The one percent sowed chaos to keep eyes turned away from taxes and regulation and may well have burned this nation to the ground.
“The 400 richest families in America pay about 6 percent income tax.”
They used to pay 91 percent and that 85 percent is paying for this insurrection. It is not over and the crescendo has not yet come to pass.
Ethnic Entrepreneurs…in an “anocracy.” We are in big trouble. What is so bizarre is my black and hispanic coworkers who are conservatives or evangelicals and their cognitive dissonance regarding what is going to happen to them when the Fascists take over. I know what is going to happen but they do not seem capable of understanding it. My uncle fought at the battle of the bulge.
Most Americans don’t even understand what democracy is; the elected few governing according to the wishes of and serving the many. The autocrats are the wealthy few governing according to their wishes and served by the many.
In the YouTube Video below the term Neoliberalism does not come up, and that is a shame. However, the idea of progressive wages, of a maximum allowable wage being connected to a minimum wage, IS mentioned. That a successful company would have to pay the lowest paid employee some set percentage of the highest salary would terrify Neoliberals. Reagan and Thatcher would have advocated for death camps instead.
EO Wilson taught me that we are driven by unseen forces and for most that lesson is refused. We are not the captains of our fate except perhaps in that tiniest detail of sentient existence; realizing that we are not the captains of our fate.
“Steven Pinker argues that critics have been overly swayed by politics and a fear of biological determinism,[a] accusing among others Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin of being “radical scientists”, whose stance on human nature is influenced by politics rather than science,[26] while Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin, who drew a distinction between the politics and history of an idea and its scientific validity,[27] argue that sociobiology fails on scientific grounds. Gould grouped sociobiology with eugenics, criticizing both in his book The Mismeasure of Man.[28]
Noam Chomsky has expressed views on sociobiology on several occasions. During a 1976 meeting of the Sociobiology Study Group, as reported by Ullica Segerstråle, Chomsky argued for the importance of a sociobiologically informed notion of human nature.[29] Chomsky argued that human beings are biological organisms and ought to be studied as such, with his criticism of the “blank slate” doctrine in the social sciences (which would inspire a great deal of Steven Pinker’s and others’ work in evolutionary psychology), in his 1975 Reflections on Language.[30]“
Interesting to sort out where Mammon supernaturally enters into this argument. I say this as lately I am more and more convinced that greed is the force that drives all things now in the modern world. There is nothing left but greed, which is really just what passes for faith when money is the god of planet Earth.
There is a dividing line between two types of human being. This is not an appropriate statement to make in almost any context imaginable. But in this case…I feel justified in doing so. I listened to the linked Tech Nation podcast the other morning on the way to work- it was a repeat from several months ago- and it was both exhilarating and infuriating. Near the end the scientist being interviewed explains there is just not enough of a market for big pharma to fund a cure for spinal cord injuries. Not enough profit. Though they make, literally, countless billions in profits (pharma revenues worldwide, those reported anyway, totaled 1.27 trillion U.S. dollars in 2020). There are those who believe, and will tell you this in so many words, that there is a dollar price for everything that exists, and to pose that some things are not to be bought and sold is to go down the road of socialism and this “evil” should not be entertained.
The language in this argument has been carefully engineered over the last couple centuries to produce, again, literally, libraries full of dense, endless, misinformation and counterarguments and obfuscations. It is the bible of Mammon, one of the seven princes of hell and the canon of Neoliberalism. I am not saying people cannot change their views, but the last couple years have led me to believe it is very difficult. Neoliberalism is a mindset, and ideology, that is a cancer on the human race and if not treated will ultimately lead to our extinction. The spinal cord example is a good way to explain to people that Democracy is the enemy of Neoliberalism. We in America are locked in an invisible unspoken struggle for the soul of humanity. Very few people understand this.
“We are locked in an invisible unspoken struggle for the soul of humanity.”
Notice I refer to humanity as having a soul. A collective soul. There are certain words and categories of words that have been demonized and made into blasphemies by the right. Collective, community, redistribution, social, etc. Any terminology that is used when describing large groups of people has been targeted in an Orwellian manner. I am in the process of leaving a job I have struggled with for the last 6 years. In the course of my life, I have belonged to a few professional organizations that treated their people well and I always took this for granted and thought, surely everyone must understand how this works! I was incredibly naive and foolish to think those few good shops were the norm of course. But I wanted to believe that people are basically good- and maybe they are…except for the few that abuse their power and contaminate the world with their predatory ideology. In fact, one of my coworkers told me, as we discussed my exit, that now I have learned something new and am better for it. I have learned from seeing the best and the worst- and my real job, in the last years of my life, appears to be to explain this so all know the truth. Which is actually my favorite verse in the Bible, the words that inform what I consider my essential quest for knowledge of this life; when Pilate asks Jesus, “What is truth?”
As a systems troubleshooter I understand the basic problem. Humans are faced with a profound desire to succeed and to dominate. They also have the opposite drive built into them- to cooperate instead of competing when required. When assaulted with variations of FOMO and NIMBY and the other weapons in the culture war arsenal, people generally surrender to the manufactured complexity of it all. When tasked with making choices between fight, flight, or freeze, the masses really have no choice but to freeze their routine into conformity. Often not for themselves but for the sake of their children or family or extended family. It comes down to fear, to Terror Management. To conform, cooperate, and consume, equates to survival. Those who have a natural ability to bypass primal fear, related to narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy, seem most equipped to place themselves in positions of power. Not that all those who control our lives are narcissists, sociopaths, or psychopaths…
Which brings us back to that dividing line between two types of people.
The spinal injury example is not a one off. It is common, as this other Tech Nation podcast tells us. Money is the god of this world and more important than human life. And now for some more truth:
Flynn calling for a coup, the national guard refusing orders, soldiers refusing vaccinations, and…confusion over allegiance to the constitution or Trumpism.
Insane. Generals and Judges were my heroes for a moment, but now I am wondering who to trust. “Obviously he has lost his mind-“. Flynn’s brother is now suspect in delaying the national guard response, and the Oath Keepers count far too many military and law enforcement as members.
“Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, deliberate deception.”
“We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).”
“If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Actover time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.”
From Rachel Kleinfeld: “The media’s focus on groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Bois has obscured a deeper trend: the “ungrouping” of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which maintains the Global Terrorism Database, most political violence in the United States is committed by people who do not belong to any formal organization.”
“The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that white Christian evangelical Republicans were outsized supporters of both political violence and the Q-Anon conspiracy, which claims that Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites are pedophiles who (aided by mask mandates that hinder identification) traffic children and harvest their blood; separate polls by evangelical political scientists found that in October 2020 approximately 47 percent of white evangelical Christians believed in the tenets of Q-Anon, as did 59 percent of Republicans.5 Many evangelical pastors are working to turn their flocks away from this heresy. The details appear outlandish, but stripped to its core, the broad appeal becomes clearer: Democrats and cultural elites are often portrayed as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children.”
“The bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending—and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.8 This pattern is similar to that of political violence in the nineteenth-century United States, where partisan identity was conflated with race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration status; many U.S.-born citizens felt they were losing cultural power and status to other social groups; and the violence was committed not by a few deviant outliers, but by many otherwise ordinary citizens engaged in normal civic life.”
“Today, Americans have sorted themselves into two broad identity groups: Democrats tend to live in cities, are more likely to be minorities, women, and religiously unaffiliated, and are trending liberal.Republicans generally live in rural areas or exurbs and are more likely to be white, male, Christian, and conservative.”
“A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that 32 percent of U.S. citizens believed that to be a “real American,” one must be a U.S.-born Christian. But among Trump’s primary voters, according to a 2017 Voter Study Group analysis, 86 percent thought it was “very important” to have been born in the United States; 77 percent believed that one must be Christian; and 47 percent thought one must also be “of European descent.”
I remember watching him come down that escalator and thinking how bizarre this is and had a bad feeling. How can we stop Trumpism?
“Such regimes are particularly susceptible to outbreaks of armed conflict and unexpected or adverse changes in leadership.[9]“
The storm is coming, the day of the rope, whatever label you want to use for catastrophe.
“Former democracies that transition to anocracy have a greater risk of being embroiled in civil conflict.[4] The population’s awareness of what rights they had as a democratic society may compel them to fight to regain their rights and liberties.”
“As for the possibility that the Guard or military rank and file might refuse to follow orders to take up arms against armed Trump supporters, the Naval War College’s Cohn deems it unlikely. “There isn’t a ton of evidence that the rank and file are solidly behind Trump,” she says. “But whatever their beliefs, they’re highly professional. No more than a tiny percentage would refuse.”
But on the other hand:
Given the growing intensity and polarization of political life, would either side accept a decision that handed a contested 2024 election result to the other?
Such a decision would more likely bring tens of millions of protesters and counter-protesters into the streets, especially around the U.S. Capitol and possibly many state capitols, plunging the country into chaos. Although many Democrats might be inclined to demonstrate, a larger percentage of Republican protesters would almost certainly be carrying guns. If the Supreme Court ruling, expected in mid-2022, on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen establishes an unrestricted right to carry a gun anywhere in the country, bringing firearms to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. could be perfectly legal. Says Winkler: “The Supreme Court may be close to issuing the ruling that leads to the overthrow of the U.S. government.”
“- “There are lots of fully armed people wondering what’s happening to this country-“
“Are we going to let Biden keep destroying it? Or do we need to get rid of him? We’re only going to take so much before we fight back.” The 2024 election, he adds, may well be the trigger. He may speak for millions when he insists it’s too late. “There are too many of us ready to give our lives to take the country back,” he says. “We need a civil war.”
Ice on the Moon 