I don't watch TV, but I've never once seen a Jimmy Kimmel bit that was even a little bit funny. All the same, this alignment of corporate and government power to silence opposing view is wicked. He was himself a corporate mouthpiece, of course; it's not like he was a human being. Not when he was speaking on ABC, he wasn't, though I'm sure he is over coffee.
My very good friend Jim Hanson is happy about the designation -- provisional, but the paperwork will likely catch up given that the Secretaries of State and the Treasury seem to be on board with the President -- of Antifa as a 'terrorist organization.' It was the considered conclusion of his wife and his after a fairly thoughtful discussion. I respect their thoughtfulness. All the same, it's hard to say what the limiting principle might be that would guarantee the rights that is the only legitimate reason for any government to exist. Antifa is barely an organization at all. That lack of structure will open anyone who's been anywhere near one of the protests at which their ilk have been seen to Federal prosecution or worse.
What worse? We're killing people in the Caribbean now without due process, on the strength of the President's word that, you know, we were really sure they were hauling drugs.
Well, I've participated in killing a lot of people myself. In Iraq, we'd blow them apart if they were out at night near a road with a shovel in their hands even if they had no visible weapons. Probably planting IEDs, obviously; and anyway, why take a chance? In Afghanistan, it was worse still.
These demons you're haunted by, they turn you. It's not for no reason that I turned to philosophy after the war. Strong feelings about what's good and evil aren't going to help you. Such feelings give you pleasure and pain, and if you've learned anything from the recent study it should have been that you should push off pleasure and pain like the old men looking on Helen at the gates of Troy. Troy, whose failure to do that led to her being so leveled by the Greeks that her very location was lost for two thousand years. Homer carefully conveyed what their helmets looked like, but they were so comprehensively destroyed that for all that time nobody could even find their high and ancient walls. Even the Wise came to believe that they were no more than a myth.
Beware.
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