I was cogitating earlier about a pattern that you see in right-wing media circles frequently. Most of the propagandists enjoy an individual sort of celebrity, even if they're operating out of some organization.

cw: lengthy discourse on patterns of organization among right-wing propaganda figures, with Charles Murray as a particular example

there's something so forlorn about dollar-store merchandise that I feel aggrieved by it. cheap paper feels so thin these days, like they've figured out how to make it out of the absolute minimum of recycled pulp. and no I'm sorry I've never thought that writing on an electronic tablet was anything like the same and I've had some very tortuous thoughts about why that should be the case that aren't about just...UX issues. directly altering a physical medium is...significant.

I'm so happy that Kel got into those cheap plastic discs from the dollar store. I was a bit worried at first; they seemed a meager sort of gift, but Kel really took to them. I wish I could say that other dollar-store toys looked as promising.

~Chara

My RL parents left me with a very painful and intimidating legacy to deal with, and I don't mean estate stuff or the house or anything like that. I mean...their memories. It's within my power now to remember their hopes and dreams for their children, which were...formidable.

"You're the future of humans and monsters!" is seared into my brain. My RL parents may not have wanted their children to achieve anything that extraordinary. I mean...they didn't believe in the extraordinary, not really, although I suspect that my mother had her lingering superstitions and half-serious folk beliefs. The reconciliation of humans and monsters, which I take to be roughly equivalent to the reconciliation of magic with human civilization—yeah my RL parents would have rolled their eyes at that one. But they wanted big things anyway. My father hoped we'd become great scientists or engineers maybe. My mother secretly dreamed we'd become revolutionaries, like the men she admired still. She loved Fidel, oh yeah. We were definitely a pro-Cuban-revolutionary household.

As far as I'm concerned...all those hopes and dreams are still "operative", to use the Ron Ziegler term. I am taking G. K. Chesterton entirely at his word here, regarding tradition as the democracy of the dead, and so my RL parents get a say even though they're gone. I've been struggling against that for much of my life, trying to scale myself down a dozen times over and be happy with something less, but it's never worked. I'm the last child left, the survivor of the catastrophic wreckage of a family that shouldn't have ever existed maybe, and I need to deal with that properly.

I haven't wanted to deal with remembering...everything. As much as I've wanted it...when it actually comes time to gaze into the Total Perspective Vortex, it's difficult to be blithe about it.

~Chara

"Electrification" was sold to me, during my liberal whıte-American grade school education, as a modern miracle. It was one of those unquestioned benefits of civilization—electricity everywhere, bringing on a veritable age of Reason, if I may quote O Brother, Where Art Thou? One of my grade-school civics textbooks was Robert F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, which Kennedy did not actually write. I feel like this hagiographic textbook could use a bit of critical examination because it's such a perfect embodiment of all the civic values that modern-day U.S. Democrats still pretend to uphold, including their nauseating idolatry of compromise. Anyway, one of the political heroes idolized in the book is Nebraska Senator George W. Norris, a liberal Republican who's credited with the Tennessee Valley Authority or TVA, a great federal electrification project that quietly enforced anti-Black social values (q.v. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/tva-race-problem/ and many other sources.)

That's the other side of the miracle, the bit they don't like teaching about in American grade schools: the fact that electrification was a destructive process, spectacularly unequal in the distribution of its gifts. Numerous Black communities were destroyed by electrification projects (this has been usual with American public-works projects) and the indiscriminate damming of rivers for hydroelectric installations ruined many rivers and watersheds. The actual work of electrification—the massive construction projects and the cascading social consequences from them—is tossed off with a few words. Instead the usual history books teach only the miracle: electricity itself, on tap, for everyone (ideally) with all the costs swept out of sight and bundled up neatly with monetary arithmetic.

American grade-school history is mostly about teaching legends. It's a laundry list of things you're supposed to revere and never forget, mostly battles and great monuments and famous laws and other factoids. It's a dead, static thing to be scrutinized the same way you'd scrutinize a dead moth—consider that there are myriads of human beings still devoted to extracting every last possible scrap of verifiable detail that can be obtained from meticulous study of the Battle of Chancellorsville or the Tennis-Court Oath, as if we could somehow recapture the spirit of these events by knowing down to the last stitch what everyone was wearing that day. There's very little history in American history classes, from what I can remember. It wasn't until my Classics education at SDSU that I felt I was actually digging into the good stuff of history, the texture of life in the past.

~Chara of Pnictogen