It’s Tab-alicious!

Yup, it’s that time again: “Wow, I have tabs open that I don’t even remember opening or why I opened them or what point I might have made when I decided to keep them open!”

So, here are some things I’ve had open of late. (Or some stuff I did not have open but still remembered I want to link it, you know how it is. Or maybe you don’t know how it is. I dunno, I just blog here.)

::  Athena Scalzi likes stuff:

I have the issue of holding objects so near and dear to my heart that it hurts. And it’s not just things like a grandmother’s necklace, one passed down and made of precious gemstones. It’s not a lighter from a beloved great uncle that his grandpa used in the trenches of World War I. And its not the dried flowers from a loved one’s funeral. It is the dishware at my house.

A simple set of black dinner plates, with matching smaller plates and two different types of bowls. My parents have had these dishes since before I was born, and they are the dishes that I ate basically every single meal of my life off of. To this day, they are used on a daily basis. They are scratched, some are chipped, but it matters not. They serve their function and need not be replaced.

You know what? I like stuff too. And I know it’s going to make cleaning out my house a bit of a chore when I shuffle off this mortal coil, but dammit, I like stuff. I have started accumulating less stuff, but I am by no means immune to the siren song of stuff.

I suppose this is a big reason I love going to the antique mall and buying things there: I always wonder what life this tchotchke or that knick-knack had before, who owned it and who liked it enough to have it around for years. I like the idea of “rehoming” stuff…especially old books. The books I really love are the ones still signed by their original owners, or inscribed as gifts. Does that harm their “value” as “rare” books or whatever? Maybe. But for me, there’s an appeal in knowing that book has left one library for another.

::  Conspiracists are about to get a dose of reality.

This may be paywalled for you. In my experience, though, for many conspiracy-mongers, there is no dose of reality sufficiently large to get them to abandon their preferred conspiracies. Sigh.

::  No one knows how this will end (but I do not think it will end well for them).

If the right was producing wonderful culture that audiences were eager to consume they’d be consuming it already, and force-feeding it at a high-status institution seems likely to backfire. I’m sure that many Republicans in the D.C. area will show up for, say, the Ted Nugent rendition of Swan Lake or Kid Rock conducting Richard Strauss, but you can’t force a broader audience to like what you offer there. There is no right-wing equivalent to the success of Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce; the plots of Shakespeare plays are unflattering to would-be dictators; and a whole lot of this country’s great artists are BIPOC, are female, are queer, are progressive, are all of the above, and nothing can change that. 

These isolationists confuse coercion with power and cooperation with weakness, when in truth it is more or less the other way around. Coercion and violence are what you resort to when you have failed at convincing and allying and negotiating. Meanwhile our power lies in cooperation and connection, those of us who are still striving toward a more perfect union. We now must do it by opposing and obstructing the attempt to shatter and corrupt that union. We have power, and our power arises when we connect, when we join organizations like Indivisible (whose very name proclaims this truth),  when we come together as civil society, when we act together to protect the vulnerable, to defend what we love.

Lord, I hope so. But they are going to do a lot of damage before they’re done, and I have total conviction that a lot of their damage will be permanent. There’s no going back from where we are; we’ll have to build a better world from the ground up. Do we have that in us?

::  The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide.

On the other hand….

::  Finally, on a less serious note, I’ve just discovered videos where people set up their dashcam and record driving an entire route. Here is US 219 from Ellicottville to Buffalo!

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