As you might have noticed, this site has not had much by way of updates. Several articles I’ve been planning to write are on the upcoming elections in Worcester (Massachusetts); some thoughts on the current political scene; some movie, book, and television reviews; and a few other odds and ends.
I have a lot of thoughts related to national events – the debacle of the Trump administration, the impeachment, the incoming administration, and others – but much of what I would add are things that have already been said, repeatedly. There is a glut of “content,” with partisans on all sides saying the same thing over and over. It’s all highly predictable: liberals will say this, the growing choir of leftists/socialists will say that, and the national nihilist, Trump-supporting crowd will say something else. But they’re all generally repeating talk points more than making original arguments. Indeed, much of the “news” media has moved in this direction as well. Take a look at the front page of the NY Times online, and you’ll see that the op-ed pieces make up nearly half the page. Most content now is simple talking points: leftists issue a barrage of articles on canceling student debt and their reasons that doing so is the only just, economically sound approach. Trumpians write on and on about the unfairness of losing an election, about conspiracies, etc. It’s all very boring, and, worse, it adds to the national “noise” around public discourse, causing people to either believe that they can never hope to grasp the truth or, conversely, to dig into their opinions, assured by a thousand articles repeating the same thing, that they possess The Truth.
Lost is room for dialogue between the entrenched sides. Case in point: is the new, “woke” antiracism helpful or harmful to the cause of combating racism and increasing equality? Now there are two camps: those who are “woke,” and who think that any deviations from the new orthodoxy puts one into the camp of racism; opposing them are the anti-woke like the depressing Gad Saad, a group of “free thinkers” who, with a few exceptions, seem to really just dislike any ideas of racial progress. There have been important exceptions, like John McWhorter, who argues that racism is a problem in America, but that the way of addressing it perpetuated by people like Robin DiAngelo, whose White Fragility seems to imply that Black and white people can’t even have authentic friendships, does more damage than good. There are also some conservatives, like the writers at Commentary, who make an argument that is, regardless if one agrees or disagrees, done in good faith. How does one know that Commentary’s writers act in good faith? One important distinction is that they do not hesitate to criticize ideas from both the right and the left, avoiding the temptation to ignore the errors of those on “their side.” But people like McWhorter and the small group of writers around Commentary are a decided minority; mostly, everyone has gone to their own camps, accepting like dogma the arguments people around them are making, writing them down over and over, using different words to convey the same essence. Generally speaking, you know what someone has written before you’ve read it.
I intend to write when I feel like I have something useful to say, which hasn’t been said already ad nauseum. As you can see, I haven’t felt that to be the case very frequently. Still: quality over quantity.
Thanks for reading – when there is something to read, anyway.