Quick take: How to watch the January 6 hearings

 As the January 6 hearings begin, it is important to understand what these hearings will accomplish.  They will not change the minds of anyone in today's America.  We live in either Ul Qoma or Beszel, seeing and unseeing separate countries, except that truth doesn't work that way.  "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away," as Philip K. Dick said.  The reality of January 6 will not go away, despite Republicans' refusal to believe in it.  The consequence is that we will be condemned to repeat it.  What happens in Congress will not stop that.  That doesn't mean you should disregard it.  These hearings are how we compile primary source documentation.  Note my phrasing.  These are the source materials for historical analysis.  Historians and other scholars will, at various points, look back at January 6, and the subsequent riots and insurrection attempts that we are likely to see.  They will need primary source materials.  These must be compiled and collated, preferably contemporaneously.  It is cold comfort to those of us forced to live through this, but that is all that can happen.  Democracy depends on the losing party accepting defeat.  The Republican Party no longer recognizes losses.  The Democratic Party?  I am worried that they are moving in that direction, but they aren't there yet.  Either way, democracy is in a bad way.  Possibly doomed.  All that can happen now is collating historical documentation.  Perhaps this sounds a bit Seldon-like.  Should we build a library, out on Terminus?