Your faithful facebook correspondent is not MIA, he's just a mixture of sick and not able to figure out what to do through all this.
He has been convalescing through a two year mystery illness that mostly continues to get worse in which his stomach bloats to unheard of proportions accompanying nausea and belching. In addition a current medication has given him a bright red rash around his waist that is extremely irritating to the skin and his body is making extremely weird involuntary movements. His doctor has not responded yet to two days worth of pleading for advice.
For whatever it's worth he got something not unlike a diagnosis last week, not that it's helped yet: hence the medication. He's sure it will take a while before anything gets better.
But in the meantime: how to deal with all this.
He pledged he was done with politics, and to an extent that's absolutely true.
...Fuck I don't know how to get through this while staying sane except to disengage with the daily noise thats making everybody crazy. The only way to get through it is to realize that 9 out of 10 'executive decrees' from Trump are just noise, false flags, red herrings... meant to energize the faithful and demoralize (trigger) the opposition. And, of course, it's working.
For the moment, the only way to fight back is to do exactly what we're not doing: stay calm (at least try), try not to let your fear cloud your judgement, realize that 9 out of 10 executive orders are meant to be bullshit, things that can't possibly happen and will be struck down by the courts with all due haste. Our 'Fake Supreme Court' can only hear 1 out of every hundred cases that go to it (and there will be more cases now...), and in the meantime, we just have to wait and see which of Trump's goals has a chance of being carried out. As of yet: not even Trump's team (the actual President) knows which of them has a chance of becoming reality yet (except what Elon Musk is doing to the Treasury Department: that shit is terrifying). The way to fight it is to wait, watch, save our energy, call congressmen to register our complaints about the issues that matter most to us personally, and keep very close watch on the courts, and donate all our time and money to whatever doesn't go through. THAT is when we need our energy.
But such efforts are what you're good at, not what said correspondent is good at. Not that he can take much action in his current, friar-like state. While he's at home, capable of little else, he is reading. Reading long, reading hard, getting ready for his new never-to-be-finished project.
He's going to write up a series of articles, commentaries, tutorials, 'classes', a pompous conceit for a pompous guy that he has something to offer that 20,000 people are more qualified to do than he, in which he reads te great books about totalitarianism/authoritarianism of other eras, and figures out which insights among these thinkers translate from previous eras to this one, and can elucidate some clarity about what's going on: Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demich, The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper, The Authoritarian Personality by Teodor Adorno (and others), and yeah, 1984 and Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale and all those others you've read already.
In other words, he's going to write more shit that you're not gonna read, in the hope that somebody persists with it and he leaves a record that hopefully gives some clarity to someone who reads it, whether now or in 50 years, to show that he existed, and that his life made its own meaning.
In the meantime, back to
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