Václav Havel: The Sickness of Being Unwilling to Say What One is Thinking

Douglas Murray, discussing The 1989 Address of the newly elected Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel:

The central theme of the essay...is that truth is inescapable. We can run away from the truth; we can pretend that lies are facts; we can pretend that there is no such thing as objective reality. But reality always manages to force its way into our consciousness. The dissident does not really choose to become a dissident. Dissidence is forced upon a person, born from a painful but unavoidable tension with the external world, an awareness of the suffocating, subjugating power of myth.

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment,” Havel said in his 1990 address. “We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.”

The most devastating effect of this contamination, Havel explained, is a melting away of real emotions and relationships—a grotesque atomization that leaves us feeling deeply alone, misunderstood, frightened.

“Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships,” he added.

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About Focusing on One’s Priorities

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." Socrates

As a gift to myself this year, I've been doubling-down on my need to spent my waning hours my intentionally. Waning? I'm 68, so I've already lived most of my life. That said, I'm in good physical shape and I'm passionate about my work as a civil rights attorney (especially First Amendment). Every day I treasure opportunities to engage with friends and family, especially the love of my life, Beverly, who I met one year ago today. I am a serious musician and an exhibiting artist. I'm lucky in more ways than I can count.

But numbers don't lie. Last year I made an intrepid assumption that I'll live about 20 more years. Simple math reveals that this is only 240 more months. Last month went quickly. In fact, the better I am at living a mindful, principled and socially engaged life, the more quickly the months flash by. My endgame: If I'm really fortunate, I'll be able to look back at my 20 year Plan and consider that it was a life well-lived, which will make it much easier to deal with my inevitable decay and death. But how do I keep on track, giving my cravings to attend to more things than I can possibly absorb?

This year I committed to unsubscribing from emails lists that seemed like good ideas at the time. There are also many commercial emails that keep popping in, unsolicited. In the past few weeks, I have unsubscribed from about 200 email lists, which makes my inbox much more inviting. Now, most of my inbox consists of emails that I will either read or at least scan. This has also addressed my concern that I might overlook important emails because they are hidden among low (or no) priority emails. I recommend this to everyone. If an email list seems interesting, but not interesting enough to subscribe to, I follow the organization or person on X (Twitter), which circumvents my inbox.

I also decided to commit (for the umpteenth time) to do a better job of making and adhering to a daily to-do list that I create either that morning or the night before. I use a combination of paper and pen at my desk and the Reminders app on my iPhone. This simple tactic works extremely well.

I also make better use of my iPhone DND feature when trying to focus, sometimes for hours. This is heaven. How did we ever get to this point where so many people assume that you will immediately respond to texts and phone calls?

These three simple things have made a noticeable difference to help me spend quality time on the things that I have personally identified as my priorities. The alternative is the lose time chasing squirrels all day, which is admittedly sometimes valuable for generating unexpected but important insights, ideas and projects, but this daydreaming and brainstorming time needs to be consciously kept in check or else it destroys one's ability to deeply concentrate one's own priorities.

Today I received a mass emailing from Cal Newport announcing a new online course called Life of Focus. I won't be signing up, but I do appreciate his three goals for his course, which closely align with my own resolutions:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. You'll restructure your work life to feature less distraction and more depth.

Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. You'll implement a digital declutter to help you break screen additions and cultivate a more deliberate relationship with the digital tools in your personal life.

Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages your mind and your soul in something meaningful.

v Along these same lines I recommend Newport's book: "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

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About Men in Women’s Prisons

I personally know "Elizabeth Bennett" and trust her information.

"Husband is an ER doc. He has repeatedly seen female prisoners come in pregnant or sexually assaulted by male prisoners who are housed with them because they state that they identify as female. The prison nurses generally think this situation is awful and are angry about it."

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The Twilight of DEI

Pre-DEI: Don’t Discriminate and hire the best qualified person no matter their appearance.

DEI: Do Discriminate and hire people who are not the best qualified for the job, impugning the abilities of the people supposedly being helped. It's hard to think of anything more racist than current DEI programs. How can getting rid of DEI possibly be controversial?

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Why Neocon Foreign Policy Fails Over and Over

This goes for the Neocons who taok over Republic foreign policy and also those how commandeered the cabinets of Democrats such as Obama and Biden. Mike Dimino, a former CIA analyst and a fellow at Defense Priorities. He has been involved in Mideast policy, particularly under the Trump administration, where he has served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East. He hammers it here:

We could talk about sort of the military analysis all day, and I think it's really important to do that. But the bigger point here has to be, you know, we have now seen 20 years worth of evidence in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, and Afghanistan that we cannot force liberal democracy at the end of a gun. Okay? Iran is a nation of 90 million people. Enough of the people in that country have to overcome what many sociologists and political scientists have called the collective action problem, right? The cost benefit analysis of organic political change, that calculation has to get to a point where change can happen. And that's how it has to work if it's going to last and if it's going to be meaningful. This idea that the United States should be using its military to go around the world and depose every single tin pot dictator that we find and bog ourselves down there to the tune of trillions of dollars to 1000s of American lives with no real goal or or purpose, where we are squandering our national resources in our bandwidth that need to be directed on far more pressing issues is just not really in America's interest. And that's, again, the biggest point that I would make here, is that, you know, this idea that you can, you know, send a couple of, you know, American stealth bombers, you know, over the border and kill all the ayatollahs and some kind of cinematic cutscene. And then, you know, some young woman stands up in a pantsuit and goes, you know, I'm ready to be the president of Iran now. I mean, life is not a Marvel movie and life is not, it's not Harry Potter. So as somebody that has spent a lot of time in the region and has worked on these issues as an intelligence officer, I could just tell you the idea that something like that is possible, I think, is what is in the heads of a lot of people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, and even a lot of the, you know, the Persian diaspora elsewhere, that is very against the regime. Again, I'm against the regime too, but it just doesn't work that way, where there's going to be some sort of perfect cutscene ending, and there's going to be, you know, overnight, some kind of new regime in Iran, we have learned that the world just doesn't work that way.

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