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honesty

Don’t always protect people from your truth. It won’t make things right

One of the day-to-day reasons that relationships between human beings become so screwed up has to do with this well-intentioned deception. We protect those we interact with from the negative aspects of our feelings about them, because we want to be nice and foster goodwill. And we do it so fricking often, without even thinking twice about it! (“oh, it’s nothing”)

The problem is, it’s dishonest. It’s not authentic, and it misleads people who interact with you about how you really are.

untitled poem

i thought i saw a tear at the bottom of your eye
but it looked like crystals as i got closer.
or sparkles.

The other ‘9/11’

Chile: The other 9/11

Following Allende’s election, the US Ambassador cabled Washington: “Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first country in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly.”

Dear Jack,

thanks for your letter.

Politics aside, this hit me hard. i’ve just lost a summer to anger and fear and despair, despite many good things happening. Optimism i can kind of do, but my hope always goes nowhere, and love? i can’t even start, despair and fear and anger always follow when i try to love, when i even think of the word.

Where do i start, Jack?

i just hope that these sentiments can change the world, on a social as well as a political level, to the point that “get over it” and “who gives a fuck?” and “angst is for the weak” are no longer the answers my friends offer for my pain.

Why we fight

Eisenhower’s worst fears came true. We invent enemies to buy the bombs

It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them.

truth


Transcript

Pseudoprosoponic Fiction

Makers of Worlds

Imagine a world – call it Mundavia – in which the dominant genre of literature is one in which plots, dialogue, and setting can be freely invented, but all the characters have to be real people.

Vote splitting

Vote splitting crucial : NDP strength swung Liberal votes to Tories

The first returns suggest the rising support for the NDP has drawn enough votes to allow the Tories to capture 13 seats perviously [sic] held by Liberals and one held by the Bloc Québé cois [sic].

Although the Greens saw their popular vote again fall well below its 2008 level, returns suggest they were helping Tories win or lead in 14 seats where their plurality was smaller than the number of Green votes.

The Day After

Let’s perform an experiment.

Let’s pretend that, instead of there being the Liberals and the New Democrats, we had one party representing the left wing in this country. Call them the Liberal Democrats. Now, granted, there will be some voters who might not want to vote for the Liberal Democrats. (Maybe they don’t like Jack Layton’s moustache.) So let’s assume that, oh, 5 per cent of the Liberal Democrat vote bleeds away to the Tories on the right. While we’re at it, let’s assume that 5 per cent also bleeds to the Greens on the left.

[…]

That’s 31 ridings. Under this scenario, the Tories win 135 seats and the Liberal Democrats 168.

Meanwhile in America

What’s Left of the Left

Even then, these economists recognized what a paltry, bowdlerized proxy for the left they were: six academics, and by any broad ideological standard a pretty moderate group, comfortable with markets and free trade. But liberals had long ago ceased to rally around class. “In the United States,” Blinder told me weeks later, a little bleakly, a little apologetically, “there is no left left.” Krugman, looking back, diagnoses two problems. First, the progressive economists had been too disorganized. And then they had been too late.

nah, i don’t think we’re screwed

Rules of Misbehavior

Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?
[…]
If Savage’s ethical guidelines—disclosure, autonomy, mutual exchange, and minimum standards of performance—seem familiar or intuitive, it’s probably because they also govern expectations in the markets for goods and services.