Ali ibn Abi Talib was an in-law of the "prophet" Muhammad. Which means to me, he was a huckstering preacher - a guy who knew he could hold on to power only as long as he could keep the sheep in line, so... First, you're not a fuckin' flower. Second, even if you are a fuckin' flower, you still have a brain and you're expected to use it for something other than storing recipes and birthdays and the firing order of a Dodge Hemi. Third - YOU'RE NOT A FUCKIN' FLOWER.
The firehose of bullshit we've had to endure since about 2011 is part of a deliberate attempt to make us question the very existence of truth - and it's going to get worse. McKay Coppins, The Atlantic: The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today?
As I swiped at my phone, a stream of pro-Trump propaganda filled the screen: “That’s right, the whistleblower’s own lawyer said, ‘The coup has started …’ ” Swipe. “Democrats are doing Putin’s bidding …” Swipe. “The only message these radical socialists and extremists will understand is a crushing …” Swipe. “Only one man can stop this chaos …” Swipe, swipe, swipe.
I was surprised by the effect it had on me. I’d assumed that my skepticism and media literacy would inoculate me against such distortions. But I soon found myself reflexively questioning every headline. It wasn’t that I believed Trump and his boosters were telling the truth. It was that, in this state of heightened suspicion, truth itself—about Ukraine, impeachment, or anything else—felt more and more difficult to locate. With each swipe, the notion of observable reality drifted further out of reach.
- and -
What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.
At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”
It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks. There’s a flag and even a news agency (in English and Russian). There are several Twitterfeeds. It’s like something out of a Borges story - except for the very real casualties of the war conducted in its name.
The invention of Novorossiya is a sign of Russia’s domestic system of information manipulation going global. Today’s Russia has been shaped by political technologists—the viziers of the system who, like so many post-modern Prosperos, conjure up puppet political parties and the simulacra of civic movements to keep the nation distracted as Putin’s clique consolidates power. In the philosophy of these political technologists, information precedes essence. “I remember creating the idea of the ‘Putin majority’ and hey, presto, it appeared in real life,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a political technologist who worked on Putin's election campaigns but has since left the Kremlin, told me recently. “Or the idea that ‘there is no alternative to Putin.’ We invented that. And suddenly there really was no alternative.”
The point is that we're on the receiving end of some truly and amazingly scary shit.
And the question is: do your neighbors - and some of your wackier family members - have what it takes to resist the sophistication and the insidiousness of it? Have they already been sucked into it?
How may Bernie Bros are being manipulated in the same ways? How will the means and methods described in these articles be adapted to, &/or adopted by, the campaigns of our own homegrown candidates?
In a D&D fight, the Chaotic Neutral character has a bit of an edge, but it's offset by the powers of a Lawful Good character.
In the real world, it's a lot worse because the good guy is expected to follow rules that the bag guy is free to ignore.
Weirdly, the constant pimping of Both Sides is a manifestation of the Divide-n-Conquer approach of the would-be plutocrats. They throw the contradiction shit at us all the time, and it's no wonder we're all a little - or a lot - confused. "You citizens are divided. You can't agree on anything because your politicians are all alike and they agree on everything." What seems even weirder (but isn't) is that there's a grain of truth in that. Which is what good little propagandists can do. If people are at the point where they start to get hip to your tricks, you don't just stop trying to trick them - your paycheck depends on keeping your benefactors in power, so you fucking well better come up with some better tricks. And the best tricks have to be aimed at people who're suspicious that you've been tricking them, so you can get another shot at convincing them it wasn't you at all, but those other guys, or that they're not being as smart and sophisticated as they should be, or whatever. Or (and this has been the basic pitch for quite a while) "Hey, that's how the game is played - they all do it - you're too nice a person to get mixed up in such a dirty thing - you should just stay out of it... ... ..."
In case you're tempted to fall back into it, just remember that the GOP are the ones who want to:
Eliminate your healthcare coverage and protections for pre-existing conditions
Make cuts in Medicare and Social Security
Privatize public schools and make education the exclusive province of a ruling class
Criminalize abortion
Bomb Iran
Block climate change action
Continue stripping away EPA regulations
and
and
and
Everything that benefits us - everything that empowers people to do more than subsist, suffer and then die - all of it is supported by the Dems and opposed by the GOP.
Democrats say they’re beginning to see a GOP strategy developing — one that tacitly criticizes Giuliani but treats his actions in Ukraine as a rogue, one-man mission that was not specifically sanctioned by Trump.
“The idea is let’s throw everyone including Rudy under the bus to protect the president,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.). “The cast of characters around him continue to change all the time. But there’s one constant — and that constant is the source of all the chaos, and that’s him.”
The plan seems to be to find someone to take the fall for Trump on Ukraine. Trump got Mike Pence roped into it. The president tried to blame Rick Perry, but Perry saw what was coming and resigned from the cabinet.
Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to blame the State Department, and make it totally clear that Donald Trump was directing the whole operation make more sense now. Even though Trump hasn’t dumped his lawyer yet, the writing is on the wall that Republicans want to blame everything on Rudy Giuliani to save Donald Trump.
The blame Rudy clouds are building, as Trump has done with others, he will eventually say that Ukraine was all Giuliani’s idea that he had nothing do with. Democrats are ready and they aren’t going to let Trump escape by blaming Rudy Guiliani.
They tried this with Michael Cohen. Even though they did their level best to trash his credibility, they were angling to make him a believable patsy who did it all on his own, having nothing to do with 45*.
This is the kinda shit that pops up on any given social media feed a hundred times on any given day.
First, I have no problem respecting and showing a little appreciation for the cops or the librarians or the moms or the service members or the guy behind the counter at 7-11 - although I have indeed gotten more than a little peeved at how much whining goes on about all of it. But I think maybe I should be trying to see past the complaints, and look at the reasons for those complaints. Maybe what we need to do is address the fucked up system that gives people good reason to believe there's no respect for them, and leads them to where they have to stand up and holler. Which happens to be also the place where they're more easily manipulated into thinking a bottom-feeding slug like Donald Trump is their ticket to a more perfect union. We have to start talking about honor again. If we put some sense of honor (and honorability) back into the way we conduct ourselves - and the way we demand our government conducts itself - then there's less likelihood that anyone becomes so disillusioned that they end up feeling they have no alternative to throwing rocks and punches and bombs.
And like the man said - when we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make bloody rebellion inevitable.
The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.
Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix.
What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.
"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."
Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.
For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).
And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".
Every prediction of dire consequences is a threat - either they're causing that dire consequence now so they can blame us for problems of their own doing, or they plan on causing it later in order to manipulate us into doing what they want now.
Two U.S. Senators — Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) — are applying for federal money under a $12 billion bailout program set up by the White House to help farmers hurt by trade hostilities, spokespeople from their offices said.
The Agriculture Department confirmed last week it has already sent more than 7,800 bailout checks totaling over $25 million to farmers across the country. The assistance is intended to help farmers survive the trade war with China, which has dramatically widened in scope this month after the U.S. announced it would target another $200 billion in Chinese goods.
And then, a little classic double-speak:
“Sen. Grassley participates in farm programs for which he is legally eligible, including this program, like every other farmer,” said the spokesman, Michael Zona. “Grassley receives no special treatment and is always transparent about his participation. As a family farmer, Sen. Grassley brings firsthand knowledge and experience on behalf of agriculture and rural America to the policymaking tables in Washington.”
How many times have we heard some variation of this:
"The republic will stand...until the populace discover the ability to vote themselves benefits from the public treasury..." ?
Radical Libertarians (people who were once quaintly referred to as "conservatives") have been using that quote as a defensive weapon against us for a long time.
It's part of the overall strategy to delegitimize government at every level - and the very concept of democratic self-governance - to plant the notion that getting together, pooling our resources, and trying to do anything that's best for the most is the "evil of the collective".
They've been teaching huge segments of Americans to be afraid of each other, and to look to "their superiors" for marching orders.
One of the main reasons people stay split once they're split is that once trust is broken, it can be damned near impossible to repair. And it doesn't work quite the way we think. There's the whole Cheater / Abuser thing, and this is going to sound backwards, but here's the deal: If I believe you've done me a great wrong, it becomes very difficult for you to trust me - because in the back of your mind, you'll always worry that I'm just biding my time waiting for the perfect opportunity to exact my vengeance. Even if I continually express my forgiveness, and you've shone me a sincere effort to atone, that doubt is always there. Extrapolate that out and apply it broadly across a society, spanning a generation or two - or 20 - or 500. Now add in the advantages that certain cynical manipulators can cash in on by pimping that mistrust and we've got "intractable problems" caused by "irreconcilable differences". So just keep that in mind for a bit. Niraj Chokshi, NYT: Ever since Donald J. Trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, Christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” Hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send Mr. Trump, and a message, to Washington.
Or so that narrative goes.
A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.
“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”
In her study, Dr. Mutz sought to answer two questions: Is there evidence to support the economic anxiety argument, and did the fear of losing social dominance drive some voters to Mr. Trump? To find answers, she analyzed survey data from a nationally representative group of about 1,200 voters polled in 2012 and 2016.
- and -
“The shift toward an antitrade stance was a particularly effective strategy for capitalizing on a public experiencing status threat due to race as well as globalization,” Dr. Mutz wrote in the study.
Her survey also assessed “social dominance orientation,” a common psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. People who exhibited a growing belief in such group dominance were also more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, Dr. Mutz found, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected.
“It used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened,” Dr. Mutz said.
The other surveys supported the cultural anxiety explanation, too.
In a neat little nutshell - White Male Christians are scared shitless that brown people and women are going to treat them the same as White Male Christians have treated everybody since they started this joint.
And Brown Women? Holy fuck, dude - you don't even wanna think about that shit.
This ain't new, BTW. And it helps point up one of uncomfortable truths about 2016 - that the bit about "Hillary was such a shitty candidate blah blah blah" is a convenient excuse for not showing up for her, and allowing the greater of the two evils to be installed as POTUS.
There is no purity in politics.
One last thought - stop thinking that Blue Tsunami is some kinda sure thing.
Republicans are all crooked. Sorry not sorry. Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Dealing a setback to Gov. Scott Walker and other Republicans, a judge ruled Thursday the governor must call special elections to fill two vacant seats in the Legislature.
Walker declined to call those elections after two GOP lawmakers stepped down to join his administration in December.
His plan would have left the seats vacant for more than a year. Voters in those areas took him to court with the help of a group headed by Eric Holder, the first attorney general under Democratic President Barack Obama. No, of course not all of them - just the ones who're in office now. And the ones running for office. And their donors. And their Think Tanks And their staffers. And their voters.
Cuz y'know what? Seems like the decent folk have left the GOP. I think most Americans are fundamentally good people, so I think what's left of the GOP is whatever you get when you distill a political party down to its concentrated, extract form. In this case, I think we can call it something like Essence of Asshole... ... or Eau DePlorable maybe. As the Press Poodles keep insisting on being amazed at 45*'s popularity among Republicans, a couple of things may have popped up your brain. 1. Fewer Americans self-identify as Republican almost every day. 2. As the "GOP Cohort" shrinks, the percentages of that cohort who still support 45* almost have to hold steady or increase. Which means on the other side of that ledger, the "Not GOP Cohort" will increase, which accounts for a corresponding steadiness or decrease in percentages on that side.
I suck at math; and statistics flummox me to the point where I fear I'm about to have a stroke. So c'mon, guys.
Anyway, if we're going to talk about trends at all, then we have to consider the number of Shitty Things A Political Party Will Do To Stay In Power - and we get a pretty lopsided pie chart. What we don't get is "Both Sides" and "Yeah but the Democrats".
We get all het up because we're seeing something cool and new, and it's hard to slow it all down enough to consider what shitty things can be made to happen if the cool new thing is manipulated in an attempt to drive us in a direction not of our choosing.
We've become a nation of the Rugged Individualist Lone Wolf Renegade. That's what we think is cool - and necessary. We see very rich very powerful CEOs raping and pillaging across the land; buying Congress Critters outright; installing their own employees in the regulatory apparatus, and getting sweetheart legislation passed so they can do almost whatever they want in order to boost profits at the expense of anything or anyone they think might get in their way. We're living an old western movie, and somehow we've been talked into rootin' for the bad guys. We're told that if we're not making it, it's our own fault. And if we are making it, it's because we made it on our own, and so what if we broke some rules along the way? That's what you do. Boy Scouts help little old ladies. Straight-thinking, clear-eyed entrepreneurs help themselves (just like god said). Only losers depend on Gubmint to do things for 'em, including enforcing the law as only you can truly understand the real meaning of that law. If you want something done, stop bitchin' about it and go do it. If you make enough money at it (or if you can make it look like you've made a big pile of money), you're good - only poor people go to jail. And now we have a guy pretending to be POTUS who personifies all this with:
it didn't happen
it's not a big deal
it's not illegal
OK so it's illegal. But I've got the power now - what're you gonna do about it?
It's something of a jump from all that to Stephen Paddock, but it's not a big jump. "So here I am in my room on the 32nd floor. I've been suckered into thinking a casino is a place where gambling goes on - instead of a place where I pay thru the nose if necessary to have a few hours of fun, just as I've been suckered into going along with all the other shit I've swallowed over the years". "I've blown thru somewhere between 30 and 70 thousand dollars that maybe I have and maybe I don't (check with my absentee Filipino girlfriend on that $100k transferred to an account in Manila), I'm in a shitty mood, and now those assholes are down in the plaza whoopin' it up having a good time and making noise that makes me feel even worse - so I'm gonna do something bold to get 'em all to shut the fuck up. Cuz that's how we roll - I get what I want and fuck all 'y'all." "etc etc etc" He shoots 500-n-some people, but instead of standing up for himself - justifying what he's done - he kills himself. I don't know what all it means, but it's gotta include something that indicates Mr Paddock had some inkling that he knew he was doing an enormous wrong - not just the final acts of murder and suicide, but everything he was told to believe, and everything he did because of what he was told to believe - everything that led up to those last few minutes. Maybe deep down, he knew he'd been played for a sucker, and admitting to it out loud was just too much for him - the pain was so bad that he had to pull others into it so he wouldn't have to bear it all on his own. What the fuck are doing?
This makes me think she had some real points to make - a lot like the points black folks are still trying to make - but all I really remember about Angela Davis was the feeling that I was supposed to be wary of her - and that whole merry band of "black radicals" out there in California. Trying to sort through it is complicated, and I have to continue looking back to learn a bit more from that weirdest of weird times we call the 60s, when I was very much just a knuckleheaded teenager, trying to make sense of what I thought I was learning about the world - especially the parts concerning Race Relations and Power and the Politics of Change here in USAmerica Inc - as the world's problems were getting bigger even as the world itself was getting smaller in what seemed like one big fuckin' hurry. Way too much of "the news" - one of the things I was trying to learn from - way back in the golden age of "honest broadcast journalism" - turned out to be about as slanted and warped back then as I see it now when I consider how the Dis-Infotainment Industry has really kicked it into high gear. I guess I could ask, "What chance does anybody have?". But then I'd have to tell you not to bother watching this (even if you've got the 2 hours and 45 minutes to spare):
Now try this one on for size: You can't believe anybody, so you'll have to believe me.
"Post-Truth" is bullshit. I may not have more than a couple of dime's worth of neurons to rub together, but I'm not going along with anybody who tries to tell me there's no way we can ever know what's real and what's not.
12 people have walked on the moon for fuck's sake - and we got them all back so they could tell us about it. We can figure this shit out.
I try. Lord knows how I try. I try to maintain a certain equilibrium about all of my fellow citizens. We're all in this great democratic experiment together, after all. I think we have an obligation as a self-governing democratic republic to make government work best for all our people. I believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, and in the political commons to which we all have a right and in which we all have a stake. Economic anxiety in de-industrialized America is very real and it is a real danger to all of what we can achieve together. It is now, and it was in 1980, when I drove from Youngstown to Toledo to Flint to Grand Rapids as we wound into the election that brought us Ronald Reagan.
(So, by the way, is the intractable poverty of people, working class and otherwise, who are not white.)
So, I try. Lord knows how I try.
But what am I supposed to do when so many of my fellow citizens guzzle snake oil by the gallon and call it champagne?
I think what hangs us up the most is that we're all clinging rather desperately to the Presumption of Regularity. We need something that looks and feels more like normal. So we project that need onto an awful lot of what's going on. Especially with 45* making such forceful and deliberate efforts to vacate the norm.
Add it all up and we're danger-close to a charge of False Consciousness, but what else we got?
Knowing more about Acquired Memory and Altered Memory gets me a little closer to understanding small pieces of how advertising and propaganda work on our little simian brains to produce something of a cult-like adherence to a particular brand of ideology. Dr Elizabeth Loftus on the Thinking Atheist podcast:
Now if I could find someone who's published a study telling me I'm really not so crazy thinking I can make a solid link from all that memory stuff to things like the Etch-A-Sketch effect, I might have something. The search for intelligent life (inside my own head) continues.
No matter what else, pretend it's all normal - it happens all the time - nothing to see here - it doesn't concern you - Obama did it too - everything's fine - don't get hysterical - the status quo is the problem - revolution is the only thing that brings peace...
The Daddy State is rolling along in spite of what we can see on the surface. Vox:
Report: Trump transition ordered government economists to cook up rosy growth forecasts
The Trump University economics department strikes again.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias matt@vox.com
Feb 17, 2017, 2:19pm EST
As the White House staff tries to put together a budget for President Donald Trump, they face a fundamental problem. Trump has promised to cut taxes, increase spending on the military and infrastructure, and avoid cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The only way to do that without producing an exploding budget deficit is to assume a big increase in economic growth.
And Nick Timiraos at the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is planning to do just that — by making things up.
Deep into his story about Trump budget hijinks, Timiraos reveals that “what’s unusual about the administration’s forecasts isn’t just their relative optimism but also the process by which they were derived.” Specifically, what’s unusual about them is that they weren’t derived by any process at all. Instead of letting economists build a forecast, Trump’s budget was put together with “transition officials telling the CEA staff the growth targets that their budget would produce and asking them to backfill other estimates off those figures.”
And all that crapola falling out of 45*'s Putin Receptacle about Fake News?
Isolate your devotees from outside influence. Give them a comforting substitute for reality. I'm not going to indulge the ridiculous notion that 45* is playing some amazing 8-Dimensional Chess - that's not something Obama could do, and it sure as fuck ain't something 45* could handle. That's not to say this shit happens by accident, or that he's not capable of subtlety - just that 45* does what he does with a purpose in mind and it all ends up pretty much out in the open because he can't help bragging about it. And that's the key. The Authoritarian has to keep score. He has to be able to point to what he's done and count something (rally attendance, Electoral Votes, dead Jews) because he has to show you how great he is as a boss, or to show the boss what a good little follower he is. And when he runs up against the contradictions he creates (which always in turn create massive fuckups), he just makes shit up so the "facts" will fit around the required outcome. Keep watching. Keep pushing back.
When we stop believing people in positions of leadership can deliver on promises of hope and progress, we get this weird protection racket thing going - where we're told evermore frightening tales of how the bad guys are trying get us - and eventually, that means the people who get the most attention are the ones who have the darkest imaginations, driven by their own paranoia &/or ambition for power.
We put 'em in charge, and sometimes they start to think "keeping their promises" means they at least have to give us a taste of the misery and destruction that they warned us about, and that they alone can save us from.
And suddenly, we have to figure out how to protect ourselves from our protectors.
Here's the thing: I refuse to cower behind the Daddy State while Lobbyists and their Coin-Operated Politicians continue lining their pockets with my tax dollars.
