This analysis of the likelihood that we are on the brink of a new civil war, a violent one, in the name of MAGA, is worth watching, the warning worth heeding.
Mehdi Hasan is one of the best in the business, and his guests in this segment are no slouches either.
If you are reading this, then, more likely than not, you are a homo sapiens, a “wise ape”. We are so wise we’ve invented countless languages, most can be written in one of several distinct alphabets or systems of ideograms or symbols representing words, which can be used by our most skilled to express the deepest thoughts and most profound feelings we have.
Our species has created marvels and miracles over the millennia as the brightest among us have enabled our species to exert increasing mastery over the natural world. We are so brilliant we’ve even developed the technology to destroy the entire planet many times over, we have these tools stockpiled and ready to go, if needed one day.
Of all of our various expressions of genius, by far our greatest talent is justifying our actions. We never do anything without a damned good rationale.
You have to be very crazy not to be able, or willing, to justify the righteousness of your actions.
Self-defense is a legitimate legal justification for using deadly force if you are threatened with deadly force. Every criminal defense attorney will instruct a client accused of murder, if there were no witnesses present and no evidence — like a surveillance video — that otherwise contradicts it, to plead self-defense by making the dead person the aggressor. We are geniuses, in the sense that someone like Donald Trump can be considered a genius, at pleading our case in a way that makes us right and innocent of all wrongdoing, at least in our own eyes and in the eyes of sympatico people.
If I tell you the story of someone who flew into a rage at me, I will include every background detail to make you understand exactly what led up to it, how unfair, even irrational, the anger actually was.
If you hear the story from the person who got mad, they will often have a similarly convincing story for you. From their point of view, I will be the one who, whether on purpose or not, got on their last nerve and provoked them to defensiveness, which I wrongly may have perceived as anger, though it was, in their telling, the farthest thing from anger, more like perfectly reasonable exasperation that anyone in their position would have understandably felt.
One way we do this is by framing the stories we tell. The proper frame includes everything we need to prove our case and leaves out anything we don’t want to talk about. My father was a master of this device, retelling the story in a way that left you little wiggle room to talk about what was now left out of the new frame. That frame excluded anything that might make him look blameworthy in any way. The more the frame relied on a strong moral principle, the better. The right frame can nip the entire issue of right or wrong in the proverbial bud.
Think of Bagpiper Bill Barr, who auditioned for the Attorney General job by writing a long legal memo about how he’d make the findings of the Mueller Report go away, no matter how damning they might seem. Here’s a piece of Barr’s framing:
So, of course, it’s undeniable, in this frame, that nothing Mueller finds could ever actually be valid. If Mueller’s core premise is untenable, unsupportable, cannot withstand scrutiny, logic or legal analysis, anything he finds, no matter how seemingly damning, unethical, corrupt, illegal or whatever, is immaterial (another Barr fave framing term) because his core principle — that a corrupt president may not obstruct justice by interfering in an investigation into his actions — is “untenable“.
Nice conclusory word, and, beautifully, a legal conversation stopper. If the powerful subject of an investigation into his corruption may take any actions to stop the investigation because the investigator’s core premise is untenable, well, whatever the overreaching bastard finds is based on a flawed idea that a corrupt president may not interfere to thwart an investigation into his alleged corruption. It’s beautiful, in a Satanically legalistic kind of way.
In Barr’s case, he justifies this position based on two things, his belief that Jesus Christ Himself wants a Unitary Executive, a strong, conservative, Christian leader unfettered in the exercise of his CEO-like powers, and that the Attorney General, who works directly for the CEO, has the final say on all matters of what is tenable and what is untenable in the highly selective pursuit of justice. Barr reasons, correctly, that if he is the boss of the Department of Justice, no investigation can proceed without his say so, the buck stops with him and he is the final arbiter of what is just and what is unjust. Case closed. Like a narrowly decided 5-4 Supreme Court decision, the AG’s take on justice is the unappealable last word on what his Department of Justice will pursue and what it will not pursue.
To my horror, after four years of nepotism, incompetence, open prifiteering, constant chaos, daily temper tantrums and countless acts of predictable, petty, peevish vengeance against members of his constantly shifting administration who resigned or were fired, a rash of openly corrupt looking pardons of his lying, justice obstructing criminal colleagues and notorious strangers, the Orange Polyp got 12,000,000 more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. Tens of millions of Americans had seen him in mad action and decided that he was the man to lead us out of the pandemic and vicious tribal division and back to American Exceptionalism and “greatness”.
Millions more voted to end his reign, but those 74,000,000 are a hell of a lot of people who thought Trump was better than the alternative, the smiling, compromising, slightly creepy moderate Democrat his party’s big donors and strategists selected, though he was far behind in all the primaries when they orchestrated his sudden ascension to presidential candidate.
There was always something a little creepy about Biden, though he has greatly exceeded my expectations so far. To my mind he was a deeply flawed candidate, with his spotty record as a lawmaker who’d supported more than one unjust law and, conspicuously, his inexcusably shitty treatment of Anita Hill, his pathetic decades-late non-apology to her, his famous smile and tough guy bluster. But spin it as you like, 74,000,000 of our fellow Americans voted for the reality TV star who played their hero on a popular TV show where every week the smartest businessman in America fired the next loser who had failed to flatter and impress him. If you consult the internet for the exact number of votes Trump got in 2020 you learn this, in a flash:
Trump won 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8 percent of the votes cast. That’s more votes than any other presidential candidate has ever won, with the exception of Biden.
Like the Second Amendment, which starts with the words “a well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state…” inconvenient words which are discarded in the framing of “gun rights” absolutists, Trump simply goes:
Trump won 74,222,958 votes, more votes than any other presidential candidate has ever won.
True, as far as it goes, though it leaves out one detail many consider important, that Biden got 81,283,098, or 51.3 percent of votes cast, the highest total ever for a candidate in a US presidential election, 7,000,000 more than his record-setting opponent got.
Partisans on opposite sides of any struggle have ingeniously (or otherwise) resolved all doubt in favor of their side. An incoherent argument works as well as a meticulous, factually predicated one, as long as partisans remain angry as hell. So it’s not that Biden actually brought out more voters than Trump’s shockingly gigantic army of voters, it’s that, as the Polyp predicted, the election was, in fact, stolen from him by massive systemic fraud, a gigantic conspiracy that included key traitors in his own party, and that HE actually won in a landslide since nobody ever got anywhere near his 74,000,000 votes, unless, of course, you bring the lying, fraudulent, illegitimate Joe Biden into the equation.
This is the world we live in, boys and girls. It is well to remember the human genius for self-justification, a genius so divinely inspired that it can make us doubt what our own senses tell us directly. When people are angry, it takes almost nothing to assure them that they are 100% correct to be mad as hell, even as, in a calmer mood, they might be struck by the fact that angry and mad mean the same thing, while “mad” also means crazy.
As I told somebody whose apology I accepted for getting her back up and glaring at me after she felt I was aggressive and threatening towards her, and she explained later that she’d apologized to me for reacting as she understandably did, after I put her on the spot like that, and I forgave her for not reacting better to my offensive body language, or whatever it may have been that got her back up: it’s fucking hard to be a human.
Dig it.
Keep America great. Enforce the law that no-one is above.
New York Times headline today about the querulous Democrats, faced with a 50-0 GOP threat to filibuster debate and a vote on raising the debt ceiling to pay for some of the $7,800,000,000,000 the GOP added to the national debt in the last four years, to tank the US economy and hurt Biden and his party in the 2022 elections. (Note, this false “deadlock” over extending the government’s ability to pay its past debts is calculated to make the Democrats waste their one shot at reconciliation on keeping the government running, not on the Build Back Better bill).
Phew, perhaps our moderate president will appoint a commission to publish a report on this in six months or so, after all the new Republican districts are gerrymandered into being in thirty or more states for the 2022-2031 elections.
In fairness to the NY Times and Democrats, there is a brutal hostage situation underway here. The minority-powered GOP is demonstrating over and over that they will do whatever is necessary to regain total power in the US. The Democratic party, with the slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate, is hostage to the united GOP and two of their own.
Conservative Joe Manchin III (Joe Manchin II owned both stores in the small town Joe III grew up in, was apparently generous giving credit to impoverished coal miners) and narcissistic corporate-funded sphinx Kyrsten Sinema, for whom the “c-word” seems pretty apt (goes equally well for Joe Manchin III, actually, though at least he gives half-baked rationales for his positions) stand athwart several needed reforms favored by most Americans.
Truth and alternative-truth are seen as interchangeable, incoherence and non sequitar are no problem, and in a pinch, the argument that there is no truth anyway, outside of a version of Christianity that would make Jesus weep, is dottily trotted out whenever only winning, especially after you lose, is an acceptable outcome.
Yes, Trump was raised by an abusive psychopath, so were the Koch boys, so were many of our greatest and most implacably competitive American winners. The exemplar of this kind of person, and its unchallengeable will to dominate, is the legally created vampire of eternal life, the corporate “person.” In the context of the shocking revelation that Facebook has winked at promoting fear, hate and rage because those driving emotions generate clicks and it’s so damn profitable, that, you know, who could resist? (even after you make your first $100,000,000,000 on personal wealth) we have this:
So, if you think about this, the manifest unfairness of it [the collection and sale of detailed, personalized user data, the lack of filters to protect society from lying hate speech that goes viral and actually incites violence] is magnified by a corporate culture that says the only people that matter are shareholders. And if you think about it, optimizing for shareholder value is like — it’s the equivalent of saying, “I’m just following orders.” It forgives all manner of sins. And when Frances Haugen was talking about the moral crisis of CEOs who maximize profits instead of the public good, one of the challenges here is that, as a country, we have accepted this notion that corporations should only worry about shareholder value.
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The Supreme Court, ever more openly corporatist, long ago ruled that corporations have only one mandate: to increase shareholder profits. American courts give tremendous deference to the “business judgment rule” which means if a business decision has any kind of rationale in the quest for increased shareholder profits, courts will not second guess the right of the business to make its profit-driven decisions, absent a showing of TREMENDOUS harm to society, beyond externalities like pollution, unemployment, global warming, a kerfuffle at the Capitol, etc. Here is multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s one-time mentor:
ROGER McNAMEE: So, the thing here is there are two basic problems that we’re dealing with. One is the culture of American business, where CEOs are told to prioritize shareholder value at all costs. And it’s a little bit like the excuse “I’m just following orders,” right? That it absolves, essentially, all manner of sins. And that’s a big part of the problem at Facebook.
Essentially, think about the business this way. Advertising is the core of their economy. They get that through attention. And Facebook created a global network where people share things with their intimate friends. And what happened was, Facebook was the first medium on Earth to get access to what I call the inner self, the characteristics of people they would normally only disclose to their most intimate partners, friends, family. And in marketing, that stuff is gold. And the thing is, it’s not just valuable to traditional marketers. It’s incredibly valuable to scammers and people who are doing things that would otherwise be illegal. And if you think about what Facebook did, by connecting the whole world, it brought the world of scams into the mainstream.
So, when Mark says something like, “Well, you know, our advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want to be by hostile content,” the problem with that is that some of their biggest, most important advertisers are the actual people who spread dangerous content. So, if you think about “Stop the Steal,” that was an advertising campaign. If you think about anti-vax, those people are advertisers.
And so, the issue here for Facebook is they’ve created this network that is essentially an unpatrolled commercial place that preys on people’s emotions, because the best way to get people’s attention is to trigger fear or outrage. And so, the algorithms don’t sit there going, “I’m looking for fear or outrage.” What they do is they’re looking for things that get you to react. And it’s simply a fact of human nature, of human psychology, that fear and outrage are the most effective way to do that.
And that’s why Frances Haugen’s testimony is so devastating, because she is an expert in algorithm design. She is completely credible on this issue. And the stuff that she shared was not stuff that was her opinion. It was research created by the best people at Facebook at the direction of Facebook’s management. And so, when Facebook comes out afterward saying she only worked there for two years and she wasn’t in any of the meetings, none of that is relevant, and it’s sort of classic deflection by Facebook. And I would argue that Facebook’s responses yesterday really built Frances Haugen’s credibility, because if you sat there after that hearing, just ask yourself: Who did you find more credible?
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McNamee went on to make a larger, more fundamental point about our corporate culture:
But my perspective on this is, if I could get into that room with them [Congress], I’d say, “Listen, Facebook is the poster child for what’s wrong today. But the real problem is that in the United States we have abdicated too much power to corporations. We’ve essentially said we’re not going to regulate them, we’re not going to supervise what they’re doing. And in the process, we’ve allowed power to accumulate in a highly concentrated way, which is bad for democracy.”
But, worse than that, we’ve allowed business models, and, as you just described, surveillance capitalism, this notion of using surveillance to gather every piece of data possible about a person, the construction of models that allow you to predict their behavior, and then recommendation engines that allow you to manipulate their behavior — that that business model, which began with Google, spread to Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, is now being adopted throughout the economy. You cannot do a transaction anywhere in the economy without people collecting data, which they then buy and sell in a third-party marketplace. And that is, in my opinion — and I think if you ask Shoshana Zuboff, she would agree with this — that that is as immoral as child labor.
And if I could sit these members of the Senate down, I’d say, “Listen, guys, you’re mad at Facebook today, but the way to solve the problem for kids, the way to solve the problem for democracy, the way to solve all of these problems” — and Jessica, I’m sure, is going to talk about the civil rights aspects of this, because they are humongous — “but the way to do that is to end surveillance capitalism, because if we can’t protect the rights of individuals — if you will, our human autonomy — what do we have?”
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These two subway riders had on great masks, funny, macabre, slightly disturbing. I’d given one of them, the Barry Goldwater lookalike who made eye contact with me, a thumbs up and called across to him “great mask!” He nodded, with that same fixed, mad, clownish smile plastered across the lower part of his face.
I was sorely tempted to photograph them, and eventually did, realizing, as I cropped the photo there in the subway car, that nobody has any reasonable expectation of privacy any more.
About a week ago I went to post something on this blahg, which I rent from WordPress (they never fail to thank me each time they automatically bill my credit card), and got this message:
Currently, my laptop won’t allow me to so much as visit my blahg, out of an overwhelming concern for my privacy. There was no way to overcome this uncompromising protection of my privacy to post on this blahg, or even visit, except on my phone. I contacted WordPress (email only) and was told I probably need to update my macbook operating system. I noted:
I resist doing the updates on the macbook because Apple, in its infinite greed, is notorious for disabling useful features of their native programs with each update, clawing back once-included capabilities so they can sell them back to you.
A few days later I was given three things to try, by Happiness Engineer Tish, (the second idea was overcoming my reluctance to have all programs reformatted and some randomly rendered useless) and wrote back:
Hi Tish,
Took a weekend away from technology. Now I’m trying your suggested fixes.
1- clicking this link got to the same message as the screen shot I sent a few days ago, Your Connection is Not Private!
2– still reluctant to have all of my programs reconfigured/disabled by Apple as they have been every update since at least 10.6.7
3– installing Firefox now (unless I get a Connection Not Private! message preventing it), Here you go:
There used to be a game in the Chinatown Arcade in NYC where a live chicken would play all comers at tic tac toe for 50 cents a game. The bird went first. If you played well you could tie, but I’d never seen anyone beat the bird. After the bird beat the sucker, right after its victory dance (the disk it stood on would wobble and it would exert itself not to fall over) it would frantically claw for a couple of kernels of dry corn, literally two or three, that were its reward. While this was going on a big lighted sign flashed BIRD WINS.
Perfect parallel for technology companies of all kinds. You want the feature you’ve always used? Tough. We had a team of geniuses redesign it completely and it’s what you want now. Choice is for the people who bring you this miraculous technology, they know better than mere “users” what is actually desirable in the product. Capitalism runs on eternal “improvement” and built-in obsolescence. Tech companies, even a nice outfit like WordPress, are the masters of this. New design, new world order. Read Shoshanah Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” and shudder for the amazing world of crushing pressure to conform kids are growing up in now, ushered in by “social media” and unlimited, ever more thorough data collection from “users”, in the name of… well, profit, mostly.
Anyway, thanks for your help. I’ll probably wind up updating this machine and using it just as a word processor, as nature intended.
Eliot
P.S. Before I sent this I tried one more thing. DuckDuckGo just fixed it, I can get to the innovative (and, like, totally improved, even if the theme I use is now “unsupported”) WordPress block composer from there.
I did not bother to add, for Tish, a complete stranger, that I am clearly, as my father more than once noted, the kind of person who’d complain if he was hanged with a new rope.
Punchline, which I sent to “tech support”:
DuckDuckGo allowed me to get on the WordPress site, write and post an entry. Once. Now I get this again:
BIRD WINS!
NOTE: had to add this using my phone…
when you try to defeat this unwanted “protection” you get this message:
gratuitousblahg.com normally uses encryption to protect your information. When Google Chrome tried to connect to gratuitousblahg.com this time, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. This may happen when an attacker is trying to pretend to be gratuitousblahg.com, or a Wi-Fi sign-in screen has interrupted the connection. Your information is still secure because Google Chrome stopped the connection before any data was exchanged.
You cannot visit gratuitousblahg.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later.
Or, if you prefer, Go fuck yourself. Have a great day!
The headlines in corporate media put the focus for our political dysfunction right where it belongs, on Democrats, with a razor thin margin in the Senate and two implacable Senate “mavericks” raking in corporate generosity with both hands not voting with the other 49 to make a simple majority for “reconciliation” (and both are also filibuster supporters), are being humiliated, almost dead of self-inflicted wounds.
The New York Times, our journal of record, ran an alarming doom story Friday under a headline something like “Democrats in disarray, humiliating defeat for Biden Agenda” because an arbitrary deadline for a House vote on an overdue human resources and climate catastrophe prevention bill passed without a vote. This happened because of massive pressure, from lobbyists and mainly two obstructionist Senate “centrists” Sinema and Manchin, with their threat to vote with the 50-0 Republicans, to pass the smaller bipartisan bill first. It happened, according to mass media, because, unlike the disciplined, even lockstep, Republicans, Democrats are not united in supporting desperately needed legislation that 70% of Americans favor.
The problem, according to corporate media, apparently has nothing to do with the lack of even a single “reasonable, traditional, moderate” Republican of principle, like the highly principled Mitt Romney, for example, having any problem with their party holding a nuclear device to our collective head, traitorously threatening (50-0) to destroy the US economy and let the nation plunge into financial disaster to block anything the Socialist, Chinese Communist-controlled Democrat (sic) party is struggling to impose on this once great nation.
“Raise the debt limit, like you dumb Democrats voted to do three times under Trump? To pay for a national debt increased by almost $8 TRILLION (25% of our total debt), under our leadership? FUCK YOU, LOL!” You can hear Mitch McConnell chuckling that mirthless laugh and drawling on about how much more defaulting on our debts and tanking America’s credit rating is going to hurt the Democrats and their beloved Replacement Voters, those mindless brown and yellow and red voters with their “entitlement mentality”, semi-Americans who are not obscenely comfortable, who will be the first to cry when the economy hits bottom again.
The problem also, of course, if you go by the NY Times and the rest of corporate media, has nothing to do with one of our two major parties being literally hostage to the incoherent, illegal demands of an enraged madman. His childish refusal to admit defeat, attempt to thwart the peaceful transition of power, his ban on allowing non-alternative facts into any discussion, his reflexive ability to create ever bigger, more infuriating lies and his proven ability to deliver on his ugliest personal threats (delivering on policy proved to be a lot harder than blowing up agencies he controlled, cowing the ‘disloyal’ with threats of primary challenges, or publicly berating and firing anyone who crossed him) is the soul of the now thoroughly autocratic Republican party, the party of bosses. This GOP is the culmination of literally six decades of hard, organized, well-funded extreme right wing work to overcome liberal democracy and “majoritarian tyranny”.
Charles Koch and his well-born ilk have mobilized a collective trillion dollar fortune (largely inherited, except in the case of Koch, who parlayed a measly $100,000,000 inherited business into a vast fortune) to spend a tax deductible fortune to defeat all government regulation, all democratic initiative, all government effectiveness. The Koch-network learned as it went, engineering a brilliant, if dark, secretive and unethical, plan to influence public opinion to deregulate, privatize and ensure that America’s wealthiest keep an ever greater share of national treasure as the earth itself is destroyed by unregulated, extractive business practices.
It kicked into high gear when a half black man (only in a racist country is a biracial person automatically considered a member of a despised race) was elected president with promises of Hope and Change. Birtherism begat the Koch-network funded, totally spontaneous national Tea Party which begat a wave of enraged Koch-powered obstructionists announcing an intention not to allow a Democratic president to exercise his powers to the extent they could prevent it. The legislative workaround of Executive Action, common under Dubya Bush and Cheney, was, in the hands of this illegitimate black puppet TYRANNY.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has presented a clear, horrific picture of exactly how this network succeeded in regulatory and judicial capture, spending hundreds of millions directly in order to guarantee that protecting the rights of corporations and the wealthiest are given top priority by our Supreme Court. I will try to summarize his presentation on The Scheme (delivered in the Senate in discreet parts over the course of several months) in a future post. For now, they are numbered, 1-7, and you can see the first one HERE.
Biden’s response to the accusation that Democrats are in distressing disarray, while the Republican party is marching forward with purpose and unity, was pretty good. Here it is:
gratuitousblahg 