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 instinctively 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 inherent 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.