One More Thing...
09:33 Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 54.45°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 54% Wind: 8.21mph
Words: 226
Something had been gnawing at me for the last week or so since I saw this post from Jack Baty.
My views have never totally aligned with Ben Thompson’s, and his latest Stratechery piece reinforced that.
Here's the bit that pissed me off:
What is important to note is that the entire debate is ultimately pointless: the very concept of “international law” is fake, not because pertinent statutes and agreements don’t exist, but because their effectiveness is ultimately rooted in their enforceability. That, by extension, means there must be an entity to enact such enforcement, with the capability to match, and such an entity does not exist.
Bullshit.
And I'm surprised and disappointed that it's taken me this long to figure out why I knew it was bullshit.
The concept of "international law" is not fake. Its "effectiveness" is not ultimately rooted in its enforceability.
It exists so that we can know who is a criminal.
What we do with that knowledge is up to us.
To put it another way, if, after this weekend, you want to hold onto the concept of International Law, then realize the debate has been resolved: Iran was in violation, because their military just had its clock cleaned by the U.S., which means the U.S. decides who is right and who is wrong.
Bullshit.
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08:33 Tuesday, 10 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 49.71°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 59% Wind: 7.65mph
Words: 584
I should be in the gym right now, on the elliptical machine, but I'm here because I can't seem to sleep "normally." Always with this wake up around 0200, lie awake until around 0400, then finally fall asleep and wake up after 0700.
And what do I do while I'm lying awake, I check the RSS feeds.
Ian Betteridge wrote a very long post called Zen fascists will control you... I read it. Should you read it? I don't know. Seems like a lot of work for little gain, but if you like the kind of game he plays in the piece, you might find it entertaining.
To get this out of the way, "the game," is to make reference to a lot of cultural events, popular figures, popular cultural movements, and then draw a through-line to the present, which supposedly points to the source of all our problems. That may be just a little unfair, but only a little.
(Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't make reference to Pure Land Buddhism, since he opened with Zen fascists.)
The piece did not help me fall asleep, mostly because I didn't agree with the "logic." While I was somewhat in sympathy with the notional thesis, which is that the "politics of purity" is dangerous. And his "logic" throws a lot of things that are decidedly not dangerous under the bus.
Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.
What is the counterculture today? Didn't we just talked about this? To the extent that a "counterculture" exists at all, it mostly seems to exist online, with influencers competing with one another for attention. I don't think it's an identifiable group; and its "purity" tenets, insofar as they may exist, seem transient at reasonable timescales.
And I really think the whole "purity" construction is problematic for the thesis he's trying to support. I think he uses "purity" because it's more emotionally evocative than a word like "ideal," which is, I think, the real notion he's placing under indictment.
None of what he describes in the piece is new. All of it is rooted in human behavior, human weakness. It's been happening since we've had the cognitive surplus to conceive of "ideals" and the resource surpluses to try to achieve them.
"There's a sucker born every minute."
Zealots, ideologues, fanatics, fetishists, many of them are harmless. Some of them are frauds, charlatans, con artists. They promote an ideal, not to achieve it, but to use it to separate you from your money. Or your vote.
And true believers can be problematic sometimes. Mostly they're harmless, like the "plain text" fetishists.
We are stardust, we are golden. This is the counterculture's central claim about human nature, compressed into eight words.
Dude, seriously? Why do you have to drag Joni Mitchell into this? (That was the first thing that pissed me off.) And that's six words.
Count much?
Anyway, I'm boring myself at this point.
The notion of the "ideal" is a fantasy. Everything exists in contingent connection. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something. It doesn't require an exercise in pop-culture critique or populist politics to figure that out.
And leave Joni Mitchell out of this!
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