Rad Geek People's Daily

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Outrage Fatigue

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 20 years ago, in 2004, on the World Wide Web.

I, like Roderick Long, haven’t had much to say about the war on Iraq lately; Roderick chalks it up to outrage fatigue. I think that’s right, but I don’t think–as one might take Roderick’s post to imply–that it’s merely a matter of personal psychology. The issue itself is tired: in the presence of such callous and brutal disregard for the truth, for rational argument, for other people’s lives and livelihoods, or for basic human dignity, there is no commentary left; at most you can only point out what you already said, and anything else is just more talk. The moral, political, and human disaster is, at this point, something so searingly obvious that it can only be shown, not said.

The War Party has surpassed both calumny and satire; there’s nothing left to us but the methods of Karl Kraus: to simply repeat what is being said verbatim, without comment. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dar?@c3;bc;ber mu?@c3;178; man schweigen.

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  1. Discussed at www.radgeek.com

    Geekery Today:

    Same Old, Same Old

    I suppose that I’ll read some of the commentary on the speech tomorrow. But, as happens so often with this administration, it’s just the same…

  2. Discussed at www.radgeek.com

    Geekery Today:

    Yadda yadda yadda

    Yesterday I offered the following commentary on the debate over the authenticity of the alleged memos on Bush’s alleged no-show for Air National Guard appointments:…

· November 2004 ·

  1. Discussed at www.radgeek.com

    Geekery Today:

    Kill them all. God will know his own.

    (Links from Austro-Athenian Empire 2004/11/08, Wendy McElroy @ Liberty & Power 2004/11/08, Anarchocyclist 2004/11/08, and Tex @ Liberty & Power 2004/11/08) It seems that…

— 2009 —

  1. Discussed at radgeek.com

    Rad Geek People’s Daily 2009-01-05 – In which commentary becomes copy-and-paste:

    […] and again, and again, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference but it remains no less true. There is a point at which no more commentary is possible; there is only copy-and-paste. […]

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