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Every Member of Team Trump Is Now Enabling Treason
Rick Wilson, writing at The Daily Beast, has a pretty strong opinion about the recent interview Trump had with George Stephanopoulos.
We live in a world of counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and more tu quoque scenarios than a reasonable person can process. That said, I have to beg my Republican friends to imagine — just for a moment — what you’d be doing if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama said they would accept the help of a foreign power in a campaign and not report it to the FBI.
I’ll tell you what you’d do: You’d lose your fucking shit.
You’d spurt blood from your goddamn eyes.
You’d corner the market on guillotine, tumbrel, and pitchfork stocks. A gibbet would appear in Lafayette Park.
Fox News producers and on-air talent would grind out weeks of videos until they collapsed, as sick and exhausted as they keep saying Trump’s opponents must be. They’d work like galley slaves, a nearly naked Lou Dobbs beating a massive kettle drum to keep them producing screeching agitporn.
Entire forests would be leveled and pulped to write the condemnatory articles and books. The lights would dim on the Eastern Seaboard, and nuclear power plants would be brought online to support the massive surge of electricity needed to power a hundred thousand new servers hosting the hundred million articles and videos you’d make condemning this outrageous act.
You’d demand not only impeachment, but also drawing, quartering, and the wholesale razing of the villages of everyone involved. You’d call anyone else doing this a traitor, a villain, and the worst person ever to hold the office of president.
But we all know what’s going to happen to Trump, don’t we? It’s already happening:
Not a goddamned thing.
This isn’t hard to understand. It isn’t something shockingly new. Republicans don’t care about governing for the good of the people. They only care about power and the rich and powerful. As soon as the vast majority of Americans realize this and vote them out of power will they change.
What Happens When Our Lives End
Jack Gronsky, writing at Viva El Birdos, paints a picture of what it’s like to be at the end of a career and trying to figure out what’s next. Brilliant piece of prose.
The Coming Apocalypse
David Brooks, in his column in The New York Times, describes an impending disaster for Republicans.
But it’s hard to look at the generational data and not see long-term disaster for Republicans. Some people think generations get more conservative as they age, but that is not borne out by the evidence. Moreover, today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.
Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is. If you are a millennial in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona or New Jersey, ethnic minorities make up more than half of your age cohort. In just over two decades, America will be a majority-minority country.
I remember this being a prevalent thought during the last few years of the Obama presidency. It’s why I was shocked and saddened at the election of Trump. Looking back now, I think Trump is that last gasp of a party that has been surpassed by a whole generation about to be able to vote in the 2020 election.
What I don’t see is how the Republican party can change. Who are the young, dynamic Young Republicans and what will they stand for?
Post Death Internet Service
Warren Ellis has a modest proposal that made me laugh.
What I need is a post-death internet service. This is something people have been talking about a lot over the last few years. I don’t know if any true solutions were found for the thing that, this morning, I think I’d like the most. A year after I die, I’d like to post to Twitter or something. Hell, who even knows if Twitter will be there by then. He said, as if he were likely to outlive any internet service. Maybe it should go to my newsletter system instead.
But: just a message, a year after I die. Saying, hi, I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. Which, yes, is unsettling enough on its own, I know. It’s not unamusing to me, obviously. But.
Hi. I died a year ago, but I just wanted to tell you something. I loved being with you all, and I hope you’re all making the most out of life, because we only get one go on the ride. Hold on tight.
But I think mostly I probably just want to scare the shit out of people.
What a cool idea.
Jon Stewart’s Plea
Jon Stewart, former host of The Daily Show, spoke on Capitol Hill today about continued funding for health care and benefits for 9/11 first responders. His passion is moving.
I really wish Stewart would run for political office someday.
Blog Posts can be Questions
Brent Simmons, regarding the web ―
The web is a conversation. Blog posts can be questions.
25 Episodes that Changed Television
Writer Emily Todd VanDerWerff and designer Amanda Northrop, in Vox, have put together a fantastic overview of the episodes that pushed the envelope of television. It’s a fantastically designed and written piece and exactly what how a good listicle webpage should be created.
Your Future Self
In many ways, right here is where I write daily. Sometimes it’s just a quick snippet or commentary on someone else’s piece of writing that I’ve shared. I’ve never ever been good at keeping a diary. I’m more of a “commonplace book” guy than writing down what I did that day or how I’m feeling.
Thinking about all of this reminded me of a post by Derek Silvers about the benefits of daily writing. He had a paragraph that resonated with me.
If you’re feeling you don’t have the time or it’s not interesting enough, remember: You’re doing this for your future self. Future you will want to look back at this time in your life, and find out what you were actually doing, day-to-day, and how you really felt back then. It will help you make better decisions.
Writing every day in a journal/diary made a huge difference for him. I wonder if it will make a difference for me? Maybe it might for you too?
A Baseball Win
Here’s video of Paul DeJong warming up with a young #Cubs fan, wearing a Rizzo shirt, before Sunday’s game. #Cardinals #MLB https://t.co/y3mWNuobTj
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) June 10, 2019
This is how you make a baseball fan for life.
We Only Do the Good Shit
Warren Ellis, writing in his newsletter Orbital Operations, commented on what he wants to talk about.
Here’s a thing that came up in an email conversation the other week, that I don’t think I’ve ever made explicit to you: herein, I only talk about the things I like.
This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not be used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days.
This is the basic equation, even ignoring the reflex of “I might think it’s bad but you might think it’s good” and “anywhere between one and ten thousand people laboured to bring this thing into the world and they did not intend to make something bad” and all the other shades of grey that generally get lost in the mix.
I’ll only ever tell you about things I think are good. Because, really, that’s all we should be spending our time on, and all we should be raising up into the conversation. Save your badness hot takes for Twitter or some other place where people prefer misery to joy. Start another petition about how the end of AVENGERS: ENDGAME made you sad and so should not be allowed.
Here, we only do the good shit. Okay? Okay.
Makes a lot of sense to me.
Paul Darrow, RIP
Actor Paul Darrow died at age 78. I remember him as one of my favorite characters, Kerr Avon in Blake’s 7. If you’ve never seen the show, it was a science fiction show about freedom fighters against a malevolent empire. Firefly and Andromeda are direct descendants.
Finding this show during my freshman year in college was one of my favorite memories. I had never heard of it, but once I caught an early episode, I was hooked. Avon was obviously one of the standout characters and actually became the lead later.
The best part of learning about the passing of Darrow was learning all of Blake’s 7 is now on YouTube.
In Praise of Sleep
Andrew Sullivan, in his weekly column for New York Magazine, had an awesome section on sleep. His whole column is great, but this part made a lot of sense.
Can’t we just accept sleep for what it is — not a means for more productivity, but an integral, simple, enriching part of a natural human life? A means for the body and brain to rest and integrate and heal, as it is for so many creatures on a planet that orbits a sun. Why does it have to be for anything else?
My current regimen is an Ambien, half a joint, “sleep music” on Pandora, and a stupid but charming game, Angry Birds, which I play for a while to keep my mind focused on something that won’t set my imagination off, until the chemical elephant dart I’ve lodged in my brain begins to work, and my Angry Birds skills rapidly decline. Then a ritual of putting on my super-sexy CPAP mask, which inflates my asthmatic lungs and blocked sinuses with a constant stream of filtered air, until a welcome oblivion arrives.
Since quitting the blog, I almost never set an alarm, and wake up when I wake up. This is an extraordinary luxury, I fully understand. But life is short. And this luxury costs nothing.
Not sure I can get away with an Ambien and a joint.
Trump Wants This
Writing for The Concourse, David Roth is killing it these days. His diatribes against President Trump have been nothing but glorious take-downs. His latest regarding the recent UK state visit sheds a white-hot spotlight on the psyche of Trump.
It’s unquestionably true that Trump wants things. He wants to be noticed, on television if possible, and he wants to appear impressive when he is noticed. He does not want anyone to seem to have more money than he does. He wants a big beautiful piece of the most amazing chocolate cake you ever saw. All of these things he wants very much. But he is accustomed to demanding these things and then either receiving them (the biggest slice of cake, the television appearances) or believing that he has (the respect of other people). All of this goonish entitlement would be kind of darkly funny if Trump were not also president, but that is not the world we live in. It is not clear even today how much Trump wanted to be president, although he also clearly did not want to lose the election he somehow wound up in. It’s always seemed more accurate to say that he’d prefer to be a king, or some other less readily beheadable royal.
This paragraph is delicious.
This is true when he’s in the United States, too; he is happy, if he’s ever happy, when there are other rich people around to give him compliments and tell him how rich he looks and how well he’s doing. This is his class, but they are not really his people. Even with the servile dermatologists and thrice-divorced yacht ghouls and buttery finance lordlings that crowd his social orbit and pay to belong to Trump’s clubs, there are still some latent traces of dirt under their fingernails-these people have to work to make the money to pay those dues, even if that work amounts to a few moments of strained patter during a Botox injection or taking long lunch meetings while underlings hide other rich people’s money from taxation. They’re rich, in many cases entirely richer than any ethical society would permit, but they’re not where Trump imagines himself to be. They’re not where he sees the Next Generation of his legacy.
“Thrice-divorced yacht ghouls” is amazing.
Digital Privacy
I’m generally okay with giving away a bit of privacy to use tools that treat me as the product. Google and Facebook are pretty notorious for gathering a ton of data on individuals who use their services. I like Gmail and Google Drive, and sometimes Facebook is ok, but I probably should worry more about my digital privacy.
Recently, Curtis McHale pointed me to an old article on The Next Web about privacy with four smart arguments. The fourth one, for me, is the killer.
If someone says they have nothing to hide, ask them to unlock their phone and give it to you for ten minutes. If they hesitate they will have realized it’s nice to keep some things to yourself.
The whole article will make you think twice about privacy. McHale says, “Many of us (including myself) have been far too permissive in the value we give away with our personal data.”
He’s right. Not sure what that means for my workflow, though.
Exercise Tiger
Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
Dan Lewis, in his Now I Know newsletter, re-shares a story written in 2012 about the failed D-Day dry run. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of this before.
50 Years Ago
Not enough people are talking about the fact that 2019 is the 50 year anniversary of the moon landing and it makes me sad.
Over the last few weeks, Jupiter and Saturn were in the night sky bright and beautiful. It puts things in perspective. We are small. Fifty years ago we leaped out into the bigness and we should be celebrating… not just on July 20, but all year long.
What Do I Want?
Every few months, I start having passionate debates with myself about what I want to do creatively. A newsletter may inspire me to restart my newsletter operation. Someone on Medium tells the story of how she made loads of money using the platform, and I want to do the same thing. I think to myself that having a blog is a waste of time and that I should go back to a single-page site and forgo writing online and curating altogether.
I start making lists with scenarios and pro and con columns. I go back and forth arguing with myself about what is the best way forward.
What do I want most? What would make me the most fulfilled creatively?
It’s hard to pin down.
Ranking Every Black Mirror Episode
In anticipation of the latest Netflix episodes, The Ringer staff has made a ranking of the first 20 installments of Black Mirror.
I’d flip “USS Callister” and “Hang the DJ,” but the rest is pretty spot on.
Tuning Online
I came across this old post from Warren Ellis on his (I think) defunct site, Longwave.
You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time — but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you.
These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.
That’s the trick — “Tune them until they bring you pleasure.” The caveat to that is if they aren’t bringing you pleasure, then perhaps you should just delete them.