You hear a lot of talk, usually from right-wing trolls and ‘bot farms and influence operations, about how terrible left-wing authoritarianism is. Constantly the screams of “socialism” and “communism” are used as boogey-men to startle the easily manipulated away from their own best interest.
It’s important to understand that all authoritarianism is not the same.
The real left has been in “dad vibe mode” for a long time. Part of your job as a dad is the hard, hard task of letting your kids learn their own lessons. You gotta watch ’em try things you know won’t work and might even sting a little, because they’re not going to believe you TELLING them what’s gonna happen, no matter what you do.
And then sometimes you’ve got say okay, this has gone on long enough, time to step in.
There’s a very current-day Undertaker vibe to it, if you’re a wrestling fan. Like “okay, we’ve had our fun, but it’s time to set some things straight now because this has got out of hand. Watching the campfire is cool. Roasting marshmallows is cool. Playing with matches isn’t, and you won’t put ’em down, so now I’m gonna have to bark at you and startle you and scare you a little so you do, because you have to put them down, for your own good and everyone else’s.”
It is the inclination of the left to be hands off. Real anti-authoritarianism (as opposed to performative flexing, the people who can scream along with the lyrics of every Rage Against The Machine song but don’t understand a single word) has always been a leftist inclination. The same values and attitudes that make us leftists make us very disinterested in telling anyone else what they should do or trying to enforce social compliance with authoritarian tactics.
But…once in a while, the alternative choices start getting slim.
That’s how you can tell the difference between genuine leftist movements and right-wing propaganda campaigns pretending to be leftist, like so-called “communist Russia.” Genuine leftist movements abhor and avoid tactics of force and intimidation and coercion whenever possible.
The back side of that is when someone like me tells you, this is how it’s got to be, that’s not because “I say so.” It seems like those of you who tend to think in those terms have a really hard time grasping that not everyone does. Very, very little of *anything* I’ve said in the last thirty years, even before I started getting off the drugs and detoxifying my thinking around 25 years ago, has been said simply as a matter of throwing my opinion around. My opinion isn’t any more meaningful or powerful or authoritative than yours; anything I say that I think is “more authoritative” is so precisely because it’s not an opinion but a series of descriptions of observed facts.
That’s really important to remember, because there’s a difference between strong-arm tactics backed by abused power, and good advice, and part of the strategy of those who rely on strong-arm tactics to maintain their power is keeping you confused about which is which.
I’m not telling you that you have to reject bigotry and xenophobia and hate and oppression as behaviors and thought processes simply because I find those things distasteful and obnoxious. I don’t have to be around you, if that’s the case.
I’m telling you that because the consequences of not doing so are the existence of the species and the ongoing, right now, day to day quality of your very own life, which is itself oppressed often without you even realizing it, using exactly the same tools and values and attitudes that you’re using to oppress others, and until you figure that out, none of us is gonna get the boot off our necks so we can deal with the clowns at the top of the pyramid whose relatively tiny footprints are somehow holding all of us down under their weight.
I’m telling you that because I can see that the consequences of your behavior are making you miserable, even if you can’t see it.
(Yet. People like that usually catch on, and usually about five seconds after the acute and material costs of their behavior come due.)
That’s the difference between “authoritarianism” on the left and on the right. On the right, they live for that crap because they all believe that if they’re just big enough jerks and can sufficiently prove their heartlessness and ruthlessness to their owners then they’ll be allowed to become an owner one day.
On the left, we’re mostly pissed because you made us get off the couch, and we’re gonna want to get this over and done with quickly so we can get back to singing kumbaya and watching TV or tending our kale gardens or driving our lesbian friends around in a Subaru or whatever stereotype you want to throw around for a little cock-eyed giggle.
If you’ve been around enough people, you know. The folks who tend to the right are the ones who yell and threaten and hit and make a big production out of things and there’s all the theatrics and this is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you gaslighting.
The folks who tend to the left are the ones who snatch your ass up about two seconds before the consequences of your actions hurt you, which gives you a nice three seconds to let your life flash before your eyes and give you a real good scare before sitting you down, looking you dead in the eye, and saying “now don’t you feel a little dumb for doing that? How about you don’t do it again?” And we do it knowing you’re going to hate us for it, at least a little bit, but also knowing that if we don’t, you won’t be around to hate anyone.
And that’s the lesson you remember and learn from. You might remember getting hit. You might even believe it’s the right way to do things and do the same to your kids. But you’ll rarely remember any specific reason it happened, any specific action for which the violence was a consequence, any particular moral or ethical lesson you learned from it.
But you remember that feeling of having disappointed someone you respect and admire, for the rest of your life, and you try not to do it again.
Right wing authoritarianism is their default setting. Bullying and pushing people around and ordering compliance and throwing your weight around is part and parcel of what attracts people to right-wing ideology, it’s why they work so heavily on anger and fear and ego.
Left-wing authoritarianism is reluctant, always a last resort, and always executed in the hope of being a temporary expedience to solve an acute issue, and letting go of it when that issue is solved.
As the current situation worldwide shows us, sometimes, as reluctant as we are, we have to stand up and say :no more, or else.” That’s a form of authoritarianism, to be sure…but it’s the only one I can see having any ethical redemption or validation – reluctant leadership that wishes to stop leading the minute it’s possible to do so.
Welcome to another Friday, hailing from Parts Unknown and weighing in at 226 pounds I’m John Henry with the Morning Message, lots to talk about today so let’s get right to it!
First, big shout-out to festering social disease Pat Robertson who made his contribution to Pride Month after a lifetime of blaming gay people for hurricanes by dying yesterday. Perhaps more than any other minion of evil in the American Theofascist movement Robertson, taught people how to weaponize religion through mass media to spread hate, ignorance, and fascism throughout American culture for profit and power. We note Robertson’s death is tragic primarily in that it didn’t happen fifty or sixty years ago.
The big news today of course is the return of a seven-count indictment against tribble hatchery and ongoing refutation of Darwinian theory Donald J “The J Is For Jeenyus” Trump on charges related to his illegal and deliberate removal and sharing of classified intelligence.
The most serious of these charges is being filed under the federal Espionage Act, and that’s super important for two reasons that aren’t being talked about much in the coverage I’ve read.
First, a conviction of espionage lays the groundwork for a much more serious charge of treason. Article 3 Section III of the US Constitution spells it out clearly: treason is committed when a person a) makes war against the United States, b) “adheres to” enemies of the US, “giving them aid and comfort.”
Without getting into the weeds on it, “espionage” generally involves spying on or stealing information. “Treason” is when you communicate that information in a way that is harmful to your nation (or attempt to harm primary officials). There’s a lot of overlap there, but it’s not complete.
Any given act has three requirements to be considered treasonous. First, it must be an act that harms an order to which the actor has a duty of allegiance – a citizen spying on their own country for a hostile foreign power, for instance. Second, the intent to violate that duty; you can’t accidentally commit treason. Third, there must in fact be an “act” or “action.” Without actually “doing something,” you’re talking about sedition but not treason.
If a conviction under the Espionage Act is secured, that establishes as a legal fact that “something” was “done.” This is key to prosecution for treason down the road.
The second thing that isn’t being talked about is the extraordinarily problematic nature of the Espionage Act. This act is one of the few clearly defined legal lines in the US where your right to free expression stops, cold. That such a line exists, and must exist, has been upheld repeatedly by courts left and right over more than a century now.
As with any such tool, it can – and has been – readily weaponized to oppress reasoned dissent against abuses of power. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced ten years in prison under the Act in 1918; noted anarchist philosopher Emma Goldman was deported to the Soviet Union in the same year. The Act has also been used to stifle speech critical of war, or which portrayed US wartime allies in unflattering ways, and prosecuting a case under the Act was a key moment in the early career of infamous “Red Scare” senator Joe McCarthy.
This is one of those moments when there is no clear black and white picture. What we do know is that if the GOP gets the chance, they’ll attempt to use the same sets of laws against their enemies, because that’s what they do – they corrupt and bend and twist everything that can be made bad, to their own favor.
I’m absolutely on board with Trump’s indictment and I hope he, his enablers, and everyone who supported him ends up doing time over it. They are traitors to all our trust, and there must be a reckoning if the idea of trust is to have any merit at all.
I would be very, very careful about getting sucked in to cheerleading authoritarianism or the application of power that can readily be abused when held by someone who’s more like Donald J “The J Is For Jailbird” Trump than not.
That’s your Morning Message I’m John Henry reminding you that I am completely crowd-funded because it keeps me completely independent. You can help via PayPal, CashApp, Patreon and more at johnhenry.us/money, and don’t forget the best support is engagement so stay on those like, share, comment and subscribe buttons. Thanks again and have a great weekend!
Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…
Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.
Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.
Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?
Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.
Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.
Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.
I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:
The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.
They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.
They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.
We refuse.
Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.
Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.
Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.
Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.
Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.
When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.
That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.
I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.
What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.
And we…aren’t.
Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.
That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.
NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.
Those are your “American Values.”
When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.
Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.
In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.
As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.
Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)
Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.
So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.
Lately it seems like I’ve been on a bit of a tear, as they say. There’s been some status messages, and even a short video, all coming back to the core idea we’ve got to stop explaining basic things to people who completely understand them but pretend not to because the pretense allows them to continue engaging in unacceptable behavior.
I don’t mean to ever discourage reading or genuine intellectual curiosity. I absolutely believe that understanding what the facts are is critically important, and that of necessity that means understanding what a fact is, is pretty important too.
I’m just over the constant going back and forth with people who act like they don’t get it.
It sucks up too much energy.
Explaining why black lives matter and what that phrase means when it’s been under public discussion since 2013 is waste of time, as is arguing back and forth over what groups where and why “own” what “interest” in whatever related commercial trademarks there may be and how they’re used and why. First and foremost the conversation must begin with the basic understanding that black lives matter. Full stop. Anything beyond that is nonsense and argument, because anything beyond that means on some level and to some degree you are willing enough to compromise that basic idea to bother arguing about it.
Same thing with explaining why Confederate statues don’t have any place in the United States, same thing with explaining people why they should wear a mask in the midst of an ongoing deadly pandemic, on and on. We just expend so much time and energy on people not to educate them but to chip away at the idea that their position has some social acceptability, that we can’t ever move forward because these sandbaggers keep siphoning all our energy into just not going backwards any faster.
Manners?
The darker colors have smaller gaps; the darkest, the *smallest* gap is about 10% (women make a little over 90% what men do), and the lightest – in Utah, women make less than 70% of men on average.
Meanwhile women are still making 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, black people are still getting shot by cops on an almost daily basis if not more than daily, there are still thousands of kids in cages in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re doing worse than nothing to help them including losing them entirely.
I’m really not trying to be rude about it, but at this point who’s more rude here? The person who is continuing to act as though they don’t understand the arguments why human beings should be human beings and we shouldn’t put up statues to people who bought and sold human beings and fought against the interests of human freedom because that is neither honorable nor laudable? Or the person who says “enough, we’re moving on now?”
Who’s being more disrespectful, the person who refuses to wear a simple facemask, repeatedly demonstrated to have zero to negligible ill effects, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic that’s already killed at least – depending on your source – 125-130-ish thousand people just in the United States at the time I’m writing this, and probably many more? Or is the person who firmly insists we’re done arguing about it now and have the best guidance possible, and that’s WEAR A MASK WHEN YOU GO OUT, being rude by their firm insistence? Who dies in which direction? How many cases are there, EVER, of people dying because they were wearing a mask? Right. Wear the damn thing. If you’ve got reason beyond selfish and spurious hypochondria not to, you really WILL have the advice of a doctor because you’ve already got other serious problems.
In the vast majority of cases that first person is simply not being honest. It’s silly that we keep having to say the same things over and over as if each individual person is always hearing it for the first time. For instance I’m quite sure that my friend’s friend, whose remark started the comment that became this article, has heard all of these arguments before. He just doesn’t want to accept them. He can’t find a reasoned basis in objective fact and ethical behavior to support his position so he just pretends not to understand the arguments against it. Maybe that’s a conscious decision, maybe it’s not, I don’t know the man well enough to say. But that’s what’s happening.
At some level that stops even being about questions of racism or sexism or xenophobia or bigotry, and just starts being about personal character and integrity. I know people are going to find that offensive and outrageous and insulting, but it’s more offensive and outrageous and insulting to continue to insist that we don’t understand the basic realities of life whenever they’re inconvenient for us.
Consequences
Worse, it’s deadly.
This whole “I don’t get it” game is half the problem in a lot of places right now, where you’re talking about coronavirus or gender issues or racial issues or economic disparity issues or any of it. Half of any of those problems at least is people who just insist on pretending not to get it because if they admit they understand the arguments they have to admit that they’ve been wrong. Nobody likes to do that, so we’ve developed this elaborate set of communications to justify not doing it.
That has to stop now. That’s really what all of this is teaching us.
In another example, there’s a big kerfuffle up the road from me in Allendale, Michigan over the removal of a “confederate statue,” arguably more a civil war memorial featuring a generic confederate soldier.
That statue, though, was placed in 1998. It’s less historically relevant than The Simpsons, Nirvana, or Baywatch. And, it’s in Michigan. Nobody from this state fought for the breakaway traitorous republic; the statue doesn’t represent anyone who has any sort of tie here.
But obviously it must be important, after all apparently nobody in that town heard about the Civil War until 133 years after it was over and that’s why we’ve got to keep the statue!
Top feature of Allendale MI civil war memorial statue. Statue photos courtesy reddit.com user u/resister_sister
No more of that nonsense. It’s dumb, it’s a waste of time, and it’s a bunch of dishonest and disingenuous people complaining about things that don’t even have the slightest significance to them other than having something to complain about.
In the greater part, right now especially, they are complaining simply because other people whose oppression these people have benefited from for centuries are demanding an end to that oppression. The loudest subgroup of those voices, those with legitimate grievances that remain ignored, are those who descended from or look like the people who have been largely enslaved and dehumanized throughout the entire history of this country. And those people are saying “you see this? This is what we’re talking about!”
That scares people whose current state of privileged comfort is in some way is a product of their privilege and social standing they were born to and other irrelevancies like their gender or the color of their skin. They are facing the reality that pretty much their entire way of thinking is wrong and cruel and intolerable and it must stop. They’ve lived so long with privilege, they think they’re entitled to it. They’re afraid they can’t compete without the advantages privilege brings, against those who have historically been denied those privileges. So when the oppressed rise up and say “you see this?” the response of the oppressors is “I don’t know what you mean,” and they keep right on going.
Solutions
So the privileged are scared again because their privilege is threatened and they imagine that’s a threat to their comfort. That’s where all this comes from, right, is this stupid zero-sum thinking where in order for me to have, you have to do without. Some people, most of them simply mislead and others deliberately misleading, push that way of thinking to rationalize their own greed or self-interest above and beyond others. It’s uncomfortable for people who have defined themselves around a core creed to realize that it’s cruel and harmful, not only to those against whom it is directed but also against those who create it and perpetuate it. They don’t want to change because it’s not comfortable and they think it means they’ll lose something.
That, my friends, is just too bad. Those privileged folks are just gonna have to handle themselves, because if they continue behaving that way and treating the problem that way, they may just end up right. Problem is, so will we all, again, and that crap has to end or we’re going to end. So the traditionally privileged can just go find find those bootstraps they’re always telling the oppressed to pull themselves up by. Because the world is moving on, with them or without them.
The truly stupid thing is, it’s not even really “taking away” anything; it’s just making sure other people have access to the same opportunities and “rights” even if they’re *not* born into privilege &c.
Those people who are afraid they can’t compete on a level playing field rely on the power of their privilege to continuing to sabotage the game.
All of this is to say nothing of the fact that the statue itself perpetuates the idea that freedom of black Americans is a gift from white men rather than their right as human beings.
The problem is – and this is why I’ve been saying for years that “kumbaya liberalism is dead” – those same people have learned that they can manipulate the good nature of people who are decent. They can claim injury where there is none, or ignorance that is really saccharine stupidity, and rely on The Good Guys™ to continue being gentle.
It’s time we faced the difficult reality that the long term result of that has been a lot of good, dead people and a lot of live crappy ones, and it’s quickly becoming an existential threat to the species.
As I’ve paraphrased Heinlein so many times: survival and propagation of the species is the only universal morality. Ultimately, as a totality of human consciousness and existence, anything threatening that single universal morality will be eliminated, one way or another, just as happens with Darwinian selection for any other species, to the greatest extent that can possibly be exerted by that totality.
What makes that humane and ethically acceptable – or what defines the point at which it becomes so – is the effect of individual human will. At some level, all else being equal, we can each choose to act in ways that benefit or detract from the universal morality. “Lower” life forms don’t always have a choice about that.
In the US and other nations we’ve built entire systems that detract from the sole universal human morality, and we’ve insisted on treating the very things about those systems which detract from that fundamental drive to survive as though they are themselves required for our survival.
We have, rather than elevating and empowering human life, chosen to subjugate and restrict it for our own material benefit.
That has to stop, and we can either choose to stop it or the greater will of the collective species will absolutely act to stop it one way or another.
Conclusions
When our self-serving idiocy begins to work against the universal morality of other species and we refuse to put an end to it ourselves, those species do their best to fight back.
When we act against the universal morality of great numbers of species, we act against the universal morality of all life, and all life will work together to ensure we can’t keep doing that.
This is how all of this crap keeps going on, every bit of it. Including coronavirus, even including an alarming percentage of seismic activity in the last fifty years, to say nothing of the natural disasters that are made worse by our destruction of the environment, and it just keeps going and it all starts with individuals thinking clearly and ethically. Individuals who make a deliberate choice to refuse to at least make the genuine effort to *try* to do either one of those things are making a deliberate choice to die.
We no longer have the option of first considering the hurt feelings of the privileged. Especially when it’s mostly adults acting like little kids, being afraid to remove a band-aid and see the healing where a wound used to be. None of this is really going to “hurt” anybody, beyond the blow to their ego in finding out they’ve got to actually start living up to their own self-image, they’re not allowed to keep faking it anymore.
The coddling of these egos has to stop, and it has to stop now. It’s killing us, in very large numbers, and those numbers are going to get larger still before they start shrinking. Aside from basic human selfishness in the immediate sense, what mostly keeps this going is that arguing over these things is a multibillion dollar industry, and in spite of the generalized damage is inflicts on society as a whole, it props up the power and lifestyles of the ownership class.
But if we don’t change what we’re doing, NOW, they’re not going to start shrinking until so many people have died that the human population is no longer a threat to the rest of the world or itself.
We can no longer, as a matter of that universal human morality I keep talking about, continue to be polite to the stupid. Yes, there are going to be people who genuinely don’t get it, but that’s what education is for. That’s ignorance and it can be fixed. I’m talking about stupidity, which is willful ignorance or pretense to it. There are many more people who get it just fine and pretend not to – they play stupid – like the people who get a fake “emotional support animal” just because they notice people with real ones and are pissed off that someone is getting something “special” and they’re not.
The protection of these people’s feelings has to end, or it’s going to end us. It sounds cruel, but it isn’t. What’s cruel is the price everyone has to pay to keep propping all this BS up.
Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.
The man who fractured Martin Gugino’s skull is out on bail, along with the only other officer of dozens who witnessed the assault and did nothing.
We still have an avowed and publicly declared fascist controlling the executive branch, and scores of not-so-publicly declared fascists in Congress, to say nothing of a judiciary that has been filled with rot.
22 states still have no legal age requirement for marriage, with parental consent – “parental consent” being a mechanism used for thousands of years to legitimize pedophilia.
8 states still forbid atheists from holding office.
There are still uncountable millions without health insurance – 44 million *before* COVID, and untold millions more since. Health care is still treated as a benefit of employment rather than a human right.
Profit interests still hold power – in some cases nearly absolute power – in our prisons and criminal justice system, our schools, our hospitals, and our elections.
Women still aren’t paid the same as men.
Thousands of police with records of violence, including both domestic violence and illegal assaults of captives, continue to be employed.
Nothing, still, has been done to help the over half a million homeless people, including about 18 thousand unaccompanied, unsheltered minors, in this country – again, pre-covid numbers.
Nothing, still, has been done to help the 38 million Americans living in poverty – pre-covid.
Legal abortions are still nearly impossible to obtain in vast stretches of our nation.
Most states still do not have laws requiring mandatory termination of parental rights in cases of rape.
Hundreds of police officers have walked off their jobs in recent weeks in protest against demands for accountability and transparency related to abuse of police power.
Thousands of pathetic, cowardly, entitled, overgrown infants continue to terrorize the streets of this nation with terrorist displays of deadly force and threat of violence against any and all who threaten the totalitarian oligarchy these supplicant bootlickers think is going to benefit them as long as they’ve got enough guns and MAGA hats.
Oh, and in case we’re not noticing, COVID-19’s “second wave” is happening before the first one was over because these same sniveling lickspittles can’t stop kissing their own asses long enough to grasp what “deadly pandemic” means. It probably doesn’t help that, under the guise of “freedom of speech,” much of the media and even the “president” himself continue to insist it’s not a thing, because if it was they’d lose money.
The struggle, as they say, is not merely “not over.” It’s barely begun. It’s not going to be easy. Some of us may lose our lives in this struggle, as some of us already have, to say nothing of grievous and permanently disabling injuries at the hands of militarized police and white fascist bigots who have, in at least some cases, been coddled by police rather than properly arrested and charged.
Some of us will become estranged (or further estranged) from family. Some of us will end marriages. Some of us will lose our livelihoods for speaking out. I personally have been targeted by fake “Antifa” trolls (and they ARE fake, at least one of them is well known to me and has been stalking me for decades) who outed my home address, putting nine other innocent people in danger of violence at the hands of bigots and fascists who might not like what I have to say.
None of us wants to go through that, and yet…we must. We must because decency and compassion demand it. We must because the very concepts of human freedom and dignity are at stake. We must because until the oligarchy that controls most of the planet is crushed into a bad memory, we are all a moment’s notice away from returning to the darkest of all imaginable dark ages, a world in which all the evils of the past combine with the technology of the future to create a dystopian hellscape that Orwell couldn’t have imagined in his worst nightmares.
“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”
We MUST keep fighting. MUST. It’s been a minute since anyone in this country had to truly and seriously consider whether they’re willing to risk their lives to uphold and advance the cause of human decency, compassion, and dignity; to wonder if they might just end up being a martyr for the causes of justice, equality, prosperity, and peace.
That time is now. That place is now. We who cherish genuine freedom and who seek genuine progress are looking directly into the eye of our moment in history. One hundred years from now, either this moment will be taught as the moment when we finally decided to start living up to our own hype…or it won’t be taught at all.
Nazi rally of SS and SA troops in Nuremberg, Germany, 1935. Image public domain via US National Archives & Wikimedia Commons.
In my last article I discussed some broad generalities that empower and normalize the slow-motion fascist occupation of the United States Government. Now, let’s start talking about solutions.
I’ve asserted that this occupation exists and is actively working to reshape our nation.
Based on the feedback, that’s not a real hopeful message, and it wasn’t intended to be. It’s not happy news, and we all need a swift kick in the butt for letting things get this far.
Beating ourselves up even more, however, isn’t going to solve the problem. Feeling hopeless…well, it sure isn’t my goal to make people feel that way, at the same time I’m forced to think that it’s not a bad thing. There are millions of people in this country who feel, and have felt, that hopelessness every single day of our lives, and maybe it’s not a bad thing for the shoe to be on the other foot, so to speak. In spite of that, though, wallowing in self-recrimination (or inducing you to do so) isn’t my purpose in writing.
Now is the time to stop wallowing in it and start looking within ourselves and at the greater society as a whole and decide what we’re going to do about it, what we need to do about it, if we intend to have hope at all, let alone successfully end the occupation.
Step one is always: look in the mirror. Look at the accouterments of your life. Look at your own behavior. Do you sit and say nothing when the drunk uncle starts preaching MAGA at the family reunion? If you’re white, do you just sort of laugh uncomfortably when your white friends tell “n****r” jokes? That’s a surface thing, right there. A glaring, enormous bit of personal behavior you can change to help undermine all of the thought and behavior patterns that empower and normalize fascist thinking. Stop flinching. We all own this, and we’re all going to have to take these steps one way or another.
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Maybe in your world, the aggressions aren’t so cut and dried. Maybe instead of wearing white hoods and talking about what has eight legs and says “Hodedo,” Uncle Bigot is more into the what-abouts. Like every time a cop kills a person who was no real threat to them, pulling out the ‘what about his criminal record’ and ‘why didn’t he cooperate’ and ‘black on black crime’ tropes. What are the assumptions in that thinking? Don’t we all, to some degree or another, find ourselves thinking in these terms? Even I, anti-authoritarian as I am, get a laugh out of Det. Olivia Benson illegally breaking in to a suspects apartment while they’re mid-coitus and making a joke about “exigent circmstances, I heard a woman scream,” or watching some doofus on COPS try to tell the officer arresting him that he hasn’t smoked pot while he’s got a joint behind his ear in plain sight of the camera.
I kind of hate to give up that guilty pleasure, that schadenfreude. We all do it, it’s just part of human nature to get a little personal lift out of going “look at that idiot!” But back to the mirror – how do these narratives normalize fascist authoritarianism? As others have pointed out, why are the internal affairs investigators in police procedurals always written as the “bad guys” who are just interfering in the ability of a “good cop who isn’t afraid to break the rules” to get his man? Why do police portrayals in general come down to either egregious violations of civil rights normalized under the guise of “justice,” or comically inept rubes who don’t know which end of the gun the bullets come out of?
Is it sinking in yet?
We’re gonna have to give some of these things up. Here’s another thought – why are our schoolchildren (and I’ll get you did it to) taught to pledge allegiance to a flag, before they’re taught how to uphold the values that flag ostensibly represents? Being the little social outcast I am, I stopped participating in like fourth grade, but this isn’t about me patting myself on the back for being so woke – there’s enough of that shallow, empty garbage on the internet. What I want to know is, what are you teaching your kids about that flag?
Because it’s parenting too, right? We thrive in this country on authoritarian parenting. While hard, recent data is difficult to come by, indications are that somewhere between 60 and 90% of parents still believe that spanking is an acceptable form of discipline (PDF), even though every serious study of the issue in the last fifty years has unambiguously said it’s not just ineffective but highly counter-effective.
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Yet we continue to do it, don’t we? We’ll say with a complete lack of self-awareness “my parents spanked me and I turned out fine,” even though we manifestly didn’t because we turned out to be someone who thinks hitting a child is okay, and it’s not.
We’ll argue back and forth all day long about teaching “respect,” but we’re not teaching respect; we’re teaching fear of authority and rule by force, aren’t we? Isn’t it true, and isn’t it time we accepted as true, that if we’re doing our jobs properly our kids are absolutely going to rebel against us and push back against our values and demand that we validate and justify those values whether doing so makes us comfortable or not? Are you a parent who falls back to “because I said so” and “as long as you live in my house,” instead of being able to admit and discuss our own flaws in thinking, or for that matter to effectively explore and explain our values?
How does that normalize unquestioning fealty to authority, and how does that empower and normalize what ultimately becomes fascism in our kids’ thinking? Have you really thought about that? Have you looked inside yourself and asked whether you, yourself, haven’t been normalized and acclimated to authoritarianism – which is the root of fascism – far more deeply than you realized? Or have you decided that it’s just “easier” to say “because I said so” rather than taking the chance of having to defend your position and coming to the realization that you can’t?
Nobody said this was going to be easy. In fact I’m trying to make clear that it’s very much going to be hard. Even those of us who have been going over these things in our minds and making adjustments for years still have plenty of work to do. What I’ve written here isn’t an all-encompassing plan of action; it’s a start. The point I’m making – or trying to, in my clumsy way – is that it starts with us. You, me, your crazy aunt, your kindly old gramma who keeps making the snide remarks about der Schwarze.
Your kindly old gramma does that because when you don’t ask her to stop, that makes it okay for her. Your crazy uncle probably cares a whole lot less about worshiping Trump than he does about gaining attention and feeling like people think he’s smart, because nobody’s bothered telling him that they really don’t. Your drunk brother-in-law yammers on about “the antifa terrorists” because nobody around him has bothered standing up to that ignorance, or even pointing out the basic linguistic reality that “opposing anti-fascism” is “fascism.”
These are tough conversations to have. They may cost you relationships and friendships that you’d rather not lose. This process is not painless…but getting here wasn’t painless for millions of disenfranchised, marginalized, and oppressed people, whether that’s a race, a sexual identity, or just being someone like me who doesn’t fit comfortably into other people’s pigeonholes.
While I can’t really make it easy for you, perhaps these thoughts will help. I’ve gone through these processes myself many times, and continue to do so daily. Just try to remember; for every dominant social group you’re a member of, there are thousands of people who have been hurt by our passive-aggressive refusal to stand up against the status quo of nationalism, xenophobia, othering, and so forth.
You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the culture in which you were raised. In accepting that responsibility and living up to it, you become part of the improvement of the culture as a whole.
A little cognitive dissonance experienced in the process of trying to grow to be better people really isn’t that much to ask. Is it?
(Somewhat ironically, a technical error prevented me from getting an archive of the first night with the “new set.” I’ve embedded the livestream from Facebook here, but I’ve only got the last ten minutes locally and right now FB is not letting me download the video directly. If/when I can get this archived on YouTube, I will. For now, you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/144898762238389/videos/496311224370776). Yes I know the audio’s out of sync.)
Why is Bernie running as a Democrat?
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders takes the stage on the first night of the second 2020 Democratic U.S. presidential debate in Detroit, Michigan, July 30, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
One of the most-often asked questions I see – or depending on who’s talking and what their purpose is, accusations – about Bernie Sanders is why he’s running on the Democratic ticket. There are a number of reasons, some easier to see and obvious, some not so much.
First and foremost, he’s running on the Democratic ticket because the two major parties have the process locked down and an independent candidate doesn’t have a chance in hell at winning.
Now maybe – MAYBE – if he finds a way to get on the national ticket without the democratic party at this point, if they decide to keep playing to power, depending on how things go over the next couple of months – after all this work and in this time of great crisis that screams out with the voice of millions that the things Sanders has worked for must be done now, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that he could win the electoral college as a write-in. He needs 270 votes. 9 states, for a total of 53 electors, don’t allow write-ins.
The rest – 483 – do, with various requirements. In Michigan, for instance, you have to file a letter of intent by the beginning of September and have a list of electors. Each of them must have been a resident of the congressional district for which they’re voting for one year, and a US citizen for ten. But right now I think the inclination of the campaign is to do everything possible to save the one remaining party structure that *could* be saved to energize a united President and Congress to get some things done. Certainly that’s not the Republicans, so the Dems are what’s left.
But in the end, Bernie’s allegiance is to this country, not a party. How that will lead him to decide the best way to pursue this situation, I don’t know. I think if he made sure to dot his I’s and cross his T’s he could be an eligible write-in candidate. Depending on how many districts in which he can win the popular vote at that point, he’s got a margin of 213 electoral votes to work with.
But in the end his allegiance is to doing the right thing for the people of this nation. He’s entirely uncorrupted by special interests.
That’s. Why. The. Party. Doesn’t. Want. Him. To. Win.
That’s why the power that props the party up, including all the media companies who make all the big campaign donations, do not want him to win.
That is why it does not require a conspiracy. The big money interests, including those who control most of the information you see, do not want a healthy, educated population. Having a healthy, educated population creates opportunity for you which means it creates competition for them in an “open market.”
This is not an open market. If this market was open, we’d all be making plenty. We’re not.
This is not a free country.
You are not free when you don’t have your health.
You are not free when you aren’t taught quality critical thinking skills. You can not be free if you can’t think clearly. You can’t think clearly if you’re surrounded by carefully crafted messaging with the direct purpose of keeping you stuck where you are and falling like you have been for decades.
It would be easy and poetic to say that we’ve become so advertising-besotted that we can’t tell a real message from an ad anymore, but sometimes poetry doesn’t tell the story. The reality is not that you are stupid.
The reality is that you have been kept ignorant. What you hear and see shapes what you believe, and no matter what your race, class, culture, identity, background, current status, that is the truth.
There is a very small group of people who control what you hear and see for their own interests. That is also the truth. In much the same way it does not require a formal conspiracy for like interests to pursue like ends, it does not require traditional authoritarianism to keep at least enough people at heel to discourage the rest who aren’t from rising up in protest.
One of the ways that works is through recursive authoritarianism. So and so has this going on at worked that could be improved or has ethical considerations that concern you, but it’s clear that your best interest, and the company’s, is to simply not acknowledge that out loud. So you agree to say nothing and now whatever your position, you have to use it to ensure nobody else does either. Authoritarianism.
You are constantly at risk of losing your livelihood if you do the right thing ethically when you’re doing business. I have been constantly paraphrasing a line from Robert Heinlein lately: the survival of the species is the only universal morality.
Willful ignorance – the selfish pretense to stupidity
A whole BUNCH of people are about to hit what a lot of people, including people like me, have lived with most or all of our lives. It is not going to be pretty.
And where we are mostly not prepared is in our own minds and hearts to just admit that we have been wrong, and do something about it.
You are watching everything change, right now. It is changing precisely because IT HAS TO.
It’ll happen the easy way with good leadership – leadership that has consistently stood *against* all these abuses of power and resources, who has consistently worked in the best interests of *the people* and *the nation* and long-term sustainability and health and education and all the other things that go along with REAL freedom.
This is not an acute problem. This is the predictable result of a systemic problem. We can face that, or we can KEEP trying to pretend “it can’t happen here, not to us, we’re good people, my deity wouldn’t do that to me, we’re just trying to [insert euphemism to rationalize all the ego-driven bullshit of this planet], we’re doing the right thing, all these people who want all these changes are just self-interested, I just want what’s best for me.”
What’s best for all of us is to start working together instead of against each other. Abundance is everywhere. We have everything we need. We just refuse to let go of the things we don’t, because they’re comfortable. Because of that, we’ve all become far LESS comfortable than if a few of us weren’t so obstinate about their comfort.
The future is scary. The unknown is scary. The future is unknown. What is known is that we are at a key point in human history when we can no longer continue to pretend and act at the game of political leadership. We must lead, individually starting with ourselves, and in the world starting with a capable, competent, non-nonsense president who walks into the office with zero allegiance to anyone but the people who elected him.
The global coronavirus pandemic absolutely must be dealt with in an immediate fashion, and it is – as much as the ham-handed boobs currently running the country can manage it. But we absolutely must not ignore the lessons it brings, because frankly there will be more if we don’t re-prioritize IMMEDIATELY. To simply deal with the immediate problem is to remain unprepared for the next one.
Bernie Sanders understands that and is doing his best with a system that has been corrupted almost beyond repair. Personally, I hope if he loses the Democratic nomination he chooses to move forward as a write-in candidate in any state where he can’t get on the ballot as an independent, immediately if he loses the Democratic primary, which *right now* it appears he may, but we’ll have to see what happens. The concept of faithless electors exists, too. We have no idea how the national conventions, which are traditionally where the nominations take place, will turn out yet. A lot can change between now and then. I think it would be a mistake to start running independently *before* the official things are officially official, unless they try to drag ass past the deadlines for indys or write-ins to get on ballots.
But if they officially reject Sanders as a nominee…boy. I just can’t see him as head of the Senate. That’s not his job. And the offer would have to be made – which would immediately break Biden’s campaign promise – and he’d have to accept, neither of which we know anything of right now.
Orwell’s Boot (n.) – phrase describing metaphorically the end result of the mechanical functions of tyranny.
I’m sure someone said “Orwell’s Boot” before I did, but strangely it hasn’t come into common use, so I guess I can take credit for a formal definition (although obviously Orwell conceived it). It’s based on this passage from 1984:
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
I use this phrase to describe the acts of oppression and tyranny engaged in by dictators and other authoritarian bad actors, particularly when it involves group oppression – sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry. Often I get the feeling from people organizing “against oppression” that rather than trying to rid the world of oppression, some folks are just waiting for their turn to be the oppressor; this was the context of formally labeling the Orwell’s Boot metaphor for reference in other conversations.
Example sentence: “Either you want to eliminate Orwell’s Boot, or you want to wear it. If wearing it is your goal, you’re no better than whatever you’re fighting against.”
Another of those subjects that just refuses to go away because the fascists we’ve allowed to take part in our government know that keeping us stupid is their best weapon.
The sound quality on this really stinks, I’m afraid, and I don’t know why. Unfortunately all the source video has been lost to the inevitable costs of poverty, but if it’s that tough to hear feel free to DM me via FB or Twitter and I’ll go ahead and transcribe it here.
What’s interesting about this video to me is that it inadvertently documents one of those “things I never do,” in this case working with Eric Byler and a group of fellow students who eventually called ourselves “Michigan’s Future” (clearly reflective of my traditionally-aged colleagues!) at Western Michigan University to get a resolution passed by the local city council that they would refuse to enforce any attempt at creating an Arizona-style “show your papers” law. I’m pretty bad about documenting the things I do; in this case it turns out that I did, and totally forgot. You also see legendary Kalamazoo city council member Don Cooney speaking at a pro-education rally, among other things; Don turns up again in a documentary I did about the Occupy movement.
Breonna Taylor’s murderers have not been charged. The accessories to that murder are still employed.
