Rage rages, it’s all it can do

Have you noticed that when people are in a rage, angry on a deep level about things they can’t necessarily put into words and unable to calm themselves, only more rage makes sense to them?

The solid 35% of the country that loves wannanbe strongman Donald Chrump love him because he keeps fighting, no matter what. When he is proved wrong he just fights harder. When caught lying, or is criticized for echoing Hitler’s incendiary rhetoric, he angrily calls his critics liars, says they’re Hitler, with that winning sneer of his. “I know you are, but what am I?” His angry 35% love, love, love it. “You won’t be calling me Hitler when I put you in one of my camps, asshole…”

When the mountain of evidence against him in multiple criminal and civil court cases is steep and mighty he rages that it’s all a witch hunt, total lies told by hacks and peekaboo racist riggers, chiggers and diggers. His claims that the “most secure election in American history” (he fired the lying Trump appointee who lyingly made that claim) was rigged and stolen, by a cabal of Democrat [sic] radical thugs and traitorous, weak RINOs, while not provable in court, is still true! “Look how many millions of Americans believe it!” as Lyin’ Ted himself put it the day before the patriotic MAGA riot at the Capitol.

The bit that’s hard to wrap the old brain around, the bit I experienced recently in my personal life, to my great horror, is that even the most transparent and easily disprovable lies, as long as they inflame the emotions to righteous rage, can be very hard to resist, even for good people. For angry and or stupid people? A delicious slice of cake! You want to argue with a delicious slice of cake, you sick fuck? Go for it. Make my day, punk, what kind of assault weapon you bringing to the fight, pussy?

Trump plans blitzkrieg against all foes

“Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communist, Marxist, Fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”    

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Source

God save us from Jewish Nazis. What the fuck, Stephen?

Chapter 54 Self-soothing behavior

Many of us, particularly if we suffered as children, develop behaviors to soothe ourselves when we feel up against it. Some methods of dealing with stress are more productive than others. While I have bad habits that make me feel a bit better than not doing them, I have one that feels productive. I always take comfort from expressing myself clearly. It is a great relief to feel heard and understood.

I enjoy conversing with someone, or writing clearly to someone, who grasps what I have to say, adds their personal observations, allows me to reflect and refine my thoughts and feelings. This essential human give and take is a beautiful thing, and at the root of much learning. Expressing myself as clearly as I can, while listening as closely as I can, facilitates this exchange. The next best thing to this human back and forth is writing and its mirror twin reading.

I was sensitized to not being heard early in life. My parents alternated listening to me anxiously with studiously ignoring what I had to say. This strategic, selective silence was more the practice of my father than my mother. With my mother, who could flail and fight with the worst of them, I always knew that in a calm moment afterwards I could approach her and, most of the time, be heard. I was even able to persuade her from time to time, which is no small thing for a child to receive from his mother. Understanding after angry disagreement is one of the great balms of love.

This balm is something neither of my parents experienced much growing up. My mother clearly got it a bit more than my father, but my father got pretty much zero understanding from his angry, religious fundamentalist mother or from his father, a damaged cipher unable to protect his son, himself, or anyone else. The little brother he bullied throughout their lives clung to him as the big brother was dying, but prior to that time there seemed little love or understanding between them. My father found understanding, appreciation and love in his wife, my mother, and that was the greatest blessing of his embattled life.

The damage inflicted on my father throughout his childhood rendered him largely helpless against frustration and rage. I understood, shortly before he died, that he’d truly done the best he could, based on the monumentally shit hand he’d been dealt in life. I think of the rage I was regularly faced with at the dinner table. My father’s vehemence and abuse was a shadow of the horror my he’d gone through, but bad enough for me.

Unconsciously I knew that to respond with rage, which I sometimes did, would be final, terminal, irrevocable and the harm of it could never be revisited or undone. Over time I resisted going to that rage zone when my parents were furious. I eventually became pretty good at masking my rising emotions and reining in my anger. I have noticed over the years that for a type prone to humiliation it is humiliating, when in a rage, to be confronted with superficial calmness. They are out of control, and calling out their enemy for a good Western saloon-style fistfight, and their would-be opponent remains mild, unruffled, expressing honest confusion about the disproportionate rage blazing around them. Talk about humiliation.

What could be more provocative, for someone ready to deliver a righteous punch to the face, the gut, followed by kicks in the stomach, than a mild reply? They are enraged and you remain enragingly, humiliatingly composed as they circle for the attack. I realize now, given the set-up, that I couldn’t help becoming that way. I had no choice but to learn that survival skill when my father made me his adversary from before I even had words.

It is no surprise, given that background, that using words to present my view as clearly as possible would become supremely soothing to me. A good talk reminds me of the basic goodness of the world. The most painful type I still have to face sometimes is the righteous, angry person who will not let me speak. They insist on the right to silence me in spite of the many years I’ve listened to them as a good friend, brother, colleague, in spite of many excellent talks we’ve had over the years. What gives someone the right to tell another person they may not speak is another, hideous question.

We meet people like this sometimes in life, we may become close friends, having no reason to suspect how badly they will act in a moment of pressure. We don’t discover, til a moment of supreme tension, that a friend or other loved one may be so damaged in their souls that they truly cannot listen to someone else’s pain. In fact, another person expressing hurt and expecting sympathy is infuriating to them, given the right circumstances. Nothing is more hurtful for this type, at a vulnerable moment, than to be reminded of the fragile emptiness of the shell they created to make themselves feel better and more important, than others.

This is a certain type of asshole, the snarling, angry one standing on their right to anger. You can easily picture them in a lynch mob. Nothing you can say will make the slightest impression on their anger because they will never acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind without blaming you, somebody else, everybody else. They also always insist on one condition for any conversation once there is a conflict: you shut the fuck up about your goddamned feelings. The one condition I can’t agree to.

There is a deathly pain associated with being silenced. When you are prevented from speaking by someone else, it is a direct negation of your humanity. It presupposes the right of one person to make the other person shut up. Enforcing silence requires force, or the credible, frightening threat of force. Once you have shown your mercilessness to the others, say be ostracizing one critic, there is no reason to demonstrate your power again, unless strictly necessary. Your reputation as an indomitable competitor not above a quick kick to the shorts precedes you in your social milieu. Brutalize one and the rest tend to fall in line.

So on a bleak day, thinking about the silence of longtime, now former, friends, their unshakable, righteous enmity, to the death, I console myself by presenting my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I can.

I set the basic idea down quickly, once it’s in my head. I read it again, trying my best to make like an innocent reader seeing it for the first time. I clarify things that could be confusing. I elaborate on things I didn’t develop, condense whatever seems tedious. This work is a pleasure, considering my words and their effect, as I refine them into successively better reflections of myself and my views. When everything is combed through and smoothed down into its simplest form, I put it up in an online journal, another example of my soul doing its best to make my notion of a good life tangible on a given, otherwise shit, day.

The dilemma of trying to maintain integrity in a war to the death

When I was very young, and first learned that Switzerland had been neutral in World War Two, I took that as a good thing.  They fairly didn’t take sides, the Swiss loved peace, I reasoned in my childish brain (they also made delicious chocolate, as I knew very well).  By the time I was eight, and saw nauseating film clips of what the Nazis had been up to not long before I was born, I understood that Swiss neutrality was essentially an acceptance of Nazism.   With friends like fair and balanced Switzerland, who needs Franco’s Spain?

How do we negotiate a world that demands a black and white taking of sides in so many cases?   Nuance is the weapon of obfuscating, timid pussies, we are told over and over by those with an interest in division and the loudest megaphones on earth.  The criticism of liberals and progressives often focuses on their presentation of detailed nuance rather than fierce, no holds barred, smashmouth, simple to grasp angry political rallying cries.  The right is not afraid to act like Nazis, including threats of violent reprisal against political opponents, why are the good guys so “principled”? 

There is something brutal about all politics, especially if one side is out for actual blood.   How do you discuss poisonous subjects with integrity?   The difficulty of this is hard enough to stop us from even trying, most of the time.   Can you actually come to a compromise with a Klansman, unless you somehow agree that their point of view is somewhat justified?  A separate question: why would you want to?

As I watch the unfolding horrors in Israel and Gaza I also watch the clannish response of so many.   Israel, as a haven to long persecuted Jews, has a right to exist.   The people of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians, have a right to exist.   May I go so far as to opine that all people, all creatures, have a right to exist?

There is an extreme right wing/religious fundamentalist government in Israel, the most extreme and divisive in its history.  The government is so extreme that hundreds of thousands of Israelis regularly march to protest Netanyahu’s ongoing plan to curb the Israeli Supreme Court, an institution that has long been Israel’s protection against anti-democratic and inhuman practices.

This fight between Israeli democracy and religious and ethnic autocracy provides the perfect historical moment for a murderous group, purporting to represent the persecuted, to attack Israel and inflict a grievous wound in horrific fashion.  No need to propagandize, Hamas provided the torture, burnings, slow death of parents in front of terrified children and vice versa.   They bragged about it themselves and took two hundred plus hostages.  No secret, Hamas said, we went to your villages to terrify you, make you feel vulnerable, enrage you, provoke the bloodiest possible response to make you look like the blood thirsty mass-murderers you are.

Now the world is divided into two simple camps on this awful question, as on most questions today.  The Jewish state has a right to exist, and to do anything necessary to survive, particularly after the Nazi-style atrocity on October 7.   The other side points in outrage to Israel’s long oppression of millions of Palestinians, to the open air prison conditions in Gaza and the impunity with which violent settlers dominate the West Bank, and demands that this oppression end now.

There is a moral core, and righteousness, to each argument, to both sides in this violent dispute to the death.  What does a person who sees both sides do?  In my case, I look up the history of the creation of the State of Israel, a country I’ve spent a lot of time in, whose language I speak.  

Nothing clean about that moment of international guilt, when, in the shadow of death camps for Jews, the Jewish state was “created” as a haven for a historically despised and persecuted minority.  Read about Mandatory Palestine, it was a shit show.  The British, as the Ottoman Empire was being defeated, were given control of newly created Palestine and all the inhabitants thereof.  There was also the “creation” of Lebanon, Jordan (Palestine was part of Transjordan), Iraq and the rest of the current Middle East, national boundaries drawn by the victorious European nations who had ousted the Ottoman Empire in World War One.  

The British Mandate was won in a war.   The winners imposed the rules, the local inhabitants had nothing to say about it.  Nations in the former Ottoman Empire were created by drawing lines on maps, in some cases combining, in the old British practice, warring tribal and ethnic groups in the same national boundaries.  The better to control them, if the newly created Iraqis themselves were fighting and killing each other, so much the better for ruling them.  European colonial powers had perfected this technique in Africa.

You had Jews displaced by Hitler’s plan to kill them arriving in Palestine, intercepted by the British, who were also fighting Hitler.  You had the “illegal immigration” of thousands of such persons.   You had Arabs who had lived on the land for generations and owned over 90% of the land.  You had the Jewish claim to the land rooted in the Old Testament, when God promised the land to His people.   That biblical claim, one must concede, is as problematic as any claim made in any holy book anywhere.   You had violence and killing, including by Jewish terrorist groups intent on ousting the British by any means necessary.  You had Arabs occasionally killing Jews, many of whom had escaped Hitler’s death machine.  There was a decade or more of desperate dealmaking, dealmaking that rarely included local poor people, Arab or Jew.

The vote for the creation of the state of Israel in the newly created UN was hotly contested, as was the map of the new state.   There was no worldwide recognition of the need for this Jewish state, in spite of Hitler’s heroic efforts to demonstrate the need for such a nation and our collective memory of this rare moment in history when support for Jews overcame long hatred.  Israeli independence squeaked through, with all kinds of compromises.  The British couldn’t wait to get out by then. 

Soon after Israel announced its independence the new country was attacked by a huge force of its Arab neighbors.  The war went on for months.  Israel’s existence was touch and go.  During the war 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

We have the Israeli story of this exodus: Arab nations broadcast messages to the Palestinian Arabs to leave so that the Jews could be forced into the sea.  Once all the Jews were gone, they could go home in peace.  There were such broadcasts, but that was not the only reason Palestinians left.  

There was a war raging.  There were forced expulsions of Arabs from their villages in what was now Israel, war crimes, documented (see Deir Yassin) that terrified Palestinians and made them flee.  There was the usual displacement of any war.   There were multiple compelling reasons Palestinians fled.

At the end of the 1948 war Israel had expanded its borders slightly and the new status quo did not include the reintegration of Palestinians who had fled.  While understandable, from an Israeli point of view, that unaccomodated mass of refugees, which has lived in poverty for generations now, planted the seeds for what has followed.

The Israeli government’s position has long been that those refugees are Arabs and should be taken in by other Arab nations.   The Arab position was a hard “fuck you.”  The Palestinian refugee crisis was too good for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and friends to pass up.  Nobody likes impoverished refugees, so how about a resounding, righteous international “Fuck Israel” instead?

Not to say that the Israeli position on Palestinian refugees being the responsibility of other Arab nations made much sense.  All of these talking points, if you take them one at a time, are easy enough to debunk as bullshit.  The practice of partisans on both sides is to have a few self-serving, one-sided talking points ready to deploy when needed, to make a complicated problem the sole responsibility of the enemy.

We cannot talk about these things calmly.  The killing of children, of old people, always rightfully enrages us.  I heard a journalist I love and respect (Amy Goodman) point out that Hamas had treated the 85 year-old Israeli hostage they later released humanely, even kindly.  Really, Amy, Hamas gets points for not beating and raping an 85 year-old hostage?

So back to the question: how to talk about what an Israeli fascist/theocratic government is doing in response to a hellish masterpiece of terrorist strategy in a world where Putin and Trump are the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of explosively divisive war.  If you have any idea, I’d love to hear it. 

MAGA Mike

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner,” says MAGA Mike. If you want to know the rest of his views, simply read the new testament, he says. Read the Bible and pray to the only thing stronger than the two wolves democratically deciding the lamb’s fate.

. . . He advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the nation’s voting machines. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional. When questioned, during his first news conference as speaker, whether he stood by his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he ignored the question, and his fellow Republicans shouted down the reporter who asked it.

Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life

It’s obvious why the former president was so supportive of the new speaker. Mr. Johnson was “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, as a New York Times investigation found last year. He made unfounded arguments questioning the constitutionality of state voting rules; he agreed with Mr. Trump that the election was “rigged,” cast doubt on voting machines and supported a host of other baseless and unconstitutional theories that ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Johnson now refuses to talk about his leading role in that shameful drama. When a reporter for ABC News tried to ask him about it on Tuesday night, he would not respond; his fellow Republicans booed the question, and one yelled at the reporter to “shut up.” Such questions cannot be dismissed when Mr. Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Though changes in the law and Democratic control of the Senate make it much harder for the House of Representatives to impede certification of the vote, the American public deserves a speaker of the House who will uphold the will of the people, not someone willing to bend the rules of an election for his side.

Trumpism Is Running the House

The anti-ethics party threatens ethics probe

I don’t call these guys Nazis for no reason. This is from today’s New York Times:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday abruptly put off its push to subpoena two conservative allies of Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas as part of a Supreme Court ethics inquiry that has met stiff resistance from Republicans.

Facing G.O.P. threats to engage in a bitter, drawn-out fight, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the panel’s chairman, halted his planned effort to compel cooperation from Leonard Leo, a longtime leader of the Federalist Society, and the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.

Mr. Durbin said that Democrats remained united in their desire to force more information from the men about undisclosed luxury travel and other benefits provided to the justices, but that they needed more time to assess a barrage of politically charged amendments that Republicans were planning to offer in an effort to embarrass them and derail the inquiry

It takes only simple math to understand the reason for this GOP opposition to investigating unethical rightwing extremists on the Supreme Court and the extremists with unlimited money and influence who support them after they lobby to get them appointed.

We get the democracy we deserve, I suppose.

Habba, Habba, Habba

From Alina’s website:

Alina Habba’s journey toward becoming the lawyer of her dreams began with her pursuit of education. Her academic journey commenced with her enrollment at Lehigh University, where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. A couple of years later, she pursued higher education again and attended Widener University Commonwealth Law School, where she successfully earned her J.D. (Juris Doctor). Despite acquiring her degrees, Alina Habba did not stop seeking opportunities for further learning. She recognized the significance of continuing education and completed Leading Professional Service Firms courses at the Harvard Business School of Executive Education. This added knowledge, and experience helped her advance her career significantly.

Currently she stands on the steps in front of 60 Centre Street making angry statements about an enraged judge with a red face who is gagging her and her totally innocent client so unfairly as she continues her journey toward her dreams!

Excellent piece on Trump’s perfect day on the witness stand

Trumpie testified yesterday in the civil fraud case against him, summoned by the prosecution. He had no legal choice but to sit in the witness box. He acted the way he always acts, the outraged victim of unfairness, defiant, angry, entitled. The judge told him to stop making political speeches and answer the questions. His lawyer, Alina Habba, stood in front of the courthouse during the lunch break claiming the judge wouldn’t let him speak, echoing her boss’s talking points about unfairness, partisan prosecution, the racism of the Black attorney general, witch hunts etc. As the battle for America’s soul plays out, inside the courtroom and in the ignorant court of public opinion, Lawrence O’Donnell had a very good take on the Orange Polyp’s perfect day on the witness stand.

Chapter 53 negotiating with terrorists

There are people, imbued with righteousness forged in unbearable injustice, who believe that their suffering allows them to do unspeakable things.   They inspire terror by their willingness to behave viciously, in the name of never being wrong.  When someone in your life makes it clear that they will behead someone you love and force you to watch the video, your prospect of reaching a mutually acceptable compromise with them is pretty much done.   

“If you don’t accept what I tell you to accept, my personalized version of history, and accept all blame, then I will rain holy hell down upon you and everyone you love, I will fucking destroy your world,” is an inauspicious starting point for a productive conversation.

If someone is truly willing to kill you, destroy your good name, your friendships, trust, throw away years of loving mutuality, in the name of never being in the wrong, accept that there is no fixing that.  You are dealing with a damaged, destructive soul, too desperate and determined to make peace with.  You cannot make peace with someone willing to kill anyone who makes them feel in any way bad about themselves.  These people are terrorists and are absolute in their demands.

This impossibility of solving problems with someone who cannot be wrong is a painful, but important, thing to digest.   If your best efforts to be patient, kind, fair and honest are met with dismissal, anger, recriminations, you’re not going to find a way to fix things with that person.  

It may seem impossible to imagine that someone you love, someone who loved you, can become an implacable enemy, but it sometimes happens.  When it does, you need to look at it without sentimentality, realize you are no longer dealing with any form of love, and get away from it.

The therapist asks “what do you think your role in these recurrent situations is?”   It is an important question.

In my case, maybe it is no more than my infuriating insistence, in the face of irrefutable evidence of incapacity in the other, that an old friend must be as vulnerable as needed to feel somebody else’s pain.  And my belief that empathy, and the ability to put yourself in a hurt person’s shoes, always leads to a desire to help heal that pain.   This belief turns out to be tragically, masochistically misplaced when dealing with someone who cannot be wrong.

My insistence in the face of their inability must be fucking maddening to the point of violence to them.  I suppose it is that stubbornness in the face of implacability that marks me for the violent endings, the displays of rage and idiotic denial I sometimes have had to face at the end of long relationships.

A person who reserves the right to rage, with or without reason, and never to concede fault or responsibility for harm they may cause, who needs to control others and be viewed as perfect, especially when they act destructively, is not a good partner for peace talks.   

Over time you can understand how badly they are damaged, how violently they feel compelled to react when criticized, but, sadly, that understanding gives you no tool to help fix anything broken in them.   

No amount of patience, kindness or understanding can help them change anything about themselves.   The only change possible is your own point of view, and learning to make yourself scarce as soon as you see that you are locked in a conflict with this type.   Any conflict with this type, no matter how seemingly easy to resolve, must end in death, as it is written.   Save your own life by learning when it is time to walk away.