Brooks is right about a few things….but he is not worried about Donald Trump’s fascism?
He thinks candidates like John Fetterman are the future?
He reduces the election to high school against college degrees?
This is the problem that ended America…being half right. We try to pick out the things that we personally “feel” are important in complex problems and end up failing.
Brooks states that “maybe” Bernie Sanders is right but leaves out everything important and turns it into a single class warfare issue….but barely mentions economic inequality.
What happened to critical thinking? To logic? We have the left and the right, and the interplay between scientific reductionism and chaos theory, and this mess has turned America into Jurassic Park.
America has ended….whatever is to come will not be what it was. If the fascist state now consolidating power falls, then what comes after will be “New America“… if it restores democracy. Accepted. Stage Five complete.
11:38 “He’ll implicitly say they want me to abuse my power, they’ve given me permission to do whatever I want…and I think it’s worth noting, for a whole lot of people, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.”
13:17 “People who didn’t vote for Trump can get discouraged…and overwhelmed…and tell themselves, people who voted for him voted for everything he stands for, and what follows from that, is a sense of alienation (that) this is not my country, and I don’t understand what’s going on.”
16:03 “He doesn’t want James Mattis’s or Mark Milley’s or John Kelly’s, he wants absolute loyalists, either people who share his ideological world view or out of a sense of ambition or cravenness are willing to do exactly what he says without questioning it.”
And…it continues on with some grim things said. The most optimistic takeaway was- “- tell yourself, no, the voters did not give Donald Trump a mandate to do whatever he wants and carry out all of his policies; that is not what happened in the last election.”
There is some more….and it is important, but I am exhausted.
The avatar of self-interest is Donald Trump. With him as your hero there is no shame in anything you want for yourself. I am very familiar with this ideology after dealing with the Ayn-Rand-in-space-libertarians for the last 15 years. They are loud and proud about there being absolutely nothing having any meaning except money.
Trump is the model for millions of borderline and straight-up narcissist creeps who hold money as the god of this world. Almost anything goes in Mammon worship; lying, betrayal, bullying, intimidation, manipulation….only the amount of wealth amassed, which is power, has any real value. What does not go, what is heretical and blasphemous, is self-sacrifice. That is for the suckers and losers. While everything traditionally named as evils are just good business practices, what is shameful and evil to the materialist is the non-transaction. Everything must be traded up for profit in the great pyramid scheme of wealth. Only in this way can wealthy individuals exist. While the rest of us are taught that pyramid schemes are stealing, the wealthy smile knowingly and shrug. Society camouflages those that take the most and give the least. Extreme profit in business is all about deception.
Stealing makes the victim a sucker and a loser and is the ultimate materialist good because it is the most satisfying transaction of all; the risk is the only investment and is “free” so the pay-off is always something from nothing, ex nihilo. God-like. Who and what you are stealing from is simply the other person and, depending on how close to total psychopathy you lean, are not really people and do not matter. Only you matter and what you can get away with, without damage or loss. Simple, beautiful, and the sacred doctrine of the materialist.
War, as some anthropologists have noted…is theft. It is stealing by investing in violence. Materialists in the 21st century do not generally like war for several reasons. The main one being the more violence, the more expense. It is not ex nihilo and requires risk and an investment. Most, like Trump, would rather steal without the expense. There is also the uncomfortable necessity for soldiers, who Trump called “suckers and losers.” These beings willing to die fighting for their nation, which they think they have some kind of ownership of…are dangerous. No telling what they will do. Why will soldiers die defending their country? For their loved ones. For the collective state that sustains and protects their people, not the individual. For individuals who only exist across the narcissist-psychopath spectrum, there is no love for anyone because there is no one person…. there is just one person. So, they do not really understand soldiers. This is the difference between a warrior and a soldier. The warrior-psychopath is a well-known character often used to raise morale and entertain, but they are very rare and extreme examples, and mostly fiction. The warrior seeks self-aggrandizement while the soldier sacrifices for others. Soldiers and not warriors are why we have Veterans Day.
Having been a soldier and many other things, I have more to say on this, but I have to go to work right now.
“Strongmen rewrite history to justify their abuses of power and they depend on fear to control their followers.”
But…
“He does not have unlimited power.”
“(America) -has a history of more than 250 years in which power has been systematically dispersed throughout society.”
“-so, there is (an) enormous reservoir of resistance and authority that we need to now activate-”
It all sounds good, but the white supremacists are out there…and they know this is the only chance they will EVER have to start a race war and pursue genocide. Whatever they are going to do, they are going to do it fast and try to ride this wave of fear of confusion.
I had that awful feeling Trump would win and the reason it was awful was because of a million closet nazis that just might “ignite.”
Look for signs of them organizing…of the FBI arresting large numbers of them.
It is Sunday morning….and the sadness is not overwhelming like it was Wednesday, when I woke up to the end of America. Profound confusion is more the ground I walk on now. It occurred to me after I woke up that in the weeks leading up to the election, I was building up my excitement level for after the victory. That all would be right in the world, and I could get on with my life. That victory would be the mythic starting gun signaling real progress on all the projects I was working on. With that thought I now realize how damaged the future now is. The VA called last night with good and bad news. What could end my life in a year will not this year, but the other thing that definitely will end my life, perhaps in not very many years… is progressing.
It started going bad for me on September 10th with the Polaris Dawn billionaut mission. I thought that was rock bottom…for Human Space Flight anyway. Then lying in bed with Covid I watched the chopsticks catch the shiny and called that the new rock bottom not only for Human Space Flight. Now….as I reflect on stage four of the grieving process, depression, I believe today has to be all the way down to rock bottom. Nihilism is eating away at my soul, and I feel zero hope for the future.
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It is noon and I am arguing with myself about what to do next. What is there to do? Listen to a comedian.
So… to go along with Stage Four, Al has a depressing one for a change.
This started well and relit some hope of progressing to stage five (acceptance). The first bit of knowledge leading to processing what has happened being Norm citing the main factor as Covid. Every developed country, conservative or liberal, experienced inflation from the Covid supply chain breakdown and suffered a popular backlash.
Family hardship bred the sense that the government was indifferent to the plight of the “working people”, and this led to a distrust of “elites.” Populist backlash against experts and elites goes back to the Tea Party and after Covid those intent on dividing and conquering portrayed Trump as the anti-elitist and opposite of those who seemed to have disdain and condescension for the citizenry. The price of eggs ended America.
With the exception of Jews and black women, every group moved to the right. Over half of Latino males, at least in Michigan, ignored the racist Madison Square Garden rally and voted for Trump. The media kept treating Trump like he was not what he is and only became super-critical at the very end when it was too late. The sane-washing of Trump by the media took him to victory.
So… essentially, something we knew was going to happen eventually, a pandemic, raised consumer prices and this inconvenience enabled the neoliberals to drive our consumer-programmed democracy to suicide, aided by a profit-driven “free press.”
What will happen now is preordained.
“Well, one of the ways that I fear Trump will act is -to do what Orban did in Hungary…to get states and the courts and maybe even the congress to do a set of things that will turn our elections into, you know, turn our elections into a farce – where – they’re tilted so they win no matter what.”
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.” Albert Einstein.
I bargained with my grief and came to terms with it yesterday in a small way. Part of that was figuring out why this election has affected me so much. I believe that stress actually compromised my immune system over a month ago and I went from the Flu to catching Covid to a bacterial infection in my lungs I am still taking anti-biotics for.
How I came to this state is going to be part of the bargain I have struck with my grief over American ending. To avoid Stage Five, depression, I am going to need a project.
I am going to try something within my abilities and “podcasting” looks like the best path.
Maybe this is going to go a little quicker than I thought a couple hours ago.
My wife had a talk with me and said many people are crying. I have not been able to bring myself to watch any news, but they know what I know. And now I am thinking about the two-digit IQ half of America that just destroyed it and are cheering. This takes me out of denial, which I have already processed as my brain just playing a trick on me….and on to anger.
I imagine I will be stuck on anger for quite a while. But…maybe not.
After anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
Contemporary Views However, more recent research shows that the process of grieving may not necessarily follow a set pattern of specific reactions over time. People react to loss in different ways and grief can be messy.
-a more current interpretation of the theory is that:
“Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are some of the common reactions to loss. People may experience these emotions at any time during the grieving process and not necessarily in any particular order. Everyone may not necessarily experience all five of these emotions when grieving, as each person tends to have a unique bereavement process. Factors such as the severity of and circumstances surrounding the loss, individual differences in personality and temperament, and cultural, spiritual, and religious beliefs can play a role in the person’s grieving process.“
This is my third post today and I have a long drive ahead of me…so I will end it here for now. Bargaining seems to be next, and I will think about that. “In this stage, you may find yourself negotiating with yourself, with people around you, with fate, or with a higher power to try and mitigate or undo your loss.”
I am now entering that first stage of grief….denial.
I am fated to watch America die over the next few years. It was obvious to me in the run up to the election if we lost, we would lose everything…. irretrievably. After nearly a quarter of a millennium, the experiment is over. Several billion others around the world are wondering how this happened, but unlike Americans, they know what will happen next. Inevitably. But while we did understand what was at stake, now suddenly we do not. That does not change the fact there is no going back now.
And I am thinking, and I cannot stop myself….well, maybe this is not the end.
Denial it is.
Next comes anger, then bargaining, then depression, then acceptance.
I do not know personally how the next stage, the anger, will manifest. I am not violent but there may be some violence in society. How long will it take to go through the outrage and move on to the next and the next and finally accept what has happened?
I predict the anger will come with the first actions of the regime. Then the bargaining with my soul that it is not that bad. Then it will become clear that it really is that bad. My fear is that it will be as bad as it possibly can be, which would be the last chapter of The Turner Diaries.
Up at five after about six hours of sleep. Here we go. Not a great feeling about today. I hope it is my old ready crew thing messing with me (when I stood duty as a helicopter aircrewman I would get these bad feelings). Of course it was just my mind playing tricks on me. Bad things would happen sometimes and sometimes not. Hopefully not today.
Rejecting reality is the ultimate superpower it seems. Redefinition, repetition, projection…flooding the zone with misinformation and chaos. Only the strongman can decide and assign “truth.” What is truth?
Ice on the Moon 