I will let the wonderful L. E. Modesitt, Jr. say what I’d love to say. This is exactly why the Bush Doctrine is an utter failure, along with many of the political designs the preceded it.
That is all.
(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
Dr. Shaun Duke © 2010 - 2025. All Rights Reserved.
4 Responses
I thought there was no financial crisis? *bats eyelashes and smiles*
There probably is one now, but there wasn’t when this all started. The problem is that the people in charge are actually allowing the market to take a dive. The government isn’t doing its job to stop this from getting worse.
However, for people thinking this will be remotely like the Great Depression, it’s not. Not even close and unless the world market dives with us, it probably never will. Could it get worse than it is right now? Of course, and it probably will, but we are going to survive and most of us will keep our standard of living at the same level. Some of us will see reductions, but in the end we’ll all mostly be better off than most of the rest of the world. America is spoiled and perhaps this will give us a swift kick in the ass to make us realize that making voting choices based on religion, looks, and likeability (and other factors) leads us to situations we don’t want. The American people are due to get off their lazy asses and do something. We hired these dipsh*ts to office. Some of them we hired over and over. Look where it’s put us and look how they’re treating us. Are they helping? No. In fact, they’re making matters worse by not doing their jobs.
And every single one of those CEOs who are abusing their authority and our money and trying to tell us that it’s our fault the financial market is like it is should be locked up in prison for corporate terrorism. If that isn’t a crime, make it one.
And, of course, the more people buy into the market collapse and panic, the worse it gets. It’s a Catch 22 situation. Confidence is the only way to beat depression 😉
And therein lies the problem. Nobody trusts this administration. Anything it does or proposes to do, even if it’s a good thing, is met with extreme distrust. You can’t blame people, though. We’re dealing with an administration that has single-handedly ruined America’s reputation across the globe. They have ever right to be concerned and unsure about where this country is going.
Which is why I propose that the government shut down the market for a short period of time to allow for the bailout to do whatever it’s supposed to do. Don’t let people sell off their shares. The economy will bounce back, but it’s going to take time and people can’t expect it to do so overnight. It might take a week or two for the economy to stabilize and maybe a few months for it to grow again. Or it could take years. Holding the market firm, however, will prevent the economy from getting worse while the bailout starts working.
I also think a way to boost confidence in the country is for President Bush and his administration to effectively stand down and declare the various branches of the government effectively in charge of the country until the next election is over. They have failed us in so many ways that it actually surprises me that we’ve let them stay in office for 8 years. We impeached Governor Davis in California for spending money we didn’t have and putting us in debt. Why aren’t we impeaching the current President for his failures?