Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Monday, May 29, 2023

Channel note: Book review not yet done

I'm working my way through the 2023 book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face Of Tyranny In The 21st Century. This one hits much harder home about modern tyranny and mass murder than anything I have seen so far. This analysis of tyranny supersedes even the great master analyst of mass scale slaughter and cruelty described in Hannah Arendt's 1951 masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (chapter review here). Arendt did not, and could not, see what is happening right now. She wrote in the 1950s. Spin Dictators is a 2023 analysis about a mostly unrecognized form of dictatorship, which has existed for millennia.

I've written about Arendt's observations about unspeakably brutal mass slaughter of humans by humans. The closest thing I am aware of to Arendt is the incredibly sad masterpiece by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Spin Dictators sees reality as beyond modern mass slaughter replaced replaced by mass deception with far fewer corpses and far more popular support. I need a day or two to finish and write a review.

Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 as 
a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine

I'm all jazzed about Spin Dictators because it opens a line of data and reasoning that is new to me about (i) the human condition and modern mass politics, and (ii) the grave danger to American secular democracy.


Hannah Arendt
Nazi Survivor (1906 – 1975) 
historian and political philosopher
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