The worst may yet be to come
October 7, 2018 7:07 PM   Subscribe

 
This reminds me of Sarah Kendzior's piece from November 18, 2016: We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump. That's probably a good one to reread after reading this.
posted by limeonaire at 8:03 PM on October 7, 2018 [18 favorites]


Related train of thought: These are tough times to be someone who depersonalizes at the first hint of fear. I really do have to reread things I've written before and look back through my own Twitter and Instagram streams sometimes to remind myself who I am, what I want to be, where I've been, why it matters. We probably should all do that more, though.

I was thinking about my own depersonalization because I watched the first episode of Legion and was reflecting on how that's a hard show to watch as someone who has an actual (informally diagnosed but very real) dissociative disorder. It's one reason why I don't usually read politics threads, because it's so easy for me to get lost in despair. (See also: why I asked for escapist feminist romantic movies about an hour and a half after reading this bit about abused Latinas going underground in the age of Trump.)

But true to form as the survivor of trauma and a subsequent psychology major, I'm definitely intrigued by the psychology of politics and dystopia. This article is good along those lines. So thank you!
posted by limeonaire at 8:18 PM on October 7, 2018 [22 favorites]


Her cynicism is profound. Soros’s support for Syrian refugees cannot be philanthropy; it must come from a deep desire to destroy Hungary. Angela Merkel’s refugee policy could not derive from a desire to help people either. “I think it is just bullshit,” Schmidt said. “I would say she wanted to prove that Germans, this time, are the good people. And they can lecture everybody on humanism and morality. It doesn’t matter for the Germans what they can lecture the rest of the world on; they just have to lecture someone.”
One small thing missing from this: the role of projection.

The Kavannaugh thing is a recent example. Republicans believe, truly, that partisanship is the only reason Democrats could have opposed their nominee. There were a diversity of reasons, of course, but there's no symmetry between, say, Democrats' response Trump's first appointment and Republicans' response to Obama's last. The distinction is everywhere in North American politics.

It's seems (to me) that the divide that the author is talking about is partly sustained by the belief of one side that the motivations of the other are equal and opposite, which always seems to leave the liberal side at a loss and the illiberal side in eventual power.
posted by klanawa at 9:02 PM on October 7, 2018 [47 favorites]


One small thing missing from this: the role of projection.

The Kavannaugh thing is a recent example. Republicans believe, truly, that partisanship is the only reason Democrats could have opposed their nominee. There were a diversity of reasons, of course, but there's no symmetry between, say, Democrats' response Trump's first appointment and Republicans' response to Obama's last. The distinction is everywhere in North American politics.


Grandma always said, "You judge others by yourself."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:19 PM on October 7, 2018 [6 favorites]


("By yourself" as in using yourself as a rule, not "by yourself" as in alone.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:21 PM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


My grandma always told me to judge people by how they treat those less fortunate than themselves, so...
posted by klanawa at 9:25 PM on October 7, 2018 [8 favorites]


The right wing is playing with fire. They've created followers who lack critical thinking and a politic of faith. Its been useful for them but is going to be so easy to turn it against them. Their rage will be their downfall as soon as some of us on the left start to utilize the same tools of trolling to sow seeds of dischord in their party until they devour themselves. Maybe I should take this to metafilter projects?
posted by iamck at 9:34 PM on October 7, 2018 [23 favorites]


It's that darn Satan, I'll bet. There are reports he has been manipulating a lot of things lately. Mostly perceptions . . .
posted by RoseyD at 9:40 PM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]


The administration just put out a report saying that they expect global warming to cause a 7 degree rise and we can't stop it. Any attempts to would just be a hassle to industry and meaningless anyway. It's reported on in the Washington post but I'm out of free reads so you'll have to look it up.

So basically a bunch of bitter old men and women who were never well liked by their peers and who sought power as revenge are facing death and taking the rest of the world down with them as a giant fuck you. And I've no idea if we can stop them. Maybe a big enough war and famine would wipe out enough people to slow it down some but why would any leader risk that? Why would they not do everything to stop it?

I've never been religious and I know the book of revelations refers to an ancient war that already happens but damn if it didn't make some good points about the anti-christ, his motivations and his supporters. Humans: too smart and too dumb at the same time to survive.
posted by fshgrl at 9:58 PM on October 7, 2018 [19 favorites]


Good luck, bad luck, who knows?
posted by RoseyD at 10:04 PM on October 7, 2018 [1 favorite]


Finding out about Poland has been eye-opening. There's a tendency to see the US and the UK as having uniquely gone quietly insane, but so have Hungary and Poland.

Which puts what I already know about South Korea into context: they've had a very turbulent history, including long periods of autocratic rule. They even had an alt-right, a decade before it was a glimmer in the West.

Their former leader was sentenced to 15 years for corruption. South Korea might be a model for how we deal with this: in the courts, where there's a burden of proof and no amount of mugging to your support base can save you from the facts.
posted by Merus at 10:12 PM on October 7, 2018 [17 favorites]


Unless, Merus, you pack the courts with your own people. As the GOP is doing.
posted by bryon at 10:38 PM on October 7, 2018 [18 favorites]


Per fshgrl's comment above, here's the October 7, 2018 WAPO article: The world has barely 10 years to get climate change under control, U.N. scientists say. It refers to the new U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Global Warming of 1.5 °C with Press Release (PDF) and Summary for Policymakers (PDF).
posted by cenoxo at 10:55 PM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]




Honestly? You already have concentration camps set up, the police and the judiciary are making lists of dissidents and there is no shortage of brownshirt wannabes ready to roll up the death squads into town. You *should* be worried.
posted by sukeban at 12:47 AM on October 8, 2018 [37 favorites]


Brazil is the worlds eighth largest economy and is in the process of democratically voting itself into full on fascism.
Only two weeks to go !
With the Bolsonazi getting 46 % of the vote in the first round the run off is already pretty much decided. His chosen candidate is also in the runoff to be governor of Rio de Janeiro so all in all its getting to be a very rough ride. I'll tell you when the disappearances begin.
posted by adamvasco at 3:22 AM on October 8, 2018 [17 favorites]


It's looking more and more like Putin won and we're like Wile E. Coyote after running off a cliff. We talk as if the battle is still ongoing, but it's over. We just haven't looked down yet.

I think it's time to start thinking about defensive countermeasures to disrupt any organized brownshirting before it gets too far out of hand. Americans are, for the most part, fundamentally lazy. Cut off their connection to the people pulling the strings and they'll take it as an excuse to go home and crack open a beer and put off the shit stirring until it isn't so much of a hassle. Since confrontation is the goal, they don't consider people shouting at them and being physically inconvenient as hassle, it's the entire point. Make organizing/getting to events an exercise in apparently random frustrations, though...
posted by wierdo at 3:57 AM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


And it isn't just Brazil. Japan and India are ruled by far right governments as well...
posted by talos at 3:58 AM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


And Poland, Hungary, Italy and Austria. France was touch and go last elections, and someday the cordon sanitaire will not work.
posted by sukeban at 4:01 AM on October 8, 2018


Have any of those 2016 accelerationists filled us in on step two of their underpants gnome plan yet?
posted by tobascodagama at 5:53 AM on October 8, 2018 [22 favorites]


Why would they? We're not on the guest list. We're on the menu.
posted by ocschwar at 6:04 AM on October 8, 2018 [5 favorites]


This is one of the reasons I have been so desperately afraid since 2016: if Americans can't stave this wave of fascism off at home, where can I go? Where do we flee to? There's nowhere to run where we will be safe. All there is to do is stand and fight, and that with no guarantee we will win in any way that can be sustained another decade.

I'm tired, but I have my back up against a wall and gaping, yawning canyons to my left and right. Sometimes the only thing I think I can do, faced with national brigands brandishing their swords, is to make them bleed in exchange for the lives they'll take anyway. It's not enough, but what else is there?
posted by sciatrix at 6:20 AM on October 8, 2018 [16 favorites]


My thinking is this: the alt-right types are a serious and major threat, but (thank God for small mercies) one wiht a very short lifespan for one simple reason: ammo.

Ammo is heavy, expensive, and these people, if they Go There (TM), would run out quickly, and more importantly, they can be made to run out much, much quicker. As noted upthread, they mostly come from the exurban demographic. They think they're better equipped to ride out a crisis than urban pantywaists, but the truth is they are even less prepared because they are just as dependent on our industrial farming infrastructure as any Brooklyn pantiwaisted hipster, but they have to spend a gallon of gas to get that gallon of milk to the last mile, and Brooklyn hipsters don't. Same observation applies for all that ammunition they think they need and you know you don't.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. You want to scare the shit out of the right wing? SHow them that you're better prepared for their fanatasies than they are. Stockpile shelf stable food, the medicines you rely on, water purification tablets, spare bicycle parts. To really rub it in, start stockpiling the spices that Indians use to turn vegetarian food into something edible. It does not take much money to turn a stockpile of chickpeas into a stockpile of chana masala.

In other words: general strike. We already have the Teamsters, after all. We can make the alt-right and GOP fear that notion way more than we do.
posted by ocschwar at 6:40 AM on October 8, 2018 [18 favorites]


And Poland,

Someone ought to write an article about that. Maybe an American born journalist who's married to a former member of the Polish cabinet. If the ex-cabinet minister was friends with the last UK Prime Minister at Oxford, so much the better.
posted by ambrosen at 7:00 AM on October 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


Ammo is heavy, expensive, and these people, if they Go There (TM), would run out quickly

you realize a lot of these nutters load their own shells, right? and a lot of them are in our armed forces and "law enforcement," where they have access to much more that can mysteriously go missing, right?
posted by entropicamericana at 7:35 AM on October 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


The persistence of Christian antisemitism is one of the most depressing things in my lifetime.

Back in 1995, when I was in Bosnia and Croatia, I heard many conspiracy theories about the collapse (really, the tearing-apart) of Yugoslavia. A good number involved Jews.

I'm saddened, but unsurprised, to see antisemitism continue in eastern Europe now.
posted by doctornemo at 7:40 AM on October 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


One of the themes of Erik Larson's book, In the Garden of Beasts, a non-fiction account of Germany in the early 30s, was how much could appear normal in the first couple of years of Hitler, that is, to the outside viewer (clearly not to the victims).

There is an extended account of an American family on a trip through Germany in 1933 with no signs of violence until the family encounters a woman being dragged through the streets by Storm Troopers. (I'm a little hazy on the specifics, it has been awhile since I read the book.)

America 2018 is probably already worse than Germany 1933.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:46 AM on October 8, 2018 [15 favorites]


you realize a lot of these nutters load their own shells, right?


THat works in the gun range. Try to use them in the field, and collecting your own brass becomes infeasible. If the majority of Amrericans is better prepared for the shit hitting the fan, the shit slingers will have reason to rethink their life choices.
posted by ocschwar at 7:46 AM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]


Bolsonaro's inevitable win is a terrible gut punch for south america. I really feel hopeless, there's such darkness in the horizon. I feel genuinely terrified.


His views are beyond abhorrent. (FB link, sorry)
I translated the spanish subtitles for you, as best I could:

"I'm all for torture, and you know this. The brazilian people are for it too."

"In memory of General Carlos Alberto Ustra, Dilma Roussef's nightmare" (He was a violent torturer an the detention center where she was held.)

Reporter: "what would you do if you found out your son was gay?"
Bolsonaro: "The thought doesn't go through my head. I've been present for my children, they had a good education. There's no risk of that for me.

"Listen, I've no idea why a guy that has sex with an excretory organ thinks he's better than the rest."

"I'm a rapist, now? Listen. I wouldn't rape you because you don't deserve it. I'll give you another! "

"The lightest... afrodescendant (sic) was 80kg! They are good for nothing. I feel they're not even good for procreating anymore.""

"We will make a Brazil for the majorities. Minorities should prostrate by the majorities! Minorities will adapt or
they will dissapear!"


Here's more.

Highlights of that second video: "Voting achieves nothing in this country, absolutely nothing."
He also asks for the work "The military regime didn't do, killing 30 thousand."
posted by _Synesthesia_ at 7:58 AM on October 8, 2018 [8 favorites]


I really, really hope that at least one or two of the organizations that front as revolutionary socialists is actually stockpiling weapons and ammo instead of just selling shitty newspapers.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 8:12 AM on October 8, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't think Americans are fundamentally "lazy" any more than, say, Brazilians or Swedes or Hungarians. I would say many are complacent - by "many" I mean "middle class and up, especially white and straight people." Recall how the police treated the (much more white, suburban, and older) "pussy hat" Women's Marchers compared to the Black Lives Matter protesters. Leopards don't eat white faces - yet.

I surmise that most of the Balsonaro voters are white and well-off and think that any inhumane and/or morally repellent policies will be directed at Those Other People and not them - that they will benefit.

As for the right-wing militia cosplayers - most of them are older, and hence reliant on prescription medication - how many of them would last under True Survivalism? I don't know how many of them could actually, when the chips are down and the rubber meets the road, have the kind of discipline and endurance and sacrifice that a working militia will require. They want their suburban conveniences, too, and couldn't survive without them any more than you or I or any other pantywaist hipster could.

(I think a general strike is a great idea; I can stockpile my thyroid meds and my cats' food and I already know how to do great things with lentils - thanks, vegetarian cookbooks!)
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 8:17 AM on October 8, 2018 [9 favorites]


Recall the Bundy siege? When the power bars run out, the game changes. We're not about to go to war next week, but we're already in a situation where our future will be decided by what we're willing to inflict and what we're willing to endure. So it's time to start talking in those terms.
posted by ocschwar at 8:33 AM on October 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


The fact that the shift to the "right" is a global phenomena suggests to me it will not be easily or quickly reversed--It appears little different from the periods of global exploration/colonization, industrialization, democratization, the tech revolution etc--it is a global shift that is a function of the rise of China/SE Asia, mass migration / displacement, a very real shift in economic power from Western to Eastern economies, the role heightened expectations, the immediacy of information and the fluidity of capital. AI will only accentuate the fear and the attempts to preserve the status quo/recent past. Progressive political thought will eventually prevail ( it always does) but it is going to be a very difficult ride. It will be the daily actions of billions of people that will take us ahead but it will be very messy. I don't think a substantial reversal will happen in my lifetime but I will continue to live my life as best I can and with the hope that hard work, managed fear, commitment to justice and daily integrity will lead the way for most of you
posted by rmhsinc at 8:39 AM on October 8, 2018 [12 favorites]


How is Whig history still a thing in this day and age?
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:59 AM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've been living in Hungary so I've been watching Trumpism rise from afar. Living here has made it crystal clear that things will get much worse in the US if good people don't start putting their necks on the line. I also have a professor here who was very well connected to politics in Poland during Poland's transition towards one-party rule and one of the lessons that he passed on to us is that we should expect many people, even vocally liberal people, to eventually choose to be on the "winning" side. Friends who believe in democracy will become more and more scarce as power consolidates.

Also, nationalist oligarchies suck for competitive capitalism. Start a successful business and it will catch the eye of one of the oligarchs and you will only receive one buy-out offer before the bureaucracy buries you in obscure taxes and penalties. I have friends who keep their businesses on low burn just to avoid this and I have favorite businesses that have been swallowed up.

@ocschwar makes a good point. A general strike with built in support amongst the left is called for. A stitch in time to save both our economies and our souls.

All of that being said, the US is very different than Central-Eastern Europe. There aren't a lot of gun nuts here and the EU's Schengen zone means that a lot of disaffected youth and alienated liberals can just up and move to more friendly countries instead of engaging politics. There were fewer and weaker institutional controls here and a less established culture of open society. There are also fewer scapegoats: jewish people, immigrants, Roma... but the US's diversity also gives the US right wing a huge buffet of scapegoats to pick and choose and A/B test for the best populist hate narrative. (Read the comment section of any even mildly inflammatory news story these days and you can see the A/B testing of talking points in action.)

Here's the thing, though. The US's incarceration and military systems are unparalleled in human history. Whereas post-Soviet central and eastern europe is still unorganized and has limited infrastructure, the US has nearly unlimited ability to militarize crowd control and to imprison huge groups.

And let's not kid ourselves, police and military personnel are demographics with the highest levels of support for authoritarianism and specifically for Trump. History has shown us that militaries are more than willing to fire on their own citizens when the right discovers a powerful enough hate narrative. We can see from Patriot Prayer protests in places as liberal as Portland, Oregon that mainstream centrist institutions are quick to attack liberal movements and also quick to forget/forgive the violent tendencies of the right wing.

If shit hits the fan, the police will side with the right and the US law enforcement institution is the largest and most powerful such force that the world has ever seen. We have to stop this right-wing cultural movement while it is still cultural, because the alternative will be too horrible to bear.
posted by Skwirl at 9:08 AM on October 8, 2018 [47 favorites]


My grandma always told me to judge people by how they treat those less fortunate than themselves, so...

mine told me not to judge people at all, but rather focus on cultivating my own particular garden (to borrow a Voltaireism).

I'm not going to suggest that there are not at least a billion things to worry about these days, or that things aren't demonstrably worse than they were six months ago (or perhaps six years) -- how do you even begin to prove something like that? What I am going to suggest, given the overload of despair I'm feeling in this thread (and elsewhere in my network), is that there may be some wisdom in pausing for a moment and concentrating on our breathing. It just worked for me.

Because as I learned way back when in 1989 the day/night that the earthquake hit San Francisco, which I'd only recently visited, and all you could get on TV were pictures and reports of apparent calamity. Burning buildings, collapsed bridges and freeways -- thousands maybe tens of thousands dead and dying. And then a friend called who lived in San Francisco not far from Noe Hill. His power was out and he'd had to hike a ways to find a phone that worked, but as far as he could see, everything was more or less okay. He was drinking a cold beer and wondering how he was going to get to work tomorrow. My point being -- we need to be careful with how we filter bad news, how it tends to suck is into viewing things from too close up, blinds us to a perhaps less dire wider view. Which is not to deny the suffering going on, just not to willfully drown in it, and "do the devil's work for him".

Also what Marshall McLuhan was on about fifty years ago. I wouldn't say that he saw all of this coming as much as he had the eyes to see it already present. Seriously, take 51 minutes 5 seconds and watch that video if you can. At worst, it's delightfully archaic. At best, it's a smart, maybe even hopeful wakeup call from a time traveler just returned from their journey ....
posted by philip-random at 9:28 AM on October 8, 2018 [18 favorites]


By prepared I didn't mean stockpiling food or weapons. There is zero need for any of that when there are nonviolent means of monitoring and disrupting their attempts to organize themselves in any meaningful way beyond Constitutionally-protected, though both annoying and distressing, rabble rousing.

Sorry to talk in terms of the US alone, but the use of technology as force multiplier is something we would do well to learn from this new wave of fascists. They haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible in shaping events and opinions. It wouldn't be that hard to sow chaos in the ranks every time they tried to do something that involves more than 20 people.

At the very least it might be a good idea to know when they're coming if it gets to that point. Surveillance isn't just for states any more, it's damn near rice and beans cheap these days.

I'm not advocating anything illegal or violent, just being prepared to annoy, disrupt, and possibly subvert threatening groups of people should the need arises. If nothing else, maybe we could consider countering Putin's troll farms with some of our own trolling and brigading before it comes to actual violence in the streets or mass incarceration.

Just to reassure those who are less inclined to consider any drastic deterioration of social norms here in the US to be more or less imminent than some, my breathing and heart rate are just fine, thanks. I intentionally limit my exposure to the cesspool to ensure it stays that way. Doesn't hurt to be prepared, though, and those preparations might just help people in other countries facing similar possibilities.
posted by wierdo at 12:00 PM on October 8, 2018 [5 favorites]



All of that being said, the US is very different than Central-Eastern Europe. There aren't a lot of gun nuts here and the EU's Schengen zone means that a lot of disaffected youth and alienated liberals can just up and move to more friendly countries instead of engaging politics


The US's own Schengen ZOne has done precisely the same thing, which unfortunately has mean that liberals are moving to areas where their vote carries less weight in the federal system.
posted by ocschwar at 12:22 PM on October 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


"Monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—these were all familiar to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago."

But the author leaves from consideration Theocracy. The one-party illiberal state she describes, and the various manifestations of authoritarian rule around the world today are, as she argues, not so much about political and economic ideas and policies but about consolidating power and wealth in the hands of members of the ruling regime. They co-opt loyalty from the population at large using fear -- fear of "the other" and fear of being seen as "the other." They assume the unquestioned superiority of this in-group and reject any oversight or questioning of their authority. In all these respects they resemble establishment religions rather than political parties. And they are just as immune to logic and reason.
posted by binturong at 12:41 PM on October 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


Anyway, the "Medium-Sized Lie" theory in the article seems very convincing to me. A conspiracy like the Smolensk Theory (or Birtherism or Sorosism) is sort of vaguely plausible if you don't look to closely, which self-selects for people who, well, don't look at things too closely. And then that initial self-selection becomes a ratchet that further isolates the conspiracy theorist from the actual world. To believe a conspiracy theory is basically to create your own alternate reality anyway, so it's not hard for a motivated propagandist to steer people who believe in any given conspiracy to believe in whatever other alternate reality is most useful.

It's not unlike the algorithmic black hole effect on YouTube that has been well-documented. You start out watching some kind of reaction video about how the new Star Wars movie sucks because of not-transparently-insane reasons XYZ, which leads to videos about how the new Star Wars movie sucks because of SJWs, which leads you down the full rabbit hole to videos about how SJWs and George Soros are censoring conservatives on Google while pissing on your childhood or whatever.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:14 PM on October 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


When you mentioned that, tobascodagama, it made me realize that most people here probably haven't seen danah boyd's talk from last month's Online News Association conference, Media Manipulation, Amplification and Responsibility. It is extremely worth watching or reading (there is a transcript!) to understand how this all actually works now. It's become possible for bad actors to first exploit the media by getting them to share search terms for which there is a data void (in the name of explainer journalism), thereby driving more traffic to their terrible streams of prepopulated YouTube videos and other search results using that set of keywords, then make the media itself complicit in stoking the flames of resentment and doubt of the media by calling out these bad actors (through more explainer journalism). The bad actors then point to that and say, "See, they don't want you to know about this or believe it's real, but you're more sophisticated than that. You see through media lies to the truth." That's how you get batshitinsane stuff like QAnon actually becoming a movement or large numbers of people who believe in "crisis actors" and "false flag operations," as well as wide-scale doubt of the media. (I hesitate to even use those specific search-term examples in describing this, but they are fairly established and long-running conspiracy theories at this point. There are surely others that are less documented.)

The goal is not only to get their search terms and videos in front of people and take them on a ride into a netherworld (e.g., redpilling), but also to cast doubt on the accuracy and intent of the media as a whole when the media inevitably, in good faith, covers the topic in the name of explaining or debunking it. The search funnel effect is enabled by the fact that YouTube is bizarrely now the primary search engine for some large proportion of people under age 25. This is all important to know about when we talk about this topic.
posted by limeonaire at 3:47 PM on October 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


Aha! I was trying to think of exactly that talk on my bike ride home, but I couldn't remember the title or speaker. I read the transcript when it was posted here as an FPP, and I agree it was incredibly enlightening about how algorithmic propaganda works. It definitely needs to be spread far and wide.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:22 PM on October 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh cool, I didn't even realize that was a front-page post. Yeah, it was very good!
posted by limeonaire at 5:09 PM on October 8, 2018


I haven't seen it yet, as it will be released in cinemas & Netfix tomorrow (10th Oct) but supposedly part of 22 July, Greengrass's film about the Norway attacks also deals with Norway attempting to deal with the growth of right-wing fascists. And that the starting point is main-stream politicians and "ordinary" people acknowledging that they exist and have grievances. And that engaging with them is the only way forward, although being careful not to just give them a platform.

I'm not sure if Norway succeeded, I only heard Greengrass being interviewed, but he seemed to think that they had, at least, made the correct initial steps.
posted by Fence at 11:22 AM on October 9, 2018 [2 favorites]




My grandma always told me to judge people by how they treat those less fortunate than themselves, so...

mine told me not to judge people at all, but rather focus on cultivating my own particular garden (to borrow a Voltaireism).


Mine wasn't telling me what she thought I should do, but what she thought people did do.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:16 AM on October 10, 2018


my grandma always told me "you ought to be out raising hell, this is the fighting age."
posted by entropicamericana at 6:41 AM on October 11, 2018 [2 favorites]


« Older Sharing is good, and with digital technology...   |   Tsukiji Market (1935-2018) Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments