NYC Journal – Politics

NYC Journal – Politics

[NYC Journal]

Do we have political opinions?
Sometimes and somewhat.
What we most of all have is a lonely worry.

Political & Political-ish Essays:

Update 2/24/2024: What can we do?

In Operation Biden we explain as best we can (as of late February 2024) in one reasonably-readable essay why we think Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, why democracy is spiritual good, and how we think Joseph Biden should approach this campaign season.

In What We Know and A Time of Evil we discuss Trump’s political evil and point out that people supporting Trump in 2024 are participating in a world-historic political evil. Right now [2/24/2023] “What we Know” is the better essay: We thought it was better a month ago, and we continue to edit it.

In Trump and Democracy 2023 we update (a little bit) our pre-election 2020 meltdown over Trump’s attacks on democracy. It’s also related to this book we wrote this summer and then edited again this winter, Diary of an Adamant Lover.

In 20000 dead we wondered (a while ago now) what to say about what’s been going on in Israel and Gaza lately. (And now we wonder again, but without an essay in sight.)

In Open Letter on the US House of Representatives we suggested that the Democrats save Kevin McCarthy and work with him to keep the country together. Well, it was a thought!

Sometimes it seems like we have absolutely NOTHING — like we don’t know what to do or how to do it. See, for example, Please, God. But we keep trying because we know that Trump is wrong and should be resisted that we should therefore at least try to find a helpful way to say that Trump is wrong and should be resisted.

This is not a brand new project for us. In 2020, we undertook a similar emergency intervention. See below.

The theme for Summer/Fall 2020: Save US American Democracy from Donald Trump and his GOP enablers / Step #1: Elect Joseph Biden as President of the United States of America.

God help us!

Update 12/11/2021: No Possible Plan

Update 12/31/2020: What to do about political evil?
Last night we wrote this: “Pan’s Labyrinth” & Political Evil
On November 17 we’d written:
On November 17,2020 the election is over, but Trump and friends continue to try their hands at stealing the election. At the very least they’ll harm democracy and help evil. Why are they doing this? Don’t they understand that in a healthy democracy, even the political losers are winners because they still get to live in a nice, stable, sound land where elected officials, bureaucrats, and citizens collaborate meaningfully and in good faith to build a better country for everyone? Trump and collaborators are crazy. Let’s say NO! to their destructive madness and YES! to a nation of, for, and by all the people united under the common cause of honesty, accuracy, competence, kindness and shared joy.
And now it is 12/31/2020.
What should we do?
What can everyone do to make things better for everyone and how can we as individuals best encourage and participate in an effective collective embrace and love-lift?

Election Prayer, with John Stewart Singer Songwriter from California et al and Five Poems from the collection.

Supporting Biden is a Moral Imperative.

On Not Burning it Down.
[Step #1 to save our democracy: Electing Joseph Biden.]

A Fun New War.
[Written in 2016. About Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election. A good mix of Something Deeperism and political commentary. Better than we normally pull off. We keep trying.]
[A pretty Something Deeperist piece (see political philosophy essays below for more on Something Deeperism.]
[We need to write an updated piece about the threats to the integrity of the 2020 election.]

Trump Push-Poll / Lesson in Disinformation.
[Examining a push-poll from the Trump campaign (an example of their disinformation).]

Destroy Reality, Destroy Democracy.
[Trump’s worldhistoric dishonesty; his digital information campaign; the suspicious move of transferring hospital coronavirus reporting from the CDC to the less-transparent HHS; links to organizations working to save US democracy (1st critical step: remove Donald Trump from office).]

Our more recent overview of Trump’s Threats to Democracy is less ambitious but perhaps better than our incomplete previous version (As of October 2020, we’re more than three-fourths done.)

Here we begin a spate of Something Deeperism political essays:

The US is a shared culture

I don’t know what to say about complex systems
[it’s hard to know how everything fits together in a complex system like a nation state, but with representative democracy, meaningful collective decision-making is possible; so we should all be able to agree on making our representative democracy as healthy as possible. For much more on this, see the next several links.]

Representative Democracy is a Spiritual Good is three essays and it links to several others. It makes the case that a healthy representative democracy helps people to live well (both happily and decently) as individuals and groups and should not be sacrificed for short-term political gain.

The Something Deeperism Institute has more of the little bit of political philosophy we’ve written.
Mostly in A Simpler Shared Something Deeperism and Duties of a Republic’s Citizenry.
Why Something Deeperism? Simple! It’s not self-defeating, but it’s rivals are is an argument for choosing to pursue Something Deeperism as a philosophy/worldview/general-direction.

From Existential Threats & the Wisdom Meme:

Remember the anti-weapon?
A meme that worked like an irresistible koan: come into contact with it and you can’t escape enlightenment: selfless wisdom overtakes you, becomes you, turns you inside out, makes you gentle and kind, in step with the Light that alone Knows that and in what way it is True to say “We are all in this together”.

Let’s return to that:
The Anti-Weapon

Oh, here’s another would-be, broke-back wisdom-meme

We wish people would help us with Something Deeperism and this political moment. We are convinced Something Deeperism is the way forward for everyone, but we are not convinced we are explaining ourselves well enough. You can write to us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com with any questions, or suggestions on how to clarify our writings on this topic, which is to us so critical, though to others so far not even worth reading quickly over.

Every so often someone will attempt to think about abortion out loud, most recently with Abortion: A Spiritual Argument??.

There’s been a lot of brainstorming about politics over the years, like in Practical Politics, Say People and Deep in the Americas.

Sometimes we think we want to say something about race in America, but then we’re always wrong.
Here’s a poem called Maryland, 1795 (at the end, after Melville’s poem, which is better anyway).

And there’s a whole poem category called “Political Concerns / How to live right? / Help! I can’t pull it together!” towards the bottom of Bartleby’s Poetry Corner.

We also have a bazillion essays in First Essays, some of which are political (though most of those we’ve linked to from this page).
A Readable Reader has many of the more readable “First Essays” essays, and a few from elsewhere.
Those are books that we sell on the !Buy Our Books! tab.

A Political Writer’s Prayer
Existential Threats & the Wisdom Meme

All Content in this site is copyrighted by Andrew Mackenzie Watson, except of course at those exact times and in those exact spots where we reprint something written by some famous long-dead author. Or like now that we’re doing political pages: sometimes — like with the overview of Trump’s threats to democracy — we assemble excerpts from articles written by other people so that we can see them all at once and in case anyone else wants to. Obviously, those are other people’s copyrights. Living people. Although they never talk to us.

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