One Way of Knowing

I discovered “The Joe Rogan Experience” on YouTube recently and have been sampling from among the nearly 900 pod- or webcasts posted there. I’m hooked. Rogan is an impressive fellow. He clearly enjoys the life of the mind but, unlike many who are absorbed solely in ideas, has not ignored the life of the body. Over time, he’s also developed expertise in multiple endeavors and can participate knowledgeably in discussion on many topics. Webcasts are basically long, free-form, one-on-one conversations. This lack of structure gives the webcast ample time to explore topics in depth or simply meander. Guests are accomplished or distinguished in some way and usually have fame and wealth to match, which often affects content (i.e., Fitzgerald’s observation: “The rich are different than you and me”). One notable bar to entry is having a strong media presence.

Among the recurring themes, Rogan trots out his techno optimism, which is only a step short of techno utopianism. His optimism is based on two interrelated developments in recent history: widespread diffusion of information over networks and rapid advances in medical devices that can be expected to accelerate, to enhance human capabilities, and soon to transform us into supermen, bypassing evolutionary biology. He extols these views somewhat regularly to his guests, but alas, none of the guests I’ve watched seem to be able to fathom the ideas satisfactorily enough to take up the discussion. (The same is true of Rogan’s assertion that money is just information, which is reductive and inaccurate.) They comment or joke briefly and move onto something more comfortable or accessible. Although I don’t share Rogan’s optimism, I would totally engage in discussion of his flirtation with Transhumanism (a term he doesn’t use). That’s why I’m blogging here about Rogan, in addition to my lacking enough conventional distinction and fame to score an invite to be a guest on his webcast. Plus, he openly disdains bloggers, many of whom moderate comments (I don’t) or otherwise channel discussion to control content. Oh, well.

Paintballing Wildebeests

I attended a fundraiser a short while back. It’s familiar territory for me, filled with gifts culled from local businesses and corporations to be resold at auction, portable kitchens and bars to feed and libate guests to break down their inhibitions to giving, and lots of high heels and party dresses (with ample cleavage). Men rarely strut and parade the way the women do; tuxedos are the rare except. Secondary and tertiary activities are typical, often a DJ or live band that plays so loudly sensible people would flee the room rather than slowly go deaf. But monstrous volume in the era of amplified everything has dulled that reflex to nothingness. Or people are by now already deaf from habitual exposure to arena-rock volume filtered down to small venues. Folks simply, stupidly tough it out, ending the night with their ears ringing and their voices hoarse from screaming over the noise just to be heard.

Beneficiaries of fundraisers usually fall into two categories that are poorly served by American institutions: those seeking quality educations (including public schools that ought to be better funded through taxation) and folks suffering from catastrophic illness or disease that is ideally meant to be covered by health insurance but in practice is not. Auctioneers do pretty well enticing people to part with their money. It’s a true skill. But then, who goes to a fundraiser determined to hold tightly to their hard-earned cash? (Don’t answer that question.) Silent auctions may accompany the live auction, but the group vibe definitely contributes to some competition to outbid the next person (a wallet- or dick-measuring exercise?). Auction items are mostly luxury items, things normal Americans wouldn’t consider buying except when associated with charitable giving. Getting something for one’s charity (bought under or over its presumed market value) also shifts some portion of the philanthropic burden to those entities donating gifts.

All this is preliminary the most appallingly tone-deaf item offered for auction: a 4-person safari to a game preserve in South Africa to hunt and kill a wildebeest. When the auctioneer described the item, everyone in my vicinity looked at each other as if to say “what the fuck?” Certainly, humans have a long history of hunting game purely for sport (which is to say, not for food), and from the perspective of a South African safari outfitter, wild animals are a natural resource to be exploited the same way that, for instance, mining and agriculture is conducted throughout the world, but the last few years have seen a notable change of heart about killing animals, especially so-called romance animals (mostly large mammals, including whales, less so large fish), without need or admirable purpose. The outcry over an American dentist killing Cecil the Lion was an expression of that sentiment. So, too, was the killing of a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the enclosure. (Personally, considering how few of them exist, I would privilege the life of the gorilla over the child, but that’s a mine field.) Pictures of Donald Trump’s sons standing over their trophy kills have also elicited significant disapproval. We are now acutely aware that wild animals are not an inexhaustible resource (and never were — consider the passenger pigeon).

I judged that bidding on the safari was no more or less robust than other auction items, but I mentioned aloud that if I were to bid on it, I would probably go on the safari but would also insist on merely paintballing the poor wildebeest, a relatively harmless proxy for killing it needlessly. Admittedly, the wildebeest would experience the same existential terror as if it were being hunted to death, but at least it would live. Or it would live until the next safari came round. Hunting and killing a wildebeest or other large game has never been on my bucket list, and its appearance at auction would not suddenly inspire me to add it to the list. That is the province of of a class of fools rich and insulated enough to still regard the world as their playground, with no thought of responsibility, stewardship, or consequences.

Coping with the Post-Truth World

Once in a while, a comment sticks with me and requires additional response, typically in the form of a new post. This is one of those comments. I wasn’t glib in my initial reply, but I thought it was inadequate. When looking for something more specific about Neil Postman, I found Janet Sternberg’s presentation called Neil Postman’s Advice on How to Live the Rest of Your Life (link to PDF). The 22 recommendations that form Postman’s final lecture given to his students read like aphorisms and the supporting paragraphs are largely comical, but they nonetheless suggest ways of coping with the post-truth world. Postman developed this list before Stephen Colbert had coined the term truthiness. I am listing only the recommendations and withholding additional comment, though there is plenty to reinforce or dispute. See what you think.

1. Do not go to live in California.
2. Do not watch TV news shows or read any tabloid newspapers.
3. Do not read any books by people who think of themselves as “futurists,”
   such as Alvin Toffler.
4. Do not become a jogger. If you are one, stop immediately.
5. If you are married, stay married.
6. If you are a man, get married as soon as possible. If you are a woman,
   you need not be in a hurry.
7. Establish as many regular routines as possible.
8. Avoid multiple and simultaneous changes in your personal life.
9. Remember: It is more likely than not that as you get older you will get
   dumber.
10. Keep your opinions to a minimum.
11. Carefully limit the information input you will allow.
12. Seek significance in your work, friends, and family, where potency and
    output are still possible.
13. Read’s Law: Do not trust any group larger than a squad, that is, about
    a dozen.
14. With exceptions to be noted further ahead, avoid whenever possible
    reading anything written after 1900.
15. Confine yourself, wherever possible, to music written prior to 1850.
16. Weingartner’s Law: 95% of everything is nonsense.
17. Truman’s Law: Under no circumstances ever vote for a Republican.
18. Take religion more seriously than you have.
19. Divest yourself of your belief in the magical powers of numbers.
20. Once a year, read a book by authors like George Orwell, E.B. White, or
    Bertrand Russell.
21. Santha Rama Rau’s Law: Patriotism is a squalid emotion.
22. Josephson’s Law: New is rotten.

Traffic Report No. 12

The last traffic report observed the 10-year anniversary of this blog. For this traffic report, I am on the cusp of achieving another significant threshold: 1,000 subscribers (just five more to go). A while back, I tried (without success) to discourage others from subscribing to this blog in hopes that it would provide responsive traffic. Since then, more than 700 new subscribers have appeared, many of them commercial blogs hawking things like photography, technology services (especially SEO), fashion, and celebrity gossip. I used to at least have one look at them, but I no longer do. The most incongruent (to those who are familiar with the themes of this blog) are the testimonial blogs in praise of (someone’s) god. If I could unsubscribe others on my end, I probably would; but alas, my basic WordPress blog does not have that feature.

So what besides the almost 1,000 subscribers has occurred here since the last report? Not a whole lot besides my regular handwringing about things still wrong in the world. There was that small matter of the U.S. presidential election, which garnered some of my attention, but that really falls within the wider context of the U.S. destroying itself in fits and starts, or even more generally, the world destroying itself in fits and starts. More than usual, I’ve reblogged and updated several old posts, usually with the suffix redux. I haven’t had any multipart blogs exploring ideas at length.

The Numbers

Total posts (not counting this one) are 474. Unique visitors are 22,017. Daily hits (views) range from 10 to 60 or so. Total hits are 95,081. Annual hits had climbed to about 12,500 in 2013 but have since declined steadily. The most-viewed post by far continues to be Scheler’s Hierarchy, with most of the traffic coming from the Philippines.

Doom Never Dies

Whereas the so-called greatest story ever told refers to Jesus for most people, I think the most important story ever told (and ignored) is how we humans drove the planet into the Sixth Extinction and in the process killed ourselves. I find more and more people simply acknowledging the truth of climate change (though not yet NTE) even as Republicans continue to deny it aggressively. Now that Republicans will control both houses of Congress and the White House (debatable whether Trump is truly a Republican), those already convinced expect not just an acceleration of weather-related calamity but accelerated stoking of the engine powering it. I leave you with this relevant quote from an article in Harper’s called “The Priest in the Trees“:

What must die is the materialist worldview in which physical reality is viewed as just stuff: “The world is not merely physical matter we can manipulate any damn way we please.” The result of that outlook is not just a spiritual death but a real, grisly, on-the-cross kind of death. “We are erecting that cross even now,” he said.

Addendum

A meaningless milestone (for me at least), but a milestone nonetheless:

Fog Machines

Continuing from my previous post, Brian Phillips has an article, writing for MTV News, entitled “Shirtless Trump Saves Drowning Kitten: Facebook’s fake-news problem and the rise of the postmodern right.” (Funny title, that.) I navigated to the article via Alan Jacob’s post at Text Patterns (on my blogroll). Let me consider each in turn.

After chuckling that Phillips is directing his analysis to the wrong audience, an admittedly elitist response on my part, I must further admit that the article is awfully well-written and nails the blithe attitude accompanying epistemological destruction carried out, perhaps unwittingly but too well-established now to ignore, by developers of social media as distinguished from traditional news media. Which would be considered more mainstream today is up for debate. Maybe Phillips has the right audience after all. He certainly gets the importance of controlling the narrative:

Confusion is an authoritarian tool; life under a strongman means not simply being lied to but being beset by contradiction and uncertainty until the line between truth and falsehood blurs and a kind of exhaustion settles over questions of fact. Politically speaking, precision is freedom. It’s telling, in that regard, that Trump supporters, the voters most furiously suspicious of journalism, also proved to be the most receptive audience for fictions that looked journalism-like. Authoritarianism doesn’t really want to convince its supporters that their fantasies are true, because truth claims are subject to verification, and thus to the possible discrediting of authority. Authoritarianism wants to convince its supporters that nothing is true, that the whole machinery of truth is an intolerable imposition on their psyches, and thus that they might as well give free rein to their fantasies.

But Phillips is too clever by half, burying the issue in scholarly style that speaks successfully only to a narrow class of academics and intellectuals, much like the language and memes employed by the alt-right are said to be dog whistles perceptible only to rabid, mouth-breathing bigots. Both charges are probably unfair reductions, though with kernels of truth. Here’s some of Phillips overripe language:

Often the battleground for this idea [virtue and respect] was the integrity of language itself. The conservative idea, at that time [20 years ago], was that liberalism had gone insane for political correctness and continental theory, and that the way to resist the encroachment of Derrida was through fortifying summaries of Emerson … What had really happened was that the left had become sensitized to the ways in which conventional moral language tended to shore up existing privilege and power, and had embarked on a critique of this tendency that the right interpreted, with some justification, as an attack on the very concept of meaning.

More plainly, Phillips’ suggestion is that the radical right learned the lessons of Postmodernism (PoMo) even better than did the avant-garde left, the latter having outwitted themselves by giving the right subtle tools used later to outmaneuver everyone. Like other mildly irritating analyses I have read, it’s a statement of inversion: an idea bringing into existence its antithesis that unironically proves and undermines the original, though with a dose of Schadenfreude. This was (partially) the subject of a 4-part blog I wrote called “Dissolving Reality” back in Aug. and Sept. 2015. (Maybe half a dozen read the series; almost no one commented.)

So what does Alan Jacobs add to the discussion? He exhibits his own scholarly flourishes. Indeed, I admire the writing but find myself distracted by the writerly nature, which ejects readers from the flow of ideas to contemplate the writing itself. For instance, this:

It turns out that the children of the ruling classes learned their lessons well, so when they inherited positions in their fathers’ law firms they had some extra, and very useful, weapons in their rhetorical armory.

In precisely the same way, when, somewhat later, academic leftists preached that race and gender were the determinative categories of social analysis, members of the future alt-right were slouching in the back rows of their classrooms, baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, making no external motions but in their dark little hearts twitching with fervent agreement.

Terrific capture of the classroom culture in which teachers are steeped. Drawing identity politics more manifestly into the mix is a fairly obvious extrapolation over Phillips and may reflect the results of the presidential election, where pundits, wheeling around to reinterpret results that should not have so surprised them, now suggest Republican victories are a repudiation of leftist moral instruction. The depth of Phillips’ and Jacobs’ remarks is not so typical of most pundits, however, and their follow-up analysis at some point becomes just more PoMo flagellation. Here, Jacobs is even more clearly having some fun:

No longer did we have to fear being brought before the bar of Rational Evidence, that hanging judge of the Enlightenment who had sent so many believers to the gallows! You have your constructs and we have our constructs, and who’s to say which are better, right? O brave new world that hath such a sociology of knowledge in it!

This goes back to the heart of the issue, our epistemological crisis, but I dispute that race and gender are the determinative categories of social analysis, no matter how fashionable they may be in the academy. A simpler and more obvious big picture controls: it’s about life and death. My previous post was about geopolitics where death is rained down upon foreign peoples and justifying rhetoric is spread domestically. Motivations may be complex and varied, but the destruction of people and truth affects everyone, albeit unevenly, without regard to race, gender, religion, nationality, etc. All are caught in the dragnet.

Moreover, with the advent of Western civilization, intellectuals have always been sensitive to the sociology of knowledge. It’s a foundation of philosophy. That it’s grown sclerotic long precedes PoMo theory. In fact, gradual breaking apart and dismantling of meaning is visible across all expressive genres, not just literature. In painting, it was Impressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. In architecture, it was Art Deco, the International Style, Modernism, Brutalism, and Deconstructivism. In music, it was the Post-Romantic, the Second Viennese School, Modernism, Serialism, and Minimalism. In scientific paradigms, it was electromagnetism, relativity, quantum mechanics, the Nuclear Era, and semiconductors. The most essential characteristics in each case are increasingly dogmatic abstraction and drilling down to minutia that betray meaningful essences. Factoring in economic and political perversions, we arrive at our current epistemological phase where truth and consequences matter little (though death and destruction still do) so long as deceits, projections, and distractions hold minds in thrall. In effect, gravity is turned off and historical narratives levitate until reality finally, inevitably comes crashing down in a monstrous Jenga pile, as they do periodically.

In the meantime, I suppose Phillips and Jacobs can issue more gaseous noise into the fog bank the information environment has become. They can’t get much traction (nor can I) considering how most of the affluent West thinks at the level of a TV sitcom. In addition, steps being considered to rein in the worst excesses of fake news would have corporations and traditional news media appointed as watchers and censors. Beyond any free speech objections, which are significant, expecting culprits to police themselves only awards them greater power to dominate, much like bailouts rewarded the banks. More fog, more lies, more levitation.

Penetrating the Fog

I watched John Pilger’s excellent documentary film The War You Don’t See (2010), which deals with perpetual and immoral wars, obfuscations of the governments prosecuting them, and the journalistic media’s failure to question effectively the lies and justifications that got us into war and keeps us there. The documentary reminded me of The Fog of War (2003), Robert McNamara’s rueful rethinking of his activities as Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (thus, the Vietnam War). Seems that lessons a normal, sane person might draw from experience at war fail to find their way into the minds of decision makers, who must somehow believe themselves to be masters of the universe with immense power at their disposal but are really just war criminals overseeing genocides. One telling detail from Pilger’s film is that civilian deaths (euphemistically retermed collateral damage in the Vietnam era) as a percentage of all deaths (including combatants) have increased from 10% (WWI) to 50% (WWII) to 70% (Vietnam) to 90% (Afghanistan and Iraq). That’s one of the reasons why I call them war criminals: we’re depopulating the theaters of war in which we operate.

After viewing the Pilger film, the person sitting next to me asked, “How do you know what he’s saying is true?” More fog. I’m ill-equipped to handle such direct epistemological challenge; it felt to me like a non sequitur. Ultimately, I was relieved to hear that the question was mere devil’s advocacy, but it’s related to the epistemological crisis I’ve blogged about before. Since the date of that blog post, the crisis has only worsened, which is what I expect as legitimate authority is undermined, expertise erodes, and the public sphere devolves into gamification and gotchas (or a series of ongoing cons). If late-stage capitalism has become a nest of corruption, the same is true — with unexpected rapidity — of the computer era and the Information Superhighway (a term no one uses anymore). One early expectation was that enhanced (24/7/365) access to information would yield impressive educational gains, as though the only thing missing were more information, but human nature being what it is, the first valuable innovations resulted from commercializing erotica and porn. Later debate and hand-wringing over the inaccuracy of Wikipedia and the slanted results of Google searches disappeared as everyone simply got used to not being able to trust those sources any too much, just as everyone got used to forfeiting their privacy online.

Today, everything coughed up in our media-saturated information environment is understood either with a grain of salt mountain of skepticism and held in abeyance until solid confirmation can be had (which often never comes) or simply run with because, well, what the hell? Journalists, the well-trained ones possessing integrity anyway, used to be in the first camp, but market forces and the near instantaneity of (faulty, spun) information, given how the Internet has lowered the bar to publication, have pushed journalists into the second camp. As Pilger notes, they have become echo chambers and amplifiers of the utterances of press agents of warmongering governments. Sure, fact checking still occurs, when it’s easy (such as on the campaign trail), but with war reporting in particular, which poses significant hurdles to information gathering, too many reporters simply repeat what they’re told or believe the staging they’re shown.

Newsbit Commentaries 01

Stray links build up over time without my being able to handle them adequately, so I have for some time wanted a way of purging them. I am aware of other bloggers who curate and aggregate links with short commentaries quite well, but I have difficulty making my remarks pithy and punchy. That said, here are a few that I’m ready to purge in this first attempt to dispose of a few links from by backlog.

Skyfarm Fantasies

Futurists have offered myriad visions of technologies that have no hope of being implemented, from flying cars to 5-hour workweeks to space elevators. The newest pipe dream is the Urban Skyfarm, a roughly 30-story tree-like structure with 24 acres of space using solar panels and hydroponics to grow food close to the point of consumption. Utopian engineering such as this crops up frequently (pun intended) and may be fun to contemplate, but in the U.S. at least, we can’t even build high-speed rail, and that technology is already well established elsewhere. I suppose that’s why cities such as Seoul and Singapore, straining to make everything vertical for lack of horizontal space, are the logical test sites.

Leaving Nashville

The City of Nashville is using public funds to buy homeless people bus tickets to leave town and go be poor somewhere else. Media spin is that the city is “helping people in need,” but it’s obviously a NIMBY response to a social problem city officials and residents (not everyone, but enough) would rather not have to address more humanely. How long before cities begin completing with each other in numbers of people they can ship off to other cities? Call it the circle of life when the homeless start gaming the programs, revisiting multiple cities in an endless circuit.

Revisioneering

Over at Rough Type, Nick Carr points to an article in The Nation entitled “Instagram and the Fantasy of of Mastery,” which argues that a variety of technologies now give “artists” the illusion of skill, merit, and vision by enabling work to be easily executed using prefab templates and stylistic filters. For instance, in pop music, the industry standard is to auto-tune everyone’s singing to hide imperfections. Carr’s summary probably is better than the article itself and shows us the logical endpoint of production art in various media undertaken without the difficult work necessary to develop true mastery.

Too Poor to Shop

The NY Post reported over the summer that many Americans are too poor to shop except for necessities. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Retailers have blamed the weather, slow job growth and millennials for their poor results this past year, but a new study claims that more than 20 percent of Americans are simply too poor to shop.

These 26 million Americans are juggling two to three jobs, earning just around $27,000 a year and supporting two to four children — and exist largely under the radar, according to America’s Research Group, which has been tracking consumer shopping trends since 1979.

Current population in the U.S. is around 325 million. Twenty percent of that number is 65 million; twenty-six million is 8 percent. Pretty basic math, but I guess NY Post is not to be trusted to report even simple things accurately. Maybe it’s 20% of U.S. households. I dunno and can’t be bothered to check. Either way, that’s a pretty damning statistic considering the U.S. stock market continues to set new all-time highs — an economic recovery not shared with average Americans. Indeed, here are a few additional newsbits and links stolen ruthlessly from theeconomiccollapseblog.com:

• The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.
• In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
• 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.
• The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.
• According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

For further context, theeconomiccollapseblog also points to “The Secret Shame of Middle Class Americans” in The Atlantic, which reports, among other things, that fully 47% of Americans would struggle to scrape together a mere $400 in an emergency.

How do such folks respond to the national shopping frenzy kicking off in a few days with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Charitable Sunday, and Cyber Monday? I suggest everyone stay home.

Filling Up Time

Back in the day, I studied jazz improvisation. Like many endeavors, it takes dedication and continuous effort to develop the ear and learn to function effectively within the constraints of the genre. Most are familiar with the most simple form: the 12-bar blues. Whether more attuned to rhythm, harmony, lyrics, or structure doesn’t much matter; all elements work together to define the blues. As a novice improviser, structure is easy to grasp and lyrics don’t factor in (I’m an instrumentalist), but harmony and rhythm, simple though they may be to understand, are formidable when one is making up a solo on the spot. That’s improvisation. In class one day, after two passes through the chord changes, the instructor asked me how I thought I had done, and I blurted out that I was just trying to fill up the time. Other students heaved a huge sigh of recognition and relief: I had put my thumb on our shared anxiety. None of us were skilled enough yet to be fluent or to actually have something to say — the latter especially the mark of a skilled improvisor — but were merely trying to plug the whole when our turn came.

These days, weekends feel sorta the same way. On Friday night, the next two days often feel like a yawning chasm where I plan what I know from experience will be an improvisation, filling up the available time with shifting priorities, some combination of chores, duties, obligations, and entertainments (and unavoidable bodily functions such as eating, sleeping, etc.). Often enough I go back to work with stories to tell about enviable weekend exploits, but just I often have a nagging feeling that I’m still a novice with nothing much to say or contribute, just filling up the time with noise. And as I contemplate what years and decades may be left to me (if the world doesn’t crack up first), the question arises: what big projects would I like to accomplish before I’m done? That, too, seems an act of improvisation.

I suspect recent retirees face these dilemmas with great urgency until they relax and decide “who cares?” What is left to do, really, before one finally checks out? If careers are completed, children are raised, and most of life’s goals are accomplished, what remains besides an indulgent second childhood of light hedonism? Or more pointedly, what about one’s final years keeps it from feeling like quiet desperation or simply waiting for the Grim Reaper? What last improvisations and flourishes are worth undertaking? I have no answers to these questions. They don’t press upon me just yet with any significance, and I suffered no midlife crisis (so far) that would spur me to address the questions head on. But I can feel them gathering in the back of my mind like a shadow — especially with the specters of American-style fascism, financial and industrial collapse, and NTE looming.

Barstool Wisdom (redux)

The U.S. election has come and gone. Our long national nightmare is finally over; another one is set to begin after a brief hiatus. (I’m not talking about Decision 2020, though that spectre has already reared its ugly head.) Although many were completely surprised by the result of the presidential race in particular, having placed their trust in polls, statistical models, and punditry to project a winner (who then lost), my previous post should indicate that I’m not too surprised. Michael Moore did much better taking the temperature of the room (more accurately, the nation) than all the other pundits, and even if the result had differed, the underlying sentiments remain. It’s fair to say, I think, that people voted with their guts more than their heads, meaning they again voted their fears, hates, and above all, for revolution change. No matter that the change in store for us will very likely be destructive and against self-interest. Truth is, it would have had to end with destruction with any of the candidates on the ballot.

Given the result, my mind wandered to Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village, probably because we, the citizens of the Unites States of America, have effectively elected the village idiot to the nation’s highest office. Slicing and dicing the voting tallies between the popular vote, electoral votes, and states and counties carried will no doubt be done to death. Paths to victory and defeat will be offered with the handsome benefit of hindsight. Little of that matters, really, when one considers lessons never learned despite ample opportunity. For me, the most basic lesson is that for any nation of people, leaders must serve the interests of the widest constituency, not those of a narrow class of oligarchs and plutocrats. Donald Trump addressed the people far more successfully than did Hillary Clinton (with her polished political doubletalk) and appealed directly to their interests, however base and misguided.

My previous post called Barstool Wisdom contained this apt quote from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky:

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself.

We have already seen that our president-elect has a knack for stating obvious truths no one else dares utter aloud. His clarity in that regard, though coarse, contrasts completely with Hillary’s squirmy evasions. Indeed, her high-handed approach to governance, more comfortable in the shadows, bears a remarkable resemblance to Richard Nixon, who also failed to convince the public that he was not a crook. My suspicion is that as Donald Trump gets better acquainted with statecraft, he will also learn obfuscation and secrecy. Some small measure of that is probably good, actually, though Americans are pining for greater transparency, one of the contemporary buzzwords thrown around recklessly by those with no real interest in it. My greater worry is that through sheer stupidity and bullheadedness, other obvious truths, such as commission of war crimes and limits of various sorts (ecological, energetic, financial, and psychological), will go unheeded. No amount of barstool wisdom can overcome those.

Too Close for Comfort

Predictions are fool’s errands. Useful ones, anyway. The future branches in so many possible directions that truly reliable predictions are banal, such as the sun will rise in the east, death, and taxes. (NTE is arguably another term for megadeath, but I gotta reinforce that prediction to keep my doomer bonafides.) Now only a few days prior to the general election finds me anxious that the presidential race is still too close to call. More than a few pundits say that Donald Trump could actually win. At the same time, a Hillary Clinton win gives me no added comfort, really. Moreover, potential squabbles over the outcome threaten to turn the streets into riot zones. I had rather expected such disruptions during or after the two nominating conventions, but they settled on their presumptive nominees without drama.

Polls are often predictive, of course, and despite their acknowledged margins of error, they typically forecast results with enough confidence that many voters don’t bother to vote, safe in the assumption that predicted results (an obvious oxymoron) make moot the need to actually cast one’s vote. (The West Coast must experience this phenomenon more egregiously than the East Coast, except perhaps for California’s rather large population and voting power. Has Hawaii ever mattered?) For that reason alone, I’d like to see a blackout on polling in the weeks leading up to an election (2–3 ought to do), including election day. This would allow us to avoid repeating the experience of the Chicago Daily Tribune publishing the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” back in 1948.

Analysis of voting patterns and results also dissuades voters from considering anything other than a strategic vote for someone able to actually win, as opposed to supporting worthy candidates polling far enough behind they don’t stand a chance of winning, thus reinforcing a two-party system no one really likes because it keeps delivering supremely lousy candidates. Jesse Ventura, having defied the polls and been elected to office as an independent, has been straightforward about his disdain for the notion that voting outside the two main parties is tantamount to throwing away one’s vote. A related meme is that by voting for independent Ralph Nader in 2000, the Democratic vote was effectively split, handing the win (extraordinarily close and contestable though it was) to George Bush. My thinking aligns with Jesse Ventura, not with those who view votes for Ralph Nader as betrayals.

If the presidential race is still too close for comfort, Michael Moore offers a thoughtful explanation how Trump could win:

This excerpt from Moore’s new film TrumpLand has been taken out of context by many pro-Trump ideologues. I admit the first time I saw it I was unsure whether Moore supports Trump. Additional remarks elsewhere indicate that he does not. The spooky thing is that as emotional appeals go, it’s clear that Trump connects with the people powerfully. But Moore is right about another thing: to vote for Trump is really a giant “fuck you” to the establishment, which won’t end well.