Let No One Speak to You of Lived Experiences

The first step toward stopping fascism is not allowing hucksters and the pretentious to speak of things like Lived Experience in your hearing.

There is no such thing as an unlived experience. Those who ask you to believe otherwise will, at your first sign of accession, try to get you to buy the self-help book they have just self-published on Amazon, or sell you some sort of esoteric medical treatment of ancient Hindu origin that won’t make you feel even slightly better, but noticeably poorer.

There is no such thing as living your best life. It’s not as though even the richest of us has a climate-controlled walk-in closet in which he or she keeps a selection of lives — pretty good, really good, and best. There’s such a thing as making the most of what you have, and I heartily endorse the idea, but this idea of having a best life is the province of those who, at your first sign of accession, will try to get you to buy the self-help book they have just self-published on Amazon, or sell you some sort of esoteric medical treatment of ancient Hindu origin that won’t make you feel even slightly better, but noticeably poorer.

Obliteration is total by definition. Which isn’t for a millisecond to deny that The Lion of Mar-a-Lago’s bombing of Iran was an almost inconceivably brilliant military achievement.

Is it too much to ask that newsreaders take 18 milliseconds to learn that Iran is correctly pronounced ear-ON? I mean, I understand that those of the right mispronounce other countries’ names as a sort of dominance gesture, but BBC newsreaders, for Pete’s sake?