racist, misogynistic, fraudulent, fascistic, infantile, corrupt lunatic fantasist moron — Kenosha Kid

What I am hearing you say is that you didn't like Donald Trump.

Here's a play you might want to read sometime when you have nothing better to do -- The Bacchae by Euripides. The tragedy features Dionysus and his mortal family.

At the present time, there seems to be an opposition between the philosopher, boundary-behaving Apollonian type and more experiential boundary-violating sex-drugs-and-rock & roll Dionysian type. For what it is worth, the Greeks contrasted these two types 2500 years ago.

In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity. Dionysus is the god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, and theater, and appeals to emotions and instincts.

We humans can not be one or the other: Too great a focus on the Apollonian mode leads to arid sterility, and immersion in the rites and rituals of the Dionysian mode lead to debauchery and Alcoholics Anonymous. We will inevitably blend the two; the trick is in the best possible employment of logic and rational thinking while also attending to both the pleasures and pains of the body.

Christian theology, at least -- and I suspect not at all alone -- has given much more attention to the mind and spirit and not nearly enough attention to the body--to our embodiedness, in whatever shape it appears. Philosophers follow in the footsteps of the theologians on this front.

The Classical Greek Sex, drugs, and rock and roll scene could be found in various places, among them worship centers around Eleusis, near Athens. The Eleusinian Mystery religion was aided by hallucinogenic drug-taking (as far as we can tell). Sex wasn't a big part of the Eleusinian scene, as far as I know, but arrangements were made for alcohol and sex elsewhere.

Classical Greeks with means liked to attend the mystery rites. It was, as we might say, a safe place to trip out.

One of the things that made the 1960s - 1970s so memorable was the blending of the Apollonian and Dionysian modes, with lots of sex, alcohol, and drugs coupled with heated political discussions, demonstrations, and lots of cultural consumption (reading, film, music, TV, etc.)

Calvinist, Catholic, Capitalist Culture just doesn't relate well to Dionysus. That's why one has to boldly break on through to the other side.

Everything you said in your post pretty much matches my understanding. And you are right about the utopias appealing to their authors.

Two interesting asides:

"Fascism" had a specific invention: "According to Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's own account, the Fasces of Revolutionary Action were founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan, which became the National Fascist Party two years later."

Mussolini's urban rebuilding policy in Rome was apparently quite successful (I've never been there). And the architecture he liked was in general pretty decent (much better than Hitler's or Stalin's taste). Italian fascist-period design was a forerunner of the again-very-popular mid-century modern style. (There's no political connection between fascism and the mid-century style.

Here are two examples:

Hey, Charles: I'm not an expert on history; just giving it my best effort based on limited knowledge.

For my money, the major flaw of BLM is that they have not articulated any plan that would have any effect on black-on-black violence. And they should, because black lives matter as much as anyone's, and the death rate from violence is extraordinarily high in poor black communities, and it isn't police that are doing the lion's share of the killing.

The people who would become Nazis did not have a party at all at the very beginning. They took over a very little workers party in the early 20s and that became the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler thought that communism was a Jewish creation, along with capitalism, and despised everything that he thought the Jews were responsible for. In both Italy (Mussolini) and Germany, communists and fascists were bitter enemies.

Kindred spirits? I don't think so--despite the fact that the Communists, German Nazis, Italian Fascists, et al produced brutal regimes. Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini were all three very bad hombres, especially the first two. However, their founding documents and their intentions were far different. The history of the Soviet Union is quite different than Germany's, and history of course has something to do with the way things turned out.

Utopian? Jesus! If you think the nazis were building a utopia, I hate to think what you would call a dystopia. Dogmatic? Yes. Totalitarian? Similar, certainly. Equally socialist? Hitler's Germany never approached liquidating the private ownership of the means of production. Most of German Industry under the Nazis was privately owned.

As for the scope of the Nazis and Communists -- both of them were intent on world domination. Hitler had big plans for the rest of the world; the communists did too.

OK, thanks for the encouragement. On closer examination, my arithmetic applied to the New York Times map shows Biden winning by a hair or two. But again, Biden will not signal any sort of Reformation, though it would be an enormous relief to see Donald Trump hauled away by solid waste removal.

it feels like something has to break — Mr Bee

This applies to either Biden or Trump, for different reasons, and things are already breaking. Public health efforts were sufficiently hobbled to prevent the pandemic from having free rein. At this point, Covid 19 is out of control. Forest fires. Near-term unsustainable policies that are unlikely to change under either presidency (CO2/methane emissions, for instance). Global warming -- the Arctic as prime example. ETC. Economic disaster? Already in progress for a large share of the population, and a bail out won't cure it.

Apparently 'the situation' of individuals in closely contested states precludes accurate polling. In states which are predominantly liberal or conservative, people seem to be more forthcoming about their intentions. And/Or the techniques polling companies employ are just not that good. Are the polling samples too small? Are the polling questions misstated? Are the statistical processing of the results erroneous? Don't know.

Maybe wishful thinking is the problem.

What's the comparative success of commercial market research? I don't know whether they can reliably predict whether a new brand of apple sauce will fly or not.

I don't happen to reside in a literal superpower state which has changed the course of the lives of billions for the worse. — StreetlightX

Where you happen to reside is neither a virtue you can claim nor a vice you can be convicted of. Unless, of course, you chose to live in a shit hole country so that you could help make it a worse shit hole, then that would count against you--which, by the way, isn't your situation as far as I can tell.

As for your arraignment of the United States, I pretty much agree with it. Once one gets behind the official version, one finds an appalling history. Slavery, of course; genocide, obviously. But then there is the history of how working people (minimum 90% of the population) have been exploited, suppressed, and thoroughly misinformed about it all, and have been fed a false narrative which cripples critical thinking. Then there is the US as Global Power, another trail of tears.

Early on Wednesday afternoon, 11/4/20, it looks like Trump will prevail. And if he doesn't, Biden's presidency will not be any sort of national reformation.

I can associate with the down feelings of the man in red. God, I just don't want to put up with another 4 years of that fucking asshole!

Nice outfit. Who is the depressed person supposed to be?

Those 100,000,000 mail in ballots are not all counted yet -- it's a slower process than scanning ballots at a poling station. The suspense is awful.

↪Wayfarer To be honest, I think typical conservatives are better at divorcing people from subjects and will happily vote for a douche if that means they get what they want. So Trump's behaviour is totally irrelevant to them as it should be. It should've been irrelevant to Democrats as well. — Benkei

A given conservative may not like aspects of Donald Trump, but in what he says--and how he says it--they see something very likable. They may not have much in the way of health insurance, but they do believe in reducing the weight of the government. Millions of Americans have had a hard on to cut the federal budget ever since there was a federal budget. They may be losing ground economically, but they don't see taxation as a tool of the 1% used against them. So when Trump flails away about cutting taxes, they like that.

The average conservative probably does not want to see the police gunning down every demonstrator marching for civil rights, safer streets, civil protection, a just economy (etc, etc, etc,) but they don't like seeing black people marching in large numbers; they don't want to see high school students demanding environmental protection. Why should that half-assed 17 year old be judging me for driving a SUV? There is a lot of stuff they just don't like at all, and Trump seems to be against what they are against,

There is nothing uniquely American about this. American politics are uniquely American, of course, but other countries have their own uniquely embarrassing practices and experiences.

I have been reading 1877: OUR YEAR OF LIVING VIOLENTLY. Rutherford B. Hayes [some people called him Rutherfraud...] had just been elected in a very dubious electoral process, and the country was awash in far more violence than we currently have to put up with. Much more. Corruption was rife. Capitalist exploitation of the workers was remorseless, and the robber barons of the gilded age reigned supreme. Strikes were suppressed by the arms of the state. Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, and Native Americans were being ruthlessly oppressed and abused. The country was also in a severe depression, without any succor coming from Washington (or anywhere else).

From a distance of 140 years, we are likely to look back on the the last two decades of the 19th century as "the good old days". But as Otto Bettmann, the famous archivist said, "The good old days were TERRIBLE". Life sucked a lot more in 1877 than in 1977 or 2020.

getting worse precisely because of our aping Americanisms — StreetlightX

So you must live in "a shitty country filled with shitty people who have made the world a worse place to be for everyone". How are you not one of the shitty people?

The US doesn't have so much influence on the world because of our solid gold virtues; it's because of our extensive inventory of armaments and very large GDP. That is true for all other leading nations, past, present, and future. "Nice" is nice, but having nuclear subs and hellfire missiles launched from drones are features to think twice about. So is being one of the world's biggest consumers of the stuff everybody makes.

emotions, though difficult, even impossible, to put into words, are, at the end of the day, physical in nature. As per physiologists, emotions are simply certain biomolecules attaching themselves to receptors on neurons, these events causing emotions. — TheMadFool

The music begins. Molecules of dopamine and serotonin are emitted, circulated, received, and up took. Perhaps you are with your partner, both hearing the music; you kiss, cuddle, and canoodle and some oxytocin is added to the mix. Warm moist rose colored light suffuses all. Lovely.

If you think emotional experiences were purely physical, would administering the proper dose of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin produce the same experience for you, sitting alone in cool, sterile lab room? I would think not. Chemicals do not make the music resonate with you, and kissing and cuddling a plastic mannequin would not be a warm fuzzy experience. There's too much content missing.

It seems like what neurotransmitters do is to actualize the emotions arising out of experiences, memory, or Imagination. If spiders frighten you, it isn't cortisol that will cause fear. Cortisol will enable you to get away (or to attack the room-sized arachnid).

Contrary to the preceding, when people experience psychotic mania, perhaps the chemicals come first, stimulate all sorts of wild thoughts (hallucinations, paranoia, intense fear, anxiety, anger, etc.) In this abnormal situation, the chemicals cause the experience of emotions in a very crude way,

I am both a soft-core Marxist and a soft-core Christian. My doubly soft-core social conscience compels me to at least try to understand the causes of the major injustices to which people are subjected. There are a couple of books which I think do a very good job of explaining why so many black people live in abject poverty:

#1 would be A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America by Elliott Currie. Currie isn't focused on police violence; he's more interested in the extremely high levels of violence within the black community--black on black. Why some groups, and some parts of the country have much higher levels of violence than others can be analyzed and understood. This issue (regional disparate levels of violence) was first given serious attention in about 1880. Some of what was found in 1880 is still true. But highly uneven access to opportunity and deep poverty are leading causes. That plus a plentiful supply of guns.

#2 would be the The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. Rothstein shows how US Government policy, particularly through the Federal Housing Administration, systematically favored two generations of white families with plentiful assistance in obtaining new suburban housing, while forcing black people to accept inner city housing (which usually meant living in a slum). The upshot of FHA policy is that by the time it was ended, discriminatory policy had greatly enriched white families while greatly impoverishing black families. Having been carried out coast to coast, the bad consequences of FHA policy would be extraordinarily difficult to undo or redress.

BLM tends to be way too focused on police violence. It is entirely understandable that minorities should be concerned about police violence: It's official violence performed by some level of the state. The state is supposed to protect citizens, not selectively oppress them. However, internecine violence claims many times the number of black people than those killed by the police.

Well, I've never met the founders of BLM, or even local coordinators. Alicia Garza said (in a quote Google found) "“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk”. And that is a significant achievement.

I don't know what "a trained Marxist" would look like. There are people who read and discuss Marx and Engels; there are a few people who teach Marxism, and there are a few people who belong to very minor political parties that are "Marxist" or Marxish.

"We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories." I too am super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. Maybe you are also, sort of.

The people I referenced--who wouldn't have been able to present a cohesive ideological point of view--were not leaders; they were neighborhood people milling around watching the fires burn. Which is what I was doing, too.

Certainly, insurgencies can arise from the left as well as the right. At least in the United States at this time (last 20 to 30 years) it has been the white supremacist / anti-government right that has been the source--such as the individuals conspiring to kidnap the governor of Michigan. In the 1960s and 70s groups like the Bader Meinhof gang were leftist, and exceptionally violent. The Chicago Democratic Convention riot in 1968 was leftish.

I don't think BLM and ANTIFA are synonymous; their tactics seem to differ significantly. For one thing, BLM is able to marshal much larger and more diverse numbers in most parts of the country and they do not ordinarily spar with their opponents or police in the manner of ANTIFA--at least like in Portland, OR. BLM can mount very large, and pretty much peaceful demonstrations. Large demonstrations--left, right, or center--tend to be inconvenient for those not involved.

The riots we saw in late May and June were not as much partisan as opportunistic. Incidents which serve as provocations and then receive social media distribution, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric, can quickly wind up into riots. There was a small number of specifically ideologically left and right people present in the Minneapolis riots. Most of the people there (black, white, hispanic, asian) would have been hard put to present any sort of cohesive ideological point of view.

Of course the riot in Minneapolis spiraled out of control because there were no controls. Nobody was in charge of the riot.

if a convict is also more likely to be prototypical of their Gender in appearance or even hyper typical — Benj96

Why on earth would a convict be proto- or hyper-typical of their sex?

are we then as a society negatively selecting those physical (biochemical) or psychologically traits that led this person to behave as a criminal? — Benj96

I was just reading a book, 1877: Our Year of Living Violently (2010) by Michael Bellesiles in which the author references the thinking of some late 19th century prison enthusiasts EXACTLY along the lines you mention -- life imprisonment of 'hereditary paupers and criminals' would over time result in fewer paupers, fewer criminals, and fewer crimes.

Even in those "unenlightened ages" others suggested that it might be the case that upbringing and the environment had more to do with pauperism and criminal behavior than heredity. Moreover, the 1870s saw the US in a severe multi-year depression with national railroad strikes and minimal resources available to charitable organizations. If there was more crime (there seemed to be) perhaps it was because of Very Hard Times.

Another reason there was a lot of crime was that the southern states allowed concealed carrying of firearms, and many people carried guns with them. Minor disputes could escalate into a fatal shooting. Even school children sometimes carried concealed guns and sometimes used them to settle disagreements on the playground, Sound familiar?

Another factor was that southern courts refused to recognize murder as anything more than self-defense (unless it was a black-on-white killing) and would not convict. One of the reasons the southern courts behaved this way was that violence was a central piece of punishing black people for their mere existence. It was a harsh regime, and poor whites too were expected to toe the line. So, a lot of people got shot for bad, very bad, and absolutely atrocious reasons.

The general principle that "anything worth doing at all is worth doing well" certainly applies to masturbation. The experience of billions is that masturbation is imminently worth doing as often and as well as possible.

Kant:

Masturbation has been considered "A Problem" for quite a while--a perversion, an act against god (one ought to fuck a member of the opposite sex and beget children), an act against the state, an act against whoever wanted to feel aggrieved about it. It has variously been considered unhealthy, a drain of vital energies (see books about tantric sex) and precious bodily fluids (see Dr. Strangelove), and a crime. Some guys think it is an insult to their manhood that they should ever have to masturbate--somebody should jolly well make themselves available to fuck.

Fortunately a lot of people have dispensed with the nonsense of ages past and no longer give a rat's rear end what Immanuel Kant thought about masturbation.

"the word fascist is intended to mean oppressive, intolerant, chauvinist, genocidal, dictatorial, racist, or aggressive."

I think it was Paxton in Anatomy of Fascism who said that fascism is characterized by a method as much as its content. It has tended to be ruthlessly indifferent to prevailing democratic norms. The National Socialists in Germany (Hitler), for instance, seized power. Rarely, if ever, did the Nazi Party ever do well in elections (except when there was no choice but to vote for them).

Fascist parties have usually had a devoted following -- sometimes composed of odd bedfellows. Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, the various South American fascist-type dictators, etc. Fascist totalitarianism (like Hitler's) didn't leave room for an opposition.

Does the United States have a fascist movement? Some of the white supremacist militia types resemble fascists. But it doesn't matter in the end whether they fit the formal definition or not (whatever one uses). What does matter is that crypto or pre-fascist groups not be allowed to develop into militias, parties, or gangs that have the power to disrupt democratic society. (That's different than preventing them from speaking their opinions.).

Is Trump a fascist? I heartily loathe and despise Trump and his party, but I don't think he is a fascist. His behavior as president isn't even all that original. We've had grotesques serving in the Presidential Office before, and as regrettable as they are, they aren't fascists. They aren't eligible for summary execution. They are just abysmal people who should never have gotten anywhere close to nomination, let alone winning an election. For that you can lay blame the political parties, the media, and the idiots who supported them early on--usually wealthy people, which was the case with Hitler and a few other fascist dictators.

I will try not to drown in the deep seas of the unconscious mind which I wish to explore. — Jack Cummins

You can't drown in "the deep seas of the unconscious mind" because YOU are the deep sea. This isn't Freud. My theory is that "I" exist in the unconscious. Not Freud's SUBconscious sea of unutterable wishes, but my sea of enormous back-office operations where I exist outside the view of my front-office public relations staff, spies (observed sensory input), and all the public stuff. The front office (consciousness) isn't writing this. The public relations people are watching this as it goes up on the screen. The big Composition Group in the back office is putting the ideas together and sending it out to a transmission desk where fingers are instructed to hit the right keys.

I live in the unconscious, but I can't consciously observe my unconscious self because I am not exterior to it. I am in it, the interior. What goes on here can't be observed by the front office - conscious mind. The front office gets its marching orders from back here, not the other way around.

In my humble (maybe quite mistaken) opinion, we (front office consciousness) give ourselves too much credit. We tend to think we are in charge. We have a little control, but it's the back office that does the heavy lifting, major decision making, decides on priorities (like ending up at our favorite pub even though we said we would be home at 21:00. The back office decides how much risk to take, or not, often before the front office even knows it will soon be doing something it didn't plan on.

How can you tell whether what you are reading or hearing me say is coming from the unconscious or the conscious mind? You can't. The flow of instructions from the massive unconscious back office to the small conscious front office is seamless. What you see and hear is coming from the real me (the real person).

That's my theory, none of which should suggest that we can't drive ourselves crazy. There have been some pretty ugly conflicts in my back office which disrupted business for years on end. I just couldn't quite get my several idealist / realist / dreamy / pragmatist political parties to cooperate. So I was often working at cross purposes with myself.

Peace has reigned between my ears now for... maybe 8 years. Age and circumstances I wasn't in charge of brought me to retirement and living happily alone again. If I could take "where I am now" back to the time I was 30, say, "I could have been somebody -- I could have been a contender" (as Marlon Brando said in On the Waterfront 1954). Oh well...

So, ONE OF THE TASKS OF PSYCHOTHERAPY OR SELF-ANALYSIS is to learn how our minds actually are working--especially if they don't seem to be working all that well.

Happy, fully functioning, highly productive, sophisticated people can, I suppose, get along just fine without thinking about how their fucking splendid brains work. Most of us, though, find there are problems upstairs that have to be dealt with.

So question, @Jack Cummins: Why couldn't I figure all this out when I was 30?

I will be wanting to find the evidence to check my own sanity — Jack Cummins

Having to prove one's sanity by finding a lost reference to an obscure story sounds too Kafkaesque.

"Your Honor, the defendant can't produce the reference, so Counsel recommends that the Court proceed with the involuntary commitment."

I know one person who has undertaken proper psychoanalysis. This fellow has a very vigorous / rigorous intellect, is very well read, and engages with people at a demanding high level. His two mainstay intellectual pillars are Freud and Marx. He claims that psychoanalysis helped him a great deal.

One has to undertake psychoanalysis; it isn't a therapy that can be applied to a patient in the way medication can. Any talk therapy requires the cooperation and active participation of the patient, but psychoanalysis is a major project. Surely a belief or confidence in its efficacy is essential. Stupid, neurotic thinking just has to be sorted out, and it takes a committed patient, a very insightful therapist, and time.

On the other hand, drugs for a lot of major mental illness--like bi-polar, psychosis, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, etc-can be given to the patient without a whole lot of belief involved. Thorazine suppresses psychosis whether the patient believes it will work or not. All the couch time in the world isn't going to help someone who is so depressed they are catatonic.

Still, there are millions of ordinary people who are screwed up by their upbringing, life experiences, or flaws in their mental apparatuses. Unraveling how one got screwed up (like feeling intensely guilty for one's rather pedestrian sexual desires, or the ways in which one defeats one's best efforts, or why one is such a domineering son of a bitch, etc.) isn't something that medication will help.

My best guess is that it isn't so much the particular theory on which psychotherapy is based, but the commitment of the therapist and patient to work together to produce insight and a path to changing one's thinking. In the end, therapy means change, and it can take a long time. Hence the requirement for commitment to the process.

Lots of pioneers in psychology have influenced the way we think about the world (philosophy). A simple example: early on psychologists learned that a variable rate of reinforcement is far more powerful than a steady rate of reinforcement. Gambling is attractive because we win (and lose) unpredictably. If we always (or never) won at poker it wouldn't have such attraction. Variable reinforcement explains some of our thinking and behavior. Habits (little apps of learned behavior) have something to do with our success or failure in life. So on and so forth. Psychology (and people like Freud) have dethroned the autonomous self-directed person. We are not masters of our own houses.

All that should have a significant effect on philosophy.

What Freud developed that was seminal and useful was a psychodynamic theory of personality development. The id, ego, and superego weren't merely levels, they were interacting forces, operating in the subconscious, and under social demands, all of which has to be continually resolved by the individual. (There's more to psychodynamism, of course, than id, ego, and superego.)

Yes, Freud got penis envy wrong; it's a problem for us guys--we all have one, but envy others. We at least make comparisons whenever we get the chance. Even guys with enormous penises aren't always satisfied; as one well endowed guy confessed, "they attract too much attention".

Anyway, here's a song by somebody that doesn't have penis envy.

You don't know what you want. Neither do I. Few to none of us know what we REALLY want because what we really want has so rarely if ever been an option that we have so little real experience in considering it. — Hippyhead

Observing that "what we really want has so rarely if ever been an option" is a useful insight, assuming that what we think "we really want" really IS what we want. I wanted "meaningful and fulfilling work" and a couple of times I actually had it. But meaningful and fulfilling work is scarce, and routinized work (as it always becomes) is a pretty much a drag.

What I have really wanted I finally obtained when I retired. I stopped 'working' altogether and now just do whatever I feel like doing, which is mostly reading, listening to music, absorbing information, thinking, feeding, sleeping, etc. There are chores that have to be done, but I can tolerate that.

Unfortunately 99% of us can not retire before we spend our drab wretched lives at work to MAYBE save enough to finally stop working at 65 and finally just do what we feel like doing. Talk about delayed gratification!

Another problem is that we can't choose what we want. We have attacks of wanting that are generally -- and on even brief reflection -- irrational, but stupid never stopped anybody from wanting something. That's what keeps the economy humming along. I recently had an attack of wanting a pair of expensive (on sale) boots that I did not need, by any stretch. Fortunately I dithered and they went back to their regular ridiculous undesirable price. No instant gratification--a loss for our GDP.

we all thought that Bush was the worst — Mr Bee

The Republicans have been electing a downward spiraling list of candidates since... Eisenhower in 1952.

1960 -- Nixon (slimy)
1968 -- Nixon -- not the worst president, even though he was a crook, slimier
1972 -- Nixon -- resigned in disgrace, slimiest
1980 -- Reagan (deplorable)
1984 -- Reagan (senile and more deplorable)
1992 -- H. W. Bush -- poor, but at least he had the insight to call out Reagan's "voodoo economics"
2000 -- G. W. Bush (abysmal)
2004 -- G. W. Bush (abysmal)
2016 -- Dildo Trump (sub-abysmal)

When does history begin? With the Big Bang? Life arising on earth? the appearance of Homo sapiens? Settled life 12,000 years ago? The rise of the city state? The invention of writing? Or 2000, as some history teachers say their students think?

As for the driving force behind history--maybe a better question would be "What is the driving force behind human affairs?" DNA? Sex? Security (food, clothing, shelter...)? Ego? Economics? Religion? Politics? We became a species and were successful hunter-gatherers for maybe 200 or 300,000 years, during which "economics" was absent. Do those hundreds of thousands of years not count in our reckoning?

I wasn't there so I don't know--and I don't think anybody else does either--why we stopped being successful hunter-gatherers and started becoming successful farmers and villagers. James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States thinks that agriculture was more like a conspiracy than an opportunity. It was a way of settling people down and then using them for plutocratic purposes. Whether Scott is right or not, don't know. His is at least an interesting proposal to think about.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Well, maybe not. We have had hierarchies of prowess, holiness, wealth, strength, and so forth, Classes, if you will, a long time. But to collapse 12,000 years of settled life and then say that what was going on in the wake of the industrial revolution in the 19th century characterizes all of history could be, perhaps, possibly, BOGUS. A mistake. Error. Over-generalization.

(Ok, off to the firing squad with you, Crank -- this is totally heretical and anti-revolutionary thought.)

Well are you a woman or disabled? — BitconnectCarlos

Others have had liberation movements as well. Gay liberation was a high water mark for me, but it would be absurd to claim it as the driving force behind history. I'm not sure that class struggle is the driving force behind history either.

The idea that there is a "driving force" behind history leads to teleological delusions -- like those embedded in the cliché that so-and-so or such-and-such "changed the course of history". The invention of dynamite changed the course of history. John F. Kennedy's assassination (or 9/11) changed the course of history. Facebook changed the course of history. As if anyone knew where history intending to go before dynamite, JFK, 9/11, or Facebook came along, from outside of history, to redirect the course of time.

History wasn't headed anywhere, so it couldn't change it's direction. Per the Cheshire Cat to Alice, "if you don't know where you are going, it doesn't matter how you get there."

History is what happened, and we don't know what it is until after it happens. Then something else happens. And so on. One damned thing after another.

Still, there are trends. The atmosphere and the oceans are warming up. The population of the globe continues to grow. Every day Amazon sells more stuff. But a trend as seen in the rear view mirror then predicted down the road isn't the same as history going some place.

The Iraq war was misbegotten from the beginning. The justification (that they were working on nuclear weapons) was a lie told to the American people, and everybody else. Worse, the US did not display insight into how to remove a mostly hated dictator without collapsing the whole society into chaos from which they have still not recovered. It was an altogether inhumane AND incompetent operation.

Let's turn to Iran, your preferred target. True, they were (probably still are) working on nuclear weapons and a rocket program with which to deliver them, but the US is not their target, as far as I know. A more likely target would be Israel or Saudi Arabia. Of the two, Saudi Arabia may have an edge in preferment.

The Iranian people will have to work out their own liberation -- not because nobody cares about them, but because it seems highly unlikely that the US, or any other power, can confer liberation upon them. We contributed a great deal to the Iranian people's previous suffering under the Shah. Let's not repeat the gift.

According to William Faulkner, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past." So there is that.

(The quote is from "Requiem For a Nun". It's not a religious book. The "nun" is a prostitute.)

By American exceptionalism, I meant that the US does the things it condemns others for. — frank

That is merely diplomatic hypocrisy. All very routine and customary. But it is unavoidable. Personally, I'm kind of naive. I'm always shocked when I see politicians behaving hypocritically.

Just because a lot of our wealth once depended on slavery should not prevent us from condemning slavery where it is still carried out. Just because we practiced genocide must not prevent us from condemning it elsewhere. Just because we have some liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels employed in government doesn't mean we can't condemn corruption elsewhere.

What is Important is for citizens is to be honest with themselves about their country's real history. I can not think of a nation that does not have plenty of bad history for which they ought to beg pardon.

Nations are all exceptional and they are all alike and different. Finland and Spain, Japan and Uganda, Russia and India, and so on. Politicians at the Helm of the State pursue what they think the nation's collective interests are. They can be quite mistaken, of course, with disastrous consequences.

So we aren't gorillas, we're civilized humans. — frank

Well... that would be nice.

Not to cast aspersions on gorillas, but the most elegant civilized being still has a primate limbic system humming away, which accounts for a lot of the sturm and drang of human existence. In Trump there is very little sublimation of emotions: his raw emotions just spatter everyone around him. A consummate diplomat (or con man) has his or her emotions under tight control.

Political realism — frank

Political Realism understands that exercising power can be a dirty business, but is nonetheless necessary. A realistic politician understand that he will get his or her hands dirty in the process, even when doing good.

I do not think "comfort" is a significant philosophical problem. The phrase "I am not comfortable with..." is a euphemism, a dodge, or perhaps even an empty expression. Certainly. it has been used far too often to retain any vitality. One could say, "I find the idea of a second Trump term nauseating." Or one could say "I am not comfortable with a second Trump term." Which one leaves the speaker the most wiggle room?

The word "comfort", and its derivatives (comfortable, uncomfortable, discomfort) have been enjoying an increase in popularity during the last 40 years. (information source: Google Ngram produces stats on the use of words in print over the last 220 years.)

Here's the frequency history for "uncomfortable":



"Comfort" and the other 3 derivatives have similar frequency histories. I've noticed the increased use of "comfort" and derivatives. I haven't yet starting loathing the term, or begun wishing to kick the "comfortable" user in the teeth, but... it's only a matter of time.

Why? Don't know. The popularity of words varies over time.

A laudable and economical proposal.

The Color of Law by Rothstein and A Peculiar Indifference by Elliott Currie provide a solid understanding of how housing segregation was engineered in the 20th century, and how the black population has been subjected to high levels of violence, both from within and without its communities.

Michael Bellesiles' 1877: America's Year of Living Violently [2010) and C. Vann Woodward's Strange History of Jim Crow (first published in 1955) describe how the black, hispanic, and Chinese populations were marginalized in the 19th century.

The lesson I take away from these books is that the elite moved deliberately and strategically to keep the majority white working class and minorities physically apart, and socially distanced as well -- by a lot more than 6 feet.

These and similar books explain much more than a BLM protest can. For one, they show how CLASS figures into systematic oppression in a way that a focus on RACE alone can not.

The Anatomy of Facism — darthbarracuda

Said to be the best available book on fascism. Someone (can't remember, might have been Paxton) noted that fascism is as much method as content. In other words, it isn't just what it attempts to achieve, but it's also its method.

What seems like a fascistic tendency in the Trump / Republican / right wing method is to blur certainty over what has been said (Trump says something quite objectionable, then a day later says the opposite). So then, what does the president mean? It's open ended. Years of this degrade political discourse to the point of meaninglessness.

Disregard for time-honored procedure, such as the Republican refusal to confirm Obama's last Supreme Court Nominee Garland, when 9 months remained in the year, then the rushed confirmation of nominee Barrett with 3 months remaining in the year. That alone isn't fascism, but it's part of a trend.

At the early end of Reconstruction (which had scarcely progressed towards completion) the newly elected Rutherford B. Hayes acquiesced to the former Confederate states becoming "the solid south" a one-party region of white oligarchic terroristic rule over blacks, poor whites, and hispanics (in Texas and the SW territories). Nobody called it fascism (the term hadn't been invented yet) but it was a variety of American fascism in place for about a century - 1877 to 1977, give or take a few years.

The Democratic Party in the south held a tight grip on the Senate and was able to impose it's preferred CIVIL ILLIBERTIES on the rest of the nation. For instance, blacks (mostly agricultural workers and domestics in the south) were initially left out of the social security, unemployment, and disability programs instituted in the New Deal. That was corrected fairly soon, but blacks were excluded from the federal housing program beginning in the 1930s and going forward (well into the 1970s). After courts and legislation remedied the exclusion, other mechanisms of discrimination were in place. The overall effect of the solid south strategy was a permanent marginalization of the black population. That 140 years after the fascist take-over of the south.

Fascism (in effect, if not in name) was established in the south through violence -- and flagrant violation of voting rights and constitutional protections.

I've tried to read Celine and haven't had much luck getting into Journey to the End of the Night. I should check out Becker and Horney. It's been... 50 years? since I last read about them.

name one event in a bullet's trajectory that isn't determined. — TheMadFool

Once the bullet leaves the gun, its trajectory is determined. But the moment the fool waving the gun around pulls the trigger is determined by chance. Not patternless?

BitterCrank, wear :mask: and stay safe. :smile: — TheMadFool

I do, you too.

I think I understand your clear explanation.

Chance events seem like they are part of the knowable universe. We don't know when they will occur, just that they do. And when they do, chance events will be entirely consistent with the behavior of physical objects.

Lots of people have guns, bullets, and hands to hold, point, and fire off bullets on any number of trajectories. The behavior of the bullet is entirely determined, but which trajectory the bullet will follow depends on events which are not lawful (determined)--all the factors connected with the firing of the gun.

So, if a bullet's trajectory from a gun located a considerable distance away should by chance pass through the container of gas particles, the shattering of the glass and the dispersal of the particles, will all be perfectly 'lawful'. But there is no law that states no bullet will be launched on a container-smashing-gas-particle-scattering trajectory.

That's my view. If you don't agree, that's fine; there's a chance that you won't.

There's a chance that you won't because, by chance, a highly charged particle may have passed through your brain and disrupted the critical processes of one neuron which was pivotal in determining the way you think about chance.

Given the number of highly charged particles in the universe, it's amazing we are able to think at all.