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"Boom! Boom! - John Lee Hooker" (Watch on YouTube)

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Monday Morning

The sun came out this morning, and so did the cats. They were getting a little wild at five in the morning, which seems to be the usual wailing hour. They will get to run out their feline energies all day today, but I will need to keep them in overnight - hopefully, they will not be so restless in the small hours of the morning.

Policing Language

Due to the heightened interest in misogynist hate-speech, there is more effort in social media, especially at Twitter, to block such expressions, as well as some interest in making it a governmental matter. Fredrik DeBoer argues that liberals should be concerned about this direction, because government power is a double-edged sword.

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It may be tempting to embrace the violent power of the state as the solution to ideas and expression you find hateful and ugly. But I promise you: the day that the United States bans hate speech, such a law will be invoked against a pro-Palestinian activist, to pick one example. I promise. That is inevitable. Whether the elites that so credulously embrace the notion of empowering the police state to squash harassment like it or not. And it may be tempting to embrace the coercive power of large corporations to limit speech online. But I promise you: that power will also be used against you by your antagonists, who are opportunistic and learn quickly. Lefty Twitter might be obsessed with policing language. But they won’t actually get to do the policing themselves. Instead, they will hand that work off to the same broken institutions and corrupt authorities that they themselves have diagnosed as broken and corrupt. And that is one of these fundamental, existential paradoxes within contemporary left-wing orthodoxy today: simultaneously recognizing that we live within structures of intrinsic, intentional inequality and injustice, and yet forever ready to abandon that skepticism towards those structures when it seems convenient to do so. Pure folly.

We on the left speak for those without power, money, or privilege. To assume that ceding rights of individuals and minority rights to establishment authority will help us in the long run is to abandon the most powerful, most important insight we have. We can, at times, grasp power, and we have used it in the past for good. But power is not your friend. Not if you are a feminist. Not if you oppose racism. Not if you speak for the poor and the dispossessed. And if you abandon your resistance to power because you think that’s in your short-term interest, you will find in the long run that when power comes to crush people, it will crush us, first and most brutally of all.

-- Fredrik DeBoer, "Power Is Not Our Friend"

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The Three Journal

The Three Journal has swung back into life. I would not say it is thriving and ready to run marathons, but it has a pulse that is regular and stable. It had started to look dead on the table for a while there. My hardcover journals, curiously enough, are providing the needed stimulus. When I do an entry in a little book, I go ahead and post it at the Three Journal as well, and I post the full version, not just the whittled down quotation that I write down in the book. I am not shy about adding some new thoughts and reflections, rounding out the affair nicely, of some little event from a particular day of a long-ago year, meaningful to no one but myself.

Recall that I looked to follow a rule of brevity on the Three Journal, but that is no longer so. However, I still edit for quality. I no longer bother to print them out. I do not really read it, which was one of the reasons why it was dying. My hardcover journals have taken up that sort of energy from me, being the material that I read over and over again. Nevertheless, I like having the Three Journal ready for me. It is a nice deep pool of memory that I can wade into whenever I should fall into the mood. The Three Journal is composed of all the journals and blogs of my life brought together into one super journal with the entries all nicely pruned and polished to shine a little. I like having it.

Jack

Pop has returned from his rounds, and he tells me that Jack needed dental treatment. I am upset, though I keep it to myself. I ask, "Doesn't he have health insurance from his managerial position?" No, and he has to pay cash, or at least Pop does. I'm upset in the thought that Jill is making in the vicinity of $30,000 a year, and Jack should be in line to make close to that, and I imagine that Jack must be using his money for strippers and booze, so that Pop's little money is subsidizing his wife's bastard son and his good times, while I am here just withering away in my old age. I am fine, and there is nothing very meaningful that I would be able to do if all that money were given to me instead of him, but I cannot help feeling bitterly resentful.

Those Founding Fathers

This is our next installment of founding fathers backbiting each other, and we have John Adams unloading on Hamilton. “Hamilton I know to be a proud, spirited, conceited, aspiring mortal, always pretending to morality, but with as debauched morals as old Franklin, who is more his model than anyone I know … [having] a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.”

[Source: Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”]