Category: Politics

Is the United States going to shit?

It is amazing to me that people I know, people who I consider my friends, actually feel and express their opinion that the United States is going to shit because of…X.

It doesn’t matter what the “X“ is. I’m just amazed that people who are my friends who I consider pretty intelligent people 😜 Actually have the opinion that this country is going to shit because of… THOSE people. Those people being the people that are stupid or that are bringing this country down.

I feel compelled to discuss with them, to question along a certain line, rather than just tell them and argue with them. And this line that I discuss with them Is really that the very idea that ‘this country is going to shit because of “those people”’ is most probably the reason why the country might actually be going to shit. And so you, my friend, who are thinking that those dang Trump supporters, or even my friends who say, those people who don’t support trump — because I do have friends who support Trump — both of you people are missing the mark of the United States and I submit that that is why the country is probably going to shit.

My point is is that this United States system of government is made to hold difference. Our system of democracy in the United States is constructed to allow for difference. That’s what it is. That’s what the greatness of the United States is. It is that the system allows for such an incredibly diverse and polemical amount of difference, of kind as well as belief, and indeed holds it that that we are a great country.

And when people start, for whatever reason, pointing at other people, people who do not believe or think the same way that they do, as a reason why this country is going to shit, those finger pointers should be looking at the other three fingers that are pointing right back at them.

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that when you point a finger at someone else you got three more pointing back at you.

And so my political comment right now is that we have to believe in the American system more than we believe in how fucked up someone else is and how absolutely righteous I am.

The United States is “us”. The United States contains both “we and them”; that is the strength of our system. That’s what makes the United States great, because within the United States as a citizen of the United States no matter what you think, if you are a citizen of the United States then you are us. And as long as we both remember that then it is Us who are allowing for this great country to thrive.

Not us against “those people”. 

When I think I’m so great, and that some other citizen of the United States is stupid and is the reason why this country is falling apart, Then I am really the one that is responsible for this country falling apart.



It may well be that it is not a system that fails, But human beings who are unable to separate their own views from a functioning of a system. and this is to say that people routinely view their thinking and emotions as part of the same function, the same ontological function, as if it is a righteous and proper manifestation of truth.

Yet, perhaps, systems that would otherwise function might not serve their purpose when it comes right down to it because people simply will not allow it. They won’t allow it because they will not be able to see the system functioning for itself. Which is to say, that their emotions will cloud what the reason is telling them is the functioning of the system, for example, tradition, history, values. Instead of seeing a system functioning to hold difference, people will see that the system itself depends on a certain set of emotional connections.

And that may be the reason for the fall of civilizations themselves.

–

What do you think?

x

cancel culture and ‘bad religion’ – BBC News

The musician believes political correctness online is having an “asphyxiating effect” on society.
— Read on www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53768254

——- and of course, my commentary:

That’s cool. On the other side of it though, I think the ideal where everyone just gets to say whatever they want and everyone is in awareness and excepting of their own emotional reactions, is a utopian pipe dream.

Lol

Wow I didn’t know he was 62 years old. That’s insane. Lol.

It’s interesting though, I think this idea that has accompanied the web and Internet which sees free speech and free expression as naturally extending to the infinity of Internet access, it’s self is a kind of religion.

I think the idea of free speech and acceptance of difference is much easier when you don’t have the full range of human experience in your face, or the potential there of.

It’s easy to live a tiny life that only encounters other people if you travel, or through the newspaper or through the TV news, and say that we should all have free speech and freedom of expression.

It’s a little bit more difficult when you have every type of speech and every type of expression available at a click.

I think both extremes are two types of religious expression.

What we have as the left and the right, and I think the myopia over each is really the manifestation of our present political climate.

And I love Nick Cave, but Nick Cave as an old man, I’m not really sure of.😁

He’s definitely the artist type, And now he’s an older artist who thinks society should be made up of a bunch of intellectual artists.

—

Well, actually maybe the left and the right are switching places. Said that the left has become so left that it’s starting to implement its liberal strategies as a kind of dogma.

And then it’s the right who’s actually taking on more liberal ideas, American ideals about free speech and letting everyone say what they want and not care what anyone else feels. Like, we are all adults and just grow some balls would you? And don’t be so sensitive!

But you know what, what I think kind of addresses both of these ends is something that neither of the extremes really understand.

*

It really extends from race relations, critical race theory. The idea is that the institutional/systemic norms (we could even bring in Foucault here) are made by white people. And so to be inconsiderate of other people under the assumption that “we’re all human beings, and just grow up already” is to deny the lived experience of people that fall outside of the norms, namely, people of color, but really anyone who doesn’t fit into the operative “top down” norms. 

This is the experience of America, though, and when you get out side of the generalized Americans and United States white culture into other countries, the hard line of critical race theory seems to meet some contradiction. However, the more we look at what is contradicting, the more we begin to hear voices that confirm what we are finding is the case in America, or the United States in particular actually, actually holds water across the globe.

So, the issue really isn’t between the “you need to be considerate of others”, side of things, and the “just get over it and stop being so sensitive” side of things.

But it’s more about having a realization about how the norms of society itself, and now I mean global culture in the widest sense, has been shaped by white identity.

And we call this identity “modern capitalism”. But even if we have a difficult time seeing history as the history of white capitalism, It doesn’t take very much to look around the globe and it’s history to see that it is always been lighter skinned people who developed the privilege, and it’s the darker skinned people who end up being oppressed, in poverty, excluded from what is “civilized” — yeah, like a dogma. Exactly like a religion. We can go even back to what we know as the first civilizations. It is pretty well known that even in the pre-history of India it was the Aryan races that came down and subjugated the darker skinned people of the subcontinent of India. The Aryan people are known to have lighter skin; And they were from the north.

(Please, some historian and/or anthropologist please correct me if I’m wrong!)

We need only Paulo Freire’s Formulation of oppression: both the oppressor and the oppressed play the game of oppression. And what typically happens is that the oppressed are so repressed that when I offered a chair at the oppressors table, playing by the oppressors rules, most gladly take it, and thus end up oppressing their own people, their own culture, their own kind, so to speak.

So the idea of this left and right Politicalization of this basic and fundamental issue is really a misunderstanding of the issue, actually identity politics.

Actually both sides are only being able to see what they are able to see, all the while proposing that they see the “whole big picture”. This is where the rift appears, in the blind spot that neither one can see nor really want to see because they both view their ideas as “liberal”, as in, having to do with liberty and freedom.

But what they are really developing is a kind of religious dogma which colors of the world for the benefit of that particular side.

And I don’t mean to use the word “color” just as a insignificant adjective. I literally mean it in the sense of critical race Theory that both sides who are involved with their sense of white righteousness actually color the world through their moral and ethical imperative of which they are incapable of seeing outside.





x

Review: Manufacturing Consent

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Convenient mythologies require neither …

Review: Manufacturing Consent

——- I have not read this book, nor do I think really anything by Chomsky or Heller. but I remember in my undergraduate it was a name that floated around our anthropology department like smog over LA. 

In reading the summary, I am reminded of the philosopher Alain Badiou More recent comment that the most responsible political action that one could take is to not participate in politics.

It’s kind of like a Captain Kirk solution to the Kobiashi Maru.

Of course, such a radical argument most often merely flames the fuel 😜 of those people who feel they have a say through political activism in one extreme, and merely voting at the other, both which represent at least some sort of political action.

It is interesting, though, that the point of these guys, at least by the summary, taken to us and really tells us that any political opinion that I have, which motivates my action into politics, is already decided for me. That my Choices by which I have my opinions are already sculpted out, That indeed what I think is so important, is merely given to me a priori, Buy an unseen force which is outside of me and yet acting upon me.

So where I feel like I’m considering all the facts and making an informed decision by someone as myself who is intelligent and critically capable of thinking — me also, in so much as I might want to pick a political stance I have to take a political position on situations that have been given to me, and the options that are likewise given to me which create the category that I am deciding upon taking political action.

This catch 22, no-win situation, seems to make a strong argument for what Badiou Makes a philosophical argument about some 30, 40 years later.

**

But I think even more problematic is the extension of this Chomsky heller review.

Because at what point is anyone making decisions that is shaping or limiting my choices? Who is this culprit? Where is that group that is making these intentional decisions to limit my freedom and to move me in a particular way so that they benefit?

I think in the end run we have to admit that there is no one that is doing this.

But we can’t admit this in the real world (it is like a commandment, a universal ethical prohibition, thou shout not!) due to our investment in the value of politics. Indeed this is capitalism, indeed this is modern democracy.

Yet, also Indeed, it is a very Zizekian World that we are in countering here. Because it’s both and none. I could, I am totally capable at some point to point and identify the actual cadre Of big manipulating despots who are fucking up my life and stealing money from me, indeed controlling my very mind.

Yet, if I shift The reflector just slightly, just change the angle just a little bit, and I might get a glimpse that I am an intricate and intimate part of manipulating a whole world of individuals around me, and for my sole benefit as well. It’s just that my scam is Working much better than the supposed “big manipulators” who are fucking up the whole world. Indeed my scam is working so well that no one Ever accuses me — not even myself!  Shirley, I am not responsible for fucking up my own world?!?! 

I think this is One of the points that is in mashed in Zizek’s Constant and ongoing critique.

Namely, on one hand whatever we might identify as this great manipulation and indeed able to bring them to justice, it and they lay at the most extreme parameters of my ability to conceive of reality. He might even say that it is the “signifier of the master signifier”, that which comes into view, that which I can put my finger on which lay in front of the master signifier perpetually falling outside  my ability to reckon.

But further, and as much as I have put my finger on these great manipulators who are screwing up the world, I have thereby changed the frame of reference by which I’m understanding change — and yet not noticing it by virtue of the fact that I am casting myself into the screen that I am at the same time viewing, albeit, without noticing that I’m actually sitting in the seat audience eating popcorn and watching this ridiculous theater.

 And even further! What is that event whereby I find the culprit? It is nothing! It is the part of festival which make festivals festive. It is absurdity. It is the giving up of all social rules and norms, and even getting so wasted as to smear out for a few moments the very idea I have of myself as a political entity.  After which I can then, a few days or a week later or a month later, go back to that regular life which is the same and more of the same, and yet feel like something has changed, like it is indeed a new day.



xxxx

Basically, We have an honest but ignorant president, maybe.

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/1/21276918/obama-statement-protests-george-floyd-president-trump

Pretty much everyone that I encounter over the years who either voted for President Trump or likes President Trump, the main theme that I hear over and over again is that he’s honest and he speaks his mind.

I think the next thing that I heard, not so much now but a couple years ago when he first got elected, was that people wanted something different.

I know my blog really only gets to people that generally agree with me, and it’s not really going to touch the eardrums of those who might otherwise come upon some considerate sense.

Basically a different kind of president who speaks his mind and is honest. Ok; I’ll give him that. And I won’t even say that those are bad traits; I like those traits, I like someone who speaks their mind and is honest about their opinions and who they are, for sure. I’ll even give him that in as much as he might be seen to be spouting lies, to himself he is being honest, he is having integrity to who he is. OK, I’ll give him that also no problem. 

But what we find with Trump in him doing this is that he’s an ignorant person. He may (or may not) be very financially intelligent; OK, maybe he knows how to be a boss in a company and he knows how to work systems and rules in order to make sure that he stays very wealthy. OK, no judgment there.  As a person, I’m really OK with him doing personal things so far as their abilities and what they feel is good and right. I’m not making a judgment upon him as a person right now ethically.

I’ll even grant that he’s allowed to be ignorant about intellectual kinds of things. No judgment; all of us are ignorant about many avenues of this world.

But in Donald Trump being himself he just shows us that he is only intelligent in a very small domain. 

I believe someone who is running the most powerful country in the world should be intelligent in more than one domain, at that a small domain of finance and manipulation.

I feel that a great country should have a great leader. And I think a great leader should have some sort of intellectualism about them, someway to engage intellectually with that aspect of citizens who, for no mincing of words, are intelligent in many domains, even intellectual. But as well, be intelligent enough to be able to code switch; which is to say to be able to relate, include, and represent people who aren’t intellectualists, whose intellect and interests may be very small and limited.

In short, I think a leader of the United States of America should represent all the people in her or his capacity as leader. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be politics or they shouldn’t be partisanship or people should not have their opinions about various agendas and how to run government. But I am saying that someone should have the intelligence to at least be able to understand the people that she or he represents. 

And Trump, if we can be honest, does not have that ability.

And honestly, I’m kind of embarrassed for all of us United States citizens; the best we could do is to elect a person that clearly is lacking in so many areas for which even a bad president would have competency.



John Wayne wins the 2020 Democratic nomination!

America takes its first step back into the good ol’ days of ….

Wait— what? What good ol’days?

Have we had any past America that was good for everyone ?

——

I’m voting for Biden, but not Becuase I agree or like him. And you should too.

Just like with Trump, I’m just gonna cross my fingers and hope for the best, cuz’ anyone is better than Trump. And the Republicans party right now is a ship of fools.