Plato's Republicans

I credit it to motivation and determination, but Plato's ideas as presented in the Republic have been used in the creation of deliberately bad governance. Government good at doing evil. Through specialization, focus and efficiencies. No philosopher kings. Philosophers are impractical. Instead we have self-serving assholes adept at rationalizing any kind of evil and at avoiding accountability. 

Warriors are deployed by them to keeps arms merchants and manufacturers swimming in cash. Everybody serves the ends of the overlords and carry on only at their pleasure, with no rights independently of them. Religion is co-opted to stifle dissent and further control the messaging, which is all lies and bullshit. Further down in the food chain lives are precarious. They are powerless. 

When has any technology not been used for bad ends? People are reasonably scared about how it might play out with AI. Plato's scheme for governance is a technology. What if good government isn't efficient? Is the American scheme deliberately inefficient and cumbersome in it's everyday operations to protect us and the system from abuse? Maybe so. But the power seekers have taken over. 

SOS

Time to run up the distress flag. Issue a mayday. Trump is back. And the confluence of his personal shit and the desire of a bunch of disgruntled white people to take vengeance on the universe for bringing them into existence in the first place is coming together in a terrifying way. They want chaos. A meltdown. Destruction for its own sake. God help us all. 

A Cup of Joe

I don't know where it came from and how we got here but we need more Joe. I'd vote for Biden if he were bedridden and he's given us something to mull over, like where the fuck has this kind of leadership been for so long? How hard was it, to own something so good? 

There was that legacy of Roosevelt which I suppose lasted through Kennedy and (yuck) Johnson but was MIA thereafter. And, I mean, why? This is fucking us. It defines Democrats. And it's all, pardon me, wonderful. Compassionate. Inclusive. Practical and pragmatic. 

I'm curious about the workings of the White House and I hope there's a whole committed group of influential people there who are all-in on it but right now we have Joe. He's doing it, it's happening and I'll let his fucking dog bite me if it will keep it up and running. 

The Answer is Death

Republicans really do have the answer. To climate change and everything else. The answer is death. There are too many people in the world. We all know that. The ultimate inconvenient truth is overpopulation. The right wing faction represented by Republicans has controlled population and kept us from becoming like China and India. Kept us in some kind of relative equilibrium by getting people killed. 

Trump understood it. The pandemic was going fine when the coastal elites who didn't vote for him were dying. Fuck them. But even later, sacrifices had to be made and notice how Trump cleverly got the stupidest element in the society disproportionately killed off even though they were his voters. There we see the self sacrifice of which Republicans are capable. It might have cost him the election.

But he did what was right. Evangelical voters and the filthy rich are the core of Republican support. Evangelicals want the world to end so courting environmental disaster, which they are doing, is great. The super rich think they can buy their way out of anything. We will see. In any case the affluent are really too drunk on the wonderfulness of being rich to give much of a shit about anything. Trump again. 

He is an example. The world is theirs, not ours. Any idea otherwise is laughable. Come on now. Admit it. You know it. That 'the meek will inherit the earth' is bullshit. The rich always get everything in the end. Money and power are all that matter. Religions are the opiate of the masses. Do you really think right wingers and the rich don't know that? And religions are wonderful at getting people killed.

So that's good. 

Idealism is for losers. It's how they feel better about losing. You have to understand the significance of Trump and why his support never wavers, no matter what he does. He understands this, the most essential of all truths, that winning is everything. No matter how you win. In fact, winning cynically, as he does, and without talent is better. It doesn't reinforce the lie that any of it makes sense.

None of it makes sense. Nothing makes sense. The notion of justice is a joke, a bone the rich throw the rabble when it suits them. Notice how they tell the rabble to fuck off or get them killed in inventive ways and walk away from it. Does George Bush come to mind? Bush was such an important figure, the love child of the blue bloods and the rednecks. And those people are about to get us all killed. 

This is good. So enjoy every day you can folks. The only uncertainty is how ugly it will get and how soon. But it is going to get ugly.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Bullshit

Bullshit -- a form of disingenuousness -- is having another maybe brief moment since the man who wrote the book has died. On this topic I've always trusted black people. Because they've been subjected to an inconceivable amount of bullshit. Saying something not true is lying. Bullshit asserts the irrelevance of truth in its application and is not necessarily the assertion of untruth. 

Rather, it's the fog of fraud. The liar says it isn't raining when it is. The bullshitter says it isn't raining so much and flooding everything because of climate change. Whatever. Where, the whatever is somehow convenient on the bullshitter's part, making money or defending group-think or simply the good feeling of getting away with it, honing one's skills for use when it really matters. 

But notice how corrupting bullshit is. There's no good v. evil. Evil and good are made obscure. So a larger existential kind of untruth underlies bullshit. That the distinction is a matter of spin. Or marketing or persuasion. Intelligibility is on the block and up for grabs. And intelligibility is everything. Because it relates to accountability, for one thing. And where there's none of that life is shit. 

Bullshit is a luxury good. A rich man's game. A liberal art. A leisure class activity among the unaccountably rich or aspirants to leisure among those unburdened by conscience. Persecuted people understand the stakes. That it's not a game. That lives are lost and ruined in the rubble of its confusion. And nothing is learned. Learning can even be lost. Lessons abandoned. Think of the sobering outcomes of so many wars.

And then we forget and do it again. And all the meaning is lost, though there's plenty of meaning while it's going on. Lots of effort and courage and nobility and decency and so on in the microcosm of it. Real goodness at one level. Insanity at another. Perfection is an attribute of the macrocosm. The macro-macrocosm. A place of which we have only speculative and suppositional knowledge. 

The realm of religion and myth. Those are the good lies. Stories that can make us whole. If they're good stories. Because even those can be bullshit. 

Universal Suffering

Democrats believe in universal sufferance. Republicans in universal suffering. But be reassured. Though Republicans are having their way it's either the will of God or Social Darwinism running the show. It's not your fault. You were doomed from birth. Feel better now? 

Something's the Matter

It doesn't rise to the level of thought, you might have noticed. By trying to reason with them. Those who say something is happening when it isn't. Or that it isn't when it is. Spin was one thing. Maybe there was a nod in there to reality. We're reinterpreting this for you. Helping you to understand. But it's beyond that now. And the dangers of bullshit are apparent -- in the corrosion of the ability to discern anything.

We have the fog of war. But there's no war. Ha! Or so you thought because you're in the 'reality based community.' The are not. When they said culture war they meant it. With casualties and shit. We are the casualties, those whose rights have been destroyed. For them there's always a war to be fought. Because of the way their outlier brand of Calvinism regards creation as shit. And humanity is a part of creation.

I know, it doesn't make sense. That's the point. They are at war with themselves. So, to them, it's reassuring to have that battle externalized. And an affront to God for life to be nice. Nice is for later. When you're dead. If you were chosen, that is. The rest of us burn in hell. At some level they believe this insane shit, with all its fatalism. As I said it doesn't rise to the level of thought. But they must have conflict.

And that's why we are where we are. The most fortunate people in the history of humanity being torn apart and running all kinds of unnecessary risks for no reason at all. Because some minority of nutcases must have a war. They must have conflict. They are not amenable to persuasion. They must be beaten. And they've seized control of everything. The sooner we see it as a war the better. We have no choice. 

Puppets for Putin

The latest emanations from MAGA-land indicate they've associated 'liberal" with legal, democratic and representative government. And they're against it. Right there with Vlad. And all the other autocrats and autocrat wannabes since the dawn of whatever. Hard to believe there was ever a time when this crazy shit didn't exist. 

Why Hate Innocence?

This is tough. As with many hard questions, though, the behaviors of Republicans compel us to look into it. In Republican eyes, or the fundamentalist branch of it with roots in extreme Calvinism that currently predominates, something about innocence is an insult. Corporeality and corruption are one. You could be forgiven for thinking they celebrate corruption. 

But, no.

If it isn't corrupt it isn't real because corruption underlies everything. If you aren't at garbage you haven't dug deeply enough. So, children are a problem. Children cause Republicans to blow a fuse. What to do with them? They must be indoctrinated. They must be infused with guilt and that guilt then and thereby combatted. Because they are part of that drama. 

Inescapably. Because life is a prison for souls. Bodies are prisons. Innocence is an illusion. Kids are corrupt because everything is corrupt. The sooner they are inoculated by exposure to evil the better. You see, they do believe in vaccines. They react so strongly against the government's versions because it's stepping on their turf. Like the 'Sharia Law' bullshit. 

Which rings their bell, being in perfect parallel and direct competition with their ideas about theocratic government. Very much for. Their Christian version. Anything other than a theocratic state embodying that battle of good v. evil is illegitimate and must be destroyed. Better yet, let's have a final judgment. Meaning the final judgment, and be done with it. 

Armageddon and such. Are we having fun now?

Splinters Up the Ass

Now, then. Republicans have been shoving a broomstick up the ass of huge swathes of people for over 40 years. That asshole is getting worn out. It hurts. This includes the working and the middle classes. 

What's left of them. As the pain increases Republicans multiply their efforts to divert attention away from themselves. If people ever realize how they've been screwed they will want to kill Republicans. 

The whole establishment. So Republican operatives, acolytes, and their propaganda arm at Fox News are screaming their heads off, 'It's the Democrats, it's the Democrats.' Because it's not. Because it's not.

That's all that's going on, folks. Nothing complicated. Just a lot of lies. And now the desperate aftermath of decades of astonishing corruption. Laughable corruption. If people's lives weren't being destroyed. 

But they are. Every fucking day. And they're not done yet.

On the Perfection of Projection

Because projective mechanisms are unconscious they work with perfect revelatory predictability. In other words, when people are as fucked up as Republicans they accuse other people of being what they are and doing what they do, with certainty and with absolute accuracy. Guilelessness, for once. 

They tell us what we must do by what they threaten to do to us. 

And the urgency as they convey it applies to them. This is bad news. They are telling us it will probably take illegal and extreme measures to stop them and maybe require violence. Because they want to do that to us. They are saying it's critical that we stop them and that it will be hard as hell to do.

Great. It's not fair to us at all. Sucks all over. But we must stop them. 

I Hate Huckabees

One clip of an interview of Tommy Tuberville is enough to remind me what pieces of shit are raised up in Arkansas. But, for those who need a real face-full of inbred southern garbage to get the point, there's a video you can stream on some huge family of white trash whose name I can't bring myself to speak. 

They were once shiny and happy for all the world knew, is what I will say, and having babies out the ass for the express purpose of taking over the planet so that they can destroy it. Because, they want to see Jesus riding in on a cloud as does Herr Pastor Huckabee and his complement of degenerate children. 

One of those, the charmingly lying Sarah, is now governor of the state and wouldn't know Jesus, to judge from her stint as an degraded Trump slut, if He drove a stock car up her twat. But she's in a position to influence things, as is Tuberville, so the end times draw closer every day, by the grace of God.

Guilty Inheritance

As we know, America is becoming a country of generational wealth. There will always be new fortunes but Republicans have, in addition to encouraging an insane concentration of money at the top, done everything they can to ensure more of it gets passed on intact. And not only legally. They don't want to defund the IRS to benefit factory workers.

Let's say inheritance is a given. I think then the culpability for any criminality involved in the making of that money should get passed on as well. So, for example, if the Kochs are one day determined to have corrupted the American government for profit and, assuming the penalty for such treasonous doings is death, then the Koch heirs should clearly be shot. 

The Conservative Dilemma

How do you have a viable political movement that asserts that its core members and beneficiaries, a smallish group, are innately superior and better than everyone else? Looks like a tough sell. Circumstances will play a big role, out of the gate. People who feel threatened are more likely to elect those they see as leaders and get behind them. So conservatives are interested in keeping the threat level up. 

Defcon always up there. The loss of the Soviet Union as an antagonist was for conservatives a disaster. Now, consider that, since then, they've been able to ramp up the fear. Bin Laden was a big help. But they also increasingly moved the threat within. Come to rest on us. Democrats. Liberals. Which is an invention. On a whole new scale. Marketing is a kind of lying. In the way of dissimulation. 

'Making things look like what they aren't.' We got sold. They have no political product, meaning policies. No service, in the way of efficiencies, added value, or even in creating a coherent brand. Unless you count something so inimical to itself it blows up. 'Beyond obsolescence.' It doesn't wear out and require replacement it explodes, taking the 'purchaser' with it. That is, sabotage. Hello, hostages.

Hello, suckers and victims. We haven't been sold a piece of crap but a bomb.

Obviously, this is beyond exploitation. I don't know if it's new, allowing for the technologies that speed everything up and enable more and more generations of mischief to be compressed into a destructive lifetime. But destruct they must. Because they fear the masses getting a clue and rising up against them. They fear us. Because they know what they would do if the situation were reversed. 

And they know they deserve it. 

Dame Donald

Maybe if Donald got the right honor it would assuage his anger. He's clearly got to have something implying hereditary superiority or it won't work so we end up trying to talk the Brits into getting involved. 

But Donald is such a crybaby a peerage might be a stretch. No denying, however, he's a princess of the first order. I say Dame. Dame Donald. And the sooner the better. Because he's on the warpath again. 

Right Rebrands Shootings

Following a holiday period of a modest number of mass shootings (by America's insane standard) right-wing media sources are indicating these slaughters are merely 'celebrations' and expressions of freedom and patriotic enthusiasm. Not to worry, in other words. 

In fact, mass shootings embody the right idea of freedom, and any consideration of the negative effects of (ahem) a explicitly constitutionally guaranteed liberty is wrong and illegal, as we are seeing decreed with speech only one step removed from actual killing.

Incitement is a right as a form of speech, so the left had better shut up about it or they might find out first hand why assault weapons are such a common Christmas gift among conservatives, because defending human dignity and independence is a sacred duty. 

Something blessed by God. And liberals are known apostates, heretics and haters of both God and country so they had better keep their fucking heads down. 

In Piscine Condition

Something fishy is going on at the Supreme Court and in our schools. Firstly, I will say that I had the college education conservatives dream of. Classics, in a special honors program that had big breadth requirements, including theology, at a Jesuit university. 

Take that, thou Supreme Court conservative justices with Catholic ties, credentials or identifications. And I inwardly roll my eyes at the idea of Women's Studies or Black Studies programs or majors or whatever. But I think it will simply work out. Over time. No big deal.

If it's not a good idea they'll come to that conclusion, the people who do it all the time and for a living, or the programs will just dry up. But it makes conservatives angry. They want to stamp it out, and anything that strikes them as 'liberal,' while they're at it, and immediately. They seem to seethe with the cleansing fires. 

Like old-fashioned Puritans. What the fuck? I have known people of faith. Real people of faith. They don't present like this at all. More calm and relaxed about things. More trusting. Because they are believers. Not just that they believe there is a God they believe IN God. 

So this whole sudden urgent attempt to remake education and crush 'wokism' and burn liberal influence at the stake smells fishy to me. The people of faith I've known aren't much into crushing and such. Maybe reducing their own sinfulness to a minimum, on a good day.

They are somewhat hesitant to crusade and purge, thereby seeming to focus on the sinfulness of others, or to question motives. Maybe it feels a little presumptuous. Reeking of moral superiority. Ungenerous. At a more godly pay grade. But what do I know. 

I'm not really a believer. Anyway, my ear having been tuned and trained by Jesuits I also detect something very fishy at Ye Olde Supreme Court. Like, the ability to rationalize absolutely anything. Any kind of bullying, for example. Not Christian, to my mind, but maybe more broadly 'ad maiorem dei gloriam.'

None of this passes the smell test to me. These are people of fear, not people of faith. Not to be reactive myself but with all the apparent vitriol, urgency, vindictiveness, and the ability to rationalize hateful behaviors, I think they might be working for the other guy.

I Want a Junket

Apply the private jet test. How many of you have been on one? Go into politics. For those without talent it's by far the easiest way. You might live like a king. Even if you're a scumball like Newt, Jim Jordan and the rest. 

Do You Know the Way to Saint-Tropez?

Lie. Cheat. Steal. It's the Republican way. The conservative way. 

Take all you can any way you can. Making a contribution implies accountability. That the world makes sense. Fuck that. Better to make your money on manipulation. Exploitation. Plunder and graft. 

Admit it. We all know life is shit. Idealism is for suckers. Cooperation is a refuge for losers and cowards. For those who can't cut it. Competition is everything. The dirtier the better. That is real life. 

The Great Desecration

I say it goes back before Trump but it doesn't matter. He made it undeniable that Republicans would love it if you spoiled and soiled everything. Which Trump did, routinely and compulsively. He loved to splash shit our ideals, tear down standards and make people kowtow to him and don the cloak of servility.

Maybe 'make' is a little strong. Republicans stood in line and volunteered to humiliate themselves in front of him, to stay in the power loop, with shocking predictability. The country got Trumpified. As horrifying and disgraceful as that is we have to own it. We go used to not owning stuff under Republicans.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush. Enough 'cognitive dissonance' to last forever there. 'That's not really us.' Yeah, it is. Try too deny it now, as we tumble into a morass of self-betrayal. What do we stand for? Above all, making rich people richer, and ensuring that wealth is generational. And disempowering everyone else. 

As must be done so if the rabble realizes how it's been had they will be unable to reverse it. We're getting a solid glimpse of a dystopian future. Evangelicals want it. Relatively affluent Americans think they are secure or are in denial. They are expendable. We all are. Our 'rights' are going up in smoke.

Perp Fiction

The tsunami of Republican lies distracts us from the simplicity of what's going on. They lie because they have a lot of shit to hide. Because they're criminals. 

Trump Pubic Hairs

Donald Trump has announced on his website an important, one-time, massively significant opportunity to buy his pubic hairs, in a limited edition of 100. The price is $10M per pube. As part of the deal Trump agrees that all his future hair clippings will be disposed of, thereby protecting the investment. 

Pubic hairs were chosen because of their assumed purity, freedom from 'product,' and possible infusion with Trump mojo and generative goodness. The point, of course, is that the pubes will contain the entirety of the Trump genetic code. His whole sequence. Years from now, no doubt, the pubes will be priceless. 

That is, when it is accepted that he is the greatest human ever to have lived. Changing standards and technology might allow you to grow your own Trump, like some people say of dinosaurs, the value of which would be incalculable. The certificate of authenticity contains numerous protections.

Other potential sources of Trump's genetics will be entirely controlled. You have his word of honor. Most of the interest so far has been not from buyers but from other fantastically accomplished people, such as Elon Musk, thinking of doing the same thing. But surely they are no competition for Trump.

Ask yourselves, as a store of value or possibly as collateral, whose pubes do you want to own? 

Illusions in Ulysses

What if your leaders are nuts? Your heroes delusional? Your rulers warped? Everything goes wrong. I don't want Odysseus running my country. But better that than Ajax. Better Apollo than Zeus. And better either than Ares. In other words, you don't want Douglas MacArthur or Curtis LeMay or George Patton in positions requiring tact, diplomacy, deliberation etc.

You see what I'm saying. Look to your archetypes. Archetypes are normally more unidimensional than what you want in a leader. That's the point. Someone with healthy personality development can draw widely on aspects of themselves to fit the circumstances. An arrested or emotionally sick person wants to force circumstances into their drama. 

Their story, with its compensatory twists. As a means to an end.

Therapy exists for that. Not electoral politics. But this means, under them, a bad ruler, you play a role. You are a means to an end. I've experienced this in interpersonal relationships. I'm sure I've done it. It's both pathological and normal, depending on the degree. In a good relationship you're more yourself in spite of all the inevitable compromises. Which is cool.

And that might be a paradox or bullshit. I don't know. But, we're at the other end of the thing. Such monstrous pathology that the unrealizable self-actualization of a tiny group of horribly sick people is controlling us. People with -- guess? -- an authoritarian bent. I hate to bring him up but Trump is incredibly sick. He's probably unfixable. A lost soul. 

He makes Curtis LeMay look like St. Francis. The guy is so sick it works for him because too many people can't imagine he's as sick as he is. He's an archetype. Or maybe a number of them, sequentially, as he struggles along, lashing out all over the place. To everyone's detriment including his own. A seething mass of pathology. He's arrested at multiple levels, never rising above the sickness. 

He never cycles out of it. And he's running for president again.

The air-raid sirens should be on. All day. This is an emergency. And there's the entire bureaucracy of pathology that enabled him. That made him possible. The assorted cults. View these with archetypes in mind. Because they've thrust us into that primal world again, which the lovers of civilization and decency thought we might have finally escaped. 

Onward Christian Soldiers

Democrats found it hard to understand back then, when the Republican assault against them was taking shape. Understandably, because the movement made no sense. At any level. The rich and powerful feeling threatened by the powerless. And as though there was ever a viable commie movement. In America. It's like Nazis blaming Jews after the Prussians' blind love of war got their asses kicked. 

The Nazi analogy holds up. Stream some stuff on the birth of the Third Reich, then tell me it doesn't. I come away impressed by the similarities in determination. These fuckers are absolutely driven. They will have their triumph of the will. They must rule. We see it all around. As some jackass (probably Karl Rove) once more or less said, while you're trying to digest the last shit we did we do more.

They make history. We're always on our heels. On our asses. Under the fucking ground, sometimes. The latest news in the pronged assault is at the Supreme Court, where their will has triumphed over reality. Again. Let none dare call it coincidence. That a raft of anti-voting legislation occurred after they decreed how unnecessary the old voting protections were. But fuck that. Down with affirmative action. 

Fuck you is the message. But it has been for 40 years. We got canceled. So, of course, they get all wound up and fanatical and reactionary about 'cancel culture' and 'replacement' and . . . name your nonsense. Amidst the noise though the Christian Soldiers on the Supreme Court are really striking out. Not whiffing. You know what I mean. At us. The justifications for their latest rulings are so patently bullshit. 

This is bad. Late stage stuff. And I have no idea how to stop it. I did some years ago but not now. The Koch effort to defeat Trump means even they can't control the monster they created. And the Supreme Court is a place of last resort. Aha! (Light bulb moment). That's why they have been (determination again) hell-bent on controlling it. None of it makes sense but all the pieces fit. 

The puzzle is coherent within its delusional field of reference. So this is very bad news. How could it happen? It's the Confederacy, stupid. They got their asses kicked by being belligerent, reactionary idiots. A 'superior' culture unjustly defeated. An honor culture. A martial culture. And a culture with enough dark baggage to support any delusion. The lost cause? A big lie, if that sounds familiar.

A Dilemma

The people who deserve to be shot -- because they don't know how to live without preying on other people -- are the ones who want to do the shooting. Of their innocent fellow citizens, who are capable of and desire a just and humane society. But those people don't want to shoot anybody. They are born for compromise and conciliation. For cooperation and fairness. So the nutcases take over. They inevitably push it too far and cause a lot of unnecessary destruction, in spite of the attempts to structure a society that can preempt their barbarism. 

Justices Like To Fish and Hunt

For cases, I mean. Our Republican Supreme Court justices are looking for opportunities to redefine American law and life. Or take us back, perhaps, to the wonderful antebellum days of unfettered capitalism and a brutal, bigoted way of life, with extraordinary inequality and the rampant misery and ignorance God always intended for the world.