{"id":5492,"date":"2011-02-18T10:06:09","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T17:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5492"},"modified":"2011-02-18T10:48:22","modified_gmt":"2011-02-18T17:48:22","slug":"when-youre-being-pecked-to-death-by-ducks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5492","title":{"rendered":"When You’re Being Pecked to Death by Ducks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Nancy Nall<\/a> sums it up perfectly: “It\u2019s just as well that the weekend is coming, as I need to unplug from the internet and stop paying attention to politics for a while. I\u2019m starting to feel that old sourness, the simmer I maintained from roughly 2004 through 2008 … no, through now, that pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling.”<\/p>\n

The media is addicted to fear-mongering and right-wing propaganda.\u00a0 Public discourse in the United States is hysterical, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and anti-science.\u00a0 It’s tempting to withdraw entirely, to follow the advice Einstein gave to a young man in Munich in 1933<\/a>: \u201cRead no newspapers, try to find a few friends who think as you do, read the wonderful writers of earlier times, Kant, Goethe, Lessing, and the classics of other lands, and enjoy the natural beauties of Munich\u2019s surroundings. Make believe all the time that you are living, so to speak, on Mars among alien creatures and blot out any deeper interest in the actions of those creatures. Make friends with a few animals. Then you will become a cheerful man once more and nothing will be able to trouble you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, you can’t pretend the ducks aren’t pecking you to death when they are, in fact, pecking you to death.\u00a0 Einstein himself knew better: he got his ass out of Germany while he still could and engaged himself in the fight against fascism on the side of the United States and its allies.<\/p>\n

You can’t engage the ducks … the birthers, the Obama-is-a-Muslim crowd, the legislators who want poor people and minorities to starve in the streets, the voters who act against their own interests by siding with the aristocrats.\u00a0 You can’t talk them around, reason with them, or educate them.\u00a0 They have always, and will always be, the way they are now.\u00a0 On a personal level, it’s best to follow Einstein’s advice: blot out any interest in the actions of these creatures.\u00a0 But on a political level, you have to be willing to fight them.\u00a0 When the ducks gain control of government and the media, they become a serious threat.\u00a0 And they will peck us to death if we let them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nancy Nall sums it up perfectly: “It\u2019s just as well that the weekend is coming, as I need to unplug from the internet and stop paying attention to politics for a while. I\u2019m starting to feel that old sourness, the simmer I maintained from roughly 2004 through 2008 … no, through now, that pecked-to-death-by-ducks feeling.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,7,10,16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class","category-culture","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5492"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5496,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5492\/revisions\/5496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}