deathmtn

The country’s conservative establishment made the first mistake. In the late 1920s, the mainstream right-wing party, the German National People’s Party, was struggling. Its leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was a powerful businessman and media mogul, but he lacked charisma and mass appeal. As he watched Hitler’s Nazi movement gain popularity in state and national elections in the late 1920s, Hugenberg saw an opportunity—not to stop Hitler, but to use him.

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But by then it was far too late. At a pivotal moment, Hugenberg had given Hitler what he needed most: respectability.

The Nazi-led government launched mass arrests, and Hitler immediately promulgated the Reichstag Fire Decree, a draconian measure restricting freedom of the press and assembly and allowing the police to detain suspects indefinitely without a trial.

It was this climate of emergency following the Reichstag fire that allowed Hitler to propose the Enabling Act. Kaas and his fellow Center Party leaders debated it for hours, torn between principle and self-preservation. Some urged resistance, warning that Hitler’s power must be checked. But most feared the consequences of defiance. Still others clung to the hope that by cooperating, they might influence Hitler from within—perhaps by helping weaken their Social Democrat rivals or by carving out protections for Center Party or Catholic leaders. In the final vote, all 73 Center Party parliamentarians capitulated, justifying their surrender as a necessary evil to save the party. As Kaas himself told his colleagues, “If a two-thirds majority [is] not achieved, the government will carry out its plans through other means.”

The collapse of the Weimar Republic was not inevitable. The Nazi Party never garnered anywhere near a majority of the German electorate’s support, winning just over 30 percent of the vote in the republic’s last free and fair national elections.

Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him.

As a result, Medford became the third municipality in the country – after Dearborn, Michigan and Portland, Maine – and the first in Massachusetts to bar investing public funds in companies that contribute to or are complicit in “severe violations of human rights and international humanitarian law.”

“Our community requested this and it is really bold. It would be the first time that a city in Massachusetts did it,” City Councilor Emily Lazzaro said at the meeting. “In this case, to ignore the requests of our community and our own morality, to me, it’s not an acceptable path. I think this is a perfect moment for us to be bold.”

Medford resident Claire Sheridan who attended Tuesday’s meeting said she supports the ordinance and urged the council to “stand up for humanity here and abroad.”

“At 83 years of age, I am sick and tired of my tax money going to these immoral companies and manufacturers who aid and abet not only the killing of innocent citizens in faraway lands, but who compromise the lives of the Medford citizens,” she said.

This is all just a long-winded way of saying that while your current job, and healthcare, depends on building the Torment Nexus, your best bet might be to start thinking of fields that don’t require building the Torment Nexus to earn a living. And while spending considerable time and energy (and probably going into considerable student loan debt) to enter a field that wasn’t building the Torment Nexus when you decided this was how you wanted to earn a living can be maddening, and depressing, and anger-inducing… we need to judge this field by what it’s currently doing, and not the vibes of the past.

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Your soul will not remain intact while building surveillance software whose footage companies hand over to ICE. Your soul will not remain intact while you build software that allows disinformation to spark genocides. Your soul will not remain intact while you hoover up artists’ work to train theft-engines that poison the water of communities in need.

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To anyone who’s about to email me and let me know “they have a right to earn a living” please make sure to append “…in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed” to the end of that sentence because, honestly, that’s what you’re really saying. But no one has the right to live a hundred times better than anyone else.

Noor’s hands, covered in deep scars, spoke to the 15 years she spent separating copper wires from transmitters and crushing circuit boards. When I visited her workspace, the walls were smoked black from the fire she used both to see her work and keep warm.

Noor made 50 cents for picking through 10 kilograms of e-waste, which can take eight hours. She pays $120 a month to rent a flat next door for her family of five. Her son, 15, works at another trader’s warehouse in the next alley.

In fact, it is useful and important to look at this question not through the lens of persuasion but the lens of power.

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With respect to a friend who works there, this is why I am not publishing on Substack. I’ve had a number of people ask why I don’t simply publish there, letting my pieces pop up in their inboxes and allowing me to potentially generate income. The central answer is that I don’t think Substack uses its power responsibly.

The company has done a good job creating tools that make it easy to publish. A number of well-regarded journalists use those tools and have built their personal brands by doing so. I certainly don’t begrudge them doing so. But they have done so while sharing that growth with Substack, a company that intentionally provides a voice to white nationalist and Nazi propaganda. They have transferred their power to a company that has used it to promote toxic rhetoric in the guise of “having a debate.”

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Even if they worked perfectly, Substack and Twitter/X only accrue power over the long term for Substack and X.

During the 10 days after Jimenez Rosa was detained, the family would be thrust into a bureaucratic maze as the 42-year-old mother was shuttled between detention facilities — including one for men only — from Massachusetts to Maine. She was denied proper health care for her diabetes, asthma and other serious health issues, which led to two hospitalizations, her lawyer said.

All the while, her husband — a former Department of Homeland Security employee who grew up in Boston — struggled to locate her and secure her release through court intervention.

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When Rosa asked about his wife’s medical care, the agent cited HIPAA laws as a barrier to knowing her health issues. Taken aback, Rosa pointed out that doctors can share medical information with law enforcement when a patient is in custody, which is specifically outlined in HIPAA.

“He said a very disgusting joke after that,” Rosa recalled.

“He said, ‘We’ll notify next of kin if she dies.’ And at that moment, I knew that I was no longer dealing with humans.”

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Pomerleau and her family would later discover she had been hospitalized a second time while in custody, her blood pressure at 198. Jimenez Rosa was handcuffed to the bed and this time, told she couldn’t make any calls.

“I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country,’” Marcel Rosa, 38, said on Friday.

“I looked over to the officer and said, ‘Am I telling the truth?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that could be possible.’ I told my kids right in front of the officer that she’s being arrested, and the girls just started crying, hugging her,” he said.

“I know most parents would not have told that to their kids, but there was no way I was going to allow those officers to think they’re just going to rip my wife away from my family, thinking it’s going to be ‘business as usual.’”