Outside the Asylum

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Primary Concerns

The establishment and its status quo depend on not remembering that things were different in the past, just as they depend on not imagining that things could be different in the future. They are obsessed with establishing and maintaining a persistent monoculture, even across time. Apparently there are no possibilities apart from the current set of conditions.

I’m guessing their obsessive need to stamp out both history and imagination stems from their inability to compete in a battle of ideas. The elites and their employees in politics and the media have gone to a special lunatic fringe of their own, which rarely gets noticed because it’s quieter than Trump’s. The political and policy ideas of bankers, oil barons, and the military industrial complex drive Bush Republicans, Clinton Democrats, and even Obama Democrats (Obama Democrats would like to draw the line at nuclear war, which is why the Iran deal existed and why Obama wanted to draw down in Syria. But when pressured, they tend to fall in line, as Obama ultimately did in Syria.) None of these political factions has any history of reliably dissenting from the ideas of the richest sociopaths in the country.

Unfortunately for the politicians, the political ideas of the elites are too extreme to be competitive. Any rational debate would reject their views on war and ecology within minutes, on the grounds that only an insane person would advocate for policies that will bring down human civilization. Their views on economics are only better in the sense that they produce apocalypse and mass death indirectly, rather than immediately. No rational person could support these choices. Too many people have realized their lunacy. And it’s becoming ever harder to contain that realization within the old framework of right versus left.

It used to be that all establishment political ideas—all the ideas that were considered normal and were held by people with power—had a home, generally a political party or a branch of one, which was supported by adherents both among the elites and in the populace. We are now living in a weird era in which few establishment ideas have any home, or any adherents among the populace. Of course the two political parties will do whatever the elites want, offer a home to even the worst policies if they say so. But the trouble is that political parties, unlike aristocratic individuals and private corporations, require justification. They need some argument, moral or practical, rational or emotional, that can justify their policies—and their very existence. And in this era, the elites, who choose and implement the policies we live by, have no argument that justifies those policies. They simply support them because those policies give them money and power—consequences be damned, morality be damned.

It is difficult, to say the least, for a political party to use that sort of onanistic sociopathy as a public basis for its existence. They need ideologies that inspire fervor, or at least notice. And ideology itself seems to have faltered in this best of all possible worlds. Since we are looking at the only way things can possibly be, where is the political argument? In fact, where is politics? Why do we even have political parties? Certainly not to determine a course of policy. As a member of the first Obama Administration said of single-payer healthcare, “All that was decided when Barack Obama was in law school.” A concerned citizen might wonder what else was decided when Barack Obama was in law school. How much now falls within a predetermined D.C. consensus?

Within this monoculture, where most policy decisions are predetermined and dedicated to the proposition that the elites should remain unequal, the only ideological resource America has left is its prejudices. Prejudice is the only thing that offers people a meaningful political choice to make. People can stand on one or the other side of various social divisions: bigots on one side, “the resistance” on the other. Without bigotry to fight over, the two parties would stand revealed in all their emptiness, revolving around the desire for power at any cost like twin solar systems orbiting the same black hole.

But the media-approved, D.C-approved fights against racism, against sexism, against homophobia and transphobia and xenophobia, arguably do not belong to those oppressed by prejudice, nor to their allies. It seems to me that these movements have been readjusted to suit other purposes since I participated in them in the 80s, 90s ,and oughts. The Resistance seems very concerned with the word choices in various tweets, and much less concerned with the fact that we have coast-to-coast institutionalized freedom to murder black people for anybody with a badge. I hear a lot about “deplorables” and Trump, but not a whole hell of a lot about how the police, as an institution, are abusive to black people and possibly infiltrated on a national scale by white supremacists (there was an FBI investigation ongoing into just that issue a few years ago. Amazingly, neither MSNBC nor CNN seemed interested in it.)

As recently as the beginning of BLM, material concerns (such as whether or not a cop could with impunity put a bullet in a black person’s brain) were front and center. Now there’s a whole lot of talk about talk. We’re all very concerned about the racist thing Trump said today, and very unconcerned about black children in poverty drinking lead. Water, war, and Wall St. apparently have nothing to do with racial justice. Climate change and corporations equally have nothing to do with racial justice. But what people say on Twitter is of the highest importance and should be scrutinized in detail. Forget those sticks and stones breaking your bones.

This political climate has a transformative impact on American electoral politics. Only with such a readjusted definition of what constitutes a fight for racial justice could the candidacy of Kamala Harris have had any chance at all. In the days when racial justice was seen as something that involved more than getting a certain number of highly-placed black politicians in office and policing what people say on Twitter, Kamala Harris would never have stood the first chance of gaining black people’s votes. A black woman who made her money putting other black people away in the white man’s prison? No way. But I forgot. Prisons have nothing to do with racial justice.

Next week: Abortion has nothing to do with feminism.

How are you all today?

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

I was going to write something entirely different, but this is what came out. So I let it.

How are you all this morning?

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

I see it more or less the same way -- an inability to compete coupled with an entitlement to power.

Analytically, I think most of them are developmentally stunted at a very young stage because they've not experienced any/enough of the pressures and struggles of regular life. For most of the rest of us, that's the main impetus to keep moving into the next stage of maturity, to eventually challenge ourselves to grow all the way up.

The vast majority of these people have had such an easy ride through life, never being made to honestly compete for anything, that I think many of them don't even know what they don't know anymore. They were always able to get whatever they wanted by hook or by crook so why should they develop a character? They of course view themselves as "the adults in the room" but most of them haven't bothered to mature much past the toddler tantrum/tweenage fake-conformity stage -- which, to me, explains why so much of modern political discussion sounds *exactly* like the gossip in the girls' room from junior high school.

It also seems, if you read much history, that we humans keep playing out this same story over time and across cultures. The instruments may change but the song remains the same. For awhile I've thought there must be some kind of herd-level lesson we're all failing to learn about how to get our asshole problem under control.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

to write and what I actually wrote!


They of course view themselves as "the adults in the room" but most of them haven't bothered to mature much past the toddler tantrum/tweenage fake-conformity stage -- which, to me, explains why so much of modern political discussion sounds *exactly* like the gossip in the girls' room from junior high school.

I originally wanted to write about how political discourse around electoral politics has been hyper-personalized over the last ten years or so. People line up on various sides so quickly, and the conversation very quickly devolves into "You said mean things about X! I bet you're friends with Y! How dare you say Z!" That's particularly true when discussing the dreaded "authenticity" issue, basically the I/P of campaign politics.

I wanted to remember how these discussions went pre-Obama. It's not like the hyper-personalized way of talking about candidates didn't exist back then, but it didn't swallow the conversation the way it so often does today. The speed with which we reach that point seems to have increased. One thing that's being lost is: what are we actually selecting candidates for? I mean, what do we want them to do? Everything else should emerge from that. Instead, we're getting mad because Susan Sarandon said that Liz Warren used to be a Republican.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

It also seems, if you read much history, that we humans keep playing out this same story over time and across cultures. The instruments may change but the song remains the same. For awhile I've thought there must be some kind of herd-level lesson we're all failing to learn about how to get our asshole problem under control.

People talk a lot about how it's mankind's aggressiveness, greed, or selfishness that's dooming the species. Those things are problems, of course. But I think it's our inability to deal with bullies that's going to kill us, a lot faster than any of those other vices.

The problem with authoritarianism is that it takes far fewer psychos to wreck everything.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

In casual chats about this with my friends (pretty much all nerds of some spot or stripe) we speculate that we won't truly be able to call ourselves an intelligent species until we can figure out how to keep bullies from hijacking whatever social/economic/religious/governmental systems we devise to organize ourselves.

For most of us, socio-organizational methods don't even really seem to matter very much provided they are generally effective and more just than not; most of us can learn to drive on either side of the road, so to speak. But as soon as there are roads, some asshole shows up and starts robbing travelers and merchants. So we decide we need a cop on the road. And at first maybe the cop works out ok, but eventually the cop becomes the robber one way or another. We have to find ways of solving this problem beyond the individual response of punching the robber in the face, and the systemic responses of giving cops too much power while stigmatizing whichever social group the robbers can be sorted into.

As to solutions, I got nothin, but articulating structural problems, that's my jam. Wink I have very much enjoyed reading your essays about all of this from lurk mode, by the way.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

As to solutions, I got nothin, but articulating structural problems, that's my jam. Wink I

And thank you very much for your kind words.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski
join the Dem Party was so that I could attend the state Party convention in 2003 (leading up to the disastrous Kerry nomination/campaign); and that what struck me most was that the overall social atmosphere largely resembled high school society, notwithstanding the grey hair and spare tires of the participants.

Enthusiastic college-age Deansters were there, mind you, but of course they represented nobody but themselves -- they were not the soulless soul of the state party, and of course they were doomed to have their optimism and idealism dashed by one of the most absurd media feeding frenzies of the post-Reagan era.

The best speech by far was that of Dennis Kucinich; and I mean "best" in an objective sense -- in the sharpness of the rhetoric, and the passion with which he delivered it, with which he tried to call up from the assembled members of a largely purposeless social club, some little glow of the fire that perhaps had once burned in their boomer hearts. The response to his call to arms, to each of his enumerated series of challenges, was a tepid and somewhat embarrassed applause -- the sort of response one might imagine from Garrison Keillor's firmly unenthusiastic Minnesota Lutherans.

In a harbinger of future self-inflicted disasters, the state party hacks stood at the lectern congratulating themselves and the audience for having claimed, the previous November, all four statewide offices (governor, lt governor, attorney general, secretary of state), while saying nothing about having lost seats in both legislative chambers.

Meanwhile, the middle-aged empty-nester women swooned over Kerry; while the (less abundant) 25-40 XX-karyotype demographic giggled "girlishly" over Stephanopolis. Mind you, the daughters of the empty-nesters had their act together, they were an army in red t-shirts backing lieutenant-governor Barbara Lawton (who wasn't even running for anything at the time); they were the ones 6 years later would be fucked over by Team Obama and outgoing governor Doyle.

I was never tempted to return.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

@UntimelyRippd

Thanks for taking the time to write out your experience. It's always interesting to me how people have traveled, politically speaking.

I think I've mentioned here that I've never belonged to any political party past the register-for-a-primary-vote point, but that cycle I was trying to coalition with Dems too -- the team of brazen criminals assembled beneath Bush-Cheney brought a lot of the otherwise nonpartisan left out to the carnival again. I hadn't done much in the way of electoral politics before that (I'd been too poor, too wounded, too homeless, and too queer to worry about anything besides some immediately pressing survival-related politics) so that was only the second cycle where I was able to pay very close attention to the entire electoral process and start to understand just how bad things were all the way through the system.

I'd been dealing with some fairly serious health concerns since the late 90s so I only had access to anything via the internet, which was how I'd wound up at DailyKos while it was still a tiny little blogspot blog, but the childish atmosphere was palpable out of the gate. It was mostly 20something & 30something guys there then, and notably, they were stridently anti-feminist as well as very vocal about telling those of us on Team Rainbow that we needed to shut the hell up about our equality. At first I thought it was just because the people hanging out there were all younger, and I love a good debate so I jumped in (and won a few!), but things got worse quickly when the blog moved to Scoop. Scoop's format allowed Kos to control the place much more effectively, amplifying whatever amoral message he was paid to put out and force feeding any inconvenient truths down the memory hole. Then came the rise of a few popular bullies who were obviously given free rein by management to abuse the membership in order to maintain control, and I was outta there.

Ohio had a Governor's race last year, and when Kucinich put his hat in the primary ring, I felt the first glimmer of political hope I'd had in ages. (Let's just say Obama did not inspire hope in me and leave that there, and when I voted for Bernie in the 2016 Ohio primary, I wasn't hopeful, I was terrified they were going to kill him.) Then Elizabeth Warren came to Ohio during that gubernatorial primary and she campaigned against Kucinich, and that was very last straw for me. I'm still fire-breathing angry at her as well as the party for that.

Warren's supporters around here are the Clintonites, and they sneer at me for the same reasons they sneer at Kucinich, but there is no point in arguing policy with people who either don't understand it, are paid to oppose it, or else just happy to fight it provided it increases the suffering of the plain-bellied sneetches.

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@Reverend Jane Ignatowski
that army of young female Lawton supporters. Many of them no doubt helped propel Tammy Baldwin into the Senate. I'm guessing that they wept, for HRC and for themselves, on election night 2016. It was Lawton's unfortunate support of HRC in 2008 that doomed her (and everybody else in Wisconsin, really), as it created the partnership between the outgoing Doyle Administration and Team Obama to nominate a charmless do-nothing party hack for governor in 2010. (Lawton was already hated by Doyle et al -- she had more or less snatched the lieutenancy out from under Doyle's preferred running mate).

up
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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Lookout's picture

to an informed population. Instead what we have is corporate propaganda parading as news. US citizen's are, for the most part, simply ignorant of our national and global activities.

The corporate capture is complete across the spectrum of our society. They merely prop up the illusion of choice with rigged elections and the megaphone of blatant bias by the elites.

Political parties are just another domain of the capture. Thanks for the essay and OT!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Lookout

I always appreciate you putting your head in when you have your own thread to manage on Sunday mornings!

And yes, media is key. I would say, specifically, that Facebook and Twitter, especially Twitter, are increasing how fast people personalize politics, and discouraging rational discourse (which often takes more time to do).

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Lookout's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

...if that is possible. They are certainly more controlling...dropping accounts, down playing info they don't like and so on. Glad I'm tweetless and faceless.

Have a good one!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

ggersh's picture

@Lookout @Lookout world and of course not in a good way

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/penn-state-prof-social-credit-will-...

As this 2013 Wall Street Journal article stated, your insurance company:

“…already knows whether you’ve been taking your meds, getting your teeth cleaned and going for regular medical checkups. Now some employers or their insurance companies are tracking what staffers eat, where they shop and how much weight they’re putting on — and taking action to keep them in line.”

Artificial Intelligence, programmed by power hungry individuals, is steadily taking over our society. It is already censoring political opinions. It will be making medical, education, and financial decisions. Humans are to be sidelined. The social credit system will be watching you closely for any deviant behavior. If you arent careful, you will become an outcast. Access to food, transportation and medical care will be denied.

EDIT:spelling

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

enhydra lutris's picture

"onanistic sociopathy" as catchphrase of the decade, possibly century, though it is young yet. We have the fake anti-racism, anti-misogyny, etc wars over language and tweets, like identity politics, and somewhere along the way from LBJ to HRC, concern for the poor morphed into concern for the middle class (really? concern for the middle class? WTF?) because solving the problems (or even trying to ameliorate them) of any and all non-privileged and non-elite members of society is incompatible with predatory corporate capitalism. (Morality, ethics, justice and damn near any value one should value is likewise incompatible with what capitalism has evolved into.) All along, we have needed distractions and the narrative control machine provides them, from those tweet wars to what passes for news. For amusement, I sometimes use actual google to google the date, and, over to the right I get some drivel about today followed by a row of captioned photos unde the heading "Famous people born today", here's today's list: Tom Felton, Andrea Bocelli, Ronaldo, Joan Jett, Kim Yoo-jung. WTF? That the list is almost always "celebrities" of the Kanye or Kim category says it all, because it is where they are trying to direct our attention; away from anything, anything and everything that matters.

Have a great one.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

We have the fake anti-racism, anti-misogyny, etc wars over language and tweets, like identity politics, and somewhere along the way from LBJ to HRC, concern for the poor morphed into concern for the middle class (really? concern for the middle class? WTF?) because solving the problems (or even trying to ameliorate them) of any and all non-privileged and non-elite members of society is incompatible with predatory corporate capitalism.

One thing I don't get is why it's so difficult for the left to recognize and admit publicly that "social justice" is now a tool of the elites, deployed through both old and new elitist media. It shouldn't be that hard to see that the revolution will not be televised. Suddenly the people who brought us endless cheerleading for Bush's wars are concerned about social justice and ending bigotry? Disney Corporation? ATT/Warner? Seriously? They all just started caring about this in the last five years, after decades of not only ignoring, but deliberately browning out and even blacking out the protests and other activism of people fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting homophobia? They just got enlightened because...because why? It couldn't be because Obama gave the elites the opening they needed to take over and repurpose the concept of social justice, could it? It couldn't be because Hillary Clinton desperately needed such a repurposed concept of social justice in order to have any credible basis for her campaign, could it?

I guess you gotta talk about something if policy is out of bounds.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

I guess you gotta talk about something if policy is out of bounds.
@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

I keep bringing up the warS our country is engaged in and the money wasted on same.
Most people have No Clue.

Nice series of posts you got going here, stretching me cranium!

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Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .

Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .

If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Tall Bald and Ugly

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

There's actually some rational basis for "looking out for the middle class" nowadays because, by the mid-oughts, the elites finally got around to attacking the white middle class. They had started, in the late 70s, with attacking black and brown poor people. In the early eighties they had moved on to poor white people and working class people of all colors (they celebrated moving to that stage of their plan by throwing a big union-busting party at the air traffic controllers' house), although most of the white working class took an awful long time to notice. By the mid-nineties they were working on the middle class, with an emphasis on middle-class black and brown people. By the oughts they were attacking all parts of the middle class with extreme prejudice.

That's why I don't understand the upper middle class. How they can fail to notice that they surely must be next is beyond me.

However, your point does still stand in the sense that "fighting for the middle class" was then used to obscure the needs and very existence of the working class and the poor, in the same way that "access to healthcare" is used to obscure the need for a nationalized public health care system.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

enhydra lutris's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
middle class were falling, but I figured that too warranted a WTF, as in how did we get to the point that they needed care and attention -- weren't they the magic element that distinguished *this* implementation of capitalism, and if they too are at risk ...

Thanks for bringing it up explicitly and clarifying all of it for me.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

I doubt you needed me to clarify it for you. The air seems pretty fresh and clear around your thoughts--more so than mine, I sometimes think.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

I figured that too warranted a WTF, as in how did we get to the point that...[the middle class] needed care and attention -- weren't they the magic element that distinguished *this* implementation of capitalism, and if they too are at risk ...

Well here's the thing. As I'm sure you know, there is no necessary relationship between capitalism and democracy, capitalism and republicanism, capitalism and liberty, capitalism and the rule of law, or capitalism and human rights. There may be no necessary relationship between capitalism and tyranny either--but I'm not sure about that. I tend to ride the fence between the Marxists and the farthest reaches of non-Marxist leftism, because I honestly don't know whether there's a way to do capitalism that isn't horrible. Could we have done it in a way that doesn't turn out like this? I don't think that point has been conclusively proved one way or another.

However, what has been proved is that you certainly can't rest secure in the knowledge that your country is the bastion of freedom, democracy, republicanism, human rights, and the rule of law, just because your country is capitalist. What seems to have emerged through this country's history is the following: all those things can co-exist if a bunch of powerful guys keep their word and keep to their bargains with the less powerful. If you want capitalism to co-exist with all those things--or any of them--you need the wealthy and powerful to be honorable and you need an additional belief system, outside of capitalism, that will provide a moral framework for society, because capitalism seems to provide next to nothing in that regard. (Sometimes capitalists practically boast about that fact, touting capitalism's "neutrality" as if having no moral views was a super achievement.)

Capitalism only provides morality in the following ways; in capitalism there's an idea, vaguely expressed, that people should keep their word, stick to the business deals they've made, and pay their debts. That's about the extent of capitalism's morality, though capitalists do also genuflect perfunctorily in the direction of obeying the law (read Milt Friedman sometimes for a hilariously transparent version of this. It runs something like "Businessmen have no moral obligation to do anything except increase the profitability of their companies. Oh, and of course, they have to obey the law too.")

This is, by the way, the moral address of one Elizabeth Warren--not Friedman's views, which are the intellectual equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, bearing the same relationship to civilization that white phosphorous does to Falllujah--but the idea that rich, powerful people need to keep their word and obey the law and we all need to act like moral, nice, law-abiding people who respect one another, and then the system we've got will work swimmingly--after a few tweaks.

Would be nice if it were true.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

Friedman's views, which are the intellectual equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, bearing the same relationship to civilization that white phosphorous does to Falllujah

up
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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@UntimelyRippd

I think that particular idea of his is a civilization-destroying idea.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxE-gZzo9HA]

up
0 users have voted.

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@UntimelyRippd

I'm both grossed out...and also, I feel like you may be being unfair to the slugs....

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

that I would hear some right winger saying how the parties are just alike, thinking he or she was nuts.
My humble apologies, right wingers.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@on the cusp

to make that apology.

I wish they would be equally gracious and fair-minded in apologizing for not joining me in my fight against government tyranny in the eighties--or in the oughts, for that matter. All that rebellious libertarianism was nowhere to be found as long as the President was named Reagan or Bush. They cheer on creeping fascism for thirty years, calling dissidents on the left traitors and a lot of other fun things, and then, when Obama gets in and starts acting like an asshole, they're suddenly shocked because we're embroiled in tyranny.

Yeah, I'm a little irritated. 2010 is too damned late for them to show up.

This is the counterpart to Glenn Greenwald's argument about how liberals hated Bush policies till Obama did them. The right wing loved fascist policies until Obama did them.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal 2 lovely ladies from Minnesota responded to a Peruvian guide about their opinion of Trump. They said they liked him for telling the truth and for being consistent.
I could not keep my mouth shut, made sure the guide knew that a large portion of the population thinks he is an embarrassment, but that is what rich donors wanted, that's who we got, and we have no damn say in it.
The ladies did agree that as the rich donors go, so goes government.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

Mark from Queens's picture

Common Dreams or Truthdig or something?

You have such a clear-eyed and incisive way of analyzing the moment we're in and the hidden forces and motivations driving it.

I’m guessing their obsessive need to stamp out both history and imagination stems from their inability to compete in a battle of ideas. The elites and their employees in politics and the media have gone to a special lunatic fringe of their own, which rarely gets noticed because it’s quieter than Trump’s.

Unfortunately for the politicians, the political ideas of the elites are too extreme to be competitive. Any rational debate would reject their views on war and ecology within minutes, on the grounds that only an insane person would advocate for policies that will bring down human civilization. Their views on economics are only better in the sense that they produce apocalypse and mass death indirectly, rather than immediately. No rational person could support these choices. Too many people have realized their lunacy. And it’s becoming ever harder to contain that realization within the old framework of right versus left.

As recently as the beginning of BLM, material concerns (such as whether or not a cop could with impunity put a bullet in a black person’s brain) were front and center. Now there’s a whole lot of talk about talk. We’re all very concerned about the racist thing Trump said today, and very unconcerned about black children in poverty drinking lead. Water, war, and Wall St. apparently have nothing to do with racial justice.

Great stuff.

It's with real joy that I consider you a friend in this insane world.

That's all I have time for now.

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"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

- Kurt Vonnegut