The Conscience of a Conservative

I remember reading a book by a Jesuit, a philosopher I think, who said, basically, there are higher and lower elements in both individuals and societies and the higher elements must run the show. Note this acknowledges the existence, as a given, of the lower elements. 

Even in a society. That’s defining some members of the society as lower elements. I’m fine with that. In that respect I’m probably conservative. BUT I THINK IT’S CIRCUMSTANTIAL. Not existential. As an ethical matter we all have the same rights. I think this for several reasons.

The critical one is that people are incomprehensible in isolation. We exist as a group, as a species and as an aggregation. Not intelligibly as individuals. Individualism is subjective, obviously. Experiential, and valid as that. But try reproducing individually. Without another person. 

Without cooperation. It’s just about possible these days.

Musk might try. But it’s not a recipe for anything human. Incidentally, I’d argue that Musk is not human. He’s fundamentally sick. But that’s another story. Liberals, or progressives, or whatever I am, believe that, as a matter of accountability and intelligibility, we are all equal. 

Conservatives believe they’re existentially superior, that they have rights you don't have. American conservatives are typically social darwinists or religious exclusionists. Both are fatalists. Social darwinists believe they are superior as determined by competition. They won. 

That they outcompeted everyone else so they’re better. Take that. Religious fundamentalists believe they were arbitrarily chosen by God by predestination, so take that and fuck you to hell to those that weren’t. Election is arbitrary in that it’s above our ability to understand it. 

I point out that this is against the express terms of our constitution, as it concerns one’s citizenship and legal rights and as a political matter. As it concerns us as a polis. Secondly this is expressly and definitely unchristian, for some people to say they’re saved and you’re not. 

Conservatives, the social darwinist faction, don’t have consciences. They have drives. Aristocratic drives define conservatives. Privilege. I don’t deny they might be superior in some respects, I deny that makes them the boss of me. And exempt from the laws of the commonwealth.

I don’t exist at their pleasure. This group of supremacists is of course a minority. But with the intent to rule and turn the rest of us into serfs. So they lie, at an industrial scale, and try to exert leverage. They try to turn the tables by claiming we need them, not that they need us.

It’s all a fucking lie. They can think whatever they want, but stop lying about it. And if you’re in a democracy or claim to be a Christian play by the rules. Instead, for example, of trying to overthrow our government and reduce our religious traditions to blasphemous bullshit. 

ED and FOP

Two career tracks are available in Trump's administration at this time, the Epstein Diversion track and the Friends of Pedophiles track. The latter is higher in prestige and might require a donation to the Donald Defense Fund to get on but yields greater access to Herr Donald and possible financial rewards. 

Remember the diversion part. For all the fantastic mess being created by Trump never forget it's all about Epstein. The ED track is loaded with lackeys and younger associates many just out of college, typically Patrick Henry or Hillsdale, and they are the foot soldiers. Cannon fodder, if it comes down to it. 

Trump Show, Season Two: More Murder and Mayhem!

The killing in season one was nearly passive, as Donnie got his footing in his important new job. He's president! But as a murder show it sucked. An epidemic didn't make good drama, though Donnie is estimated to have gotten over 400,000 people killed, a pretty good number, watching old farts with comorbidities die in a massive mess of hoses and tubes with a ventilator and shit, well, what a drag! 

The highlight was the idiot anti-vaxxers that passed, out of devotion to Donnie. Those morons believed they were actors like Donnie, I guess, and that they wouldn't really die. SAD! But that's the thing about the Trump Show, people really die. It's a snuff show. Season Two has been better. They're blowing shit up. Beating people in the streets of American towns and cities. Tormenting citizens in all kinds of ways. 

It's a much better show this time. Herr Hegseth, Trump's man of war, saw some poor souls clinging to a boat and said 'kill them!' What a man. Donald himself, it's said, loves nothing more than to see the films of the strikes. He started a war, he likes it so much. But they fought back! My God, the nerve. They messed up the plot. The whole thing is stalled now. But if there's one thing Donald's good at it's stirring shit up. 

So, stay tuned. That's the whole point, isn't it? 

Finding Out Is the Fun Part

At least if you're a Republican. Because they're the ones that fool around. We're the ones that find out. 

His Word Is His Bond Markets

I wonder if anyone is telling our compulsive idiot leader where he is heading. Maybe he thinks his will can shape anything, or that he can squirm out of any kind of massive failure and bankruptcy, where we know he has had practice, but he's also been the author of his own catastrophes before and gone into kiss-up mode. He seemed to be there with Xi and he took plutocrats with him to run interference. 

It all reeks of weakness. Donald has had to grovel before but he does it differently, looking down his nose at you while he's at it. I'm not a psychologist but I think I understand compensatory posturing, which rests on a kind of thermodynamics of the psyche, an inborn accountability that's in effect of you're not a psychopath and maybe even then. It suggests Donald knows he's a worthless piece of shit. 

He creates desperate circumstances for himself because, confoundingly, it's stabilizing to him. He's such a wreck inside externalizing it gives him an opportunity to fight that battle. Laws and customs, down to the level of etiquette, are supposed to enable societies to function with such people because they are inevitable. You keep them in line and try to channel their shit or jail them if they're bad enough. 

Trump should probably have been jailed but with the right kind of pushback earlier who knows. Money can insulate someone from almost anything and it did with Trump. Why, this leads me to ask, would a society empower such a piece of garbage? Averages should apply and keep it from happening. There has to be a mass psychological injury. Like, let's say, a Civil War. Americans are figuring this out.

Too late. The damage has been done with more to come. Yes, they want to destroy the county. Look at the electoral results just in. Trump is still getting his way in places. I think we need to understand it to react appropriately for once if we have the chance to run things again. They're fighting a war. Against us. People are shocked at these deep-south states attacking voting rights. I'm not shocked. 

Talk about bond markets and interest rates is fine but it's in the realm of expertise and they're pulling us out of there. What does expertise mean if it applies to destruction? And we're heading there. Nobody cares about it when the real suffering begins and Americans have forgotten what that's like. So we're playing brinkmanship with seriously bad shit. Maybe biggest case of FOMO ever is in store. 

I say this out of respect for the bond markets. Not as sexy as stocks but I believe they're the thing you really don't want to screw up. And little Donnie's baggage could take us there.

Where Have All the Fuckheads Gone?

All Republicans now. Republicans have cornered the market on fuckheads. Or they're working on it. When will they ever learn?  

The Golf and Grovel

Air Force One has carried Trump to China like the huge baby he is, sucking his thumb and groveling before Xi. He's so depleted America he can't do anything. And Taiwan is on the table.

China wins as the USA and Russia destroy themselves. The smell of bankruptcy is in the air. This time little Donnie Trump has bankrupted the whole country. While enriching himself. For now. 

Escape from Trumpatraz

We're all Trump's prisoners. Even his supporters, because they're his dupes. How do we escape from Trumpatraz?

Future Proof

Republicans are ensuring our country has no future. We're future-proof. Also known as being fucked. They're redefining future-proofing like everything else. Like truth. Like freedom. Like justice. 

They rely on a fundamentalist, evangelical base to stay in power. Evangelicals want to see the end times so it works out. Together with 'disaster capitalism' and 'creative destruction' our future is assured.

We don't have one. 

Please, President Xi, a Little Favor?

Woke up this morning with the fantasy that Xi would arrest Trump on behalf of humanity or say he had a medical emergency and stick him in a room somewhere. Maybe then use him as leverage against Vance, the immediate acting president, and the Republicans in Congress, demanding we stop fucking around and follow our own laws or declare ourselves an officially authoritarian state and be done with it.

What would those Republicans do? 

Say please keep him for a bit and make sure he's okay he's been a bit off lately? Then what? Try to institute some kind of intelligible interim government? I don't think so. They would be jockeying for power, trying to get pardons from Vance, protecting their fortunes any way they could, and trying to guarantee their personal hegemony forever. At least the pretense, that we aren't already completely fucked, would be over.

That's how far gone we are. The world would be so relieved if Trump were somehow stopped. Like Democrats, but much more understandably, they've never been able to comprehend this block of fundamentalist religious sociopaths we have. But behold these scumbags in Alabama and other states capitalizing on our rogue, politicized Supreme Court's latest farcical voting rights ruling.

Just a thought experiment, of course, but it leads me to believe Democrats as a party are incapable of dealing with this. They can't mount a coherent, effective attack on an administration that's nothing but a rolling coup or even criticize it in a way that sticks. My conclusion? The only way we get out of this is charismatic leadership. Anybody. A fucking Martian would be fine. And I see absolutely no one.

Befits Charity

Conservatism is about privilege. Privilege is about getting something for nothing. Conservatives are making the case for charity, for them. Not because they need it but because they want it. They think they deserve it, no matter what they already have. Is it any wonder they lie all the time?

They've Lost the Plot

The plot was democracy. But, don't worry, they've found another one, authoritarianism, the version of it known as white supremacy. Everything old is new again, even Nazism.

Pesky Blighters

I have a dramatic series in mind documenting the Trump Crime Family's thefts, manipulations and nefarious activities modeled on Peaky Blinders, the excellent British show about an Irish gang that makes the sniveling cowards of Trump's version look like the pathetic lightweights they are, using the status and power afforded them by their government positions to bully and abuse people with no such leverage. 

They aren't even respectable villains. They stink at it, parading their insecurities around and lording it over the locals, trying to prove something, that quest for their elusive manhood or a hint of character. Real crooks don't allow such things to interfere with maximizing profits relative to risks. Now, Trump and his cronies are stealing incomprehensible sums, I'll give them that, but it looks bad on the risk front.

They're blowing up everything. A Valentine's Day Massacre a day, seems to be the reference quality, with allowances for their access to WMDs. Yes, those WMDs they were worried sick about. We knew THEY had them, of course, a privilege supposed to be earned by a capacity for restraint and reserve. Self-control -- not a known character trait of Donald Trump, a bawling infant if there ever was one.

Our derivative culture has coughed up a raft of derivative rogues, a derivative resistance that can't stop them, and is suffering a derivative decline almost certain to culminate in a derivative collapse. We can't even fuck things up properly or with a little plot and style. We suck infinitely. But let it be said we suck with impressive collateral damage and mess. Imperial and colonial collateral damage and mess. 

We were never supposed have those aspirations, the imperial and colonial type, so maybe we're getting what we deserve even if we backed into it.

Society for Destructive Anachronism

Donald Trump is going medieval on the world. 

Fires, Floods, Plagues, and Famines

Fundamentalist Christians want to see some Biblical shit happen. Fires, floods, plagues and famines appeal to them. So 30% or so of Americans still support a madman. They see it. They like it. There are no internal checks on it at all. They're out of their fucking minds. 

America, a City on a Hill

And a blight unto men.

America is becoming a Calvinist dream state, a city on a hill. A light shining forth, the beams of the bonfires of witches and heretics, and of the self-immolation of fundamentalists striving for perfection. Looking up, they assume guidance from heaven. They don't notice there's nowhere to go but down. 

Threat Brain

Threat Brain (TB), a Republican affliction of imagined danger, also known as WMD Delusion or Invented Antagonism, varies inversely with the Actual Threat (AT) according to rational risk assessment. It might not be a linear function but run quickly to infinity in the reasonable near absence of threats though this is hypothetical since there's always something to be afraid of. 

The only known remedy is death. Once someone is dead there's nothing left to fear but no one has been able to report back on this. Mystics maintain fear can survive death if the spirit is still shackled to its corporeality by guilt. Republicans thrive best in the presence of real, immediate existential threats. This is thought to be an evolutionary anachronism, and a potent one. 

Possibly the most potent evolutionary artifact, with natural selection favoring suspicion and paranoia over millennia, the survival of the craziest and most naturally belligerent. Republicans are believed to start wars because of this. All the origins of the wars of the past must be approached with skepticism for this reason, more so because the mechanisms are unconscious. 

Republicans are always sowing the seeds of discord in subtle ways. Recognizing that Republicans are a rogue branch of traditional European conservatism, Threat Brain still seems to be a conservative project, it's supposed because of privilege and entitlement. Privilege and the resulting assertion of arbitrary superiority and station mean conservatives think themselves targets. 

Field studies indicate a projection of their own jealous, arrogant, entitled, presumptuous, acquisitive, reactionary, and persecutory predispositions. They expect others to be like them, prone to unprovoked attack. Threat Brain can't be eliminated it must be contained. By its nature the assumptions of privilege apply to a minority. Be on the lookout for leverage and alliances. 

By these means they attempt to take over, achieve total control and unlimited power. When that happens we are fucked because the same suspicious mechanisms aren't assuaged they intensify. In their minds they have more to lose, further to fall and they're more vulnerable than ever. They will never see they bring that all on themselves, a case of self-fulfilling expectations

The Story in Their Lies

There's a story there. We know it, that Republican lies are revelatory. Not to say endless and sick. They're especially harmful lies because they're designed to hurt people at every level. I don't mean every economic or social level because they go after the most vulnerable. I mean they have a whole system of lies. 

Those lies attack the same people, from rather trivial deprivations to getting them killed. Overwhelming force appeals to monsters. Bond villains fantasize about it. Unlimited power over everything. Everybody. Intensity and scope. They're going for it all. And there's no rhyme or reason. They're just sick. 

Do the Myth

I understand 'do the math'. I support it. But it's a tool. People don't live math. Math helps them live. People live stories. Do the myth. 

The Giant Sucking Noise That Is Texas

The extraction capital of the world. That's Texas. They think they're strong and independent. Texas men, anyway. If they were they wouldn't be so touchy, reactive and sensitive about being told they're not all strong and independent. That they're anything but real men who hunt and fish and rule their women, benign or brutal, it doesn't matter. 

Build a Better Basket

Elon Musk is a basket case. Maybe a basket savant, I don't know. Let's put him in an institution, a prison or asylum, and see what he can come do. That would be fine with me. His murderous, destructive stint at DOGE has earned him that. And give his money to the poor. Fucking all of it. 

The Rat Revolution

Rats. The rats are running everything. Cannibal rats. They eat their own kind. They spread misery and disease. They're always nibbling. Infiltrating and nibbling.   

The rats haven't fled a sinking ship. They mutinied. They gnawed holes in the ship and sabotaged it until it was could be commandeered by them, innately inferior elements. 

Republicans are the rats. They'd rather rule in a shithole than exist in a nice place because for them nice isn't an option. Nice is unnatural. Life is shit. Creation is shit. 

So let it all be shit. Republicans want everything to be shit. With them in charge. When they're in charge everything is shit, because they're destructive, so it all works out. 

Self-fulfilling expectations. 

Dinner Out in Washington

I'd like a main course of responsible governance with a side of entertaining intrigue. Hold the plunder and sociopathy. And in an earlier review I heard you had a massive roach running the kitchen, à la Proust. I assume that's been corrected and is no longer the case. If not we're leaving and will burn down the place down on the way out. Restaurants shouldn't be run by roaches.

Lonesome Dotard

This is the saga of Donald Trump, a boy who can't get any respect. A stranger in his own land. A king and hero unappreciated and maligned by his people. 

He thinks only of his constituents. His subjects. Do they love him as they should? With the love he craves and needs? No. They refuse him his ballroom. 

It is nothing! In the scheme it is nothing. And he is taunted, mocked and abused. He does everything for his subjects. They are lucky to be ruled by him. 

Dotard Days

Remember the innocent days of a fat North Korean fuck trading insults in an admirer's spat with a certain fat American fuck?

Notes From the Pit of Hell

Trump therapy -- your personal issues fade as Trump's engulf the world. Trump's baggage can take us all down. And a big chunk of creation. Jesus died for our sins. We must die for Trump's sins.

Hence he's the anti-Christ. Christ took on humanity's imperfection, corruption and sinfulness, in expiation. Trump unloads his inhumanity onto everyone else. Then he tries to burn us all at the stake. 

We'll Always Have Paris

It's over. Whatever it was -- the good, the bad -- it's done. There's a war on, if you haven't heard, no matter that only one side gets it. 

So we can't go back. No USA as it was. Don't accept that? Wake the fuck up! Because if we don't we're less likely to keep the dream alive. 

We carry it within us. The other side doesn't. That's reality. There's a fucking war on. Getting by and going along isn't good enough. 

Bluto Is President

A lot of Europeans turned loose on a continent of unexploited natural resources isn't a model for anything. It doesn't result in culture or a civilization but a frat party, not that it hasn't been fun. But it's over and the boys aren't getting it.  

Ants Will Inherit the Earth

I was out moving some stones around and ants are everywhere. They will surely inherit the earth. Then I realized Republicans are a species of ant. Individuation matters for nothing. There is absolutely no disagreement in thought or deed. Human beings supposedly endowed with reason and free will sacrifice that and utter the Republican line with absolute predictability and a unanimity of practice and purpose. The same language. The same message. Joe Biden blah blah.

What's observably true is not true. Trump didn't say or do what he said or did. He has an IQ greater than Einstein and plays quantum chess. Anything bad, Democrats did. Anything good, we did. The colony is everything. The Republican colony, whatever that is, a fair question since they've thrown reality out the window. Defenestrated it. It's a mind virus. Another implication is that Trump is a queen, not a king, and somehow connected with reproduction. He spreads the mind virus. 

And, to be clear, I am in no way disparaging ants. They are fine and industrious creatures. They cooperate in meaningful ways and their behaviors make sense. For ants. I like ants, but not fire ants. Not a fan of those. And Republicans most remind me of that breed. Insanely reactive. Aggressive as shit. They must have evolutionary baggage. Humans, in any event,  are not supposed to be ants so this is a mutation. A mind mutation. Or a contagion. A contagious illness of the brain. 

A brain disease. More on this important insight and public health concern is to follow.

Trump Wasting Disease

Trump is wasting everything. He's a disease. 

The Anti-Christian Worldview of Evangelicals: Into the Shithole

Their idea of Christianity, and the avowed understanding of it among evangelicals, is that it's the worldview within which everything works, under Christianity's status as the revealed truth as conveyed in the Bible. This sounds academic. They might insist the point is just Jesus but, same thing. Except they believe stepping outside their system to describe it invalidates the description because life is a matter of faith, not of analysis. There's no stepping back. Life apart from faith is invalid. That makes me wonder about all the talk of evangelization in the Bible -- why bother, just kill them. 

So it applies to governments, of course. These are Christian or they are invalid. Whether evangelicals think illicit governments should be converted or destroyed is unclear and might depend on having a critical mass of Christians available to run the government. Because if not it is invalid. Evangelicals buy into nationalism because it's in the Bible. Tribes and nations appear, so they are part of God's plan but note the interplay of power dynamics and Christian principles. My reading would be there's nothing supporting merging the Roman Empire with Christianity but it happened anyway. 

Who knows how evangelicals find what they find in the Bible. It seems selective and distorted to me. I say Christianity is not their worldview -- that they have another worldview and that their Christianity is subsumed to that. That worldview is a deranged, racist, uncompromised authoritarianism. Which is incompatible with Christianity and democracy and pretty much anything other than living in a shithole of violence, competition without rules, and basic barbarism. They're extreme Calvinists in that respect, and their most fundamental belief is that life and creation are shit.

Everything arises from that. So it's useless trying to understand who they are and what they're doing. They're insane. They simply must be stopped. Or, welcome to the shithole. The shithole isn't entirely bad. Mostly it's arbitrary as hell. No overall justice -- that's for the afterlife, where most of us are fucked. Kindness and decency exist, in pockets and places, but these are like theme parks, artificial environments cut off from the horrors of life for the enjoyment of the elect while they await rapture or the Second Coming or whatever, I think even they are unclear how that plays out. 

Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein doesn't get paid to shut up. And it shows. 

The Full Monty Cristo

With Trump coming unglued and his administration reeling from his desperation and stupidity they are talking about turning to male striptease to keep the party going. Along Chippendales lines. It makes as much sense as anything they've done, and who wouldn't love to see Miller, Vought, Vance, Lindsey Graham and all the others gyrating and taking off their clothes, to say nothing of Donnie himself. As a Christ figure Trump can do no wrong. So his base will certainly stick with him. 

Doctor Who-the-Fuck

Doctor Donald. He is what ails you. 

Trump Zealots Going After Everybody

Trump's administration isn't an administration but a monstrous, mutated thing. The human beings in it aren't humans. They lack integrity to an incomprehensible degree. They don't do their jobs. They don't fulfill their roles. They are the system and they aren't, since they're killing it off. 

Nothing is intelligible or makes sense. The administration is an abomination. Horror movie material. Blindly attacking everybody and everything. All the old ways, the semblance of constitutional governance must be destroyed. It must be destroyed. It must be destroyed. It's a zombie thing. 

Fire Up the Ovens

They're using preservatives. I know they are. And anti-upchuck alleviators. Coming at it from both ends. Concealing the stench of the Republican death machine and the corpses they leave scattered AND inoculating the troops so they can't smell it or convince them rotting corpses smell okay. 

Portray it as renewal. That's the ploy. Death giving way to new life. In reality an emerging dystopia of brutality, inequality, arbitrary authority and compulsive, preemptive retribution. No real enemies? Not a problem! Invent them. The perps are zombies and vampires. Creating more or their kind.

It must get worse, they say, before it gets better. A purge. We've reached the burn time. The time for fire. Random killings are slow. Dehumanized, distanced, individual murders prepared the ground. For mass slaughter. Too many impure elements. They must be eliminated. Democrats. Iran. Brown people. 

Dirty people. They must be removed. God's purity must be restored. That stench can't be masked or concealed. It's too huge. So fire up the ovens. Ready the big bombs. Nukes, maybe.

Things That Go Trump in the Night

We think the nightmare can't get ay worse. And it always does. 

Nationalize SpaceX

We paid for it. Time to take possession. 

Time Has Come

The Republican Party made itself into something to attract certain people. Estranged people, bigoted people, confused people. People who felt left out, unseen, disrespected and abused. People with grudges, suspicions and resentments. 

Then they trained them. Lied to them. Led them. Cultivated hate. They validated all their worst ideas and impulses. Yeah, you were right. The cards were stacked against you. Other people had unfair advantages. You were screwed.

And they were. By Republicans. Who created all the dissatisfaction, and compounded it at every opportunity. Then they exploited the hell out of it. They played all the 'little people' off against one another. This was a marketing campaign from hell.

There are implications -- we're probably fucked, at least to the point of needing a crash of some sort to pull out of this. A reckoning. A crisis. The thing Republicans are best at is blowing stuff up, it turns out. Their economic program is boom and bust. 

They'll do it again. Last time they were ready. They're always ready. They have an infrastructure of lies. The lie cloud. A worldview of insanity. Plans and proposals, on the shelf, ready to go. And a cure-all -- cut taxes on the rich. Shovel them money. 

Democrats had nothing. They have nothing. No vision for the American people. I know it's hard fighting lunatics. It's hard when there are hostages. Still, no excuse. Let's try to be the fuck ready this time. That system that creates drone warriors? 

Shut it down. What does this mean? Fox News and hate radio. Shut them down. Close the mass of Republican anti-American subversive organizations. Yes, their 'think tanks.' And the Supreme Court, at this point. Got you there, didn't I. 

BY WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY. There's a model for this. Fucking Trump. He just does shit. We can do that, if we have the opportunity. And the will. Trump invents emergencies. We have one. Trump is the emergency. He's destroying us. 

Nobel Peace Pacifier

Turns out, Little Donnie Trump wanted the Nobel Peace Prize as a pacifier. And he didn't get it. Now Little Donnie Trump is gonna blow shit up.

It's Too Late

It's too late for the American left to own its shit. The right is in full possession. 

My Exceptionalist Myth

My family had its own exceptionalist myth. We thought we were special. I thought it was normal and that everyone felt that way. And the story wasn't arbitrary, not like we were chosen. We thought we were exceptional because we had standards. Because we were nice. 

What's wrong with that? Blindness, if the story is too extreme. Blindness to what other people go through or might be going through, the seeds of being inadvertent assholes. I never enjoyed hurting anybody. I was appalled when I knew I had. But that has to change behaviors. 

Or it doesn't mean anything. Grownup empathy is different. It doesn't only operate in restricted ways in space and time. It works across space and time. It has immersive aspects and abstract aspects. Elements of justice added to mercy. Wisdom, one hopes, and some intelligence. 

The Destruction of Decency, Humanity, Reason and Restraint. Call it the Destruction of Civilization.

The Republicans and Trump are winning or have won, a perfect realization of the victory of redneck/evangelical values. We'll be noble savages again, I guess, in their vision, with all the suffering and slaughter that goes with it.  

The Garden of Eden

The message of the story: sin is the loss of perspective. We were living in paradise and got obsessed with the one thing we were told we couldn't have. Still, we didn't lose paradise. We lost the ability to live there without doing the work. 

We're still living in Eden. The struggle we're faced with since the Fall is to see the world correctly as a miracle. A thing of wonder. What do with think the admonition to be like children is about? Or the lilies of the field? To remain in a state of wonder. 

Representative Death

Kentucky's Senator Mitch McConnell is a corpse. He's a representative corpse. They hoist and wheel him around. He represents death. The force that wants death in the world. That wants the world to die. 

Call it Calvinism. Calvinism is one of its forms. A form that hates life so much for its imperfection and decay it craves death. Call it Satan. Call it Trump. Call it evangelical Christianity. They all want death. 

The Easter Up-Fucking

Maybe this will be remembered as the Easter Trump lost his shit. Or lost it over some line since Trump was born having lost his shit. Evidently his parents misplaced it, prenatally. Or bequeathed him the lost-shit gene. Or willed it on his ass. But it's some seriously lost shit. World-altering. And none for the better. 

The Wisdom of Clouds 4/20/2016

We need an Aristophanes, and we need a chorus. We are too immersed in ourselves. News sources ought to amount to a collective chorus but they're too implicated. 

The agent of implication is money. Money is the problem: too much money in private hands. America should have poured money into public works and social welfare.

We should have shamed Scandinavia, as our wealth increased. And why not? Racism, to begin with. And a vain, irrational, narcissistic cult of individualism. 

Oh, you Clouds, sing about us and our Sophistry. We are unwise:

See how they Spin

yet All in Vain

Reeling in the Wind

the Sons of Cain

Slayers of Brothers

And Mothers

they Want more

what a Bore

you'll have More 

more of Gore

you Fools, the Violence

will Return to You

Are we our brothers' keepers? Well, yes.

My Answer

Liberalism is more fully an integrative and adaptive approach, which conservatism is supposed to be as well but with an emphasis on and respect for traditions and established ways. So the problem is extremism and polarization, in which case either approach can become reactionary and self-negating. Normally this occurs through utopian and puritanical impulses, more naturally coming from conservatives. They are also more likely a minority in a democracy though I understand both Bismarck and Disraeli saw extending the franchise wasn't a threat to the right because many workers and lower class voters would choose what they would perceive as the stability of conservatism.

Utopianism can infect the left as well, but most often under duress from the right. 'Wokism' is exactly that. In my experience conservatives are much more prone to confirmation bias. That's natural since they're more on the side of preserving an existing order and suspicious of change and adaptation. Confirmation bias is a harder fit for liberalism's moving target of adaptation than conservatism's fixed target of protecting the status quo and existing order. I'm an instinctive conservative who ended up on the left because I didn't see Republicans, in the American example, as conservatives at all. Which I think happened because America's constitution is ragingly progressive. 

So all Americans were called on to be conservatives in the sense of preserving that original liberalism thereby crowding the conservative space and forcing those identifying as the right into an extreme and reactionary posture fighting against constitutional norms. Fighting against the law and for overthrow of the government, in other words, to the degree the government is true to America's ideals and the core, liberal beliefs embodied in its laws and traditions. This is playing out now as people claiming the mantle of conservatism wantonly destroy American society and constitutional governance. Or, if that's actually conservatism, it's nothing but the rationalization of animal drives. 

Fuck Fuck No

Fuck Fuck No is a browser for the apocalyptic age. The enshittification age. The age of frustration, rage and disempowerment, with the devaluation of average citizens and the loss of leverage among everyone but the super-rich to the degree of disposability. 

We are expendable. The new browser will give you actual truth and real information, none of which will be reassuring. The actual truth is that we are fucked. Real information will still be useful but, longer-run and bigger-picture, our lives have been nullified.

We are fucked. Ransacked, beaten, robbed blind and plundered into inconsequence. Helpless. Keep your heads down. Leave if you can. American society is uniquely inhumane, with inconceivable wealth reaching an impossible crescendo of concentration. 

Patriarchy

I don’t know anything and never been to Europe but American feminism is different, I think. It went puritanical like everything in America. Leftism generally went puritanical and utopian, strident and judgmental, and it cost the hell out of the left.

Who wants that, constantly feeling watched over, unwhole and inadequate? So, the patriarchy, which I’m convinced is compensatory. Men are compensated by society for their weakness and vulnerability. They were given power to console them, to invest them in something other than death, and to keep them from acting out. 

Patriarchy is a function of a deeper problem, I believe, the absurdity of being alive. Women are fundamentally more grounded, including in a chthonic kind of way, and fundamentally stronger by being more able to achieve a harmonious existence within nature whereas men too often want to fight against nature and mortality. 

Which never fucking works. So civilization is about constraining and channeling men’s dominating and destructive impulses. Borrowed (power, petro) energy made this harder because men wanted to own it. Ownership is fundamentally wrong and illusory. The sicker the culture the more focused it will be on property rights.

In healthier and more harmonious cultures, though they may offer significant protections for property, it will be still be understood, as a cultural matter, as a kind of stewardship. The guy at the gym wanted to own y’all. Kicking him in the nuts would have been one way to negate it but it’s risky and inflammatory. 

The reaction of the other women is another way of disempowering him and contributing to disempowering the whole mass of this shit but the striving for power and security-through-domination instead of security-through-cooperation is a perennial problem. American white women voted for Trump three times.

That’s support for an especially addicted, abusive, arbitrary form of patriarchy. I got on board with feminism early though it troubled me that it seemed insulting to the American midwestern women I grew up with who were mostly one generation off of farms but in any case generally tough, productive and nobody’s patsies. 

I got on board with feminism because of nukes and industrialized slaughter as represented by the Holocaust. But Israel is now another example of the perennial problem of everyone getting compromised by patriarchal impulses relating to historical cycles of tribal wrongs and not being able to break those cycles.

I agree with you about accountability. I think it must be at the societal and cultural levels. If that works then these interpersonal instances and transgressions get instantly processed as sad and desperate attempts of losers to assert themselves. Which, if it’s socially reinforced, gets us to the sociopathy of Trumpism.