The Twelve Who Ruled by R.R.Palmer

A lot of us are in that situation.
We have 3 sons & wives we can talk to pretty bluntly (because they generally agree with us), 1 who is still open-minded and rightish but his wife is a mine-field of ideological opinions that I can never walk through safely, and 1 who was brainwashed from working at Google too long.

“We all know what kindness means, and I think we can all agree that libraries are sacred, and our revolution will decree that we will fight tooth and nail for these things, politely.” – Lamont

If only that was the way it worked!

You continue to blow, stick to philosophy.

Her daffy, Marin-County-ish notion was that the counter-revolution would be based on kindness and libraries. Apparently, she had never read a word about the French Revolution nor Bastille Day itself.
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In this revolution, there will not be any positions except kindness, and libraries. We will not even have a battle cry, as that can lead to chanting, and haranguing: Hey, hey, ho, ho, all that chanting’s got to go! We would simply look one another in the eyes, shake our heads, and say, “This just can’t be right.” We will not try to figure out what it all means: Iraq, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Terri Schiavo, abortion rights, the Downing Street Memo, domestic spying, immigration, the Kyoto Accords, the Geneva Connections, Tom DeLay — none of it. We all know what kindness means, and I think we can all agree that libraries are sacred, and our revolution will decree that we will fight tooth and nail for these things, politely.

“Let’s have a revolution! Does July 14 work for you?”
https://www.salon.com/2006/03/29/revolution_2/

“DNW
There’s no fool like a windy fool. Whatever. Bring on the next tome.”

We had a disturbed police dog roaming the neighborhood for a time. It would show up in your yard or wherever folks were gathering, and make noises in order to get your attention. But if you took pity on it, and extended yourself to treat it humanely, it would yip and snap.

Then it would go away and do it again to someone else.

Poor mutt.

That stuff seems like Don Quixote on steroids – so far beyond anything that ever would be or could be that it is hard to imagine that people actually believe this could ever be reality. Also, it’s based on some very iffy anthropology that probably doesn’t even reflect what is true about present-day hunter/gatherer tribes.

I remember being told once in anthropology class that we can’t look at recent hunter/gatherer societies and imagine we know anything about hunter/gatherer societies of the past, much less of the distant past when that was the way most humans were organized. One thing that we do know is that large populations can’t be sustained that way, and I wonder what these primitive anarchists think will happen in order to get the population down that low. Nuclear war? Or do the just envision living in small hopefully-Utopian (probably soon to be dystopian) communities amidst the rest of the people of the world who live quite differently?

At any rate, recent hunter/gatherer societies are very rare, and they probably represent a very special and atypical subset of said societies of the past. That subset is probably composed of unusually successful examples of the genre – after all, they have survived and the others haven’t – and/or unusually remote ones in lands no one else has wanted till recently (another reason they’ve survived).

Rousseau. Did a lot of damage in the world.

There’s no fool like a windy fool. Whatever. Bring on the next tome.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

–Upton Sinclair
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That said, I wouldn’t give up. He has been exposed to conservative ideas and he sounds like a decent, curious fellow. Thirty-five years-old is plenty young and he’s still growing.

When I was 35 I was entranced with Noam Chomsky and an active member of an affinity group, which tabled and marched regularly. I never got arrested but some of my friends did.