What a Label Does

A label is real information. Withholding the true ones to avoid being sorted is its own kind of dishonesty, and it reads as exactly that — a page with no affiliations anywhere on it has told you something too, and what it told you is that the person was managing you.

What changes is when the label arrives. Coming first, it stops being information and turns into an instruction. Everything after it gets filed as evidence for or against the category, and the sorting finishes well before the reading does. The same word arriving after the events that produced it lands as a conclusion the reader had already half-drawn.

So the affiliations stay, and they stay where they are earned. What I hold politically is a page of its own, and getting there is a decision rather than an accident. The arguments underneath those positions are twenty-two more. None of it is hidden and none of it is the first thing.