I aintent dead!

And neither is this newsletter!

I should probably have mentioned this before the holiday, but I took the Junteenth holday as a 4-day weekend with my wife to cuddle up and relax in the pleasant cool glow of LEDs and animated pixels. We made every effort to avoid the outside world and mostly succeeded, such that I didn't realize until today that the US has unlawfully entered a shooting war with Iran, who even now is planning to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, kicking off a likely energy crisis; that is, unless someone can talk a bunch of really, shockingly self-centered, ignorant, and willfully obtuse people off of various metaphorical ledges. We're about one bad Double Big Mac away from Our Furor dropping a nuke on Madagascar just because someone told him it was a bad idea.

I work pretty hard these days to make sure I avoid ableist language across multiple axes, so I try to avoid using words like "stupid" because I don't believe in the idea that someone's (fake) measure of (whatever we mean by) intelligence is what makes them (more or less) worthy. What I will say is that many, many people who have been ostensibly put in charge of things are wildly disregulated when it comes to things like self-awareness, self-criticism, curiousity, a willingness to accept other points of view, and recognizing value in others' opinions. I won't say that these people don't have rich, satisfying internal lives; I will say that their ability to recognize that interiority in others is so disrupted as to be non-existent.

The thought that echoes in my head on a daily basis is Oliver Cromwell's letter to the Church of Scotland:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

By nature and by education, my tendency is to assume at any given moment that my rigorously and vociforously held beliefs are both correct and may be incorrect if presented with further evidence. It's part and parcel of being a curious being, and part and parcel of living in a multimodal, multicultural society in which value is independent of existence – people are not "more" or "less" important based on their contributions, collections, concepts, or abilities; people are valuable simply because they exist as people – and it's something that both fanaticism and capitalism attempt to destroy and overwrite with other, more harmful rhetoric.

What I'm trying to say is, when the cry goes up that "someone should do something", it's important to recognize that at this point we are the someones. There has been a process of evolution, either on purpose or accidentally, that has concentrated authority and influence into the hands of those who either cannot or do not want to change things. Thus cometh the words of Stafford Beer:

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

The only choice now is to accept the machine, or throw our shoes into the workings in the understanding that if that doesn't work, our bodies are next. We must all become Luddites, on purpose or against our will.