Everything is awful.

Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV Parts 1 (my review) and 2 (review) and King Henry V (review) have given me a hopeless sense of a fallen world in which there is little or no good and only evils of various magnitudes. All people in every walk of life are criminals and hypocrites and all paths lead to Hell.

Meanwhile, in the technical writing class I’m taking this summer we read a monstrous example of the Nazi’s use of technical writing and how an ethic of expediency suggests the Holocaust is not just an “aberration in Western civilization” but instead an underlying ethic in Western culture, as well as science, technology, and capitalism, that can often lead to negative consequences. [Katz, Steven B. “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust.” College English 54.3 (1992): 255-75. PDF.]

But neither are why I am truly depressed this evening. I wrote a short response to the paper pointing out the Dark Enlightenment as a worrying contemporary example of where an ethic of expediency can lead. One of the other students in the class who read my response now thinks segregation (whether by race, intelligence, posthuman aspirations, etc., an idea promulgated by some neoreactionaries) is a great idea.

Fuck me. 🙁