Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Keep Standing Up

The Supreme Court's just-announced decision to hear Trump's ridiculous immunity case and to schedule it for April 22 (!) — when they previously turned it down back in December — is clearly part of delaying to keep the DOJ's January 6 case from coming to trial before the election.

I would find this hard to take at any time, but having just finished watching three seasons of Babylon Berlin, and therefore feeling immersed in another time when fascism was on the march to defeat democracy, it feels extra-malevolent. 

I remind myself I/we can't control what these fools and miscreants do. We can only stand up as people, residents of this country, and keep standing up. Intimidation will likely increase given the way things are going, but keep standing up, keep coming out. 

Cory Doctorow had a thread on Twitter last week about how censorship works, and pointed out that a lot of it is people self-censoring:

Censors have always done — and still do — their work not by wielding power, but by projecting it.

Even the most powerful state actors are not powerful enough to truly censor, in the sense of confiscating every work expressing an idea and punishing everyone who creates such a work. Instead, they rely on self-censorship, both by individuals and by intermediaries....

The censor can only succeed by convincing us to do their work for them... Censorship is, and always has been, a public-private partnership.

They're cowards and they expect us to be cowards, too.


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