On September 14, 2025, I published an essay to this journal titled, ‘The Bluesky Delusion’.

The argument or, thesis, of that essay is that many people who fled Twitter for Bluesky thought they’d at long last found a refuge from the madness of social media, particularly of the Muskian type, dominated by the sort of people who ask the language model system, ‘grok’ if it’s sunny as they gaze out a window and consider Mein Kampf to be a self help guide.

Here’s how I closed the essay:

What is Bluesky for? I have no idea and really, it doesn’t matter. My mind has been forever rewired by witnessing genocide. There is no going back to the belief, or delusion, that there is someplace, outside of this ring of fire, where we can just relax and talk, as if the flames don’t exist.

[…]

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began a direct military assault on Iran. I say, ‘direct’ because Iran has been under attack from the US via sanctions since 1979 and clandestine warfare since 1953, when Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a UK/US orchestrated coup. In the current war, which, as I type this, spreads like fire across a dry prairie, the goal of the US and Israel is annihilation. Iran’s goals, as it wages total war, are survival and, the creation of a new, post US dominated order in what ‘western’ people call the ‘Middle East’ but which is more accurately described as west asia.

Complex events, with deep historical roots, can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, often simultaneously contradictory. To have any hope of seeing clearly (or as close as possible), study, and a willingness to abandon beliefs that take one’s thoughts away from reality are essential. It’s noteworthy that many people on Bluesky, the sort who, in search of civility, fled Twitter, seem unable, or perhaps, unwilling, to grasp the depth of what’s unfolding before our eyes, choosing idealism over looking at the ground. Even people who’ve never read Hegel are, in the end, Hegelians.

There are people who vaguely ‘hope for peace’ or who talk endlessly of Trump’s stupidity and evil (as if these are new facets of the ‘American character’) but few who, as they express hopes for US midterm elections and debate whether or not Graham Platner is a Nazi or merely an aww shucks guy who somehow stumbled his way into sporting a Nazi tattoo, understand that they have always been under an evil sky. That rather than traveling to Mordor, their entire life has been lived in Mount Doom’s baleful shadow. Somehow, these naifs think, it’s possible for a nation to begin via genocide and slavery (only ended, with ultra-violence, by civil war) and through a magical process of voting and marching, become a ‘democracy’.

About such people, scholar and author Mike Templeton, in an essay titled, ‘Barbarians, the Multitude, and the Bloom”, wrote the following:

The fact is that the pacified bourgeois world, what I have characterized as that swarm of emptiness and consumerist dismality in the sprawling middle class American suburban nowhere, is incapable of acting on anything at all. They are an undifferentiated mass of absence, and they make up the majority of the United States. In other parts of the world the mass of humanity resides in something like a greater urban metropolis surrounded by something that would count as a ghetto if it did not stretch on for miles. In the United States, the metropolis is suburban sprawl. These regions are the spaces where the majority of Americans live, and this majority forms the basis of what counts as “the people.”

[…]

As the US plunges the world ever deeper into destruction, there is little hint of action from its heavily armed population, who’re being dragged to hell with only complaint and expressions of fear on platforms such as Bluesky. Templeton explains why.

…

I never deleted my Twitter account, choosing instead, watchful silence. Life, as I mentioned above and as every adult should know, is full of contradictions and surprises. One such contradiction (or, it it?) is that the place of supposed safety and civility is not a source of information about the most momentous events of our time (even discussion of so-called ‘AI’, a popular topic, is typically coached in terms of returning to a world of honest, smart electeds and robust regulation that never existed and cannot be created in a US trapped in a death drive inspired ennui).

On Twitter/X, I have long followed Arya Yadeghaar, Elijah J. Magnier, Ali Abunimah, Mark Ames, Justin Podur, Amal Saad, Jon Elmer and the Electronic Intifada, among others. Their work shines like starlight piercing the darkness.

…

Raymond Chandler, in his essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (about crime fiction as it existed in mid 20^th century when he wrote the piece for The Atlantic) wrote, “It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in…” Wisdom, hard won and tenuous, starts, at least in part, by accepting this hard truth and not despairing, but acting with the world as it is, in plain view.