womble

I just finished The Crippled God, 10th of 10 in the epic fantasy series The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. I started this series for the first time several years ago, and got to about book 7, which was the most recently available one, then swore off finishing the series until the last book was out, in case Erikson "did a Jordan" and popped his clogs before finishing his oeuvre. I finally got round to starting again a while back, some time after we actually acquired book 10 because I hadn't realised that it was done.
 
Really glad I did. Some of the best sword-and-sorcery fiction I've read. Sufficiently engaging that there was the occasional time that I had to take a break because it was all so intense. Laughter and tears; joy and despair. I have no idea how many characters get dealt with in such fascinating detail. Heroes and villains, and villains who are heroes... I'm a sucker for military fiction, and there's that in spadefuls, along with mystery and intrigue and world-shattering plots.
 
The background was, I'm given to understand, created as the setting for Ericson's GURPS game...

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

There's probably some principle of moving goalposts here, though: "Working 27 hours a day so you can pay for healthcare is unhealthy, so we're going to push your premiums up so you need to eat cheap process-recovered food padded out with carcinogens to keep your food bills down enough to be able to afford the cost of health insurance. But eating that crap is even more unhealthy, so we're going to increase your premium so you have to scrimp on the heating/aircon, which increases your chance of sickness, so we're going to up your contribution again..."

Background: WW2 supers (Allies), planning an infiltration of a castle where the Nazi supers are. The castle happens to be adjacent to a training camp for Wehrmacht mountain troops and is accessible only by cable car, and the Ubmenschen are all members of the SS.
 
Jimmy (preternaturally coordinated assassin from London's seamier side): "So the fellers at the cable car station in the valley are SS, not Gewurstjagers*, right?"
 
 * [For those with no German] "Gebirgsjager" are the mountain troops. "Gewurstjager" probably means "sausage hunters"...

The Alt Right movement is profoundly disturbing, but you can see the logic driving it. As economic conditions become more difficult, as hyper capitalism continues to dissolve communities, as the wellsprings of meaning and hope dry up, as people are excluded from higher education, and as stimulus-driven entertainment continues to usurp reality, it makes sense that people will lose access to their nobler potentials and will begin to disintegrate both psychologically and politically. Plato talked about this: personal virtue requires harmony among the appetitive, willful, and rational faculties, which in turn requires a comparable balance in one's society. As that harmony is lost, it becomes harder to aspire to virtue and people become increasingly enslaved to their "master passions," or addictions (taking the term in its broadest sense to include ideological fanaticism). People lost to their master passions create further chaos in their society, leading to more suffering and, ultimately, a yearning for a tyrant to impose order. The tyrant is typically a person utterly subjugated to his master passions, and the order he imposes is pathological, but his psychologically disintegrated subjects are blind to his failings. Maybe it's just my own depressive state talking, but as economic growth rates continue to regress to 19th Century historical norms, and as ecological collapse proceeds and geopolitical chaos worsen, I can only see the problem of brain-dead right-wing authoritarianism getting exponentially worse.
 
The internet seems to accelerate the process by, in Chomsky's words, lending itself to cult formation. No one can really educate themselves on-line, but for people deprived of a decent education and living in an increasingly image-driven post-literate society the Internet and its crazy quilt of factoids and conspiracy theories is all they have with which to design a worldview. And now we have a President who loves Infowars, is skeptical about vaccinations, and thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax. This nightmare is moving really fast.
 
It's like watching a zombie apocalypse erupting all around me. In fact, I wonder if the modern cinematic zombie expresses exactly this peril. The Haitian zombie was a mythological analogue for the hyper-exploited producer, the soulless slave of a monstrous economic machine. The modern cinematic zombie seems to represent the hyper-exploited consumer, the atomized individual bereft of any rational community or psychological harmony, enslaved to his master passions to the point of complete ethical collapse.
 
It's no wonder I'm tempted by such intense panic. I just can't see this getting any better in my lifetime.

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."  
 
Frank Herbert. Dune.

What you just did was list a bunch of criteria for diagnosing Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I think it did ring alarm bells, but a lot of people thought "Oh, the alarm's gone off, so we don't need to call the firefighters," and proceeded to neglect to vote.
 
 
 
 This is probably true. Doubly so if you define "benefits for himself" as "increases my chance of reelection", whether their base motivation for reelection was the pure joy of being In Charge or the fervent and honest wish to be able to continue to do the best for the country as they see it.
 
 
 
Like most absolutes, this holds little water. Many politicians, possibly even a large majority just want to be In Charge, but there are certainly some who are trying to make the world a better place (however much you disagree with their definition of "better"). That they have to play the political game doesn't alter their motivation, though it does tarnish their image.

What does he want? The things you said, and to persuade the Russians that he's "Making Russia Great Again", so they continue to ignore the theft of their national assets by Putin and his cronies for their personal enrichment.
 
There really isn't any need to try and put any benevolent motives into Putin's actions. Malice and greed (extreme self-interest) will pretty much provide accurate general classes of reasons for anything that gangster does.

What does he want? The things you said, and to persuade the Russians that he's "Making Russia Great Again", so they continue to ignore the theft of their national assets by Putin and his cronies for their personal enrichment.
 
There really isn't any need to try and put any benevolent motives into Putin's actions. Malice and greed (extreme self-interest) will pretty much provide accurate general classes of reasons for anything that gangster does.

What does he want? The things you said, and to persuade the Russians that he's "Making Russia Great Again", so they continue to ignore the theft of their national assets by Putin and his cronies for their personal enrichment.
 
There really isn't any need to try and put any benevolent motives into Putin's actions. Malice and greed (extreme self-interest) will pretty much provide accurate general classes of reasons for anything that gangster does.

What does he want? The things you said, and to persuade the Russians that he's "Making Russia Great Again", so they continue to ignore the theft of their national assets by Putin and his cronies for their personal enrichment.
 
There really isn't any need to try and put any benevolent motives into Putin's actions. Malice and greed (extreme self-interest) will pretty much provide accurate general classes of reasons for anything that gangster does.

Well, if nothing else at least you can always count on the Russians to respond predictably to all this.  Same response as any other claim by a foreign power: "Prove it, or shut up about it.
 
I wonder if any other president (let alone president-elect) has ever been so openly skeptical or even nearly hostile towards a core part of his countries national security infrastructure?
 
It must be nice to know better than a few billion dollars worth of operatives, informants, and data analysts.  

Small company == no leverage with the insurance providers.  Providers that know my employer must provide health plans to its employees.
 
Really the entire for-profit healthcare industry needs to be beaten to death with a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat.  But I digress.

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely.
 
 
And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely.
 
 
And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely.
 
 
And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely.
 
 
And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

Indeed. Which worries the bejazus out of me. Nothing I've seen of Clinton suggests she's worse evil than Trump. He's a bigger liar than her, a bigger philanderer than her husband. He's less consistent in his beliefs and even more hypocritical. And he's a racist narcissist who's doing it for the attention. What makes these people think that Hilary is worse than Trump? Mostly big lies, told often and loudly. And unsupported by evidence. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Hilary is anywhere near perfect President material. That'd be Barack Obama, for my money. But Trump? Worse? I thought Brexit was bad, over here, but he has taken "lying your way into office" to another level completely.
 
 
And for every one of those thousands of reasons, they decided that racism didn't matter enough to stop them voting for the man, implicitly sanctioning with their only civic input, his racist mindset, along with the same attititudes in others.

Bah. That's just a whole meal sandwich. I was eating those back in the eighties... Roast dinner sammidges are reaaallly good.

Or maybe those starving dogs chewed on the Wikileaks for a while and found it tasteless and lacking in nourishment. Like the law enforcement wallahs have.
 
Or maybe those Wikileaks revelations are just "old news" (one for/from the "Oxymorons" thread ) and they're just in the usual feeding frenzy about the most recent scandal.
 
I get the impression that Clinton's "malfeasances" are "no worse than your run-of-the-mill politician". If you vote for pretty much any politician ever, you're going to be voting for one that has flaws and foibles and has done questionable or possibly incautious things, and things you don't agree with. 
 
Trump is simply a whole new level of crazy that most politicians would never have the imagination to approach and if they had some sort of fever dream to come up with the concept, they'd have the "nous" to take some febrifuge, some antacids and a nap, and come back to sanity.

"I see you're using Bonnetti's Defense."
"I thought it appropriate, given the terrain."

"I see you're using Bonnetti's Defense."
"I thought it appropriate, given the terrain."

"I see you're using Bonnetti's Defense."
"I thought it appropriate, given the terrain."