no. 1173

The right wants homogeny.

The left wants diversity.

And this is why there’s no seeing eye to eye. These two objectives are fundamentally incompatible. They cannot be simultaneously achieved.

The right wants uniformity; cultural, religious, racial, ideological. One way of being that applies to everybody. A strict social hierarchy. And a singular order controlled by those who are believed to have the most authority.

Diversity disrupts the social order… and that’s why it’s seen as a threat. 

The left, by contrast, desires pluralism. They don’t want to be forced to conform to a single identity. They believe it should be their right to govern their own moral template. All they are asking for is dignity and equality. 

That’s why the right doesn’t just oppose ideas on the left. It opposes the existence of people on the left. Queer people. Trans people. Immigrants. Religious minorities. Political dissidents. Their presence alone is seen as an act of provocation and a violation of natural law. They are treated like a manifestation of instability. And an attack on God’s order. 

The truth is that the anger from the people on the left is a natural reaction to legislation, policing, surveillance, deportation, violence, and criminalization based on identity. When people are told they don’t belong, their existence itself a violation, that their families are illegitimate, and their culture, history, and spiritual traditions are a problem… anger is not radical. It’s reasonable and proportionate. In the least. 

The whole process creates one giant cycle. 

The right initiates harm and the left responds. The response is subsequently framed as the actual offense. Self-defense is called “aggression”. Boundary-setting is “intolerance”. Refusal to assimilate gets labeled “extremism”. When marginalized groups protest police violence, the initial harm is minimized while the protest is called a riot. There is no demonstration quite enough. When queer communities resist laws targeting their existence, they’re accused of “pushing an agenda.” When immigrants object to being caged or deported, they’re framed as ungrateful and told to leave… or called dangerous. When women assert the right to independence, they’re accused of destroying family values. When educators teach history about the harms we have committed, they’re accused of indoctrination.

The pattern is always the same. A scapegoat is chosen. Harm occurs. Resistance follows. Resistance is treated like the problem. The right makes sweeping moral claims disparaging those they are harming. 

“Look how angry they are”

“Look how divisive they are”

“Look how violent they are”

This framing erases the original coercion. It paints dominance as neutral.

Then the right accuses the left of being unwilling to coexist. But genuine coexistence isn’t actually on the table. So when the left refuses (or is unable, by virtue of their identity) to assimilate…when it insists on visibility, autonomy, and legal protection… that refusal is framed as hostile. Refusing to disappear is called an act of aggression.

The right calls the left “divisive” while pushing policies that restrict or deny their right to exist. Calls for inclusion are labeled censorship. While bans and crackdowns are seen as “order.” It’s why the right insists it’s being persecuted by the very people it is trying to eliminate. The right claims to be defending peace while demanding unrestricted control. The left is blamed for conflict… simply for existing.

And over time, this framing conditions the public to see control as stability. Resistance as chaos. And domination as order. It teaches people to side with power instinctively, even when that power is openly violent to the very groups it is supposed to protect.

The whole “both sides” narrative is insane, the symmetry of oppression is a lie, and calling people divisive for refusing to disappear is bullshit. What we are actually witnessing is one side is demanding homogeny… and the other is refusing to disappear.

no. 1171

 “Remember folks. Fantasy Football is just Dungeons and Dragons for jocks.“

@midwestminiguy.bluesky.net.  

no. 1170

 “It takes a long time to sound like yourself.”

— Miles Davis

no. 1169

  “The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.”

— Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Government (1940).

no. 1168

"On the question of the definition of national defense, I'd like to read to you a one sentence quote from Dwight Eisenhower. "The problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without." And any definition of national security, it seems to me, has to involve the well-being of the citizens, economic well-being, a positive sense of the future based not on pap but on real expectations.

Education, especially in science and technology. The scientific illiteracy of Americans, in general, is scandalous. Every day, there are significant decisions made in Washington, involving science and technology, which have very long outreach into the future. And 435 members of Congress. There are, perhaps, two who, in any sense, have a scientific or technological background.

The office of the president's science advisor has been downgraded. In recent years, the president's scientific advisory committee was canceled in the Nixon administration because it gave advice that was politically undesired. The laws of physics did not correspond adequately enough to the ideological wishes of the leadership. And no subsequent president has thought it advisable to resuscitate the president's science advisory committee."

Carl Sagan "National Security" (MIT 1987)

no. 1167

“My mom, who is a cafeteria Catholic, recently said she didn't like this current pope because he was a "socialist". Had to remind her about "Jesus, the great capitalist".”

toysarealive On Reddit

no. 1166

 “That summer of 1816, a group of out-of-work miners set out to walk from Bilston to London—a distance of 125 miles. They had a petition for the prince regent, an accounting of their hardships. They carried signs—Willing to Work, but None of Us to Beg—and carts of coal, which they planned to present to the prince. They were slow and steady. They were orderly and unthreatening. But they were stopped. They had to be stopped. The government would prefer not to admit that there were hardships, but it would never admit that the prince might be responsible for any. At the edges of London, the procession was met by the police. There was no possible way the marchers could meet with the prince, the authorities said. But they would buy the carts of coal and they would buy beer for all the marchers. There would be no better offer. The lesson was clear. Being polite got you nowhere.”

Nicholas Day, from his book A World Without Summer 

no. 1165

“The idea that some people were better than others at interpreting things—that was a new concept. It’s the idea of expertise, and the whole notion of expertise was still being worked out. William Herschel was the great astronomer of the day, a deeply learned man, and yet his views about sunspots were not taken much more seriously than the views of the man who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard that the sun was going out the day after tomorrow. All the evidence from the Tambora years didn’t add up to anything. It just inspired wild guesses about earthquakes and lightning rods and rice paddies. This is the fate of a world without the idea of expertise, a world without any sense of whom to trust. In that world, any story was a relief. It’s not a surprise that people migrated from explanation to explanation to explanation. Any story was better than nothing at all.”

Nicholas Day, from his book A World Without Summer 

no. 1164

 You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”

Terry Pratchett from the novel “Guards! Guards!”

no. 1163

 “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” He waved his thin hand toward the city and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back. “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.“

Terry Pratchett, from the novel “Guards! Guards!”

no. 1162

 “All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Science to Save Us from Science, The New York Times (19 March 1950)

no. 1161

 There's a boy in you about three 

Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death. He said things like:

"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.

You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy At night. He's uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.

Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you.

Robert Bly, 'One Source of Bad Information’

no. 1160

 “And the pity of it was that such hate and such intolerance would never have been born, could never have existed, had it not been for men like Finn—the bigots and the egomaniacs; the harsh, stern Puritans; the little men who felt the need of power to lift them from their smallness.”

Clifford Simak in “Time Is The Simplest Thing”

no. 1159

 "You may never be happy. So you just have to dance, dance so well that you leave everyone speechless."

Haruki Murakami 

no. 1158

Toad sat on the edge of his bed. “Blah,” said Toad. “I feel down in the dumps.” 

“Why?” asked Frog. 

“I am thinking about tomorrow,” said Toad. 

from Frog and Toad bot (frogandtoadbot@bsky.social.net)

no. 1157

  “If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you should feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.”

— Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (1943) Image: Bertrand Russell on the grounds of his home at Penrhyndeudreath, Gwynedd, United Kingdom, 3 March 1965.

no. 1156

 "Money is like manure, it's not worth a thing unless its spread around encouraging young things to grow"

 quote from Hello Dolly

no. 1155

 Gently, as from a distance, the magic tones of Mozart's music sound upon my ears. Thus do such sweet impressions, passing into our souls, work beneficently in our innermost beings.

A diary entry by Schubert for 13th June 1816.

no. 1154

 

Efu Nyaki 

no. 1153