DocWatts

Well we've already decided that mass graves for school children are an acceptable price to pay for easy access to firearms, so Charlie Kirk should be proud that he gets to lay down his life so that gun owners aren't inconvenienced in any way. In all seriousness, I have zero sympathy for the guy, but this is a really bad portent of where we are as a culture. 2020s America is looking more and more like 1850s. And if you know anything about American history, that's an incredibly dangerous parallel to be living through.

The correct response to this event, plus every other unhinged thing that the Orange Shit Stain is doing right now:

You might enjoy this SubStack article I wrote over the 4th of July called 'Death Throes Of The American Republic' which delves into this topic. The tldr is that America began with the trappings of democracy, but only for a privileged few. It's only within the last 60 years, since the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts, that we could be considered a full democracy in practice. The USA of today is what's known within political science as a flawed democracy that's on its way to becoming a hybrid regime under Trump 2.0. A hybrid regime is essentially a failed democracy that's in the process of authoritarian consolidation, but isn't a full-on authoritarian state yet. It’s a political system that retains some formal features of democracy - such as elections and a constitution - but these are increasingly hollowed out in practice. In such a regime voting still happens, and on paper you still have 'rights,' but those rights function more like optional guidelines than guarantees. If they get in the way of the ruling faction's ambitions, they're ignored, reinterpreted, or swept aside entirely.

Are there problems with the Left? Obviously. They/we (for include myself when I speak of 'the left') can be inflexible, unrealistic, and developmentally blind. Fair enough. No one is more aware of the blindspots of the Left than Leftists such as myself with little patience for performative bullshit (like holding your nose and refusing to vote for a candidate because they don't meet your purity test, when the opposition is a literal fascist). That said, the solution to these shortcomings isn't to sprint 50 miles in the other direction to the opposite extreme. Parroting far-right propaganda doesn't make you edgy - it shows that you're likely insecure in your identity and social status, and that you have a lot of inner work to do.

Drop dead of congestive heart failure. Cults tends to fracture and die without their charismatic leader, and Trump is too much of an abusive narcissist to appoint a successor.

Kudos to this show than having more of a backbone than %90 of our politicians. Background context for this is that South Park's just signed a $1.5 billion contract with Paramount, which is in the middle of a corporate merger for which they need approval from Trump's FTC. While this was going down, Trump pressured CBS to get Stephen Colbert taken off the air, since the comedian has been a vocal critic of Trump. In the midst of this shit show, South Park is throwing down the fucking gauntlet and daring the man-baby to try to get the cartoon taken off the air - and nuke the merger between Paramount and Skydance Media in the process, because he can't handle mockery. Additionally, Trump was trying to pressure Paramount to air 'pro-Trump' advertising, which South Park was all too gleeful to oblige. This may seem like a lark, and it kind of is, but it highlights something important about how you deal with an abusive narcissist who's the head of a fascist cult - through ridicule and disdain, not argument and debate. Debating only creates the dangerous illusion that the Trump's "ideas" (ie, his staggering criminality, bigotry, and incompetence) are worthy of consideration. They're not. And good on South Park for recognizing that. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2025-07-24/south-park-season-opener-trump-60-minutes-paramount (Heads up, these clips are extremely NSFW. Trump goes low, South Park goes lower.)

The Short Answer: I'd say that we can validate the lived significance of such experiences while retaining healthy skepticism about any broader metaphysical conclusions we might draw about our shared reality. A good analogy is that we can take the phenomenological experience of someone seeing their dead grandparent during an ayahuasca trip at face value and be curious about what that person took away from that experience, without concluding that ghosts exist. Longer Answer: I actually wrote about this topic in another section of my book, where I outline an ontology of Interactional Realism - where that mind and world are entangled. Our conceptual distinctions are 'real' - but in a different way from folk-realism, which reifies these mental models into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. What I argue is that our conceptual distinctions, like an 'atom' or a 'tree', are real insofar as they ground us with a shared experiential reality. Hallucinations fail this test because their connection to this shared reality is erratic and tenuous, and they don't allow us to engage with our environment in a constructive and healthy way.

I thought I might share a long-form essay I wrote on underdetermination - which deals with the epistemology of facts, the enshittification of news media, an autopsy of bullshit, and how to navigate today's chaotic information environment. Whereas most treatments of underdetermination tend to explore the topic from the domain of science, I do so in the context that's more relatable to most people - the media landscape that molds our attitudes and beliefs about the world. The article itself can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/facts-dont-speak-for-themselves ______________________________________________________________________________________ Facts Don’t Speak For Themselves Still from 'Network' (1976), directed by Sidney Lumet, © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Text added by the author. Facts, it turns out, do care about your feelings - not because truth is a matter of preference, but because what counts as a relevant fact is always a matter of context. A context is just a background situation for forming interpretations. Think of how a spoken conversation can carry very different meanings depending on tone, body language, and your relationship to the speaker. Facts work the same way. The relevance of any particular fact isn’t fixed - it varies enormously depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, and where you stand in relation to the world. If this sounds like academic pedantry with no real world stakes, think again. Human communication depends entirely on shared conventions about relevance. Just ask any journalist, whose job description is heavily focused on making judgments about which facts matter. The quality of those judgments help determine whether we get functional information ecosystems or dysfunctional ones. Before we tackle today’s chaotic information environment, and what it reveals about the perspectives we inhabit, let’s start with a best-case scenario - and what we get wrong when looking back at it today. The middle of the 20th century is widely considered a high-watermark of American journalism. These were the decades when reporters took down Joseph McCarthy, cracked the Watergate scandal wide open, and laid bare decades of deception about Vietnam by publishing the Pentagon Papers. There’s a charming but misguided notion that this golden age was defined by newsrooms sticking to a simple principle: ‘just the facts’. If this sounds blissfully uncomplicated compared to today’s algorithmic echo chambers, that’s exactly the point. It never was this straightforward. We only think it so because the interpretive machinery operated so seamlessly that we mistook it for objectivity. Yet the myth persists, and it’s easy to see why. Picture an era before cable news, before social media - where families across the political spectrum gathered around a single television set to receive the day’s news. All of it delivered by a trusted anchor, whose voice carried the weight of national consensus. Hard as it is to imagine amid our current algorithm-driven polarization, there was a brief window of time when mass media served as a unifying force. One where we’d argue about what course to take, but could more or less agree upon what happened. That’s not to say that this was some golden age of civility - just look back to the civil rights struggle to see how vicious those disagreements could be. The key difference is that we were having our culture wars within something resembling the same Reality. In contrast to contemporary infotainment - where fact and opinion are tossed into a blender as a matter of course - it’s easy to grow nostalgic for the journalistic integrity of this bygone era. Of course, quality journalism still exists, if you know where to look for it. But its authoritative role has greatly diminished - collateral damage of changes in how we consume our news. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle was pivotal - when eyeballs equate to revenue, sensationalism wins out over substance. By the 1980s these trends were converging into an early version of our media-driven echo chambers. Today’s social media feeds are in fact just the latest iteration of a decades-long transformation. Cable television and talk radio were the initial catalysts. A ‘greed is good’ ethos provided the rationale. Politically motivated deregulation made it inevitable - specifically: 1) The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which necessitated balanced coverage of controversial political topics. 2) Media consolidation, which concentrated ownership in the hands of a handful of major players. 3) The privatization of public airwaves, which drove programming to become advertiser-driven. What you get from this brew is what the author and digital activist Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, where media platforms are hollowed out into a scheme for extracting money from the very people they were built to serve. What began with cable news and talk radio has been supercharged by the digital attention economy. We need look no further than our social media feeds, which are precision engineered, like slot machines, to keep us scrolling and tapping. Against this brave new world of competing realities, a desire to return to ‘just the facts’ is understandable. The trouble is, this romanticized version of journalism’s high watermark gets the story backwards. Through our rose-colored glasses, we remember a time when trusted reporters like Walter Cronkite supposedly delivered just the facts, and let events speak for themselves. News was news and commentary was commentary - or so the story goes. What’s missing from this nostalgic portrait is a recognition that Cronkite and his peers were never delivering just the raw facts. They were instead master curators, whose skill was in deciding which facts were relevant to the public interest - and then arranging those facts into a coherent narrative. The higher journalistic standards of this era weren’t illusory - but they weren’t the result of news reporters serving as neutral arbiters of truth. They instead emerged from skilled professionals who understood themselves to be public servants, tasked with helping citizens make sense of a complex world. It was a role that required rigorous judgment about accuracy, relevance, and fairness, rather than a presumption that these journalistic principles translated into objectivity. The kernel of truth in this idyllic distortion is that a distressing number of people today lack even basic media literacy skills - which is understandable given today’s chaotic information landscape, and decades of educational neglect. What this amounts to is a form of epistemic inequality - where access to reliable information - and the skills (and inclination) to evaluate it critically - become yet another form of privilege. What does this inequality look like in practice? It’s a media environment where quality journalism demands our time, effort, and resources - while misinformation flows freely through social media feeds engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. The natural outcome of this digital divide is that people gravitate to sources of information that accommodate their reality. And if you’re someone struggling to keep a roof over your head while juggling two jobs with family obligations, you probably don’t have the time or motivation to become a part-time epistemologist. Fair enough - what’s needed isn’t sophisticated theory, but basic bullshit detection. An Autopsy Of Bullshit Bullshit is a term we love to throw around casually, but it’s a concept that’s taken seriously by respected philosophers, who’ve given it a precise definition. So what is bullshit? It’s not the same as lying. A liar at least respects the truth enough to avoid it, but bullshit is speech that’s manufactured without any regard for truth or falsehood. Its main purpose is to deceive and distract in service of an unforthcoming agenda. Whereas a lie might fabricate facts, bullshit separates facts from the contexts that make them meaningful. Its intent is to get you to bow out of the truth game altogether due to apathy and exhaustion. To that end, the bullshit artist will bludgeon you with anything and everything: flattery, half-truths, irrelevant statistics, thought-terminating clichés. Whatever they can get their grubby little mitts on, they’ll use to get you to stop asking questions. While bullshit has been around with us from time immemorial, our fractured media landscape provides today’s bullshit artists with the cover they need to thrive. Inclusivity - the notion that we should accommodate different ideas and perspectives - is a worthy ideal whose very nature makes it self-undermining without proper guardrails. All manner of dangerous bullshit will take advantage of this openness to masquerade as legitimate perspectives - including those that seek to undermine the very tolerance they cynically exploit. This is known within philosophy as an example of a ‘free rider problem’ - where individuals benefit from a collective good without bearing their fair share of the costs. It’s a dynamic that enemies of open societies have gotten very good at exploiting, as evidenced by the fact that modern authoritarians are more likely to gain power through the ballot box than through military coups. There’s a widespread folk-theory of information that makes us especially vulnerable to this kind of exploitation - the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’ - which holds that truthful viewpoints will ultimately prevail over toxic nonsense. It’s a lovely aspiration that’s unfortunately disconnected from the messy complexity of human psychology, which is wired for survival rather than truth. What Facts Get Wrong The vast majority of our viewpoints aren’t arrived at through careful consideration, but as an organic outgrowth of our lived experience. Precisely because we can step back from these lived orientations but not step outside of them entirely, this necessarily means that our assessments of the world are always localized, limited, and incomplete. Given this reality, the idea that we could somehow critically examine all of our assumptions is absurd. While armchair philosophers may exhort us to ‘question everything’, in reality this isn’t a blueprint for wisdom - it’s a recipe for psychosis. This is what philosophers call the problem of underdetermination - where the available evidence literally under determines which interpretation is correct. It’s not just that we disagree about what facts mean; it’s that we have to go beyond facts themselves to make sense of the world. Which brings us back to our original dilemma. If the relevance of facts is always a matter of what we’re trying to accomplish and where we stand in relation to the world, then what basis do we have to reject harmful or destructive viewpoints? When we remember that facts never speak for themselves but are always curated and arranged, we can be more attentive to the agendas that facts are in service of. While there’s no shortage of bad actors who are at the ready with a firehose of lies, more sophisticated bullshit artists know how to use facts to deceive and manipulate. The so-called 13/50 rule that’s a staple of racist discourse is a telling illustration - where it’s asserted that black Americans make up 13% of the population but make up roughly 50% of the crime statistics. Conveniently missing from this ‘factual’ premise is everything that would prevent someone from drawing the racist conclusions it’s designed to promote: centuries of economic exclusion, forced ghettoization, discriminatory policing practices, engrained prosecutorial bias, and methodological problems with crime statistics. Not to mention the unspoken implication that 40 million people are collectively responsible for the actions of individuals, in a way that white people never are. More prevalent than outright malicious intent are instances where someone is using facts to prop up a flawed premise. Take the argument that systemic racism is overblown or exaggerated, based upon the achievements of a number of high profile black entrepreneurs. Not individuals born with a silver spoon, but those who overcame genuinely harsh circumstances. For someone who lived this reality - working late nights and scraping together every penny to build something meaningful despite real obstacles - these stories vindicate that the system works, and success is simply a matter of talent and effort. What’s often missing from these accounts is an acknowledgment or awareness of the invisible infrastructure that made their success possible: the community program that provided avenues for constructive engagement in a rough neighborhood. The social programs which helped a parent put food on the table. Or simply the luck of avoiding the kind of crisis that destroys someone’s potential before they’ve gotten off the ground. Blind spots that in no way undermine the talent and hard work of these success stories, but do go to show that individual achievement doesn’t automatically translate into special insight about social policy. Where We Go From Here Which brings us back to our earlier question: if facts can be misused by malicious actors and misinterpreted by well-meaning people, how do we separate viewpoints that are worth engaging with from those that we’re better off discarding? A question made all the more complicated by the recognition that no viewpoint captures it all, and we’re always evaluating from within our own vantage point. When we acknowledge that viewpoints exist on a spectrum, we can start to develop some workable heuristics for which perspectives foster constructive engagement in spite of their blind spots, which are seriously hindered by distortive patterns, and which are deliberately manipulative. In general, higher quality perspectives are characterized by their adaptability, contextual awareness, and a realistic appraisal of their own limitations. Lower quality ones can be identified through reliable patterns of Reality-denial, where relevant complexities are ignored or dismissed. And malicious viewpoints weaponize whatever they can get their hands on - facts, emotions, grievances - to feed a selfish, shitty agenda. The key lies not in escaping the limitations of our viewpoints, but in acknowledging their existence - and learning to work within them skillfully.

Thanks! And there's a term that's used for this problem - 'relevance realization' - which is shorthand for the automatic way in which we just seem to know what's relevant for everyday tasks and activities, without any thought or effort on our part. Our perceptual system puts in a great deal of work to structure the world into gestalts of meaning, long before logic and reasoning ever enters into the picture. This is very easy for living organisms, and has proven very, very difficult for AIs. Although LLMs like ChatGPT have made impressive strides in emulating some aspects of this through the error backpropagation method which its models use to output text.

If that's the case, what you've managed to achieve is all the more impressive - adjacent paths to a similar destination, I suppose! Nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel, a lot of the insights from phenomenological texts are frankly poorly communicated. It's obvious you have a deep grasp on this material from how refreshingly straightforward you're able to convey what someone like Martin Heideggar contorted his text into a pretzel to communicate.

Howdy! I thought I might share an excerpt from a long-form essay I wrote, which is a deep dive into the epistemology of perspectives. The main idea that this piece explores is that we don’t just 'have' perspectives - we inhabit them. Meaning that we don't leave our viewpoints behind as we inspect their construction. Rather than chasing an impossible 'view from nowhere' or bowing out of the truth-game altogether, what I propose is embracing this 'view from within' - and learning to navigate it skillfully. Full article can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/the-view-from-within A ‘View from Nowhere’ promises an impossible escape hatch from our messy, partial perspectives. Here’s a better alternative. ______________________________________________ The Waters We Swim In Like that old parable about the fish that’s oblivious to water, we too are immersed within a sea of influences that we rarely notice or examine. We like to think that our viewpoints are our own, yet they’re shaped by currents flowing through us from countless unseen sources. As social beings, our immersion within these shared currents of meaning isn’t optional - it’s a central component of having a viewpoint at all. Yet not all of these inherited patterns are benign. Some can become maladaptive when our circumstances change, while others are deliberately engineered to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. We can’t opt out, and we can’t fully step away - which makes dissecting this all-encompassing presence a real bitch. Precisely because we don’t leave these currents behind while we’re coming to grips with how it directs our gaze, any such analysis will inevitably contain some degree of circularity. Given this predicament, we may find ourselves drawn to an impossible ‘view from nowhere’ which promises to liberate us from our messy, partial perspectives. Or else we may bow out of the truth game altogether, leaving us ill-prepared for when the world forces us to pick a lane. Neither approach works - so let’s find one that does. When we abandon the fantasy of escape and the luxury of disengagement, we can pivot instead to an acceptance of our ‘view from within’ - and learn to navigate it skillfully. That means being able to discern between viewpoints that are aligned with our values, those we’ve slid into out of manipulation and bias, and those that are intrinsic to human cognition. The million dollar question, then, is how to develop this discernment, when we can step back from what we’re trying to assess, but not step outside of it entirely? What we’re left with is a gordian knot, where our tools for assessing perspectives are themselves a product of those very perspectives. This predicament becomes even more challenging when we remember that we don’t inhabit these landscapes alone - we’re a product of the systems we participate in, even as we help shape them. And our current landscape is rife with systems that are precision engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. And with AI entering the mix, this epistemic and emotional minefield is about to get a hell of a lot worse. Faced with the prospect of being swept beneath an exhausting tide of complexity, our frantic desperation for a life raft of easy-answers is perfectly understandable. If only the world itself was so accommodating. ______________________________________________ You Are Not An Island The hard truth: if you were hoping for an escape hatch from the nebulosity of daily life, think again. Becoming skilled navigators on the sea of perspectives begins with attentive absorption within the mundane. No shortcuts here - more purposeful engagement with these landscapes of meaning is hashed out over kitchen tables and workplaces and school boards. The takeaway of this reality-check? You are not an island - your viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner-sanctum, but from the messy give-and-take of our shared, everyday world. Our vehicle for exercising agency within these negotiated realities is through culture. Culture is our shared system of collective meaning-making, which we inhabit and shape together. It’s our signature evolutionary specialization, as instinctive to humans as hive-building is to bees. And like a hive, cultures too are living systems - maintained by individuals, who are shaped by those very cultures in turn. For the influence flows both ways. This recursive relationship between individuals and collectives reveals something crucial about perspectives. We don’t construct our viewpoints from scratch - we inherit cultural templates and adapt or invert them to fit our circumstances. To that end, our attitudes and beliefs are always situated against a horizon of significance - a tacit framework of assumptions about what matters - which we negotiate with our culture. Our intuitive sense that someone’s political beliefs are more significant than their preferred pizza toppings is an example. Most of this horizon comes to us ready-made - we don’t normally begin our mornings by drawing up an inventory of what’s important and what’s trivial. For the most part, these prioritizations come effortlessly - only jumping to the fore when our world is seriously disrupted. Most of us only catch glimpses of this horizon when we experience an unexpected loss or setback that shatters our sense of who we are. But here’s the rub: the effortless nature of this cultural osmosis is a double edged sword - we can’t scrutinize every assumption we absorb, but only fanatics and fools doubt nothing. ‘Question everything’ may sound profound in theory, but it would be utterly paralyzing in practice. Instead, it pays to be strategic about what we’re questioning. Which begs the obvious question: scrutinize what exactly? Since our concern is on how to exercise agency within constraints, that means zeroing in on how this autonomy gets undermined in the first place. Doing so will help us tease out where we have avenues for genuine choice. As we’ll see, some of these limitations on our autonomy are benign, while others are designed to serve agendas that aren’t in our best interests. But what makes us so susceptible to these problematic influences in the first place? To see how this works, it helps to understand the psychological machinery these systems are built to exploit. ______________________________________________ Our Cognition Is Built For Survival, Not Truth Human cognition is wired to prioritize threats over opportunities, which is highly sensible from an evolutionary standpoint. Miss an opportunity and you might go hungry. Miss a threat and you might be dead. While today’s societies are considerably safer than the ancestral environments where this cognitive architecture evolved, evolution doesn’t care if this legacy software is a bad fit for our current circumstances. Natural selection doesn’t optimize - it satisfices, cobbling together solutions that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. As a result, outdated wiring doesn’t just get switched off - it gets repurposed. Practically speaking, this ancestral firmware shows up in the form of cognitive biases. Two major culprits stand out for our purposes. There’s a negativity bias - where negative events are more emotionally engaging than positive ones. And there’s a recency bias - where we prioritize what’s fresh in memory. The upshot of these inherited vulnerabilities? When our priorities aren’t our own, this can leave us hypervigilant to the wrong kinds of threats, while overlooking ones that actually matter. Our anxieties, then, provide important clues as to our psychological blind spots - areas where our emotional needs override our epistemic ones. And when these hijacked responses get scaled up across entire populations, it metastasizes in culture. ______________________________________________ The Authoritarian’s Bargain So what do our cultural artifacts reveal about our current moment? Judging from our social media feeds, we’re awash in a sea of hostility, superficiality, and despair. Yet we also inhabit a world full of wonder, creativity, and joy. And here’s the real kicker - both of these realities are simultaneously true. So what’s going on here? You can touch grass, experience genuine beauty and connection - and you damn well should! But that doesn’t make the grind of day-to-day life against systems that are increasingly stacked against you any less real when you return. The jarring gap between these two realities isn’t just disorienting - it creates a breeding ground for bad actors to take advantage of us. Our lingering sense that a better world is possible can become the hook for an ugly form of grievance politics, where demagogues offer up a set of reliable scapegoats for why the good life was stolen from us. A fairy-tale for adults that promises to return us to a mythologized past - if only we surrender our agency to a charismatic strongman, and trust in his plan to make us ‘great again’. The allure of the authoritarian’s bargain lies in how it contains a kernel of truth - one that’s rooted in legitimate fears and frustrations. Anxiety over one’s social status is a reliable culprit here. Social status isn’t just some theoretical construct - threaten it, and people respond in dangerously predictable ways. For those feeling the gnaw of victimization and decline, it’s an attractive bargain. Sacrificing one’s intellectual sovereignty and moral agency becomes an acceptable trade off for the intoxicating illusion of empowerment it provides. Put simply, this exhausting disconnect between our expectations and our lived reality didn’t emerge from nowhere. To make sense of this split, it will be helpful to highlight why this particular moment is unusual - and the forces brought us here. The hyper-polarized world we’ve become habituated to didn’t occur by happenstance - it has specific causes that can be traced and understood. So what happens when a disruptive technology collides with a social fabric that’s been hollowed out by decades of quiet erosion? It turns cracks into chasms. ______________________________________________ The Attention Economy The digital revolution that we’ve come to take for-granted was no mere technological shift. It was also an accelerant for an erosion of communal life that was already well underway as this disruptive technology was entering the mainstream. Evidence of this atomization could be seen in declining participation in shared associations that knit individuals into a community - from bowling leagues to union halls to neighborhood associations. These stable anchors of collective meaning-making became collateral damage of changes in how we live and how we work. Suburban isolation, mounting economic inequality, and overscheduled lives gradually hollowed out the civic associations from which our shared social reality is woven. The evolution of today’s digital platforms was a process in learning how to monetize the human needs that were being unmet in the wake of this fragmentation. And while there’s been no shortage of bad actors along the way, this commodification didn’t require an evil mastermind. Just the banal mechanics of market incentives, combined with new means for exploiting old vulnerabilities in the human psyche. The cumulative effect of this algorithmic optimization was the gradual creation of an attention economy - one where our psychological vulnerabilities are systematically exploited.

For what it's worth, this kind of in-depth and thoughtful analysis requires time to reflect and integrate - which is why I suspect that the Intellectual Stuff form gets less traffic than sections of the Forum. I really dig your writing style, which does an admirable job of making a complex topic approachable without dumbing things down. You also do an impressive job of integrating the sort of insights that Leo shares in his videos within a rigorous, phenomenological analysis of experience. All too often I see the sort of topics that you take the time to deal with here handwaved away with catch-all terms like 'God' or 'The Absolute', without the sort of grounded deconstruction of these concepts which makes these notions feel earned. There's a surprising amount of overlap with my own epistemic and ontological framework, with an obvious difference in emphasis. I'd be curious to hear what some of your influences were - the shadow of Alfred Korzybski, Martin Heideggar, and Hubert Dreyfus seem obvious (but perhaps not, there are of course other places to absorb these ideas). Some favorite sections from your piece: From a meta-phenomenological perspective, this does not confirm an external God’s existence, but rather situates “God” as the felt substance of experience itself – an infinite, divine-like reality encountered within consciousness. This view honors the power of the experience while maintaining humility about its ontological meaning. Love, love, love this! A perfect encapsulation of the phenomenological God that I subscribe to - where the big G isn't a metaphysical entity but our felt connection to Reality itself. The intensity or beauty of an experience does not determine its ontological status. The mind is evolutionarily tuned to treat powerful sensations as meaningful, but this is a heuristic – not a reliable truth-detection mechanism. Mystical experiences are vivid, coherent, and emotionally overwhelming, but this doesn’t mean they describe an ultimate reality. They may reveal something about the nature of experience, not what exists outside of it. Perfectly sums up some of my criticisms of psychedelic mysticism - we can attend to mystical states with an appropriate amount of skepticism without being dismissive of their value. A very William James-ian point.

For what it's worth, I'm willing to give much more leeway to 19 year old kid who got suckered because they saw some Joe Rogan clips pop up in their YouTube feed. I'm far less willing top extend that leeway to folks who remember the shitshow that was the fascist cheeto's first term. Watched him attempt a violent insurrection at the US Capital. Heard him say that he was going to be a 'dictator on day one'. And said to themselves "more of that please". I'm also pissed at the folks who sat this election out because of they couldn't be bothered to vote for the most clear case of the lesser of two evils in the history of US politics, but I'm not going to place them in the same bucket as literal fascists.

Meanwhile, MAGAs are shocked that their family and friends have cut them off for participating in our version of a Nazi movement.

As much as Trump is posturing as being a strong-man, his regime is weak and historically unpopular. Recognize that there aren't enough troops in all branches of the US military to enforce martial law on a nation of 340 million people. This is political theatre by a weak, wanna-be dictator meant to intimidate us into anticipatory obedience. Don't fall for it.

And Al Capone was ultimately brought down on charges of tax evasion. The lesson here is that you bring down these powerful bastards however you can, with whatever legal, political, and rhetorical tools that are at your disposal.

Because the timing of this is no coincidence. For weeks DJT has been telling his supporters to 'shut up' about Epstein - but the Cult isn't buying it anymore. After saying that the Epstein files were on her desk (with the implication that they were ready to be released), Pam Bondi is now involved in a blatant cover up at the behest of Trump. Again, this is on the heels of Trump cutting Ghislaine Maxwell a sweetheart deal - transfer to a luxury prison in exchange for her silence. So yes, it's a power grab - but it's also calculated political theatre

Additionally, he's also actively alienating the national guard - the majority of whom are not MAGA and are uncomfortable being deployed against American citizens. Morale among the troops who are being used for this stunt is reportedly in the shitter. Most of our national guard are ordinary people who signed up to help their communities by aiding in things like disaster relief. They didn't sign up to become political puppets for wanna-be dictator.

Some context and perspective Let's not lose the plot - Diddlin' Don has placed his bloated, disgusting foot all the way down on the authoritarian accelerator as a direct response to his Epstein problems not going away. In addition to being a dangerous power grab, it's important to keep in mind that this is also psychological warfare - outrage bate calculated to terrify us while draw attention away from Trump's involvement with a literal child sex trafficking ring. Don't fall for it - as we push back against this dangerous escalation, we also need to be loudly and unapologetically drawing attention to the fact that Trump is soft-launching martial law so we're not talking about Epstein. Don't forget that this move is coming on the heels of his DOJ giving sweetheart deal to Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a blatant cover up. This matters because Epstein is an area where he is very vulnerable - a growing crack in his pillars of support that we need to be pushing on as we speak, post, and protest against this fascist theatre. Here's some free images and memes to that effect.

Thanks, appreciate it!

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated! The book that this article is from is still another year or two out though

Trying to change the trajectory of national politics as an individual is a recipe for burn out. When nothing you do is enough, you do what you can. So my suggestion is to pick one issue (or set of related issues) you care about that you can engage with locally in your city and state, and then find your organizing home. That could be collecting signatures for a ballot initiative, canvasing for a progressive candidate in your state, getting money out of politics, becoming a voting member of your local Democratic Party or DSA, organizing and attending protests, advocating on behalf of immigrants, or being on ICE watch. Unless you truly live in bumblefuck-nowhere, odds are high that you'll be able to finding something worthwhile to lend your time and energy to within your city, county, and state. In short - find a way to help people who share your values and concerns acquire Institutional Power on a local and state level, so that they can wield it in constructive ways. Finding your local chapter of Indivisible is a great way to find out which organizations are doing what in your home state. As Individuals, we can't do much to affect politics on a national scale. As networks of communities pursuing a long term strategy we can do a lot. American fascism was built methodically over 50 years through participation in school boards and local radio stations and city councils and state governments. But the flip side is that if the far-right can do that, we can too.

Let's not be hasty, there's a chance he might have only sexually assaulted adults while protecting pedophiles. Huge difference. /s.

Exactly this. They went as hard as it was possible to go, baiting him to have a narcissistic crash-out over being portrayed as a tiny-dick Middle Eastern dictator ala Saddam Hussein. It places dRump in a no-win scenario. Either let South Park get away with their brutal takedown thus giving courage to other creators, or prove their point if the wanna-be king tries to get the show cancelled.