Me vs We

blank 719

see repair the commons, unions....

see story 1 vs 2

note mult scotus rulings on class action [i just saw moldy but goodie sibling tort reform in ca biz roundtable):

see empathy, ~ reduct, requires seeing myself in someone else's shoes?

5/21 someone said democracy depend on empathy (trust, rebuild commons vs rather fill in public pool good than let those undeserving POC use it; rather cut social safety net that i poor rural not well educated ppl need to stay in middle class to make sure brn/blk ppl don't use it b/c lazy.

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AN GUK 4 25

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor tell The Guardian that corporate city-states are back in fashion thanks to Trump politics indulging tax-hating millionaires and billionaires to start their own high-tech fiefdoms.

A “glorified gated communit[ies]” like Próspera on a Honduran island and Elon Musk’s distant proposal of “a handful of people and robots eke[ing] out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars) appear to be catching on with ultra-wealthy members of the Trump circle.

End-time communities were on the rise in 2023, when a campaigning Donald Trump promised to hold a contest that would lead to the creation of 10 “freedom cities” on federal lands. And since election, “would-be country starters have been on a lobbying blitz, determined to turn Trump’s pledge into reality.” Próspera Chief of Staff Trey Goff called the new energy in DC “absolutely electric, and legislation “paving the way for a bevy of corporate city-states” complete by the end of the year, Klein writes.

It’s a fantasy word evolved from the “doom-prepping” movement of the first Trump administration, only now fueled by ultra-wealthy “religious end-timers.” It also hastens the degradation of the only world humanity realistically has, Klein and Taylor say.

IFrame Content

“Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s right-wing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them,” says Klein, a Canadian author.

There is no second planet to occupy, however, and reducing humanity to a tiny dome on a distant island or mountain peak requires a commitment to letting a huge swathe of humanity die. So, how do you break the apocalyptic fever?

“… We help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries,” Klein writes. “We must first understand … [that] we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”

Second, Klein advises countering “their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”

Read the full Guardian article at this link.

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an 12 24

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/americas-story/

alternet

Trump has offered extreme versions of America's four basic stories

Robert Reich December 12, 2024

Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Trump Republicans have succeeded in framing issues to their advantage. While it’s true that Kamala Harris lost by a small margin, the overriding reality is that through many elections, Democrats have failed to speak to America in ways that most Americans understand.

The challenge facing Democrats is deeper than simply finding the right words and phrases. To win back the heart and soul of America, Democrats must retell the four basic stories that have defined and animated the United States since its founding.

For most of the 20th century, Democrats did this instinctively. But in this century, they have tended to speak in technocratic terms, giving Republicans — culminating in Trump — the dominant political narrative.

I want to tell you about how the four basic American stories have been told and explain why it’s urgent that the real story of our era be told: that wealth and power concentrated at the top are corrupting American democracy and shafting most working people.

There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.

The Triumphant Individual. This is the tale of the little guy who works hard, takes risks, believes in himself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.

It’s the story of self-made people who buck the odds, spurn the naysayers, and show what can be done with enough gumption and guts. They’re plainspoken, self-reliant, and uncompromising in their ideals — underdogs who make it through hard work and faith in themselves.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is the first in a long line of U.S. self-help manuals about how to make it through self-sacrifice and diligence. The same story is epitomized in the life of Abe Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.”

The identical theme was captured in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches. It’s celebrated in the tales of immigrant peddlers who become millionaire tycoons. And it’s found in the manifold stories of downtrodden fighters who undertake dangerous quests and find money and glory. Think Rocky Balboa, Norma Rae, and Erin Brockovich. The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

Trump wants Americans to think of him as the Triumphant Individual, and he has extolled others, such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as similarly triumphant.

The Benevolent Community. This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good.

Its earliest formulation was John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on board a ship in Salem Harbor just before the Puritans landed in 1630 — a version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, in which the new settlers would be “as a City upon a Hill,” “delight in each other,” and be “of the same body.”

Similar communitarian and religious images were used by the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.

The story is captured in the iconic New England town meeting, in frontier settlers erecting one another’s barns, in neighbors volunteering as firefighters and librarians, and in small towns sending their high school achievers to college and their boys off to fight foreign wars. It suffuses Norman Rockwell’s paintings and Frank Capra’s movies. Consider the last scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” when George learns he can count on his neighbors’ generosity and goodness, just as they had always counted on him.

Trump Republicans have distorted the story of the Benevolent Community to show what America would be without “woke”ism, Critical Race Theory, transgender kids using bathrooms or being on high school sports teams inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth, “cat ladies” who choose not to have children, and other cultural bogeymen.

The Mob at the Gates. In this story, the United States is a beacon light of virtue in a world of darkness, uniquely blessed but continuously endangered by foreign menaces. Hence our endless efforts to contain the barbarism and tyranny beyond our borders.

Daniel Boone fought Native Americans — white America’s first evil empire. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. The same story is found in the Whigs’ anti-English and pro-tariff histories of the United States, in the anti-immigration harangues of the late 19th century, and in World War II accounts of Nazi and Japanese barbarism.

It animates modern epics about space explorers (often sporting the stars and stripes) battling alien creatures bent on destroying the world. The narrative gave special force to Cold War tales during the 1950s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy, and subsequently of “evil” empires and axes.

The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest diabolical forces overwhelm us.

Trump and his Republican enablers have emphasized this story to scare Americans into believing we’re being overridden by undocumented immigrants and taken advantage of by foreign nations who are allied with us and major trading partners.

The Rot at the Top. The last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places — of conspiracy against the common citizen.

It started with King George III, and, to this day, it shapes the way we view government — mostly with distrust.

The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top: William Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Willie Stark as the Huey Long-like character in All the King’s Men, Lionel Barrymore’s demonic Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the antagonists who hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath.

Suspicions about Rot at the Top have inspired what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in U.S. politics — from the pre-Civil War Know-Nothings and Anti-Masonic movements through the Ku Klux Klan and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.

The myth has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s.

Trump and his Republicans have used this story against government workers, civil servants, independent agencies, the FBI, and other examples of a so-called “deep state.”

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding — the two hopeful stories rendered more vivid by contrast to the two fearful ones.

These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow, because people don’t think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they’re to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into these larger stories about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we should be going.

Major shifts in governance — in party alignments and political views — have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories.

In the early decades of the 20th century, progressives and Democrats filled all four boxes.

They accused leaders of big business of being the Rot at the Top. They argued that the large industrial concentrations of the era, the trusts, were stifling the upward mobility of millions of potential Triumphant Individuals and poisoning democracy.

During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson (who also promoted racism) promised to wage

“a crusade against powers that have governed us ... that have limited our development, that have determined our lives, that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please.”

The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy.

Wilson’s Mob at the Gates was composed of the large, bellicose states of prewar Europe who posed similar challenges to democratic freedoms. Wilson grimly rallied Americans to “defeat once and for all ... the sinister forces” that rendered peace impossible.

Theodore Roosevelt shared Wilson’s antipathy toward trusts, but by the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. That was okay with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.

Like today’s Trump Republicans, the GOP’s approach to foreign policy through most of the 20th century was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates — close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.

They celebrated the wealth of Triumphant Individuals but didn’t champion upward mobility or equal opportunity, and they offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. As such, they stayed firmly in the minority most of the first half of the 20th century.

The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democratic stories.

By the 1930s, the Rot at the Top included Wall Street as well as big business. In the 1936 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt warned against “economic royalists” who had impressed the whole of society into service. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor ... these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship,” he warned. What was at stake, he concluded, was nothing less than the “survival of democracy.”

To cope with the Depression, Americans needed a national Benevolent Community. “I see one third of our nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” FDR told a nation whose citizens clearly understood they were all in this together. He described the purpose of the New Deal as “extending to our national life the old principle of the local community.” “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.”

The Social Security Act was not just a social insurance scheme but the very symbol of national solidarity. Henceforth, all American families would share the risk of becoming unemployed or losing the family’s breadwinner or retiring without adequate savings.

Then came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country — over the objections of Republican isolationists — into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered.

Democrats managed the transition from Depression and world war to postwar prosperity and the Cold War with only slight alterations in story line. The Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual depended on federal provisions — the GI Bill, government-backed mortgages, a guarantee of equal civil rights.

Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, but now the Mob was the dangerous and expansive Soviet Union. Truman stopped the communists in Korea. Kennedy stopped them in Berlin and during the Cuban missile crisis. And he tried to stop them in Vietnam, which he saw as “the finger in the dike” holding back the Soviets.

Johnson, of course, tragically tried and failed to erect a dam against the North Vietnamese and their patrons.

While Republicans continued to wrestle with the isolationists and nervous Nellies — such as Senator Robert Taft of Ohio — Democrats spoke of paying any price and bearing any burden to protect the United States.

In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top gradually dropped out of the Democratic message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen and unscrupulous financiers.

This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink. White-collar workers were now abundant, and blue-collar workers got generous wage increases that could be absorbed by the huge postwar market.

Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle.

For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but the McGovern wing of the party had no clear plan of action. Indeed, its approach seemed redolent of the Republican isolationists of the earlier part of the century, who wanted the United States simply to turn its back on the Mob.

After President Carter and the hostage crisis, even when Democrats did try to tell this story, they seemed uncertain of themselves.

In short, Democrats and progressives came off as confused and conflicted about the dangers the United States faced. They stopped talking about both the Rot at the Top and the Mob at the Gates and thus ceased giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I discuss why the Democrats left Trump to tell his fake version of the Rot at the Top, not the real one.

NOW READ: A reckoning is coming for the people who didn't care about their country

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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the other has orcs ( well he does not say she read ayn, just embodies philos)

thom 822

...

Sociopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, theproducershad no obligations to thelooters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with of60 Minutes.

Suggesting that selfishnessunderminesmost truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand....

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AlternetFor Republicans — the outgroup can take care of itself — or die trying

John Stoehr October 10, 2024

During a national emergency, it’s good to say that “we’re all in this together.” Whether it’s a war, a pandemic or a hurricane, everyone is affected. Everyone has a stake in the outcome. And if we don’t believe and act like we are all in this together, the crisis will get worse.

This idea of collective fate in the face of dire threats to our lives and fortunes is conventional. So much so that it beggars belief when rightwing politicians tell us that, actually, we’re not all in this together.

It beggars belief so much that it’s just easier, mentally speaking, for ordinary people who have a sense of the national good to say that rightwingers don’t really mean it. It’s easier to believe they really do share the same core values as we do, but aren’t living up to them.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

In defiance of God

Rightwingers are not hypocrites, though. They believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups. The former is good, right and deserving. The latter is bad, wrong and undeserving. When there’s a national emergency, the federal government should help the ingroup, because it’s the only group that constitutes a “real nation.”

Meanwhile, the outgroup can take care of itself.

Or die trying.

Not only do they believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups, they believe it ought to be. The orders of power should be vertical and hierarchical. That is the ideal, because that is “natural.”

For this reason, liberal efforts to flatten the orders of power, so that the outgroup has as many rights and privileges as the ingroup, are seen by rightwingers as a perversion of the natural order of things.

To them, we are not all in this together, because we can’t be.

If we were, that would be in defiance of God.

Barbarism, not hypocrisy

No matter how many times rightwingers tell us what they really believe, the rest of us cling to the belief that they really don’t.

Stubbornly, we insist that they will set aside politics during a national emergency and that, in the end, they will choose nation over party.

While some of us realize that they will never set aside politics, not even during a national emergency, most of us don’t understand why.

The reason?

They already put the nation above all else. The politics that we keep expecting them to set aside are in service to the nation as they define it, and they define the nation in ways most Americans never would.

For most people, the nation is everyone. We’re all in this together.

For rightwingers, the nation is them. You’re with us or against us.

They are not hypocrites. They are the “real Americans,” God’s chosen. They are not failing to live up to their values. They are realizing them.

What the rest of us fail to understand is that those values are horrible. They are not only illiberal and anti-democratic, they are barbarous.

So barbarous that it beggars belief.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

You can’t shame a zealot

Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is the reason why a Florida Republican could say with a straight face that FEMA funding should come in advance of Hurricane Milton even though she voted to cut it a few weeks prior.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna falsely implied that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were withholding disaster relief, even though she “voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion,” according to the New Republic. “Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.”

Luna’s critics would allege that she’s saying one thing but doing another, but it’s the opposite to her. Demanding government money if it helps the ingroup is in keeping with withholding government money if it hurts the outgroup. Indeed, the concept is so natural to Luna that she’s falsely accusing the vice president of doing the very same thing.

When Republicans like Luna do this, critics often despair. They say there’s no bottom for these people. There’s no shame. They’ve abandoned their principles. They’ve followed Donald Trump too far.

Again, it’s the opposite.

They are realizing their principles.

They want a society in which the ingroup gets the blessings of freedom and democracy, and all the government assistance, while the outgroup gets whatever’s coming to it. If a hurricane plows into Florida, God’s chosen must be helped! If it plows into Puerto Rico, well, tough luck.

They want such tyranny, because they believe God wants it.

You can shame a hypocrite.

You can’t shame a zealot.

No such thing as collective fate

Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is also the reason Trump can betray America without risking his reputation among zealots for putting America first.

To them, it doesn’t matter that, as president during the pandemic, he sent Vladimir Putin covid tests for his personal use, as the country struggled with shortages. It doesn’t matter, as my senator Chris Murphy said, that “he decided to let Americans die to keep Putin alive.”

The “America” in “America first” is not America. It’s the ingroup. And the ingroup has more in common with Russia than the outgroup.

Russia is a top-down society in which the orders of power are strictly maintained. Liberal efforts to flatten those orders democratically are crushed, often violently, with every instrument of the state.

In times of national emergency, as there is with Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is no such thing as a collective fate. They don’t believe “we’re all in this together.” The weak are sacrificed by the strong.

Russia is the ideal.

It’s what the ingroup believes America should be.

And if Trump helped an ally in God’s plan, so be it.

:{:{Barbarism is bizarre}:

Joe Biden didn’t say “we’re all in this together,” but he meant that when he said there are neither blue states nor red states in the face of national emergencies like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

“There’s one United States of America,” he said, “where neighbors are helping neighbors, volunteers and first-responders are risking everything, including their own lives, to help their fellow Americans.”

To meet our collective fate, we must be able to trust each other, and to do that, everyone must have good information. That’s why Trump and the Republicans are lying so much. It doesn’t matter that they’re hurting their own. What matters to them is preventing the spirit of solidarity from destabilizing rightwing forces that keep us apart.

Biden offered a liberal alternative to barbarism.

“Former President Trump has led the onslaught of lies,” Biden said. “Assertions have been made that property has been confiscated. That’s simply not true. They’re saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more. That’s simply not true. They’re saying the money needed in this crisis is being diverted to migrants. What a ridiculous thing to say. It’s not true. Now the claims are getting more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, is now saying the government is literally controlling the weather – controlling the weather! It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.”

The lies and disinformation won’t stop, of course, because zealots like Greene believe they’re fighting for their country. They believe Donald Trump is their champion. They believe they are God’s chosen.

If they were hypocrites, they could be shamed into doing the right thing and acting like we really are all in this together. Hypocrisy isn’t the problem, though. Barbarism is, no matter how bizarre it seems.

222 an

anec or quiet part loud?

READ::{Woman at city council meeting declares herself a :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{'proud white supremist': That 'means you’re a patriot':(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

7 22 an salon

famous British writer Samuel Johnson once criticized a political opponent's self-described patriotism by memorably pointing out that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Although Johnson lived before the advent of psychology and modern brain science, his observation has been at least partially vindicated by experts in subsequent centuries.

This does not mean there is anything wrong with celebrating the 4th of July with fireworks, good movies and learning about the founding fathers (even when it includes some ugly details). Feeling good about one's nation and your place in it is patriotism. But these days, many conflate patriotism with its more extreme cousin nationalism, which is predicated on superiority and competitiveness. You cannot merely be proud, but you must be proud of your nation's dominance – which means that you think in terms of winners and losers, friends and enemies.

Nationalism, because of its inherently tribal nature, can be as dangerous as the most potent illicit drug if the sentiment is used improperly.

One of the most famous early intellectuals to articulate a conclusion along these lines was Benedict Anderson, an Irish-American historian and political scientist. In his influential 1983 monograph "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism," Anderson observed that nations are "imagined political communities" in that the nature of the community itself is, in a literal sense, rather arbitrary. Prior to the Middle Ages, people derived equivalent identities from things like their religious affiliations or loyalties to particular monarchical lines.

This changed during the Enlightenment period for a number of reasons: Latin was replaced among political leaders by their local vernaculars, capitalism cultivated a new class of business leaders that wanted to control the state, the Reformation weakened the power of the Vatican, royal governments were on their way out as democratic movements popped up everywhere, and the printing press allowed people to feel kinship based on common languages and geographical landmarks. Even the Western world's collective sense of time shifted from a theological to a more secular perspective, particularly as literacy became more prevalent.

When combined, each of these factors led people to crave a new sense of community. Hence we have the popular notion that one should feel a sense of community with others based on being part of a common "nation," which by definition is imagined because members have a sense of "horizontal comradeship" even though they have never met and often come from radically different backgrounds.

In theory, this may seem harmless, but as the bloody nationalistic wars that have marred human existence since the late 18th century prove — World War I perhaps most prominent among them — people are willing to kill for, and die for, their nations.

Even when the behavior is not seen as that extreme, nationalism can still bring out the worst in people.Take President Donald Trump, who psychologists noted has stimulated narcissistic behaviors in his followers by virtue of creating a cult of personality around his own seemingly narcissistic traits. While Americans were justifiably alarmed at that phenomenon, Trumpism is hardly alone or novel in tapping into collective narcissism. And what this leads to is not encouraging.

Writing for the journal Political Psychology in May, a group of American and British researchers examining Polish politics found that "national collective narcissism" tends to go hand in hand with nationalism, and additionally winds up being a strong predictor of whether a given person will hold nationalist sentiments. They concluded that "our analyses thus provide evidence that nationalism may be rooted in narcissistic exaggeration of the greatness of the national in-group rather than non-narcissistic national in-group satisfaction" — in other words, people are likely to hold nationalist views if they're already susceptible to narcissistic political styles.

Therefore, nationalism – which was created to form a sense of community – can bring out toxic traits in people. In addition, it is fueled by humanity's deepest insecurities and fears.(Hence the nationalist furor whipped up by a pandemic.) English author and psychology lecturer Steve Taylor PhD expressed a similar perspective in a 2020 article for Psychology Today.

"In my view, it makes more sense to explain modern day nationalism in terms of psychological factors," Taylor wrote. "There are some clues from the psychological theory of Terror Management. This theory — which has been validated by many studies — has shown that when people are made to feel insecure and anxious by being reminded of death, they tend to become more concerned with identity values such as nationalism, status and success."

To be clear, these sentiments do not only fuel nationalism. Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist from Wayne State University, further elaborated on the downsides of nationalism in a 2019 article from The Conversation:

"Tribalism is the biological loophole that many politicians have banked on for a long time: tapping into our fears and tribal instincts," Javanbakht wrote. "Some examples are Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, religious wars and the Dark Ages. The typical pattern is to give the other humans a different label than us, and say they are going to harm us or our resources, and to turn the other group into a concept." Nationalism, while not the only manifestation of this tendency, is certainly one of the most prominent.

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Defeating fascism's 'loneliness and alienation' has a simple solution: author

John Stoehr March 14, 2022

The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.

But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.

Amid Donald Trump’s laundry list of grievances, including reiterations of the Big Lie, he said: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival.”

“We have no choice,” he said:

The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.

That’s boilerplate fascism.

Just ask Jason Stanley. In 2018, he told Vox:

The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.

Per usual, the crowd was so rapt with attention, so immersed in the grume and gall, you wonder if it’s possible to reason with fascists.

Yes and no.

“You can’t argue a person out of a cult by walking into it,” Nathan told me. “There is hope only when they step outside of that experience.”

One does not ‘reason’ with fascists. It is more that you get outside the fascist vocabulary and talk about something different. The hope is by connecting with ordinary experience, perhaps they find life is more valuable than Donald Trump’s talking points.

What would that “outside life” look like? For Dewey, it meant more than protecting and advancing democracy. It meant protecting and advancing the capacity all humans have to be more fully human.

But first, get them out and back into ordinary experience.

As Nathan said:

Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other like-minded people.

Dewey used to be central to our discourse, but his appeal has faded. What brought you to thinking he'd be worthy of a new book?

Dewey lived through two world wars. As a young man, he absorbed the spirit of the early 20th-century progressive movement. He believed in the upward ascent of society toward its ultimate end in democracy.

What he saw instead were fascism and global catastrophe.

I believed his life would be instructive for our time to prevent catastrophe from happening again. I believe there is something called wisdom about human beings we can learn. He had that wisdom.

Let's break down some of that "progressive spirit."

The foundation of Dewey’s thought was the possibility of experience to be educative. Everything he wrote revolved around that basic idea.

We were born to learn and grow. Although Dewey was a Christian in his early writings, he came to look skeptically at organized religion and adopted a more naturalistic perspective toward human experience.

He believed human beings are born to live on earth like all other organisms. We are gifted with certain powers that other organisms do not possess. It is our gift to use those powers for our own growth and the growth of our community, not for any transcendent idea or aim beyond this world. This world is our home.

So by “progressive," he meant we could always learn to grow.

I love that, but how can this view face the fascism of his day? One wants to grow. The other to destroy. They seem irreconcilable.

It’s important to see the world from the perspective of fascist anti-humanism. Fascists also wanted to grow in the 20th century. They just wanted to grow in one direction toward a fixed aim.

The anti-humanism of the fascist is not anti-growth.

It is anti-experimental.

The fascist has one idea of what it means to be human and excludes all others. Fascism’s destructive power is the annihilation of alternative visions, of difference, of diversity of views and practice, of anything that, from the fascist view, obstructs the one way vision toward utopia.

So the idea of “growth” might need to be modified. Fascists want to grow in the sense of feeling a fixed mold, like pouring water into a jug.

For Dewey, humanism meant seeing the human being as a source of potential power, diversity and creativity. Nothing inherent in us meant we’re going in one direction. This was his resistance to religious fundamentalism. He saw power as very general. It is through individual practices and cultures that we develop these powers in different ways.

So there is certainly a conflict here.

Unfortunately, there is no ultimate reconciliation of these forces.

I think trying to reconcile them at a philosophical level is somewhat futile. I think it comes down to creating the conditions of diversity to continually get in the way of a singular totalitarian mindset.

Unfortunately, technology creates the conditions for that totalitarian view by combining like-minded people into a single vision that prohibits alternative realities. When those unities become strong enough and resourced enough, one ends up in contests of force.

Dewey recognized that, although he wished it to be otherwise.

Please explain the three parts of fascist antihumanism that you talk about in your book. 1. “Ragged” individualism. 2. Animist nationalism 3. Totalitarian propaganda. Can you walk us through each?

From my reading of Dewey, I looked through every single moment he talked about fascism and authoritarianism in the 20th century.

I tried to reduce these characteristics to their absolute foundations. I found there were three conditions that make fascism possible: ragged individualism, animist nationalism, and totalitarian propaganda.

Each foundation was built on top of the other, but all of them were grounded on the modern destruction of the self and community.

By “ragged individualism,” Dewey was playing on the utopian notion of “rugged individualism.” This was the idea connected to the cowboy of the American West and the self-made man of the industrial US city.

The rugged individual was someone who found strength in being different from other people, in being separate from and even contemptuous of society, and who through trial and error would intuitively discover the virtues and the methods for success.

Dewey saw the opposite.

Rugged individualism tended to celebrate primarily industrial capitalism that came about not through individual creativity but the harnessing of capital and the exploitation of weaker populations.

Meanwhile, ragged individualism created an ethic of contempt for community. It saw thatif you needed help, you were weak.

Rugged individualism was “ragged” because it didn’t exist.

In a modern society, individuals were dependent on machines and techniques, not just for industrial production but through social organization. From birth to death, we are dependent on organized technology and automated systems to regulate mass society.

Human beings simply cannot get on in the world without being connected, in one way or another, to some kind of system. The idea that a person should “make it on their own” is virtually absurd.

That does not mean human effort is unimportant. Dewey simply says we cannot pretend, if we truly want to be individuals, that we can do all of these things on our own. We are intrinsically connected to each other. To pretend you are not is to leave you helpless and alone.

I am loving this so far. Keep going!

Worse ragged individualism creates conditions for animist nationalism.

I use the word “animist” to distinguish it from more traditional political nationalism which simply refers to any geographically organized citizenry that feels connected to a state and a common history.

Animism is when you invest a non-living entity with animal spirits. The state is that spirit. Animist nationalism speaks of the nation but it ignores the citizen and our common bond with each other.

Instead, it talks about the national spirit and the origin and destiny of the nation as if it was a kind of creature. What you get in fascist states is the mythology of, say, the “Aryan” as a complete fabrication.

But that’s a natural outcome of rugged individualism.

The more we are set apart from one another, alienated from our community and our families, organized by technology and machines in a way that loses any sort of personal relationship, the more we seek a relationship with something that is simply non-living.

We try to justify our lives by connecting to something deep inside of us and outside of us. This force of the living spirit that we can tap into that is superpersonal, somehow above and beyond everyone.

Once you get into this position, there is no more responsibility either to oneself or to other human beings. You get tied up into a vision of history totally detached from the experiences of ordinary people.

The fascist state or movement is the result.

It’s pathetic because it’s driven by a genuine desire for belonging.

Totalitarian propaganda organizes animist nationalism. I say “totalitarian” to note total absorption into a propaganda message.

Propaganda isn’t necessarily totalitarian. I teach propaganda frequently, as a college course. It can be simply a collection of methods for persuading on a larger scale than rhetorical argumentation can. We see propaganda all the time in social movements we find very noble.

Totalitarian propaganda is not specific to fascism by any means.

It can happen in any cult-like situation and is not subject matter dependent. Any idea whatsoever can be exploited by propaganda.

The key difference is totality, a vocabulary and a worldview so dependent on media the individual no longer experiences the world.

Thus, we come full circle.

Fascism is the destruction of the individual in the name of some higher ideal of personality.

What were Dewey's counterpoints? This is important, because I think most people still believe fascists can be reasoned with.

I think Dewey’s response is never about persuading fascists. You have to confront power with power. And I don’t mean force or violence.

I mean the capacity to act in concert for a common end against resistance. This is where rhetoric and communication become so valuable. One has to fight fascism by establishing a community.

By creating conditions that allow people to experience what they wish to recover. It is loneliness and alienation that sets the possibility for fascism. The way to battle that is by fighting for a community that allows self-expression and love and connection and creativity.

There is really no other option.

see civil virtue/ responsibility

aha2 bowling alone (globalization/ outsourcing, corporatization walmarting of rural rust belt] led to kids leaving, all sorts of other problems, rw talk radio proposed enemy/scapegoat solution ol time religion --> echo/escalator polarization that just made problems worse which called for trump i lone can fix it --> nazis on florida overpass /cda truckers....

aha: echo is isolation from Earth1, legit press info (ie ideas/info you do not want b/c does not fit your POV) and escalator= AMPLIFY/ BOOST/ PROPAGATE TO MORE PPL AND MORE INFLUENTIAL/INFECTIOUS PPL/ SOURCES; boost is boosted by algorithm and hype hate anger fear is monetized which is both an incentive and an extra further boost --> runaway mode

an 2 22 edit bd

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”

Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.

His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.

“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.

Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.

Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”

Then there is this part:

Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.

“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.

Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.

He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.

Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?

His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:

They become isolated(or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).

A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.

What you're describing is collectivism, no?

The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."

But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.

Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?

Ideally, yes.

Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.

The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.

That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.

That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."

The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?

One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.

In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).

I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.

For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.

I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:

Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success,you’re going to sacrifice things along the way.There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.

A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.

He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.

I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).

But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.

A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.

I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying thatif Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.

Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.

222

Nasty, brutish and short” is the phrase that British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his 1658 book “Leviathan,” famously used to describe the lives of England’s working class. Hobbes, born in 1588, lived a long life and was 91 when he died in 1679, but many working-class Brits of Hobbes’ time didn’t make it to 50.

Centuries later, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman uses Hobbes’ “nasty, brutish and short” concept in his January 31 column — arguing that in 2022, Republican policies are designed to make American lives exactly that: nasty, brutish and short.

“As Thomas Hobbes could have told you, human beings can only flourish, can only avoid a state of nature in which lives are ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ if they participate in a ‘commonwealth’ — a society in which government takes on much of the responsibility for making life secure,” the 68-year-old Krugman explains. “Thus, we have law enforcement precisely so individuals don’t have to go around armed to protect themselves against other people’s violence.”

Krugman continues, “Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health when they can, but the nature of infectious disease means that there is an essential role for collective action, whether it is public investment in clean water supplies or, yes, mask and vaccine mandates during a pandemic. And you don’t have to be a socialist to recognize the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy like electricity supply and the monetary system." [twt]

the liberal economist/columnist lays out a variety of Republican policies that can make the lives of Americans “nasty, brutish and short” — from COVID-19 policies and anti-vaxxer insanity to a failure to support and maintain infrastructure.Krugman specifically mentions Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans’ failure to properly “winterize” the Lone Star State’s “gas and electricity facilities” and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to “block just about every measure intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus.”

DeSantis “and his officials,” according to Krugman, “have stopped just short of being explicitly anti-vaccine, but they have catered to the anti-vax fringe.”

“I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members reject any policy that relies on social cooperation, and they want us to return instead to Hobbes’ dystopian state of nature,” Krugman says of the Trumpified GOP of 2022. “We won’t try to keep guns out of the hands of potential mass murderers; instead, we’ll rely on teacher-vigilantes to gun them down once the shooting has already started. We won’t try to limit the spread of infectious diseases; instead, we’ll tell people to take drugs that are expensive, ineffective or both after they’ve already gotten sick.”

Krugman wraps up his column by stressing that the Republicans of 2022 fail to realize that government has its place.

“Government exists for a reason,” the economist/Times columnist writes. “But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making all of our lives nastier, more brutish and shorter.”

nice pix sign: evil vaccine agenda]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/personality-traits/

a new study explains how a number of dark personality traits are connected to the ideology of conspiracy theories. According to PsyPost, a study recently published by Personality and Individual Differences was conducted by Sara Hughes and Laura Machan. It indicates that **"Machiavellianism, primary psychopathy, and collective narcissism**" are traits that appear to coincide with the beliefs of those who buy into conspiracy theories.

Science Direct reports that the study, which focused on 406 participants from the United Kingdom, was based on an assessment of a number of personality measures. It also delved into individuals' "susceptibility to conspiracy beliefs and the mediating role of Covid related conspiracy beliefs on links between personality and intentional dissemination of Covid-19 conspiracies and willingness to obtain a Covid-19 vaccine."

The study focused on the characteristics of those who possess the dark triad traits and how they have a tendency to hold more hostility toward other groups. Participants completed a questionnaire to assess conspiracist ideation where they had the opportunity to provide their opinions with answers like: "There is no hard evidence that COVID really exists."

"To assess intention to be vaccinated against Covid-19, participants were asked what they would do if a vaccine were tested and approved and they had the opportunity to be vaccinated next week," the study indicates.

READ: 'You were gullible': Federal judge torches Trump's election lies — and a rioter who believed them]

Per PsyPost, their findings indicate the following:

"Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and collective narcissism have been previously linked to conspiracy mentality. Machiavellianism is concerned with the strategic manipulation of others. Primary psychopathy is characterized by callousness and lack of emotion, while secondary psychopathy is characterized by impulsivity and antisociality. Collective narcissism refers to an inflated sense of superiority extending to one's in-group."

Their research also highlights three potential limitations.

"First, rather than obtaining behavioral measures, participants were prompted to provide self-report ratings of their intentions to disseminate COVID-19 conspiracies. Second, given participants' knowledge relating to COVID-19 was not assessed, it could be the case that those with greater beliefs in Covid-19 conspiracies were lacking in factual knowledge. Lastly, given the cross-sectional nature of this work, the researchers do not make causal inferences about their findings."

vax everywhere = neg?

gw denial eroded faith in sci for decades and made us vuln to vaxxer BS --> civil war?!

fox murdochs burn down the world for money and power (vax and AGW) ; koch gopanti-gubmint erode norms,

fox briefly forgot trump TV hacks and acted like a news org and reported FACT that trump lost AZ, immediate threat from oann newsmax reb mercer soc media play

no lnx

Black flag:Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply....

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/

also macho?

11 21

...Another one of her cartoons, called "Avatar: The Last Airbender," speaks to our current social and political crisis, which I think of as a crisis of humility.

Meaning, there's not enough of it on account of there being not enough demand. That might be a consequence of history. When I was my daughter's age, in 1984, American culture was very worried about children and their feelings of shame. (To a degree, it still is.) The culture asked parents to encourage in their kids a pride of self. Healthy self-directing egos were thought to mean healthy self-directing children, which meant a society of healthy self-directing individuals.

But Uncle Iroh, one of the characters in "Avatar," knows better. For reasons I won't go into, Iroh is something of a pariah by the time we meet him. He has fallen from a great height. As such, he's come to understand the real link between pride and shame. As he tells his young nephew, who insists on being proud: "Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame."

READ:**Former Trump aide who was 'Anonymous': Why he stayed, why he left and how the GOP became more dangerous than ISIS**]

Our culture still seems to think the answer to feelings of shame and insecurity is feelings of pride and self-confidence. You often see this after some kind of disaster, like a shooting massacre. We are frequently told suspects felt shame so they lashed out violently. If they had a more robust inner life, a more secure sense of self, perhaps the violence could have been averted. But as Uncle Iroh understood, high self-esteem is not the answer to low self-esteem. The ego is the source of rage, hate and violence. Humility is where one finds peace.

This has some empirical basis. In the 1990s, social psychologist Roy Baumeister led a team of researchers in finding that threats to the ego can disrupt a person's ability to self-regulate emotions. This can and does result in hate, which, in turn, can and does lead to violence. Baumeister does not address humility specifically, but he does imply it as he points to the problem of being proud instead of being humble.

"The new cultural demands on selfhood make it into a burdensome concern that can produce frequent stress," he wrote in The Self and Society in 1997. "People feel they must maintain a highly positive image of self that requires constant vigilance against dangers and threats. Even if they do not experience major experiences of humiliation or disgrace, the ongoing threat and resulting demand for vigilance may become tiresome and draining. Awareness of self may often be tinged with worry or stress and hence may take on an aversive aspect."

You can imagine how this plays out politically. Since 2008, the political right has stood against democracy on account of democracy electing a Black president. To these bigots and ghouls, America is a white man's country given to them by God to rule with impunity. Every time the outgroup wins a little freedom, the ingroup feels less free. Democracy, moreover, leads to equality. The political right hates that. Equality means bigots and ghouls aren't as super-duper as they believe they are. Equality means they just might have to go out and kill somebody.

You could say the election of Donald Trump, the anti-democratic turn we have seen from the GOP and all the shooting massacres we've seen since the reelection of a Black president altogether constitute one giant wounded ego. The result has been one giant lashing out against democracy the way mass shooters lash out against schools. As Baumeister said, in a different but relevant context: "Cultural prescriptions can exert considerable influence by telling people at what point it is appropriate to turn violent, ranging from 'only when someone is attacking you in a life-threatening fashion' to 'when the person implies disrespect toward you by making eye contact.'"

Ego, pride, shame, hate, rage, violence, fascism. These all have a common source in the human mind. The irony is our culture believes the antidote is more of the same. USA Today's Marco della Cava wrote today that the path toward national political healing this Thanksgiving holiday might be "practicing gratitude." As one of his sources told him: "We learn to appreciate things when we lose them, unfortunately."

How about we appreciate losing them? To be sure, you should have what you need. If that's not enough, rethink your needs. Desire, said Epicurus centuries ago, is what causes so much pain. To minimize pain, and maximize pleasure, you should minimize desire. "Practicing gratitude" can easily slip back to the original problem -- to an ego that can't be satisfied no matter how much self-confidence it has, an ego that can't tolerate the "disrespect of eye contact," and an ego that manifests itself politically as a Republican Party turned fascist.

aha me v we // rights responsibilities ayn lurks here;

10 21 an

i know you want to know if I know what US Senator Joe Manchin wants. I do not. I do know, however, that our national discourse over taxing and spending is so warped he opposes a so-called billionaire's tax while favoring a tax on billionaires not called a billionaire's tax. Such word games conceal the truth.

Taxes pay for a full and equal democracy.

This is not how the GOP would prefer we talk about taxes. They would prefer a national debate centering on individuals living an atomized existence, separate from and unequal to others, while encouraging individuals to think of themselves as "taxpayers" who are "liberated" from the moral obligations of fellowship, community and citizenship.

There was a time when this perspective was thought radical — either it was a cover-up for greed or for something more sinister. That's why Ronald Reagan, before he was president, cited a widely admired transcendentalist writer to make that view seem respectable. In 1964, while stumping for conservative Barry Goldwater, Reagan said: "Henry David Thoreau was right: that government is best which governs least."

Thoreau was right, but Reagan was wrong. That line comes from "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849), in which Thoreau famously developed the principle of moral conscience superseding the citizen's uncritical adherence to law. The occasion was Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes he believed the government was using to fund imperial expansion, on the one hand, and advancing slavery, on the other.

So the government that Thoreau said would be better if it governed least was, to his way of thinking, an anti-democratic government — a government that, before Abraham Lincoln became president, was not of, by and for the people but instead of, by and for the interests of proto-fascist slavers in the American south. That's why Thoreau accepted prison time for failing to pay his taxes. He refused to be morally complicit in his government's crimes against humanity.

By the time Reagan stumped for Goldwater, the government had become of, by and for the people more completely than any time in the country's history. By then, President Lyndon Johnson had signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, together representing American democracy in its fullest flower yet. This is the proper context for knowing what you need to know about anti-tax rhetoric, which struggled in the 1960s but has dominated our national discourse from the time of Reagan's election through today. What you need to know is this: anti-tax is anti-democracy.

With the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it began illegal for the United States government to do what it had been doing since the American founding — treating non-white people, but especially Black people, as if they were not equal citizens fully and morally entitled to the same rights and privileges as their white counterparts. Of course, an equal democratic union did not sit well with some white people.

Before 1964, anti-tax rhetoric was, to them, rich people bitching about paying their fair share. After 1964, it sounded different. It sounded, to them, like the very obscenely rich defending their "freedoms" and their "rights." With enough time and effort, the anti-tax rhetoric of the very obscenely rich was no longer thought to cover up for greed or something sinister. It was thought downright principled. By standing against the government, and standing up for "taxpayers," the GOP seemed to have a noble lineage going back to Henry David Thoreau.

Beneath the rhetoric was a belief long-standing and deeply rooted in the blood and soil of America — that nonwhite people, but especially Black people, don't count in this experiment in self-rule. "The people" doesn't include them. "The people" is us.["real am"] A government treating them as equals to us, therefore, is not a government that "sovereign citizens" can support with their tax dollars in good conscience. The whole of the "conservative movement" in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, was a movement to defund a government that would not, because it could not, treat Black people like second-class citizens. A democratic government governing the least became the best of all governments.

That Joe Manchin is trying to have it both ways is, in a sense, not surprising. He has one foot in two worlds. A world that Reagan built, in which billionaires are "job creators" who should not be "punished" for being successful. And a world being built right now, I think, on the ashes of Reagan's in which billionaires are increasingly seen, for all the right reasons, as abominations offensive to all lovers of democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe, we want to get to the costs of war. You wrote a book on this. But first, the World Health Organization's Africa director has condemned plans by the U.S. and other wealthy countries to offer third-dose COVID vaccine booster shots, while only 2% of Africa's 1.3 billion people have been fully vaccinated. Dr. Matshidiso Moeti said the U.S. should have given priority, and must do it now, to poorer nations. This is what she said.

DR. MATSHIDISO MOETI: Moves by some countries globally to introduce booster shots threaten the promise of a brighter tomorrow for Africa. As some richer countries hoard vaccines, they make a mockery, frankly, of vaccine equity.

AMY GOODMAN: You've just written an article on this issue, along with Lori Wallach. And I'm wondering if you can talk about — it's called "Will Corporate Greed Prolong the Pandemic?" Can you talk about vaccine equity?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Sure. I mean, it's very clear that we're not all — we're not going to be safe until the whole world is safe. As long as the disease is festering someplace in the world, there are going to be mutations. We know that. And we know that these mutations can be more contagious, more dangerous, and even more vaccine-resistant. So it's in our own self-interest that we get the disease controlled everywhere.

But right now there are two problems. This issue of vaccine equity, who gets the vaccine and who doesn't, and disproportionately, United States is getting a real access to the vaccine, and the developing countries simply are not. But, to me, the real issue is lack of supply. There is no excuse, a year — more, well more, than a year after the COVID-19 started, well after we discovered the vaccines that work, that there should be this kind of supply shortage. The market economy has the ability to produce these vaccines. I'm afraid that they're limiting the production to keep the price up. The head of Pfizer was hoping that he could sell each dose for $175, something that costs far, far less than that. So, to me, the first priority ought to be revving up production so that there is a supply for everybody in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the costs of war — you wrote a book on this subject — as Biden pulls U.S. troops out of Afghanistan?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, the title of my book I wrote more than a decade ago was The Three Trillion Dollar War, pointing out the high cost of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq. We knew that our numbers were conservative. But as time mounted on and the costs mounted up, what we've discovered is that the cost just of caring for our returning troops —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: — is in the trillions of dollars. The wars have been little benefit, but enormous cost to our society.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Columbia University professor, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Among his books, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.

That does it for our show. I'm Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.

521 raw an

Some members of a rural Wisconsin community wanted to demonstrate a commitment to inclusion during the racial protests last year, but the debate over how to express that has ripped the town apart.

Older white conservatives in Marathon County, whose 135,000 residents are 91 percent white and backed Donald Trump by more than 56 percent in each election, objected to naming theresolution "No Place for Hate," which they found too inflammatory, and the county board's executive committee shot down "A Community For All" last week with a 6-2 vote, reported the *New York Times*.

"They're creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we're white," said supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer and longtime board member. "You can't come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they're racist and they've got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they're racist. People are sick of it."

The proposed resolution grew out of the protests over George Floyd's police killing, with the county's people of color wanting an acknowledgement that they faced some disparities based on race -- but conservatives have been whipped into a froth by local GOP chairman Jack Hoogendyk, who claims it would "end" private property and lead to "race-based redistribution of wealth."

The resolution, of course, would not do those things, but even acknowledging the existence of racism in the community is too much for some residents.

"[Systemic racism] doesn't exist here," said dairy farmer James Juedes, a public opponent of the resolution who's also organized counter protests against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

"I have yet to recall any type of racial instances that has been reported in this community that has caused any type of stress," Juedes said.

La'Tanya Campbell, a 39-year-old Black social worker who was at the meeting last week, related a different experience. Ms. Campbell works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and said she sometimes had to enlist white colleagues to help clients find apartments to rent in Wausau.

"Typically, the racism you experience is behind closed doors, but since I've started on this resolution I can't believe some of the things that I'm hearing," Campbell said. "You feel unsafe being a woman, I feel unsafe being a Black woman, and doing anti-oppression work, it adds up."

The experience has been crushing to non-white residents, who say they're disappointed in their conservative neighbors for seemingly turning their backs -- or worse.

"I don't have the same type of confidence or faith in the community like I used to," said supervisor Ka Lo, a 39-year-old of Hmong descent who fielded death threats during the debate. "I was born and raised here, and I don't recognize the community that I grew up in right now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Subjective vs. objective

Let's turn to the three distinctions described above: The objective/subjective distinction comes first. One reason perceived victimhood hasn't been systematically studied, Armaly told me, is because "there are actual political victims." In the course of getting the paper published, he said, "People were talking about 'How are Black people different from white people? How are women different from men?' Because people were stuck in the idea of genuine victims of the political process. I think that's one of the reasons that we haven't had this direct focus on perceived victimhood in political science or similar fields."

In fact, the paper itself notes: "Men seem to be slightly higher in perceived victimhood across the board. … Such an observation underscores our claim that victimhood — as a self-perception — does not require relative disempowerment or subjection to injustices."

In conversation, Armaly was more blunt. "It doesn't matter what's true," he said. "It matters what people think and what they feel."

A broader public understanding of this could be helpful, he said: "If people understand that these are perceptions, that they can be made to feel this way — and that's a powerful source for political elites." Indeed, promoting this kind of awareness was the underlying insight behind the race-class narrative project developed by Ian Haney López, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and Demos, which I wrote about here in June 2018. I described it as a suite of narratives "that call out scapegoating by greedy, wealthy special interests, and that call on people to unify across racial lines for the common good."

Armaly expressed the promise he sees in more general terms. "If an individual can recognize that perhaps they are being told they're victims when indeed they're not, maybe there's something there that people can learn from: 'Hold on, I'm not really the victim here.''"

The race-class narratives didn't specifically discuss victimhood, but they did confront the dynamic. For example:

California's strength comes from our ability to work together – to knit together a landscape of people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place of freedom for all, we cannot let the greedy few and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from or how much money they have. It's time to stand up for each other and come together. It is time for us to vote for leaders who see all of us as equal, whether we are white, black, or brown, who respect all of our families, and who will govern for all of us.

Armaly's work suggests that other elite manipulations of victimhood could be countered with similar kinds of messages. Recognizing victimhood as a subjective state is the first step toward breaking its spell.

Egocentric vs. systemic

This distinction is the most fully elaborated of the three. What both poles have in common is that victimhood is "attractive," Armaly explained, "because it's placing the blame for one's lot in life on somebody else: 'It's not my fault.' It's a psychologically pleasing thing. I don't have to be blamed, because somebody else is doing this." From there, the two types diverge. "With the systemic, people are placing the blame with specific higher entities if you will, and with egocentric, people feel this way, they have the internal feelings of victimhood, but again, it's not their fault. It's always nice to lay blame somewhere else. That's the way to eliminate psychological pressure on oneself."

The difference between the two might seem subtle, and only emerged gradually over time. "We were discussing how to measure victimhood, and we have these ideas central to what we thought victimhood entailed," Armaly explained. "At a certain point we realized these are kind of tapping different things. So if you look at the items we use, four of them refer to the self, or 'me' or 'I' or something like that, and the other four are referring to outward sources."

The paper itself puts it this way: "The major distinction between egocentric and systemic victimhood is blame attribution. Systemic victimhood is a manifestation of perceived victimhood whereby the self defined victim specifically attributes blame for their victim status on systemic issues and entities." By contrast, "Egocentric victimhood ... is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the 'oppressor,' nor the attribution of blame, are very specific."

Indeed, the difference is striking: As mentioned above, egocentric victims are more supportive of Trump, while systemic victims are less likely to be. This makes intuitive sense, in terms of Trump's vague, self-centered language way — about victimization and pretty much everything else. The lack of evidence of voter fraud or any irregularities in the 50-plus election-related lawsuits Trump and his allies have filed does not matter nearly as much to egocentric victims as it potentially would to systemic victims. But the differential support could also reflect the fact that Trump was president when the study was done, Armaly noted. On top of that, "Trump is the establishment, he's wealthy, he's been around forever. So people who see wealth and maybe other systemic issues as victimizing don't support Trump."

There was a similar difference with regard to a set of racial issues, including affirmative action. "Somebody who thinks that they're the victim, an egocentric victim [is] going to view something like affirmative action as taking away possibilities that they think they rightfully deserve," Armaly explained. "Whereas a systemic victim seemingly recognizes that there are systemic forces that need to be corrected, and affirmative action is a correction for that type of systemic racial issue."

A similar logic applies with respect to anti-political-correctness attitudes, Armaly said. "The egocentric victim sees it like, 'I'm being told what I can and can't say. This is an infringement of My First Amendment rights.' Of course it's not. It's not coming from the government. But they perceive society as censoring them."

By contrast, people with a high sense of systemic victimhood "would think you really shouldn't speak to each other the way we do sometimes. Maybe some of this political correctness language is a good thing, because it's more inclusive, It helps people not feel so bad about how other people speak about them," Armaly explained.

With this more detailed understanding of systemic and egocentric victimhood in hand, we are better able to appreciate the significance of the third distinction, between the top-down and bottom-up aspects of victimhood. The primary focus of the paper (and the discussion above) is on the latter: Bottom-up aspects provide the primary data. But top-down elite messaging is central to the political process. There's no way to understand victimhood's political significance (not just potential) without it.

Subjects were presented with identical victimhood narratives attributed to Trump or Joe Biden, according to their partisan identification. "One thing we know from decades of political science research is people only respond to cues from sources they trust," Armaly noted. "Republicans are going to support Trump, Democrats are going to support Biden. Let's see if they can cue victimhood in their followers." The message was simple:

You, the middle class and working people, have been the victims of so much. You never seem to catch a break, and always seem to pay the steepest price. It's sad, it really is. And I'm going to keep fighting for you no matter what.

The result, the paper noted, was that "both egocentric and systemic victimhood increase as a result of hearing Trump or Biden describe the average people's inability to catch a break." In short, Armaly said, "This is not a Trump phenomenon. This is not a Republican or conservative phenomenon. It cuts across ideological lines and partisan lines. But Trump is very effective at it. And it seems like he's weaponizing this victimhood to adhere people to him, to the party, to certain policies. This is a powerful force and it's a powerful feeling.If people feel like victims, it's unlikely that they're going to see the other party as a way to fix victimhood.

"So Republicans who agree with Trump that 'Hey, we are the victims,' they're never going to turn to Joe Biden for the remedy. They're only going to turn to Republicans in the future, maybe even continuing to support Trump. So one consequence of this, we think, is entrenching polarization, furthering extremity in beliefs about politics, and making people set up more in their existing camps."

Of course, Trump election loss and his subsequent behavior has further intensified feelings of victimhood: "That's precisely what the 'Stop the Steal' thing is about," Armaly said. "'We're the victims of fraudulent elections,' even though there's no evidence pointing there and they keep losing in court. But that is definitely a victimhood-cueing rallying cry."

In a way, this helps makes sense of the decades-long thrust of "The Long Southern Strategy." Threatened identities — first around race, and then gender and religion — were key to the whole enterprise. As co-author Angie Maxwell told me, "They didn't have infrastructure in a lot of places for the Republican Party. So they had to create this sense of urgency, and you do that by tapping into things that people feel are fragile and are being threatened." In short, they had to promote feelings of victimhood.

I asked Maxwell to comment on the theme of victimhood for this story. She responded:

In an effort to cut an electoral map path to victory, starting in the 1960s,Republican strategists pushed individualism against the collective — against collective bargaining, protest, organizing. Individualism creates blinders that can deny systemic racism, sexism and privilege. Simultaneously, these GOP strategists, in order to shake Southern whites lose from their long-term connection to the Democratic Party, manufactured a sense of urgency about everything from the "war on Christmas" to the welfare queen bankrupting the taxpayer. That combination creates a self-focused, faux victimhood, reminiscent of the Lost Cause in the South but with a national appeal.

This is how, under the "Stop the Steal" banner, we get a majority of House Republicans supporting an utterly frivolous lawsuit before the Supreme Court that flies in the face of decades of GOP "states' rights" rhetoric. Surprise! The Southern strategy was never about states' rights, any more than the Civil War was. (The Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made a mockery of those Southern claims.)

On the role of narcissism

It's worth highlighting how significant Trump's narcissism is in this dynamic. He is utterly incapable of ever admitting he's been wrong. When finally forced to recant his support for birtherism, he double-falsely claimed, "Hillary Clinton started birtherism, and I ended it." Now, having lost an election by more than 7 million votes he claims the election is being stolen from him.

So even though narcissism is only related to victimhood statistically, it's still important to consider the role it plays. For this, I reached out to therapist Elizabeth Mika, whose chapter in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" on "Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism" explained how tyranny is a "three-legged beast," encompassing the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole.

"A sense of victimhood — as opposed to real victimhood — is always based in narcissism: the erroneous, corrosive and inherently destructive belief that we are special — somehow better than others — and thus we deserve special treatment, perks and privileges," Mika said.

There's a logical connection, she continued. "Narcissists are eternal victims, as perpetual victimhood is the other side of the narcissistic coin. It can't be otherwise, because if you believe yourself to be special and the world does not reflect this back to you, as is always the case sooner or later, you are going to feel victimized by the lack of special treatment."

A similar logic applies to groups as well. "You can expect the members of historically privileged classes and groups to have a sense of specialness ingrained in them by the virtue of being part of that class," Mika said. "When their sense of privilege is threatened and/or eroded, by, for example, expanding the privilege to others, members of previously disenfranchised and thus 'inferior' groups, they react with anger and rage that seek suitable scapegoats, more often than not from among those who are seen as 'stealing' their privilege or otherwise responsible for its loss. For narcissists, the loss of privilege feels like oppression."

This description is a near-perfect fit for Trump's white, Christian nationalist base. That base easily delivered landslide re-election victories for Richard Nixon in the 70s and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, but has only managed one popular-vote victory since 1988. Its privileged position has been eroding for at least 30 years now, and has only survived this long because of multiple anti-democratic features of our politics: the Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Senate filibuster and ideologically-stacked courts. The longer that power has been sustained on such a fragile, illegitimate foundation, the more crushing its loss would seem. Hello, snowflakes!

A third kind of victimhood

As mentioned before, a third form of victimhood is proposed in the paper, an other-oriented or accusatory one typified by right-wing attacks on liberal "snowflakes" and political correctness in which victimhood is projected onto others. "This mobilizes the projectors because the 'victims' are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting."

This is clearly more complicated than egocentric or systemic victimhood. But more than projection is likely going on. It may be a process known as "projective identification," discovered by British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, which I wrote about here in late 2015. It involves "introjection (imagining another — or aspects of another — inside oneself) as well as projection—or even both, simultaneously." The first example Klein gave was a specific form known as "envious reversal," in which the projector's unwanted inner states (thoughts, feelings, etc.) are projected (into what Klein called the "container") while the projector steals some desirable state of the "container."

If one is not a victim but claims to be, that's very likely an example of envious reversal. But if one is a snowflake and has spent years attacking others as snowflakes, that's also an example of envious reversal. So, too, if you believe that others are unfairly claiming victim status, when in fact that's been your go-to move ever since Brown v. Board of Education. So there's a potential for this kind of victimhood to lead into a hall-of-mirrors fantasy situation. But remember: This is still subjective victimhood. Questions about how subjective and objective realities align are incredibly important, but to fully address them we need to understand the subjective side as well as can.

The first step in studying "other-oriented victimhood," Armaly said, would be to examine whether the "correlates" are "similar to egocentric or systemic victimhood, or whether we are talking about a third, totally unique type?" His intuition is that such people "would reject the idea that they're victims, most of the time," but might also "reject the idea that others are victims. Other-oriented victimhood doesn't ever seem to be saying, 'Oh yeah, those people are victims of the political process,' It's usually used as a way to say they're not."

The notion of other-oriented victimhood can also have significance for the public as citizens in a democracy, helping us to see things more clearly. "The bleeding heart in me wants to talk about empathy," Armaly said. "Maybe let's not think about victimhood in terms of who is and isn't a victim. Maybe there's another way to approach it. Also, I think victimhood is not zero-sum. Multiple people can be victims — it's not mutually exclusive and not dichotomous in that way."

As a big-picture thought about victimhood as whole, Armaly raised a fundamental question. "We should be asking ourselves, 'Are we comfortable giving victims increased status to make social and political claims?'" he said. "And then, similarly, 'Are we comfortable judging the veracity of different claims?' We don't have a way to do this. Society isn't cohesive. We don't have the same mores and the same norms, necessarily, across all facets of society." He went on to note that, "Elevating some claims over others incentivizes these feelings of victimhood, and that's one of the reasons people are attracted to them. I think we have to consider whether incentivizing that feeling is a good thing."

Recalling the three points from the conclusion of "Why Me?" cited above, the answer may be that victimhood is inevitably central to politics and isn't necessarily pernicious, but that our capacity to deal with it without falling prey to hyper-victimization may be at a historically low ebb. That recognition could help orient us toward civic repair. Eliminating both actual victimhood and a sense of victimhood is not within our power. But continuing to be a victim of victimhood just might be. If, as Armaly argues, victimhood is not zero-sum, the best way to help any professed victims might be to help them all. Yes, even the snowflakes-in-denial who can't let go of their damaged and defeated president.

aha: i got that this was transactional before, but now i see also extraction/extortion; capitalism, he is ultimate / apotheosis of me vs we.

grifter libtards decry gubmint but 1st to line up to suck off taxpyer resouces/ buffer/commons

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/donald-trump-hunger-games-meme/

truscott 4

Remember this number: $3.

That's how much Trump charged the federal government for a glass of water in April of 2018 when he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to the Washington Post, Trump's company also charged the government "$13,700 for guest rooms, $16,500 for food and wine and $6,000 for the roses and other floral arrangements," over the two days he held meetings with Abe at the resort. But one day, Trump was scheduled to meet with Abe without aides and advisers, with no meal service or cocktails or any other celebratory nonsense. Just the two leaders, alone in a room, talking. According to the Post, the bill for that day contained a line item reading, "Bilateral meeting. Water. $3.00 each."

Donald Trump has been paid "at least $2.5 million by the U.S. government," since taking office, according to official documents obtained by the Post. Trump has made more than 280 visits to his own hotels and golf clubs over the last four years, and the payments covered costs for "hotel rooms, ballrooms, cottages, rental houses, golf carts, votive candles, floating candles, candelabras, furniture moving, resort fees, decorative palm trees, strip steak, chocolate cake, breakfast buffets, $88 bottles of wine and $1,000 worth of liquor for White House aides." according to the Post.

And water. A total of six bucks for water, no charge being too small to make it onto a bill to the government for a payment going straight into the pocket of the man who owns the Trump Organization and everything it comprises, including his resort in Palm Beach.

It's apparently a good part of what the Trump base likes about him — his appetites, his pure, unadulterated, money-grubbing-right-down-to-$3-for-water greed. Trump has wanted more his entire life. He wants more money, of course. He has spent a lifetime in pursuit of more money, and then some more, and more and more. He borrowed so much money in pursuit of even more money that it drove him into bankruptcy, several bankruptcies in fact. Today, as president, he is said to be in debt for nearly $1 billion to banks and other lenders, a debt that will come due within the next few years, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Trump wants more fame, a drive that started off with mentions in gossip columns like the New York Post's "Page Six," during the years he was coming into his own as a builder in New York City. He used to call gossip columnists and plant items about himself, posing as a PR person, and then he would call the columnists the next day and comment on their mention of him in order to gain yet another column inch or two in the tabloids. Some said he ran for president back in 2016 to "burnish his brand," to achieve even more fame and use it to make even more money. Since he became president, he has been relentless in his pursuit of attention, tweeting at all hours, criticizing cable networks who don't give him enough coverage, calling in to shows like "Fox & Friends" and "Hannity" both to reward them for the coverage they've already given him, and to get more coverage.

He wants more women, from wife No. 1, Ivana, when he was just starting out, to wife No. 2, Marla Maples, after he jettisoned Ivana, and now wife No. 3, Melania, who replaced No. 2 when he determined she had a few too many miles on her. And then there were all the women in between, in and among his marriages, the women he groped on airplanes and at bars and during parties, the women he (allegedly) raped in places like a Bergdorf's dressing room or a hotel room or a bathroom during a party, the women whose mouths he forced his tongue down, the women he pushed up against walls and pressed himself against, the women whose bodies he commented on in offices or across rooms, the women whose skirts he put his hand up at restaurant tables, the women whose breasts he grabbed at tennis tournaments and beauty pageants, the women whose rear ends he grabbed in green rooms before television show tapings, the women he dragged behind curtains at New Year's Eve parties and forcibly kissed and groped. All of those women. Trump wanted their bodies and their mouths and he took them without asking permission because he was Donald Trump, and he took what he wanted.

He wanted more golf, so he played more golf more frequently than any president before him. He wanted so much golf that he went around the world buying and building his own golf courses, and then he played them, because he owned them, and because he owned the golf carts, as president he could charge the government for his own Secret Service agents. He could even charge the government for the hotel rooms the agents stayed in while they protected him. He charged the government $17,000 a month for a cottage at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, which the Secret Service had to rent month after month just in case he had a mind to play a round of golf.

Trump wants more adulation, more love from the "base," and when he feels he isn't getting enough, he tweets. There aren't enough hours in the day for Donald Trump. He was up at 3 a.m. this week, tweeting about the Supreme Court, the court to which he has appointed three arch-conservative justices, yelling at them for their recent decisions allowing mail-in votes to be counted after Election Day, because of course, he wants more votes. He's been up at 3 a.m. tweeting before, taunting a Miss Universe contestant for a "sex tape," taunting CNN as "low rated," bragging about his debate performance, yelling at polls that show him losing.

And now Trump is making his final campaign swing through the "battleground states," feeding the insatiable need of his base for more of himself. "Four more years" has become "12 more years." Somehow Trump is owed more years of the presidency because "they" took two or three years away from him during the Russia investigation, because "they" spied on his 2016 campaign, because "they" don't deserve to win. The red-hat-wearing mobs of un-masked fans at his rallies want more of the America they think Trump is bringing back to them. It's an America that is more white, has more guns, has more churches, more of "us," less of "them."

That's what they like about him. They want it all, the same way he does. That's what opposition to affirmative action has always been. They don't want some of the college admissions, they want them all. That's what Shelby County v. Holder was about, that's what voter IDs and all the restrictive rules about voting by mail are about. They want all the votes.

For the Trump base, making America great again means making America ours again, but he's going to make sure he puts it on their tab, right there with $3 for water and $546 for rooms and $50 for decorative palm trees for table decorations and $1,005.60 for 26 servings of Patron and Don Julio tequila, 22 Chopin vodkas, and six glasses of Woodford Reserve bourbon consumed by White House staffers at the Mar-a-Lago bar. It's going to cost us more than votes to get our country back. We're going to be paying for Trump's insatiable greed long after he's gone. More than 228,000 of us have already paid with our lives. If the Friday totals keep up — 98,500 new cases and more than 900 dead — a half million of us may perish by the time Trump walks out of the White House for the last time.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/economist-paul-krugman-libertarianism-gone-bad-wont-protect-americans-from-the-terrifying-path-of-19/

Paul Krugman explains why Ayn Rand's libertarianism is absolutely deadly

Alex Henderson October 23, 2020

During the coronavirus crisis, President Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies have not only downplayed the severity of the pandemic — they have also vehemently opposed social distancing restrictions, mask wearing and other measures meant to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Liberal economist Paul Krugman discusses that mindset this week in his New York Times column, slamming it as "libertarianism gone bad" and the toxic influence of the late right-wing author Ayn Rand.

"If you look at what Republican politicians are saying as the pandemic rips through their states," Krugman explains, "you see a lot of science denial. Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has gone full Trump — questioning the usefulness of masks and encouraging potential superspreader events…. But you also see a lot of libertarian rhetoric — a lot of talk about 'freedom' and 'personal responsibility.'"

Noting the autumn surge in COVID-19 infections that is occurring across the U.S., Krugman writes, "Donald Trump's disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ayn Rand — or, more generally, libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about."

Krugman agrees with libertarians that there are many times when the government needs to butt out and mind its own business. But when a pandemic poses so great a threat to public health, Krugman argues, it isn't government overreach to encourage social distancing or ask someone to wear a mask in public.

"Many things should be matters of individual choice," Krugman argues. "The government has no business dictating your cultural tastes, your faith or what you decide to do with other consenting adults. But refusing to wear a face covering during a pandemic, or insisting on mingling indoors with large groups, isn't like following the church of your choice. It's more like dumping raw sewage into a reservoir that supplies other people's drinking water."

According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 1.1 million people worldwide and over 223,600 in the United States — and some health officials fear that the worst is yet to come if the pandemic follows a path similar to that of the 1918/1919 Spanish flu pandemic, which went from bad to worse during its second wave. Whatever happens this winter, COVID-19 has already killed a staggering number of people. And in light of all the misery the novel coronavirus has inflicted, Krugman stresses, it is hardly unreasonable to ask Americans to take precautions.

"Many prominent figures still don't seem to understand, or aren't willing to understand, why we should be practicing social distancing," Krugman explains. "It's not primarily about protecting ourselves — if it were, it would indeed be a personal choice. Instead, it's about not endangering others. Wearing a mask may provide some protection to the wearer, but mostly, it limits the chance that you'll infect other people…. Trump may complain that 'all you hear is COVID, COVID, COVID.' The fact, however, is that the current path of the pandemic is terrifying — and we desperately need leadership from politicians who will take it seriously."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-and-the-right-share-a-darwinist-herd-mentality-and-preference-for-sacrificing-the-weak-to-capitalism/

carl pope salon

Donald Trump's promise in an ABC News town hall last month that the United States would soon achieve herd immunity for the coronavirus, and conflating that with herd mentality, may be explained because Trump is counting on the latter to rescue his second term. It's otherwise impossible to imagine a campaign whose endgame is to recover the lost loyalty of voters over 65 selecting as its closing argument, "Not enough of you have died yet."

It's a safe bet that none of his 2016 Republican primary challengers would have embraced the idea that the solution to the pandemic was more American casualties than the Civil War and World War II combined. But many of Trump's Republican comrades-in-arms have embraced, often eagerly, a default preference for herd immunity — harkening back to the harsh social Darwinism that underlies much of modern conservatism. Early on in the pandemic there were Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana and radio host Glenn Beck, all of whom argued that the loss of more American lives was preferable to scaling back the economy. Then, when the issue became wearing masks, some opponents argued "if I'm going to get COVID and die from it, so be it …" Of course they really meant, "If you are going to get COVID ..." Wearing masks was a deprivation of freedom — although this argument seems never to have been extended by Republicans to the prohibition on public nudity.

As the pandemic surged again, by October Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was referring to "unjustified hysteria" about covid, and asked, after he became infected, ""Why do we think we actually can stop the progression of a contagious disease?" (The obvious answer is that we have been doing so, with increasing success, since the 1854 cholera pump moment. That is rejected by many on the right, because stopping a pandemic may require the government to prevent citizens from endangering others.)

Herd immunity can sometimes reduce mortality from a disease, but over the centuries has failed to end the curse of influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, rabies or dengue fever. It fits neatly, however, into a social Darwinist framework. Those who die are the "weak" — the poorest, the youngest and the oldest young —or can at any rate be classified as weak and deserving to die, because they died.Survival of the fittest requires discarding the weak.Remember the "let them die" hecklers who populated some of the 2011 Republican debates on health care.

This underlying value distortion — my personal freedom extends to my right to endanger you — spreads out across a range of other issues.Today's Republican reluctance to curb pollution even when it is demonstrably is killing a power plant's neighbors, to keep pesticides that kill farm workers out of the fields or to do anything at all about the climate crisis, which conservatives have privately conceded for years was real and caused by carbon pollution, are all illustrations of how the toxin of social Darwinism still contaminates much of the right's thinking about freedom.

So Trump's response to the COVID crisis — and the willingness of the Republican congressional establishment to enable it — illustrates a deep-rooted flaw in the American right. In a world in which we are, like it or not, all bound together, a tolerable conservatism is one that is willing to protect me from irresponsible neighbors, whether those are COVID-risking teenagers, irresponsible gun owners or multinational chemical companies.

aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction

terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/americas-enemies-perceive-weakness-in-donald-trump-foreign-policy-expert-explains-how-the-president-squandered-us-exceptionalism/

no lnx audio

c de v

bot line chaotic makes him weak/played

president of the United States takes the following oath at his or her inauguration: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly betrayed this promise, and should long since have been removed from office for doing so.

The Constitution deems that the president is commander in chief of the military. As revealed in famed journalist Bob Woodward’s new book “Rage”, Donald Trump believes that members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed in battle are “suckers” and “losers” for not being as selfish and cowardly as he is. Trump also believes that disabled veterans should not be seen in public because they somehow shame or embarrass the country.

Trump also has no respect for the United States military’s role as defender of the country’s democracy from threats both foreign and domestic. To that end, he attempted to order military commanders to attack Americans who were (and are) exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights by protesting against his regime in response to the police killing of George Floyd, as well as in support of social justice more generally.

Fortunately, military commanders put the institutional legitimacy of the armed forces ahead of the president’s whims by deflecting his orders. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has also apologized for appearing alongside Trump on the streets of Washington.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he is likely ignore the results of the 2020 election, and may seek to use the military to quell protests or other acts of resistance, perhaps by invoking the Insurrection Act.

Trump has also pardoned accused or convicted war criminals because he idolizes cruelty and lawlessness. Trump and his regime, in fact, views war criminals as useful tools in his authoritarian campaign against American democracy.

Many of the United States’ most senior retired military personnel, members of the intelligence community and diplomats, as well as other elites in the national defense community, have publicly condemned Donald Trump as an extreme threat to the country’s safety, security and democracy.

Overall, Donald Trump has made the United States less safe, less respected, less powerful, less influential, and less respected as a world power. In the Age of Trump and the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has become a pariah nation, shamed before the world.

Is there any strategic logic to Trump’s decision-making about the United States and its role in the world? How do Trump’s ignorance, selfishness and authoritarian beliefs, combined with his conviction that his own personal interests are identical to the nation’s, imperil our safety and security? Does the Trump regime’s contempt for the truth and empirical reality endanger the long-term future of our nation?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent and co-anchor of “CNN Newsroom.” Sciutto previously served as ABC News’ senior foreign correspondent and during his extensive career has reported from more than 50 countries, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. His new book is “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World.”

At the end of this conversation Sciutto warns that the consensus among many of the country’s senior defense and intelligence professionals is that Donald Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, and is somehow personally bound to him. If this is true, Trump’s fealty to a foreign leader has fatally compromised his ability to make decisions in the best interests of the United States and the American people.

You can also listen to my conversation with Jim Sciutto on my podcast “The Truth Report” or through the player embedded below.

How are you feeling, given all that is happening and has happened with Donald Trump and his administration?

I’m feeling stress for my country. That is not a political sentiment. I love my country. I’ve spent a lot of time outside of it for professional reasons. As a foreign correspondent, you end up loving America more because you live in places where they do not have our freedoms or institutions, many of which we take for granted. When I see those institutions being undermined here in the United States and people losing confidence in their own country, I am very concerned. I am still an optimist, but there is much to be concerned about here in the United States because of Donald Trump and all that has happened.

How does America look from abroad?

There is not a lot of respect right now for the United States. I do not want to overstate that because, frankly, there are many countries in the world with much bigger problems than this country right now.

For example, the COVID outbreak. The U.S. has certainly been one of the worst in terms of responding to it. That is not a political statement. It is based on the data. Europe is doing much better for example than the United States with the pandemic and its deadly consequences and other problems.

The state of the country’s political discourse is also not good. Is the United States able to solve problems in the way it did not too long ago? Pew polling shows that the world’s opinion of the United States has greatly diminished. The world is viewed much worse than it was during another low point, which was during George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

How are career diplomats and other public servants reacting to the Trump regime and its assaults on norms and values? These are government professionals who have served in multiple administrations. How are they making sense of this tumult?

Here is what is different. There have always been disagreements about policy and how best to accomplish those goals. What is different now is that there is an assault on the truth. There is not an agreed-upon set of facts. At first, I thought that maybe having to confront a pandemic would do that. Another example would be Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. There was a bipartisan judgment that Russia interfered, and that the Russians did so to help Trump win.

It came out of committees, as well as the intelligence agencies. Trump attacked those findings and took them personally. That was a consensus not just of a bipartisan committee but the country’s intelligence community as well. Intelligence findings can be attacked more easily because it is still a matter of interpretation.

But in the middle of a pandemic, there are hard facts. People are dying. You can count the number of people dying. You can count and document the positive infection rates.

You can count the number of infections. One can easily disprove Donald Trump’s claims that cases are only rising because there is more testing, because the percentage of people testing positive is also going up. But not in this environment where even the facts are disputed. Conspiracy theories existed well before Donald Trump, but he has super-turbocharged them to the point where they are leaking more and more into mainstream conversation. Democracy cannot operate without an agreed-upon set of facts and the country is miles down that rabbit hole right now.

Does Donald Trump have an ideology? Is his administration guided by some overriding principle that orients its approach to the world?

He has an approach and a view of the world. It is an open question as to whether he has a strategy — and that is a question raised by people who worked for him. For my new book, I spoke only to people who worked for Trump and were appointed by him at the highest levels.

When I asked those officials to describe Trump’s view of the world it was described as transactional: “What can you do for me? I scratch your back. You scratch mine.” Trump has done that equally with adversaries and allies. Trump has no worldview beyond that. There is no understanding of the ancillary benefit of friendships and alliances.

[Former national security adviser] H.R. McMaster told me how much trouble he had convincing Trump that there was more to alliances than just some sort of quid pro quo bottom line. These include shared history, shared values, a shared interest in the rule of law, sharing of intelligence to fight terrorism and other understandings. Trump does not see the world and alliances in that way. As such, Donald Trump will just as easily upend a friendship as he will antagonize a competitor. The United States is on a path of confrontation with China. But the United States also has highly antagonistic relationships now with our closest allies in Europe. With South Korea, the president is demanding they quintuple their contribution to the deployment of U.S. forces there and is threatening to take those forces away in the midst of the worsening standoff with North Korea.

Or even consider Canada, arguably one of our closest allies. Trump has used national security powers to impose economic sanctions on them including tariffs. In essence, Donald Trump has labeled Canada a national security threat.

Donald Trump does not read. He is proudly ignorant. He is a malignant narcissist. How is it even possible to have a coherent foreign policy with such a president?

Trump’s national security advisers knew and realized that he was not reading any of the briefing notes. So early on, McMaster’s team came up with the idea of boiling the briefings down to note cards with just three bullet points, thinking that would get through to Trump....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-explain-why-the-wealthy-struggle-with-empathy/

matt r salon

a new study reveals that people from higher income backgrounds struggle with certain aspects of empathy when compared to individuals who have lower incomes, who are better at reading people’s emotions.

The research paper, which was published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” asked individuals from different class backgrounds to infer others’ emotional states by looking at images of their eyes and to attempt to assume the visual perspective of other people.

The findings suggest that our socioeconomic status may affect the way we see and interact with other people.

Researchers know that there are many things can make it difficult for one person to effectively empathize with another, including neurological conditions like autism and psychological illnesses like schizophrenia. In their study, researchers Pia Dietze of the University of California, Irvine and Eric D. Knowles of New York University attempted to better understand how social class specifically influences Theory of Mind.

"[Theory of Mind] encompasses a range of competencies that together enable people to solve problems in a world full of other minds,” the authors explain. “Examples of ToM include our ability to infer people’s emotions, understand others’ visual perspectives, trace behavior to actors’ underlying intentions and desires, and grasp the fact that others’ beliefs might misportray reality. We focus on two facets of [Theory of Mind] in this work: emotion perception and visual perspective taking.”

The authors concluded, both from their research and by analyzing previous research (some of which they felt was unreliable), that “higher social class is associated with attenuated [theory of mind] performance,” with individuals from higher income backgrounds struggling more to ascertain the emotions and empathize with the visual points of view of other people. One possible explanation for this is that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”This would also help people from lower classes to “spontaneously calculate other people’s perspectives.”

Dietze and Knowles also point out that their conclusion “stands in clear contrast to the common discourse concerning neurocognitive deficits among the lower classes.” They also note that “decades of research documents that lower-class individuals are more likely to exhibit attentional deficits and display impaired working-memory performance. The evidence provided here suggests that these deficits may be domain-specific. Indeed, we show that lower-class performance outcomes are reversed in the social realm.” The term “domain-specific” refers to the theory of learning which holds that there are multiple forms of intelligence rather than a single way to assess where one has cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses.

This is not the only new research which sheds light on how being wealthy can lead to harmful psychological behaviors and personal habits. In July a different study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals from affluent backgrounds would often deny their class privilege by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes,” the authors wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”

Another study, this one published in June in the journal Nature Communications, argued that the consumption patterns of the affluent are so egregiously unsustainable from an ecological standpoint that only a concerted effort by the wealthy to consume less can prevent catastrophes like global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions,” the authors wrote, adding that “existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.” They advocated “a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity,” pointing out that “theworld’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact” while “the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/economist-paul-krugman-gops-cult-of-selfishness-informed-its-destructive-response-to-coronavirus-pandemic/

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has reported a COVID-19 death count of more than 148,000 for the United States, which has become the world’s coronavirus hotspot. Liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column, argues that the United States’ high number of coronavirus-related deaths and infections underscores the failures of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.But Krugman also stresses that the problem goes way beyond Trump’s ineptness and exemplifies “America’s cult of selfishness.”

“Premature reopening led to a surge in infections: adjusted for population, Americans are currently dying from COVID-19 at around 15 times the rate in the European Union or Canada,” Krugman laments. “Yet the ‘rocket ship’ recovery Donald Trump promised has crashed and burned: job growth appears to have stalled or reversed, especially in states that were most aggressive about lifting social distancing mandates, and early indications are that the U.S. economy is lagging behind the economies of major European nations.”

Krugman notes that “Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy.” But he goes on to say that “there’s a deeper explanation of the profoundly self-destructive behavior of Trump and his allies: they were all members of America’s cult of selfishness.”

The economist explains, “You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society."

Republicans who are consumed with selfishness, according to Krugman, have a hard time looking at the big picture.

“I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for lightbulbs,” Krugman writes. “It’s the principle of the thing: many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.”

According to Krugman, far-right Republicans equate irresponsibility with “freedom.”

“This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom,” Krugman observes. “But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents teargassing peaceful protesters. What they call ‘freedom’ is actually absence of responsibility.”

Krugman concludes his column by warning that during the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans have “sacralized selfishness” with deadly results.

“What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness,” Krugman argues. “And this cult is killing us.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/do-republicans-have-a-god-given-right-to-infect-you/

leT

Writing at the Washington Times, Cheryl Chumley makes the argument we’re hearing a lot these days from those who are protesting against the measures being used to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She is particularly upset about any requirement for people to wear protective masks.

Major U.S. airlines have announced that as a condition of riding their friendly skies, passengers must all put on a face mask.

Let the muzzling of America commence.

After noting that some state governments are requiring people to wear masks under certain conditions—like working in a restaurant—Chumley writes this.

This seems a blatant violation of an individual’s right to choose — of an individual’s right to self-govern. America, after all, isn’t a nation founded on collectivism, but rather individualism — on the right of individuals to exercise their God-given authorities, absent government tinkering and intrusion. What gives government the authority to order citizens to cover their faces?

My immediate reaction was that she could make the same argument against things like speed limits, carrying explosives on airplanes, or even smoking in public places. After all, those laws restrict an individual’s right to self-govern. What gives the government the authority to order citizens to limit how fast they drive?

The answer, of course, is that we have always had laws that put restrictions on individuals to limit the damage their behavior could pose to others. Honestly, the kind of “individualism” Chumley describes is more akin to anarchy than anything our founders envisioned. They actually wrote a kind of collectivism into the Preamble to the Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In our modern-day two-party system, the traditional argument has never been that “freedom” gives the individual the right to do anything they please. Instead, it has been to disagree about how far the government should go in intervening for the common good.

At the Democratic Convention in 2012, President Barack Obama laid out that tension as he focused on what citizenship means in a democratic republic.

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world’s ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations…

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.

There is a reason why Obama focused his speech that year on the importance of citizenship. During a campaign appearance in Roanoke, Virginia, he had talked about the fact that economic growth is driven by a dynamic of both individual and collective effort.

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own…somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Republicans, and their presidential nominee Mitt Romney, zeroed in on two sentences: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” claiming that Obama attacked the very foundation of our free enterprise system. They even went so far as todedicate a whole day of their convention to a rebuke of those two sentences taken out of context.

This battle between the individual and the collective has been the defining difference between Democrats and Republicans for years. It is important to recognize that when conservatives talk about “freedom” these days, it is most often in the context of freedom from any form of government action or intervention. The claim, as Chumley notes, is that self-government no longer refers to our collective responsibilities as citizens of a democratic republic, but “an individual’s right to self-govern” themselves. That is one of the more dangerous arguments that Attorney General William Barr made during his speech at Notre Dame.

In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”

This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

What makes that argument so dangerous is that it wasn’t being made to promote anarchy or even libertarianism. Instead, it is a way to advocate for the idea of “religious liberty,” or the right of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs onto others via government intervention. In other words, it is all about freedom for me, but not thee.

That is precisely why we see the irony of people protesting the coronavirus restrictions carrying signs that read: “My body, my choice.” These people seem to believe in their freedom to threaten the lives of others during a pandemic, but the government should decide what a woman does with her body.

Even more dangerous is the kind of attitude on display with the protester who carried a sign that replicated the one on the gate of Auschwitz, translated “work will set you free.”

What I would observe is that the Republican Party has completely lost touch with concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” in an attempt to deny the collective responsibility of citizenship.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-most-horrifying-aspects-of-capitalism-to-the-ultra-rich-the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-a-trial-run-for-apocalypse/

coronavirus pandemic is a present-day dystopia. Unfortunately, it is not the stuff of a science fiction novel set in the near future or an alternate reality. If not stopped, this pandemic threatens to become a new type of normal, one where the pain and misery are chronic, and therefore gradually seen as acceptable. The damage is ongoing, and will only get worse with time.

This pandemic has already killed more than 70,000 people in the United States. A million or more are infected. The Trump administration — in what may well be an intentional undercount — now reportedly projects that by June 1 at least 3,000 people will die of COVID-19 every day.

The economic devastation has also been significant: At least 20 percent of Americans are out of work. Trillions of dollars in wealth and income have also been destroyed. The harm caused by this catastrophe will be intergenerational in ways not yet understood or imagined.

But for some people the coronavirus pandemic is a type of utopian dream. Many right-wing Christians see the combination of the pandemic and President Trump as good things. Why? Because in their mythology these events are harbingers of the apocalyptic “end times,” a titanic battle between good and evil during which true Christians who are “saved” will be raptured away to paradise. Writing at Rolling Stone, Bob Moser describes the power of this deranged fantasy over the Trump administration:

While the media typically just uses the euphemism “Christian” to describe such beliefs, these folks are Christian nationalists, who view the second coming of Christ as an event in which America will play a leading role, thanks to its founding as a “Christian” nation and its Judeo-Christian principles. They’re also known as Rapture Christians, thanks to their conviction that before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell…. Now, their pagan king is leading us through an actual Biblical-sized plague — with the guidance of End-Time Christians.

As a class, the gangster capitalist plutocrats view the coronavirus pandemic as another opportunity to make money from human misery and expand their power over America and the world.

Many neo-fascists and other members of the Global Right are “accelerationists” who want to bring about the destruction of multiracial democracy in North America and Europe so that they can rebuild Western society as a white-only or white-dominated autocracy. Nonwhite people, Jews, Muslims and other “undesirables” will be killed, enslaved or exiled through an apocalyptic “race war.”

Mark O’Connell is the author of the new book “Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back.” His essays and other writing have been featured in the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian.

In our conversation, O’Connell reflects on the strangeness of publishing a book about the end of the world just as the world is confronting the coronavirus pandemic. He explains how disasters are an opportunity for right-wing extremists, as well as plutocrats and oligarchs, to advance their antisocial agenda — and how such people plan to survive the apocalypse. O’Connell also argues that this pandemic may provide an opportunity for the best of humanity to assert itself, rather than devolving into barbarism as many doomsday preppers, survivalists, one-percenters and others have both predicted and, perhaps, hoped.

Given the coronavirus pandemic, your new book is either very well-timed or very horribly timed.

I suppose that it is both. But I can’t really decide. I was being interviewed recently and I was asked if “Notes From an Apocalypse” is prophetic. The book is actually the exact opposite. The timing is sheer coincidence. The prospect of a pandemic coinciding with the launch of my book seemed so far-fetched. Who could have predicted it? There is a great deal of dramatic irony around the timing for my book in a moment people are talking about nothing other than how apocalyptic everything feels.

Moreover, the prospect that the coronavirus pandemic could just become part of how children normally experience reality is quite sobering for me. I hope that these children, when they are adults, do not look back on this moment with the coronavirus as that singular event where everything went to hell. I hope they remember it as some type of weird, strange interlude that we all had to live through.

The apocalypse is never the end of the world. It is an idea that people reach for and use as a way to make sense of incomprehensible and challenging times. The apocalypse is a way to manage uncertainty and chaos and sudden change. Those are the times when the idea of the apocalypse rears its head, and I think this moment with the pandemic is definitely one of those moments.

In making sense of this moment, it’s very important to highlight how one person’s dystopia or apocalypse is another’s utopia and dream. Some people have been waiting for a disaster such as the coronavirus pandemic, in order to remake the world.

One of the things that has kept me going throughout this uniquely horrible experience is the idea that things are going to change in society because of this, and that those changes might be beneficial for a large number of people. The truths that are revealed by a global catastrophe cannot be easily ignored. The catastrophe shines a light on how societies are fundamentally structured. There will be those people who want to create positive change and there will be bad actors who are using the pandemic to advance a less hopeful and more negative vision of the future and society.

One of the scariest things about the coronavirus pandemic is that there are people, right now, for whom this disaster is an opportunity.

The coronavirus and its destruction strike me as a metaphor for Trumpism. You live in Britain. Is the coronavirus viewed as a metaphor for Brexit in the U.K. and Europe more broadly?

In terms of metaphor, for some time here in the United Kingdom and Europe everything seemed to present itself as a stand-in for Brexit. But I do not see the coronavirus as a metaphor for anything. Yes, there are ways in which it absolutely reveals so much about the way we live in the West and elsewhere at this moment in history. But how can the coronavirus pandemic be a metaphor for something else when it is the dominant subject of conversation — really the only thing that most people are talking about?

You are correct to say that the virus itself, in a U.S. context, is a huge society-wide problem. But the virus is not the central, fundamental core problem in your country. The problem is the radical inequalities in your society, the insane approach to health care, Trumpism and other issues which make the coronavirus’ impact much worse in your country than in most others.

In philosopher Fredric Jameson’s book “Archaeologies of the Future,” he argues that science fiction may focus on the future, but in fact all writing about the future is really an exploration of the present. How do you negotiate that tension?

In a way both of my books have been about “the future.” “To Be a Machine” is about people who are obsessed with a fantasy version of the future. “Notes From an Apocalypse” is also about some version of the future. But I am not interested in making predictions about what life will be like in the future, or thinking about various permutations of technology or politics, or how are we going to live in the year 2065 or what have you. That topic is not interesting to me.

I am interested in the present and the near past. For me the future is really a way to think through the complexities of the present. The ways that we imagine the future always have as much to do with the past as they do with anything else. The future is not a real thing. It is just an idea.

In terms of the way crises present a type of opportunity for some people, how are plutocrats and mega-rich individuals like Peter Thiel preparing for the apocalypse?

For me,Peter Thiel almost operates as a metaphor, a way for me to invest all of my anxieties and loathing about the extreme manifestations of capitalism. In that way, Peter Thiel is a kind of gift that just keeps on giving. A good portion of my first book, “To Be a Machine,” focuses on Peter Thiel’s quest for eternal life and the various companies he’s investing in as a way of accomplishing that goal.

In my new book, Thiel is a metaphor for the most horrifying aspects of capitalism, the moral void at the heart of the whole ideology and system. The way that he imagines surviving the collapse of civilization is extremely interesting insofar as it’s a way of thinking about how, in the present, with late-stage capitalism there is an increasing drift away from any kind of investment in democracy. What Thiel represents is the idea of the future as belonging to a very small number of extremely intelligent, far-sighted, radically self-interested individuals.

One of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic and economic collapse here in the United States has been the suggestion by Donald Trump and his followers that elderly and vulnerable people should be willing to die for “the economy.” It’s almost a form of human sacrifice.

Civilizations fall. And they fall quite suddenly. In fact, some of the most elaborate and sophisticated former civilizations practiced some type of human sacrifice as central to their culture. A classic example would be the Aztecs. They were convinced that human sacrifice was necessary for the continuation of their way of life. Such cultures genuinely believed that they had to kill to appease the gods and to ensure a good harvest or some other type of prosperity.

Now, it just so happens that they were wrong. Modern society has convinced its subjects that we have moved beyond such behavior. Human sacrifice seems too barbaric to us at present. But in reality, our own modern civilizations are based on human sacrifice in various forms.

The rich are building luxury bunkers to survive the “end of days” and to ensure their social and political power in the future. What does that reveal about Western society and culture?

Those bunkers are a classic, overblown, extreme metaphor for capitalism in the present, not in some imagined future. The rich are building luxury survival bunkers with private cinemas, DNA vaults, wine cellars and other lavish ways of surviving the end of the world. As the saying goes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

What do these luxury bunkers reveal about how the global one percent and other oligarchs imagine society? Do they simply reject the obligations and responsibilities that human beings should have to one another?Whether it is doomsday preppers who are stockpiling guns and freeze-drying food, or billionaires buying chunks of the South Island in New Zealand, the approach is to look after yourself first and survive at the cost of other people, or survive outside of the context of other people. In all these cases it is civilization as both an idea and structure that is considered a very fragile thing. From their point of view, society is a weak construct, a very thin layer of societal norms which hangs over an abyss of chaos and violence.

The preppers, as with the very rich who are building these luxury bunkers, have a sense that people are going to quickly revert to some type of animalistic savagery once a severe enough crisis comes along. This idea animates so many of these right-wing apocalyptic thinkers. It is capitalism to the extreme. The heavily fortified, luxurious bunker is just a logical conclusion of the gated community and of capitalism itself.

But such a conclusion is also wrong. During the pandemic, from what I have been seeing, people have mostly been pulling together. Community and society are much more resilient than we have been led to believe. That is something which is not accounted for in the worldview of the apocalyptic people, the preppers and so on. For them, this is not what is supposed to happen. They believed that the pandemic was supposed to create a state of mass civil unrest.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-re-emergence-of-totalitarianism-and-why-some-extremists-prevail/

j sherman

“News” means two things, what’s happening and what’s surprising. In information theory, it means surprise.It’s not news that you still have air to breathe or that millions live in poverty. More of the same is not news because it’s not surprising.

By information theory’s standard, it’s no surprise that news reporting is all about surprise, shock and the extreme versions of everything. Extremist trolls are surprising and therefore newsworthy, dominating subtler interpretations of what’s going on.

There’s a fundamental human bias toward “trolltalitarianism,” domination by the extreme, trolling version of any idea. There’s a strong bias toward extremism built right into our powers of attention. We ignore what’s subtle, we perk up about what’s extreme. Even when an idea originates as subtle, what makes the headlines won’t be.

Newsmakers play upon the trolltalitarian bias from opposite extremes. Proponents of an idea will be tempted toward extremism in order to cut through the din. Conversely, opponents of the idea will want to paint it extreme as possible to make a salient caricature of it. Shades of gray turn black and white to capture our attention.

Trolltalitarianism is frustrating for those who hold a subtler version of an idea. Religion and spirituality take many subtle forms, but what we hear about are the extreme versions. Likewise, political views get oversimplified toward ideological purity, absolutism and impracticality, because that’s what shocks, sells, emboldens and worse, wins simpler hearts and minds. Extremist loud-mouths capture attention by appealing to people who don’t have the bandwidth to think subtler thoughts – people so harried by everyday life or so education-deprived that they can’t handle subtlety.

It’s easy to point fingers at the extremists we oppose and to claim that our ideas are misunderstood but the problem runs deeper than that. It’s about attention, our extreme of consciousness and how it always shifts toward surprise. Trolltalitarianism isn’t about one extremism or another dominating but about the distracting allure of extremism in general.

Extremism is a relative term: Extreme compared to what? What’s the reference point by which you can claim that some other idea is extreme. Elsewhere, I’ve favored the term absolutism based on its original meaning “dissolved away,” in other words, ideas insulated from all possible challenges. Absolutism is often the means to extremist ends a way of making an idea shocking, new and threatening enough that it turns heads.

The term “extremism” is useful but doesn’t speak to the appetite for it, or its tendency to dominate the news. Hence, we need a term the way extremism prevails, for which I’d suggest trolltalitarianism.

Advances in media technology don’t cause trolltalitarianism; they exacerbate it. The problem originates in how attention works, again, the extreme of consciousness. We’re all living in the 21st century, ADHD.

We’re often told that we should be more grateful for what we have, more attentive to what’s already working in our lives. Still, among the things to be grateful for is our inattention to what’s already working. It frees attention to focus on problems yet to be solved, for things that can’t be handled by unconscious habit. Whatever keeps happening we handle unconsciously.Nobel prize-winning decision theorist Herbert Simon called this human trait “satisficing.” We don’t obsess over what’s sufficiently satisfying when there’s a squeaky wheel we grease it just enough to dampen the squeaking and then shift our attention to the next loudest squeaky wheel.We don’t optimize; we satisfice, shifting our attention away from the sufficiently satisfying.

As such, conscious attention is not a computer but something akin to a computer programmer. Anything that stays the same can be handled with unconscious habit, the equivalent of a computer algorithm. What rises to consciousness are matters as yet unsettled, the doubts that arise from surprising events. Consciousness stuffs as much as possible into unconscious habits, in order to free up attention for surprises.

Satisficing is efficient. We should all be grateful for our ingratitude. Still, it has a variety of perilous side-effects, chief among them our rubber-necking toward what information theorists call “surprisal.” Here’s another perilous side-effect.

These days, most of us feel pretty independent. We think we don’t need other people so much. Labor-saving technology means we don’t have to get people to do this, that and the other thing for us. We assume that we could go it alone if we had to.

Actually, we couldn’t. Our false sense of autonomy results from the reliability of our the people and things we depend upon. Lose electricity, the internet or public services during a government shutdown and you’ll soon notice how dependent you really are. When the habits of what service us, serve us reliably, we form unconscious expectations. We accumulate habits of unconscious dependence. We ignore what we depend upon.

The same can happen in a relationship. When your partner is always there for you, you’ll tend to assume them. Ironically then, we notice our dependency most when what we depend upon disappears. We feel most dependent when we’ve lost what we depend upon. As the song says “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”

Combine these two side effects and you’ll get extremist versions of autonomy, for example, Libertarian and anarchist extremists, loud-mouths proclaiming their absolute independence.They don’t need other people, their burdens and their challenges. What use are fellow citizens who disagree with them? People who disagree with their extreme trolling opinions are dead wood, second class citizens little better than illegals. Liberty is a virtue we all value. Libertarianism extremism ignores liberty’s cost. For anyone to feel independent, what they depend upon must be kept reliable.

Is there a remedy for our innate trolltalitarian tendencies? Is there any way to counter the extremes of consciousness so we can hear the gray within the black and white fray?

Education perhaps which, at its best, cultivates greater tolerance for, and curiosity about ambiguity and subtlety. Or maybe we just have to wait until we get jaded by the din of attention-seeking extremism and tune it all out.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-far-right-wants-to-make-its-shared-fantasy-of-violent-civil-war-a-reality/

david n kos

The Age of Conspiracy Theories in which we are now immured has produced a kind of bastard offspring: the Shared Violent Fantasy. Exhibit A is the “Boogaloo,” the far-right’s ironic name for the long-sought “second civil war” they believe is on the verge of erupting in the United States—and in which the ongoing novel-coronavirus pandemic has become a virtual petri dish for cultivating the fear of societal collapse essential to their worldview.

Like many conspiracy theories, and all such fantasies, the “Boogaloo” has a powerful tendency to produce real-life violence from people who absorb the underlying paranoid values and believe in them fervently. A recent incident in Texas in which a self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boi” set out to murder a police officer in order to help spark the civil war underscores the extent to which the believers are likely eventually to attempt manifesting their fantasies—which can entail violence not just against authorities, but sometimes even their unsuspecting neighbors.

Aaron Swenson is a 36-year-old Texarkana man who frequented “Boogaloo”-related Facebook pages with some frequency, sharing their frequently violent memes and indulging the usual violent rhetoric in the comments. Eventually, he reached a point where he decided to act on it.

The world of “Boogaloo” on social media—particularly on Facebook, where over 125 such pages reside—is riddled with references, both direct and obscure, to their eagerness to begin a civil war by shooting law-enforcement who attempt to enforce gun-control measures, or for that matter any other measures that attract the ire of the far right. Recently, these have come to include COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures.

The universe it occupies resides in a bubble of conspiracy theories and “constitutionalist” fantasies, but with a distinctly alt-right edge. Irony abounds everywhere:adherents wearHawaiian shirts as a reference to “the boog,” or the “Big Igloo” (the “Boogaloo” flag features an igloo and a palm tree). Their memes reference “Pepe the frog,” white-nationalist OK signals, and the common shared belief that nefarious communists are plotting to confiscate their guns and enslave them in concentration camps. This fantasy is the justification for their announced intention to begin shooting their fellow citizens, especially those who work for the federal government or police.

On the night of April 11, Aaron Swenson began livestreaming from his pickup truck, telling his audience that he was out hunting a police officer—anyone would do, he wasn’t particular—to shoot and kill, all in order to start the “Boogaloo.” He told them he was seeking a lone cop to “ambush and execute.”

People began calling the Texarkana Police Department, which promptly found the page and figured out both where Swenson was located and what kind of vehicle he was driving. Upon locating him, he fled a squad of police cars at high speed, eventually grinding to a halt well after his tires were flattened by a spike strip. “He was wearing an armored plate carrier type vest when we arrested him, and officers found several loaded weapons inside his truck,” the police department’s Facebook post reported.

At his own Facebook account, Swenson liked more than a dozen pages that mention boogaloo in their names, as a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on the “Boogaloo” phenomenon described. It also noted that “some users leaving comments on the profile on the night of the attempted attack endorsed the targeting of police officers, while others suggested calling 911 in response to the live broadcast.” The two videos were active on the Facebook page at the time of the report, having amassed over 1,500 and 3,400 views, respectively; however, they have since been removed by Facebook.

Swenson has been charged with making terrorist threats against an officer, evading with a vehicle and illegal possession of a weapon.

He is not the first such “Boogaloo” enthusiast intent on making the shared fantasy into a violent reality. In January, three would-be terrorists from the neo-Nazi organization The Base were arrested by the FBI, charged with plotting to wreak havoc with their weapons at a planned anti-gun-control march in Richmond, Virginia, around which “Boogaloo” rhetoric was already rife.

A few days later, three more “Boogaloo”-loving members of The Base were arrested in Georgia for plotting to assassinate a local antifascist couple, as well as overthrow the local county government.

At the Richmond rally, the “Boogaloo” was a major theme—flags, signs, and social-media posts from the event all referenced and celebrated it—that continued even afterward during the debate in Virginia over its gun-control laws.

And just as the white-nationalist, conspiracist and “accelerationist” right has sought multiple means to exploit the novel-coronavirus pandemic, the “Boogaloo” theme has become a louder topic of discussion on far-right telegram channels. The lockdown measures instituted by governors around the nation in response to the virus have particularly provided ample evidence for the conspiracists—in their minds, at least—of their long-running contention that “globalists” are seeking ways to enslave the world.

Signs referencing the “Boogaloo” have popped up at a number of the far-right-led protests against the lockdown measures. One marcher at the “ReOpen” rally in Topeka, Kansas, on April 23 carried a large black “Big Igloo” flag.

There has also been a certain amount of somewhat predictable crossover between the “Boogaloo” element and the far-right conspiracists of the Trump-loving QAnon world, some of whom have also been acting out violently during the pandemic—notably the locomotive engineer who attempted to ram the USNS Mercy with a train engine.

According to QAnon expert Travis View, the “Boogaloo” has become the preferred fallback position for people swept up in “The Storm” theories, believing that one day soon there will be mass arrests of leading liberal and media figures for their roles in a global child-trafficking ring, and increasingly disappointed at its failure to materialize.

“If that change doesn’t come, some of the followers have made reference to what they call Plan Z,” View says. “If the whole Q operation fails, then Plan Z is sort of equivalent to what the far-right extremists call the ‘Boogaloo.’ Which is civil war, basically.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the interest in a civil war. The TTP report found that most of the 125 Facebook groups devoted to the “boogaloo”—some 60%—were created in the very recent past (within three months), just as the states began declaring lockdowns and social-distancing measures. Perhaps more worryingly, “they have attracted tens of thousands of members in the last 30 days.”

In several private boogaloo Facebook groups that TTP was able to access, members discussed tactical strategies, combat medicine, and various types of weapons, including how to develop explosives and the merits of using flame throwers. Some members appeared to take inspiration from President Donald Trump’s recent tweets calling on people to “liberate” states where governors have imposed stay-at-home orders.

Despite these findings, TTP notes, Facebook has been slow to remove these pages. One of the most prominent—Thicc Boog Line, which specializes in selling branded “Boogaloo”-themed gear and clothing—attracts thousands of readers. It has recently been pitching messages to its readers emphasizing the opportunity to wreak “boojahideen” havoc during the time of a pandemic.

These findings resonate with a similar report issued in February by :{the :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Network Contagion Research Institute,:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: warning that “domestic militants” are organizing around memes to “incite violent insurrection and terror against government and law enforcement.”

The boogaloo, a joke for some, acts as aviolent meme that circulates instructions for a distributed, viral insurgency for others.The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition,may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events.

Daniel E. Stevens, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, the umbrella organization under which TTP operates, told Christopher Mathias of HuffPost in a statement that “Facebook’s failure to stop their platform from being used as an organizing tool for extremists is completely unacceptable.”

“There is nothing subtle about how these extremist groups are using Facebook’s platform to advance their cause,” Stevens said. “Boogaloo proponents are not simply discussing ideas or political views; they are directly advocating for violent action and tactically planning how to defeat government entities.”

“Boogaloo” enthusiasts indeed have detailed plans for how to achieve their goals, both militarily and through propaganda, as the TTP report details. However, government and law enforcement are not the only targets that “Boogaloo” memes discuss. A subcurrent in a number of the violent fantasies that they express in their memes is the idea of committing home-invasion robberies targeting their relatively hapless and untrained neighbors as a means of thriving during the civil war—or a pandemic.

Another featured a photo of an angry Joaquin Phoenix in Jokerwith the script: “When you dispatch the normie with ease to raid their stash because they stocked up on TP and not ammunition”—with a subscript across the bottom reading: “You get what you fucking deserve.”One popular meme among Facebook “Boogaloo” followers was one that showed a SWAT-style armed raid team in military gear massing outside a door, with the script: “Me and my boys going for a grocery run at my asshole neighbor’s house.” Another features a grid of graphics demonstrating military hand signals during a raid, all of which are interpreted in the language of a home invasion: “Shoot that dog.” “Cover up the evidence.” “I found cocaine. It’s pretty good.” “Wrong house. Let’s boogie!”

These ideas are not particularly new among the more openly cynical participants in far-right conspiracism and survivalism. Indeed, they were openly elucidated back in 2014 by a “Patriot” movement survivalist named Tyler Smith, who was featured on an episode of National Geographic’s TV series Doomsday Preppersboasting about his plans to invade the homes of his neighbors—particularly those who might also be preppers, since they would make better targets.One of the more commonly shared of these memes actually makes fun of other “preppers,” particularly those who are suddenly new to the business amid the pandemic. It shows a “Virgin Prepper” who is “always scared, can’t sleep at night,” and “has no fun,” then contrasts him with an obviously fun-loving “Chad Raider” who “Takes your good shit and burns all the rest so no one else can have it,” and is seen holding up a bag marked “All Your Shit.” He’s also “not scared of death or coronavirus.”[vid]

“We’re not in it to stockpile,” he proclaimed in a segment that was used to promote the show. “We’re in it to take what you have, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. We are your worst nightmare, and we are coming.”

He told the show’s producers that he only had a few months’ supplies for his family because he intended to aggressively assault his neighbors and steal their food and weapons caches.

“All your shiny ARs, your high-powered .308 rifles, your 50,000 rounds of ammo, are all going to be ours,” he said on the show.

Smith was arrested by the sheriff of Pierce County, Washington, where he resided at the time, shortly after his appearance on national TV, because he wielded multiple guns on camera in the segment, and he was already a felon (on a sexual-behavior-with-a-minor charge) forbidden from owning weapons. He spent a couple more years in prison for that, but was back on the streets by late 2016.

He was most recently spotted marching in Portland with Patriot Prayer—the far-right street-brawling group led by Joey Gibson of Vancouver, Washington—at one of its 2017 demonstrations. Gibson, as it happens, has been active in the anti-coronavirus-lockdown protests, traveling to Seattle and Olympia for protests.

Those protests, of course, featured plenty of “Patriots” wearing Hawaiian shirts underneath their body armor—a signal for what the “boojahideen” like to call “the Big Luau.” The chief organizer of the “Boogaloo” motif in Olympia was Matt Marshall, the leader of the III Percent of Washington, a “Patriot” militia group based in Eatonville, Washington, and a close ally of both Gibson and state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right legislator whose plan for a post-breakdown society called for the execution of all non-believers.

These violent fantasies keep mounting in number and vehemence. The question increasingly is what spark will inspire them to attempt to make them manifest.

see free freedom, liberty etc god term ~ tyranny

aha: recall that magical invis hand converts all my selfish act into the common good = $ = prospeity= life = up good=god

ainsly earh F&F [something sensible ] =a plot to take away our freedom

gadsen presumably big in TP ~ stay at home covid protest eg gadsen flags

ME VS WE // GUNS 9cops wil get sick, ppl of color will riot/loot

Dr. Richard Pan, a pediatrician and California state senator who has championed stronger vaccine mandates, described anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protesters as “essentially selfish” because they put other people at risk.

“One of the hallmarks of the anti-vaccine movement is this sense of selfishness and lack of concern for other people’s health,” Pan said. “They like to talk about rights and freedom. But what they really want is freedom without consequences.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/we-had-a-better-social-safety-net-then-we-busted-unions/

...1935 act...

Unions became a lynchpin to a robust social welfare system during World War II. They built on what they had won at the bargaining table, and began to accept employer-provided benefits in lieu of wage increases, which were restricted by the National War Labor Board. After the war, it was not clear whether the country would increase or decrease the government’s role in the safety net. Many unions demanded a more robust state presence and pushed (unsuccessfully) for universal health coverage, full employment legislation that would guarantee all workers a job, and even legislation that would link wages to prices. When they lost these legislative battles, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), the United Auto Workers (UAW), and other unions began to push for employer-provided health care and retirement plans in labor contracts. Workers and employers struggled over the developing employer-provided social safety net. In the early 1950s, up to three-quarters of strikes were over health and welfare issues....

ctr-pt: to covid bailout bill as dis cap'l NEW STORY? WE CAN SAVE $ AND PPL BY GOING GREEN

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-economic-growth-2645724784.html

Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.

In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.

The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK

The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.

While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.

The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.

"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.

The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy.The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.

According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.

"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.

"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.

However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.

"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves"...

me v we, my freedom; i have no responsibilty towe to not spread covid

Gadsden flag is a historical American flag with a yellow field depicting a timber rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. Positioned below the rattlesnake are the words "DONT TREAD ON ME."

420

trump twt support TP covid protests, // ingraham

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/governor-warns-trump-against-encouraging-supporters-to-disobey-the-law-on-lockdowns-words-can-be-fatal/

no lnx

Governor warns Trump against encouraging supporters to ‘disobey the law’ on lockdowns: ‘Words can be fatal’

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story April 18, 2020

On Friday’s edition of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) tore into President Donald Trump for his comments that Democratic states should be “liberated” from lockdown orders.

“Governor, you called the president’s tweets saying liberate Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, ‘dangerous’, ‘unhinged,'” said Cooper. “You just heard him … I’m wondering what your reaction is.”

“Extreme disappointment, and frankly anger, because we’ve lost over 500 people in my state, and we know — there’s saying in automobile safety, that speed kills. Well, words can be fatal too.”

“When you have a president of the United States openly, willfully, maliciously trying to encourage people not to abide by the law in these states — these orders are the law of these states — president of the United States willfully trying to inspire people to disobey and violate the law with potentially fatal consequences, is irresponsible, no other way to look at it,” continued Inslee. “And what is doubly enraging to us, both Republicans and Democrats, the day before this president put out very clear guidelines based on substantial epidemiological evidence of his experts Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx that had a lot of reason to it, saying we have to wrestle this virus down significantly before we let off pressure of social distancing.”

“His own physicians saying this, his own guidelines that we’re pretty consistent with in state approaches, Republicans and Democrats,” added Inslee. “The next day, to say you should ignore that, is an outrage.”

Watch below:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-tormented-conservative-mind-is-so-drawn-to-the-dangerous-allure-of-miracle-drugs/

no lnx

Here’s why the tormented conservative mind is so drawn to the dangerous allure of miracle drugs

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 3, 2020

In one of the oddest developments of the coronavirus crisis, there’s been a run on a pair ofantimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which are used primarily in the U.S. to treat arthritis and to prevent organ damage from lupus. The drugs are being sucked out of pharmacies at an alarming rate, thanks to Americans who have convinced themselves these drugs will save them if the develop COVID-19, and thereby leaving patients who actually need these medications in danger.

This is happening in the face of only thin evidence that these drugs work against the novel coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that they don’t work. At one Paris hospital that used the drug heavily — on the recommendation ofDidier Raoult, a climate change-denying French doctor with a shady reputation— the results suggest these drugs are not effective at all. Chinese doctors also concluded they were useless. These drugs are known to have some scary side effects, including sudden cardiac death in some patients. They are also notorious for psychological side effects, such as paranoia and nightmares. At least one person in the U.S. has died from swallowing aquarium cleaner that contains a similar chemical compound.

So why are so many people so eager to get their hands on drugs that are clearly dangerous and may do no good?

The most immediate reason is simple: The people rushing the pharmacies are Republicans, and both Donald Trump and numerous Fox News personalities have told them these drugs are a “game-changer” that can save them from the coronavirus.

But there’s a reason these false or unproven claims are resonating with the ordinary citizens of Trumpistan. The hope that there’s a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.

Conservative ideology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Instead they’re drawn to this fantasy that there’s a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.

There’s no question that Trump and other right-wing figures are pushing this hydroxychloroquine angle hard. Trump has talked about these drugs several times during his daily propaganda-dump “press briefings,” as well as on Twitter.

Laura Ingraham of Fox News has been hyping this stuff heavily, hosting a doctor who misleadingly argued that “this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic” Wednesday night. She’s also had tweets removed by Twitter for promoting medical disinformation.

Sean Hannity of Fox News has been urging his millions of viewers to grab this stuff up as well, saying “I love the idea of off label use” and arguing that even if it doesn’t work, people have “right to try”— completely ignoring that these drugs are dangerous.

There are many other examples, carefully collected here by Media Matters. This kind of repetition works, and goes a long way towards explaining how enthusiastically right-wing audiences have latched onto these drugs as a possible miracle cure.

But hydroxychloroquine mania also flows from the rigidly hierarchical viewconservatives hold of society, one where even basic necessities like health care should be differentiated along class and race lines. Public health measures like quarantine and vaccine are viewed suspiciously precisely because they involve everyone on an approximately equal basis. They long for a special kind of medical care, one that’s just for the people they see as better than everyone else.

This attitude has manifested in many ways before this crisis, most notably around the debate over health care policy. For progressives, the conservative resistance to a single-payer health care system is baffling, even viewed from the perspective of pure self-interest. Private insurance is expensive and unreliable, and since your plan is constantly changing, it can makes basic things like keeping a steady relationship with a doctor nearly impossible. A single plan for all Americans that covers us all in the same way would be cheaper and more efficient and take a lot of pain out of seeking medical care when you need it. That seems obvious.

But that’s just what conservatives don’t like about it: They don’t want a single plan for all Americans.The very idea of having the exact same health care plan as people they see as beneath them, especially lower-income people of color, causes an angry reaction. That’s what all the right-wing hysteria over “rationing,” in response to both Obamacare and the possibility of Medicare for All, is ultimately about.It’s not that you might have to wait in line for something like knee surgery, because that’s already happening under our patchwork private-insurance system. It’s that people you deem unworthy, due to skin color or class status, also get to wait in line and — heaven forbid — might be ahead of you.

(This attitude also explains the longstanding right-wing desire to police the food purchases of people on food stamps, to make sure they are sticking with “their” food and not buying conservatives feel are reserved for true and upstanding Americans. It also explains the often-hysterical levels of right-wing hostility to public transportation, which can be traced back to the end of the practice of sending black people to the back of the bus.)

In this worldview, certain kinds of health care are for grubby commoners, while the well-off white homeowner class should have its own elite status. This is also part of the reason that the anti-vaccination movementhas taken off in this country. Vaccinations, after all, are an unpleasant reminder that disease has no respect class or race, but sees all humans as basically equal, which very much does not fit with conservative ideology.

Unsurprisingly, then, anti-vaxxer attitudes have taken hold on the right, especially in the religious right, which has long been tightly intertwined with a hostility to the government defining and controlling public goods, and has favored widespread privatization of everything from education to welfare.

A lot of people believe that anti-vaccination attitudes are most common among New Age-style leftists, but in reality, Republicans are more likely to oppose mandatory vaccinations than Democrats. It’s largely Republican elected officials who are trying to roll back laws requiring vaccinations, and the religious right has increasingly promoted the idea that it’s better for kids to simply get diseases like the chicken pox than to vaccinate them.

It’s true that anti-vaccination ideology started off in lefty circles, but that happened largely among well-off white people who may vote Democratic but tend to live in highly segregated communities and tend to embrace reactionary ideologies like “attachment parenting” that prevent women from having employment outside of the home. Ultimately, the logic of anti-vaccination comes down to a belief that an elite lifestyle of organic foods and helicopter mothering precludes the need for sharing the same health care common people use, including universal vaccination. That this mentality would leap to Republicans, who would lean into it even harder, isn’t really a surprise.

The irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the “elite” form of health care — organic food, a mother’s unwavering attention, chicken pox parties — is less effective than the universal policy that’s under disdain, which is vaccination. But that kind of logic, where reactionaries turn up their noses at the common good since it also benefits the proletariat, is hardly limited to health care. It’s also evident in everything from rejecting the local taco stand to thinking that hip-hop isn’t “real” music.

That tormented way of thinking is what’s driving the conservative enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The drug probably doesn’t work, and the side effects are scary. But getting a prescription for it helps set one apart from ordinary working people who are doing the stuff public health officials prescribe, such as washing their hands a lot and staying home (even though, for many, it’s meant the loss of jobs and steady income).

Even if a coronavirus vaccine is developed relatively quickly, don’t be surprised if many conservatives prefer the fantasy of hydroxychloroquine over having to submit themselves to the same jab that janitors and hamburger flippers will line up for. Most working-class people can’t afford to turn their backs on effective, preventative health care when they can get it.

an 320

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/me-not-we-heres-how-far-right-arguments-against-social-distancing-mimic-those-against-obamacare/

interesting long v short, me v we: limit immigrant will hurt economy

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trumps-most-lasting-legacy-analyst-reveals-the-presidents-worst-mistake-in-economic-policy/

...Admitting fewer immigrants generally means less economic growth, since labor force growth is an important element of economic growth,” Anderson explains. “It is economic growth that improves the standard of living in a nation. Using the public charge rule to reduce legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy.”

Anderson backs up his assertions by citing data from Macroeconomic Advisers as well as economists at Oxford University. Macroeconomic Advisers’ Joel Prakken, Anderson notes, has estimated that cutting legal immigration in half in the U.S. would reduce the country’s rate of economic growth by about 12.5%. And Oxford economists, Anderson observes, have said that the majority of economic gains the U.S. enjoyed from 2011-2016 would have been wiped out without immigration

Anderson also points out that Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley, has cited immigration as an importance source of economic growth....

this cd be our future, also booktv

bento box: me now, me later, us now, us later

gop trump smash and grab is me now (and a bit us, as defined as party, which is just an extension of my pvt selfish ambition, means to an end.

// asian comic destroys america: amazon now, before, figure out what i want before i know and send it to me now

trump ultimate ego-ist baby balloon

transactional: how do i benefit now?

919 cult corrupt different in kind not just degree/freq? related to post-truth?

trump inc pod

...we’ve done dozens of episodes over the past 18 months, detailing how predatory lenders are paying the president, how Trump has profited from his own inauguration and how Trump’s friends have sought to use their access in pursuit of profit.

We’ve noticed something along the way. It’s not just that the president has mixed his business and governing. It’s that the way Trump does business is spreading across the government.

Trump’s company isn’t like most big businesses. It is accountable to only one man, it has broken the rules, and those promoting it have long engaged in what Trump has dubbed, ahem, “truthful hyperbole.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/how-tumps-old-business-patterns-are-spreading-across-the-federal-government/

aha, lessen power of one small aspect of democracy in cap'lism, structural incentive MAX profit [// Worster Dust Bowl maxims, extraction]

1219, CoC lobby

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/reuters-america-update-1-u-s-sec-proposes-rules-that-could-limit-shareholder-voices.html

Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street’s top regulator on Tuesday proposed a pair of long-awaited rules that would set new limits on shareholders ability to call for corporate changes on thorny issues like climate change disclosures and executive compensation In one of the biggest wins for the corporate lobby under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 along partisan lines to raise the re-submission thresholds for motions that shareholders file on company ballots and to put new requirements on firms guiding investors how to vote in corporate elections.

Both shareholder proposals and proxy advisory firms are cornerstones of corporate governance and how investors hold management accountable.

Both changes will be subject to public comment.

Democrats Rob Jackson and Allison Herren Lee voted against the rules, saying they tilted the playing field toward corporate management.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/neoliberal-capitalism-and-the-limits-of-individual-choice

fitbit, 23& me etc

...These services also draw on, exploit and kick into high gear the notion that it is the individual’s responsibility, given this knowledge, to mitigate all health risks. As such, it becomes even more incumbent on the subject to align their interests, behaviours, and labour in ways that are consistent with neoliberal health objectives. This approach callously disregards inequalities of income, access, and education; the role played by the environment in determining health outcomes (e.g. pollution, waste, infrastructure) – which often cleave along racial lines, and the very real way in which the ability to engage in labour oriented around health and wellness requires that ones’ labour in the public sphere (i.e. productive work) is stable, sustaining, and life-affirming.

Notably, most of these services allow for and recommend that consumers to engage in form of communicative interaction through social networking such that the data that is produced, according to Tamar Sharon, becomes “not just a tool for gaining insights about oneself but becomes a medium for connecting with others.” In doing so, as stated by Deborah Lupton, they aim to fulfil the very human need to be part of a social community, albeit superficially, and does so by encouraging users to produce personal health narratives through blog posts, entries, and videos about ones’ findings, conditions and progress – all forms of affective, unpaid labour.

cooch evil b/c aid weaponized

snap or other help lose green card/path to citizen? 8/13/19

aha-let: isolation anomie seems to underlie much of our problems; but not quite so simple as me v we; all the me's want or imagine being part of a we, in fact d roof and other shooter imagine they will catalyze action in their we subgroup turner files race war; many indiv are not part of a larger we that can have agency in the world (a union, church, neighborhood).

deathcult

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-frightened-legions-show-a-pathology-at-the-root-of-our-cultural-nervous-breakdown/

Trump’s frightened legions show a pathology at the root of our cultural nervous breakdown

Written by Phil Rockstroh / Common Dreams August 9, 2019

The United States of America is less of a nation than a collective, psychotic episode.

Within day to day life in the nation, a cultural aura exists that shifts, mingles, and merges between a sense of nervous agitation and displaced rage, in combination with a sense of weightlessness. The fragmented quality of daily life imparts an insubstantial, unreal quality wherein the citizenry of the capitalist/consumer empire of hungry ghosts drift through a nadascape comprised of ad hoc, fast-buck-driven, suburban/exburban architecture and the ersatz eros of constant, consumer come-ons.

Yet beneath the nebulous dread and nettling angst of it all, there exists the primal human imperative for connection and social communion i.e., authentic eros. The most lost among the lost in the ghostsphere of the collective mind attempt to animate the realm of shades with libations of blood. The gods of the capitalist death cult demand no less.

“According to its own laws, the nation’s citizenry, sufferers of mental distress, should be restricted from purchasing a gun. Yet without a doubt, the most disturbed of all are the nation’s political class, those responsible for gun legislation.”

Where does an impulse to possess an unlimited number of firearms fit into the scheme of things? A firearm’s heft, for one. The weapon feels substantial when held and hoisted thus serves, provisionally, to mitigate a psychical sense of weightlessness. The act of engagement eases nervous agitation. Guns reality is antithetically to the weightless content of media reality. Focus is achieved when one aligns the weapon’s site to a target. Nebulous dread transforms into adamantine purpose. The presence of an Angel Of Death will focus the mind. The ground, for the moment, feels solid beneath one’s feet. Hence, there arrives a craving, in the sense of addiction, to hoard the object that provides relief; in addition, massive quantities of ammunition must be stored as emotional ballast. The mystifying, rankling, uncontrollable criteria of this weightless Age and the white noise of uncertainty seem to yield to the clear and decisive crack of a rifle shot. Relief is imagined in the concomitant carnage. Rebecca West captures the phenomenon in prose:

Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, choose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half will live out the latter on a collective basis. During the blood lust on display at Trump rallies, the mob finds a collective comfort zone in catastrophic longings. The domestic landscape of paranoia works in behalf of the profiteers of perpetual war, perpetrators of the U.S.-created deathscapes overseas, and vice versa, in a self-resonating feedback loop of carnage.

In our era, in which, the U.S. empire is in decline, as a consequence, the White supremacist order no longer seems inevitable, Trump’s frightened legions have personalised the decline. In their gut, they feel as if their identity is under siege. Seal off the nation’s borders. Construct an unscalable wall. Create a cordon sanitaire to protect and preserve racial purity. A strong authority figure is craved in order to set the world back in order. The phenomenon could be termed, Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)—a pathology manifested in personality types who have been traumatized by the authoritarianism of the U.S. socio-political milieu but who seek to assuage their hurt and humiliation by identification with the very forces responsible for their torment. The stuff of a cultural nervous breakdown.

To that end, according to its own laws, the nation’s citizenry, sufferers of mental distress, should be restricted from purchasing a gun. Yet without a doubt, the most disturbed of all are the nation’s political class, those responsible for gun legislation. There is compelling evidence that they present a clear and present danger to themselves and others. The political class is a menace to society; they make decisions, more often than not, based on delusional thinking, that are responsible for harm on a massive scale. Thus they should be subject to institutional-style restraint, within the confines of the most heavily secure, lockdown ward in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Although the so-called mentally ill, as a rule, are not any more inclined to commit violent crimes than are the general population of capitalist dystopias. The U.S. was founded in genocidal violence and the fortunes of its ruling class’ are protected by the state sanctioned violence of the police and are bloated by the violence inherent to imperialist shakedown operations.

It comes down to this: In our emotionally brutal era, those deemed mentally ill are suffering from capitalism. The pummelling stress and boot-in-the-face, hierarchy-inflicted humiliations inherent to the system inflict trauma on large swathes of the citizenry.

Epidemic levels of middle age, U.S. citizen’s are dying with needles in their arms. The inherent and internalised White supremacy of the societal order has been exacerbated by Trump’s self-serving, reckless agitprop and acts in a drug-like manner causing dopamine levels to rise in those experiencing emotional torment due to humiliation-caused despair. Demagogues such as Trump are aware and exploit the manner despair can be palliatively mitigated by the emotional displacement of rage.

Fascist insignias rise when the hopes and aspirations of the working class lay shattered across a capitalist economic wasteland. Hoisted torches provide the illusion that dark despair has been banished. The fascist mob becomes possessed by a belief that they, en masse, can ascend into the precincts of heaven by scaling a mountain of corpses comprised of outsider groups.

Fascism not only acts as anaesthetic to the wounds delivered by capitalism, it is a psychoactive drug because incantatory rhetoric and imagist psychical material get those susceptible to its crude allure high.

Capitalism is borne on manic wings. The economic elite move from corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops in order to travel by helicopter, where upon landing, they board private, luxury jets, then, whereupon landing again, they are transported by helicopter to corporate skyscrapers and high rise rooftops. Touching the earth is a fleeting experience. The ruling class have lost touch with ground level verities. In a classical sense, such displays of hubris were understood as the progenitor of madness. The gods first elevate those they drive mad.

And, yes, race-based fears and animus are in play. Racism engendered mass murder has been coming to pass since armed Europeans trudged ashore in the Americas, with their blood-sodden religion and their murderous craving for gold and land. Of course, the racist demagoguery of the Bloated Orange Tub Of Nazi Goo oozing into and agitating the limbic systems of violent cretins during homegrown Nuremberg Rallies and his compulsion to blitzkrieg the pixel-sphere with Der Stürmer tweets is fomenting racist mayhem that includes bacchanals of blood. U.S. mythos is rancid with the reek of the corpses of the innocent slaughtered by White men brandishing firearms. Mass murderers have been and continue to be enshrined as heroes, from Wounded Knee to Afghanistan.

The nation was established by gun-enabled genocide and the intimidation of African slaves held at gunpoint on capitalist plantations. The truth has never been faced, e.g. the suppression of the Nixon tape in which Ronald Reagan displayed his racist mindset.

The U.S. citizenry thanks the soldiers of its racist wars of aggression for their “service.” Perpetual shooting sprees origins can be traced to the heart of darkness of the nation and its concomitant White supremacist creed. The killings happened long before the rise and election of the Tangerine Tweet Führer. Of course, the racist shit-heel Trump has exacerbated the situation. He deserves all scorn cast his way. It is obvious his capacity for malice does not possess a governor’s switch.

Trump is a two-legged emblem of the hypertrophy at play in late U.S. imperium. Gun-inflicted violence is steeped into the blood-stained fabric of the U.S. (sham) republic. Withal, Trump is not an anomaly; he is an emblem. Gun-strokers are no more going to shed their mythos than liberals and progressives are going to shed theirs that the U.S. is a democratic republic, governed by the rule of law, and progressive reforms will be implemented by its High Dollar owned and controlled political class that will serve to turn around the trajectory of the blood-built and maintained U.S. empire.

overview recap status:

prez steelworkers

Americans are not happy. And for good reason: They continue to suffer financial stress caused by decades of flat income. And every time they make the slightest peep of complaint about a system rigged against them, the rich and powerful tell them to shut up because it is all their fault.

One percenters instruct them to work harder, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop bellyaching. Just get a second college degree, a second skill, a second job. Just send the spouse to work, downsize, take a staycation instead of a real vacation. Or don’t take one at all, just work harder and longer and better.

The barrage of blaming has persuaded; workers believe they deserve censure. And that’s a big part of the reason they’re unhappy. If only, they think, they could work harder and longer and better, they would get ahead. They bear the shame. They don’t blame the system:the Supreme Court, the Congress, the president. And yet, it is the system, the American system, that has conspired to crush them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, unemployment is low and the stock market is high. But skyrocketing stocks benefit only the top 10 percent of wealthy Americans who own 84 percent of stocks. And while more people are employed now than during the Great Recession, the vast majority of Americans haven’t had a real raise since 1979.

It’s bad out there for American workers. Last month, their ranking dropped for the third year running in the World Happiness Report, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a UN initiative.

These sad statistics reinforce those in a report released two years ago by two university professors. Reviewing data from the General Social Survey, administered routinely nationally, the professors found Americans’ assessment of their own happiness and family finances has, unambiguously, declined in recent years.

But if Americans would just work harder, everything would be dandy, right?

No. Not right. Americans work really, really hard. A third of Americans work a side hustle,driving an Uber or selling crafts on Etsy. American workers take fewer vacation days. They get 14, but typically take only 10. The highest number of workers in five years report they don’t expect to take a vacation at all this year. And Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in other countries.

Americans labor 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more than Brits, and 499 more than the French, according to the International Labor Organization.

And the longer hours aren’t because American workers are laggards on the job. They’re very productive. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates that the average American worker’s productivity has increased 400 percent since 1950.

If pay had kept pace with productivity, as it did in the three decades after the end of World War II, American workers would be making 400 percent more. But they’re not. Their wages have flatlined for four decades, adjusting for inflation.

That means stress. Forty percent of workers say they don’t have $400 for an unexpected expense. Twenty percent can’t pay all of their monthly bills. More than a quarter of adults skipped needed medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it. A quarter of adults have no retirement savings.

If only Americans would work harder. And longer. And better.

Despite right-wing attempts to pound that into Americans’ heads, it’s not the solution. Americans clearly are working harder and longer and better. The solution is to change the system, which is stacked against workers.

Workers are bearing on their backs tax breaks that benefited only the rich and corporations. They’re bearing overtime pay rules and minimum wage rates that haven’t been updated in more than a decade. They’re weighted down by U.S. Supreme Court decisions thathobbled unionization efforts andkneecapped workers’ rights to file class-action lawsuits. They’re struggling under U.S. Department of Labor rules defining them as independent contractors instead of staff members. They live in fear as corporations threaten to offshore their jobs—with the assistance of federal tax breaks.

Last year, the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court handed a win to corporatists trying to obliterate workers’ right to organize and collectively bargain for better wages and conditions. The court ruled that public sector workers who choose not to join unions don’t have to pay a small fee to cover the cost of services that federal law requires the unions provide to them. This bankrupts labor unions. And there’s no doubt that right-wingers are gunning for private sector unions next.

This kind of relentless attack on labor unions since 1945 has withered membership. As it shrank, wages for both union and nonunion workers did too.

Also last year, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can deny workers access to :{class-action arbitration:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. This compels workers, whom corporations forced to sign agreements to arbitrate rather than litigate, intoindividual arbitration cases, for which eachworker must hire his or her own lawyer. Then, just last week, the right-wing majority on the court further curtailed workers’ rights to **class-action** suits.

In a minority opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgwrote that the court in recent years has routinely deployed the law to deny to employees and consumers “effective relief against powerful economic entities.”

No matter how hard Americans work, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has hobbled them in an already lopsided contest with gigantic corporations.

The administrative branch is no better. Just last week, the Trump Labor Department issued an advisory that workers for a gig-economy company are independent contractors, not employees. As a result, the workers, who clean homes after getting assignments on an app, will not qualify for federal minimum wage (low as it is) or overtime pay. Also, the corporation will not have to pay Social Security taxes for them. Though the decision was specific to one company, experts say it will affect the designation for other gig workers, such as drivers for Uber and Lyft.

Also, the Labor Department has proposed a stingy increase in the overtime pay threshold—that is, the salary amount under which corporations must pay workers time and a half for overtime. The current threshold of $23,660 has not been raised since 2004. The Obama administration had proposed doubling it to $47,476. But now, the Trump Labor Department has cut that back to $35,308. That means 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the larger salary cap now will not be eligible for mandatory overtime pay.

It doesn’t matter how hard they work; they aren’t going to get the time-and-a-half pay they deserve.

Just like the administration and the Supreme Court,right-wingers in Congress grovel before corporations and the rich. Look at the tax break they gave one percenters in 2017. Corporations got the biggest cut in history, their rate sledgehammered down from 35 percent to 21 percent. The rich reap by far the largest benefit from those tax cuts through 2027, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. And by then, 53 percent of Americans—that is, workers, not rich people—will pay more than they did in 2017 because tax breaks for workersexpire.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted the corporate tax cut would put an extra $4,000 in every worker’s pocket. They swore that corporations would use some of their tax cut money to hand out raises and bonuses to workers. That never happened. Workers got a measly 6 percent of corporations’ tax savings. In the first quarter after the tax cut took effect, workers on average received a big fat extra $6.21 in their paychecks, for an annual total of a whopping $233. Corporations spent their tax breaks on stock buybacks, a record $1 trillion worth, raising stock prices, which put more money in the pockets of rich CEOs and shareholders.

That’s continuing this year. Workers are never going to see that $4,000.

No wonder they’re unhappy.The system is working against them.

Leo W. Gerardis the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.