#The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies

[fatehbaz]

“Being a bad biocitizen.”

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Marlene Feenstra (née McCorrister), my grandmother, was a Cree woman from Peguis First Nation. Peguis, our nation, is nestled among the ancestral lands and shared territories of the Cree, Anishinabeg, Assiniboine, and Métis peoples -- our homelands that sprawl out from the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in what is now Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. [...] Gram [was] born in 1936 [...]. She attended residential school [...], and then, as an adult, she was legally denied residence on her reserve due to her marriage to a non-Indian [...]. Yet, despite these and other experiences, and like many Indigenous people, my grandmother never thought of herself as being colonized. [...]

Three years ago, when my grandma passed away, I spent a few days going through the old photographs, newspaper clippings, calendars, and notes she had archived for over sixty years. [...] I was glad, on that cold Winnipeg afternoon, to appreciate her taste in interesting imagery. Their combined content lays out a scene ripe for analysis: One card depicts what it called the “Discovery of Canada”: Jacques Cartier presenting the “weird apparition” of an Indian Chief to the king and queen of France in 1536. A postcard named the “Canadian Rockies” displays a scene of Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, and La Verendrye: on the back, the card describes them as “great explorers who played stupendous and courageous roles in western development.” Another postcard features the nineteenth-century Métis leader Louis Riel, sitting inside a prison cell awaiting his federally sanctioned execution. Finally, at first glance out of place in this set, is a postcard with the name “Science and Invention” and an image of a basement laboratory peopled by Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Frederick Banting.

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It is difficult to say whether Gram chose these cards for how, taken together, they illustrate the curious relationships between colonial expansion, the confinement of Indigenous peoples, and scientific inquiry. If she did conceive of the reciprocal relationships connecting the logics of exploration, discovery, and innovation with histories of colonialism, then she was in good company.

Historians of colonial science, for example, have shown that there is a historical relationship between the development of what is now considered modern science, the technoscientific advances indelibly marking Western civilization, and European imperialisms and colonialisms. Further, Indigenous studies scholars have located modern science within an ongoing colonial system that, working in tandem (and, at times, in tension) with other institutionalized fields, overwrites Indigenous peoples’ knowledges of their existence as peoples in terms of the logics of citizenship, rights, sovereignty, and capital. [...]

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Advances in genomic knowledge are both intriguing and frightening given that the “gift” and “weight” of science and technology fields have always been simultaneously present for Indigenous peoples.

When I was invited to speak at “The Gift and Weight of Genomic Knowledge: In Search of the Good Biocitizen,” out of which this special report evolved, I was enthused by the rich conference rationale provided by organizers Joel Reynolds and Erik Parens. Consistent with Foucauldian scholarship such as that of Nikolas Rose, Carlos Novas, and Dorothy Roberts, the conference framed biocitizenship in relation to that shift provoked by increasing amounts of biological, and especially genomic, knowledge and data that are changing the ways that citizenship is being imagined. Civic responsibility in the age of biocitizenship, Reynolds and Parens observed, encompasses being and remaining healthy for the sake of ourselves and for the greater good of human populations: biometrically monitoring one's physical activity, seeking out direct-to-consumer genetic tests, coughing into the inside of one's elbow, employing barrier methods during sexual intercourse, and on and on are all examples of good bio-practice. In this spirit, biocitizenship -- the emphasis on the human population as biological -- has been endowed with the capacity to reconcile historic wrongs. The conference and this special report, as I understand them, are challenging us all to take pause amidst the accelerating pace of biomedical and genomic data generation and to critically reflect on the seemingly simple yet hugely difficult questions, what is a “good” biocitizen, and how do we become one?

I propose that one analytical pathway leading to said aspirational goodness might be found in its reverse: that is, in badness.

Following bell hooks's description of politicized looking relations, I am establishing these provocations to reorient, from my explicit vantage point, the set of concepts and real-world problems that this special report explores. As examined by hooks, in resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating “awareness” politicizes looking relations -- one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. Reframing the terms of the discussion is a critical practice in also restructuring the power dynamics that shape common-sense ideas about what it means to be good. The exogenous generation of genomic knowledge about indigeneity, for example, exerts a scientific claim that one can see indigeneity in a way that actually matters. Seeing indigeneity through the prism of genomic knowledge is shaped by colonial lenses insofar as it is based on an understanding of indigeneity as primarily real, genetically. Academic and other ways of thinking that try to make sense of and represent genomic realities of the present are also structured by colonial looking relations. [...]

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Over twenty years ago, among the formative scholarship of early Indigenous studies, Vine Deloria Jr. published Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995). Through this book and his other works, Deloria locates modern science within a colonial matrix that seeks to secure itself as a panacea of truthful knowledge creation at the expense of Indigenous sovereignties. [...] Fields, including scientific fields, that attempt to externally translate Indigenous peoples’ self-conceptions into a categorical or taxonomical language are interfering with their sovereign way of being.

Since the publication of Red Earth, White Lies, others have considered what the complicated entanglements of Indigenous knowledges are as they exist in relationship to science and technology fields. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), Robin Wall Kimmerer, for instance, provides a textually melodic illustration of the complementarities between botany, Potawatomi ecology, and the human and nonhuman relations that sustain her everyday experience. Noenoe Silva's Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (2004) similarly considers how Kanaka Maoli have leveraged modern technological advancements in press and printing to oppose the illegal annexation of their territories. These works and others like them have unlocked methodological potential that is not premised on orthodox cultural expectations by framing the use and formation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sciences and technologies as being instead Indigenous. These novel works set a stage for elaborate consideration of how engagement with technosciences on Indigenous peoples’ own terms might support their local governance systems: their ways of relating in and with localities of misewa (all that exists). [...]

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Fundamental to colonial civilizing missions were the so-called gifts of science and technology that Western imperial powers gave to their colonies and subjects.

Through the rhetorical prism of gifting, scientific claims to the “greater good” have been an enduring logic justifying scientific pursuits, while the collateral damage characteristic of incremental and experimental scientific methods have been disproportionately felt by Indigenous peoples as well as all other bodies deemed unreasoned (including human and nonhuman). [...]

Although there are now many versions of justice in concept and practice, many if not all of them are shaped through the presumed possibility that a normative good exists and that the journey of becoming good is, in itself, good. [...]

I charge non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples alike to be bad: unpack and undermine the investments they have in propertied [...] state-based sovereignty and nationalism, capitalist cultures of consumption, and settler fantasies of being rightful and good.

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Jessica Kolopenuk. “Provoking Bad Biocitizenship.” Hastings Center Report Vol. 50 Issue S1. June 2020.

[arcticdementor]

On June 24, amid great cultural upheaval and unrest, Glenn Yu reached out to Glenn Loury, his former teacher, to record his thoughts about the current moment. An edited version of their conversation follows.

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You may or may not have an opinion about that, but suppose the question were to arise in the dorm room late at night. Suppose you have the view that you’re not sure it’s racism, and then someone challenges you, saying, “you’re not black.” They say, “you’ve never been rousted by the police. You don’t know what it’s like to live in fear.” How much authority should that identitarian move have on our search for the truth? How much weight should my declarations in such an argument carry, based on my blackness? What is blackness? What do we mean? Do we mean that his skin is brown? Or do we mean that he’s had a certain set of social-class-based experiences like growing up in a housing project? Well, white people can grow up in housing projects, too. There are lots of different life experiences.

I think it’s extremely dangerous that people accept without criticism this argumentative-authority move when it’s played. It’s ad hominem. We’re supposed to impute authority to people because of their racial identity? I want you to think about that for a minute. Were you to flip the script on that, you might see the problem. What experiences are black people unable to appreciate by virtue of their blackness? If they have so much insight, maybe they also have blind spots. Maybe a black person could never understand something because they’re so full of rage about being black. Think about how awful it would be to make that move in an argument.

Suppose someone, a white guy, is arguing about affirmative action with you. Suppose he thinks that affirmative action is undignified because he thinks that positions should be earned, not given, but he allows that he doesn’t expect someone like you to understand that argument because you’re black. That would be terribly unreasonable— even “racist.” Yet I’m hard-pressed to see the difference.

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People cry, “structural racism.” Is that why the homicide rate is an order of magnitude higher among young black men? They say structural racism. Is that why the SAT test-score gap is as big as it is? They say structural racism. Is that why two in three black American kids are born to women without a husband? Is it all about structural racism? Is everything structural racism? It has become a tautology explaining everything. All racial disparities are due to structural racism, evidently. Covid-19 comes along and there’s a disparity in the health incidence. It’s due to structural racism. They’re naming partners at a New York City law firm and there are few black faces. Structural racism. They’re admitting people to specialized exam schools in New York City and the Asians do better. This has to be structural racism, with a twist—the twist being that this time, the structural racism somehow comes out favoring the Asians.

This is not social science. This is propaganda. It’s religion. People are trying to win arguments by using words as if they were weapons.

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And just so I don’t sound like a right-winger, observe that if I were a Marxist, I’d be furious at these people going around talking about “structural racism.” Structure, yes. Racism, no. Because if I were a Marxist, which I’m not, I’d understand the driving force of history to be the interaction between class relations and the means of production, the struggle between workers and capital in the quest for profit given the logic of capitalism. Though I don’t subscribe to it, that’s at least an intellectually serious theory. I know what people are talking about when they say we need more unions, when they say we need to break up big companies, when they say that the accumulation of wealth has gotten too great. When someone says that the logic of profit-seeking leads to war, at least I know what they’re talking about. I don’t necessarily have to agree with Das Kapital to understand that it’s a serious engagement with history.

Structural racism, by contrast, is a bluff. It’s not an engagement with history. It’s a bullying tactic. In effect, it’s telling you to shut up.

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Yu: I’ve had conversations in the past few weeks that have ended very poorly; conversations that have spiraled out of control, where I’m suddenly a racist, so I’m on damage control. I just don’t know how to reach people in a meaningful way, and that’s very disturbing to me.

Loury: It is disturbing. I’m not a seer. My mouth is not a prayer book. I only say what I say based on my subjective assessment of it all. But it may be that, for a while anyway, there’s not going to be a whole lot of effective talking. It may well be that we have to imagine a world where effective deliberation and consensus is not within reach for us, and we’re going to have to manage that situation. It could get very bad. It could go to violence. This is what Sam Harris always says, and he’s got a point. He says that if we can’t reason together, then the only alternative for dispute resolution is violence.

I don’t know if you saw my piece in Quillette about the looting and the rioting, but I pick up these pieces published in the New York Times, respectable left-wing journals. I’m reading them, and the writer is saying, “America was founded on looting. What did you think the Boston Tea Party was?” Or, “You’re talking about looting when George Floyd lies dead? Oh, I see, black lives don’t matter as much as property.” These are, to my mind, incomprehensibly idiotic. I don’t mean that to cast aspersions. The civilization that we all enjoy rests upon a very fragile foundation. Look. I’m in my backyard. It’s very nice. I’ve got a lot of space. There’s a fence. The birds come. I have a lawn. It’s mine!

Now, if a homeless person comes and squats in my backyard, I call the police. I have him removed, forcibly. There should be no lack of clarity about whether George Floyd’s death somehow excuses or justifies burning a bodega to the ground that a Muslim immigrant spends his whole life building. Being confused about that, equivocating about that, splitting the difference about that—I don’t understand how we’re going to have a reasoned discussion. My thoughts go back to, protect civilization. Again, I know how that sounds. It’s hyperbolic. It’s exaggerated—but only a little! My gut response is that this is not the time for argument. This is the time to protect civilization and protect institutions. When people start toppling statues of Abraham Lincoln and spray-painting on statues of George Washington, “a slave owner,” things fall apart. The center cannot hold. We teeter on the brink of catastrophe.

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Yu: If there’s no available policy intervention, and there’s also no way we can change people’s minds, then is it hopeless? Is disparity always going to be the case?

Loury: Yes. My answer is it’s hopeless. But let me rephrase the question, and I’m channeling Thomas Sowell now. You have two alternatives. You can live with disparities, or you can live in totalitarianism. Again, hyperbolic, I know. No, I’m not talking about Eastern Europe circa 1960, but look at it this way: there can’t be a disparity without somebody being on top. People don’t recognize this.

What groups are on top? What about the Jews? You could say, “There are too many Jews in positions of influence.” If there are too few black lawyers who are partners in big law firms, doesn’t it follow that are too many Jews who are partners at these big firms? If there are too few blacks who are professors of mechanical engineering at places like Carnegie Mellon, why aren’t there too many Korean professors at these places?

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What is the nature of the world that we live in? Why would I ever expect that there would be parity across the board between ethnic, racial, cultural, and ancestral population groups in an open society? It’s a contradiction because difference is a very fact of groupness. What do I mean by a group? Well, it’s genes, to some degree; it’s culture; it’s networks of social affiliation, of intermarriage and kinship. I mean the shared narrative, the same hopes, the dreams, the stories. I mean the practices of parenting and filial piety and whatever else there might be.

A group is a group. It has characteristics. Those characteristics matter for whether you play in the NBA. They matter for whether you learn to master the violin or the piano. They matter for whether you pursue technical subjects or choose to become a humanist or a scientist. They matter for the food that you eat. They matter for how many children you raise and how you raise them. They matter as to the age when you first have sex. They matter for all those things, and I think everyone would agree with that.

But now you’re telling me that they don’t matter for who becomes a partner in a law firm? They don’t matter for who becomes a chair in the Philosophy Department somewhere? Groupness implies disparity because groupness, if taken seriously, implies differences in ways of living life. Not everybody wants to play the fiddle. Not everybody wants to dunk a basketball. Not everybody is frightened to death that their parents are going to be disappointed with them if they come home with an A-minus. Not everybody is susceptible to being swayed into a social affiliation that requires them to commit a violent crime in order to prove their bona fides. Groups differ. Groups are not evenly distributed across society. That’s inevitable. If you insist that those be flattened, you’re only going to be able to succeed by imposing a totalitarian regime that monitors everything and jiggers everything, recomputing and refiguring things until we’ve got the same number of blacks in proportion to their population and the same number of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in proportion to their population being admitted to Caltech or the Bronx High School of Science. I don’t want to live in that world.

[soler97]

The Age of Unreason

Men want certainty, not truth.

- possibly from Bertrand Russell

A thoughtful friend asked me what 2020 will be remembered for, apart from the obvious, ie Covid and Trump losing. I could not think of anything.

My friend suggested it is the realisation that in the 21st century millions of people are turning away from science and reality towards a variety of beliefs that border on the crazy. Examples are QAnon, flat earthers (yes, they are serious), deniers of Covid, about 40% of Americans believe the Rapture is coming, biblical fundamentalism, climate change denial, neo-Nazis, Holocaust denial, belief in Trump as a saviour, doomsday predictions, sundry cults, alien abductions, New Age beliefs, and a multitude of conspiracy theories, such as that the moon landings were a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job.

Some of these beliefs appear harmless, but occasionally, they inspire horrific violence, such as the killing of 920 people by the Jim Jones cult, the sarin attack in Japan, the Breivik massacre, the Oklahoma bombing, the Waco siege, the Christchurch massacre, and the Heaven's Gate suicides.

It is difficult to generalise about the various strange beliefs that people hold, as these include conspiracy theories, varieties of denial, religious fantasies, extremist political or racist views, and beliefs like the flat earth, that elude classification. There is no common thread underlying this spectrum of beliefs. Rather, they can be characterised by what they reject, which in a nutshell, is rationality.

Rationality can be defined as the desire to be guided by reason, which we apply to the available evidence. The third ingredient is the willingness to admit we are wrong. So turning away from rationality means letting emotion or emotionally-based belief take precedence over reason, an unwillingness to look at factual evidence, plus a dogmatic belief that one is in possession of the ultimate truth. Many irrational beliefs run counter to Occam's Razor, which tells us to prefer the simplest explanation that covers the known facts. Complex processes may require elaborate or involved explanations, but the point is not to introduce unnecessary factors, especially ones of a fanciful nature.

Clearly, there are too many irrational beliefs to do them justice, so let us look at flat earthers, Heaven's Gate and QAnon to see whether there is a pattern.

A Flat Earth

Flat earth map with the Antarctic ice wall at the perimeter

A bizarre example is the contemporary belief that the earth is flat. Is such a belief even possible in the 21st century? It may be feasible to construct a world view that makes a flat earth plausible. However, it requires factors such as a massive world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth, the abandoning of all of modern cosmology and much of physics, as well as weird ad-hoc explanations for why planes fly in circles around a flat disc, rather than around a spherical globe. Also, that ships at sea disappear below the horizon requires adjustment to the laws of optics. If that still does not cover all the facts countering a flat view, then one could invoke mind control by Martians, or something of the sort. The point is that if one wants to conjure up fantastical reasons to invalidate what we know of reality then it is always possible to do so.

It seems to me that the flat earth people are not interested in gaining knowledge about the world. They are uninterested in discovering what lies beyond the putative ice wall in Antarctica that holds back the oceans or why NASA might be guarding it. They just believe in the flat earth and that is that. Their only concern is to bolster the theory, which I think they hold on emotional grounds. They are willing to perform elaborate mental contortions to support their belief, and it is interesting to observe how much of modern science they are willing to jettison in order to keep their belief afloat, eg gravity.

Whereas the explanations given for the earth being flat are interesting, to me it is more interesting to enquire what causes people to seek these explanations in the first place. What causes people to believe the earth is flat?

Four factors come to mind. One is a desire to be rid of experts and eggheads, who insist on telling ordinary people what to think. In the case of the earth's apparent flatness, the boffins are telling us to deny the evidence of our senses by invoking the large-scale curvature of the earth, something that is far from apparent in ordinary life. Flat earth is like the last stand of common sense in the face of the inexorable advance of science, which keeps telling us the world is far stranger than we thought. It is also a form of contrariness and rebellion against authority. The second is the ego-gratification of knowing a secret that is hidden from nearly everyone else. The third factor is on religious grounds. The fourth is a desire to return to a comforting and anthropocentric model of the universe, rejecting the notion that our planet is an insignificant speck in the incomprehensible vastness of the universe.

Many ancient cultures subscribed to a flat earth cosmography, including Greece until the classical period (323 BC). However, early Christian writers tended to believe the earth is spherical, though with some notable exceptions. Curiously, it wasn't until 1849 that the flat earth belief was resurrected by Rowbotham and later others. He argued that the "Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture".

In the internet era, the proliferation of communications technology and social media have given individuals a platform to spread pseudo-scientific ideas and build stronger followings. The flat earth conjecture has flourished in this environment. Social media and the internet have made it easier for like-minded thinkers to connect and mutually reinforce their beliefs. They have also had a levelling effect, in that experts have less sway in the public mind than they used to.

The belief that the earth is flat could be seen as the ultimate conspiracy theory, given how many people are needed for a cover-up on such a scale. According to the Flat Earth Society's leadership, its ranks have grown by 200 people per year since 2009. Judging by the exhaustive effort flat earthers have invested in fleshing out the theory on their website, as well as the staunch defenses of their views they offer in media interviews and on Twitter, it would seem that these people genuinely believe the earth is flat. They tend to distrust observations they have not made themselves, and often distrust or disagree with each other. I imagine they are maverick individuals who enjoy challenging the status quo.

Paul Sutter, "The question isn't 'why do people believe in a flat Earth?' but rather 'why do people believe in a conspiracy?' And the answer is the same reason it always is: a lack of trust. Many people don't trust the society around them, most notably the representatives of that society. By claiming that the Earth is flat, people are really expressing a deep distrust of scientists and science itself."

Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate Logo

Far more bizarre than the flat earth belief are the doctrines of Heaven's Gate, which melded the Bible with belief in UFOs into a religious cult. It was founded in California in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. These two pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read works by Helena Blavatsky, RD Laing, and Richard Bach. They studied several passages from the New Testament, focusing on teachings about Christology, asceticism, and eschatology ("the end times"). Applewhite also read science fiction, including Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies, and that they had been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet that described Jesus' reincarnation as a Texan, a thinly veiled reference to Applewhite.

Eventually, Applewhite and Nettles resolved to contact extraterrestrials, and they sought like-minded followers. They published advertisements for meetings, where they recruited disciples, whom they called "the crew". At the events, they purported to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, which sought participants for an experiment that would bring people to a higher evolutionary level.

In September 1975, the group visited the small town of Waldport, Oregon, to give a lecture about how UFOs were soon going to make contact with the human race. Roughly 150 people packed into a motel hall to hear Applewhite. At first the town thought it was a joke. However, soon after, in a testament to Applewhite's charisma and powers of persuasion, 20 people - or about one in 30 residents of the town - drove off to a meeting of about 400 people in Grand Junction, Colorado, in the hope of meeting aliens.

Later, the crew sold all their worldly possessions and said farewell to loved ones; the group vanished from the public eye. From that point, "Do and Ti", as the two now called themselves, led the nearly one-hundred-member crew across the country, sleeping in tents and begging in the streets. Evading detection by the authorities and media enabled the group to focus on Do and Ti's doctrine of helping members of the crew achieve a "higher evolutionary level" above human, which they claimed to have already reached.

Most of their followers are described by researchers as having been longtime truth-seekers, or spiritual hippies who had long attempted to find themselves through spiritual means. The clan of UFO followers all seemed to have in common a need for communal belonging in an alternative path to higher existence without the constraints of institutionalised faith. The group purchased alien abduction insurance that would pay out $1 million per person, covering abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens.

Applewhite began to emphasize a strict hierarchy, teaching that his students needed his guidance, just as he needed the guidance of the Next Level. A relationship with Applewhite was said to be the only way to salvation and he encouraged his followers to see him as Christ. In the 1980s, the group became more like a religion in its focus on faith and submission to authority. Students who were not committed to this lifestyle were encouraged to leave; departing members were given financial assistance. He specifically cited sexual urges as the work of Lucifer. Applewhite, "We do in all honesty hate this world".

In March 1997, Marshall Applewhite videoed himself in Do's Final Exit, speaking of mass suicide as "the only way to evacuate this Earth". After asserting that a spacecraft was trailing Comet Hale-Bopp and that this event would represent the closure to Heaven's Gate, Applewhite persuaded 38 followers to prepare for ritual suicide so their souls could board the supposed craft. Applewhite believed that after their deaths a UFO would take their souls to another level of existence above human, which he described as being both physical and spiritual.

News of the 39 deaths in Rancho Santa Fe motivated the copycat suicide of a 58-year-old man living near Marysville, California. The man left a note, "I'm going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp to be with those who have gone before me," and imitated some of the details of the Heaven's Gate suicides as they had been reported in the media. At least three former members of Heaven's Gate committed suicide in the months after the mass suicide.

Heaven's Gate members believed the earth would be wiped clean and refurbished before 2027, and that the only chance for their consciousness to survive was to leave their human bodies at an appointed time. Initially, the group had been told that they would be transported with their bodies aboard a spacecraft that would come to earth and take the crew to heaven, the Next Level. When Nettles (Ti) died of cancer in 1985, it confounded Applewhite's doctrine because Nettles was allegedly chosen by the Next Level to be a messenger on earth, yet her body died instead of leaving physically to outer space. The belief system was then revised to include the leaving of consciousness from the body as equivalent to leaving the earth in a spacecraft.

While the group was against suicide, they defined "suicide" to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered" and believed their bodies were only vehicles meant to help them on their journey. Suicide, therefore, would be not allowing their consciousness to leave their human bodies to join the Next Level. They believed that, "to be eligible for membership in the Next Level, humans would have to shed every attachment to the planet". This meant members had to give up all human characteristics, such as their family, friends, sexuality, individuality, jobs, money, and possessions.

The Evolutionary Level Above Human was seen as a physical, corporeal place, another planet, where residents live in pure bliss and nourish themselves by absorbing pure sunlight. They do not engage in sexual intercourse, eating or dying. Heaven's Gate believed that what the Bible calls God is actually a highly developed Extraterrestrial. Evil space aliens - called Luciferians - falsely represented themselves to Earthlings as God and conspired to keep humans from developing. Technically advanced humanoids, these aliens have spacecraft, space-time travel, telepathy, and increased longevity. They use holograms to fake miracles. Heaven's Gate believed that all existing religions on earth had been corrupted by these malevolent aliens.

Applewhite taught that "aliens planted the seeds of current humanity millions of years ago, and have come to reap the harvest of their work in the form of spiritually evolved individuals who will join the ranks of flying saucer crews. Only a select few members of humanity will be chosen to advance to this transhuman state. The rest will be left to wallow in the spiritually poisoned atmosphere of a corrupt world". Only the individuals who chose to join Heaven's Gate, followed its belief system, and made the sacrifices required by membership would be allowed to escape the prophesied disaster.

In a group open only to adults over the age of 18, members gave up their possessions and lived a highly ascetic life. The group was strictly regimented, tightly knit and everything was communally shared. Eight of the male members, including Applewhite (who was gay), voluntarily underwent castration as an extreme means of maintaining the ascetic lifestyle. "They couldn't stop smiling and giggling," surviving member DiAngelo told Newsweek. "They were excited about it."

Lalich speculates that they were willing to follow Applewhite in suicide because they had become totally dependent upon him, hence were poorly suited to life in his absence. He isolated them socially and cultivated an attitude of complete religious obedience. Applewhite's students had made a long-term commitment to him. Most of the dead had been members for about 20 years, although there were a few recent converts.

Three of the people who suicided left exit statements on their website. These extoll the joys of the Next Level while summing up people on earth as the walking dead. The texts are not the ramblings of disordered minds. The content is fantasy, but they are written in a lucid way in excellent English and give every appearance of sincerity. Unlike the Flat Earth Society, which no doubt numbers people who joined for a joke, as well as those who are not fully convinced, there is little doubt that the members of Heaven's Gate were totally committed to their beliefs. After all, they gave up their sexuality and their lives for their ideal.

QAnon

QAnon at the Capitol invasion

QAnon is a powerful but diffuse contemporary movement that sought to have Trump re-elected. It is animated by a loose collection of extreme right conspiracy theories whose central theme is that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal. QAnon claims that Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and others are planning a coup against Trump and are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring. It alleges that an elite cabal of pedophiles, comprising, among others, Hollywood A-listers, leading philanthropists, Jewish financiers and Democrat politicians, covertly rule the world. Followers of QAnon believe that there is an imminent event known as the "Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison, and the US military will brutally take over the country. The result will be salvation and utopia on earth. QAnon promises a "Great Awakening", in which the elites will be routed and the truth revealed.

However, this summary is misleading because QAnon is amorphous, multi-faceted and confusing. In addition it keeps shape-shifting.

The conspiracy theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous bulletin-board 4chan by "Q". Q claimed to be a high-level government official with Q clearance. Q predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton and a violent uprising nationwide. It is likely that Q has become a group of people acting under the same name. QAnon's adherents, while seeing Trump as a flawed Christian, also view him as a messiah sent by God. Trump himself pretends to know little about QAnon, which is a lie. Trump has amplified QAnon messaging at least 216 times by retweeting or mentioning 129 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day. Being a savvy politician, Trump is perfectly aware that many, perhaps most, of his supporters are QAnon people. He made a correct political calculation, deciding to give only scant public endorsement to QAnon. Showing full support would hurt his standing with moderate Republicans, whereas he does not need to do anything to retain the devotion of QAnon. They are happy with the crumbs he throws their way, being accustomed to snatching at Q's hints.

Q's posts have become more cryptic and vague, allowing followers to map their own beliefs onto them. Part of QAnon's appeal is its game-like quality, in which followers attempt to solve riddles presented in Qdrops by connecting them to Trump speeches and tweets. Q enthralls readers with clues rather than presenting claims directly. Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon, says that it is as addictive as a video game, and offers the "player" the appealing possibility of being involved in something of world-historical importance. According to View, "You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations."

Although Q's claims are false and the prophecies routinely fail, this does little to decrease Q's influence. Believers overlook the lack of results and failed predictions because they gauge the movement's success by its popularity, its opposition from the mainstream media, and its recognition by the President himself. On multiple occasions, Q has dismissed his false claims and incorrect predictions as deliberate, claiming that "disinformation is necessary". This has led psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to emphasize the "self-sealing" quality of the conspiracy theory, so that evidence against it can become evidence of its validity in the minds of believers. "The absence of evidence is reinterpreted as evidence without batting an eyelid." Conspiracy enthusiasts believe that the burden of proof lies with their opponents, ie that QAnon's claims are valid in the absence of positive proof that there is no cabal and no trafficking of children by Democrats.

Experts judge that QAnon's appeal is comparable to that of religious cults. According to Renee DiResta, QAnon's pattern of enticement is similar to that of cults in the pre-internet era where, as the targeted person was led deeper and deeper into the group's secrets, they became increasingly isolated from friends and family outside the cult. Rachel Bernstein, an expert on cults, has said, "What a movement such as QAnon has going for it, and why it will catch on like wildfire, is that it makes people feel connected to something important that other people don't yet know about... All cults will provide this feeling of being special."

A series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the "deep state", the cabal of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump's re-election chances. QAnon is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. Some QAnoners are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy in the mainstream media, a perception fuelled in equal measure by Q and by Trump. QAnon may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also driven by religious faith. The language of evangelical Christianity has come to define the QAnon movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better future, one that is preordained. As one adherent proclaimed, "It's not a theory. It's the foretelling of things to come."

Edgar Welch is a deeply religious father of two, who until December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in a small town. That morning, Welch grabbed his collection of guns and drove 580 km to a neighbourhood in Northwest Washington, DC. He held an AR-15 rifle across his chest as he walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. Welch was there because of a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, which three years later became a pillar of QAnon. It claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when some conspiracy theorists asserted that sexual abuse of children was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. After firing a rifle to break a lock, Welch realised his mistake and gave himself up to police. He was sentenced to four years in prison. The New York Times wrote in June 2020 that posts on TikTok with the #PizzaGate hashtag were viewed more than 82 million times in recent months. The abuse of children fantasy arose because someone suggested that emails written by the restaurateurs referring to 'pizza' and 'pasta' were code words for 'boys' and 'girls'.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

by Goya

Anthony Comello was charged with the March 2019 murder of Gambino crime family boss, Frank Cali. According to his defense attorney, Comello had become obsessed with QAnon theories, believing Cali was a member of a "deep state". Comello was convinced he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" so he decided to act. Confronting Cali outside his Staten Island home, Comello allegedly shot Cali ten times. A May 30, 2019, FBI Intelligence Bulletin memo from the Phoenix Field Office identified QAnon-driven extremists as a domestic terrorism threat. Although the conspiracy that QAnon imagines does not exist, there is a real danger that QAnon itself might become a conspiracy of armed vigilantes, determined to bring about the promised "Storm". The storming of the US Capitol by Trump supporters, including QAnoners, is not a good sign.

Heavy on millennialism and the idea that a reckoning awaits the world, the theory has found fertile ground in the American alt-right. Some 56% of Republicans believe that QAnon is mostly or partly true. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates have shown support for QAnon. A Time magazine article listed Q among the 25 most influential people on the internet in 2018. Counting more than 130,000 related discussion videos on YouTube, Time cited the wide range of the conspiracy theory and its prominent followers and news coverage.

Why did Q's cryptic post on an obscure message-board ignite a movement involving millions? Why were so many eager to embrace such a far-fetched conspiracy theory? Perhaps it was the surge in confidence of the Right in the wake of Trump's win. Whatever the reasons, the grass was dry and Q provided the spark. Not all QAnoners come from a rightwing background. For those who have had no agency to suddenly discover a path into the game is heady stuff.

QAnon is not confined to the US. It has organised protest demonstrations in 200 countries, ostensibly to "save the children". One in four Britons are said to believe in QAnon-related theories. According to The Guardian, QAnon is growing in the UK, spilling over into anti-vaccine and 5G protests, fuelled by online misinformation. At a QAnon rally, Shemirani, a nurse suspended for promoting baseless theories about Covid19, told the crowd: "Our government has declared war on the people of the UK."

"There is a high possibility that the spirited belief system which surrounds QAnon can slowly become a political movement in the UK," Liyanage said. "It will be successful because no one can fight it through reason. It's not a rational belief system but mostly a supernatural belief system."

The time for Trump to arrest the pedophiles and satanists is fast running out. It is interesting to speculate what effect his departure will have on a conspiracy theory in which he is the key figure. My guess is that the powerful energy and passion that drive QAnon will shift focus.

My own view is that QAnon is a blank slate onto which people project their darkest nightmares, as well as their hopes for a Christian utopia. Where do the ideas of satanism, eating children, sinister cabals, sexual depravity, and other crimes against children come from? The answer is simple: from the minds of those who form QAnon. QAnon is nothing but a mirror showing people their shared fantasy. People are sharing with each other their worst fears, as well as their hopes. The dark parts are projected onto the favourite targets of the alt-right, ie Hillary and other Democrats, Jews, and liberals, whereas the messianic hopes are projected onto Trump and Q. However, it is a mistake to see the QAnon conspiracy theory as the work of Q. Although Q was the initial cause, his cryptic and vague messages are merely prompts, asking people to fill in the blanks. This is what many have done and the result is a miasma of fanciful lies about corruption, sexual perversions and violence. The irony is that whereas the accusations made by QAnon are entirely baseless, QAnon might itself become a violent entity, little better than the chimera it rails against.

James Baldwin wrote, "It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own." Voltaire put it more starkly, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Is Credulity Humanity's Achilles Heel?

The three belief systems discussed  have almost nothing in common except the rejection of the consensus view of reality, combined with belief in a fantasised conspiracy. In each case, powerful unseen forces are seen as perverting or hiding the truth of what is really going on. All three beliefs appear absurd except to people who are believers. The puzzle is why do apparently normal people adopt such ideas?

In a study published online in March, 2014, in the American Journal of Political Science, Oliver and Wood, found that about half of Americans endorse at least one conspiracy theory, such as the notion that 9/11 was an inside job or the JFK conspiracy. "Many people are willing to believe many ideas that are directly in contradiction to a dominant cultural narrative," Oliver said. According to him, conspiratorial belief stems from a human tendency to perceive unseen forces at work, known as magical thinking.

In the Middle Ages the Devil was a convenient factor that could be used to explain anything weird or harmful, while the deity took responsibility for the rest. With the advance of science, both the Devil and God gradually lost their explanatory powers. God became "the God of the gaps", being only needed to explain what was missing in our understanding of the physical world. Nowadays, the term "act of God" is reserved to describe the insurance industry's view of natural disasters.

In the modern era magical thinking has undergone a new twist. God and the Devil have been replaced by conspiracies. A recent survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries asked respondents whether they believe there is "a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together". In the US 37% replied that this is "definitely or probably true". So did 45% of Italians, 56% of Spaniards and 78% of Nigerians.

2020 was the year of Covid19. The coronavirus has triggered the rise of myriad myths, waves of misinformation and virus conspiracy theories, including that it does not exist - believed by 22% in Poland, where there have been nearly 1.4 million cases. The virus has also had an incubating effect on unrelated conspiracy theories because it has thrown humankind into a state of fear and isolated people in their homes with too much time to think and surf. The extra time in the virtual space means increased exposure to the proponents of conspiracy theories, without the balancing effect of social interactions.

According to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the normal process is that as people begin to acquire knowledge of a given subject, their feelings of competence rise quickly towards a peak, before declining, as they begin to realise how much more there is to know. In the case of conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, people can arrive almost immediately at that delicious peak of confidence, without actually learning anything at all. QAnon is like a super-car that can do 0 to 100 kph in 3 seconds flat. Many are captivated by the vicarious thrill of believing they are privy to vastly important secrets about which millions of people have no idea. This is the seductive appeal of conspiracy theories.

What causes us to believe? There is an analogy between religions and conspiracy theories. Once you pay the price of entry, ie faith in a religious doctrine or conspiracy, the payoff is that much of the confusion and mystery of life is dispelled because you are in possession of the answers. Yuval Harari: "Our lives are repeatedly rocked by wars, revolutions, crises and pandemics. But if I believe some kind of global cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything. The skeleton key of global cabal theory unlocks all the world's mysteries and offers me entree into an exclusive circle - the group of people who understand. It makes me smarter and wiser than the average person and even elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook - or what they try to conceal."

The spectrum of irrational beliefs shares one characteristic: they are all unfalsifiable. Their adherents never say, "If such-and-such happens I will discard this belief." This is particularly apparent in doomsday predictions. The predicted date comes and goes, but the true believers simply reset the clock to a future date. A cult called the Seekers went one better. They believed a UFO would save them from a cataclysm on December 24, 1954. Afterwards, some of the members claimed that their group's devotion had saved the rest of the world from disaster. They responded by proselytizing with renewed vigour. Cults and conspiracy theories are highly resistant to correction. Even the thoroughly discredited Pizzagate is still believed by masses of people.

The self-validating nature of the beliefs ensures that all evidence can be construed as confirmation. New findings that contradict a belief are interpreted as proof of the further workings of the conspiracy to hide the truth. Yet cults and conspiracy theories are not the only systems that guarantee their own validation. If one questions what is taught in a personal growth course one is rebuked with, "You are resisting". Pseudo-science is very difficult to debunk. Inconvenient facts, such as aliens not showing up, are explained by another tweak to the doctrine.

To be fair, the process of theory adjustment happens in science proper as well. When a theory fails experimental test it may be given an additional proviso that accounts for the discrepancy. For instance, the fact that personal experience can be handed down as a genetic legacy to future generations seems to contradict standard evolutionary theory. As it turns out, there is no contradiction. A new sub-science called epigenetics explains the mechanism of this process in terms of alterations to the DNA molecule that do not change the genetic code but which influence gene expression.

Since science is a human activity, it is subject to the foibles of our species. It too has dogmas that are difficult to overturn. Thomas Kuhn has written persuasively about paradigm shifts in science. He saw the history of science as consisting of normal and revolutionary phases, in which the community of scientists in a particular field are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases, such as the transition from classical physics to quantum mechanics, involve great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. This is captured in an aphorism that is only half humorous, "The measure of the greatness of a scientist is how long they hold up advancement in their chosen field."

The history of science features dogmas that were held too long and new ideas that took an unreasonably long time to be accepted. One example is the resistance to the theory of plate tectonics, another is the opposition to a bacterial explanation for the cause of ulcers. The mainstream rejection of functional medicine and the progress it has made in curing Alzheimer's Disease is a current example.

Nevertheless, the greatest strength of science is that it is tentative: any scientific theory may be overturned and replaced by a better theory in the future. The criterion of a theory being scientific is that it makes predictions which could, in principle, be falsified by new data. Yet to a fundamentalist or a common sense sceptic, such as a flat earther, this is not a strength but a weakness. They point out that science can never prove anything, that scientific theories have been debunked plus questions science can't answer. Hence science is not to be trusted. With the authority of science diminished, the field opens for persuasive individuals with pet theories, especially about conspiracies. Why conspiracies? Because a belief that goes counter to the accepted view of reality requires a widespread suppression of the truth.

The bottom line is that many people do not perform due diligence in checking the information they encounter and its sources. Given the virulent spread of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, this is a massive under-statement. The worry is that many obtain their news from questionable sources, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Ultimately, eschewing reputable news media in favour of bulletin-boards and succumbing to their conspiracy theories has deeper causes. These are alienation and a lack of trust in society and its leaders. Why are people alienated and distrustful? Perhaps the underlying problem is not credulity but its opposite, ie a loss of belief in the system. Those who are drawn to far-right conspiracy theories have lost trust in democracy and the modern state. They think the US no longer embodies the ideals they believe in. Conservative Christians and right-wingers resent their defeat in "the culture wars", which were about abortion, separation of church and state, creationism, recreational drug use, homosexuality, and censorship. Perhaps the "Great Awakening" is their dream of a return to how things were. The fact that they grasp at ludicrous ideas indicates the depth of their disaffection.

Of course, irrational beliefs, superstitions, baseless theories and weird cults have been with us all through history, ever since the invention of writing, and probably long before. The difference now is that we supposedly live in the age of reason and science. Furthermore, knowledge is far more freely available than at any time in the past. The problem is that disinformation, extravagant falsehoods, fringe beliefs, and sensational stories are more easily disseminated than ever before, and they seem to capture peoples' attention more than sober facts. The difference between 30 years ago and now is that anyone can post anything and potentially reach millions of people. It's the old story - those who know least have the loudest voices. The paradox is that although reliable knowledge is now easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection, millions are turning their backs on both science and common sense.

My conclusion is that despite the advances of human knowledge, human nature itself has not changed. We remain a species ruled by emotion rather than logic, and hence we come to believe all kinds of nonsense.

Another conclusion comes from an insight of the brilliant intellectual, Yuval Harari. He is convinced that we human beings can only prosper and live in harmony with each other provided we believe in a shared myth. If so, then a propensity towards credulity might be built into our genome. Unfortunately, credulity is dangerous, as shown in Heaven's Gate, the Jim Jones cult and QAnon.

Tad Boniecki

January 2021

[go-redgirl]

U.S. President Donald Trump during the daily press briefing on the Coronavirus pandemic at the White House, Washington, D.C. - March 17, 2020 - (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

Multi-Pronged Approach Means Trump Will Win on Coronavirus

As the coronavirus crisis rapidly develops, the Trump administration must cope with two paradoxical problems looming above the race to prepare the public health service and shield the population as much as can be done, before the full force of the pandemic arrives.

An imaginative campaign by the government of the Peoples’ Republic of China to represent its response to the coronavirus as a triumph of Chinese efficiency predictably has won the hearts and minds of the credulous Western Left. In fact, it was a disaster of complete unpreparedness, insolent official refusal to pay the slightest attention to incoming facts, totalitarian dissembling and censorship, and the persecution of those who gave unheeded warnings.China now purports — with what must be acknowledged as majestic (though not simply admirable) aplomb — to be laying out a "silk road" of medical assistance to late-coming sufferer-nations. Of course, these nations are all victims of China’s official lies about the medical dangers it had inadvertently fostered and negligently transmitted. 

Having inflicted this pestilence on the world, China now claims to be the indispensable world leader in mastering the problem.Of course, the Chinese must not be allowed to get away with this colossal rodomontade. The United States must take the lead in repatriating pharmaceutical production from China, demanding the World Health Organization cease to be a shill-and-whitewash operation for the Peoples’ Republic, and render a truthful and objective account of how this virus got started and how it got so completely out of control.

The Chinese role must be exposed in effectively assuring the exportation of the coronavirus to the whole world, including through the large concentrations of Chinese workers building the self-important "Belt and Road" with which the Middle Kingdom will assert itself across the Eurasian land-mass, and through its failure to give advisory warnings to international travelers.China deliberately ignored the universally recognized responsibilities of all countries to report outbreaks of communicable diseases promptly and accurately.T

he world must understand that the Hong Kong protesters and the huge numbers of persecuted Uyghurs in their concentration camps (which China denies) are not freakish aberrations from some almost uniform munificence of the Peoples’ Republic.

They are the successors to other completely inoffensive groups who have been trampled underfoot, oppressed and traduced by the Beijing regime, from the long Civil War (1920s-1949) through the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the occupation of Tibet and persecution of practitioners of all the world’s religions, especially Christianity, but also authentic Chinese religions.

There are limits to what the world can reasonably aspire to do in jurisdictions that are not our own and boil down ultimately to Chinese internal affairs. But this attempt of the Chinese government, as it blames the United States for this debacle and threatens to be sluggish about the transmission to the United States of medical supplies produced in China by American companies it had induced to invest there, requires a sharp rejoinder.

Where this creates a conundrum for the United States is that although all Chinese comments on the coronavirus have to be somewhat, or even substantially, discounted, China’s partially plausible claim that it has turned the corner and that the virus is now in retreat, is extremely useful in combating the profound panic which is sweeping the United States and the entire Western world.

In democratic countries, the media are free to hype any version of events, no matter how terrifying, and the temptation to do so in the United States is aggravated by the possibility presented to the anti-Trump media to hammer the president for incompetence and deception in an election year, and destroy the benefits of his skillful management of the economy.

This is going to require the administration to execute the sophisticated maneuver of exposing China’s duplicity and negligence, while citing the fact that even despite the Beijing regime’s blunders and disinformation, the incidence and impact of the coronavirus are clearly now declining in China.

Proper emphasis on this point will close the door that has been hurled open to unlimited panic. It has been impossible to steady the country’s nerves, and especially the shaky-legged, sweaty-palmed managers of the nation’s and people’s money, who flee like asphyxiated cockroaches whenever any threat appears that can’t be measured precisely. 

The prudent course is to assume the worst and plan and act for it. But when the worst is indiscernible, the usual response is for the great money-managers to drink the Kool-Aid of outright panic, and flee to the front of the unsettled masses and lead them over the cliff. This can be combated in only two ways: a plan of believable action based on the assurance that the country possesses the ability to deal with the problem—FDR’s genius exhortation that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. 

"As he said at his first inauguration on March 4, 1933, our "difficulties, thank God, concern only material things." That is not the case here, and no one knows exactly where this might end since it is distinguishable from previous pandemics. Where the danger could be infinite, the Roosevelt response is not a complete solution. 

This is why, as China’s official misconduct, ineptitude, callousness, and deceit must be highlighted, the demonstrably finite character of the coronavirus threat must also be emphasized.As a completely legitimate reference point to cure panic and focus on “flattening the curve,” as the scientists say, we are doing what China did not do: take every appropriate action to minimize the human damage and shorten the life of the crisis. 

And this is where the second paradox arises: the commendable scientists, who are senior in managing the official American response, seek the most radical measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.This is natural.But the possibility of a shut-down on almost the entire population, which is already in effect in Italy, France, and Spain, and is creeping upward in the United States also, reduces the likelihood of severe attacks of an influenza that is often much nastier than any flu but is not life-threatening to more than a tiny fraction of healthy people beneath the age of 70. 

This will shorten the duration of the medical crisis. But we saw in China that it also strangles the economy, which collapsed for at least two months—there were almost no sales and little production of durable goods in China during that time.The remit of the scientists is to end the medical crisis, but the administration has the challenge of imposing total risk-avoidance measures on the susceptible elements of the population (the infirm and elderly), and urging those with minimal chance of serious, much less, mortal illness, to pursue their occupations as best they can on as risk-free a basis as they can.These are delicate balances the administration will have to sort out.

The results of the national voluntary mobilization the administration has led are already emerging. A preliminary vaccine was tested on Monday in Seattle, and the ability to test Americans — which had a very wobbly beginning, aggravated by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar’s promise of four million tests last week, the almost complete failure to occur he blamed, a bit unconvincingly, on a "less seamless" passage from production to application — seems to be coming in a week late. 

Tests are not cures.They’re only useful for quarantining, and a person who is virus-free today may be infected tomorrow. But the psychological impact of the testing failure and the reflection on the administration’s credibility and competence were significant, but not irreversible.I predict that the administration will thread this needle and that the coronavirus crisis will be seen to be receding before the end of May.

[entertainmentwithfun-blog]

12 Horror Bollywood Films That You Can not Watch Alone.

The Bollywood blood and gore movie industry has a rich history, returning to the fifties. In any case, because of a few perspectives, the standard took a gander at loathsomeness with a scorn. 

 Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the A-Listers never joined a blood and gore movie. That made an entirely different arrangement of on-screen characters who'd do Bollywood blood and gore movies - and they had a religion following. 

Since the on-screen characters were new, the spending limits were less. Since awfulness is a saleable class, the more significant part of these thrillers became moneyspinners for the makers and lenders. 

 With fresher ability coming in, makers searching for a fast jettison started agitating backward and exploitative film, Bollywood frightfulness got notorious. In the nineties, chiefs like Ram Gopal Varma and Vikram Bhatt revolutionalized the repulsiveness class with their movies. 

 Here are the five films that changed the crowd's point of view of an Indian thriller.

# 1 Stree

Dinesh Vijan coordinates this content by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK. Before this, no one prevailing with regards to making a certifiable blood and gore movie with satire components. Stree was a moment hit and resuscitated the loathsomeness fragment in Bollywood. The film stars Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, and Flora Saini.

#2 Raaz

This Dino Morea and Bipasha Basu film changed the layout of blood and gore movies. Prior, thrillers were about a detestable soul frequenting the group of somebody who wronged them. In Raaz, the purpose of the intelligent soul's presence was a wrongdoing submitted or bad form allotted by the ones who are being spooky. The striking, new age slurped up this thought, preparing for India's most well-known establishment.

#3 Go Goa Gone

first, sufficient blood and gore movies to include comedic components and pull off it. The intellectuals called it dark cleverness, and the standard parcel saw the episodes portrayed in the film occur with them consistently - separated from the zombie end of the world. Today, it makes the rundown of the most needed Indian loathsomeness continuation films. Go Goa Gone responded to a relevant inquiry - for what reason do zombies assault Western nations? With Go Goa Gone, India got it is first useful, engaging, and establishment commendable zombie film. 

#4 Pari

For three decades, Indian awfulness makers utilized the wash-flush recurrent equation. They couldn't dive into the rich Indian culture for characters and story circular segments. There was this danger of harming feelings. By one way or another, Anushka Sharma dared to get into Islamic history and make Pari, a genuinely alarming film. 

This is just the second Bollywood thriller that was a creepy encounter to watch in the theater, second only to Stree.

#5 Veerana

Entertaining yet evident, this film is as however, discussed four decades after its discharge. That puts it at standard with Sholay - well, nearly. The Ramsays made a few repulsiveness layout films like Purana Mandir, Purani Haveli, Shaitaani Ilaaka, and some more. Ut BVeerana is the one each Indian frightfulness buff thinks about. Everything considered, there's no motivation behind why Veerana turned out to be so celebrated, aside from the way that there's a fear inspired notion that the courageous lead woman, Jasmine, has vanished someplace. Possibly that is the explanation frightfulness clubs adore it.

 6. Ragini MMS

Ragini MMS is roused by the American otherworldly awfulness 'Paranormal Activity' and is somewhat founded on an original story. In contrast to its continuation, this one didn't have Sunny Leone, yet at the same time figured out how to attract the groups to the venues on account of its edge-of-the-seat thrills. This sleeper hit can give you a couple of restless hours when you hit the bed around the evening time.

7. 13 B

13 B comes stuffed to the rafters with spine-shivering chills and alarms. It doesn't rely upon a creepy foundation score or abnormal camera points to convey the chills. With a reliable content and a group cast that carries out its responsibility to flawlessness, 13 B is unquestionably one motion picture you shouldn't miss.

8. Mahal

Considered as the main blood and gore flick of Bollywood, Mahal manages the subject of resurrection. This one likely terrified your daddy too your dada. Indeed, even with moderate impacts, this film has kept on frequenting crowds for a considerable length of time.

9. Bees Saal Baad

A secretive lady strolling around at midnight through a field murmuring Kahin profound jale kahin dil scared the country so much that the film ended up being the most elevated grosser in 1962. Inexactly dependent on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Hound Of Baskerville', Bees Saal Baad stays each piece frequenting considerably after pachas saal baad of its discharge.

10. Horror Story

A gathering of adolescents chooses to go through the night at a spooky inn. Things get tangled, and it's a panic fest consequently. Some alarming scenes will make you bounce off your seat. Those searching for chills won't be frustrated by any stretch of the imagination.

11. Shaapit

The third portion in the Raaz set of three, Shaapit, is adequate to raise the hair on the rear of your neck. Like each Vikram Bhatt film, the USP of this film lies in its treatment, keeping it gorgeously ghostly. Before the finish, you should have faith in condemnations and insidious spirits.

12. Ek Thi Daayan

The idea of daayans existing in the public arena is creepy in itself. Ek Thi Daayan is a daring endeavor at taking a stab at something new. It is a combination of a pureblood and gore movie and a dreadful, paranormal spine chiller. The extraordinary dramatization may appear to be unreasonable; however, the stylized treatment and the tight storyline compensates for it, also Konkona Sen's shocking depiction of a day. Creepy undoubtedly!

[misasmemorandum]

"The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies" Susan Jacoby

BowieBookClubの５月の本。まず２００８年に出版され、今年の頭に new updated edition が出た。２００８年版が図書館にあったので、まずそれを借りてイントロと結論の頭を読んで、著者がトランプについて、そしてトランプを選んだアメリカ国民についてどう書いているかを読みたくて２０１８年版を購入（1,807円也）。

すっごく興味深く非常に面白かった。

ただ、著者、ボキャブラリーが恐ろしく広く、わざと難しい単語を使うのに慣れ切っていて、また、長くてややっこしい文章を書く習慣がついているようで（私が学生の頃あんな文章書いたら、三つに切れと指導を受けていたような、世界で一番長くまどろっこしい言い回しの文章もあった）、本の半分くらいまで読みにくくて仕方なかった。久しぶりにこの手の本を読むからもあるだろうが、私個人に知識のある事柄についての章はまだ読みやすかったので、私の英語力と理解力に問題があるのではなく、内容と文章のタイプに問題があるのだと全部読んで思った。

で、トランプを選んでしまったのは、トランプに投票したタイプの人々は、トランプと同じタイプの人間で（彼はトランプを"one of us"と感じている）、トランプはTV好きで、本を読まず、何百ページにわたる資料をもっと短くできないのは無能だ的な反応をして読んでいるのか読んでいないのか、そして、ネットに流れるウソ情報の真偽を問わずに自分に都合のいいものを信じ、外国語を話す必要などなく、本と言うものを（娯楽小説すら）読まない、平たく言ってバカが、仲間のバカを選んだのだ。バカで知識人にアレルギーがあるのがmiddle of nowhereの平均的なアメリカ人なのだそうだ。

数学と科学の知識が低く、国の歴史を教える学校が少なく、音楽の授業はなく、アメリカの学校、全部が全部そうでないのはわかってるが、ひどいなぁ。ま、日本の公立学校も出来ない子はできないまんまだが。

ネットとポピュラー・カルチャーに関する下りは、考え方が既存のhigh artにとらわれ過ぎてると思った。今残っている歴史的芸術作品は、全て淘汰されて残ったもので、だから、その作品が生まれた当時にはピンからキリまで悪いのもたくさん巷にあり、鑑識眼がない人などが駄作でも有難がっていたと思われる。それに今残っている芸術作品のほとんどは、選ばれた人々（王族、貴族など裕福な層）だけのものだった。それがポピュラー・カルチャーは大衆のもので、そして、その中から大衆がよしとする芸術性の高いものが生まれて、そこから新しい芸術が生まれる可能性もあると思う。（実際は、現代芸術を借用する方が多いようだが）

文学と現代の娯楽小説を比べるのもおかしいと思う。『アンナ・カレリーナ』が出版され広く読まれていた当初も、大衆が気軽に読む小説があった筈だ。と、ここら辺が気になった。

しかし、この本、読むの疲れた。１８日に届いて、２７日に読み終えた。時間と体力のあるときは４時間近く読んだ日もあったかもしれない。平均、連日２時間はこの本を読んだ。（１日だけ疲れてしまって、１０ページしか読まない日もあった。）しかし、１日でも読まないと、もうこの本を手に取らなくなるかもしれないと思われて、急いで読んだ。

読んで良かったが、この著者の本をまた読みたいかどうかは非常に疑問だ。

[upthewitchypunx]

thatchapstickchick replied to your post “There's this weirdness I'm seeing with people who come to secular...”

I feel like it's part of a broader cultural shift in which nobody wants to recognize the knowledge/wisdom of experts or authorities anymore. And I mean on one hand individual empowerment is great, but on the other... people study and train to get expertise for a reason.

An interesting take as we are in another wave anti-intellectualism. Ian B was reading a Susan Jacoby book about it and it appears the book has been updated and re-released last week. The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies. Asking people to be thoughtful is not an attack, but I actually got blocked by people in a few witch groups on facebook for being critical of certain books. It also goes along with learning the rules so you can break them.

I’m still just really confused that people would do a spell or a ritual and be shocked -- SHOCKED! That they might get tired or feel weird. Like, surprise! You are actually doing a thing!

[happyanchorflower]

[AUDIOBOOK] Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

Esteu buscant aquest llibre?  The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies By Susan Jacoby

 Book Excerpt :

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe prescient and now-classic analysis of the forces of anti-intellectualism in contemporary American life--updated for the era of Trump, Twitter, Breitbart and fake news controversies.The searing cultural history of the last half-century, The Age of American Unreason In A Culture of Lies focuses on the convergence of social forces--usually treated as separate entities--that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; the triumph of internet over print culture; and America's toxic addition to infotainment. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation and sparing neither the right nor the left, Susan Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.At today's critical political juncture, nothing could be

 >>> START READING NOW

"This book is available for download in a number of formats - including epub, pdf, azw, mobi and more. You can also read the full text online using our Ereader."

 #MUSTREAD, #MOBIPOCKET, #DAILYBOOK

[stooogessh]

Third Prize: Zhao Nan

 Prompt 2: As a Chinese and an incoming international student, why does social justice in the United States matter to you? 

The news about George Floyd has raised the issue of social justice under the media spotlight. I already watched the controversial video on social media even before the news broke out in China. As I watched the video, anger instantaneously took over my mind. While I know racial discrimination exists, witnessing such injustice play out over and over again still saddens me deeply every time I watch the news. What was unexpected about the news of George Floyd was the unprecedented international public attention brought about by such tragic incident As I browse through the heated discussions about George Floyd online, I realize that, this time around, there might actually be a change on the rise, as more people have become aware of social justice and equality. 

At school, I have likewise heard conversations regarding the said news. As an incoming international student, social justice is of great significance to me, not only because that the United States is potentially where I will be going for college, but also because of its larger social implication? 

Currently, social justice remains a huge unresolved problem. I have already came to know several tragedies caused by racial discrimination and stereotyping, most of which are not really far from my own experiences. The most recent prominent example is Covid-19. The pandemic has hurled unreasonable complaints against the Chinese. For quite a few times, I have heard from my friends who are currently studying abroad that they are being discriminated against by the locals. The United States, regarded the “number one” country, has sufficient power and influence to lead. As the US has begun heeding notice on social justice, I can definitely see more countries worldwide see more people around the world speaking out against racial inequality in the future. In this day and age, racial discrimination against the Chinese is heightened due to the ongoing trade war and the pandemic. International students, including myself, are going to confront this problem until the day when racism no longer exists. The existing condemnations and denunciations against the demise of George Floyd has given me hope that such day will come. 

Personally, I believe that a stereotype is not merely an opinion; rather, it is rooted deep inside a culture and in history. Regardless of how firmly we disagree with it, fight against it, or ignore it, there is no way we are unaffected. Indeed, we live under certain stereotypes, as we are all victims of it. 

Apart from concerns over safety and equal opportunity, another dilemma amongst incoming international students is self-identity – that is, the way we perceive ourselves. Initially unnoticed, our identity has since changed. We have gradually adapted to the English language, learn the American accent, and use international social media platforms. Everything that we have attached ourselves to has to become familiar. 

Consequently, we are drifting further and further away from home and culture without knowing our specific destination. However, we jump back to our roots at times. Every time we are with our family or walk on the local streets, we feel at home again. In a way, we are stuck in between two cultures, one that we have long loved and another that grasps our future. 

The society’s opinion is what we rely on when judging ourselves; in fact, its view is of massive influence especially at times when we are still questioning our self-identity. While living in a place where people around us are instilling stereotypes against us, are we supposed to behave like how others perceive us? Should we feel angry or helpless? We wish to be accepted by the society, and the first step to this need is equality. True justice is what we rely on for us to distinguish between truths and lies. This is not only applicable amongst international students; this applies to every person who has suffered from racism or other forms of discrimination. 

True enough, social justice not only applies to race, and that the underlying problem remains far from being resolved. The demise of George Floyd resembles a shotgun, as it indicates the beginning of the fight for social justice in this era. 

[justcasualasianracism]

This comment section is a goldmine

There’s a video from the Empressive Channel about Nicki Minaj being accused of cultural appropriation when she performed Chun Li on SNL. The general consensus is:

I don’t know any Asians who care!/I’m Asian (from Asia) and I don’t care!

It’s a video game character she’s dressing up as! Not a race!

It’s not appropriation! It’s appreciation!

Nicki can’t appropriate her own culture! She’s Japanese!

But one thing I kept finding was:

But Asians are always appropriating/disrespecting black culture!

There’s a lot to unload there, but let’s focus on this gem which is a lot more specific:

I don’t want to pit POC against each other because that’s counter-productive to any sort of progress. I will however, acknowledge that blackface is still being used in overseas Asian media but I want to give some more context to that because I feel that there’s certain things that are often overlooked and need to be addressed before people jump to conclusions that we’re all anti-black. But first, I wanna point out is that the user who made this comment in this screenshot specifically points at East Asia however, as a SEA, I know it also sadly exists in other regions of Asia too. And hell, blackface isn’t exclusively an Asian phenomenon (have you seen Black Pete during Christmastime in the Netherlands?) but I can’t speak for the rest of the globe. Some of what I’m about to say might apply to other non-Asian societies that practice blackface as a form of entertainment though.

There’s no denying that America has a very terrible history of unjust treatment towards the black community from slavery and segregation all the way to racist characterizations in the media and it doesn’t even stop there. Asia does not share the same past as America simply from the fact that our contact with black people has historically been very minimal, if not, non-existent. Even today, we have very homogeneous Asian societies and consequently, we don’t have exposure to different perspectives, experiences and identities, namely that of an African-American. Additionally, it’s unreasonable to expect each foreign country to have an extensive understanding of American history which blackface is rooted in because the world doesn’t revolve around the US. Hell, it’s not like the US public school system really gives you an in-depth look of other cultures or their histories either. As such, the prominence of blackface all across Asia stems from a lack of awareness and education about the plight of African-Americans. I’m not excusing this practice because it’s undoubtedly insensitive and toxic, but again, I’m just giving you context that is more often than not, glossed over. And that is not to say ALL Asians are ignorant of the connotations of blackface. As an Asian-American who grew up *ding ding ding* America and as a result, have been taught in academia about its historical context, I find blackface extremely offensive. This isn’t just the “exception to the rule” type of thing, there’s many other Asians (some from overseas but many are Asian-American) who think blackface is extremely racist too but I find that people choose to not recognize this about is and instead, are quick to call us the enemy like the user who made this very awful comment about invalidating the Asian-American experience. Why can’t we just work together and be allies though? We need to educate one another and listen to what needs to be said instead of automatically turning against each other within the snap of a finger. This attempt to paint an entire race as anti-black is a very harmful generalization. I’m not here for anti-black sentiments and I’m not here for anti-Asian bs either, but this need to invalidate the Asian-American experience because you’ve seen Asians do something disrespectful to your own culture and therefore we’re all bad is well, extremely detrimental. We shouldn’t be fighting against each other, but we should fight against the injustices of POC together instead.

Now back to "Chun Li:” this came out long ago, but it’s still one of the most recent and biggest forms of casual Asian racism in American pop culture that I can think of. What’s more is that in this age of social media, I’ve seen non-Asians trying to speak on my behalf saying that it’s not appropriation. If not that, it’s other Asians being accepting of it as if they are the sole representative of my race. None of you speak for me. For us who find fault in “Chun Li” as well as other parts of Nicki’s career, we’ve pretty much been silenced because people made the decision to not hear what we have to say. It’s just your everyday, typical reaction to anything that deals with Asian-American issues, that is, it doesn’t matter. Nicki, as talented and as iconic as she is, does not care about us beyond the chopsticks in our hair (what the fuck) and using bastardized forms of different East Asian cultures to look the part of a “Harajuku Barbie” (what the fuck pt 2). That’s not appreciation; it’s a shallow perpetuation of our “otherness.” We’ll touch on that some other time though because that’s going to be a long read.

[mdye]

[Editor’s note: Nixon biographer John A. Farrell wrote this comparison of the two presidents in February — well before the firing of FBI Director James Comey. It is reposted here with only light edits.]

We’re barely into the Trump administration and we’ve had war on the press, electronic eavesdropping, a sacked attorney general, humongous demonstrations, fury over a Democratic National Committee break-in, Cold War­­–style skirmishes, and scandalous intrigues akin to Watergate.

Sound familiar?

“Imagine packing 6 yrs of the Nixon admin into 3 weeks,” tweeted Nicole Hemmer, a scholar from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center (and Vox columnist), in February. “It’s like Nixon speed-dating.”

Veteran hands like Dan Rather, Bill Moyers, John Dean, and William Kristol have joined youngsters like Rachel Maddow in drawing parallels between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

As the author of a new biography of Nixon, I get asked — a lot — how I plotted the book’s release to coincide with the surge in discussion, in the press and social media, of similarities between the disgraced 37th president of the United States and his latest successor, Donald Trump.

Having lived the past six years with Nixon in my head (I seek no pity; just buy the book), I approach the idea of comparing the two leaders with caution and restraint, for there are important differences.

As bad as Nixon was, for example, he never embraced white nationalists, much less sat one on his National Security Council. Nixon supported every major civil rights bill in the 1960s, and may have lost the 1962 gubernatorial election in California as a result of his spirited denunciation of the John Birch Society, the alt-right wack jobs of their day. “It was time to take on the lunatic fringe,” he wrote to Dwight Eisenhower.

Which is not to cast Tricky Dick as a saint. Fallacious comparisons cut both ways. When Trump dismissed acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a Justice Department holdover from the previous administration, for declining to defend his executive order on immigration, the episode was immediately compared to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” But Trump’s move hardly rates with Nixon’s. The stakes were far higher in 1973, with war in the Middle East, a nuclear alert, and the resignation of a corrupt vice president as a backdrop. Nixon’s own attorney general and his successor resigned over principle after refusing to fire the Watergate special prosecutor, before Solicitor General Robert Bork stepped in to do the deed.

So restraint keeps me from overstating the echoes. But then Trump will produce a performance like his rambling, combative February 16 press conference (“Russia is fake news!”) so rich with “narcissism, thin skin and deeply personal grievances,” as NBC’s Brian Williams put it, that the analogies with Nixon’s piteous “last press conference” of 1962, or his Watergate-era clashes with the media, are insistent and appropriate.

And finally, perhaps inevitably, Trump himself joined the game: He alleged that Barack Obama had bugged Trump Tower in an act worthy of “Nixon/Watergate.” (You want to see your book sales leap on Amazon? Have POTUS tweet your topic.)

Why is Nixon the go-to model for presidential misbehavior? For one thing, he is deeply embedded in our lives and culture. The only president to resign in disgrace was famously polarizing long before Watergate. This red-baiter from Southern California was the point man for McCarthyism, earning the eternal enmity of postwar liberals.

In the swinging ’60s, he was the stodgy self-made man: the square in the age of hip. As such, Nixon was a model for Mad Men’s Don Draper and, after stretching out the Vietnam War for four additional years, his reign helped inspire the evil Galactic Empire in Star Wars (according to George Lucas). He may not be the subject of a hip-hop Broadway musical, but he has served as the central figure in an opera (Nixon in China) and played the villain in the X-Men and Watchmen movies.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / Getty It took Nixon a while to provoke protests like these. On the other hand, some two-thirds of the current American population were either not alive or not residents of the United States, when Nixon resigned in 1974. In my Nixon biography, and in what follows, I’ve tried to portray this oft-caricatured scoundrel, in all his glories, for Gen X-ers and millennials who may know him only as the disembodied head on Futurama.

Thinking through the points of similarity between Nixon and Trump, and where they differ, may help us to better understand both men.

Psychobiography — correlation: modest

The differences in their upbringing — Trump came from a wealthy home in New York, Nixon from the California outback and a family wracked by illness, death, and poverty — make any comparison between the two men on this score somewhat strained. Yet both are known for self-centered, narcissistic personalities — and these, perhaps were sired by the emotional austerity of their childhoods. Trump exhibits insecurity, harbors grandiose fantasies, and shows a tetchiness about criticism. So did Nixon.

The Nixon home was known for its physical and emotional severity. Frank Nixon was a crotchety and abusive dad described, by a nephew, as “a highly acquisitive person and a slave driver” who “worked all his children and he worked his wife.” Nixon’s mother, Hannah, a devout Quaker, gave the future president his sense of idealism: He really did want to bring peace to the world. But she was preoccupied with his four brothers, two of whom died as youths, and the demands of the family store. Dick craved her approval, but she never, as Nixon famously confessed, told him that she loved him.

Historians tread lightly when it comes to psychobiography, but Nixon’s career “vindicates one of that maligned genre’s most trustworthy findings: The recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough,” wrote Rick Perlstein in Nixonland.

Much of that may apply to Trump. As biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe him in their book, Trump Revealed, the president’s father, Fred Trump, was also a disciplinarian, a workaholic, and a skinflint. At 13, Donald was culled from his family and exiled to military school as a disciplinary remedy. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that, like Nixon, Trump has spent his life seeking to fill an emotional void.

The press — correlation: high

It is no accident that both Nixon and Trump are famous for waging war beyond reason with the press. In men with their backgrounds, criticism may be interpreted as rejection, ripping the scabs from old psychic wounds and inducing emotional pain and hostility.

It’s also no small irony that each was quite successful at courting the press in their early years. Nixon was a protégé of the Chandler family, which owned the then-right-wing Los Angeles Times and promoted Nixon’s career through the simple tactic of imposing news blackouts on his opponents. Trump was a dealmaking playboy in New York’s tabloid jungle. The experiences left both men spoiled by the media’s fawning, cynical about its professed values, and reckless with the truth.

Mark Wilson / Getty Trump surveys the “enemy of the people.” Trump’s well-documented disregard for veracity was well matched by Nixon’s: He lied repeatedly about Vietnam and Watergate as president. When announcing that he was dispatching troops to invade Cambodia, Nixon solemnly assured the nation that the US had been scrupulous, to that point, in observing that poor country’s neutrality. In fact, he had been bombing Cambodia, secretly, for a year.

Nixon was as brash about his lying as Trump. On one occasion, when he thought the camera had stopped filming, Nixon told an interviewer how he had inserted a crude obscenity into a quote from Lyndon Johnson, because it made for a more colorful story — and portrayed Johnson as a vulgar bumpkin. When his aides could not find the chopsticks he used during his famous trip to China, Nixon told them to use any pair for a museum display, as the public would never know the difference.

Striving to maintain control, Trump rages over leaks. Nixon, too, confessed to being “paranoid” about leakers, and famously declared: “The press is the enemy.” Trump has friends in some corners of the media, and his declaration of war may be cynical and manipulative. For Nixon, the hate was real.

Trump, erupting in nocturnal tweets — emissions quite similar to those captured on Nixon’s White House tapes, except that they are instantaneously blasted out to tens of millions of Twitter fans — has taken it further. The press is not just his enemy, he tweeted, but the “enemy of the American people.”

Their politics — correlation: modest

Trump and Nixon both rode the politics of grievance — particularly white grievance — to the White House.

“I am your voice,” Trump told the disaffected electorate of the South, West, and Midwest, who responded by giving him an Electoral College majority. In his speeches, Trump called for the return of “law and order,” just like Nixon in 1968. “The silent majority is back,” Trump said, identifying his voters precisely as Nixon did. “We are going to take the country back.”

The division between coastal elites and the heartland is a hardy theme in American political history — the tension between frontier farmers and the Founding Fathers led to open rebellions in 1787 and 1791. In crises, the country draws together, then the old divisions reemerge in times of peace.

The gulf yawned after World War I, when the carnage of industrial warfare and the doctrines of scientific and moral relativity inspired a fundamentalist response in the midlands. Americans came together during the Second World War, but the rifts reappeared thereafter. In 1946, a young Navy veteran, running as a Republican, unseated a New Deal Congress member in rural California with a campaign that promised, “Richard Nixon Is One of Us” — not one of the pointy-headed pinko elitists running things in Washington.

Arriving in Washington, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Rep. Nixon embraced journalist Whittaker Chambers, a reformed communist agent, and went to war with the establishment by identifying one of the New Deal’s golden lads, the former diplomat Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy.

It was “an epitomizing drama,” Chambers wrote in his memoir Witness, a book that would become a bible for the conservative movement. There was “a jagged fissure” between “the plain men and women of the nation and those who affected to act, think and speak for them … from their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate eyries.” The left “controlled the narrows of news and opinion,” Chambers wrote, but “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” were led and inspired by Nixon — “the kind and good.”

Nixon used the Hiss case as a launchpad to the Senate, and then to a spot as Eisenhower’s running mate. He survived a brush with scandal over a campaign slush fund filled by wealthy businessmen with a now-legendary televised address, in which he made memorably mawkish mention of his mortgage, his wife’s cloth coat, and the family cocker spaniel, Checkers.

“The sophisticates … sneer,” wrote columnist Robert Ruark, but Nixon’s speech “came closer to humanizing the Republican Party than anything that has happened in my memory. … Tuesday night the nation saw a little man, squirming his way out of a dilemma, and laying bare his most private hopes, fears and liabilities. This time the common man was a Republican.”

That was 1952. Long before the ’60s, the culture war was raging. The ’50s were “the Nixon years,” columnist Murray Kempton would write, when “the American lower middle class in the person of this man moved to engrave into the history of the United States, as the voice of America, its own faltering spirit, its self-pity and its envy, its continual anxiety about what the wrong people might think, its whole peevish resentful whine.” And so Trump and his legions follow Nixon down a well-worn path in American politics.

However, there is one significant difference in how Nixon and Trump got elected. As circumstances had it, in all three of Nixon’s campaigns for the presidency —against John Kennedy’s “New Frontier” in 1960, amid the chaos of 1968, and against George McGovern in 1972 — he ran as the candidate of moderation, of calm and experience. His speeches were generally soothing.

A young Navy officer named Bob Woodward cast his vote for Nixon, convinced he was the candidate who could end the Vietnam War. Even Hunter S. Thompson bought in.

“For years I’ve regarded his very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad,” Thompson wrote in 1968. But “the ‘new Nixon’ is more relaxed, wiser, more mellow.” Nixon’s were campaigns, as the political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg put it, of “social stolidity.”

Trump is anything but stolid.

Monkey-wrenched elections — correlation: high?

It is a testament to the efficacy of the Republican cover-up that four months after a foreign power affected — may even have determined — the outcome of an American presidential election, we still don’t know the facts. The timidity of the electorate, permitting Congress to let this pivotal question go unanswered, is stunning.

Ira Gay Sealy / Getty Anna Chennault was Nixon’s secret liaison with the South Vietnamese government before the 1968 election. The extent of President Trump’s possible contacts with a foreign government before the 2017 election has come under scrutiny.

From what we do know, it is safe to say that the Russians sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. We don’t know how or if he and his advisers, in contacts with Russian officials, acted to further the illegal hacking of Democratic organizations and officials. We know that Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to do so (though whether this was a serious request or a glib comment is debatable). This has been written off, like several such misdeeds, as “Trump being Trump.”

In Nixon’s case, it has taken almost half a century for the truth to come out about the 1968 election — about his own conspiring with a foreign power, and the steps that he took to affect that year’s outcome.

Nixon feared that Lyndon Johnson’s election year initiative to negotiate an agreement that would bring an end to the Vietnam War was nothing more than an “October Surprise” designed to elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey. (LBJ had pulled such a trick in the off-year elections of 1966.) And so Nixon employed a campaign official, Anna Chennault, to act as a go-between and persuade South Vietnam to drag its feet and scuttle peace talks with North Vietnam. He — and she — promised the South Vietnamese better terms if Nixon won.

Tragically, peace was indeed close at hand in 1968. The Soviet Union, wanting to promote Humphrey, had promised Johnson a “breakthrough” in the talks and vowed to pressure North Vietnam. But Nixon’s attempts to monkey-wrench the talks were successful. In a telephone call to Sen. Everett Dirksen, a bitter LBJ, who had been getting details of Nixon’s machinations from electronic eavesdropping conducted by US intelligence agencies, accused Nixon of “treason.”

(Trump has offered no evidence for his claim that his campaign was “tapped” by President Barack Obama last fall, but there is no doubt that LBJ was eavesdropping on Chennault, a Nixon campaign official, in her discussions with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.)

There is a law — the Logan Act — that makes it illegal for a private citizen to interfere in the foreign affairs and diplomacy of the United States. Nixon appears to have crossed that line; without more facts, we cannot say that Trump did too.

The deep state — correlation: modest

Like Julius Caesar, cut down by Brutus and a gang of conspirators, Richard Nixon fell victim to a coalition of mutinous forces. He had clashed repeatedly with Congress over its power to declare war, to appropriate funds, and to have access to presidential documents and tapes. He declared war on the press. His antipathy for the State Department, the CIA, the military brass, and other power centers was well-known, and his reliance on backchannel diplomacy with China and the USSR spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plant a spy in the White House. Nixon may also have alienated the federal judiciary by pledging to end its lifelong terms and security.

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

The FBI offers an instructive test case on what Nixon’s rash antipathy yielded. Nixon had come to power in Washington with the help of Director J. Edgar Hoover, but after Hoover died, the president provoked the bureau by trying to install a Nixon loyalist as a replacement. “Deep Throat” — the legendary anonymous source for Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward — was Mark Felt, a deputy director that Nixon passed over when choosing Hoover’s successor.

Trump has been tormented by leaks he blames on Obama holdovers in the national security agencies and other entrenched bureaucracies. Trump profited during the campaign from FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour revelation about Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Comey was reportedly outraged by Trump’s allegation that Obama tapped Trump’s headquarters during the campaign and, according to leaks, demanded a public repudiation of the imputation. (And now, of course, Comey has been fired.)

Scandals — correlation: to be determined

There are more than half a million responses to a Google search for Trump and Watergate. But as much as his critics hope to see the 45th president exit the White House like Nixon, we have a long way to go before “Russiagate” is reasonably equated to Watergate.

There are obvious parallels. Both scandals stem from break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters, whether real or virtual. Both involve electronic eavesdropping. And credit must be given to Roger Stone, a minor figure in the Watergate wars, who managed to survive the decades since and surface once more in the Russiagate stew.

Yet Nixon had years to dig his grave, and the Watergate scandals were, as Woodward and Bernstein famously wrote, “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.”

The DNC headquarters at the Watergate were one of a half-dozen targets for burglary and/or bugging, including the campaign headquarters of Sens. Edmund Muskie and George McGovern and the offices of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. By the time Nixon resigned, Watergate was a vast umbrella. The scandal brought to light subsidiary issues — like whether Nixon shortchanged the Treasury on his income taxes, and used taxpayer funds to protect and improve his Florida vacation home — that have obvious correspondence to Trump’s behavior.

But there will have to be some remarkable revelations — proof that Trump and his aides offered inducements to the Russian hackers — before Russiagate can be compared to Watergate. On the other hand, if it is proven that the Trump campaign, in league with a foreign power, stole the White House, it could supplant Watergate as the greatest political scandal of them all.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which is being published March 28.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

[plotmoney9-blog]

Director Tamara Jenkins returns with Private Life, a sharp and funny examination of infertility and art

It speaks to the complexity of Tamara Jenkins's Private Life, which recently became available for streaming on Netflix, that even its title can be read multiple ways. On the one hand, the film is indeed about private life: the plot centers on a middle-aged couple (Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn) as they try to have a child, exploring the options of in vitro fertilization, adoption, and egg donation. On the other, the title is deeply ironic; the film is also about a crisis in American public life, namely our culture's suppression of intellectualism and the arts. Jenkins weaves her social concerns so gracefully into her storytelling that the title's second meaning barely registers until after the movie ends. As in her previous directorial efforts, Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) and The Savages (2007), Jenkins displays such a gift for creating three-dimensional personages that the film succeeds smashingly as a character study. Yet her interest in character isn't limited to psychology; she also wants to consider how her subjects fit into a larger social system, and it's this aspect of her talent that makes Private Life such an affecting—and ultimately devastating—work.

It's also quite funny. Jenkins tends to deliver her observations with a satirical tinge, and she has a knack for writing sharp one-liners as well. The movie's first extended sequence, set at an in vitro fertilization clinic, is frequently riotous, as Richard (Giamatti) and Rachel (Hahn) find themselves at the mercy of one comically fatuous medical professional after another. The specialist assigned to their case, Dr. Dordick (Denis O'Hare), is a marvelous caricature of unwitting condescension, recalling the cringe-inducing doctors of the Elaine May-scripted classic Such Good Friends (1971). After a botched IVF, Dordick explains to the couple that Richard is having trouble producing sperm, awkwardly comparing his reproductive system to a soda fountain. He suggests that they visit yet another specialist, who charges $10,000 for a consultation, so they can address the issue.

Strapped for cash, Richard calls up his brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) to ask for money, and following their conversation, Jenkins introduces the film's third major character. Charlie's wife, Cynthia (Molly Shannon), takes a call from Sadie (Kayli Carter), her 25-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Sadie is in the middle of a crisis of her own—she's struggling to finish her creative writing degree at Bard College and is generally unsure of how she wants to proceed with her life. ("Finishing college at 25 isn't exactly an achievement—it's damage control!" the high-strung Cynthia shouts, hinting at years of contention between the two women.) Without asking her parents for their input, Sadie declares that she'll go to Manhattan and crash with Richard and Rachel, with whom she's always been close, until she can get her act together. A few weeks later, she acts on her plan, moving in with the beleaguered, albeit still affectionate, couple.

Sadie's arrival in New York City comes after Dr. Dordick suggests that Richard and Rachel consider egg donation as a solution to their problem. The two had ruled it out some time before (Rachel compares it, not unreasonably, to science fiction), though they begin to take it seriously after a strained meeting with an adoption agent. The narrative strands come together so neatly that one can easily guess where the story will go from here: Richard and Rachel will ask Sadie to donate some of her oocytes and the three will develop into a postmodern family unit. This does happen, and fairly quickly at that; Jenkins is too sophisticated a filmmaker to draw out needless suspense, and besides she's less interested in plotting than in exploring the nuances of relationships. In her affection for the couple and her emotional dependence on them, Sadie suggests the daughter Richard and Rachel never had; at the same time, she's something of a stranger in their world, often inadvertently hurting the couple's feelings with observations about their lifestyle. ("Look at us," she says one morning over a relaxed breakfast in the couple's smallish East Village kitchen. "We're like an ad for assholes.")

The young woman's most stinging comments concern Richard and Rachel's past. Shortly after coming to Manhattan, Sadie goes off on her classmates at Bard, mocking their artistic aspirations by citing how hard it was for her step-uncle and aunt to make a living as theater artists. It's only in this scene that Jenkins reveals that the couple used to run an experimental theater company and that they had to shut it down because it didn't make any money—adding insult to injury, their former theater space is now home to a Citibank. While Rachel has found some success as a novelist, Richard has given up on the arts, going into business with an organic pickle company. (The name of his company, "The Pickle Guy," doubles as a comic allusion to his difficulties with potency.) Sadie's fixation on Richard and Rachel's background in theater makes one realize how little they talk about art at all, despite living in a bohemian milieu. It's as though they're living in hiding.

Jenkins doesn't devote much time to the couple's past, nor does she have to—the humiliations Richard and Rachel suffer at present speaks to their fall from social significance. Yet the knowledge of their fall informs Private Life, adding metaphorical heft to the primary narrative. The couple's inability to have a child mirrors their inability to pass something down, on a cultural level, to future generations, and this sense of futility makes them bittersweet, if not tragic figures. Giamatti and Hahn convey the characters' frustration poignantly by refusing to make it the defining trait of their performances. They seem defeated from the start of the film—even their arguments quickly evaporate into passive-aggressive grumbling—yet their perseverance can be moving; ditto the way they respond to situations with self-effacing wit.

Consider an early scene where Richard and Rachel tell their adoption agent about having been scammed by a potential surrogate mother they met online, a charismatic young woman who lied about being pregnant in order to get two strangers' attention. This episode, which Jenkins presents in a series of flashbacks, would work as a stand-alone short film. Brilliantly edited and full of observant details, the passage explores various social ills of the Internet age—atomization, the failure to make meaningful interpersonal connection, the weird fluidity between the public and private—better than films that devote their entire running times to the issue. It concludes (like Private Life itself) with the couple pushing on, considering further options for how they might realize their dream of having progeny.

It feels sadly appropriate that Chicagoans will be seeing Private Life in solitary environments, as Netflix isn't releasing the film theatrically here. The company's model of premiering feature films online speaks to our culture's growing tendency to make art a private experience, a trend that goes hand in hand with the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts and arts education in public schools. Jenkins clearly sees the situation as bleak—her film has a pointedly chilly aesthetic, and she tends to make her characters seem isolated even when they're sitting among other people. Even when Sadie gets invited to the arts colony Yaddo late in the film, the development feels vaguely melancholy; Jenkins presents the colony like a sanatorium for people with the disease of believing that art still matters in America. Still, Sadie's ebullient personality shines through the darkness of Private Life, suggesting that her qualities as an individual—her wit, her compassion, and above all her creativity—might carry over to the public sphere.   v

Source: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/private-life-tamara-jenkins-paul-giamatti-kathryn-hahn/Content?oid=60804595

[we-co-lab]

“the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”

The American poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” We are not just animals that use language: we are storytelling creatures, for telling stories is a fundamental activity of all people in all cultures. The Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald expresses this well:

Language is basically for telling stories… . A gathering of modern postindustrial Westerners around the family table, exchanging anecdotes and accounts of recent events, does not look much different from a similar gathering in a Stone Age setting. Talk flows freely, almost entirely in the narrative mode. Stories are told and disputed; and a collective version of recent events is gradually hammered out as the meal progresses. The narrative mode is basic, perhaps the basic product of language.

Stories, then, are more than just stories. It is with our stories that we make sense of the world. We do not experience a world and afterward make up stories to understand it. Stories teach us what is real, what is true, and what is possible. They are not abstractions from life (though they can be that); they are necessary for our engagement with life. As the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

Unaware that our stories are stories, we usually experience them as the world. Like fish that do not see the water they swim in, we normally do not notice the medium we dwell within. We take for granted that the world we experience is just the way things are. But our concepts and ideas about the world, like the stories they are part of, strongly affect our perception of reality. In Buddhist practice, one learns, early on and then continually, the truth of my favorite bumper sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

This recognition may lead to the wish to strip away any and all accounts of the world and “return” to the reality behind them, to get back to the bare facts of experience. But that too is enacting a story, the story of “letting go of stories.” The point here is not to deny that there is a world apart from our stories; rather, it is to say that the way we understand the world is by “storying” it. Unlike the proverbial fish, however, we can change the water we swim within. Our relationship with stories can be transformed.

Stories are constructs that can be reconstructed, but they are not free-floating. In other words, we cocreate the world we live in. We need stories that account for climate change and enable us to address it. We cannot simply un-story global warming—although some fossil fuel companies have tried. Living according to certain types of stories tends to increase suffering, and living different stories can reduce suffering.

It is with our stories that we make sense of the world. We do not experience a world and afterward make up stories to understand it. Stories teach us what is real, what is true, and what is possible. They are not abstractions from life (though they can be that); they are necessary for our engagement with life. The central character in the foundational story that we return to over and over is the self, supposedly individual and real yet actually composed of the stories “I” identify with and attempt to live. Stories give my life the plot that makes it meaningful. Acting out one’s stories has consequences, a process that in Buddhism is called karma. From this perspective, karma is not something the self has; it is what the sense of self becomes as it becomes entrenched in its roles. Habitual tendencies congeal into one’s character—and one ends up bound without a rope.

There’s an important difference between improving one’s karma and realizing how karma works, which is to say, our problem lies not with stories themselves but with how we identify with them. One meaning of freedom is the opportunity to live the story I identify with. Another freedom is the ability to change stories and my role within them: I move from scripted character to coauthor of my own life. A third type of freedom results from understanding how stories construct and constrict my possibilities.

According to the British cognitive scientist Guy Claxton, consciousness is “a mechanism for constructing dubious stories whose purpose is to defend a superfluous and inaccurate sense of self.” The main plot of such stories tends to revolve around fear and anxiety, because the central character—“I”—can never achieve the stability and self-sufficiency that is sought. Such narratives attempt to secure and aggrandize an ego-self understood to be separate from the rest of the world.

Those efforts boomerang because, as Buddhism emphasizes, such a discrete self is delusory. Awakening involves realizing that “my” story is part of a much larger story that incorporates others’ stories as well. Our stories do not have sharp edges; they are interdependent. Like the jewels in Indra’s net, they are composed of other stories, recombined and internalized. I grow up by accepting some of the stories that society provides, and I reinforce them by acting in ways that validate them. Stories teach me what it means to be a boy or girl, American or Chinese, Christian or Buddhist, how and why and to what extent things like education, religion, money, and so forth are important.

The stories that make sense of this world are part of this world. It is not by transcending the world that we are transformed but by storying it in a new way. Or, to say it another way: we transcend our world by being able to story it differently. When it comes to religion, that means changing the metaphors we live by. Understanding religious metaphors and symbols in a literalistic way is a modern phenomenon that usually misses the point. In Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, Joseph Campbell writes:

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

The metaphorical nature of religious language means that its assertions are difficult to evaluate. Myth, like metaphor generally, avoids this problem by being meaningful in a different way. Religious doctrines, like other ideologies, involve propositional claims to be accepted or refuted. Myths provide stories to interact with

77_Stories

The Buddhist myth about Siddhartha’s fateful encounters with an old man, an ill man, a corpse, and a renunciate can be taken as historically factual, or as an imaginative way to represent why Siddhartha left home, or as a literary device that may have nothing to do with the actual life of the Buddha. Yet the myth is an effective way to story his teaching. Understood symbolically, this polyvalence is not a problem, because that is how myths work. It is not a matter of literal truth or falsity. As Rabbi Akiva Tatz writes in Letters to a Buddhist Jew, “All my stories are true. Some happened and some did not, but they are all true.”

A better way to evaluate a myth—a symbolic story—is to consider what happens when we try to live according to it. The most important criterion for Buddhism is whether a story promotes awakening. A myth that is interpreted for me still needs to be interpreted by me, by what I do with it—and what it does with me. A story about the suffering of old age, illness, and death challenges the stories with which we try to ignore our mortality: the importance of money, possessions, fame, power. Letting go of those preoccupations opens up other possibilities: different stories, and perhaps a different relationship with stories.

Myths are not simply bad stories that need to be replaced with rational and scientific accounts that more accurately grasp the empirical world. From a story perspective, one of the most dangerous myths is that of a life without myth, the story of a realist who has freed himself from all that nonsense. The idea that science and systematic reason can liberate us from the supposed unreason of myth is one of today’s popular fictions.

Stories have social functions as well as individual ones. Some stories, for example, justify social distinctions. Medieval kings ruled by divine right. A Rig Veda myth about the various parts of the cosmic body rationalizes the Hindu caste system. We challenge a social arrangement by questioning the story that validates it. When people stop believing the stories that justify the social order, it begins to change. When French people no longer accepted the divine right of their king, the French Revolution ensued. “Change the stories individuals and nations tell themselves and live by,” writes the Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, “and you change the individuals and nations.”

One of today’s dominant stories is that we live in a world ruled by impersonal physical laws that are indifferent to us and our fate. Human beings serve no function in the grand scheme of things. We have no significant role to play, except perhaps to enjoy ourselves as much as we can, while we can, if we can.

This story of a universe reducible solely to physical laws and processes has social applications as well. Evolution by natural selection undercut what remained of the West’s old religious story: God was no longer needed to explain creation. Soon after Darwin publishedThe Origin of Species, his theory was appropriated to justify the evolution of a new type of industrial economy. Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” and applied it to human society. You must crawl over the next guy on your way to the top, or he will crawl over you. The value and meaning of life were largely understood in terms of survival and success, the measure of which was mainly financial, not reproductive. In this story, life is about what you can get and what you can get away with until you die. You’re either a winner or a loser, and if you aren’t successful, don’t blame anyone else.

The stories that make sense of this world are part of this world. It is not by transcending the world that we are transformed but by storying it in a new way. Or, to say it another way: we transcend our world by being able to story it differently. Not coincidentally, Spencer’s social Darwinist story appealed most to the most powerful. Industrial tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie embraced his philosophy. As did John D. Rockefeller, who in a talk to a Brown University Bible class justified his business principles by comparing them with cultivating a rose, which “can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.” It is not clear whether the pruned rosebuds refer to Rockefeller’s competitors or his employees, but we can be sure who the splendid, fragrant rose was.

Obviously, the basic outlook of social Darwinism—that one should pursue one’s own economic interest even at the cost of others’ well-being—is still very much alive and thriving. From a Buddhist perspective, it seems equally obvious that this story rationalizes some very unsavory motivations, including the “three poisons” of greed, aggression, and delusion. It is the deluded belief that one is separate from others that permits one to pursue one’s own interests indifferent to what is happening to those others.

Sociologists have pointed out that a social application of Darwinism confuses impersonal biological processes with more reformable social arrangements. But if enough people believe in that story and act according to it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We socially construct the world according to those principles and society in turn does indeed transform into something like a Darwinian jungle. Using natural selection in that way becomes a Kipling-like “Just So” story along the lines of “How the Leopard Got Its Spots.” Such tales typically begin “Long ago on the African savannah” and become a game of finding the evidence for the worldview we want to buttress: “And that is how we came to be how we are now.”

As I write this, a new Oxfam report states that in 2014 the richest 1 percent owned almost half the world’s wealth (48 percent), while the least well-off 80 percent owned about 5 percent. If this were happening in accordance with basic socioeconomic laws—well, we may not like such a development and might try to constrain it in some way, yet fundamentally we would need to adapt to big disproportions. This is how a social Darwinist type of story can “normalize” such a disparity, with the implication that it should be accepted.

But there are alternatives. Instead of accepting such a story—which serves only to rationalize the growing wealth and power of a privileged elite—we can look for better ones, better because living according to them would reduce social dukkha, or suffering. Collectively as well as personally, our stories can change, and in this case must change, so that we can better respond to the economic and ecological challenges that now confront us.

In the pluralistic climate of contemporary life, the foundational narratives that served us in the past—religious and secular—can no longer be understood in the same ways. We can retreat into a parochial framework that views only one worldview as true, or we can embrace the multiplicity of stories and perspectives in a spirit of playful nonattachment. Knowing that we live in a world made of stories, we can, in the words of the Diamond Sutra, “let the mind arise without fixing it anywhere.”

[peakwealth]

The Will of the People (2)

 The Public Against the Public Interest

                                      “To the fool-king belongs the world.“

                                              (Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805)

 January 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. Day one of the new age when reality turned liquid. (Screenshot)

Of all the canaries twittering away in the coal mine of Western dystopia, the one that chants about infant immunizations must be among the loudest. The other day I noticed a picture taken during a demo of people opposed to the compulsory immunization of their children. One of the so-called antivaxxers held up a printed sign that read

 STIFLE

UNCOMFY

SCIENCE

The words have shock value for they capture the present revolt against reason and empiricism, against what is perceived by many as the unsettling, uncomfy nature of science -- as if it were a stained old IKEA sofa to be dragged onto the sidewalk and disposed of before dawn. The notion has taken hold that if science makes you feel bad, if it doesn't resonate with your inner self, or your religious faith, you can simply reject it. Opt for 'science' you are comfortable with, be it pseudoscience or complete bogus. Or no science at all.

There is of course nothing new about the discomfort caused by science or by any other sort of manifestly rational knowledge. The late German philosopher Norbert Elias (1) explains, as have countless others, how the human species, once it has domesticated the forces of nature, ends up feeling disenchanted. When the world is no longer revealed through religious myth but through reason, it turns out to be a thoroughly unsettling place. Existence itself, stripped of magic and fantasy, is a sobering affair. And the closer nature is examined, the less it shows any sign of making sense. It seems to lack the deeper logic that humans have always craved to give purpose to their short, insecure lives.

In other words, when reality does not match our hopes and dreams, many of us will reject it out of hand. But, says Elias, we have to grow up, we have to get over it: the universe is neither good nor bad, it is blind and doesn't care about us.

There we have it. In a blind universe, not only is there no god and no devil, there is no Santa either.

To make matters worse, observable reality isn't what it used to be. Ever since it came up with the story of Adam and Eve, authority has looked upon factual knowledge with suspicion. Knowledge was and still is equated with arrogance and transgression. For thousands of years, religions have ignored or contradicted rational thinking and have instead provided comfort to those terrified by the unknown as well as to those who revel in it.

But as science is not compatible with religious dogma, so empirical knowledge necessarily challenges ignorance. When science expands as rapidly as it does today, the world inevitably becomes a more disorienting place to people who are suspicious of the modern age and of all its complexity. Rather than bending their convictions to accommodate the evidence before them, they resent science for failing to provide the reassurance that will allow them to sleep at night.

Rational thinking can only go so far. Lacking transcendence and being a purely human enterprise, science is 'only' a process based on the best available evidence and therefore liable to change over time. It does not provide absolute answers and is therefore as powerless as ever against the rigid beliefs suggested by tradition and sanctioned by society.

The quest for unscientific answers never ends (Jehovah’s witness, 2016, Buffalo, NY, USA)

Again, such stubbornness is hardly new. Back in 1801, Friedrich Schiller wrote the famous line that "against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain" (in the somewhat less elegant German original: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens).  This leads me to surmise that today's problem is perhaps less with the discomfort produced by scientific relativism as with the word stifle, the aggressive readiness to sweep reality under the rug, to look the other way, claiming it is 'part of a vast cover-up'.

In this respect I may be behind the times. A few years ago I started hearing the argument that reason and science were evil ploys used by the elites to keep the people down. (Tellingly perhaps, the same was said about literacy or correct spelling as another tool of oppression).

Uninhibited anti-intellectualism like this has gained traction. It was adopted by right-wing extremists around the time when hooliganism morphed into political revolt, when the ultras, the heavies, les casseurs emerged from their soccer stadiums and moved into politics - identity politics.

But why? It is easy to point at the effects of capitalism or the intuitions of steamroller materialism (impulse shopping, binge watching, uncontrolled eating...) which in turn have given rise to impulse politics and gut-based decision making as exemplified by Donald Trump. I persist in thinking that at least some of today's populism finds its roots in trash culture, the unrelenting cult of celebrity, in computer games, spectator sports and so-called reality TV, all of which spread symbiotically in the late 20th century.

They ended up infantilizing a broad section of the population and unmooring them from evidence-based thinking. The resulting narcissism of the selfie generation and their lack of empathy then went on to infect the internet (2). Add the rising incidence of educational failure in 'advanced' societies and a new age of ignorance, superstition and triviality has emerged.

With his ample background in reality TV, Donald Trump quickly came to epitomize a post-political age where elections were popularity contests or open invitations to insurrection. The ballot box must look increasingly quaint in an age of web manipulation and click-farming where "influencers" gather vast constituencies of "followers" on Twitter or Instagram.

‘DEUS OMNIA VIDET’: from an all-knowing god to an all-seeing internet. (London,UK, 2018)

The internet has thrown everything wide open. Without reliable gatekeepers to police the discourse or to catch post-factual nonsense, it has given free rein to people who distrust reason and dislike complexity. It also suggests that, just as there is convenient and inconvenient science, there is a good truth and a bad truth, and that one is free to choose between them.

Before the internet became universal, factual reality was better shielded from manifest unreason or scientific deviancy. All kinds of people held all manner of wild ideas, as ever, but there was a cordon sanitaire around them that kept them at a distance. In order to publish scientific findings, for instance, you needed academic credentials and peer reviews. Getting any book published was a big deal. Access to the old media, far fewer in number and therefore more influential, was similarly restricted, ring-fenced, filtered by professionals whose job it was to check and double-check information. Such a system of checks and balances may have been perceived as censorship or elitism by some, but it kept the madmen out of the room.  

Not any more. The unmediated democratization of access has meant that anyone with an easy onscreen manner, no matter their lack of qualifications, can build up a following of millions. What works for make-up tutorials on YouTube can also do wonders to subvert the political process.

Liberated from restraint and social control, it wasn’t long before the web turned toxic. It was overwhelmed by conspiratorial fantasies, doublespeak and torrents of resentment.

Conspiracy thinking derives from paranoid disbelief, the haha! suspicion that things are not what they appear to be, and seems to be as intuitive as belief itself. It can be argued that one is indistinguishable from the other.

Belief in alternative medicine, in magic and miracles has been around for ages, as have religious practices such as the refusal to accept life-saving blood transfusions. Sometimes reason and paranoia actually intersect as in the perfectly rational distrust of big pharma. Generally, though, amalgamation is central to conspiracy thinking, as is the malicious disregard for observable reality.

The world changed two days after Donald Trump's was sworn in as president of the United States when photographs showed that the crowds along Washington's National Mall were much smaller than those at Barack Obama's inauguration. Not so, said Kellyanne Conway, a member of Trump's inner circle, they had 'alternative facts'. The photographs were not to be believed, your eyes deceived you. It was a historic moment. Trump's assault on reason, irrefutable facts and the media who report them hasn't stopped since that day.

Needless to say, post-truthism or postmodern disinformation didn't start with Donald Trump. Born-again George W. Bush was famously disconnected from reality, perhaps never more so than when he mistakenly declared war on Saddam Hussein in 2003 or when, standing on the deck of an American aircraft carrier only a few weeks later, he declared 'mission accomplished'.

But Donald Trump has created a matrix of all-out lies, disinformation and utter incoherence that is unprecedented and stands in the way of meaningful governance. Trump declares white to be black, only to reverse himself two minutes later and when confronted with the evidence of what he just said, turns around and says it's fake news. And his political constituency doesn't seem to mind.

Defactualization and magical thinking are now around every corner. Farcical as it may seem, some people continue to embrace the belief that mass shootings in the US are inside jobs staged by actors, that 9/11 was an obvious fabrication or, more insidiously perhaps, that European Union bureaucrats in Brussels are to blame for anaemic vacuum cleaners or dim light bulbs forced upon the United Kingdom.

Facilitated by social media, regression has corrupted politics and fed an us-against-them narrative. After moving into the mainstream with Donald Trump, it was embraced by populist imitators such as Italy's Movimento 5 Stelle (Five-star movement). They swept the elections in Italy's underprivileged, undereducated Mezzogiorno earlier this year. As a result, conspiracy theorists are now part of the ruling coalition in Rome and the incidence of measles is on the rise as unvaccinated children spread the disease. Politics in Poland and Hungary have similarly been upended by paranoia, anti-establishment rhetoric and outright anti-Semitism.

Wave after wave of primitivism and voter rage are destabilizing Western societies. Some of that anger has been a long time coming. Politics has lacked credibility for decades. Europe's leadership has been weak and often asleep at the wheel. In failing to assert its historical legitimacy, the gilded bureaucracy in Brussels has become an easy target of popular fury, no matter how uninformed or ill-advised.

The big, ugly question has become this: what to do, in representative democracies with universal franchise, when the will of the people is increasingly at variance with the public interest?

How can governments be expected to govern when hostile voters support irrational, counterproductive governance? How does the British government go about implementing Brexit, a decision imposed by a belligerent electorate against the country's manifest interest? How can the European Union continue when so many members of its own parliament oppose the very idea of a united Europe?

The Roman empire took centuries to unravel. We live in speedier times.

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Norbert Elias (1897-1990): Humana conditio (1985)

(2) ‘They Laughed at Berlusconi’ http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/146399295392

See also:

‘Let he RulingClasses Tremble’ http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/148844598007

'Autumn in America'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/152990750537 'In Bad Faith (3)'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/137980050202 'In Bad Faith (6)'  http://peakwealth.tumblr.com/post/141479058437

[apsbicepstraining]

The dangerous fantasy behind Trump’s normalisation

Boris Johnson has urged people to snarl out of the doom and gloomines. Yet such a situation is not normal. Persuasion ourselves the president-elect doesnt symbolize everything he says is a fantasize that stops us learning Trumpism for the barbarism it is

It was David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, who crystallised developments in the situation into a chilling shard, in accordance with the US presidential election result. Speaking on CNN, he said: When I listen to Conrad Black describe Donald Trump, I ponder Im hallucinating. When I listen him described as not sexist , not racist , not playing on white-hot fears , not energizing hate, when hes described in a kind of normalised acces, as someone in absolute owned of program lore, as someone whos somehow in the acceptable series of rhetoric, I reckon Im hallucinating. And I dread for home countries, and I dont think its unreasonable to do so. I accept the results of our poll, of course I do. At the same season, I feel Vladimir Putin played a distinct persona in this election, and thats outrageous. And weve normalised it already. You would think that Mitt Romney had won.

Hillary Clintons assent speech interred the tomahawk, on the basis that the quiet send of superpower a principle Trump explicitly accepted before the election would like to request that the society give him an open head and the chance to lead. Obama was warmer still: We are now all rooting for his success in marrying and guiding the country. The peaceful modulation of power is one of the specific characteristics of our republic. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world We have to remember that were actually all on one team.

The logic is that Democrat are, by definition, true-life devotees in democracy: theyre not the privilege. They dont is making an effort to charge or recount or rerun an election. That principle placeds off a series of replies suggested by reason and biography: if consenting Trumps leadership is the democratic way, then any American patriot should line up behind him. Other leaders of democratic societies should furnish him partnership and backing. The combat has been prevailed, and the only next theatre for a body politic is reconciliation.

Trump and Obama have good discussion at White House

Yet this situation is not ordinary or, if you prefer that in social media expressions, #notnormal. When girls are lining up for long-term contraception in a piteou, pragmatic farewell to their reproduction freedom; when the chief strategist accuses of permitting racism and antisemitism; when the vice-president-elect signed legislation necessary maidens to hold and pay for burials for miscarried foetuses; when the president-elect has pledged to deport three million immigrants; when he has at least 12 allegations regarding sex misconduct superb against him; when he has announced cabinet ministers that includes his own three children: this examines nothing like a democracy. It examines nothing like reconciliation. It seems despotic, inflammatory, extreme and murderous: it appears, in short, precisely as Trump promised it would look, as he campaigned on a pledge to jail his opposing. His adversaries react that he maybe doesnt mean what he says, a position for which there is precisely no evidence. Their desire to normalise has come up with them in the fantastical nation of viewing the forthcoming presidency as there is a desire to it, and not as it plainly is.

Normalising is not Nigel Farage frolicking in a golden elevation with Donald Trump: Farage was a man of the same stamp all along. The knowledge that his hyperbole was always so flaccid, so shifty, so euphemistic by comparison with Trumps doesnt excuse it any more than British decay is apologized when, compared with the USs, the summing-ups are always so paltry.

Boris Johnson: snap out of doom and gloom. Image: Zuma Wire/ Rex/ Shutterstock

But Boris Johnson, foreign ministers, telling EU captains to click out of the doom and mist, announcing Trump a dealmaker, someone with whom we can do business, telling us to see this is an opportunity: that is normalising. Gaze on the bright side, liberals. The sheer fatuousness of Johnsons speech, the absence of any recognizable values, or a backbone to place behind them, heightens in me an unfathomable, hot, eye-pricking feel of having been betrayed. How was it possible for Johnson to disappoint, after his delinquent and self-serving summertime? Its like discovering that a neighbor, after a long party-wall spat, has browsed you to the Stasi. I knew he was a jerking; I never realised he despised our shared humanity.

Normalising is not Marine Le Pen, up with the lark to hail the brand-new dictatorship of which she hopes to be the next beneficiary. But it is Theresa May waiting anxiously by the phone to assure Trump she would be his special relation; it is also a single column inch devoted to wondering how this affects our Brexit negotiating position. When you have a prime minister who will not raise a peep in defence of propriety, you are in a new world. Its data cannot be fed into age-old formulas.

Normalising is not the Ku Klux Klan taking a rosy-cheeked look of the Trump presidency, it is CNN questioning uncritically, contacting out for that judgment. It is currently in the process of pattern a gag out of the Breitbart headline, Would you preferably your child had feminism or cancer ?, issued under the inhuman chairmanship of manager strategist Stephen Bannon. I want to see the absurdity of it, but it is not amusing. Bannons ilk checks a woman on a quest for glory and equality and was intended to irradiate it out of her. Its like living in a John Wyndham novel.

Normalising is not anything the rightwing fanatics do, and they do not try: they dont look for acceptable labels for themselves. It is the mainstream that twists itself into conciliatory pretzel knots find nicer words for totalitarian, such as alt-right.

Democrats try to find the demerit within themselves: request not whether a racist dislikes; ask what induced the racist so indignant in the first place. Once we have found the right is part of the liberal elite to pin it on, the hate maybe wont racket so frightening.

All this has a few beginnings: there is straightforward dismissal, the first phase of heartbreak. Trump cant lies in the fact that bad, because that would simply be too bad. There is a sense that the far right doesnt precisely ignore liberal sensibilities, it actively takes nourishment from our anguish. The US journalist Wajahat Ali, writing the day after research results, described his conversation with his father: Please be careful if Trump prevails, his supporters will feel very energised. This was assumes out by the spike in racist and sexist hate crimes in the US, and resonates here in Britain, too.

Golden future? When Nigel fulfilled Donald. Picture: Nigel Farage/ PA

Racists are energised by the victory of racists, and announcing them racist simply rams that win residence. A year ago, to be antisemitic would have necessitated exclusion from public life, and now it amounts to fitness for high-pitched power. Every day you reassert a fundamental significance of humanity, you demonstrate a inexpensive, disdainful thrill to the person who reached it necessary for you to say it. You cannot shame a white supremacist; unaccountably, you feel the pity yourself when you try. The indict is so extreme, if they dont accept, then you are required to hysterical. There is an underlying truism, here, that the act of debating introduces its own legitimacy. If we are really going to go back to square one and have to explain why grabbing a woman by the pussy is a violation of her human dignity, or why you cant injunction an entire religion from your coasts, where does that discontinue? What field have you relinquished just by allowing the question? It is genuinely hard to say.

The hard right does not accept argumentation as a route to a shared truism; it is simply not how they are wired. They take a judgment; you take a consider; their view electorally dominates, you shut up. Expiration of, as they ever say on Facebook. You merely dont get onto, do you? You LOST. That is the authoritarian style. It is hard to escape a pragmatic conclusion that verbal duel is pointless, but it is also wrong; the following objectives now is not exhortation. I dont contemplate anybody is going to unearth any concealed finesse or rapport in the person or persons of vice-president-elect Mike Pence. The aims of moving these fundamental polemics is solidarity with one another, lest, in the stillnes, we lose our bearings.

As to the drop-off into leftwing in-fighting, so confusing from the task of trenchantly opposing a tyrant, it has the same motorist: if you are fighting to reach a consensus, nonetheless bitterly, you can only do so with people who will move. You cannot discuss climate change issues with a person who contemplates all scientists are crooked; you cannot consider abortion with people who conceive wives as chattel to begin with; its meritless. And hitherto to fight with one another is not neutral, it does more than just pass the time. It composes incorrect equivalence or, worse, a hierarchy that has its arse on downwards. If we speak about Hillary Clintons corporate cosiness and not Trumps endorsement by the KKK, “you think youre” unavoidably putting one above the other.

Stephen Bannon and the alt-right in the White House

What does non-normalising look like? Bernie Sanders told the Today programme today that it would be billions of beings coming together to defend the organizations and the legal rules. This is specific to the US, plainly there isnt much point in millions of non-Americans coming together, for all that the brand-new toxicity of the USs political culture concerns us all, essentially and theoretically. And its reactive, since the Trump presidency will choose the sites of the conflict. Yet there is intend and hope in recollecting, as the American Civil Liberties Union has, that the president is not pope; that there is a physique and a initiate of laws; that supreme court adjudicates can bend whichever way they will, but there are only so many ways and means of interpreting a constitution founded on the universal area of human rights; and that millions of people can and will oppose their traducement with the support of the ages.

A protester in Chicago with a clear message. Picture: Kamil Krzaczynski/ Reuters

The American columnist Masha Gessen, who has wasted the majority of members of their own lives living in dictatorships, gives her six rules for surviving under one, and they read as a direct accusation of the political answer so far. First, conceive the tyrant: if he says he will evict you, he means to. When you claim “he il be” exaggerating, you reflect nothing but your own are looking forward to rationalise. Relatedly, dont be fooled by tiny clues of normality, the curious moderate placed in this or that orientation, a peremptory call for peace.

Dispiritingly, convention No 3 is: Universities will not save you. The only meaningful mode to marry that and Sanderss call is to assume that institutions are as strong as the peoples of the territories ready to defend them. Rule No 4 is: Be outraged. Wherever you are in the world, however insignificant you think yourself, each time you shrug, caper, look on the bright side or do a Boris Johnson, you do grave sin to the people in the tyrants pipeline of ardour. Rule No 5: Dont shape endangers. This is to been set aside the grease of the modern political process. Politics cannot be the art of the possible when the impossible has already happened. No 6 is: Recollect the future. Trump cannot last for ever.

I would contribute a seventh, which is to remember the past: whether its globalisation or those who are left behind, whether its economic stagnation or the long, flogging tail of the financial clang, we should, as we clamber over one another to be modern in our interpretings, recollect there is nothing new about this history. It is the oldest in the world: nebulous rancours held chassis and intensity by the rhetoric of unabashed hatred. You cannot find common case on the plight of the low-waged; navigate your own style through the submerge of secular stagnation, and epithet Trumpism for the barbarism that it is.

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