[FRIAM] On the: RLY!? side

[Steve Smith]

EricS -

> This is all about holding a position that the society you live in is
illegitimate, and wanting to act out your
> animosity toward it or contempt for it, as a kind of defiant
expression of some kind of agency. 

Well stated... I think this captures a lot of the degenerate behaviour
of the disenfranchised (real and imaginedly so) in general, but as it
has come home to roost as "whitelash" it is more painfully and evidently
self-defeating.   The clown-show that was the Jan 6 attempted
insurrection really put a cartoonish face on it, albeit a dangerous
one.   The continued dribble of new arrests, of court proceedings, and
the strange defenses/pleas coming out of that really reflect this
self-defeated stylization.    Same with the Congressional (and other)
Trumpeteers continuing to step more and more on their own
clown-shoelaces as they try to have it both/all ways.   Goodbye Sydney
Powell, goodbye Rudy Guiliani, ... who is next?

> Max Rose, I think it was, had some sort of good comment about this.
>  We have to break out of the death spiral of having this as the
> motivation if we are to break out of the death spiral.
Nicely recursive.  I think too often we have to bounce off of some (real
or imagined) bottom to reverse that spiral...  in these times I fear
there is "no bottom", false or otherwise.

-SteveS