The stock in trade narrative for these right-wing folks is usually a completely invented one that paints them in a flattering light and magically transforms all their criming into noble, virtuous deeds (The Lost Cause, e.g.). I will be continuously collecting these GOP myths and de-mystifying them for posterity, and for the public record such […]
It may have seemed like the election of 2016 came out nowhere, and the January 6, 2021 attempted coup event was another deep gash to the fabric of assumption — but in reality, the authoritarian movement to dismantle America has been working diligently for a long time. Depending on how you count, the current war […]
Freedom means the right to make choices. When you have a large population, that means many different kinds of people are making many kinds of different choices for different reasons. That means, mathematically speaking, a broad distribution graph of options chosen over time. Freedom produces diversity, as a direct consequence of its own laissez-faire philosophy. […]
Data literacy is the newest frontier. The world of information has a pale twin universe of disinformation, deep fakes, fake news, and true believers — keeping track of reality will become more and more important and valuable into the future. RussiaGate: Russian hacking of the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 US elections The Thinkery See […]
On May 31, 1921, a mob of murderous whites descended on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma dubbed Black Wall Street, and razed it to the ground. They dropped homemade bombs in the first ever domestic aerial attack on American soil, during the Tulsa Race Massacre following the end of World War I. Over three […]
Cultism as a kind of collective personality disorder The enemy at the gates is us
The following list must be prefaced with some caveats about painting with broad strokes, and acknowledging everything is a distribution and Not All Republicans espouse all of these things to the same degree or even at all. Nevertheless, both the extremism and the polarization in our political system is the highest in recent memory — […]
Unthinking is a kind of militant stance against thinking, for oneself and others. It goes beyond a simple distaste for or preference against thinking, and on into something of a dedication, mission, or serious zeal for anti-intellectualism. As well, the Unthinking mentality includes a sort of reverence for instinctiveness and impulsiveness, and a distaste or […]
Baptist Evangelical minister Tim LaHaye’s 12-volume series of novels about the Rapture have sold over 65 million copies, and kept the apocalypse top of mind for the nation’s Evangelicals. Jesus is coming back any day now, and when he does, he is for some reason going to favor all the fat pasty oligarchs who did […]
There are many things in life you don’t want to rush through; many experiences you wish to linger. The American cult of efficiency is a kind of over-optimization, and over-fitting of a line that delusionally demands up and to the right every single day, every single quarter, every single time. The benefits of stopping to […]
The articles of impeachment 2021 are so much clearer and simpler than last year’s impeachment — it’s the Marie Kondo version of indicting the president’s conduct. His coup attempt most certainly did not spark joy! At least, not to the patriots who defended the United States Capitol from invasion on January 6, several of whom […]
Ghost skin is short for ghost skinhead. It refers to a white supremacist who hides his racist beliefs in order to blend into wider society, with the goal of remaining undetected and covertly continuing his Nazi agenda. Over at least the past 2 decades, white supremacists have been specifically infiltrating law enforcement. Going into the […]
Developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, classical liberalism is a political, philosophical, and ethical framework based on individual liberty via human rights and equal protection. Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of individual freedom, natural rights, and equality. Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the […]
The cognitive dissonance of the so-called Republican “agenda” is on acute display, wherein mortal threat to a literally enumerated power of the Constitution given to Congress to establish a federal US postal service seems not to bother the Constitutional originalists one bit. Not to mention said power’s role in facilitating free and fair elections. Curioser […]
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to refer to the confoundingly commonplace motives of the Nazis who perpetrated some of the worst war crimes in history. Primo Levi maintained that few monsters exist. “More dangerous are the common man, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions,” the Holocaust survivor […]