Sibylla Bostoniensis

I think this is important, and really insightful. Video and slightly excerpted transcript below.

Of note, Parkrose Permaculture is a crunchy secular leftist who is, herself, an ex-evangelical, and speaks with some personal authority about the world-view and culture.

2025 July 17: ParkrosePermaculture on YT: "MAGA mom apologizes for supporting Trump. Regrets her vote. How do we respond?" [9 min 43 sec]:

[0:00] Can we talk about that viral video of that young woman who got on here and was like, "Y'all, I'm really sorry that I voted for Trump. I'm really sorry that I was MAGA. I realize now that I was wrong"? This this video:

[0:12] [stitched video, white woman speaking to camera, with title "Official apology: I voted for Trump"]

I voted for Trump and I'm sorry. I am uneducated. I grew up in, um, public school system. I believed anything a teacher and a principal told me, and I didn't question it. And I walked in a straight line and I didn't use critical thinking skills, okay? I didn't read Project 2025, I have a disabled child, I'm a single mom of three. I believed what he said in his campaigns and I fucked up. And I'm sorry, okay?

I find the responses to that video on social media quite interesting, because on one hand you have folks who are like, I don't forgive you. And I understand that. People are angry. Trumpers did incredible damage to this country. Getting Trump and Elon Musk put in positions of power in the United States is killing millions of people, right? We know that just the cancellations to USAID are going to kill 14 million people according to a new piece out in the Lancet. Trump and Steven Miller are now freely enacting an ethnic cleansing in the United States. People have a right to be really, really angry about those things.

[1:21] I've also seen a lot of other creators who have my complexion [i.e. white -- S.] and most of them are women, who have said, "It's okay, girlfriend. We all make mistakes. We all have been hoodwinkedked in the past. Yeah, people in America are very much indoctrinated. And we forgive you. We forgive you."

[1:38] And I guess I, I disagree fundamentally with both of those takes. And here's why.

We need to give Trumpers a place to land as they are deconstructing. Maybe the Epstein files [...] [2:14] And so everybody's going to have– everybody who ends up walking away from MAGA is going to have the beginning of that journey. [...] Not everybody starts from the same baseline. I guarantee you for folks watching that woman, if you wanted to judge her, then you probably didn't start with the same level of intense indoctrination, you're probably not from the same kind of subculture that she's from. And you didn't start from the same place that she's starting at. Every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And you've got to give her space to take that step.

[3:02] So, I, I do want to give her all of the praise for getting online with her real face and doing something that's very hard to do. She was willing to swallow her pride in a culture where we very much center the self and we're not good at taking responsibility. We are not good at eating crow. We're not good at facing the music, right? She did that. [...] She deserves all the praise for that. I don't want to in any way minimize the work, the risk that she undertook in being willing to own it and being willing to say, "I was deeply wrong." Again, especially because we live in a culture where people taking accountability is not something that we are particularly good at or used to.

[4:04] And so I very much appreciate the other creators who are saying, "Come over here with us," – Right? – "I'll be a safe landing spot for you. It is never too late to admit that you were wrong."

But I also think when we're looking at MAGA, who has caused tremendous, tremendous harm in this country, right? They have contributed to the rise of fascism. They have supported the takeover of this nation by a fascist dictator. I understand a lot of them were ignorant. They chose to be willfully ignorant. I understand a lot of them come from a background where they are taught to deny their own intuition, to subvert their own will, to listen to and unconditionally obey what an authority figure is telling them. I know that so many of these folks go to churches that are telling them that Donald Trump is God's anointed, that he has God's favor, that he is doing the Lord's work. I understand the heaviness, the intense pressure, the hard sell of the subcultures that these folks belong to, and I understand the strength of character that it takes in that context to admit that you were wrong and say, "I shouldn't have done this, and I'm sorry."

[5:11] But I would encourage all of those mostly white women creators who are telling this young woman, "It's okay, girl. We forgive you. Everybody makes mistakes": this was not a mistake. And it doesn't really matter that there were extenduating circumstances and indoctrination. Doesn't matter that somebody caused great harm without understanding the full depth and breadth of the trauma and the suffering they would inflict by supporting this regime.

I know I have brought it up many times since the election and it continues to be one of the most relevant books when we are discussing people leaving MAGA, when we are discussing people deconstructing from Trumperism, when we are discussing how it is that we fold these folks back into society, and that book is called The Sunflower by Simon Visenthal. It is an incredibly important and relevant book in these times.

The subtitle of the book is "On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness." It is a book about a young Nazi soldier who is dying and he wants to be forgiven the sins that he committed in the Holocaust. But he is asking forgiveness of somebody who is not his victim. And the question that is being posed to all kinds of faith leaders and philosophers in this book is who has the right to extend forgiveness, and what does it mean to extend forgiveness and what does it mean to ask for forgiveness?

[6:35] And I know I've said this in other videos and I just I think it's so important to continue to reiterate it when we're looking at ex-Maga. I appreciate their apology. I appreciate their contrition. I appreciate that they have realized how much harm they've caused and that they want people to know they no longer support the things that they once voted for. Really important.

But at the same time, if we are not the injured party, do we have a right to forgive? And also, there's so much more to earning forgiveness, working to be forgiven, than just saying, "I'm sorry."

[7:12] I know in evangelical Christian culture it's like if somebody says "I'm sorry", it's like, "oh, we forgive you! That's what Jesus would do!" Other religions don't view it that way. But also I personally think if somebody is truly truly sorry for what they've done, they need to work to repair the harm that they've inflicted.

If somebody voted for Donald Trump and they now realize that they were wrong, [if] they now are asking you to forgive them, they need to demonstrate changed behavior. They need to now go volunteer for a Democratic campaign in the midterms. They need to commit to evangelizing on behalf of democracy and against the fascist regime of Donald Trump to all of the people in their subculture, in their community, all of the MAGA that they know. They need to go actively work for immigrants rights. They need to contribute financially to organizations like the ACLU, to progressive Democrats in the midterms, to organizations that are engaged in mutual aid for all of the people who are suffering because of what MAGA has done.

[8:27] It takes a measure of risk to get on the internet and say, "I'm so sorry. I regret my vote for Donald Trump." Yeah. And we want to acknowledge that they have taken that risk. We want to acknowledge the work that is done. We want to acknowledge how hard it is to take that first step on that journey. Absolutely true. But at the same time, they need to put their money where their mouth is.

They need to work to repair the harm that they have done. They need to work now. They need to sacrifice now. They need to demonstrate changed behavior because at the end of the day, words are cheap. People are suffering and dying. Now, if you truly understand the ramifications of what you have supported and what you have done, you must work to fix it.

[9:10] So, to that young woman and any other person who has left MAGA, who has taken that first step on your deconstruction journey: I applaud you. That's wonderful, that's wonderful. If your conscience is eating you up? If you have loads of regrets? The best way you can work to find peace in your heart, to find peace with the people you have harmed, is to get to work – fixing it. Because there's so much work for everybody to do. Join the resistance. Yep, come join the party. Yeah, we'll take you. We are a safe landing spot. We have lots of work for you to do here.

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For my entire life – I'm in my fifties – I've heard talking heads in the media complain about the "waste" they are absolutely sure must be there in the federal budget.

There's this whole little cycle. First they'll hold something up for mockery, usually an expense of the Department of Defense, because they're always a good target for this. Then later it will come out there was some reason for the expense being as high as it was. Sometimes it was because it was some specialized version of an ordinary thing, that had to be engineered to be combat ready. Sometimes it was because a vendor had them over a barrel and, well, that's how the free market works under capitalism: supply and demand, baby. Sometimes it was actually a perfectly reasonable amount of money to spend on the thing in question, it's just the general public has no idea what the cost of labor is.

( Now, it's not that I am unmindful to the potential benefits of looking for ways to economize... Read more [1,110 words] )

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There's this thing going around, both in the conventional news media and on social media, that the reason Trump voters gave for voting for Trump was "the price of eggs".

I'm not sure where that synecdoche came from, but it's been widely embraced by both pundits attempting to explain the results of the election and furious leftists decrying it, "You mean because of the price of eggs people did a fascism?"

Well, yes? I don't know what you were taught in school, but I distinctly remember being taught in junior high social studies class that the ruinous terms of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on post-WWI Germany economic conditions that directly gave rise to the Nazi party and WWII.

( This is where fascism usually comes from.... Read more [1,450 words] )

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Social class is not the same thing as economic class.

A plumber that makes $83,865 a year is not poor, but is still a blue-collar worker.

A number of reader comments on my recent post "Class Time – none of which I have unscreened yet, because I am still mulling this among other things over – went directly, do not pass go, do not collect $200, to the topic of poverty, very obviously assuming that what I was trying to bring to your attention was the plight of the poor.

These comments are thoughtful, big-hearted, compassionate, and polite, and I approve heartily of their inclination. They come from a place of what their respective authors clearly think is agreement with what I wrote.

And they are also classist.

The assumption common among white-collar people that blue-collar equals poor (and that therefore what blue-collar people want and need is social aid) is classism – of exactly the kind of harmful obliviousness about class I was decrying in the post to which these comments were made in the spirit of support.

Indeed, it is what I hope to be writing next about on the topic of class, and how it impacts US politics on the left.

I know that none of you would ever say that all Black people are poor, even while you're perfectly cognizant of the way centuries of white supremacy have impeccuniated Black Americans and systematically deprived them of generational wealth. Poverty is a problem that disproportionately falls on Black people in this country, but that's not the same thing as all Black people being poor. And you wouldn't say such a thing, or think such a thing, or instantly pivot in a conversation about racism to a discussion of poverty, because you appreciate that reducing racism to poverty is very obviously a mistake, one that anybody who cares about addressing racism might well find offensive for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Well, assuming that all blue-collar people are poor is doing the same thing. Yes, blue-collar people typically earn less than white-collar people, and poverty disproportionately hits that population. But reducing classism to poverty is exactly the same mistake as reducing racism to poverty, and it's offensive in the same ways. We can address class related poverty without equating being blue-collar and being poor.

I don't want to call anyone out by name or directly confront anyone about this, especially over comments that come from such a good place. I don't want to shame anyone or embarrass them by pointing out their classism. Like I said in the post, for most people, classism isn't something they've ever worked on. They don't know the first thing about classism or what classist practices of thought or deed they might unwittingly be engaged in. I don't particularly want to make anyone feel badly for getting wrong something nobody ever told them is wrong, or how to get right.

But I did want to say something, because I think this is important, so I decided to post this instead.

Being concerned for the welfare of people who are economically struggling is a great good thing and an ornament to your character. It's something I hope you never stop doing. But it's not the same thing as being aware of social class or respectful about class differences. It's something different.

If you are one of the people who stepped on this particular landmine, please do not think that I think ill of you. To the contrary, this is the kind of error only generous-spirited people make, and if anything I only admire you for making it. Please carry on being your wonderful selves. I'll probably be keeping your comment screened, to protect you from embarrassment and the discussion from being derailed – though feel free to go back and edit your comment if you, in light of this, might approach what you said differently – not because I think it's terrible or as some sort of punishment. I appreciate your comments, and hope this won't deter your future comments or bum you too out.

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The internet is full of people enraged by the US CDC's reduction – and all but elimination – of isolation guidelines for COVID, pointing out that the CDC's new guidelines seem to be more about what is good for "the economy" – which is to say, good for business interests – than what is good for the health of the people.

I don't think anyone's wrong to be enraged. Nothing that I am about to say is meant to make anyone feel better about the CDC's decision. I do not explain this as any kind of excuse.

There is a sense in which the CDC's decision is right. Not good, mind you, but correct: it brings their guidance back into alignment with our larger society's beliefs about the value of human life and health.

( Ours has never been a society that has particularly highly valued the health and well-being of the people of it... Read more [2,460 words] )

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This was originally posted to Mastodon here. Slight changes have been made and further commentary added.




This is a true story.

In 2014, I happened to be on site at a software development company, where I wound up being a proverbial fly on the wall during a notable conversation.

I was being shown around by the head of technical documentation, and had just been introduced to the head of engineering. Maybe he was a VP, I don't recall. Anyways, he decided that was the occasion, with me, random contractor standing in front of him, to engage the head of technical documentation in a conversation about how there might be layoffs coming, and he was of the opinion that they should probably lay off his division's tech writers, and make the software developers write their own documentation, to save money.

The head of technical documentation was, of course, flabbergasted and appalled, but substantially outranked, and she had to be diplomatic in her response, tying her hands – and her tongue. Also she was caught somewhat by surprise by this fascinating proposal.

Unbeknownst to me, while this conversation was happening and I was supposed to be being onboarded, my contract was in the process of falling through, because the disorganization of this organization was so high, the parties who had extended me the offer were unaware the organization had put a stop order on retaining new contractors.

And to this day I lament that I did not know that fact, because I was being on my best behavior, and in retrospect I really wish I hadn't been. ( Because what I was biting my tongue rather than say was...[5,020 words] )

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Over on Mastodon, I had made the comment "CSS will always be hamstrung by HTML's toxic content/appearance paradigm", to which someone else reasonably enough asked me,

What do you mean by "toxic content/appearance paradigm"? Do you think the separation of content from appearance is a bad idea, or that HTML/CSS doesn't do it well, or something else?

I suspect he never expected quite this much answer. I start with a single HTML tag and end with the downfall of civilization.

Not joking.

What follows is my reply, edited and a bit further developed.

---

Several things:

1) To a first approximation, I think the separation of content from appearance is a fine idea.

2) Which is to say, to a second approximation, I think it's terrible: I have an inchoate intuition that content vs appearance is a bad paradigm because it is an attempt to shoehorn a triad into a false dichotomy, and the real correct solution is separation of content vs appearance vs a third thing, maybe "functionality".

3) But that aside, and for the moment CSS aside as well, HTML's separation of content and appearance is catastrophically bad. It is predicated on fundamentally mistaken ideas as to what is content and what is not.

I have one particular favorite hobby horse example of this, which really captures how apparently trivial errors can have far-reaching consequences.

That example is the Ordered List (<ol>).

( Read more... [2,670 Words] )

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Someone on the interwebs who shall remain nameless made what I consider to be an unfortunate comment about democracy resting upon empathy. He wrote a whole little counterproductive article about how (he contended) without empathy we have no democracy. He said, and this was meant as a rhetorical question,

If you don’t care what happens to other people — if you only care about yourself — why would you care to live in a democracy?

Someday, I will write a post taking the concept of empathy out behind the barn and giving it the thrashing it deeply deserves. Suffice it to say, I see a big problem with how the left (such as it is) in the US puts empathy on a pedestal and venerates it as the One True Way. But for today, here, have what I wrote in response to that very unfortunate rhetorical question.

Because non-democracies typically are really unpleasant to live in?

I read the article, and I really disagree with your thesis. [...] I think you're fetishising empathy here. As much as I like and approve of empathy, I don't think it's as remotely as necessary as you propose it is here. There are perfectly good paths of enlightened self-interest that lead to preferring democracy.

I find it incredibly disturbing that people allegedly on my side of the political fence don't understand that. You don't need to feel bad for others or care authentically about their suffering to prefer to live under a democracy. All it takes is understanding that "no justice, no peace" isn't just an empty slogan. Tyranny and fascism and totalitarianism don't just make people unhappy, it makes them riot, rebel, become corrupt, and vulnerable to even more fascism.

The evidence for this is writ large on the US today. As voter suppression becomes more and more effective and the US becomes less and less democratic, those in whom power is concentrated use it to enrich and further empower themselves at the expense (quite literally) of more and more of the citizenry, who find themselves plunged in to precarity and poverty, and with a rising resentment at how unfairly power is not shared with them. Nothing about this has made the US a more agreeable place to live for most anyone. Instead it has made US culture worse in just about every way. Half the country thinks fascism is the answer to their discontent, the other half are bracing for the second coming of the Third Reich.

One doesn't have to feel for others not to want to live like this – to not have to worry about getting shot, to be able to afford to buy a home, to be able to leave abusive and exploitative employers for better options, to be able to afford to have children.

It scares me that liberals and those farther left don't seem to understand this. Democracy is not a sentimental affectation, adopted out of fellow feeling. It's a pragmatic solution for how not to have a society plunge into civil war and languish in crippling poverty and collapse into Hobbesian state of nature.

Edit: I'd like to add, this fact, that fascism isn't very nice to live under and in fact is incredibly degrading of quality of everyday life, is a major and systematically explored point of the original V for Vendetta graphic novel, which was left out of the movie. When we come in the book to the line "'For three years I had roses and apologized to no one'", they stand not just for romantic love and social justice for queer people (though they also do stand for that), but for theater and the other arts, and being able to earn a living doing something meaningful, and having a pleasant well appointed home, and a full larder stocked from full grocery stores, and personal security, and all the basic creature comforts. Moore draws it right from the labor and suffrage slogan "bread and roses", which you've heard me quote before and will no doubt again.

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It all started when I decided I wanted to know the origin of the expression "male chauvinist".

I have no idea if the young among you have ever heard this expression. It was very idiomatic back in the 1970s and 1980s. It's basically means "someone who is sexist" or "male supremacist". It was strongly associated with the second wave feminist movement, which promulgated the term.

I think it might be a super useful term to revive, for reasons. Thing is, the more you think about the term "male chauvinist", the weirder it is.

( The dictionary is happy to tell you... (Read more [6,880 Words]) )

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The following are excerpts from the excellent essay "The Deep Archeology of Fox News" by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (2023 Mar 3), which is behind a paywall:

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

In a moment like this it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it was a part of and even a relatively late entry to.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was something historians and critics of the time called the post-war liberal consensus. It was not liberal in ways we’d recognize today. Indeed, it wasn’t liberal in many ways actual liberals of the time recognized. But it did represent an important level of elite consensus about state intervention in the economy and openness to a more restrained version of the American state created by the reformist periods of the first half of the 20th century.

Though what was then sometimes called “the race question” was “complicated” and not something that could be resolved overnight, there was also in elite opinion a general assumption that the South’s system of legalized apartheid was a source of embarrassment and something from the past that the country had to outgrow, even if not any time soon. (Just as is the case today, what is actually more properly called cosmopolitanism was sometimes misportrayed as liberalism: a general belief in pluralism, values tied to cities and urban life.)

I mention all this because, in the early 1950s and 1960s, what we now recognize as the embryonic modern conservative movement could rightly sense that there were assumptions embedded in elite culture that viewed certain of their core values and aims as backward, retrograde, archaic. When the early founders of modern “movement” conservatism looked at America’s elite consensus, they saw a set of assumptions and beliefs embedded in many elite institutions that ran counter to their aims and values. And they were not totally wrong.

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s they set about trying to build a series of counter-institutions, ones that wouldn’t, in their mind, have their sails angled permanently toward the winds of liberalism. One key moment in this story was the founding of The Heritage Foundation in 1973. Heritage was founded to be the counter to the “liberal” Brookings Institution. But Heritage was never anything like Brookings, even though in the D.C. of the ’80s and ’90s they were routinely portrayed as counterpoints — one representing liberalism and the other conservatism. Brookings was mainstream, stodgy, quasi-academic. Heritage was thoroughly ideological and partisan. In practice it was usually little more than a propaganda mill for the right. This pattern was duplicated countless times. The “liberal” Washington Post was matched by The Washington Times. Fox News, which didn’t come along for another generation, was not so much the answer to CNN as to CBS News, the iconic broadcast news organization of the first decades of the Cold War.

What we see today in Fox News is most of the story: a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. [...]

Here we get to the nub of the issue. Because this is not the entirety of the story. One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against [...] None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

So how do we get from this elemental misunderstanding to the raw and casual lying of the Fox of today? Well, that’s the thing: we don’t. Both were there from the very start. It’s all but impossible to disentangle the culture clash, the inability and refusal to really grasp what these institutions were, and the more open culture of propaganda, lying and mendacity. They’re fused together so tightly that getting your head around the relationship between them is more a matter of meditative absorption than anything that can be processed or explained discursively.

[...]

If you want to read the whole thing, you can pay to access it; alternatively, @jayrosen_nyu@mastodon.social has posted about it graciously including a guest link. If you go to his Mastodon post here, https://mastodon.social/@jayrosen_nyu/109966217307755528, you should be able to click through to the article (it's the second link) and read the whole thing.

I have many thoughts about this, both quibbles and amplifications.

One of those thoughts is that it can be explained discursively: I just, coincidentally, did. The "conservative" project – meaning this thing that Marshall here identifies as starting in the 1950s – has always been to shape social truths by arguing them into existence, including by lying.

I have had a huge post brewing in the back of my head for longer than I've had a Patreon account on the topic of cosmopolitanism and its enemies, and another (or maybe another dozen) about the conservative movement that arose in the US in the 1950s (and arguably earlier) that Marshall here alludes to.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote a thing that blew my mind when I read it, about which I've been meaning to write since forever, which is about exactly the same rise of the religious right in the 1950s in the US. It was the final chapter of her Cities on a Hill, which was published in 1987. I'll not unpack it now, and just say that's a book absolutely worth reading. I found it an emotionally challenging read in the best way.