The generality of this moment

Taking in the generality of the moment

November 24, 2022

In this moment, there is so much reality to see so long as you can stay beneath the surface, which is full of illusion.  Continuing from the previous, consider this, for instance: with this whole Trump thing, whether we're talking about the latest or any in the long line of people who have tried to check him by legal means, the problem has always been that his opponents on the prosecutorial side have almost always had a checkered past of going after people who haven't deserved it, or not going after people who did deserve it.  The latest prosecutor has brought enormous prosecutorial power to bear on the New York Times in an effort to get them to disclose confidential sources.  Which prompts the question: will this prosecutor be equally aggressive against Trump?  The Trump paradigm is full of people whom normally you wouldn't say did much wrong, sitting on the sidelines where they have been put, baffled as to why they were deemed enemies of the state so forcefully before, while Trump can't be got.  This should be a signpost pointing to what is really in contention during the Trump era. 

Taking the pulse of this oppressive generality 

November 25, 2022

The Trump era attitude of talking up legal disputes that most don't really understand, covers up a deeper reality.  It's not really an era of legalism, but rather, of a sectarian idea of rule by the literati.  The true undercurrent is propaganda (or what was once called that), the democratization of various forms of literacy by the Internet, and the proliferation of media.  The legal profession is taking it on the chin because no one can keep up with the onslaught of new content coming out all the time.  The almost-demotion of the legal profession from the tastemakers of literate culture produced a counter-reaction that placed some kind of entity above them, and that created someone like Trump within the Trump paradigm.  A practical example is the emergent study of the infrastructure of the Internet because it's become nearly impossible to study the tone and character of its content some days.  But there hasn't been much there to really dig into, except when instituting a police apparatus over top of the internet content, for instance, with copyright takedowns.  The instinct is to search for some easier paradigm that we can grasp onto; for some surety in our lives.  Through human history we've always searched for some higher-level understanding to simplify the complexity of whatever is considered the fundamental medium through which human life operates.  But until we realize that what we're searching for now is some kind of superstructure on top of a superstructure, which is a very unstable device to be searching for, and realize that the simplifying and essential truths abut human life have always been able to be grasped only in the world outside of whatever internal paradigm we operate in, we will always be lost in the muddle of Internet culture.