Razors, Rules, Laws, and Zuihitsu

As a sometimes presenter of aphorisms, felicitous and humorous turns of phrase and logic interest me as examples of heuristics aimed as parsimony and cognitive efficiency. Whether one recognizes those terms or not, everyone uses snap categorization and other shortcuts to manage and alleviate crowded thinking from overwhelming demands on perception. Most of us, most of the time, use sufficiency as the primary decision-making mode, which boils down to “close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.” Emotion is typically the trigger, not rational analysis. After enough repetition is established, unthinking habit takes over. Prior to habituation, however, the wisdom of sages has provided useful rubrics to save unnecessary and pointless labor over casuistry flung into one’s way to impede, convince, or gaslight. (I previously wrote about this effect here).

As categories, I pay close attention to razors, rules, laws, principles, and Zuihitsu when they appear as aphorisms in the writing of those I read and follow online. Famous rules, laws, and principles include Occam’s Razor, (Finagle’s Corollary to) Murphy’s Law, Godwin’s Law, Jevon’s Paradox, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (do your own searches if these escape you). Some are quite useful at dispelling faulty thinking and argumentation. Café Bedouin (see blogroll) has an ongoing series of Zuihitsu, which has grown quite long. Many ring fundamentally true; others are either highly situational or wrong on their face, perhaps revealing the cardinal weakness of reduction of ideas to short, quotable phrases.

I recently learned of Hitchens’ Razor (after Christopher Hitchens), usually given as “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” According to the Wikipedia entry, it may well have been reconstituted, repurposed, or revived from other sources stretching back into antiquity. Caitlin Johnson, a notable aphorist I’ve quoted numerous times, uses Hitchens’ Razor to put the lie to claims from the U.S. war machine and its dutiful media lapdogs that the “situation in Ukraine” (whatever that is) demands intervention by Western powers lest the utility bad guys of the moment, the Russians, be allowed to run roughshod over its neighbor Ukraine, which (significantly) used to be part of the now-defunct Soviet Union. As with many controversial, inflammatory claims and assertions continuously heaped like a dog pile on hapless U.S. citizens with little time, few resources, and no obligation to perform their own investigations and analyses, I have only weak opinions but very strong suspicions. That’s where Hitchens’ Razor comes in handy. Under its instruction, I can discard out-of-hand and in disbelief extraordinary claims designed to whip me and the wider public into an emotional frenzy and thus accept or support actions that shouldn’t just raise eyebrows but be met with considerable dissent, protest, and disobedience. Saves me a lot of time entertaining nonsense just because it gets repeated often enough to be accepted as truth (Bernays’ Principle).

The Purse Seine

Here’s a term I daresay most won’t recognize: the purse seine. My introduction was as the title of a poem by Robinson Jeffers. More generally, the term refers to a net drawn between two fishing boats to encircle a school of fish. The poem captures something both beautiful and terrifying, drawing an analogy between a fishing net and government power over human populations gathered into cities (confined by economic necessity?) rather than subsisting more simply on the bounty of nature. Whether Jeffers intends a traditional agrarian setting or a deeper, ancestral, hunter-gatherer orientation is unclear and probably doesn’t matter. The obvious counterpoint he names plainly: Progress (capital P).

My own analogy to the purse seine is more pedestrian: cloth masks strung between two ears and drawn over the face to encircle the breath in futile hope of impeding the respiratory virus that has impacted everyone worldwide for the last two years (needs no name — are you living under a rock?). Like a seine allows water to flow through, cloth masks allow airflow so that one can breathe. Otherwise, we’d all be wearing gas masks and/or hazmat suits 24/7. And therein lies the problem: given the tiny particle size of the pathogen, cloth and paper masks are akin (yes, another analogy) to using a chain-link fence to hold back the wind. That’s not what fences (or face masks) are designed to do. More robust N95 masks do little better for the very same reason. Gotta be able to breathe. Other pandemic mitigation efforts such as social distancing, lock downs, and vaccines suffer from similar lack of efficacy no matter how official pronouncements insist otherwise. The pandemic has come in similar, unstoppable, year-over-year waves in locations/states/nations that took few or no precautions and those that imposed the most egregious authoritarian measures. The comparative numbers (those not purposely distorted beyond recognition, anyway) tell the story clearly, as anyone with a principled understanding of infectious disease could well have anticipated considering humans are a hypersocial species packed into dense population centers (compared to our agrarian past).

Although these are statements of the obvious, at least to me, I’ve broken my previous silence on the pandemic and surmise I’m probably tempting the censors and trolls. I’m not giving advice, and others can of course disagree; I’ve no particular issue with principled disagreement. Decide for yourself what to do. I do have a problem, however, with self-censorship (read: cowardice). So although this blog post is a rather oblique way of saying that the putative consensus narrative is a giant, shifting pile of horse pucky (disintegrating further into nothingness with each passing day), please exercise your synapses and evaluate the evidence best you can despite official channels (and plenty of water carriers) herding and bullying everyone toward conclusions that make utterly no sense in terms of public health.

Scrub-a-Dub

“Language is dynamic” is a phrase invoked in praise or derision of shifts in usage. Corollaries include “the only constant is change” and “time’s arrow points in only one direction” — both signalling that stasis is an invalid and ultimately futile conservative value. The flip side might well be the myth of progress, understood in reference not to technological advancement but human nature’s failure to rise above its base (animal) origins. This failure is especially grotesque considering that humans currently albeit temporarily live in an age of material abundance that would provide amply for everyone if that largesse were justly and equitably produced and distributed. However, resources (including labor) are being systematically exploited, diverted, and hoarded by a small, unethical elite (what some call “alpha chimps”) who often use state power to subjugate vulnerable populations to funnel further tribute to the already obscenely wealthy top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. But that’s a different diatribe.

Although I’m sensitive the dynamism of language — especially terms for broad ideas in need of short, snappy neologisms — I’m resistant to adopting most new coin. For instance, multiple colors of pill (red, blue, white, and black to my knowledge) refer to certain narrative complexes that people, in effect, swallow. Similarly, the “blue church” is used to refer to legacy media struggling desperately (and failing) to retain its last shreds of legitimacy and authority. (Dignity is long gone.) Does language really need these terms or are hipsters just being clever? That question probably lacks a definitive answer.

My real interest with this blog post, however, is how the modern digital mediascape has given rise to a curious phenomenon associated with cancel culture: deletion of tweets and social media posts to scrub one’s past of impropriety as though the tweet or post never happened. (I’ve never deleted a post nor have any plans to.) Silicon Valley hegemons can’t resist getting their piece of the action, too, by applying deeply flawed algorithms to everyone’s content to demonetize, restrict, and/or remove (i.e., censor) offensive opinion that runs counter to (shifting) consensus narratives decided upon in their sole discretion as water carriers for officialdom. Algorithmic dragnets are not effective kludges precisely because thoughts are not synonymous with their online expression; one merely points to the other. Used to be said that the Internet is forever, so wait before posting or tweeting a reasonable duration so that irresponsible behavior (opinion and trolling, mostly) can be tempered. Who knows who possesses technical expertise and access to tweet and video archives other than, say, the Wayback Machine? When a public figure says or does something dumb, a search-and-destroy mission is often launched to resurrect offending and damning past utterance. Of course, scrub-a-dub erasure or deletion is merely another attempt to manage narrative and isn’t a plea for forgiveness, which doesn’t exist in the public sphere anyway except for rehabilitated monsters such as past U.S. presidents a/k/a war criminals. And the Internet isn’t in fact forever; ask an archivist.

Shifting language, shifting records, shifting sentiment, shifting intellectual history are all aspects of culture that develop naturally and inevitably over time. We no longer believe, for instance, in the four elements or geocentrism (a/k/a the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system; never mind the intransigent Flat Earthers who need not be silenced). Darker aspects of these shifts, however, include the remarkable Orwellian insight that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” from the 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Here’s the passage for context:

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past … The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

In 2021, the awful lesson is taken to heart by multiple parties (not the Party in the novel but wannabes) who have latched maniacally onto Orwellian mechanisms of thought control specifically through the manipulation of records, history, and language. But as mentioned above, policing mere expression is not the same as policing thought itself, at least among those who retain critical thinking skills and independence of mind. I abstain judgment how effective attempted brainwashing is with the masses but will at least mention that Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea in 2007 before settling in the U.S. in 2014, describes the chilling totalitarian thought control exercised by the North Korean government — the stuff of nightmare dystopianism. The template is by now well established and despots everywhere are only too happy to implement it repeatedly, following an evil trajectory that should be resisted at every turn while still possible.

The Politics of “No!”

Jimmy Dore at his YouTube channel (traffic now being throttled) has been positively hammering various politicians and political analysts for their utterly unbelievable rationalizations and gaslighting regarding political strategy. In short, despite divisiveness sparked, fanned, and inflamed by the ownership class to keep the proles fighting amongst themselves rather than united against it, Americans are united in many of their desires. As W.J. Astore puts it,

Supposedly, America is deeply divided, and I’m not denying there are divisions. But when you ask Americans what they want, what’s surprising is how united we are, irrespective of party differences. For example, Americans favor a $15 minimum wage. We favor single-payer health care. We favor campaign finance reform that gets big money donors and corporations out of government. Yet our government, which is bought by those same donors, refuses to give Americans what we want. Division is what they give us instead, and even then it’s often a sham form of division.

I observe that $15 is only a starting point, not an endpoint, and that healthcare in a wealthy, modern democratic country is regarded (by those outside the U.S. — we’re the outliers) as a fundamental human right. Add the widely shared (perhaps banal) desire to live peacefully, prosperously, and freely (especially in the post-Enlightenment West) and contrast with what has been delivered — ongoing war and strife, massive diversion of resources to provide bogus security and safety from the very wars and strife initiated by the American Empire, and total surveillance of the citizenry under the false promise of safety — makes it fundamentally clear that Americans are being told emphatically, “No! You can’t have what you want.” Yet the ownership class gets what it wants, which appears to be uniformly MOAR!

When even modest pushback appears, the ownership class, through its bought-and-paid-for functionaries in academe, journalism, politics, and elsewhere, steps up its continuous narrative management to flummox and destabilize even the most sane thought and analysis. The deluge, barrage, and bombardment is so broad and noisome (as with all the irrationally shifting policy, opinion, and received wisdom regarding the pandemic) that few can keep their wits about them. I’m unsure how well I’ve succeeded, but at the very least, I don’t allow others do my thinking for me; I evaluate and synthesize the tornado of information best I can.

Only a couple executive administrations ago, the Republican Party, because of its assiduous opposition to anything and everything remotely popular or progressive while out of power, earned the sobriquet The Party of No! The Democratic Party took the lesson, and when it was Democrats’ turn to be out of power, made turnabout fair play under the banner The Resistance (no relation to the French Resistance (Fr: La Résistance)). No doubt many earnest progressives and die-hard Democrats consider themselves members of The Resistance. However, the real action is with Democratic political leadership, which clearly adopted the Politics of No! in denying American citizens the same things Republicans deny. Is it fair to conclude (read: not conspiratorial) that the two major U.S. political parties, at the behest of their owners, are united against the people?

Individual vs. Society, pt. 1

Having grown up in an ostensibly free, open society animated by liberal Western ideology, it’s fair to say in hindsight that I internalized a variety of assumptions (and illusions) regarding the role of the individual vis-à-vis society. The operative word here is ostensibly owing to the fact that society has always restricted pure expressions of individuality to some degree through socialization and pressure to conform, so freedom has always been constrained. That was one of the takeaways from my reading (long ago in high school) of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942) (British: The Outsider; French: L’Étranger), namely, that no matter how free one might believe oneself to be, if one refuses (radically, absurdly) to play by society’s rules and expectations, one will be destroyed. The basic, irresolvable conflict is also present in the concerto principle in classical music, which presents the soloist in dialogue with or in antithesis to the ensemble. Perhaps no work exemplifies this better than the 2nd movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 for piano and orchestra. A similar dialogue if found in the third movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, though dialogue there might be better understood as man vs. nature. The significant point of similarity is not the musical style or themes but how the individual/man is ultimately subdued or absorbed by society/nature.

Aside: A broader examination of narrative conflict would include four traditional categories: (1) man vs. man, (2) man vs. nature, (3) man vs. self, and (4) man vs. society. Updated versions, often offered as tips for aspiring writers, sometimes include breakout conflicts (i.e., subcategories): (1) person vs. fate/god, (2) person vs. self, (3) person vs. person, (4) person vs. society, (5) person vs. nature, (6) person vs. supernatural, and (7) person vs. technology. Note that modern sensibilities demand use of person instead of man.

My reason for bringing up such disparate cultural artifacts is to provide context. Relying on my appreciation of the Zeitgeist, liberal Western ideology is undergoing a radical rethinking, with Woke activists in particular pretending to emancipate oppressed people when flattening of society is probably the hidden objective. Thus, Wokesters are not really freeing anyone, and flattening mechanisms are pulling people down, not building people up. On top of that, they are targeting the wrong oppressors. If leveling is meant to occur along various markers of identity (race, sexual and gender orientation, religion, political affiliation, nationality, etc.), the true conflict in the modern era has always been socioeconomic, i.e., the ownership class against all others. Sure, differences along identitarian lines have been used to oppress, but oppressors are merely using a surface characteristic to distract from their excessive power. The dispossessed oddly fail to recognize their true enemies, projecting animus instead on those with whom grievances are shared. Similarly, Wokesters are busy exploiting their newfound (albeit momentary) power to question the accepted paradigm and force RightThink on others. Yet traditional power holders are not especially threatened by squabbles among the oppressed masses. Moreover, it’s not quite accurate to say that the identitarian left is rethinking the established order. Whatever is happening is arguably occurring at a deeper, irrational level than any thoughtful, principled, political action meant to benefit a confluence of interest groups (not unlike the impossible-to-sort confluence of identities everyone has).

Although I haven’t read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), I gather that Zinn believed history should not be told from the winners’ perspective (i.e., that of the ownership and ruling classes, significant overlap acknowledged), or from top down, but instead through the lens of the masses (i.e., the people, a large segment of whom are oppressed and/or dispossessed), or from the bottom up. This reorientation applies not only within a given society or political entity but among nations. (Any guess which countries are the worst oppressors at the moment? Would be a long list.) Moreover, counter to the standard or accepted histories most of us learn, preparation of the U.S. Constitution and indeed quite a lot of U.S. history are deeply corrupt and oppressive by design. It should be obvious that the state (or nation, if one prefers), with its insistence on personal property and personal freedom (though only for a narrow class of landed gentry back in the day, plutocrats and corporatists today), systematically rolled over everyone else — none so egregiously as Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrants. Many early institutions in U.S. political history were in fact created as bulwarks against various forms of popular resistance, notably slave revolts. Thus, tensions and conflicts that might be mistakenly chalked up as man vs. society can be better characterized as man vs. the state, with the state having been erected specifically to preserve prerogatives of the ownership class.

More to come in part 2 and beyond.

Hindenburg Moment

Cenk Uygur is running for U.S. Congress in California. Good for him … I guess. Racehorse politics don’t actually interest me, at least as a topic for a blog post, but his decision to enter the electoral fray poses some curious issues. What follows is some context and unsolicited advice, the latter exceptional for me since I’m not a political advocate and don’t reside in Cenk’s district (or even state).

Unlike many who heap unwarranted praise of our interrelated systems of government and economics, or who subscribe to some version of Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government yet preferred over all the others, I regard representative democracy and capitalism both as dumpster fires in the process of burning out. Good ideas while they lasted, perhaps, but they consumed nearly all their available fuel and are now sputtering, leaving behind useless ash and detritus. As a journalist and political junkie commentator, Cenk Uygur may be sensing his Hindenburg moment has arrived to jump onto the sinking RMS Titanic (mixing metaphors of doomed ships), meaning that a serendipitous right-time-right-place opportunity presented itself. Omigawd, the humanity! Others who had their unique Hindenburg moments and made good include Rudy Giuliani in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (only to spiral down ignominiously) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC, elected to the U.S. Congress in 2018). Dunno about Cenk Uygur. His campaign website linked above rather conspicuously omits his surname (couldn’t find it anywhere). Maybe like AOC and Pete Buttigieg, it’s just too challenging for folks. Curious choice.

I have mostly disregarded Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks (TYT) for some time now. They are part of the new media formed and distributed (primarily?) on the Web, though I’m doubtful they (and others) have yet established a useful revival to supplant traditional broadcast journalism (TV and radio) that have become sclerotic. How their business models (and the inevitable distortions those models introduce) differ is unclear. The main reason I ignore him/them is that TYT adopted a breezy, chatty, unscripted style that is less about reporting than interpreting mostly political news on the fly. They are essentially programming their viewers/subscribers with progressive talking points and orthodoxy, a form of narrowcasting. Onscreen “reporters” have come and gone, but none are as boorish as Cenk Uygur, who labors under the impression that he can outwit others with logic traps but really comes across as incoherent, unfocused, and ideological. TYT has also aired their dirty laundry in the form of beefs with former “correspondents.” None of this serves my political and/or intellectual interests.

The tone of TYT puzzles me, too, considering the utter seriousness of political dysfunction. Commentators appear to enjoy being in front of the camera for verbal jousting matches with each other and guests or simply to riff on the news. Another journalist clearly in love with being on-camera is Rachel Maddow, who has been pilloried for promulgating the Russiagate story relentlessly. Maybe anchors who relish (a little too much) being in the public eye is a collateral effect of news bureaus having been folded into the entertainment divisions of media conglomerates and being forced told to put forward a smiling face no matter what horrors are reported. If I want to see politics served up as jokes, I watch Jimmy Dore (who provides an alarming level of insight). If I want to watch people having entertaining fun, I watch movies or stream TV. I do not watch ideological news shows or political debates (if I watch at all) to be entertained but rather to be informed. While TYT commentators endeavor to be scrupulously factually correct in their opinions, they offer too little signal alongside the noise.

So here are a few recommendations for Cenk’s campaign, worth a couple cents at most:

• Recognize that politic decisions voters now face are no longer merely left/right, progressive/conservative, who-gets-to-hold-office binaries. Rather, it’s now whether we should track further down the path of authoritarian rule (e.g., a fascist national security state) masking itself as populism (but instead serving the plutocracy) under any political banner or instead serve the interests of the American people (best as able) as empire and industrial civilization sputter out.
• Recognize that logic and reason are poor substitutes for good character and clarity of vision when the public (i.e., the great unwashed masses) responds more readily to jingoism, emotionalism, and empty rhetoric.
• Zingers, gotchas, and takedowns are gladiatorial exploits that require more than mere accuracy to hit their marks and inflict damage. Take care not to indulge without considerable preparation and nuance. Some are obviously better at this than others.
• When answering questions and/or giving interviews, do not mistake the exchange as a speech opportunity and dominate from one side (boorishness). Riffing, having fun, and sucking all the air out of the room are the attributes of TYT but wear thin in campaigning. Listening is just as important, maybe more.
• Align your tone with the gravity of other’s suffering rather than your enjoyment of the applause and limelight. Your personal circumstances are not the proper locus of emotion.
• Politics is deeply intertwined with wealth, power, and corruption and accordingly creates distortion fields that threaten to undo even the purest of hearts when compromise and/or betrayal are offered as lures. It’s an inevitability, a basic feature rather than a bug. Know that it’s coming. No one is incorruptible.

Admittedly, I’m not a campaign strategist and have no access to polling data. Accordingly, this post will likely be neither read nor its recommendations heeded; I’m not a political playah. Think of this as the undesired Christmas gift so valueless it can’t even be returned for store credit.

The Severed Roots of Place, pt. 2

Continuing (after some delay) from part 1, Pankaj Mishra concludes chapter 4 of The Age of Anger with an overview of Iranian governments that shifted from U.S./British client state (headed by the Shah of Iran, reigned 1941–1979) to its populist replacement (headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, ruled 1979–1989), both leaders having been authoritarians. During the period discussed, Iran underwent the same modernization and infiltration by liberal, Western values and economics, which produced a backlash familiar from Mishra’s descriptions of other nations and regions that had experienced the same severed roots of place since the onset of the Enlightenment. Vacillation among two or more styles of government might be understood as a thermostatic response: too hot/cold one direction leads to correction in another direction. It’s not a binary relationship, however, between monarchy and democracy (to use just one example). Nor are options between a security state headed by an installed military leader and a leader elected by popular vote. Rather, it’s a question of national identity being alternatively fractured and unified (though difficult to analyze and articulate) in the wake of multiple intellectual influences.

According to Lewis and Huntington, modernity has failed to take root in intransigently traditional and backward Muslim countries despite various attempts to impose it by secular leaders such as Turkey’s Atatürk, the Shah of Iran, Algeria’s Ben Bella, Egypt’s Nasser and Sadat, and Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.

Since 9/11 there have been many versions, crassly populist as well as solemnly intellectual, of the claims by Lewis and Huntington that the crisis in Muslim countries is purely self-induced, and [that] the West is resented for the magnitude of its extraordinary success as a beacon of freedom, and embodiment of the Enlightenment’s achievements … They have mutated into the apparently more sophisticated claim that the clash of civilizations occurs [primarily] within Islam, and that Western interventions are required on behalf of the ‘good Muslim’, who is rational, moderate and liberal. [p. 127]

This is history told by the putative winners. Mishra goes on:

Much of the postcolonial world … became a laboratory for Western-style social engineering, a fresh testing site for the Enlightenment ideas of secular progress. The philosophes had aimed at rationalization, or ‘uniformization’, of a range of institutions inherited from an intensely religious era. Likewise, postcolonial leaders planned to turn illiterate peasants into educated citizens, to industrialize the economy, move the rural population to cities, alchemize local communities into a singular national identity, replace the social hierarchies of the past with an egalitarian order, and promote the cults of science and technology among a pious and often superstitious population. [p. 133]

Readers may recognize this project and/or process by its more contemporary name: globalization. It’s not merely a war of competing ideas, however, because those ideas manifest in various styles of social and political organization. Moreover, the significance of migration from rural agrarian settings to primarily urban and suburban ones can scarcely be overstated. This transformation (referring to the U.S. in the course of the 20th century) is something James Howard Kunstler repeatedly characterizes rather emphatically as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Mishra summarizes the effects of Westernization handily:

In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations — the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution, or the various ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) — reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon. They break the simple axis — religious-secular, modern-medieval, spiritual-materialist — on which the contemporary world is still measured, revealing that its populations, however different their pasts, have been on converging and overlapping paths. [p. 158]

These descriptions and analyses put me in mind of a fascinating book I read some years ago and reviewed on Amazon (one of only a handful of Amazon reviews): John Reader’s Man on Earth (1988). Reader describes and indeed celebrates incredibly diverse ways of inhabiting the Earth specially adapted to the landscape and based on evolving local practices. Thus, the notion of “place” is paramount. Comparison occurs only by virtue of juxtaposition. Mishra does something quite different, drawing out the connective ideas that account for “converging and overlapping paths.” Perhaps inevitably, disturbances to collective and individual identities that flow from unique styles of social organization, especially those now operating at industrial scale (i.e., industrial civilization), appear to be picking up. For instance, in the U.S., even as mass shootings (a preferred form of attack but not the only one) appear to be on the rise at the same time that violent crime is at an all-time low, perpetrators of violence are not limited to a few lone wolves, as the common trope goes. According to journalist Matt Agorist,

mass shootings — in which murdering psychopaths go on rampages in public spaces — have claimed the lives of 339 people since 2015 [up to mid-July 2019]. While this number is certainly shocking and far too high, during this same time frame, police in America have claimed the lives of 4,355 citizens.

And according to this article in Vox, this crazy disproportion (police violence to mass shootings) is predominantly an American thing at least partly because of our high rate of fetishized civilian gun ownership. Thus, the self-described “land of the free, home of the brave” has transformed itself into a paranoid garrison state affecting civil authority even more egregiously than the disenfranchised (mostly young men). Something similar occurred during the Cold War, when leaders became hypervigilant for attacks and invasions that never came. Whether a few close calls during the height of the Cold War were the result of escalating paranoia, brinkmanship, or true, maniacal, existential threats from a mustache-twirling, hand-rolling despot hellbent on the destruction of the West is a good question, probably impossible to answer convincingly. However, the result today of this mindset couldn’t be more disastrous:

It is now clear that the post-9/11 policies of pre-emptive war, massive retaliation, regime change, nation-building and reforming Islam have failed — catastrophically failed — while the dirty war against the West’s own Enlightenment [the West secretly at war with itself] — inadvertently pursued through extrajudicial murder, torture, rendition, indefinite detention and massive surveillance — has been a wild success. The uncodified and unbridled violence of the ‘war on terror’ ushered in the present era of absolute enmity in which the adversaries, scornful of all compromise, seek to annihilate each other. Malignant zealots have emerged at the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11 — Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity — lies in ruins. [pp.124–125]

My Fellow Americans

The “American character,” if one can call it into being merely by virtue of naming it (the same rhetorical trick as solutionism), is diverse and ever-changing. Numerous characterizations have been offered throughout history, with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835 and 1840) being perhaps the one cited most frequently despite its outdatedness. Much in American character has changed since that time, and it’s highly questionable to think it was unified even then. However, as a means of understanding ourselves, it’s as good a place to start as any. A standard criticism of American character as seen from outside (i.e., when Americans travel abroad) is the so-called ugly American: loud, inconsiderate, boorish, and entitled. Not much to argue with there. A more contemporary assessment by Morris Berman, found throughout his “American trilogy,” is that we Americans are actually quite stupid, unaccountably proud of it, and constantly hustling (in the pejorative sense) in pursuit of material success. These descriptions don’t quite match up with familiar jingoism about how great America is (and of course, Americans), leading to non-Americans clamoring to emigrate here, or the self-worship we indulge in every national holiday celebrating political and military history (e.g., Independence Day, Veteran’s Day, Memorial Day).

I recently ran afoul of another ugly aspect of our national character: our tendency toward aggression and violence. In truth, this is hardly unique to Americans. Yet it came up glaringly in the context of a blog post at Pharyngula citing a Tweet comparing uneven application of law (and indignation among online chatterers?) when violence is committed by the political left vs. the political right. Degree of violence clearly matters, but obvious selection bias was deployed to present an egregiously lop-sided perspective. Radicals on both the left and right have shown little compunction about using violence to achieve their agendas. Never mind how poorly conceived those agendas may be. What really surprised me, however, was that my basic objection to violence in all forms across the spectrum was met with snark and ad hominem attack. When did reluctance to enact violence (including going to war) until extremity demands it become controversial?

My main point was that resorting to violence typically invalidates one’s objective. It’s a desperation move. Moreover, using force (e.g., intimidation, threats, physical violence — including throwing milkshakes) against ideological opponents is essentially policing others’ thoughts. But they’re fascists, right? Violence against them is justified because they don’t eschew violence. No, wrong. Mob justice and vigilantism obviate the rule of law and criminalize any perpetrator of violence. It’s also the application of faulty instrumental logic, ceding any principled claim to moral authority. But to commentators at the blog post linked above, I’m the problem because I’m not in support of fighting fascists with full force. Guess all those masked, caped crusaders don’t recognize that they’re contributing to lawlessness and mayhem. Now even centrists come in for attack for not be radical (or aggressive, or violent) enough. Oddly silent in the comments is the blog host, P.Z. Myers, who has himself communicated approval of milkshake patrols and Nazi punching, as though the presumptive targets (identified rather haphazardly and incorrectly in many instances) have no right to their own thoughts and ideas, vile though they may be, and that violence is the right way to “teach them a lesson.” No one learns the intended lesson when the victim of violence. Rather, if not simply cowed into submission (not the same as agreement), tensions tend to escalate into further and increasing violence. See also reaction formation.

Puzzling over this weird exchange with these, my fellow Americans (the ideologically possessed ones anyway), caused me to backtrack. For instance, the definition of fascism at dictionary.com is “a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.” That definition sounds more like totalitarianism or dictatorship and is backward looking, specifically to Italy’s Benito Mussolini in the period 1922 to 1943. However, like national characters, political moods and mechanisms change over time, and the recent fascist thrust in American politics isn’t limited to a single leader with dictatorial power. Accordingly, the definition above has never really satisfied me.

I’ve blogged repeatedly about incipient fascism in the U.S., the imperial presidency (usually associated with George W. Bush but also characteristic of Barack Obama), James Howard Kunstler’s prediction of a cornpone fascist coming to power (the way paved by populism), and Sheldon Wolin’s idea of inverted totalitarianism. What ties these together is how power is deployed and against what targets. More specifically, centralized power (or force) is directed against domestic populations to advance social and political objectives without broad public support for the sole benefit of holders of power. That’s a more satisfactory definition of fascism to me, certainly far better that Peter Schiff’s ridiculous equation of fascism with socialism. Domination of others to achieve objectives describes the U.S. power structure (the military-industrial-corporate complex) to a tee. That doesn’t mean manufactured consent anymore; it means bringing the public into line, especially through propaganda campaigns, silencing of criticism, prosecuting whistle-blowers, and broad surveillance, all of which boil down to policing thought. The public has complied by embracing all manner of doctrine against enlightened self-interest, the very thing that was imagined to magically promote the general welfare and keep us from wrecking things or destroying ourselves unwittingly. Moreover, public support is not really obtained through propaganda and domination, only the pretense of agreement found convincing by fools. Similarly, admiration, affection, and respect are not won with a fist. Material objectives (e.g., resource reallocation, to use a familiar euphemism) achieved through force are just common theft.

So what is Antifa doing? It’s forcibly silencing others. It’s doing the work of fascist government operatives by proxy. It’s fighting fascism by becoming fascist, not unlike the Republican-led U.S. government in 2008 seeking bailouts for banks and large corporations, handily transforming our economy into a socialist experiment (e.g, crowd-funding casino capitalism through taxation). Becoming the enemy to fight the enemy is a nice trick of inversion, and many are so flummoxed by these contradictions they resort to Orwellian doublethink to reconcile the paradox. Under such conditions, there are no arguments that can convince. Battle lines are drawn, tribal affiliations are established, and the ideological war of brother against brother, American against American, intensifies until civility crumbles around us. Civil war and revolution haven’t occurred in the U.S. for 150 years, but they are popping up regularly around the globe, often at the instigation of the U.S. government (again, acting against the public interest). Is our turn coming because we Americans have been divided and conquered instead of recognizing the real source of threat?

Hot Mic

Much ado over nothing was made this past week regarding a technical glitch (or control room error) during the first of two televised Democratic presidential debates where one pair of moderators’ mics was accidentally left on and extraneous, unintended speech leaked into the broadcast. It distracted the other pair of moderators enough to cause a modest procedural disruption. Big deal. This was not the modal case of a hot mic where someone, e.g., a politician, swears (a big no-no despite the shock value being almost completely erased in today’s media landscape) or accidentally reveals callous attitudes (or worse) thinking that no one important was listening or recording. Hot mics in the past have led to public outrage and criminal investigations. One recent example that still sticks in everyone’s craw was a novice political candidate who revealed he could use his fame and impudent nerve to “grab ’em by the pussy.” Turned out not to be the career killer everyone thought it would be.

The latest minor furor over a hot mic got me thinking, however, about inadvertent revelation of matters of genuine public interest. Three genres spring to mind: documentary films, whistle-blowing, and investigative journalism, that last including category outliers such as Wikileaks. Whereas a gaffe on a hot mic usually means the leaker/speaker exposes him- or herself and thus has no one else to blame, disclosures occurring in the other three categories are often against the will of those exposed. It’s obviously in the public interest to know about corruption, misbehavior, and malfeasance in corporate and political life, but the manner in which such information is made public is controversial. Those who expose others suffer harassment and persecution. Documentarians probably fare the best with respect to being left alone following release of information. Michael Moore, for all his absurd though entertaining theatrics, is free (so far as I know) to go about his business and do as he pleases. However, gestures to protect whistle-blowers are just that: gestures. Those who have leaked classified government information in particular, because they gained access to such information through security clearances and signed nondisclosure agreements (before knowing what secrets they were obliged to keep, which is frankly the way such obligations work), are especially prone to reprisal and prosecution. Such information is literally not theirs to disclose, but when keeping others’ secrets is heinous enough, some people feel their conscience and moral duty are superior to job security and other risks involved. Opinions vary, sometimes passionately. And now even journalists who uncover or merely come into possession of evidence of wrongdoing and later publish it — again, decidedly in the public interest — are subject to (malicious?) prosecution. Julian Assange is the current test case.

The free speech aspect of revealing someone else’s amoral and criminal acts is a fraught argument. However, it’s clear that as soon as damaging information comes to light, focus shifts away from the acts and their perpetrators to those who publish the information. Shifting the focus is a miserable yet well-established precedent by now, the result being that most folks who might consider coming forward to speak up now keep things to themselves rather than suffer entirely foreseeable consequences. In that light, when someone comes forward anyway, knowing that they will be hounded, vilified, arrested, and worse, he or she deserved more respect for courage and self-sacrifice than generally occurs in the aftermath of disclosure. The flip side — condemnation, prosecution, and death threats — are already abundant in the public sphere.

Some time after reports of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram went public, a handful of low-level servicemen (“bad apples” used to deflect attention down the command hierarchy) were prosecuted, but high-level officials (e.g., former U.S. presidents Bush and Obama, anyone in their respective administrations, and commanding officers on site) were essentially immunized from prosecution. That example is not quite the same as going after truth-tellers, but it’s a rather egregious instance of bad actors going unprosecuted. I’m still incensed by it. And that’s why I’m blogging about the hot mic. Lots of awful things go on behind the scenes without public knowledge or sanction. Those who commit high crimes (including war crimes) clearly know what they’re doing is wrong. Claims of national security are often invoked and gag laws are legislated into existence on behalf of private industry. When leaks do inevitably occur, those accused immediately attack the accuser, often with the aid of others in the media. Denials may also be issued (sometimes not — why bother?), but most bad actors hide successfully behind the deflecting shift of focus. When will those acting in the shadows against the public interest and in defiance of domestic and international law ever be brought to justice? I daresay the soul of the nation is at stake, and as long as officialdom escapes all but temporary public relations problems to be spun, the pride everyone wants to take as Americans eludes us. In the meantime, there’s a lot to answer for, and it keeps piling up.

Tab Dump 03

Haven’t purged my bookmarks in a long time. I’ve been collecting material about technological dystopia already now operating but expected to worsen. Lots of treatments out there and lots of jargon. My comments are limited.

Commandeering attention. James Williams discusses his recognition that interference media (all modern media now) keep people attuned to their feeds and erode free will, ultimately threatening democratic ideals by estranging people from reality. An inversion has occurred: information scarcity and attention abundance have become information abundance and attention scarcity.

Outrage against the machines. Ran Prieur (no link) takes a bit of the discussion above (probably where I got it) to illustrate how personal responsibility about media habits is confused, specifically, the idea that it’s okay for technology to be adversarial.

In the Terminator movies, Skynet is a global networked AI hostile to humanity. Now imagine if a human said, “It’s okay for Skynet to try to kill us; we just have to try harder to not be killed, and if you fail, it’s your own fault.” But that’s exactly what people are saying about an actual global computer network that seeks to control human behavior, on levels we’re not aware of, for its own benefit. Not only has the hostile AI taken over — a lot of people are taking its side against their fellow humans. And their advice is to suppress your biological impulses and maximize future utility like a machine algorithm.

Big Data is Big Brother. Here’s a good TedTalk by Zeynep Tufekci on how proprietary machine-learning algorithms we no longer control or understand, ostensibly used to serve targeted advertising, possess the power to influence elections and radicalize people. I call the latter down-the-rabbit-hole syndrome, where one innocuous video or news story is followed by another of increasing extremity until the viewer or reader reaches a level of outrage and indignation activating an irrational response.