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A year later I'm still trying to figure out the most appropriate - or maybe the most pragmatic - relationship between my rational, narrative self and my emotional, intuitive one.

So many traditions run into that split - Freud's Ego vs Id, the Elephant and the Rider, the inner-child...

I think because since a young age my predominate subjective desire is to subvert my other subjective desires to my best understanding of the objectively true and good, that might mean my emotional self is a bit stunted? I don't know. I catch the emotional me rolling his eyes ALL the time - he knows when it's ok to vent a bit.

But the question is, what is the truest me? I mean it's the verbal, narrative part of me writing this of course. And because it has the power of language, it has a hook to construct an image of the self across time. (There's a theory that says the subconscious doesn't have that sense of time, that's why a threat in the past can still create trauma in the present and anxiety about the future.) On the other hand... maybe my emotional self is "more true"? Like it has knowledge slowly impressed into it, and then can make quicker reactions... so I don't know what the relationship between these two parts is, quite! Co-equal? Parent-child or more severely, Owner/Pet? Is my emotional self my truest self, and this part that does all the talking is just the mask? I don't think so on that last one, but still.

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One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump's lie while making no comment on its consequences.

Yet other Republicans saw the situation differently: They might actually break the system and have power without democracy.

The piece talks a lot about The Big Lie. Were the big lie true - and it's not - there rioters would be something like heroes (albeit with some dubious, violent methods) But the Big Lie is a lie. Biden did not win the election because of fraud, he just won the election over a mediocre real-estate mogul reality-show star who half the country hates and who proved his own ineptitude all during COVID-19 (got your vaccine yet? 'cause I sure don't) He won handily in Electoral College votes, he won by MILLIONS of actual people votes, and Trump - who famously LOVED to settle things in court - got NOTHING done there, because his cause was false.

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"YAY! I made a chain reaction [in Candy Crush]!"
"How'd you do that?"
"Luck, mostly."
"You made one move and it spent ten seconds telling you how great you are. It's like a slot machine that costs time and pays out in self esteem."