Kaspar Hauser

Speaking of post-truth tendencies, I think this quote speaks to a lot of we're hearing from the Alt Right: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean Paul-Sartre

"For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.” --Herman Melville Yeah, that sounds just about right...for Russia, for the former Republics, for all of us.

America also rammed Neoliberalism down Russia's throat in the 90s. A lot of Russians see America as the reason they don't have health insurance. In any case, Putin has good reason to see NATO as a threat. I mean, we still need to defend ourselves from the thug before he tears out our collective jugular, but it's not as though this is an unprovoked assault. If we can get out of this without an economic crash, a regression to authoritarian governments throughout the West, or a hot war with Russia it'll be a miracle.

I suspect that he's attempting to undermine NATO as a military alliance and its member countries' economies in order to have a freer hand to expand into Russia's old sphere of influence.

Michael, I want you to get through this. The evil in the world is real and strong and it has hurt you, but it is neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. Hold on to the faith that there will someday be a place of hope for you to stand in. Please don't succumb to the temptations of grief and despair. I know enough about your character to know that we need people like you. Keep trying, keep fighting, no matter how hard it gets.

Lovelock or Lovecraft, as the difference becomes less pronounced as time goes by.

The US was founded on utopian dreams, and utopian dreams all too easily give way to apocalyptic longings. I sometimes think that American culture is simultaneously self-glorifying and self-loathing, a narcissistic fever dream spiralling ever-more rapidly into oblivion.

This is the comic you want to get your hands on: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandman_Mystery_Theatre

Back to automation: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/automation-jobs-canada-computers-white-collar-1.3982466 https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/jobs/what-risk-does-automation-pose-to-your-job/article30434394/?ref=http://www.theglobeandmail.com& You know, in The Legion of Superheroes a computer selected Earth's president from a database of the most qualified people every few years. Just saying.

Les Leopoldo: "Republicans now control 32 state legislatures and 33 governorships. They have majorities in both state legislative chambers as well as the governorships in 25 states. The Democrats have total control in only six states and legislative control in two more. "If Republicans achieve veto-proof control in 38 states, they can do something that has never been done before—hold a constitutional convention, and then ratify new amendments that are put forth. To date, all amendments have been initiated from Congress where two-thirds of both houses are required. In either case, 38 states would be needed to ratify the amendments. The Republicans are well on their way." https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/why-we-could-be-on-the-verge-of-a-constitutional-apocalypse/ Meanwhile, the Arizona Senate has just passed a bill that would allow the police to seize your assets if you are part of a protest that turns violent. So, if you show up at a town hall meeting and an agent provocateur throws a brick, you could lose the car you drove there in. If you helped organize the protest you could lose your house. Expect similar legislation to sweep through Republican-held legislatures across the country. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-arizona-legislation-idUSKBN1622LB

Is this what it looks like when civilization suffers a stroke?

IN-SEMINATE! IN-SEMINATE!

Here's a link to a CBC article about a report that indicates that up to 42% of Canadian jobs are at risk of automation within the next 20 years: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/automation-job-brookfield-1.3636253

This article, written by a Bosnian who survived the horrors of the 90s, pulled something together for me. Like all authoritarians who come to power, Trump and his regime are engaging in a form of psychological warfare designed to arouse our sadism, and it's working really well. It's what the Alt Right does everywhere, because it's only when our sadism is unleashed that we're willing to let them tear down every institution that keeps us safe. http://lithub.com/aleksandar-hemon-on-the-urge-to-violence-in-a-time-of-trump/

There also seems to be an assumption that the new jobs will pay as well and have as much security as the ones being lost. I certainly haven't seen that happening.

Personally, I think the first step that any progressive politician has to take is to repeatedly say in the most mythically resonant language possible that the working class has been devastated by trade deals and automation and that they should be angry as hell. Then I think they need to talk seriously about a guaranteed basic income and heavily taxing industries that replace humans with robots--not to stop automation, but rather to share its benefits through such a guarantee of income security. Automation is hitting us like a pile driver and it's only going to get exponentially worse. If we mirror the rage of the working class while offering policies that give real cause for hope we will be able to sway a lot of Trump supporters. Continuing on as we have been won't work: you can't fact check your way out of fascism, you can't scold or ridicule your way out of fascism, and you can't fear monger your way out of fascism. Most of all, you can't expect checks and balances to be an impregnable bulwark, and you can't expect the chaos and ignorance of fascist administrations to be their undoing.

Here's a good piece on Trump's use of "humiliation porn" as both a candidate and a president, and how the blowback could erode part of his base: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/20/humiliation-porn-trumps-gift-to-his-faithful-and-now-the-blowback/ The brutal truth is that humiliated people want to humiliate others in order to temporarily relieve their own feelings of shame. As one of Altemeyer's "social dominators", Trump instinctively gets that and uses it perfectly. Social dominators tend to have pronounced sociopathic traits. In his book, "Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic," Psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that contrary to popular opinion, sociopaths are not shameless; in fact, they experience almost nothing but shame. Gilligan believes that, when taken to its extreme, shame shuts down all emotional experiences except, perhaps, for rage. Gilligan worked in a maximum-security penitentiary for many years, counseling people imprisoned for monstrous acts of violence. The prisoners he worked with consistently described themselves as the "living dead", referring to their inability to feel anything besides anger. They backed up these assertions with horrific acts of cruelty and self-mutilation. How could they do such things, Gilligan asks, unless they were in some way emotionally numbed? Each of these prisoners had suffered profound emotional or physical abuse in childhood, and each responded by going on the offensive. Gilligan uses the prison system to illustrate the strategic use of shame in capitalist societies, drawing attention to the role that institutionalized rape plays in modern penitentiaries. He argues that the purpose of the digital anal rape euphemistically referred to as a "cavity search" isn't really to find concealed drugs, but rather to humiliate prisoners into submission. He also writes that guards turn a blind eye to prisoner-on-prisoner rape because, by dividing prisoners into rapists and rape victims, the prisoners' rage is redirected away from the guards and towards one other. The cost of this strategy is borne entirely by the prison population, whose already compromised humanity is systematically ravaged. Gilligan believes that the prison system apes the class structure of capitalist society. Just as the guards break the collective strength of the prisoner population by encouraging the stronger prisoners to humiliate and oppress the weaker, so the upper classes preserve their social dominance by encouraging the middle classes to humiliate and oppress the lower classes. The guards and the upper classes both use shame as a weapon in the battle to control their social environment. The victims of prison rape, like the lower classes, are psychologically damaged by the excessive shame they're forced to bear. Relative to other classes, their capacity for positive emotion is greatly impaired, and their risk of developing psychological disorders is dramatically heightened. These problems limit their individual and collective power to fight for social change. Members of the middle class are terrified of losing their class status and descending into the underclass not only because of the material hardships they would face, but also because of the extreme humiliation accompanying the plunge. People who have learned how to despise the underclass will despise themselves if they fall into it. By condemning vast numbers of people to the economic underclass, economic catastrophes like the ongoing fallout from 2008/2009 create epidemics of shame. Shame fertilizes hatred. We hate in others what we hate in ourselves, and what we hate in ourselves are usually the emotional needs we’ve psychologically repressed. Our sexual, intellectual, and social maturation depends upon our ability to satisfy those needs. We feel ashamed when our needs go unmet for great lengths of time, which is a common experience among the working class. Such unrelenting shame can make our needs seem like threats to our peace of mind, prompting us to drive them from our conscious awareness. The more we repress our needs, the more our emotional development is stifled, the more frustrated and angry we feel, and the more vengeful our desires become. This, in turn, compels us to repress our needs all the more. Unacknowledged needs don't disappear. Instead, they re-assert themselves by focusing our attention upon people and practices that remind us of them. These reminders rub salt into our wounds, and so we’re tempted to attack them. Unacknowledged emotional pain doesn't disappear, either; instead, it re-asserts itself at the edge of our awareness, shaping our perceptions. The filth we recoil from in the world around us is often the gore spilling from the wounds we've inflicted upon ourselves. The more mutilated we become, the more loathsomely mangled the world seems to be, and the more we desire its destruction. Psychological repression thereby fuels political violence and oppression. By leaving people chronically frightened and ashamed, and by encouraging misogyny and contempt for weakness, the psychological trauma inflicted by unrestrained capitalism makes us more susceptible to right-wing authoritarianism and manipulation by people like Trump. The man has accessed the stockpiles of self-loathing we've been building up in the American underclass and turned it against his enemies--the "elites" in government, the media, and academia whose security, confidence, wealth, and education represent everything his supporters have been denied. ​Again, reason alone won't dent his supporters' faith in the man. The pain goes way, way too deep for that.

As a Canadian I'd like to be able to say that I wished Captain Canuck was here, but I've read his comics and the man is honestly a bit of a tool.

The man is clearly deranged. The fact that virtually the entire Republican Party can't see that obvious truth is truly unnerving. I once read a book that proposed that the political world is dominated by narcissists, who are only in it for themselves, and paranoids, who are obsessed with their own righteousness and with analyzing power structures in their own inevitably skewed way for signs of evils to destroy. Narcissists and paranoids are supposedly forever at war with one another, and it is the job of everyone else to make sure that their balance of power never gets too lopsided. Today, either the narcissists like Trump have harnessed paranoids for their political war machines, or the paranoids like Bannon have harnessed narcissists for their's. There are no more dangerous feedback loops in human politics than this one.

Oh, hell...did I? I apologize. I blame it on sleep deprivation.

I deleted this post....it turns out that in my sleep deprived state I posted the same info twice. Whoops!

I doubt it. Trump will blame any economic decline on scapegoats while making dramatic but substantively trivial gestures like the one he pulled with Carrier to reassure his base that he's fighting for the little guy. His base, living in their ever-expanding Alt Right media bubble, will swallow that swill and cheer for more at the Nurembergian Rallies he's planning on holding throughout his presidency. If facts mattered to his base they wouldn't have voted for him in the first place. And remember that the demographic that tipped the scales for him are people who once had dignity but who have now lived for over a generation in economic misery. The life expectancy of working class white men has actually fallen due to diseases of despair like suicide and addiction. These are people who are seething with psychological trauma, who have been denied decent educations, who have for years been shamed by prominent liberal pundits for their supposed ignorance and stupidity, and who are overflowing with an agony-powered hatred. That hatred simply can't be quelled by critical thinking any more than yoga can alleviate the pain of a broken leg. What the Alt Right and Trump offer is a political narrative that gives that pain an easily understandable and rapturously cathartic ideological form. Thus far, liberals have been unable to even speak to that pain in a language Trump's base can resonate with. Liberals speak to the deliberative left side of people's brains, while Trump speaks to the intuitive right. Liberals speak in philosophy, while Trump speaks in mythology. If you want to speak to people's pain, you have to speak to the right hemisphere in the mythological language it can hear, and that language isn't a language of facts.

I've often thought that the best metaphor for our social order is methamphetamine addiction. Trump's election has only reinforced the connection. Consider that crystal meth use and industrialization are simply strategies for pursuing unlimited productivity within limited living systems. The difference is one of scale: whereas crystal meth is meant to increase the productivity of the human brain, industrialization targets the planet’s biosphere. In both cases, the enhanced productivity is an illusion created by accounting methods that selectively focus on the acceleration of narrow domains while ignoring degeneration in the overall system. Crystal meth, the demon is a powerful stimulant. It gives users a burst of euphoria and energy while reducing hunger and fatigue. Besides numbing the pain of the human condition, the drug lets users get more done in a day, bolsters their concentration, and helps them lose weight. In our highly competitive world, crystal meth promises an edge that’s hard to come by elsewhere. Unfortunately, this edge carries a severe price. Tolerance develops quickly, so users have to constantly raise the amount they put into their bodies to achieve the desired results. Prolonged use damages nerve terminals in the dopamine-containing areas of the brain. This produces anxiety and confusion, as well as psychotic symptoms like paranoia, aggression, delusions, and auditory hallucinations. There’s evidence that the drug can trigger schizophrenia in predisposed individuals, and strokes aren’t uncommon among chronic users. Wrapped up in crystal meth’s delights, by the time users notice the price they’re paying they’re probably already hooked. The deeper that hook sinks, the more time the addict spends wriggling. Users find themselves spending all their energy getting their next dose and managing their growing misery. Their lives fall into disrepair. They stop learning new skills, and begin losing their old ones. If they give up the drug, they have to go through a period of vicious withdrawal and exhaustion. The longer they put off this reckoning, the worse the reckoning will be, and there’s no guarantee of a full recovery. Injuries inflicted by this drug may not heal, and the strength it steals—strength desperately needed by the recovering addict—may never return. In trying to escape their limitations, these addicts soar briefly before plunging into the abyss. The higher they fly, the deeper and wider the chasm opens beneath them. The pattern is similar with industrialization. Pre-industrial societies distrust surplus production, and strive to avoid it. For example, the practice of sacrifice in traditional agrarian societies usually had less to do with winning the favour of wrathful deities than with eliminating the surpluses produced by unusually bountiful harvests. Potlatch ceremonies served a similar purpose. By avoiding surpluses, traditional societies taught their members that free lunches simply don’t exist, and that short-term bursts of productivity tempt long-term costs—costs that are often initially hidden from view. In contrast, industrial economies depend upon surplus production. We take it for granted that our economies need to “grow”—that is, to increase their surplus production each year. This growth depends on rapidly advancing technologies, expanding markets, highly differentiated labour pools, and feverish consumption. Each of these requirements increases our collective resemblance to the crystal meth addict. Our dependence on technological development and market expansion encourages us to dig blindly into fragile, finely-tuned ecosystems for the resources needed to feed the engine of consumption. Just as the energy crystal meth steals from the user’s brain is returned as toxic levels of dopamine, we return industrially processed resources to the planet in the form of ecologically poisonous waste. Labour differentiation may build our skills in certain areas, but only by reducing the incentive and time needed to develop overall competence. In the same way that the crystal meth user’s time and effort is lost in service to the drug, ours is lost in service to the industrial economy. We’re just as incompetent and immature in comparison with our pre-industrial counterparts as chronic crystal meth users are in comparison to non-addicts. Finally, our enflamed desires, without which consumerism would collapse, resemble the euphoric delirium of the methamphetamine high. The delirium’s worst among the wealthy. Their position in the economic order inflates their egos beyond all measure and lets them enjoy pleasures most of us will never know. The less-wealthy, from the middle classes down to the most impoverished, vicariously participate in this indulgence through immersion in a torrential stream of media-driven ideology and fantasy. This generates what can only be called a mass psychosis. To keep our desires boiling, our economy encases us in a media universe designed to exploit our dreams and nightmares, our yearnings and terrors, in increasingly sophisticated ways. Our infinitely-layered media institutions are like a psychological maze of funhouse mirrors. We apply much of our ingenuity to enlarging and complicating this maze, ensuring that more and more of us will become lost inside it. All of us, to one degree or another, are now trapped by our own distorted reflections. Knowledge of these dynamics would threaten our self-esteem. To keep awareness at bay, we use defence mechanisms familiar to every addict. Though scientists tell us that we’re responsible for inciting our planet’s sixth mass extinction, that we’re disastrously altering our climate, and that we’re exposed to mounting levels of toxins in our daily environment, we steadfastly deny there’s a problem. We teach ourselves to dissociate from our emotions and physical sensations, numbing ourselves to the damage our economy’s inflicting. When the world we’ve created becomes too painful to dismiss or ignore, we find scapegoats to project our fear, anger and guilt onto. We also spread our addiction to other societies, stooping to seduction, corruption, and brute force to get them hooked, and thereby keep them from reminding us that there might be lifestyles healthier than ours. We turn their gardens into deserts, and their souls into wastelands more barren than even our own. To feed and defend our addiction, we use our military and economic might in ways that make us the most dangerous pushers in human history. We're electing far right leaders because by now we're all late stage meth-heads. ​

I think the difference between the Vietnam era and today is the rapidly growing divide between rich and poor and the commensurate immiseration of the working class. In the Vietnam era there was at least some realistic hope of economic security and that your children would have a better life than you have enjoyed. That's all gone now, especially since the Great Recession and in the face of environmental degeneration, an ever-growing refugee crisis, automation, the dissolution of real journalism and the ascendance of propaganda-laden Internet trash journalism. I think the world looks a lot more like it did in the 1930s following the 1929 stock market crash, minus the vast unused productive capacity that era had waiting in reserve. As the election of a kleptocratic porn-president demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt, the world is being strip-mined of its moral capital as thoroughly as its natural capital. For a long time liberal democracy seemed to be the best political environment for capitalist expansion, but the Asian models strongly suggest that isn't the case anymore. If anything resembling an equitable and democratic social order comes out of this, it will be due to forces outside the limited boundaries of my intellect and imagination, because I just can't see it right now. On the bright side: thank God for effective anti-depressants. My apologies for my preceding histrionics: I was in a deep depressive state and I wasn't thinking rationally. Sorry for subjecting all of you to that.

I think that if you want to understand Trump's appeal, you need to understand the psychology of right wing authoritarianism. Robert Altemeyer, the world’s leading researcher on the subject, states that right wing authoritarians score highly on the “Dangerous World scale.” The scale measures the degree to which a person sees the world as hostile and unsafe. Altemeyer writes that right-wing authoritarians are more frightened than most people. They live in terror of social chaos, and that fear dominates their thinking. He believes that they learned this fear from their parents, who constantly warned them that the world was on the brink of collapse. They were taught to perceive people different from themselves—people like homosexuals, radicals, atheists, and pornographers—as the harbingers of total societal disintegration. For authoritarians, every departure from traditional norms is a sign that perversion and corruption are dragging the world into total chaos. Altemeyer has found that a person’s fear of a dangerous world is the best predictor of authoritarian aggression. The fear that non-authoritarians feel during national crises like the 9/11 terrorist attacks is something authoritarians feel all the time. They are in a constant state of suppressed panic even during times of relative peace and security. Altemeyer’s research indicates that people who score high on measures of right-wing authoritarianism share three traits: a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society; high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and a high level of conventionalism, or adherence to traditional norms and values. Authoritarians do poorly on tests of logic. If they agree with a conclusion they assume that the reasoning supporting it is valid, regardless of the quality of that reasoning. They have difficulty evaluating empirical evidence, and they often believe that utterly ambiguous facts conclusively prove the truth of their positions. They have highly compartmentalized minds. Their ideas are poorly integrated with one another, they don’t scan for self-consistency as much as other people, and so they hold contradictory positions. This compartmentalization leads to double standards: since their ideas don’t interact with one another, it’s easy for them to make use of any idea that can justify, after the fact, whatever they’ve decided to do and whatever position they’ve chosen to hold. Unsurprisingly, authoritarians are hypocrites. For example, they harshly condemn non-authoritarians for trying to use “political correctness” to silence free speech, but they themselves rarely hesitate to silence other people’s opinions. Authoritarians are blind to their own failings, which, of course, they can compartmentalize and avoid dealing with. Despite their belief that they’re very honest with themselves, they’re quite defensive and steadfastly avoid unpleasant truths. They are also extremely ethnocentric. They’re constantly dividing people into members of in-groups and out-groups, and while they are extremely distrustful of and hostile towards out-groups they’re quite gullible towards people in their in-groups. Authoritarians have a deep need to belong, they value loyalty and group cohesion above almost all other considerations, and they treat those who question their leaders, for whatever reason, as traitors. Finally, they’re dogmatic: they possess an unchallengeable, unjustified certainty about their beliefs. The fact that they are often unable to defend those beliefs with convincing arguments means little to them, since they usually adopted their beliefs from trusted authorities, rather than having developed them on their own through a process of rational deliberation. Altemeyer asks, “Can you also sense from these items the energy, the commitment, the submission, and the zeal that authoritarian followers are ready to give their in-groups, and the satisfaction they would get from being a part of a vast, powerful movement in which everyone thought the same way? The common metaphor for authoritarian followers is a herd of sheep, but it may be more accurate to think of them as a colony of army ants.” These ants have the numbers to form very large colonies: Altemeyer estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of Canadians and Americans qualify as right-wing authoritarians. Authoritarians are typically led by people who score high on measures of social dominance. Social dominators are intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful. They have nothing but contempt for compassion, and would much rather be feared than loved. They’re intoxicated by power, including the power to hurt other people in their drive to the top. Authoritarian followers, in contrast, aren’t terribly interested in acquiring power for themselves. Social dominators rarely have the kind of cognitive flaws seen in authoritarian followers, and so they’re very good at manipulating these followers, especially if they’re among the five to ten percent of dominators who also happen to score highly for right-wing authoritarianism. Altemeyer calls such people “double highs”. He writes, “When social dominators are in the driver’s seat, and right-wing authoritarians stand at their beck and call, unethical things appear much more likely to happen. True, sufficiently skilled social dominators served by dedicated followers can make the trains run on time. But you have to worry about what the trains may be hauling when dominators call the shots and (authoritarians followers) do the shooting. The trains may be loaded with people crammed into boxcars heading for death camps. “And of course this lethal union is likely to develop in the real world. Authoritarian followers don’t usually try to become leaders. Instead they happily play subservient roles, and can be expected to especially enjoy working for social dominators, who will (you can bet your bottom dollar) take firm control of things, and who share many of the followers’ values and attitudes. The ‘connection’ connects between these two opposites because they attract each other like the north and south poles of two magnets. The two can then become locked in a cyclonic death spiral that can take a whole nation down with them.” You can find Altemeyer's book in its entirety at this link: http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf If you want to understand the playbook that Bannon and Trump are working from, check out Naomi Wolf's “The End of America”, in which she outlines the steps in the shift from authoritarian but relatively open societies to autocratic and closed societies. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.” They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence. They take control of the press. They publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the rule of law. It's still an open question whether the regime will be able to achieve these goals in the United States in the face of the courts and concerted opposition from both the streets and the halls of power, but so far the signs aren't terribly hopeful. Or, if you want a more poetic take on the subject, you could check out "Where The Wasteland Ends" by Theodore Roszak, in which he writes, “A despairing humanity is not merely an unhappy humanity; it is an ugly humanity, ugly in its own eyes—dwarfed, diminished, stunted, and self-loathing. These are the buried sources of world war and despotic collectivism, of scapegoat hatred and exploitation. Ugly hates beautiful, hates gentle, hates loving, hates life. There is a politics of despair. Out of despair, people rush to the counterfeit community of the totalitarian state. Out of despair, they invent themselves fantastic enemies that must be punished for their own failure. Out of despair, they grow burdened with moral embarrassment for themselves, until they must at last despise and crucify the good which they are helpless to achieve. And that is the final measure of damnation: to hate the good precisely because we know it is good and know that its beauty calls our whole being into question.”