A Reminder Of How We Got Got Here

We seem to have a few new participants at c99%, so I thought I would review some recent history about America's sorry state of affairs. First, a blast from the past a little over a year ago:

Global Collective Insanity

The constant media assault with its cacophony of killing mayhem, spectacles staged as reality, and propaganda passing for news has thoroughly brainwashed many people into a state of uncomfortable numbness.

. . .

The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/global-collective-insanity

And let us not forget that Power Causes Brain Damage. From a comment I made in a post by Feminista a few months back:

"Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.”

Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/trump-be-crazy-democrats-gambling-bi...

And last, but not least, a post from over a year ago of what I thought was an excellent description and analysis of the Duopoly Kabuki Dance:

Here’s how it works. Each group of players is assigned one of three roles: Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer. The first two roles are allowed one move each: the Victim’s move is to suffer, and the Persecutor’s move is to make the Victim suffer. The Rescuer is allowed two moves: to sympathize with the Victim and to punish the Persecutor. No other moves are allowed, and no player is allowed to make a move that belongs to a different role.

That may seem unduly limited. It’s not, because when a group of people is assigned a role, all their actions are redefined as the move or moves allotted to that role. In the Rescue Game, in other words, whatever a Victim does must be interpreted as a cry of pain. Whatever a Persecutor does is treated as something that’s intended to cause pain to a Victim, and whatever a Rescuer does, by definition, either expresses sympathy for a Victim or inflicts well-deserved punishment on a Persecutor. This is true even when the actions performed by the three people in question happen to be identical. In a well-played Rescue Game, quite a bit of ingenuity can go into assigning every action its proper meaning as a move.

What’s more, the roles are collective, not individual. Each Victim is equal to every other Victim, and is expected to feel and resent all the suffering ever inflicted on every other Victim in the same game. Each Persecutor is equal to every other Persecutor, and so is personally to blame for every suffering inflicted by every other Persecutor in the same game. Each Rescuer, in turn, is equal to every other Rescuer, and so may take personal credit for the actions of every other Rescuer in the same game. This allows the range of potential moves to expand to infinity without ever leaving the narrow confines of the game.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/rescue-game

[The Archdruid Report has closed down]

Unfortunately, the global and military disaster colloquially known as The American Empire has undergone significant additional deterioration in the past year. How we move forward from this sorry state of affairs is highly problematic.

[Edit: I ran across this story about Edward Herman, author of Manufacturing Dissent, and had to throw this link in the mix:

Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-taibbi-on-the-death-o...

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detroitmechworks's picture

Apparently the author published a bunch of the work he previously had on line for free.

His new site is Ecosophia.net

But yes, great review of how we got here.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Meteor Man's picture

@detroitmechworks
I lost the new site and was trying to Bing "Ectopia". Close, but no cigar.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

detroitmechworks's picture

@Meteor Man I never keep my sites in a bookmark, and just memorize them all. Too used to using communal computers where the bookmarks get wiped. I do similar things with history, and only look up stuff if I absolutely cannot remember exact dates or names

With the current censorship of search results for left wing sites on major search engines, my paranoia may have practical applications.

I fear that one day my job description will be:

I smoke, and I know things.

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

Wink's picture

positive we'll pull out of the death spiral, but the closer we get to crashing and burning I'm much less certain. I think time is quickly running out, that we're staring Mad Max in the face. And maybe we should focus on surviving the post- tax cut Apocalypse than figuring out how to fight the Oligarchy. Be a prepper. Buy a rifle. Get a used RV while you still can get one for under $15K, becuz there's going to be a run on them and they soon will sell for twice that. Or more. RV solar camps, people. It's our only chance, maybe the Hope and Change Obama was blabbering about. It may be too late for Bernie's revolution.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Dhyerwolf's picture

@Wink But even most of the left is completely underestimating the effects that climate change will have. CA scraped a bill speeding up our move to renewable energy because an electrician's union didn't get all the changes it wanted, and we are supposed to be the leaders in this. I've stopped talking about the effects of climate change for the most part because people will just tell me that my views are too scary (not that they disagree though).

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Meteor Man's picture

@Dhyerwolf

I occasionally visit the X-Risks institute:

https://www.xrisksinstitute.com/

Climate/environmental catastrophe is right behind nuclear Armageddon in my opinion. A global pandemic caused by antibiotic resistant microbes is a near term threat.

The global failure to address any of these threats to human existence boggles the mind.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Meteor Man's picture

@Wink
The human species is demonstrating sheer genius in ways to achieve extinction of the human race. The economic/political collapse on the road to extinction will be brutal.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

TheOtherMaven's picture

Victims could become Persecutors and vice versa, Rescuers could become Victims or Persecutors, and occasionally one of the other two could move into the Rescuer role.

This dynamic has mainly been studied in alcoholic families.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

Meteor Man's picture

@TheOtherMaven
I think the reason intentional application of The Rescue Game in politics has been so effective is that it represents the unconscious roles at play in the psychology of family dynamics.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

@Meteor Man
If everything I do is simply defined as suffering and/or persecution ... then ... well, what's the game exactly? It's my "move", I do something -- pick my nose, perhaps -- and now, I have suffered. So what? How or why would anything I'm doing relate to anything anyone else is doing? I mean ... is this a real game, or is this a metaphorical structure for analyzing situations that one is observing, in which one first chooses to classify the subjects under observation? Huh? What's it all about, Alfy?

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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.

detroitmechworks's picture

@UntimelyRippd political manipulation.

If you are the victim, the reason you pick your nose is because of the persecutor.

The persecutor's actions in first picking their nose are the reason you cannot be responsible for your nose picking.

As a result, I, the rescuer, will condemn the persecutor by picking my nose in solidarity. I also will gain a great deal of praise and attention for calling attention to your plight. I will condemn the initial Picking of noses, and work for a world in which nobody picks noses, primarily by stopping the persecutor from doing so.

This is how the Democrats address social issues, I am told. Smile

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Meteor Man's picture

@detroitmechworks
It's a sophisticated version of blame shifting and flipping the script so the designated hero can ride in on a silver stallion to save the day. Over and over again.

Identity politics are a perfect vehicle for the Rescue Game. Hillary was saving POC and women from that racist, misogynist Bernie Sanders. DACA will solve all of the problems for American Hispanics, so just ignore the Fight for $15 or living wage.

Russiagate and Donna Brazile are two stories with countless victims and prosecutors.

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn