The Digger

  National Horror Story Hour JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER Questions du jour: Can the US government make itself even more untrustworthy? Has it become an enemy of the people? Just wondering. What would be worse, actually, is if we learn that American culture is untrustworthy, since politics is downstream of culture. It would be the equivalent writ large of a human personality at war with itself, unable to trust its own thoughts and actions. Which perhaps explains the seeming psychosis raging through our society at the moment. The hallucinatory delusions of the day are exactly what you’d expect in the kind of personality undergoing a psychotic stress fracture, like the character Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s classic horror movie,  Psycho . Poor Norman (or “Mister Bates,” as Hitch playfully had the other characters call him), developed the unfortunate habit of dressing up like his deceased Mother and slashing to death any other female for whom Mister Bates had impure thoughts. That was the 1960s v

  Let’s Not Be Sensible, Folks by Sinéad Murphy My little boy with autism is back at school, for three days in the week. His support teacher is at last unmasked. On the seventh day of his return, there was an unheralded change. Instead of Joseph being accompanied by his support teacher at pick-up time so that she and I might have a quick chat, he was sent out alone along with his classmates. Inside his bag was a new small notebook, with “Communication Log” written on the cover, in which there were phrases describing aspects of Joseph’s day. Joseph’s communication is profoundly restricted. He is unable to report any aspect of his physical experience; he cannot tell of anything that has happened to him, no matter how recently. A short exchange, before and after school, with the person responsible for him during the day is essential. At drop-off time the following morning, Joseph’s support teacher watched helplessly from behind the classroom’s glass door while I held Joseph’s hand at the

The Lab Leak and Other Conspiracy Theories, Some Of Which Turned Out to Be True Conspiracy theories are the new evil of our time—or so we thought. Over the past six months, there has been a unified drive from politicians and Big Tech to ban all conspiracy theories and theorists from the internet.  QAnon ,  Alex Jones ,  David Icke , many  anti-vaxxers  and  Donald Trump  have all been banned or suspended from Twitter and YouTube, along with  dozens of public figures , while  Facebook and Instagram  have removed more than 12 million pieces of content they believed to be spreading disinformation and promoting false, discredited and dangerous conspiracy theories. A decade ago, people believed that an unregulated world wide web would be the saviour of free expression and would lead (in the case of the Arab Spring) to a hoped for revolutionary emancipation. More recently—especially since the January 2021 storming of the US Capitol—the suspicion that conspiracy theories lead to extremist vio

 Already? Time sure flies when you're getting old.  For the uninitiated, we do a music, jokes, and other fun stuff thread every weekend at Digger. Contribute what moves you, and feel free to augment the experience with the drink or drug of your choice, or not. I'll start out the festivities with one of my teenage crushes: 

  The Palestinian tragedy Hamas has turned a national liberation movement into a neverending jihad against Israel. Daniel Ben-Ami What is the driving force behind the recent tragic conflict across  Israel , the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? It might seem an obvious question, even if solutions are far from clear, but it is one to which relatively few give serious thought. It is a particularly important question given that the latest conflagration is significantly different in nature to the other outbreaks of violence in Israel in recent years. After all, Israel has had many clashes with the Gaza enclave since 2006, but this is the first time it has been accompanied by widespread inter-communal violence  inside  Israel, with Palestinians and Israelis involved in numerous bloody skirmishes in Israeli cities with mixed populations. This is a serious escalation of an already intensely violent conflict. Yet rather than try to understand what exactly is going on, and untangle the threads of t