Nearly everything in our culture, including companies and music and social media sites, is now forced to choose sides. I am right there keeping score and applauding, because too much damage has been done to talk fatuously of unity.
To those of us not playing, QAnon feels like the nightmarish but logical conclusion to the gradual realization, in valid disciplines, that all truth is subjective and relative; that the observer can alter the situation; that facts can be bent to support a false narrative.
Screen shot of photographer Greg Williams at work.
There are online classes or sessions of all kinds these days, such as The Great Courses (“Learn at your own pace with no schedule, while exercising, commuting, or just relaxing. Just you and the world’s greatest professors!”); TED…
Soul may be a children’s movie, but two weeks later, I am still trying to figure it out. Granted, I overthink everything. But I like director (and Pixar creative chief) Pete Docter’s willingness to tackle abstract concepts (Up, Inside Out) so I want to know what he is saying.
It stands to reason that participants wanted to advertise, in costume, their political beliefs, because once you dive beneath support for Trump and blind faith that the election was stolen, the agendas vary dramatically.
Distancing the Self by addressing it in the second or third person is calming, neuropsychiatrists now tell us. It reduces “overwhelm,” a feeling so common these days that it has become a noun. Emotional distress drops quickly—within one second, in fact—when someone shifts to third person, seeing themselves as others might, or as they see others.
Image capture of video on social media, showing a concerted group climbing the Capitol stairs.
As law enforcement and amateur Internet sleuths continue to identify those who stormed Congress on Wednesday, some are poring over video of a “disciplined” group in tactical gear, who walk single-file, hand on…
Is there enough rage to launch a civil war? “Is there a way to avoid one?” counters the newly cynical voice inside my head. Because we cannot talk this through, operating as we are from entirely different assumptions about truth, facts, and the Constitution.
Photo by Jose M. via Unsplash
Because they could. And because there was precedent.
No, not the British, who burned the US Capitol Building along with most of official Washington, DC, in 1814. This comparison is pertinent mostly only because yesterday’s event was “the first time a malicious group…
his is more than a story about how dogs bankrupt you and drive you crazy. It is a story about the damage that can be done to any of us when we do not get what we need.