to cry and laugh to.
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Yes, if you actually are hoping to bribe me to come back, you’re tempting me in a real weak spot.
OTOH, if you really are just kindly covering hosting fees, you can consider your job very nicely and generously done.
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Also, if I owe you a personal thank you (and this means you, AG and PT, among others) and you haven’t heard from me, that could be because I never recovered all my addresses and many of my logins after the Great Computer Crash of Ought-Nineteen. Yeah, I’m a bad correspondent in the best of times. This time my excuse is better than usual, but even through that’s true, my conscience still pricks me, penetrating a prescription haze that’s thicker than an Iowa Democrat’s misperception of reality.
Great to hear from you here again Claire. Hope you feel better soon
Seeing the email notification of a new post from you, and having said post to read, has put a grin on my face so big that it almost hurts. I hope we can say “welcome back!” but if not, at least thanks for this one. You put the Iowa debacle in perspective better than anyone else I have seen.
Claire, first and foremost I hope you can find and keep your peace with the great Pandora’s Box that is the Internet. Heaven knows I still struggle as well…with the outrage fatigue, the “need” to know what stank the pernicious piddlewits are pimping today…against all the wonderful things that the same landscape still provides.
Playing with my kids helps–a lot–but the struggle remains. I do pretty well at the goal of living-free-being-the-best-revenge (and thank you once again and always, for your part in encouraging that), but boy, are there days…
Anyway, peace to you, Freedomista.
_________________________
I hate the fact that these tiresome, committed people are in any way living rent-free in my head, but I have to admit that the current ramp-up of Teh Stoopid does have me worried. It’s not that the depth of the ignorance, idiocy, or the unapologetic chutzpah is on its own shocking, although there are certainly days when I do have to marvel at what now passes for not just socially acceptable but even routine; rather, what I keep finding myself left with is the one overarching question which seems to have absolutely no good possible answer:
Where is all this leading?
Much ink has been spilled already, and rightly so, about the control zealotocracy increasingly demanding the unconditional surrender of every remaining vestige of individual sovereignty and freedom. Any honest assessment of the landscape makes it perfectly clear that it’s on, to these people: by any means necessary; only the result is acceptable; no law, ethics, or morality is any sort of impediment to the cause. The puppet masters set masses of people at each other’s throats–quite successfully–for increasingly trivial differences, and boy do the useful idiots know their narrative…if not so much how to defend or even really articulate it past the most sophomoric talking points. Rational discourse, even the most Pyrrhic forms of individual interposition, are becoming less and less possible by the day. And I’m sure it’s not me; the rate of acceleration of all this “let’s you and him fight” theater is well past tiresome, and into alarming.
Alarming because ultimately there’s got to be a reason for it. The real puppet masters may be evil in the purest sense of that word, but I cannot believe they are stupid. The comically hubristic antics we see each day, across the spectrum, must, at some level, serve a purpose. And with pretty much all the gloves coming off on every topic, by the day, the entirely reasonable question “what purpose is that?”…sits there, nagging.
As the saying goes, anybody who demands you give up the means of resistance, intends for you something he knows you would resist. Indeed. We’re seeing a fat lot of push for getting this thing (disarming the peasantry) done immediately. Why? What do these creeps know that we don’t?
Oh, sure, it could be something simple. Maybe it’s just covering for their sorry corrupt asses by misdirecting elsewhere. Insider knowledge of impending economic or social collapse. A hive-mind sense that their best opportunity for total domination is now, so strike with everything possible. Et cetera.
The thing is, the real puppet masters would seem to be above things like this. It reminds me of a comment I recall Claire making when talking about the increasing demands of the Total Surveillance State–the idea that you don’t go to the trouble to spy on everyone, everywhere, to catch mere criminals.
So what is it, then? Here we are, currently witnessing the most comically slipshod soft coup attempt I’ve ever even heard of, much less seen–this is stuff that would not be believable in fiction–and not only do the masses not seem to care about how embarrassingly bad it is and has been since even before Orange Man was elected, but more of the same is openly promised–and apparently cheered–going forward. The fainting-couch, Kabuki theater flavor of it all is so completely over the top, it would be tempting to think of it as freedom-lover agitprop…but frankly I don’t think any of us could have–would have–gone that far.
So again: what is it?
Eep. Apparently I needed to give vent to that. Like I said above, the struggle continues. 🙂
I hope your recovery goes well. And I would love it if you started posting again.
Bribery Anyone ???
😉
Well, of COURSE we want you back — exactly to whatever extent you feel like being back!
But
“A caucus process as old and familiar as politics itself?”
The Iowa caucuses are younger than I am.
Glad to see you back, Claire, in any fashion. No shame in a hermit craving some interaction with like minds. Wishing you a speedy recovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucus
Hello, everybody. It’s great to “see” you all again. I doubt I’ll return to regular blogging despite bribes 😉 , but I confess this small return is a nice interlude (both posting my part of it and reading your parts of it).
One friend suggested maybe I should try posting once a week or so. We’ll see.
Whether I do or not, this thread reminds me how much I love the blog Commentariat.
And Kevin W, I hope there’s an answer out there to your question …
Hi Claire!
@Kevin: Ya know, somebody could make a great blog post out of that comment. 😉
The reason? To keep the great unwashed masses convinced that they’re somehow still participants in this sham democracy. Plus, if everyone’s expending time and energy watching the circus, and arguing about it, there’s less attention being paid to what’s really going on. It’s like a magic act, conducted on a grand scale.
The Iowa caucuses didn’t matter anyway. Remember 2016 and the superdelegates? Besides which, if they nominate any of the current candidates, other than Bloomberg, well, I won’t eat my hat, because they might just be that unhinged, but … I predict Bloomey gets the nod.
You wouldn’t be the first blogger to post sporadically. Every infrequent scrap will be appreciated.
I predict Bloomey gets the nod.
He skipped the Iowa circular firing squad, but I’m seeing constant soundbite ads about those gloves-off issues (gun control, free health care, minimum wage) in places I wouldn’t expect them, like YouTube videos. “Michael will get it done!”
He’s trying to look like anti-Trump, when he most definitely is another pea from the same pod.
In chaotic times, beware the Man on the White Horse.
Get well, Claire.
Oh for shits sake, Trump was paced in power by the same people who put Obama in power, the same ones who’ve put every politician in power, they aren’t even trying with their theater any more, there’s film of Trump calling H. Clinton smart and praising her, and film of clinton saying Trump is just the sort of guy they want in office.
If anyone takes part in this charade, stop saying your freedom has been taken, you gave it away.
“The medicated aftermath has left me as fog-brained and useless as the Iowa Democratic Party.” – HOLY SMOKE CLAIRE! You never told us you were getting a lobotomy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ Kevin – Good post. Scary thoughts.
Thanks for that, Val E. Forge! I almost snorted coffee out my nose and onto my keyboard.
@Kevin Wilmeth
Imagine drones bought from Hobby Lobby dropping firebombs on the roofs of government buildings. Dropping them every week. Dropping them until government falls apart because it can’t defend the bureaucrats who are funding it. Then government stays persistently fallen apart throughout the next phase, in which every militia general tries to set themselves up as a new king. For your own good, of course.
The technological singularity shifting power to the individual is the thing the current politicians are unsuccessfully trying to prevent with their too-little too-late attempts to LARP the Soviet Union.
Only the goofballs are playing the LARP Soviet game, because the competent who in times past would be nobility can actually do the military math about swarm attacks. Even the US Navy did the math correctly, in Millennium Challenge 2002.
What is coming next is a lot more freedom. The whining from the 99% who are not libertarians is going to be epic.
Anon 2/10, I hope you’re right. I hardly relish the idea of that sort of conflict, for several reasons (not least of which because I suspect you are right about strongmen stepping into any available gap), but good god, look at the state into which we have “progressed” thus far, at the insistence of these obnoxious people who seem so fully committed to forcing the issue no matter what. It’s not so much that they are making peaceful revolution impossible, as it is that they are increasingly making peaceful existence impossible.
I think that in the end I do share the faith that the peasantry, if it must, will find its ways of rising to the challenge, whether it’s riflemen “behind every blade of grass”, or the flash-mob drone swarm of the deplorables, or some other Hayduke-ian creativity none of us has thought of yet. Or all that, in combination…
It’s the days between here and there, that I’m dreading.
My pipe-dream hope is that someone, somewhere, figures out how to make a peaceful statement that makes the lunacy of the continued wolverine-poking so self-evidently obvious that even the most tone-deaf, chest-thumping wokester agitator can’t miss it, or ignore it. (In this regard, I miss Mike Vanderboegh, who had a real flair for pursuing this goal–this quest for peace via the dire warning.) This really doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult–from the “live and let live, how fucking hard is that?” angle, through to “you really haven’t thought this through, have you, hipster brainiac?”…and yet here we are.
The only problem with improvising creativity, is that it is inherently reactive. (Maybe that’s where my faith comes from, that in a world gone sideways, free people will ultimately prove more creative than the planners of other people’s business.) We’re still living in a world of strategy, where these improvising, reactive traits haven’t been truly needed yet.
And maybe that’s why the “let’s you and him fight” crowd seems so incapable of grokking the stupidity of bringing their imposed reality to blows–they can only plan, not improvise. The strategy, on paper, may seem solid. Even the tactics–the planned tactics–may seem plausible. But at the point of action, the human tendency for creativity can, and usually does, intervene, and often in unintended ways. (“In any battle the first casualty is the battle plan.”) I dunno, it seems like most folks in Claire’s commentariat would have no problem seeing this result as obvious, but maybe the obnoxious polypragmatoi just…don’t. (After all, this crowd may have tried many different things to achieve their goals, over the nearly forty years I’ve been paying attention, but I can’t say that any of the methods I have seen truly qualify as creative.)
Hey, maybe we can glom on a bit to current trends, here. I’ve been enjoying some of the Babylon Bee’s satire titles lately, including this one, “Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election”…in a similar way, maybe we can simply promise to interfere with their revolution. 🙂
Claire, it’s a joy to hear from you! I hope you have a speedy recovery. Having had surgery myself in July, I know the sluggish brain feeling. It really does go away, but I still have to remind myself that I’m not 25 anymore – not even 65 anymore…. Take care of yourself and stop by whenever you feel like some love and hugs.
@Kevin Wilmeth
Humans are not a political blank slate, humans inherited genetics from the great apes which make them want to politically organize like a great ape troop. These instincts work acceptably well when the troop size is under Dunbar’s number of about 150, and each member can be known as an individual. However the instincts often produce genocide when the troop size increases to millions.
There is no science/reality-based reason to believe the bulk of humans will suddenly start doing their politics by game theory math, rather than by “gut” instinct.
or some other Hayduke-ian creativity none of us has thought of yet
Private financial transactions defended by good encryption mean no tax collection, which means no logistics to build a government with. Nobody wants to be a chump who’s paying taxes when others aren’t. The first private financial crypto that works will spread to the masses.
Glad to hear you are doing well.
Rest up, friend.
And don’t worry about it. 🙂
The Dove and I are fine.
Get well young lady.
Hey a little nudge never hurt nobody, don’t ya know!
BTW Bunny jumping is better than any ole stinkin caucus;
Yes please come back.
Maybe instead of looking at it as something you’re obligated to do, just blog when you feel like it.
Yes ! Blog when you feel like it ! Any other way would be unnatural.
On the subject of jumping bunnies, once when I was a wannabee golfer, many years ago, I saw two bunnies on the course,playing. One bunny would jump up about 1-1/2 or 2 feet, and the other bunny would run under him while he was in the air. Then the other bunny jumped up and they repeated the amusing process. I watched them do this for about ten minutes. It was incredible.
I have two requests: First: Please heal completely and well. Second: (At the risk of being redundant)–Puhleeze, Puhleeze come back!!!
When you’re here, we’ll be here.
As long as you keep your Patron account I will keep my small donation coming. Use it any way you want. And I hope for a speedy recovery.
Good to hear from you, Claire. For your sake, I hope the recover is going well. For my sake, I hope you’ll keep posting.