It Was Either Freedom or Poetry, and I Wasn't About to Do Poetry: Interpreting History

Served by an AI Demon

[Original post date: May 17, 2024; Update/reflection below]

I've encountered a recent article in the New York Times about the shooting of the Prime Minister of Slovakia. Often, I like to think about what I would advise doing in a situation that I'm seeing, as I've taken an interest in things like army and strategy and tools and innovations. Yes, very gamer.

But in this case, I'm really at a loss.

A poet president gets shot by a lone wolf 5 times -- and is in serious condition.

Did Europe know that their Universities were using this guy? This may sound like a strange question (and it is), and perhaps, reader, you'll understand this some day.

America knew that there was something truly wrong with Europe.

Many people have thought that the European idea of liberty was the way we should go, because it looked better than what we appeared to have in the American continent (I say "continent" because I'm writing this from Canada, and I've remarked in the past that culturally, Ontario seemed to be about 2/3 American and 1/3 English, so unities and divisions). But we check things here. Because what something appears to be and what it really is may be very different things in certain places.

So we investigate. The real idea is not to make a presumption without cause about how something works, especially if we're proposing to form an economic or cultural or military or any other type of dependency upon it. It's really about, how does that thing work anyway, and can we trust it to not fail us when we call upon it to do something for us? It's a tough question, but it must be asked (and it must be answered).

The Devil's in the Details, they say.

The Americans aren't wrong. There really is something wrong with Europe. And we really would be foolhardy to form a dependency on that problem.

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UPDATE, 2025-04-05 : I can see that my brain was still "in process". I had surfaced with something here, and I kind of wanted to tell people about it. I had absorbed a lot of damage, however, and I wasn't quite sure how to comprehend or talk about the magnitude and possibility of it. Not all of the parts were in communication yet. What I did know is how it felt (rage, but good) to see that article about Slovakia's president.

The image in this article is my first use of an AI image generator.