When being a New York Times reader didn’t work for me anymore (summer, 2024), I cancelled my subscription and switched to the Post. (Kept the NYT cooking app, tho!) Later, when Jeff Bezos wouldn’t endorse Kamala Harris, (as W. Kamau Bell said recently, by way of Rebecca Solnit, It’s a chess move, not a valentine) I immediately canceled my subscription and deleted the app from my phone. Turns out, Democracy didn’t die in darkness, it’s dying because we used it to elect fascists.

When he then posted that gross congratulatory tweet after the election, I saw that a lot of people were canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions. I didn’t. Maybe I handled it backward? The shallow truth is that having Prime is useful to me (I have a bunch of purchased media there, subscriptions, I’ve used it for over 20 years, blah blah), and seeing the Washington Post makes me mad. Starting next year, our new fascist regime will get to work dismantling media outlets that don’t promote their backward and deadly policies. Bezos has signaled that he’s falling in line, so maybe the Post will still be around and maybe there will still be journalists there who are fighting the good fight, but they’ll be swimming upstream to do it. Scuba subscribed to the New Republic, which is definitely my speed, and I think we’ll even be getting a print version.

One more thing: I’m not as well read as I ought to be, so this was new to me even though it’s widely known. Anyway – look what we’ve proven out:

The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), where he argued that a truly tolerant society must not tolerate those who promote intolerance.^[2] Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices.

It’s nearly impossible for me to think about anything else at the moment, but I did get a bit of a break at pottery last night, so I’m planning to get to the studio more often.