This sort of thing is why I simply do not, ever, trust tech support people. In my experience, most of tech support is just gaslighting users into giving up and going away, and this is just further confirmation.

This is a great piece, which points in the same kind of direction that I have tried to point in some recent conversations: that obsessive comparisons of our present moment to some prior historical moment (such as 1930s Germany, to take what seems to be the most popular one these days) are not actually helpful. This piece gives me a little more of the vocabulary I need to say why: because they are worse than unimaginative; they are even against imagination. Those kinds of comparisons are the human-participatory equivalent of generative AI: an echo chamber.

But shouldn’t we seek to learn from the past? Sure, I guess. But that’s not what I see in these comparisons. Instead, I see a kind of nihilistic determinism of if this, then that, from which we have no freedom of escape. This must be coded as the nazification of the United States, and every decision must be fitted to that framework.

What we need instead is more imagination—more of the “necessary fiction,” as Butler puts it, of what the world transformed ought to look like. Not what the world looked like 90 years ago, or 80 or 70, but what the world ought to look like today. And that imaginative work must be inclusive and it must integrate all of our reality. We cannot just leave out the bad people.

Anyway, thanks for sharing this.

It’s worse than that. Those are not just things that right-wingers don’t understand or don’t like—they are all things that are focused on prioritizing people and their experiences over property and the interests of its owners. (And in that sense I think the right-wingers understand that perfectly well—they just do not want to say it out loud.)

These damned fools are going to get us all killed.