All-American delusions
Okay, this diary needed a preface, an explanation for why I am saying this. I think it's Trump. The guy obviously needs to go, like Biden needed to go. The Democrats kept him, Biden, around because they secretly wanted a second term of Trump, and so they got their second term of Trump, and he served his purpose. But they keep him around! It's got to be the big mystery of today's news, of why this guy is still there. The critiques can be withering even if they only cite the obvious stuff: that's what Lego videos are for. Maybe the inside traders profit from America's continual embarrassment. But everyone else? And the Republicans are going to go down with his ship! Now, there are two mechanisms in the official scene for his removal: impeachment, and the 25th Amendment. Both look obvious. But the key to his political survival is that Trump is kept in power through all-American delusions. So this is an exploration.
The two-party system in this country is eternal, though of course our insistence that we do all of our politics through the two-party system is how we got Trump. It's okay to have a deranged narcissist running the Federal Government, though, because the Democrats gave us the narcissist, and they're the good guys. Biden and Biden's stand-in so totally had a chance to win the election, because everyone knows there's an irresistable appeal to seeing Joe Biden stare off into space in a Presidential debate, or hearing Kamala Harris fail an interview. That's why the Democrats felt totally safe rigging the primaries for Biden -- twice. What chance Biden and Biden's stand-in had, in the year before last? Who cares? It was your responsibility to support them, not theirs to win.
We can wish politics away, and if it turns out we can't, we can just blame everything on ourselves and go into therapy -- at least until we're dead from an increasing number of causes. Meanwhile we can get jobs advertising AI, which is the best thing to come along since sliced bread, though in the end it will leave us all unemployed and homeless and on the wrong side of the law. We're so totally going to enter the Age of AI because our energy grid can so totally handle the data centers' energy load, what with gasoline prices at only $6/ gallon in California until the petroleum reserves dry up and we start to notice that 20% or 30% of the worlds fossil fuel reserves are now off the US market indefinitely. We all like high energy bills anyway, right?
America is the greatest country in the world, having been the country which inspired Hitler. So what could go wrong? At any rate, we didn't need Finland's education system or universal access to health care or China's or Japan's rail systems or houses for our 700,000 or so (that's an undercount) unhoused people -- especially in the winter because everyone thinks that sleeping outdoors when it's freezing is good for you -- or affordable education or affordable housing, anyway. The education problem was totally being solved with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, just like the university problem is totally being solved now by having the universities shrink to nothing. It will save our Zionist billionaires the trouble of ordering the crushing of nationwide student protests. What America needs, you see, is a good, solid war like the glorious one we had in Afghanistan, one that lasts forever so we ignore it and go back to being ruled by Zionist billionaires or climate change deniers or religious fundamentalists. The pattern was set earlier, then, just like we said fifty-eight years ago that we were winning the war in Vietnam without so much as having a reliable metric which would tell us if we were winning or not.
Communism is bad, you see, even though it's in the Bible.
What makes America genuinely adorable is that its non-human nature is such a thing, it has thing-ness down, Theodor Adorno called it the "preponderance of the object." Whereas much of the rest of the world is still recovering from the scars it received from past eras of capitalism, America's long-standing self-proclaimed cause. Also, because when anyone on the Internet criticizes something as being "bad," it is my American consciousness that allows me to smile benevolently in the knowledge that there's always something worse. "Our state's test scores are low," but there are worse things to learn, and there are always blessings to be thankful for, always reasons to say thank you, while we pursue the long and arduous journey toward the eventual rejection of the philosophy that we don't actually need to dream of a better world -- we can just make stuff up -- and toward that moment when in full realism we dream of a better world. Think of it as the negative version of the saying about "if you meet the Buddha on the road..."
In the Sixties, Zappa composed this song:
Today we have Carsie Blanton:
Comments
George Carlin has it mostly right here
The problem I see with his logic is that at some point the downward slide will come to an end, because the downward slide, like capitalism itself, is an anomaly. And capitalism, too, like all of the anomalies, will come to an end.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
Can't happen soon enough
.
This literal fantasy of democracy being packaged
and sold is almost humorous. Laughable at least.
Zionism is a social disease
I do not see capitalism as an anomaly,
it is simply an expression of Self being selfish, without consideration of the larger context of the mystery human life itself. Of the many civilizations that may have been hosted by this planet, ours is certainly not looking like a sterling example. (Pun intended)
Our planet Earth is uniquely equipped with a reset button that has been activated many times in the past, like clockwork. And the next iteration is expected soon. The downward slide of our Democracy may come to an end, much sooner than you may think possible.
“Even in science, falsehood can not live for too long.”
- Immanuel Velikovski - Bonds of the Past (1972) https://youtu.be/kkS-jDzxnrU ]
Here is my reasoning.
The universe is maybe 13.82 billion years old. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The human species is 300,000 years of age. The Neanderthals, who were a lot like us and who we think interbred with us, went back another 100,000 years before that. Agriculture is maybe 12,000 years old, so for the vast spans of time, 288,000 years or so, there was no organized agricultural society. My parents died at ages 83 (Dad) and 82 (Mom), so that gives me an idea of the scale of the thing.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is at most 600 years old, dating back to the Portuguese colonization of Madeira. This is the argument made persuasively by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel in their book "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things." Though there is, I suppose, some credibility to the argument made in Sven Beckert's "Capitalism," there were for some time (Beckert focuses upon what was once fashionably called the "12th century Renaissance") capitalists without capitalism. So that pushes the phenomenon of capitalists back to 900 years ago. I think it's fair to call the reality before that time "normal," and the reality after that time "anomalous."
If you want an even more profound anomaly than capitalism, there is always industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is, arguably, a product of the invention of the steam engine in 1712, although industrial capitalism became a lot more industrious and thus anomalous with the inventions of the automotive assembly line and of the large-scale power plant in the 1880s. Our version of this scene, then, is about 135 years old.
How is this "anomaly" status important? I see a lot of arguments that begin with the statement that "History shows that" or, even worse, "Human nature shows that" blah blah blah. Whereas, in fact, there hasn't been a whole lot of history to "show" much of anything about our time, or about the human species as it has existed in our time.
So, yes, capitalism is an anomaly. Capitalist life is new, and thus, malleable, vulnerable to collective feats of imagination. It isn't the normal of human existence.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
Whoo-EE, righteous rant!
A proper Jeremiad (as in both the Biblical prophet Jeremiah and Rev. Jeremiah Wright)!
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
I read a brief essay the other day....
.
....Why Capitalism is Fundamentally Undemocratic.
It was written by Jason Hickel. It was a concise, intellectually honest explanation. After reading it, I saw clearly why the US is not a democracy. And why it can never become one. The State can't reach consensus and Unity with two opposing political parties. Without Unity, the people do not have a strong and authorative voice. The People must all be pulling in the same direction. Political Parties exist to cancel out the will of the People.
See what you think....
Here is an excerpt:
.
You can read the rest of essay here .....
Good stuff!
Hickel is a utopian for sure.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
if anyone was still wondering how the duopoly stays in power
Yep, open criminality.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
okay I can't share that Lego video yet
at least not until I learn where to find it on X. Copying and pasting from Facebook seems to be the problem.
Oh well.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
And it's working!
It doesn't take brains, moreover, to see that the Democrats sit around and let it happen because they want it too. Here's Hasan Piker with a half-truth:
Meanwhile, the nonpartisan "moderates" are marketing genocide, war, and the Epstein class as prerequisites of the "center."
It's telling that the new indi.ca post is titled "why 'America' is doing such dumb sh*t and why it can't change course."
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair
Oligarchy "virus"
The “Oligarchy Virus” in U.S. Tax Code
Good luck with the "vaccine." In an otherwise very informative video, they briefly touch on anti-trust law , and omit inheritance tax problems, which are also a part of the problem. They also don't address offshoring production, which was a means to avoid US taxes altogether, while avoiding labor laws and environmental and other US regulations. No limits on greed right? But I'm mixing up apple and oranges, or so I've been told when run off "alternative" media sites over the years. So I gave up on this subject years ago. I commend Bob Lord for putting this video together. It's a complex topic. I see it's not getting a lot of views. Tax law is so dry after all. And then the Powell memo, Citizens United, Supreme Court, the need for a freaking amendment to the constitution and all that.
Raphael Rashid thread running on X, on the US company Coupang, which is trying to pull an Amazon type takeover of South Korean retail markets. According to Coupang lobbyists and lawyers, they are "being discriminated against." I heard one report that among other practices alleged, that Coupang's algorithm discriminates against South Korean products and promotes US products, which violates Korean law on internet media. I saw other issues addressed in a longer thread on this same topic by Raphael a few days ago. I think the anti-anti-trust argument being made by Coupang is what about-ism. What about the Lee family (Samsung)? What about Hyundai, SK, Hanwha? The difficulty with this argument, is that the leader of the Samsung empire found himself in prison for a substantial period for not complying with the law. It's not an anomaly for powerful (corrupt) Korean politicians to find themselves in prison as well (including former dictators and presidents). The US government is threatening South Korea with reprisals in the national security realm if South Korea doesn't stop "discriminating" against the Amazon wannabe.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
Do we here in the United States
put uor corporate "leaders" in prison? If so, I wasn't aware of it.
"Kamala Harris would probably have been elected president if she had less time, not more” -- Yasmin Nair