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I note that in general the GOP Establishment is being low key about the overturning of Roe v Wade. I suspect they're not happy that those judicial morons 'went nuclear' in the Culture War. They were supposed to just 'chip away a bit at a time' while focusing on their main job of making Business Friendly rulings. Now the 2022 Midterms have taken on a whole new dynamic.
~Even though I am ostensibly Progressive – Pro-LGBT, Pro-Reproductive Rights, Pro-Marriage Equality, Pro-Labor, Pro-Income Equality, etc – I have come to despise The American Left. I'm old enough to remember when we got out into the streets and fucked things up. If the cops came at us, we went at them. We actually believed in Revolution, even if we were a little vague on its specifics.
But now the so-called Left has become a bunch of chickenshit mealy-mouthed whiners.
They've become so 'inclusive' that they don't really believe in anything.
They preach Tolerance, but cannot practice it because everything triggers them.
They rant about Cultural Appropriation when they produce absolutely no culture themselves.
They lament the political violence of the Right, yet demand we disarmed ourselves.
And they endlessly debate and parse every tiny cultural detail and political nuance to death and so render themselves fatally divided and utterly impotent.
Worse of all, they have so become thoroughly Petite Bourgeois in their world view – Everything Must Be Safe And Everyone Must Be Nice, All The Time, Everywhere – that they are now The Perfect Tools of The Corporate Confederacy, not Citizens, but Conscious Consumers.
The American Right is the same in its own way, but it has the advantage of being able to Hate without any need to 'understand' anything beyond its own mindset. That is the great power of Fascism, being allowed to openly hate that which you fear and do so without any shame.
But now the so-called Left has become a bunch of chickenshit mealy-mouthed whiners.
They've become so 'inclusive' that they don't really believe in anything.
They preach Tolerance, but cannot practice it because everything triggers them.
They rant about Cultural Appropriation when they produce absolutely no culture themselves.
They lament the political violence of the Right, yet demand we disarmed ourselves.
And they endlessly debate and parse every tiny cultural detail and political nuance to death and so render themselves fatally divided and utterly impotent.
Worse of all, they have so become thoroughly Petite Bourgeois in their world view – Everything Must Be Safe And Everyone Must Be Nice, All The Time, Everywhere – that they are now The Perfect Tools of The Corporate Confederacy, not Citizens, but Conscious Consumers.
The American Right is the same in its own way, but it has the advantage of being able to Hate without any need to 'understand' anything beyond its own mindset. That is the great power of Fascism, being allowed to openly hate that which you fear and do so without any shame.
Debating w/ Grad Students
Feb. 27th, 2022 01:53 pmOk, had some coffee now...lol
I started to study history, most especially Military History, when I was nine years old. [I'll be seventy this year] When I was seventeen I was out in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Organized students at my high school and we confronted the police, violently. [made for great post-demo sex lol]
The single Great Sociopolitical Lesson I learned with that was how classic National Socialist crowd control techniques worked seamlessly on Leftist art students. [I went to the old High School of Art & Design in NYC] With proper technique, The Herd is easily guided and controlled no matter how intelligent its individual members may be...and most people ain't that bright.
Many of us, myself included for a while, truly believed 'The Revolution was at hand'. What we got instead was Nixon, Reagan and finally Trump, plus Corporatist Apparatchiks like Clinton, Obama...and ofc Joe Biden. [Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter tho, he has remained a Good Man] And nearly all my Old Comrades became Capitalist Roaders, aka 'Yuppies'.
I was never a Communist, tho I used some of their rhetoric. Even as a teen it was easy to see that Stalin and Mao were homicidal psychopaths, that no Russian or Chinese workers 'owned the means of production' and the so-called 'communist states' were really Authoritarian State Capitalist.
Democracy works fine in small polities, maybe no more than five or ten thousand people. That is the maximum most Baseline Humans can handle. Beyond that, all the institutional mechanisms required to run a Modern Technological State outstrip the Baseline Human capacity to keep track them. After that, running things gets 'farmed out' and that's where Corruption starts to kick in. Once we get to millions of people, it is endemic and Democracy is more and more subsumed until we get to our present state, the Inverted Totalitarianism you so blithely dismissed.
Baseline Humans [me, thee and all we know] simply cannot make Mass Democracy work. Just look at how most of us deal with Accelerating Climate Change, which is likely to kill most if not all of us. Denial...Denial...Denial...Extinction.
That, more than anything else, led me to become a Transhumanist. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that The Rich and Powerful will be the main beneficiaries of the Genetic Engineering and Cybernetic Augmentation technologies that are being developed in this very moment. But maybe a workable form of Democracy will come out of these New Humans having a Cybernetic form of Telepathy where one can download all the information required directly into one's mind.
Of course, I have little doubt that a Genetically Engineered 'laboring class' of 'less than humans' will be created to serve these New Humans, controlled by brain implants and 'made happy with their lot'. We love having servants.
Because of our failure to deal with Accelerating Climate Change, these New Humans will have to live underground and in orbit for a while, centuries I expect. But I'm sure they'll adapt just fine. They'll still be 'humans' and we're like f'ing cockroaches. lol
Me, I live out in the desert with my 2nd wife and our many cats, which worked out quite nicely in The Time of Covid [a symptom of Accelerating Climate Change BTW]. I write and think and pass the time until I pass onto the next Turn of The Wheel.
You see, I'm [mostly] at the Acceptance Stage of Grief, while you seem to be somewhere in the Anger/Bargaining Stages. /sigh I suppose that's in part a function of age...
...and that's just about that.
See here: https://nebris.tumblr.com/post/677383159172792320
I started to study history, most especially Military History, when I was nine years old. [I'll be seventy this year] When I was seventeen I was out in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Organized students at my high school and we confronted the police, violently. [made for great post-demo sex lol]
The single Great Sociopolitical Lesson I learned with that was how classic National Socialist crowd control techniques worked seamlessly on Leftist art students. [I went to the old High School of Art & Design in NYC] With proper technique, The Herd is easily guided and controlled no matter how intelligent its individual members may be...and most people ain't that bright.
Many of us, myself included for a while, truly believed 'The Revolution was at hand'. What we got instead was Nixon, Reagan and finally Trump, plus Corporatist Apparatchiks like Clinton, Obama...and ofc Joe Biden. [Goddess Bless Jimmy Carter tho, he has remained a Good Man] And nearly all my Old Comrades became Capitalist Roaders, aka 'Yuppies'.
I was never a Communist, tho I used some of their rhetoric. Even as a teen it was easy to see that Stalin and Mao were homicidal psychopaths, that no Russian or Chinese workers 'owned the means of production' and the so-called 'communist states' were really Authoritarian State Capitalist.
Democracy works fine in small polities, maybe no more than five or ten thousand people. That is the maximum most Baseline Humans can handle. Beyond that, all the institutional mechanisms required to run a Modern Technological State outstrip the Baseline Human capacity to keep track them. After that, running things gets 'farmed out' and that's where Corruption starts to kick in. Once we get to millions of people, it is endemic and Democracy is more and more subsumed until we get to our present state, the Inverted Totalitarianism you so blithely dismissed.
Baseline Humans [me, thee and all we know] simply cannot make Mass Democracy work. Just look at how most of us deal with Accelerating Climate Change, which is likely to kill most if not all of us. Denial...Denial...Denial...Extinction.
That, more than anything else, led me to become a Transhumanist. Unfortunately, it is almost certain that The Rich and Powerful will be the main beneficiaries of the Genetic Engineering and Cybernetic Augmentation technologies that are being developed in this very moment. But maybe a workable form of Democracy will come out of these New Humans having a Cybernetic form of Telepathy where one can download all the information required directly into one's mind.
Of course, I have little doubt that a Genetically Engineered 'laboring class' of 'less than humans' will be created to serve these New Humans, controlled by brain implants and 'made happy with their lot'. We love having servants.
Because of our failure to deal with Accelerating Climate Change, these New Humans will have to live underground and in orbit for a while, centuries I expect. But I'm sure they'll adapt just fine. They'll still be 'humans' and we're like f'ing cockroaches. lol
Me, I live out in the desert with my 2nd wife and our many cats, which worked out quite nicely in The Time of Covid [a symptom of Accelerating Climate Change BTW]. I write and think and pass the time until I pass onto the next Turn of The Wheel.
You see, I'm [mostly] at the Acceptance Stage of Grief, while you seem to be somewhere in the Anger/Bargaining Stages. /sigh I suppose that's in part a function of age...
...and that's just about that.
See here: https://nebris.tumblr.com/post/677383159172792320
"The truth is that this culture is insane. When Derrick asks his audiences, “Does anyone here believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” — and he’s asked it for years, all around the country—no one says yes. That means that most people, or at least most people with a beating heart, have already done the math, added up the arrogance, sadism, stupidity, and denial, and reached the bottom line: a dead planet. Some of us carry that final sum like the weight of a corpse. For others, that conclusion turns the heart to a smoldering coal. But despair and rage have been declared unevolved and unclean, beneath the “spiritual warriors” who insist they will save the planet by “healing” themselves. How this activity will stop the release of carbon and the felling of forests is never actually explained. The answer lies vaguely between being the change we wish to see and a hundredth monkey of hope, a monkey that is frankly more Christmas pony than actual possibility.
Given that the culture of America is founded on individualism and awash in privilege, it’s no surprise that narcissism is the end result. The social upheavals of the 60s split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture that offers workshops on our “scarcity consciousness,” as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux-children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming is treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one but me sees a problem with that." ~Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet Excerpt
Given that the culture of America is founded on individualism and awash in privilege, it’s no surprise that narcissism is the end result. The social upheavals of the 60s split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture that offers workshops on our “scarcity consciousness,” as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux-children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming is treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one but me sees a problem with that." ~Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet Excerpt
Quote of The Day
Jul. 20th, 2019 01:53 pmSep. 28th, 2014 at 8:39 PM
"The dumbest thing Marx ever did was fall for that "withering away of the state" business. Whether the state is "bourgeois" or "proletarian" or "cooperative" or "corporatist" or what have you, there is not the slightest reason for thinking that the state, as such, will come to an end. There is no reason at all for thinking that complex human societies can forgo politics, governmental organization, planning, the rule of law, coercive enforcement of the rule of law, the paternalistic socialization of children and the ongoing, organized defense of the realm against violent threats from potential predators. There is no reason at all to think that the many interlocking institutions in such a society can make everything work through "self-organization" or "emergent" patterns of pure voluntariness and spontaneous cooperation.
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
"The dumbest thing Marx ever did was fall for that "withering away of the state" business. Whether the state is "bourgeois" or "proletarian" or "cooperative" or "corporatist" or what have you, there is not the slightest reason for thinking that the state, as such, will come to an end. There is no reason at all for thinking that complex human societies can forgo politics, governmental organization, planning, the rule of law, coercive enforcement of the rule of law, the paternalistic socialization of children and the ongoing, organized defense of the realm against violent threats from potential predators. There is no reason at all to think that the many interlocking institutions in such a society can make everything work through "self-organization" or "emergent" patterns of pure voluntariness and spontaneous cooperation.
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
Quote of The Day
Sep. 28th, 2014 08:40 pm"The dumbest thing Marx ever did was fall for that "withering away of the state" business. Whether the state is "bourgeois" or "proletarian" or "cooperative" or "corporatist" or what have you, there is not the slightest reason for thinking that the state, as such, will come to an end. There is no reason at all for thinking that complex human societies can forgo politics, governmental organization, planning, the rule of law, coercive enforcement of the rule of law, the paternalistic socialization of children and the ongoing, organized defense of the realm against violent threats from potential predators. There is no reason at all to think that the many interlocking institutions in such a society can make everything work through "self-organization" or "emergent" patterns of pure voluntariness and spontaneous cooperation.
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has been crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
There is no millennial salvation coming at the "end of history". There will be no end of history.
You know why the left goes absolutely nowhere and has been crushed by the forces of private capital power for over a half-century? Because it is largely composed of nitwit fantasists, dreamy melancholics drowning in barbarous and muddy ideological theorization, and thumb-sucking fools who are in deep, deep, deep denial about human history, human nature, and human social life.
People want a more just and equal world? Then they are going to have to fight for such a world, struggle to build it, think hard and in a concrete analytic fashion about how to organize it, put those organizational plans in place though the messy gringing work of politics and the coercive mechanisms of an organized legal system, and then struggle to keep it from falling apart.
And the struggle will be endless, because human beings are an erratic mess, with abundant proclivities toward aggression, violence, irrationality, selfishness, delusion, laziness, fanaticism and hysteria. Decent human society comes from keeping all of these things in check via a well-thought out system of governance, not from attempts to eradicate them.
Society is hard work because human beings are just a species of wild animal with the special ability to domesticate and tame themselves. There is no race of pure and sinless angels waiting to emerge once all of the fascism, statism, or meanyism is scraped away." ~Dan Kervick
