The precise color of the gloves by the way was less purple and more magenta.

I don’t know what that means either, but it was a vivid thing.

Okay then.

***

I am more or less considering myself caught up as a viewer and consumer of videos. I didn’t watch much of what got posted in the two weeks, but I skimmed every usual channel, and picked and chose without a plan as I started unpacking.

The two videos I enjoyed most both came from Due Dissidence.

I’m posting the first without comment.

HYSTERICAL Zionist CONFRONTS Jewish Pro-Palestine Protesters

The other was much less frivolous. The title is a great question.

Can Societies Flourish WITHOUT Exploitation?

That question is considered by a panel of the two hosts and two friends of the show.

Jose Vega starts off the discussion with a mic-drop moment in which he considers the political philosophy of Aristotle versus that of Plato and Socrates. Please consider giving that much a glance, not for me, but for yourself.

After that, to me personally, it got much less satisfying and resonant, because all four panelists essentially agreed that there is a way for civilized societies to grow beyond the need for internal and external exploitation. Call it innovation, or techno-progress, or invention or creativity–they all roughly aligned around the concept that we all will be saved, someday and somehow, by just figuring out how to science our way past all the existential problems.

And thus emerge into Star Trek style techno-utopia at last.

I on the other hand doubt that, deeply and viscerally.

It would have been so much better, IMHO, if there had been an anprim or at least a solipsist around for balance. John Zerzan, for instance.

But that ain’t how it works, in the land of the algorithm, and anyway … a for-real primitivist probably wouldn’t be watching this much online media in the first place, much less bothering to go on shows and preach the Bad News.

For myself I stand in the uneasy middle halfway between that kind of purism and just being a regular guy. That might be my choice, in the land of liberty, or it just might be where I am compelled to stand, by my nature and the nature of the society I marinate in, and marinate myself in.

I offer no answers, much less prescriptions.

For now I exist and remain committed to description of that existence, of those magenta gloves, of this dirty tierra, of all the philosophical nuances that attract my monkey mind, regardless of being heard or ignored, celebrated or reviled–not because I am a “belletrist” or a Goethe or an anarchist or a Thoreau, but simply because

I don’t know any other way to live.