Donald Trump...POTUS? (Vol.2)

Carrying on from yesterday...

Chris Hedges at truthdig,  2 March, 2016:

Comment: Lots and lots of Hedges on fascism here, and as one of the more prominent Jeremiahs on the Unistat Left, it's one of the tunes he knows best. Longtime readers of the OG know I'm prone to invocations of FASCISM! and have been since I read 1984, followed by Brave New World, followed by Fahrenheit 451 one summer vacation, for "fun." I don't go to horror movies and instead prefer TV "news" to give me the twitchy creeps.

There was a time when, if someone asked me if I was a Democrat or Republican, I'd rapidly fire back, "I'm an anti-fascist!"

Subsequent reading and thinking over the last 15 or 20 years has led me to agree with Hegel: it's not sufficient to be only "against" something; you should be "for" something else too. So now I'm some sort of what Chomsky has called himself, a Libertarian Socialist (AKA anarchist), with heavy Green leanings but also with much sympathy for 19th century Unistat Libertarianism and European varietals of anarchy. I'm against anything that prevents our technology from becoming smaller, cheaper, more efficient and less-polluting (i.e., Buckminster Fuller's inevitable process of omniephemerlization). I'm for Basic Income (which still seems taboo in Unistat politics), for universal health care and education, for cutting the military budget by 5% every year and reallocating that money for R&D into renewable energy. I think the rich should be taxed at the level they were in the 1950s. At this point I'd like to quote one of our martyrs:

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one

Anyway: Hedges is really against fascism, which is a jejune thing to write, I know. Just about anyone who's read a book is "against" it, but some seem quite a lot more haunted by its historical specter than others. Hedges seems one of the truly haunted, maybe even more than I am, which impresses me in an ironic sense. The "revenge of the lower classes" is equivalent to fascism, and in a classic Hedges riff: it's because of our college-educated elites who aligned themselves with power and privilege and not with The People. That's a dramatic riff on socio-historical dynamics that's long intrigued me. The true Owners play divide and conquer, and they always win. Educated "elites" are still human and feel they are better than the Owners, and seek to fulfill their prerogatives (this is not Hedges, but my own reading of interesting Leftist sociologists and historians, like Alvin Gouldner, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky), so they pay lipservice to the Great Unwashed but want the Good Life too. I know Hedges is with me here...

Hedges: "College educated elites, on behalf of corporations, carried out the savage neoliberal assault on the working poor. Now they are being made to pay." By facing a POTUS named Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

And Hillary Clinton is a NeoLiberal to the bone, by the way...

Hedges has read all the books and authors that have roused me. His article quotes at length the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty (died 2007), who is in turn warning about fascism in 1998 because of insufficient care about what to do with displaced workers in a post-industrialized society. Hedges quotes Rorty, who quotes Edward Luttwak the brilliant amoral political philosopher and author of Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, which was read by a character in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Luttwak's readings have led him to guess that fascism is in Unistat's future and one of the reasons is people whose jobs have been "offshored" and unskilled workers will be forced to realize no one they've elected is trying to help them.

Hedges cites Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here (which I read within a year after my summertime of Orwell/Huxley/Bradbury), quotes at length from a book I have not read, Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Patton. It's scary, oh yea. Hedges quotes Hannah Arendt, he reminds us of Durkheim's term anomie, he brings up the one Great Thinker on this subject I would've had I been commissioned to write a piece on Creeping Fascism in America, Walter Benjamin, who said that fascism has occurred when politics has become aesthetics. Hedges seems borderline trivially correct when he says fascist movements do not build off the actions of politically active people; they are built on politically inactive "losers."

Trump's supporters are brimming with a transcendent ressentiment and can't wait to get revenge on intellectuals who've told them they can't yell out "Spic!" or "Nigger!" or "faggot!" like the good old days. Also, they'd love to be able to use violence on non-whites with impunity. (Pssst! ever read The Turner Diaries?) All gains made by people of color and gays will be wiped out. Also, says Hedges, Trump's brownshirts hate "intellectuals, ideas, science and culture." (This also describes very neatly just about the only group of people I do not wish to party with.)

To paraphrase from an old Woody Allen joke:

On one hand, we have Hillary Clinton, who stands for just about everything that got us in this mess.
On the other hand, we'll have violent, uneducated racists running wild, who hate culture and ideas.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Hedges even goes here: There will be salutes to the flag and cross (instead of swastika and fasces), and "mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance" which will be a "litmus test for detecting the internal enemy." Now that is some haunted jit.

Hey, when they say, "Now let us all stand and sing our National Anthem" at baseball games, I have been that guy who remains seated. Sure, people glare at me for nine innings, but the idea of compulsory saluting and singing of some abstract idea about "freedom" is just too ironic for me. I've been like this for 20 years. Hedges goes down a turgid path here, but maybe he's right and I really hope not. If he is and this blog disappears around January 20, 2017, after the inauguration of King Trump, I guess I was wrong.

(Quick book recommendation from the OG: Alfred Jarry's Ubu Plays)

Hedges - who recently said he's voting for Green candidate Jill Stein - finishes his jeremiad with this: the only thing that will save us is a massive social movement to defeat fascism, but it will not come out of the Democratic Party. (Does he even realize that's basically saying, "We're all so royally screwed!"?)

Hedges always delivers with his apocalyptic Leftist jeremiads, and he always overdoes it. It's like Performance Art to me. Nonetheless, I feel for a guy like Hedges because I think we're of the same intellectual and emotional gene pool. Therefore...

Grade: B
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ProfB AKA @hilzoy on Twitter, in a series of Tweets, 29 February, 2016:

Comment: I don't know who this person is, but I admire the judo move of having empathy for Trump supporters and explaining why. The GOP has spent decades destroying trust in science, legitimate experts and the press, constantly messaging that "America is being destroyed" when a corporate Democrat is trying to do some moderately sane thing for humans or the environment. After years and years and years of this, now they're fucked and don't know who to trust. Republicans have been dismantling their quality of life, shipping jobs overseas.

Enter: Trump. He "speaks his mind" and can't be bought. When the mainstream Republican party says, "Don't trust this guy!" well, the Trumpanistas  have just about had it with them too. And who can believe anything in the MSM?

Message: the Republican party made this mess. It's entirely their own fault. They broke it, now they have to buy it, take it home and try to glue it back together. These ideas are seen in very many of the articles that seek to explain the rise of Trump, but I applaud "ProfB" or "@hilzoy" for encapsulating these spot-on ideas so tersely. And again, the empathic turn? Admirable.

Grade: A-
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Prof Rick Searle at IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emergent Technologies), 7 March, 2016:

Comment: Searle's thesis is that Trump's candidacy is a result of "dark epistemology" and Trump is the perfect character to use this epistemology on the mass stage for his own gain.

Searle gives us his own history lesson-spiel: Neoliberalism starts in 1945 when Friedrich Hayek shows that Soviet-style central planning is no good, but continuous distributed feedback loops of information yields a better economy.

Still, Unistat gradually went for a Welfare State/social safety net in addition to State capitalism. J.K. Galbraith alerted us to the problem of manufactured "needs" and this muddles things a bit for our values/economy/understanding of where we're at. Nixon created the EPA and flirted with Basic Income (really: the FAP), but by the time of Reagan and Thatcher, the welfare state had suddenly become something evil, or at least that's what our real-life versions of C. Montgomery Burns wanted us to believe. Bill Clinton converted the Democrats to Neoliberalism and bragged about ending "welfare as we know it" before his term was out in 2000. The political philosophy of Neoliberalism led to the Collapse of 2008. (NeoConservatism seems merely a more Far-Right version of Neoliberalism to me. - OG)

[Again: Hillary Clinton is NeoLiberal to the marrow. Think before you vote. Off my soapbox...]

Hayek was for Basic Income, by the way. It's a rare day indeed when I hear a Libertarian who mentions the greatness of Hayek's thought who also mentions he was for Basic Income.

The "dark epistemology" Searle addresses has to do with the acceleration ("flood") of information, which also inundates us with deception, conspiracy theories and manipulation. He seems quite influenced by Shiller and Akerlof's Phishing For Phools. Both authors won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Searle: "We live in a media environment in which no one can be assumed to be telling the truth, in which everything is a sales pitch of one sort or another..."

He also brings up Agnotology, a term coined by Stanford's Robert Proctor, and it's the study of manufacturing doubt in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. Big Tobacco saying "the science isn't really in whether smoking causes lung cancer or not" (when internal memos showed they knew it did long ago, but that tar in your mom's lungs was making them rich), and now the best example is probably the "doubt" fossil fuel companies have spread about anthropogenic climate change.

Now that is some dark epistemology! And with Internet and all the other fear-buttons being pushed, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that all of Searle's dark epistemologies are a way of Dumbing Down the population, but as if this process was being done, to use a postmodern metaphor, "on steroids." If so, by which agency? Rogue gummint forces? Corporations? Ourselves? All of the above plus more? Do we need to go back and read Jung now? Is Trump a continuation of some Top Secret CIA mind control plan that began with Herman Cain's run four years ago? Are we hopelessly mired in a funhouse mirror-reality inside a Simulated Universe run by the Nine Unknown Men, who foisted The Matrix on us to throw us off the track while they keep us from realizing we're all only brains in a vat, run by the Illuminati? Or am I seriously lacking sleep from my bronchitis?

Grade: A-
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Chris Lehman at In These Times, March 1, 2016:

Comment: This seems almost the essay form of the Twitter artist @hilzoy/ProfB, but with more bile and far less empathy. The GOP made their bed, now we're all forced to lie in It. We get the requisite quote from It Can't Happen Here. We've had decades of antipolitics and bigotry from the GOP, but there's no time for schadenfreude because if Trump gets in we're all fucked, etc.

Lehman cites NeoCon Robert Kagan, who calls Trump a "Frankenstein monster."

Yes, a monster that YOU helped build, you brain-truster for war criminals.

David Brooks was with the NeoCons and now we're supposed to pretend we can't look at his old articles and call him out as the profoundly overrated, lightweight hypocritical blowhard he is. Brooks says Trump is "a cancer." Yes, and you are a gallon of dioxin poured into the local brooks, Brooks.

Ross Douthat of the NYT, another complete zero of a thinker, in my opinion: Trump is Obama's fault. He should have literally mailed that one in.

Mitch McConnell, who Lehman calls a "procedural nhilist," which I find apt and yet somehow too kind, says the GOP will drop Trump "like a hot rock" if he gets the nomination. I don't, and never have, believed this turtle-man. Not for one second. He's as fascist as Trump, but he's the old-fashioned kind: he keeps it to himself and his friends. When there's no mics around. As a matter of fact, I consider McConnell a traitor to the US, because, with no actual principle invoked, said as soon as Obama got elected, he and his beige fascist Do-Nothing Nihilist Republicans will oppose Obama on everything. If Obama says the sky is blue, they say, no, we say it's red. It's better if we don't even listen, much less talk. There is no democracy, no fixing the infrastructure, no exchange of ideas. The Republicans have no ideas. This traitor seemed proud to announce his only purpose was to make Obama a "one-term President." I guess: fuck the constituents who didn't bankroll your run for Senate. And forget about moving the country forward in any way. No thinking, no need to even show up. Vote symbolically to repeal Obamacare SIXTY TIMES.

Oh, McConnell would love Trump in office. You Kentuckians have been had.
On the House side, John Boehner wasn't dipshit enough for these do-nothing decent Nihilists.

My favorite line from Lehman: this Trump run is a "Theater-in-the-round production of Falling Down."

Lehman thinks Trump really is pro-choice and more in favor of single-payer health than Hillary, about which I'll address subsequently.

If it feels like I really went off on McConnell, I did. Guilty as charged, but what's a blog for? And besides, I'm pissy from being inside for five straight days with bronchitis. So there.

Grade: B+
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                           The reason for this image will become clear when you read 
                                the last article in this spiel.


Paul Krugman at the NYT, March 8, 2016:

Comment: Nice geometrical diagram, (Krugman calls his own diagram "silly") but overall a tad flippant. How bad would Trump be vs. not-Trump? Krugman thinks, "Who cares?" It has to do with likelihood of being elected. Trump is awful, but not much more awful than the others.

Krugman thinks, as I do, that Cruz is a total ass and paranoid conspiracy nutjob, and Krugman has fun with pretending he's been fomenting a conspiracy that Cruz has bit into: "Progressives should be cheering Trump on (which is why my secret committee has been orchestrating that conspiracy Cruz talks about.)"

Just an aside: how do you vote for a guy like Cruz, who, no one who has ever met him liked him? Are the evangelicals that fucking stupid? I could give a long, detailed and wonky answer, but instead I'll just say: yes. Yes, they are that fucking stupid. Take the most idiotic reading of the Bronze Age text and its sequel, factor in the "decades" of anti-politics and bigotry Lehman cited, next swirl in the dark epistemologies Searle talked about: bake for however long Pat Robertson tells you to*, and voila!: a brain is a terrible thing to waste, but millions of brains wasted this way gets you a Ted Cruz who's still in this thing.

Krugman is no Chris Hedges, I'll give either guy that! (Wha?)

I'm sure Nobelist and science fiction lover Krugman would have more to say about Trump, but this time he'd handing in something a tad light.

Grade: B-
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Evert Cilliers AKA Adam Ash, at Three Quarks Daily,  2 March, '16:

Comment: Either this guy is fucking with us, or...something else.

Clinton, W43 and Reagan were so bad, Trump would be much better, because he's smarter than the GOP "(not that this says much)" and the thing to note: Trump is bullshitting his way to the nomination. He and his minions sat up and took notice when an anti-immigrationist nobody named Dave Bratt startled everyone and beat Eric Cantor in Virginia.

For Cilliers, Obama is the best POTUS we've had since FDR.

The building of a Mexican wall: isn't meant to be taken seriously by anyone who can combine a few neurons into a thought.

What Trump's true believers like is that he has no respect for Republican leaders. Just recall what he said about McCain, Romney, and Jeb.

Cilliers seems to believe that we can get jobs back from China by imposing punitive tariffs, which goes against NeoLib doctrine. Maybe it's true, but China has bought up our debt. What about that? And how many jobs will this bring back, with rapid automation? I have my doubts. This seems more Mexican wall-ish to me than a real idea.

Cilliers - as is required - calls Trump a "narcissistic blowhard vulgarian" and a "walking wish fulfillment of every poor guy." The OG qualifies as a poor guy, but I have not for a second in my life wished for anything Trump has. This all feels a bit glib, doesn't it? Now for the conundrum:

"Don't forget, Trump is a socially liberal New Yorker, and not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative by any measure. That's why he's got nothing against Planned Parenthood, Social Security, abortion or any of the socially retro bugaboos so beloved by the troglodyte GOP."

Cilliers asserts Trump's from the elite, so if he wins, he'll surround himself with Bloomberg-like types. (Yea, maybe. But even so, that's not exactly exciting...)

If you read the article, someone in the comments section challenges Cilliers about Trump on the social issues like Planned Parenthood, abortion, etc, with links. Here's where it gets into our problem with dark epistemology. I read the articles the commenter cited. Then I looked to see if Trump has reversed his stance. He has. As of today, it appears Trump is all for Social Security, Planned Parenthood, a woman's right to choose (this one he's hedging on a bit, but that's the way it goes with politicians and abortion: if your constituency wants to end Roe, you must appear to be trying to stop it, all the while knowing what a disaster it would be), etc.

[An example from simple searches: Trump on Planned Parenthood last Oct:
It should be de-funded:

http://www.lifenews.com/2015/10/19/donald-trump-planned-parenthood-should-absolutely-be-de-funded/

but on March 1st: he's for Planned Parenthood:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/03/donald-trump-truth-teller-planned-parenthood-super-tuesday-220090  ]

Now: who do we believe? This reality TV blowhard billionaire who has burned the playbook of every politician by getting rid of any semblance of decency and decorum and protocol, assuring us his dick is plenty big, insulting people to their face on TV, etc?

This, to me, is some dark epistemology, mi amigos y amigas.

And even if Trump is socially liberal and he's playing the clueless to get votes, he's eerily too adept at it, even for a politician. And Cilliers has nothing to say about Trump with the Launch Codes or drone strikes/a private murder list that Obama currently has.

But: For fucking with my head so well in such a short piece, I have to give Evert Cilliers AKA Adam Ash:

Grade: A
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*The OG was informed four hours after this post that Pat Robertson has called for a Trump-Kasich ticket. It remains to be seen how much this harms Cruz, helps Trump, or gets particular members of the flock closer to Jeebus.

Okay, my mommy says it's time to stop playing and come in for din-din. If you like this stuff, I'll do another one manana.

                                           artist: Bob Campbell

Donald Trump...POTUS? (Vol.1)

I've had a nasty rhinovirus lately, and I've been resting, drinking lots of fluids, looking at porn. But many of the "experts" say, due to the psychosomatic synergy of mind/body, the unwell ought to convalesce with happy, humorous, less stressful mind-stuff.

And yet: I found myself spinning out into a YUGE pileup of "what does it mean to have Trump doing so well?" articles. It's the atavistic need for a bad time when there's a bad time to be had, I guess. Or: my masochism takes on ever-odd hues.

Anyway: I will link articles with my comments and, because I found while reading these articles (and what follows is merely a handful; please feel free to link to ones I didn't in the comments and say why you thought the opinion was interesting) that I was interested in the epistemologies used, and how they resonated with my idiosyncratic take on this Horror Show. Furthermore, I will act the schoolmarm and give pissy "grades" to each opinion piece.

Here goes...
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Scott Adams of the famous "Dilbert" comic strip, from his blog way back on 13 August, 2015

Comment: In what will become fairly standard in these articles, Trump is a "narcissistic blowhard" without any political credentials. I'm guessing, were Trump to confront Adams he'd say, "Damn straight, but I'm the best narcissistic blowhard you've ever seen and I get things done...I've got a lot of money my friend. A lot of money." Just a guess.

The meat of Adams's analysis is that Trump is using classic hypnosis techniques, like "intentional exaggeration" and "brand management" and "taking the high ground" (when accused of being a whiner, Trump said he was the "best whiner of all time").

And then there's deflection: when called out on his misogynistic remarks, Trump said yea, I've said some nasty things about Rosie O'Donnell, knowing his pathetic sans culottes universally revile Ms. O'Donnell. And hey, those chicks had it comin'. Adams sees Trump making a deal with Fox honcho Ailes over ratings: hey Rog, you don't like me, but your ratings go up when I appear on your network, so let's make a deal.

As of last August, Adams didn't know Trump didn't write The Art of the Deal. It was written by Tony Schwartz, who has since said Trump only "read it."

Adams seems to genuinely think Trump is so adept with his hypnotic billionaire's business ju-ju that he could make Mexico build a wall and pay for it.

Scott Adams has studied hypnosis himself, so he's spotted it. To me, it's soooo missing the point. Nassim Nicholas Taleb might call this a petty case of "tunneling," which is the neglect of sources of uncertainty outside the plan itself. Others use the term "cherry picking." I will settle with "missing the point."

There's no need to invoke hypnotic techniques; Trump seems to be obviously (to me) saying things with a certain style that appeals to downtrodden, uneducated whites who feel like they're losing.

Grade: C-
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Freddie Gray in The Spectator, 5 March, 2016

Comment: For Gray, Trump is a "fulminating demagogue with more than a whiff of mad dictator about him." Articles about Trump are your chance to really let your high-minded invective riffs out. And who can blame the writers? It's appropriate, no?

Gray calls Trump a "foreign policy moron," which I think is true. There's no way he could find Aleppo on an unmarked map. A true Murrkin, that Trump. Gray says Trump is "narcissistic and nihilistic," and I think the first term is obviously true and hope to hell the second one is not. It's an easy riff. He gets in the requisite allusion to fascism: Mussolini and the KKK. Gray also says Trump "tramples all over the corpse" of W43: the failed wars, the financial crisis. I have no problem with anyone raking W43 over the coals.

Also: Trump attracts millions "precisely because he is a rude thug." Aye, too true. Or at least Trump's playing the rude thug. (This will get complicated.) We know politics has been about bluster for a long time, but Trump takes it up a notch - hell: 23 notches! - and it makes the more sensitive among us who have read history a bit unnerved. Believe it or not, there are some of us Ordinary Unistatians who have never bought any of the lines about American exceptionalism, and do fear that It Can Happen Here. (Book recommendation from the OG: The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich.)

Here's where the conservative Freddie Gray loses me:
Unistat with Trump is seeing "the most benevolent superpower in history turning nasty." My gawd, you need to actually read outside your dipshit reality tunnel, Gray. Tell the people of Hiroshima about our benevolence. Tell everyone in Latin America. Tell the East Timorese. Show the Vietnamese peasant burned with napalm about "nasty." I could literally go on for days here.

Also, Gray apparently thinks our garrison state economy is just ducky. What an asshole. He seems to actually admire our military expenditures. And here's a line that seems ripped out of a rich kid's 7th grade essay:

"America has always tried to do the right thing." How do you get a job writing..? Ahh...conservative. Probably favors Rubio and his more foreign wars/tax cuts for the rich brilliance. Trump's ideas about protectionism are like "national socialism" and what about "free enterprise"?

Finally, Gray had to do it: he ends his piece by asserting that Trump is the "logical consequence of Obama" who "swept into power on a wave of demented hope."

Grade: F
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Andrew Bacevich from Tom Dispatch, 1st of March, 2016

Comment: The intro by Nick Turse, about Trump's "Trumpiso" and his "xenophobia, political bromides, and so-light-it-floats policy proposals" are well-taken by me. Tonight I watched Trump talk about how he'd handle ISIS: he'd find a really really tough guy like Gen. George Patton. That's pretty light. Politically speaking, it's roughly the equivalence in density of a neutrino.

I liked Turse's memory of his 1980s and the commercial for Trump's Atlantic City gaudy pleasure palace. It gave me a minor bad-trip flashback to the time I got stoned and watched Robin Leach on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," which put me off pot for a long time. Like maybe even a week. But to Bacevich.

Andrew Bacevich has been on my radar since the Awful Years of Cheney, W43 and that entire cadre of NeoCon war criminals. Bacevich is an American historian who retired as a career US Army officer. His son died fighting in Iraq in 2007. He specializes in diplomacy, military history and foreign policy and said W43's "preventative wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan were "immoral, illicit and imprudent."

About Trump: he's not a big fan. Trump is to American politics what Martin Shkreli is to Big Pharma, and that Trump as POTUS will "demolish the structural underpinnings" of what we've called "democracy." So: Trump as POTUS = no more constitutional democracy, with Trump playing a Juan Peron character, with Melania as Eva. And even if things don't get better for Trump's desperate supporters, at least he'll be more fun to watch on the teevee.

Bacevich understands the public anger, but he has some insights on Trump's use of that anger: that Trump understands that the difference between the ostensibly serious and the self-evidently frivolous has collapsed, and that "celebrity confers authority" at this stage.

Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. - Heraclitus

Trumpism "is an attitude or pose that feeds off of and then reinforces, widespread anger and alienation." In addition, his followers like the fact that Trump knows all about the bullshit corporate "news" journalists and gatekeepers and other "reality show" producers and calls them out on their bullshit, because apparently it takes one to know one.

For Bacevich, Trump is a carnival barker selling magical potions to fix health care, immigration, the economy and war.

Then it gets dark. By which I mean I think Bacevich is right: Trump, Cruz and Rubio (this last guy will now have to drop out as of his showing in primaries within the past eight hours, as of the moment I'm writing this) all say - and maybe even believe - that things were great until Obama got in, so on "day one" they'll reverse...all...that. - Playing to the childish electorate who apparently think the Prez is a guy with a Big Dick who is OMNIPOTENT. Cruz, Trump and Rubio look at the rest of the world, and Unistat's place in it and see nothing but military solutions. (Not that Obama is all that different!)

(Suddenly I'm reminded of a George Carlin bit about campaigns and telling the truth. Carlin would have run on this slogan:

The People Suck
Fuck Hope)

Finally, Bacevich predicts - and he's not the only one - that this means the Republican Party as we've known it is gone. Even if Cruz or Trump don't win.

Which brings me to my next guy, but first a grade for Bacevich:

Grade: A-
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Bruce Bartlett in Politico, July 27, 2015

Comment: A supply-sider and former Reagan advisor who worked in the Treasury under Bush41 and who is a longtime Republican party apparatchik, Bartlett thought W43 and his NeoCons had dangerously departed from true conservatism and has been vocal about the increasingly disastrous path his beloved party has taken. Bartlett voted for Trump in order to speed the demolition of the Republican party. This seems almost mythic to me. If not mythic, it's at minimum chock-full of pathos.

I've seen Bartlett talk recently. Let's lose this one, big, so we can start over with Adults in the room, and get away from the racists, borderline fascists, religious nutjobs and know-nothings in the party.

Fat chance, Bartlett. But I feel for ya, man.

(NB: Bacevich thinks the Trump/Cruz run means the end of the Republicans. Maybe. But we'll see how/if they reorganize. But I can picture Bartlett in his mansion, reading Bacevich's piece with glee. Maybe he even pushes away from his 250 year old cherry oak desk and dances a little jig, late at night, alone, with some vodka in his system.)

"Trump's nomination would give what's left of the sane wing of the GOP a chance to reassert control in the wake of inevitable defeat..." Ummm...how many "sane" ones are there? I can count 'em on one hand, right?

Bartlett seems somewhat comforted in that he thinks Trump would lose big like Goldwater did in 1964, which seems his model for restructuring. (Bartlett thinks it's good Goldwater lost in '64 because it paved the way for Nixon!) Methinks times have changed, especially with Citizens United and people like the Koch Bros. But hey: good luck on this one, Bruce.

Bartlett thinks: When the Republicans get trounced in November, we'll have someone running in 2020 who is less right-wing than either McCain on Romney were. Really? I don't see it. As a matter of fact, I think guys like Bacevich and others are right: there will be more Trumps and Cruzes in 2020, unless something is done to staunch the flow of jobs overseas, the falling wages, the shitty jobs, the hopelessness of much of the country. About this Bartlett, the Party Man, has nothing to say.

He does make an interesting point when talking about the 1960s and the history of the Republican party: that conservatives and country club Republican Party members "have always been uncomfortable allies." That's my favorite line in Bartlett's piece.

But then Bartlett tries to paint Wm. F. Buckley as for civil rights (he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but to his credit, later said it was a mistake to oppose) and that Buckley tried to purify the party by distancing it from Birchers and Randroids, which I find equivocal. Buckley wanted to appear to distance the party from extremists, but he knew they needed as many factions as possible. And Bartlett goes on with this louse-ridden history lesson by reminding us that Irving Kristol and his NeoCons were a way of getting moderate Jews into the party. How did that work out for you, 2000-2008?

Bartlett mentions nothing about the sort of anger that would give rise to Trump. I think he's been too well-fed and protected and privileged to even think about this.

Bruce says some true things about his political god, Ronald Reagan, who "raised taxes 11 times, gave amnesty to illegal aliens, pulled American troops out of the Middle East, supported environmental regulations (not so much- OG), raised the debt limit, and appointed many moderates to key positions, including the Supreme Court."

I hope Bartlett doesn't think Scalia was a "moderate."

Grade: C
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Well, that's all for today 'cuz I'm weak with bronchitis, but I'll go over some more of these tomorrow, if only get all this this off my chest. (<----did you catch the lurking pun?)

                             a graphic depiction of my inner state after watching footage of 
                             U. of Louisville student Shiya Nwanguma surrounded by white
                             supremacists at a Trump rally a week ago

Assault on Poverty: Universal Basic Income

Sometime in the next few months, the Swiss will vote on whether to give every citizen around $2800 a month, with no conditions attached. They have an initiative system where if you get 100,000 people to sign a petition, it must come up for a vote. The Swiss government is pissed because they have to deal with this; they think their welfare state is good enough. But enough Swiss citizens are alarmed at growing income inequality, an outdated welfare system and unemployment and underemployment and the specter of accelerating technological unemployment. As one of the main shakers behind this movement, Daniel Straub, said, "It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income.  We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor - that is great - we should be celebrating." And who was another one of the prime movers behind this in Switzerland? An artist named Enno Schmidt. Of all the artists I've known in Unistat - quite a lot - this seems like something so bountifully good they might start sorta thinking about believing in god maybe. (<-----That last sentence is as I have deliberated over; let's let it stand, if only for its ornate badness, hmmmkay?) I hope they get it done in Switzerland, and I hope we get something like it in Unistat. (If it passes, in heaven - or wherever he is - Orson Welles might add the UBI to the five hundred years of brotherly love and the cuckoo-clock, for there are already good reasons to suspect the UBI will add to artistic and inventive derring-do.)

Here's an interesting interview about UBI and Switzerland with John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The neoliberal austerity idea was and is a smashing failure in Europe, and that's a big reason why many groups are becoming interested in the UBI. Do we want Greece in our streets? I don't think so. As for Unistat, Schmitt points out that fascists (my word, not his) shut down the government because we were going to make sure every citizen had health coverage, while in Europe, far-right groups are extremely angry because austerity economics has cut into their health services, and so there's an immigrant backlash. I guess I'd trade Europe's fascists over ours, but now I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren't I? Indeed, Schmitt talks about the history of "welfare" in Unistat and how much of it is coded racism, which I think is true, and I think this pending debate will be won or lost on the fields of metaphors...

                       If we got UBI in Unistat I'd spend a lot of time learning how to write!

Speaking of which: George Lakoff has long said that capturing the "freedom" metaphor is one of the major games in Unistat politics. And perhaps the major thinker in the world on UBI is Philippe Van Parijs, who started thinking about the idea in the 1980s in Belgium, when he witnessed high unemployment accompanied by fast productive growth in the economy. As a Green he began playing with the idea among other sociological colleagues, and after awhile they began to realize it wasn't such a crazy idea after all, and began systematic work on it. He's often asked in interviews about the reception of the idea: technical aspects, administrative topics, and how to fund the idea. But he answers that the main objection people have when they first hear about it are moral ones, and demand a good answer. And I find him seductive when he talks about the idea of freedom and the UBI, which is, for him, the main reason why it should be done.

Van Parijs says that "the main moral objection was that basic income would be giving people something for nothing, and that it amounted to systematic legitimation of free riding on the part of the idlers at the expense of the hard workers. And so that forced me to spell out why, fundamentally, I thought this was such a good and fair idea." He calls on the concepts of "formal freedom" and "real freedom." Formal freedom, basically, says you have the right to do as you might wish. Real freedom includes formal freedom as a subset, but addresses the means that are required for you to do what you wish to do. If you find yourself daydreaming often that you'd really like to do this rather than that, but you can't afford to...you're probably a wage slave. You have much more formal freedom than real freedom. Obviously, other life conditions mitigate the argument that, say, even though you were an orphan till age 14 then ran away to the circus and never learned to read, that you want to own your own casino in Las Vegas and so you should be given enough guaranteed to do that. We need to stay in "reality" here, folks. Think of some real freedom ideas that seem within the realm of possibility for you; this is what Philippe Van Parijs wants. And so do you.

But right now you might be mired in formal freedom and not real freedom.

And doesn't that sorta just piss you off, especially when you look at the careers of people like these CEOs?

If you'd like to be able to quit your job and take care of a sick relative but can't afford it because you'd fall into poverty...you'd be able to if there was a UBI. And not only caring for others (which is real work, if unpaid), but you could afford to gain better training or retraining for your job with a UBI (if your current bosses don't fund your education, which in Unistat they are less and less likely to do). You can become more socially and politically active with a UBI. Young people will be less likely to leave their families for a job elsewhere if they had UBI. It's a boon to artists, would-be entrepreneurs, and other creative types. It's a massive boon to the ever-increasing precariate class.

In Van Parijs's and most of the pro-UBI thinkers I've studied, the income is unconditional. Bill Gates would get a check every month. So would that guy sleeping behind a dumpster at the liquor store. The libertarian Unistatian thinker Charles Murray - who hates welfare - is for it. He's thought about it and wants to end poverty for Unistatians by giving $10,000 to every fellow Unistatian over 21 who is a citizen and not in prison.

Back to Philippe Van Parijs: besides real freedom he was moved to pursue his UBI lines of thought by "A grand reflection about the fate of mankind and the way mankind should be heading." He also saw it in the spirit of socialism, but not by doing that whole takeover of the means of production stuff. In this, he saw UBI as an "attractive alternative to socialism."

Here are two videos by major world thinkers in UBI, the first an interview with Guy Standing. It's about 8 minutes long. He mentions the term "social dividend" which reminded me of some thinkers that influenced Ezra Pound and Robert Anton Wilson, particularly the engineer and economic thinker C.H. Douglas. We should receive a UBI, says Standing, due to the "social dividend from all the investments that previous generations have made." Standing also mentions Thomas Paine, who had this idea in the 18th century. Standing also talks about experiments and successes with UBI in selected areas of India, Africa, and Latin America, and mentions Lula's Brazil and the Bolsa Familia: 60 million on a version of UBI and a smashing success: increased work and productivity!:

And here's Philippe Van Parijs from what looks like earlier this year. It's 6 and a half minutes, and my favorite part takes off at 4:00, when he gets the question about "parasites" that would sit around and live off other people's work. Basically, 1.) you might not have a job but be doing useful work, like housekeeping or taking care of children, etc; 2.) some paid work is not useful, as for example making weapons; 3.) many highly paid jobs are being done by "free riders"! Wha? Yep: it's incorporated in their jobs: they've received massive gifts "from nature," they benefit from rapid technological advances that they themselves are not responsible for achieving, and they benefit from a highly organized society. This last reason reminds me of the spirit of the "social dividend." Van Parijs has spoken at length about this in other interviews.

We create reality by talking about it.

March 1997 interview with Philippe Van Parijs

July 2002 interview with Philippe Van Parijs

I'd previously spewed blog on the Universal Basic Income HERE and HERE.

Neomedievalism as Metaphor, and a Plethora of Our Discontents

For anyone who's paying attention, Obama's conducting of the "global war on terror" seems Pentagon-run, and coterminous with the Bush-Cheney years of utter barbarity and horror. The war in Afghanistan, if it already seemed endless to you (it certainly does me), in truth, will be going on at least another ten years, no matter what happy-talk you hear in the mainstream electronic media or the corporate newspapers. The Obama Administration? Forget it. Here are some of the moves Obama's made that make him no different from the Neoconservatives that got us into this mess:

• Patriot Act extended: no reforms have been made from the Bush/Cheney era
• Warrantless wiretapping? Obama just signed an extension for five more years
• increased secrecy, repression and restriction of releases from Gitmo, let alone that it hasn't been shut down
• a new scheme for indefinite detention on Unistat soil
• a new theory of Presidential assassination powers, even of Unistat citizens
• Miranda rules diluted

I could go on and on, but I'll tell you the truth: I'm weak of heart when it comes to such things, and I just get depressed. Why do you think the OG usually writes about seemingly everything but this shit?

"The voice of history of often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery." - Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

You may have heard that Unistat is getting out of Afghanistan at the end of next year. Last month the Pentagon's top lawyer said we should see the Afghan war as "finite" but clearly, that was for the consumption of dupes and starry-eyed wishers. There's every reason to believe Unistat will be in Afghanistan for 10 more years, possibly forever. We are not "exiting" at the end of 2014. If you believe that, I know a Nigerian Prince who has some money he wants to share with you. The devil is in the semantics of the thing. And O! what semantics. You want semantics? I'll give you semantics.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." - George W. Bush, on 9/16/01, to the press, South Lawn of the White House

                                                        Hedley Bull

Medievalism/Neomedievalism and Neoconservatism
In 1977, British political theorist Hedley Bull published The Anarchical Society: A Study of World Order in Politics. Considered a "realist" thinker in International Relations, Bull was concerned with the rise of non-state and post-state actors in a field of thought that was governed by Cold War nation and state-based approaches. Bull's book has since become a classic in the field, and apparently every textbook in foreign relations now includes sections on neomedievalism.

Here's some of what Hedley Bull was onto in 1977. He had the foresight to see non-state and post-state actors on the world scene as playing a big enough role that we must begin to think in new ways. But first: who or what are "non-state actors"? Some would be: international terrorists, corporations and their own paramilitary squads, drug cartels, NGOs, and, even though he didn't mention them - because they didn't exist then, but he probably would have included them - computer hackers.

Some alternative paths, or solutions for world order with the rise of non-state actors, for Bull:

• world government 
• "solidarity of states" (probably a strengthening of the UN)
• a disarmed world
• ideological homogeneity among existing states
• a modern medieval model

There are other alternative paths; I have only skimmed Bull and have been greatly aided in this intellectual area by texts that comment on Bull, the best being a slim title, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, by Bruce Holsinger a prof. of English (specializing in the medieval era) and Music at the U. of Virginia. Holsinger points out that Bull devoted a scant few pages to  a neomedieval path to a new world order, but it looks like the NeoCons took that section of the book very seriously indeed...or so I infer from reading Holsinger reading Bull...

                                              Bruce Holsinger, defending the good 
                                             name of Medieval Studies, defending well

Holsinger, whose field of Medieval Studies covers roughly the 5th-15th centuries, includes the rise of Islam, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Crusades, Charlemagne, Mohammed, the Koran, courtly love, the Book of Kells, the English kings Shakespeare would immortalize in plays such as Richard III  and Henry IV, Marco Polo, Petrarch, St. Francis of Assisi, the Aztec Empire, Dante, Chaucer, feudalism, the Jin dynasty, Hildegard of Bingen, and Genghis Khan; Holsinger objects to the appropriation and semantic use of "medieval" by the post-9/11 Unistat political regimes. In one place he admits it's now so pervasive that the word "medieval" may not recover from its new meaning, but that his Medieval Studies colleague, Carolyn Dinshaw of NYU, tongue in cheek, proposed starting a group Concerned Medievalists For Peace, in the wake of 9/11.

The Holsinger book is - to me - the most interesting work on the deeper political workings of the Pentagon, neoconservatives, and the utter disasters of Unistat foreign policy since I read Nicholas Xenos's slim book, Cloaked In Virtue, on the cult of neocons that emanated with Leo Strauss, and how he taught a secret inner "true" reading of philosophers like Hobbes, to his initiates. The great irony, since I became aware of the Neo Cons (after Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind came out), was that Strauss was one of the many great Jewish intellectuals imported from Europe during the rise of Hitler.

(short article, not by Xenos: "Leo Strauss's Philosophy of Deception")

"History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of ideas." - Etienne Gilson

What Holsinger does is show how the rhetoric of "medievalism" has been applied by NeoCons to get us into this mess. The infamous "torture memos," for instance. I've read some maddening things on how the lawyers inside Bush's White House twisted semantics in order to override the Geneva Convention III (the POW issue) to redefine prisoners of war as "enemy combatants" which overrides Geneva, all International Law, and even human rights. Obama has gone along with this.

                                            Glenn Greenwald: if you want to know more 
                                            about the truth - as I see it - of Unistat foreign
                                            and domestic policy: read him!

Because the terrorists were stateless, or from "failed states" they aren't recognized under law. They are separated from us not only by religion and region, but by time: they are medieval. Therefore, modern ideas about law don't apply to them. Let us write the laws for them.

Holsinger goes on to show, in remarkable detail for such a short book, how the semantics of "medieval" has been used to circumvent...any semblance of sanity or humanity. In the name of "security."

What a terrific little book Holsinger has written. I just have one basic difference with him. On pp.15-16, Holsinger writes that Plato's Gorgias has "one of the great critiques of the rhetoric of anti-intellectualism in the Western tradition [...] In the words of Socrates to Gorgias, a professional rhetor, 'the rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the people that he has more knowledge than those who know."

This has always been true and always will be true. It's up to the citizens (or post- or non-state actor) to educate themselves so rhetors (in this case, anyone from the Unistat State Dept) will not believe them, and seek better ways to live on the planet with "medieval" people. I'm impressed with Holsinger, but I don't believe he knows "the truth." And I don't believe Socrates or Plato knew "the truth," either. I think Gorgias was pointing out something that Plato didn't like (and I would guess, Socrates didn't like it either, but what about his schtick: The classic "I don't know anything; I'm just askin' you" routine?) and preferred to not think was "the truth": that no one has a privileged fulcrum point from which to see The Truth, with no occlusions having to do with historical accident, class interest, personal interest, psychological disposition, etc.

(These "medieval" people are people who happened to use a money-transfer scheme - hawala - that eluded all of our ultra-sophisticated computer-tracking efforts, because they knew about our computer systems. Yea: they're "medieval." They used cell phones and shredders and FAX machines. They just want us OUT OF THEIR PART OF THE WORLD. Is that so difficult to understand? Also they're pissed we support Israel so one-sidedly; they despise us, not for "our freedoms" - you have to be a total imbecile to believe that! - but because we propped up vicious tyrannies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Also they know we backed Iraq in the seven year Iran-Iraq war, that the CIA got rid of Iran's democratically-elected Mossadegh in 1953 and installed the brutal Shah and trained his secret police-killers, SAVAK. I could go on. They hate us for our policies. Some of these medieval people subscribe to a strain of radicalism that led to 9/11. But by no means all. All of this is "the truth" as I see it.)

Meanwhile, Unistat grows more and more medieval, in debt, the Robocop to the world, having lost its moral standing in the rest of the "free world," and seems intent on carrying out a neomedievalist foreign  (and, in some ways, domestic) policy that looks more and more like the Catholic Church trying to run the globe, circa 500-1450. And thus we drift ever closer to catastrophe.

Glenn Greenwald, from a week or so ago, in The Guardian. Germane to this rant.
Wolfowitz Doctrine
Late 2010 interview with the co-author of The Death of Neoconservatism
Five Ways Obama is Just Like George W. Bush
Monopolizing War: It's what we do best
Americans Are The Most Spied-On People In World History (Even the East Germans under the Stasi!)

Voting For Unistat President: Maybe I'll Stay Home

It's more like who to vote against. I was dumb enough, naive enough,  to think that, in 2008, I was finally voting for someone I'd actually like, who might at least somewhat represent my values. I had never before gone into the voting booth to vote for someone because I actually sorta liked them. In 2008 I did, I'm embarrassed to say. My guy won, and he's been a crushing disappointment.

So, in less than two weeks, our big national Dog and Pony Show crests (finally!), after $1,000,000,000 has been spent by plutocrats and kleptocrats and fascists of various persuasion, in hopes of a more favorable showing for their money...or property. Whatever.

Obama, who our version of the Taliban (shown on Fox "News") has been trying to convince its viewers that Obama hates white people, that he's a communist, a secret muslim who wants to take our guns and magically install sharia law, who's a crypto-nazi, like "Stalin without the bloodshed" (the actual words of one of our TV idiots on Fox "News") - I'm not making ANYTHING up here, folks who are reading this from outside Unistat - that Obama is all of the above (somehow) and an East Coast liberal elitist who thinks he's so great because he taught at Harvard Law. (On what planet can such a "reality" be possible?)

Yep: Obama, according to the loudest and dumbest in our media, is a latte-drinking radical muslim who is like Stalin and Hitler, and he hates white people. He wants to take away our guns, force everyone to ride bicycles because he's a radical environmentalist too! He wants Sharia Law and will make all our children eat organic vegetables because he thinks he's so smart.

Enough with the Idiot Rundown...

Instead, the reality: Obama's a tool of Wall Street. He filled his cabinet with banksters and the very people who presided over the looting of the country. Obama believes in deregulation, even though he'll pay lip service to regulation when he's talking to his pie-eyed liberal cohort. Torture has been effectively decriminalized under our Barackstar. I find this endlessly shameful. But not as much as the unmitigated shame of his continuance of Bush Administration policies of not only torture, but indefinite detention without trial,his prosecution and persecution of whistleblowers - under the Espionage Act! - which is more than all previous Presidents combined.

And Obama's El Drone Assassino Numero Uno. (Yea, like that doesn't invite what the CIA calls "blowback"! Noooooo.)

Oh, but he gave us healthcare!, you say. You mean he did everything he could to not have single-payer, the only sane system in the world. The insurance companies privately love him, but most of them back the other guy anyway.

Obama hasn't done much of anything, nor has he said anything, about the rise of poverty and decline of the middle class. He was stupid enough (that is, if he actually wanted to be FDR, which I now no longer believe) to try to reach compromise with a Republican Congress that is so far right-wing that they openly told the American public that their number one goal is to make Obama a one-term President...and this was within a week of his election! The country was heading into a Depression like 1930, people were suffering, they were afraid, and these criminal Republicans didn't care: the billionaire fascists that elected them didn't care. But I guess enough people watched the corporate TV news enough to make it all seem legit.

[Am I ranting enough?]

                                                 Danny Schecter, one of my guys

So I read 200 articles by thinkers I admire, who more or less share my values, trying to triangulate, to figure out how or what to do in this upcoming election. Danny Schecter says this election starkly illuminates the overwhelming presence of the one-percenters; we really don't have anyone to vote for. Green Party candidate Jill Stein was arrested for protesting that she wasn't allowed into the Presidential Debates, which are so obviously FIXED, and yet no one in the corporate media will admit that, much less make it a real issue.

More interestingly, Norman Pollack, who admits he'll stay home on election day, argues that at least Romney and Ryan are openly Neanderthal-ish (which I find unfair to the Neanderthals); Pollack is bristling with disgust over the polished bullshit that Obama represents, and at one point Pollack asks, how much worse can Romney/Ryan be? Maybe they'll crack down on same-sex marriage and make contraceptives harder to obtain, but at least they're relatively transparent.

Okay: my whole adult life I've had anarchist friends, educated to the nines, they'd read everything and they made variations on this argument Pollack makes in "America: On the Cusp of Fascism" (skip down below the plea for money). What they really mean is: things are bad and horrible people are in power. Vote for the worst person, so that things get so bad there will be no choice among the populace but to openly take to the streets and make real change, as history has taught us.

Not only have I not read history quite that way, I've always had to argue, "Yea, you have enough material comfort and safety it's easy for you to say. Who will do your killing for you? Are you willing to shoot it our with a hundred-thousand SWAT dudes?" And not to mention the brazen indifference to the increased suffering of the already underprivileged. But at least it works with your Theory of History...This sort of emotional blankness toward the already-suffering reminds me of my problem with the so-called "right" Libertarians. We have a values disconnect.

Sheesh.

                                    Daniel Ellsberg. Kids: if you don't know who he is, 
                                    do some research on his life! There is much wisdom 
                                     to be had in looking into the traverse of his story.

I guess Daniel Ellsberg (and Noam Chomsky) make about the most sense to me: yes, Obama is bad, but Romney/Ryan will be far worse. There really does seem to be a difference that guys like Schecter and Pollack don't point out: Romney and Ryan will be the same or worse as Obama on every thing I indicted Obama for above, but they seem to want to attack Iran, the economy would probably be worse, women's reproductive rights, health care, the safety net (what little there is of it) would all be worse under these assholes. And I really do think both of them are classic white rich-guy, wealth-worshipping-above-all 8x10 glossy assholes, with zero empathy for anyone else's suffering. Not to mention they're both astounding intellectual lightweights.

Oh and under Romney/Ryan: they'd be worse on climate change, green energy, and the environment in  general.

And last, but certainly not least: do we want Obama or Romney to choose who gets on the Supreme Court? (Actually this seems - maybe - like the best reason to vote Obama.)

But I'm still not sure. Ellsberg makes maybe the best case I've seen. And yet I'm still not convinced. In fact, the action of vengeance (which I think Obama knows a lot about; I'm not a big fan of Saletan, but he makes an interesting point here, methinks) is something that might down Obama nonetheless.

In 2008, I didn't expect much of him. Bush/Cheney had done almost irreparable harm to the economy. But I did think one egregious injustice - marijuana prohibition - could be effectively dealt with. And Obama said pot was very low priority. But for whatever reason, he's gone back on his promise to not fight the war on pot. And for that, I may withhold my vote. Because I'm vengeful enough, I guess. I know my state - California - is going for Obama. Withholding my vote for him would be symbolic, it would mean something on some other level (possibly even less significant, if you can imagine some quark-sized entity).

But then I remain haunted with complicity because I did a "protest" vote for Nader in 2000, possibly helping in the argument that allowed W. to steal the damned thing; I was assuming Gore, his evil among the Two Lessers, would win...

                                   2012 Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who's my 
                                   idea of a sane Republican, but because that party
                                   has apparently outlawed sanity, he jumped parties.
                                    I believe him when he talks with disdain about both
                                       Obama and Romney.

David Sirota has a very interesting idea that the state of Colorado and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson make a "perfect storm" for defeating Obama, and it's because there are enough cannabis-toking civil libertarians who have HAD IT with this shit. I know I have. And perhaps "vengeance" is too strong a word for a peacenik like myself. Let us call it spite.

We shall see if Gov. Johnson siphons off enough angry stoners' votes in Colorado to change history and petard-hoist Obama. Hey Barack: you think you can get away with being one of the biggest hypocrites in history? We might have a say. (I'm suddenly feeling like I might show up and write in "Robert Anton Wilson.")

Meanwhile, I will make a prediction about the US election that I feel is 100% accurate: rich people will win.

                                               Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate
                                               In a halfway sane world, she'd be 
                                                 electable. She's my choice, stands
                                                     no chance.

This Political Season: Just For Kicks

Which Candidate For You?

Not long ago I found this article at NPR: "Web Quiz Tells You Which Presidential Candidate Best Fits Your Worldview," which linked to I Side With. Take the test and see who your real candidate is.

You may be surprised.

No Need To Settle For Euclid

Because it's both easy and fascinating, I will now once again link to Robert Anton Wilson's erudite article on thinking about politics in a Non-Euclidean way. Read it and share it with your friends! Discuss it in a way that would've made Thomas Jefferson proud.

                                       Mikhail Bakunin, 19th c. anarchist who disagreed

                                       with Karl Marx for very prescient reasons.

                                

Mitt Agrees With You!

By the way: if you self-describe as a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative, Mitt Romney agrees with you! Don't believe me? Check this out! (They could have made this little bit easier to navigate by allowing us to un-click boxes in order to jump around a tad more.)

Religio

Finally, Richard Dawkins has warmed my heart a bit by extensionalizing (a term from General Semantics that has stuck with me) the Atheist/Agnostic/Theist POVs. He has three positions for Theists, and four for Agnostics/Atheists. 

My position doesn't appear there, as I see it. I think all the gods and goddesses "are" "real," but they're metaphors that emanate from deep within our biological-Being. When people ask me if I'm an atheist, I say no, I'm more like some sort of agnostic. If they ask for clarification, I'm delighted to get weird with them. But really: my agnosticism fits into the "model" model: I'll say I'm atheist in certain situations, agnostic in certain situations, and that I'm Buddhistic in others. Other times I'll say I'm a Discordian or a Javafarian. If you ever want to screw with a willfully ignorant Christian, tell them you're a "Jeffersonian  Christian." If they ask what's that? Then you get to tell them about what T-Jeff did to the Bible, which could lead to an interesting situation. Hey, I'm here to help, friends!

addenda: When I did the I Side With test, my candidate was Jill Stein, with Gary Johnson and Obama coming in 2nd in everything else. (Not that you asked.)

How To Become A Dictator

Opening Pitch: A Curveball, Low and Outside
If you look at a map of Africa, and gaze down its West Coast, 20 miles off the coast of Cameroon, in the Gulf of Guinea, you'll see a little island named Bioco. For nearly 500 years it was called Fernando Po, after its discoverer.

In the early 1970s Captain Ernesto Tequila y Mota read and re-read from Edward Luttwak's book Coup d' Etat: A Practical Handbook. Reading from yet another book that addresses Mota's coup: "He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least 48 hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapiocalike complex of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo (sic) went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequila y Mota had achieved his ambition - promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped that there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country."

I'm having you on, of course: that long passage I quoted was from the rollicking, psychedelic book of conspiracy theories, the eldritch and menacing underground fiction book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. (pp.18-19)

OG Loves His Crazy Books
Except...the Luttwak book is a real book. I own it. It's one of my favorite "Walter Mitty" books: I have a large collection of outrageous literature: Hitler's autobiography, The Turner Diaries, John Birch Society classics, books on how to get revenge on your enemies, Lyndon Larouche tracts, books explaining how advanced aliens have been herding humans like sheep since Day One, Report From Iron Mountain, a book called How To Start Your Own Country, on and on. There's a frisson I cop from owning these books; the reason I call them "Walter Mitty" books is because they have solely to do with some sort of ironic fantasy life: it's not that I would ever adhere to the ideologies in those books, much less take the same actions. The ideas are almost 100% abhorrent to me, but maybe they make for fascinating sociology? A large chunk of my epistemology is influenced by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's phenomenological sociology: knowledge must be anything that is taken as "real" by anyone. For my literary mind, these tomes represent possible habitable worlds. Possibly: worlds that some of my fellow Citizens take seriously as "real." (So...:"oppositional research"?)

These sorts of outrageous books also fuel the anthropological imagination. I like to imagine I could or would, but know I couldn't or wouldn't (I really want us to be nicer to each other: what a friggin' dreamer!) be in some racist, nazi terror group, for some inexplicable reasons not entirely clear to me. When friends see my couple shelves of Weirdo Lit, the easiest - and indeed very true - explanation is: I'm a hardcore 1st Amendment person, especially when it comes to books. But then there's my digression...

                                    Edward Luttwak, prodigious amoral scholar of power,
                                      born 1942.

Edward Luttwak
My, but Luttwak is a learned person, if an amoral one. I've seen him interviewed a few times and he's guileless. And smart. The amoral intellectuals scare the crap out of me, but fascinate me in roughly the same way that Mad Scientists do. I don't consider myself a Moralist, but when I'm confronted by the mind of a Luttwak, or Kissinger, or Herman Kahn, who experimented with LSD and found it a delightful enhancement to his schemes for winning a nuclear war, or...the King of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss...it makes me think.

Let me quote from Luttwak's Coup d'Etat:
(He's discussing France's ineffectual 4th Republic [1946-59]): "The France of 1958 had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The political structures of most developed countries, however, are too resilient to make them suitable targets, unless certain 'temporary' factors weaken the system and obscure its basic soundness. Of those temporary factors the most common are:
(a) severe and prolonged economic crisis, with large-scale unemployment or runaway inflation;
(b) a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, military or diplomatic;
(c) chronic instability under a multi-party system." (p.31)

Near the end of the book, in Appendix A, "The Economics of Repression," we read:
"Once we have carried out our coup and established control over the bureaucracy and the armed forces,  our long-term political survival will largely depend on our management of the problem of economic development. Economic development is generally regarded as a 'good thing' and almost everybody wants more of it, but for us - the newly-established government of X-Land - the pursuit of economic development will be undesirable, since it militates against our main goal: political stability." (p.175)

In 1999 Luttwak published an article in one of the foreign policy journals called "Give War A Chance." Some more idealistic scholars attempt to take him to task HERE.

                                        Out of the mouths of morons...

These Books Have Been Around For Yonks!
From Sun-Tzu's Art of War to (my personal fave) Machiavelli's The Prince, to Clausewitz on to today, polymathic scholars of realpolitick  have written books like Luttwak's. And what always strikes me when I read them: how refreshingly empirical and rational they are! I know that may sound horrible, but hear me out: given the 24/7/365 of corporate propaganda and punditocratic mush we're all subject to, I feel a sense of no-bullshit relief when reading the scholars of realpolitick. I'm not saying I agree with them - I cop to a certain idealism - but at least they are saying the stuff that you're not supposed to say. And if they have wit, all the better.

Back to my Walter Mitty frisson-dealio: I distinctly remember working in a posh old public library in a very rich and conservative area of Los Angeles, and I happened upon a field manual for how to conduct guerrilla war, by Che Guevara. Of course I checked it out and read it cover to cover. How it managed to stay on the shelves of that library (I doubt anyone had read it in at least 15 years), I don't know. That's one big reason I love physical books in physical libraries: the shock and joy of finding something that you didn't even know existed!

                                This is probably pretty close to what Machiavelli looked like

The Latest In This Hallowed Tradition: The Dictator's Handbook
Appearing in 2011 and subtitled, "How Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics," from NYU political scientists Alastair Smith and the very Robert Anton Wilson-y and Robert Shea-ishly-named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (I actually thought that was Alastair Smith's nonexistent writing partner, a nom de plume of sorts), but Mesquita (not to be confused with the fictional character Ernesto Tequila y Mota) is not only real but he's a big deal. Apparently he has a odd track record of making predictions that come true, which, if you've been reading me for long, know is quite rare. HERE is a five minute piece on "the new Nostradamus" (as Mesquita's been called) on NPR, from November 2009.

Aye: "Using the logic of brazen self-interest" pretty much sums up Smith and Mesquita's approach to political power, whether it's Obama or some dictator in a war-torn little African country. The only difference, our NYU profs think, between democracy and dictatorship, is that the guy operating in the democracy has to deal with more constraints. For any leader, the goal is simple: to get power, keep it, and control the money as much as you can. Perusing The Dictator's Handbook reminded me of reading Luttwak, but it was more breezy, and had a Freakonomics-like vibe.

If "using the logic of brazen self-interest" makes you think immediately of Game Theory, then you're one of those I wanna party with. 'Cuz you're smart, not due to any adherence to a singular "logic of self-interest." Yes: Smith and Mesquita use game theory as both a method and as a motor of considerable rhetorical effectiveness. It's as if their deftness about embedding their ideas in the theory of games makes the book not only compelling due to argument, but thrilling due to mood. And why would I, a non-Gamer, who's never played Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, find something thrilling in a popular-poli-sci book that seems to be imbued with a chunk of that same zeitgeist? I don't know, but it's not because I feel emotionally removed due to feeling like a disembodied player for hours-on-end of intense and involving video games. I think it's more that I'd rather my body not be as much affected by what I now - pessimistically? - call realpolitick. Fascistic, money-driven politics of the spectacle tend toward depressed moods. Therefore, I'll cultivate an...ironic mood?...towards... "reality"?

Let me think this through a bit more over the next week or so. And back to Mesquita and Smith.

Forget about the complex logistics and strengths and weaknesses of states, what "they" want, the grand strategies and even national interest and good and right and wrong and justice: you need supporters to keep you in power, and you need to draw from as large a pool of supporters as possible (which our profs call "the selectorate"). Who will keep you there? Billionaires and fanatical leaders of coalitions, which explains why a democratically elected leader will champion spending programs that a large chunk of the population don't really want.

There's soooo much bullshit in political reality - especially as we're ramping up for another Prez Election in Unistat - that reading a book like this might feel to you like going through the looking glass. One of our new Machiavellis, Alastair Smith, says, "It's virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own interest."

Another one: "If you're working for the common good you didn't come to power in the first place. If you're not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don't come to power."

And every man's vote counts, right? Well...I have talked to a whole lot of very brilliant, well-read young people at Occupy rallies. They have read everything and they're articulate and passionate and they can't get a job to pay off their student loans. And they know why.

But when they vote, who reading me here believes their vote goes as far as a billionaire's or the leader of some fanatical coalition that will rally voters to the polls?

Furthermore: the leader must not terrorize his supporters or take money out of their pockets to make other people's lives better - says Smith and Mesquita - but it's okay for Occupy folk to feel terrorized; it's always better to tax the crap out of people and make them fear for their next meal; it is bad to let them grow their own food. So: Occupy kids: no change, plenty to fear, almost zilch for power. The CEOs on Wall Street?: they're part of the leaders' supporters, they take care of the members of the board and big investors and senior management people. No terror there. And for their "work" they receive mega-outrageously large bonuses.

When we were in grade school, the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross a penis with a potato?" had a funny answer. Now? Maybe "funny" in another, darker way. And I'm reminded of Gore Vidal, who died last week. I paraphrase, but he often said that the American public were so gullible that they harbored the perennial belief that if we just elected a "good, nice man" as Prez, we'd be fine.

for extra credit:
How Will the 99% Deal with the Psychopaths in the 1%?
10 Mad Dictators From the 20th and 21st Century
Dictators and Fascists and their musical tastes: Kim Jong Il loved Eric Clapton?
Osama bin Laden smoked pot and watched "The Wonder Years" and was crazy about Whitney Houston?
George W. Bush 43: "Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful."
Got a budding scholar of dictatorships? Read 'em all!