Politics

The struggle is real.

Trump plays every system for profit. But the reason he is dangerous is that above all, he plays human nature.


Have you ever seen an old science fiction movie where some super-computer is reduced to smoking incoherence by humans feeding it illogical information? Well our species has a hard wired social operating system and Trump’s one and only genius is hacking that system to generate the human equivalent of “This does not compute” . He makes a special point of behaving in conflict with expected social cues in a way that leaves his victims off balance and vulnerable. He is a master manipulator who understands the weak spots in human nature very well and uses them against his opponents with intentionally contrary performances. The most basic Trump scowling monkey face might as well be a kabuki mask. Others have said that Trump is ALWAYS acting and I think they are right.

He knows that people:

  • Will get used to anything if they keep seeing it.
  • Are wowed by power.
  • Can be overwhelmed and intimidated.
  • Are easily distracted.
  • Go “deer in the headlights” in the face of shocking but unrepentant behavior or outright denials of wrongdoing.
  • Can be backed down and quieted by claims that he is the one being treated unfairly.

To Trump, our “weaknesses” are pro-social behaviors like being reasonable and polite and feeling shame and contrition. He also plays on our difficulty in calling out authority generally. If someone acts “in charge” with sufficient conviction and acts like you must be crazy and out of line to question him, most people will at least falter. If the person actually HAS power the effect of this is cubed.

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Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business… The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.” – Jacob Marley, A Christmas Carol

Epistle of James – Warning to the Rich (5:1-6)

5 Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.

  • Proverbs 22:16 Whoever oppresses the poor for his own increase and whoever gives to the rich, both come to poverty.
  • Proverbs 22:26–27 Do not be one of those who shakes hands in a pledge, one of those who is surety for debts; if you have nothing with which to pay, why should he take away your bed from under you?
  • Proverbs 29:7 A righteous man knows the rights of the poor; a wicked man does not understand such knowledge.
  • Psalm 82:3-4 Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.
  • Isaiah 1:17 Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.
  • Ezekiel 16:49 Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
  • Ecclesiastes 5:10-14 Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. As goods increase, so do those who consume them. And what benefit are they to the owners except to feast their eyes on them?
  • Matthew 5:42 Give to him who asks you, and from him who wants to borrow from you do not turn away.
  • Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
  • Matthew 19:21 “If you want to be perfect, go and sell your belongings and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”
  • Mark 8:36 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
  • Luke 12:15 Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
  • Acts 8:20 May your money perish with you, because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money!
  • Acts 20:35 “In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
  • 1 Timothy 6:17-19 Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life.
  • James 2:14-17 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and well-fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
  • 1 John 3:17-18 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

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We have always had the small town and big city split. It’s all about life strategies that use bigger networks vs those that use smaller networks.

Big cities have to figure out how to look after large numbers of people who:big-small

  • A: Don’t know each other
  • B: Might not be similar culturally

So cities are naturally liberal, figuring out plans that make things work for a LARGE number of people. And they are naturally less judgmental because of anonymity and a necessary cultural relativism.

Small towns are the opposite. You are mostly somewhere between acquainted and related with the folks nearby and it sounds CRAZY to look after a bunch of people that none of you even know. Also, there’s no anonymity – people’s actions are known and judged: Thus they are more careful and constrained. In a smaller community the actions of one person have a proportionally larger impact.

I think the context we live in technologically and culturally causes a kind of speciation. We’re all human but we become VIRTUALLY different species (that is, using different strategies to survive). The world we each live in sets up some strategic ground rules.

A big city run on small town rules is a failed state – a small town run on big city rules feels like totalitarianism. It’s a pity that this simple understanding doesn’t inform discussions and party platforms. Both big parties tend to be advocating for the ruin or unhappiness of the other’s constituency as a matter of course.

In a big city a cultural “Us vs Them” seems very different than it does in a small town because you naturally adapt to the complex and relativistic reality around you. “Healthy normal” has a broader bandwidth in the city. Politics emerges from experience and every technological reality creates a different experience and therefore a different political reality.

City/Country politics have always been a hot and ugly divide in America*. But back in the age of the public speeches we would all stand around together and listen. The full range of opinion generally was there on hand to witness and consider and discuss. Not surprisingly, the dialogue was at least MORE civil because because of being in each other’s company and following social cues. Then  from the radio to the TV and to the internet our views retreated back farther and farther into isolated comfort zones; to a zone of  homogeneous agreement. Since everyone around you echos the same views, really different views are treated as insanity or evil intent.


* Obviously city and country each contain a range of progressive and conservative types, but each will be somewhat acclimated to and moderated by the dominant reality where they are.

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Many writers on socio-economic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly over optimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?

– Richard Rorty “Achieving Our Country,” written in 1998 

 

 

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There are some funny little devices I’ve seen out on the internet which when you switch them on, a little hand comes out and turns itself right off again. When democracy fails it’s a bit like this. Any political system is a sort of machine, and when a democracy elects a tyrant or a theocracy it’s the hands of the people coming out and flipping off the machine, possibly forever.

In my theory about population dynamics there will always be a homeostatic balance between conservative and progressive. Not a PERFECT balance, simply the local balance tuned in to the local cultural wavelength. (I give a specific breakdown of what these labels really mean elsewhere.) On both sides there is wide gradient of belief but conservatives are essentially the loyal foot draggers. They ALWAYS feel that things are going out of control and that invaders are coming and that whatever the old school authority is, it doesn’t get enough respect, dammit.

There are absolutely loads of moderate and reasonable people within the conservative group. But rather like deep water, the pressure builds as we dive down into this way of believing. The extreme range of these people are angry and excitable, ferociously loyal to authority and something I might call “clean original beliefs“. Those beliefs could be about the founding fathers or Islam or Serbian nationalism, it isn’t important. Conservative people are the bedrock defense force of whatever culture they inhabit. They suffer with revulsion at everything that isn’t on message. An intriguing fact is that in psychological tests conservatives really do suffer more revulsion at disgusting pictures than the rest of the population. This is true to the point that it is diagnostically accurate. Scientists think the emotion of disgust evolved to make us keep away from things that could poison us or spread disease.  Conservatives, in this light are acting as an automatic force of rejection toward all that feels foreign or “Just not right, somehow.” * Continue reading

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iran79This is a picture of women protesting the forced Hijab in Iran days after the 1979 revolution. Don’t forget this and the fact that they lost this freedom when you are defending the Hijab.

Is it really too hard hard to hold two thoughts in mind at the same time? You can be tolerant toward emigrants AND see the ways their culture is anti-women (and gays, and freedom of speech). Your ancestors saw these things in OUR culture and fought them, not to success, but to an ever threatened improvement. It’s obvious that right wing Americans consider equal rights for women to be a political football and very much in play.

Progress is never a settled issue. Ignoring the things your own mothers hated having forced upon them, while claiming a feminist perspective is cognitive dissonance. Other cultures are not wiser, purer, better than us. It’s like saying you can’t understand what food tastes like. Taste it.


Also… The image to the right does not represent my opinion, I’m critiquing it. hkapology
This is a logical fallacy, a false equivalence on several levels.
It aims to equate honor killings, a socially accepted, cold blooded, ethically based rationale for murdering a family member with a sampled statistic for north american murders of women.

1. We consider murder a horrible crime with no religious or other mitigation. Where honor killings are practiced they are seen by some as murder and by many as a cultural/religious obligation.
2. They also have regular horrible murders, which the article ignores entirely, satisfied with the math it’s done so far.
3. In standard Islam, a man is committing no crime by beating his wife. In fact it is a cultural norm approved by religious authorities.
4. Ultimately what does the article wish us to think? It seems that the idea is to neutralize any outrage at honor killings by saying to ourselves: “I live in a flawed place too, Who am I to judge?”

And don’t forget in Islamic courts , known in many places as “THE court” women’s testimony counts half or even a third as much as a man’s. The cultural norms we are talking about display a pattern of treating women as goods and chattels and should be despised by people who are happy to see that idea stamped out here.
It’s astounding to me that a woman taking a theoretically feminist stance would write this letter which plays out as becoming an apologist on the subject of honor killings. I could imagine virtually the same letter being written by a conservative Islamic cleric.

There is a huge taboo on disliking and judging  any culture except our own. Hating OUR culture is a given in politically correct circles. I have no comfortable seat on this subject, as the right wing tends to only like “our culture” in the same way the people with gluten allergies like baked goods. If there’s a conclusion, it’s that when you separate something from the political scrum around it, you can see it’s merits and failings for exactly what they are.

 

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In 1957, William F. Buckley wrote his most infamous editorial for National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was unambiguous: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” And what method should be used to enforce the maintenance of “civilized standards”?

Buckley suggests a no-holds-barred defense, including violence. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority [white] cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.”

Barry Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and it was noted by pro-segregation Southerners. In fairness to him, he supported other civil rights plans. But it was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. As Wikipedia puts it, this was an appeal “to racism against African-Americans.” Nixon was not the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party. This is the moment when the party of Lincoln deposited Lincoln in the nearest receptacle.

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