Marcus

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” -Shakespeare, Hamlet

There are mistakes in this book. Andy Ngo probably treats the right more generously than the left. Violence on the extreme right is a big problem in America. Andy Ngo was hit by a milkshake. Antifa means “anti-fascist” and fascism is bad.

All of the above is true. And, hold my beer, it's also true that Antifa is a violent, loosely-organized, nihilistic group that hates America and wants to destroy it and has and will continue use violence, actual violence against both people and property, to accomplish their mission.

See what I did there? More than one thing can be true at the same time! This happens to be a book about the left wing extremists. There are also books about right wing extremists. They both exist and are problems we need to deal with.

If you want to understand Antifa, you won't find a better first-hand source than Unmasked. If you want to know why you should understand Antifa, watch the news and look at the reporters standing in front of burning buildings while the text on the screen says “mostly peaceful.” There's obviously something wrong with that picture, that's a start. Believe your eyes.

Antifa is not about justice, freedom, or equality and it's not the type of group that pushes a country to be better.

I just didn't get this book. Some of that, I'm sure, comes from the fact that I read it in Spanish, and while I like to tell myself that I speak excellent Spanish, reality would probably wound my ego, so I'm going to ignore that and focus on the book itself.

The plot–it moves so fast you feel like you're a dog with your head out the window of a car on a Utah freeway, the only ones where you can go 80 legally. You're driving through the state and trying to take in everything you see but it's just moving by so fast and your tongue, which you normally never have any problem keeping nice and wet, is somehow drying out in the wind and your eyes are flipping back and forth, grasping things that shine or glitter but not fast enough, you can just never quite get a good look at anything. What I mean by that, in case the metaphor missed, is that Every Sentence moves the plot forward and it is utterly exhausting.

The characters are flat and weird. They never change, are never motivated by anything other than their widely varying versions of human nature which they are born and die with and never evolve.

A lot of the time it is hard to discern the magic from the realism. Neither are very convincing, making the magic less magical and the realism less real. I've read that the 100 Years was influenced by Faulkner and I believe that, but wow, the worst parts of Faulkner. It feels like it's all the confusion and it tries to capture all the types and symbolism but it lacks the beauty and the depth. Just when you are getting used to a character or, for that matter, a generation of characters, suddenly so much time has gone by that you're now dealing with a whole new group of people, a new war, new relationships and the only things that give the book any continuity at all are Macondo and Ursula and the family names which repeat and add to the confusion.

If you want magical realism, and I know this is blasphemous, especially for someone who minored in Spanish, I'd say read Salman Rushdie or, if you really want Spanish, Borges or Carlos Fuentes. They represent the genre better. Maybe my opinion will change after I revisit Cien Años in English sometime in the future, but for now I really don't have much of a desire to do that at least not for the next 100 years or so. Oh yes I did.

The idea that I like the most from Eastern style thought is that resisting the way things are is crazy. There's a voice in my, and probably everyone else's, head that never shuts up. I'm fine with that and don't feel a huge need to silence it, but a lot of the time what it's saying (what I'm saying to myself?) is pretty dumb.

The voice constantly explains and reframes what I experience to make it feel safer or more comprehensible. It resists what it doesn't understand and tries to explain it away or come up with elaborate justifications for why stuff doesn't fit in with The Way Things Should Be. It demands resolution to anything that doesn't fit my mental model and it creates areas in my mind that are forbidden or painful to visit then tries to push those areas away so they'll be uncovered as seldom as possible.

All these elaborate thought tricks work sometimes, but the idea of The Untethered Soul (and similar books) is that the tricks are unnecessary and detrimental to finding peace. Maybe if I let the voice inside my head keep up its constant chatter, but choose to just recognize what it's saying without either rejecting it or mentally canonizing it, I can be okay with what's happening even without understanding and categorizing every bit of it.

I feel like that way of looking at my thoughts lets me experience both negative emotions like anger and hate as well as positive emotions in a way that doesn't have side effects like anxiety or attachment. It keeps me focused on what I'm doing which results in me doing things better. It helps me deal with situations that I don't like by freeing up mental energy that would normally be spent resisting the problem and letting me instead use that energy to resolve it.

Even though I like the idea, I still mostly don't think this way. I tell and re-tell myself the story of how things are and why they're that way and how I'm going to fix them later and forget where I am and what I'm doing. That's why I read books like this, to remind me that there is a better way.

The book is okay, not particularly memorable I thought, especially when held up to the Neal Stephenson standard. The chatty AI was silly and kind of killed any serious aspect of the story for me.

The real winner here was Rob Reid's After On podcast. He's a great host and his guests are very good as well.

Long before the the Civil War started, Lysander Spooner was a strong abolitionist and was extremely active in supporting efforts to free the slaves. Despite this, when war broke out, he strongly opposed it. Spooner contended that the Civil War was less about freeing the slaves than it was about maintaining the union. For him, keeping the South in the union meant violently forcing a large group of people (the Southerners) to be subjected by a government to which they no longer consented.

No Treason was written in 1867, shortly after the Civil War. It is in that context that Spooner uses such strong language when he refers to the government as “robbers and murders” (he uses the phrase, or some variation on it, 38 times in the pamphlet). From his perspective, the government of the United States had just killed hundreds of thousands of men who were defending their right to be governed by consent. The result of this bloodshed was that while the slaves were freed, the surviving Southerners were no longer free to withdraw from the bonds of a government that no longer acted as their agent. Again, Spooner was anti-slavery and at times even advocated using violence to end slavery, but he felt the motivation for the war was not freeing the slaves, but the preservation of the union (and consequential suppression of the South) and that the principal reason for conserving the union was greed.

Not content to simply denounce the government's use of violence to force the Southerners to stay in the United States, Spooner also attacks the authority of the constitution. How can a document that nobody has signed or voted for maintain authority over anyone? He argues that a social contract like the Constitution, one that is not explicitly agreed to like every other contract which must be signed, cannot be binding. One way to think of it is to ask yourself–if you were born into a country with an extremely repressive constitution would you accept its authority to oppress you solely by virtue of your being born into the geographical area over which the constitution claimed to exert authority? Essentially that is what happens with the US constitution, only because it is not considered repressive by most, its authority is generally accepted on these nebulous grounds.

Spooner addresses the position that the constitution (and government) is authoritative because the votes of the majority support it by questioning how elections held by secret ballot can pretend to have any power over a person's life and property. He poses it as a group of men (at this time only men could vote) that gather, and by secret ballot vote to rob and plunder (through taxation and the threat of violence for resisting taxation) their fellow man for their own benefit.

Spooner's logic is complex and deals with many of the nuances of voting for a document and agents (congressmen etc.) to exercise the authority of the document. No Treason is tough reading, not because the it is hard to follow, but because for most people, myself included, the content is jarring, hard to refute, and goes against a lifetime of beliefs. Whether or not he is right is a decision that the reader will have to make, but either way, his arguments should not be ignored. They are just as relevant today as they were more than 140 years ago when he made them.