What Happened

It took me a while to read Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened, partially because it was upsetting but also because I did my best to track down her sources to confirm information I hadn't already seen in multiple places before. People are Tumblr are reblogging posts saying it's a bad book, because lol Tumblr, but overall it's fairly inoffensive and uninteresting... until it gets really, really interesting.

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On one hand, this is terrifying. On the other hand, I now feel a bit more sane about my reaction to the radicalization of disruption politics in leftist spaces like Tumblr. Obviously I wouldn't be so strongly attracted to a character like Ganondorf if I didn't believe in the value and efficacy of disruption, but even I thought that people on Tumblr were being a little crazy about the extremist use of identity politics to attack proven and potential allies instead of directing their attention toward more appropriate targets. I think it's probably impossible to say how much of this radicalization was engineered and how much of it was organic, but in any case the damage has been done, and now we can only try to move forward with the most accurate knowledge we have.

As an aside, I found Clinton's descriptions of Putin to be quite intriguing. She dislikes Trump, as I assume most reasonable people do, but her frustration with him is abstract and intellectual. The animosity she expresses regarding Putin is really something special, though and fuck me but now I ship it.