#Sarah Kendzior

[noxaeternaetc]

"As the US lurches to autocracy, I turn to geology, because it is an honest broker. It retains every painstaking detail: rocks that grow an inch each millennium, fossils encased in stone. Every rock is a coffin, every coffin is a book.

Geology is an ally at the end of the world. It assures you there was a world, there is a world, and you are part of it."

Sarah Kendzior, The great unconformity: on heading to a future with a deleted past, July 4, 2024.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

From THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY

Sarah Kendizior

[Currently reading her books and substack. Highly recommended. Illuminating]

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Read more at: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com

[imkeepinit]

[thatstormygeek]

Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.

We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault. “You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!” Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning. There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on. Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.

The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again. That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don’t even bother pretending.

[ceevee5]

[alanshemper]

In the late 20th century, American dads played a Black female folk singer’s poignant anthem of a dead American Dream, and their children took note.

My dad wasn’t trying to teach me anything with “Fast Car”. He just liked Tracy Chapman.

But I listened, wide-eyed, as it described the country I was learning to fear to love.

“Fast Car” is not a relic of its time but tragically timeless. Combs’ cover could stay faithful because nothing in this country got better. That “Fast Car” can be passed down through generations without requiring explanation is both a songwriting triumph and a grim indictment of America.

A song about Reagan-era struggle became a song about 21st-century survival. When my teenage children hear “Fast Car”, they do not wonder why the narrator cannot escape poverty or why a person with a job still has to live in a shelter. Those things happen all the time.

[...]

The music industry has been dying since the advent of digital media. But now the destruction seems purposeful: top-down, vengeful, intended to destroy music’s political power. The 1980s and 1990s songs I describe would never be sanctioned by executives or travel so widely. We would never be allowed such cohesive outrage.

5 Feb 2024

[maaarine]

theguardian.com

apnews.com

twitter.com/sarahkendzior

[readingsquotes]

....it's very unfortunate that Israel is a model for world governments, and you can see its influence in places like Hungary, Russia, the Brexit UK, the United States, or any other country that has descended into mafia state autocracy, often directly in conjunction with Netanyahu, who's largely been in control of Israel since 2009, with occasional departures. But also, with the backing of a lot of the same donors and plutocrats and supporters. And Israel has, in this time, become a far-right autocratic state. It was always an apartheid state. It was never a true democracy. You cannot be a true democracy when you are colonizing and abusing a population that is living in subjugation, right beside you – which has historically been the case with Palestinians. But even for Israelis themselves, it has become an autocratic state with protests suppressed, with journalists, as you mentioned, threatened. And also, major outlets, like Haaretz, that have done a lot of brave investigative reporting. They are being threatened and the situation is dire. And I think that Israel should be listed when people put together lists of authoritarian states. It should be there. People will mention Russia, China, Turkey, and others, but they'll neglect to list Israel because Americans have always been taught that Israel is the lone democracy in the Middle East. And that is simply not the case.

Authoritarianism, Dehumanization, and the Fight Ahead "It's so important that folks stick together and recognize each other's struggles as a unified struggle," says author Sarah Kendzior. Kelly Hayes Dec 5, 2023

[willowreader]

I am Canadian, and have read Sarah Kendzior's books and her substack articles. If you are American I implore you to read her along with Heather Cox Richardson. She is a treasure.

[impromptu-manifesto]

Sarah Kendzior writes about social media, autocracy, and the attempt to eradicate memory.

Full article here: https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/out-of-words

@sarahkendzior -twitter

[bloghrexach]

the America of today — 12/2024!!

[writteninchicken]

"It is better to be free than to be cheap, as a matter of character." -Sarah Kendzior

[caiariel]

"When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how idealogies justify punishing the sick ang the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatized those who let people die, not those who struggle to live."

-Sarah Kendzior

[thatstormygeek]

The American psyche is worn from paying so much attention and learning so little truth in return.

Americans are battered by hypocrisy: Trump is a fascist, Dems say, yet they look forward to accommodating him? This is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, the CDC says, yet both the unvaccinated and vaccinated keep getting infected? “Cancel culture” is a scourge, the GOP says, yet the right-wingers bitching about it are the ones restricting speech and violating privacy? The economy is “booming”, Dems say, but everything is less affordable — and bank statements that prove it are dismissed as “vibes”? And now that the GOP is in power, they’re going to rehash that lie too?

[alanshemper]

It is easier to attribute disaster to one political party instead of examining networks and recurring figures responsible for a multitude of tragedies over the past twenty-five years.

Jamie Gorelick is one of these figures, a Forrest Gump of 21st century corruption. Like Garland, she is a Democrat who serves GOP objectives, the most notable of which for Garland was working as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s lawyer and getting them the White House clearances that they should have been denied due to conflicts of interest.

As a result of Gorelick’s actions, Kushner gained classified intelligence that he likely shared with or sold to foreign states, including Saudi Arabia, from which he pocketed two billion dollars, and Israel, to which he has been tied since birth due to his family’s long friendship with the Netanyahu family, to the point that Benjamin Netanyahu slept in Jared’s bed when visiting the United States.

[...]

Gorelick described being mentored by Dershowitz, who has been accused of raping children procured by his client Epstein, as “a joy and a thrill” and cites him as a major influence. (Dershowitz denies being a child rapist and said he just liked being massaged in his underwear in Epstein’s home.)

16 Nov 2023