Category Archives: FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
If — in my own head — I hit a universal note just about right in Facebook or other conversation, I may simply wrench it from context and publish it here in this category as a mix of observation and, I hope, a writer’s wisdom.
The talk’s off the wall as one to some want an officer of the law to march into the Oval Office, pull him out of his chair, and subject him to a psychiatric evaluation.
The thought may inspire smiles, but I believe there are very few officials or officers warranted to intervene in what has become an absurdly surreal defiance of the Constitutional and cultural principles of the American state. Barr? White House Physician? Pence? Who else?
From the Awesome Conversation
There is no authority stepping up (yet) to do it — and we’re about to watch his minions march nationwide with themselves invalidating the election.
In a democracy, power rests with the will of the people as represented through elected assigns, and then it flows through legislatures and courts and is enforced by dutiful, honorable, and loyal military, paramilitary, and security forces. Well, we might see those forces tested in relation to their loyalty — as sworn — to the Constitution.
Trump appears so far to be pushing for the feudal or medieval solution: he’s the Great Leader; power is to revolve around himself and will be held together by the familiar carrots and sticks: patronage for those favored; threat and punishment for those inclined to resist his will.
How history may remember Trump’s Republican Zealots (to the extent that reasoning modern patriotic Republicans fail to find his behavior alienating) –>l
Sixteen federal prosecutors specially assigned to monitor 2020 election malfeasance told AG Barr in a letter today they saw no evidence of substantial voting irregularities, & asked him to rescind his recent policy change. w/ @thamburgerhttps://t.co/ncFQmpjn2Q
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate . . . .
Inspiration: a word image: “Imagine being a Democrat and having to pretend Joe Biden is competent, Hillary Clinton was innocent, and Barack Obama did a good job.”
From The Awesome Conversation
Joe has just won America’s toughest election; Hillary has no indictments pending; Obama didn’t do a good job: he did a terrific job.
Imagine waking up as an aristocratic deluded narcissistic head-nodding Republican incapable of a moment’s reflection on the distribution of power in a democratic society devoted to rule of law as opposed to unquestioning obedience — oaths of loyalty appreciated — to a “great leader”.
All kinds of people are unhappy with Trump’s loss of the American election — valid substantial and outcome-changing complaint has yet to surface in the courts — but none more so than in the camp that has brushed away “Trump-Russia” and now embraced “Biden-China”.
Well, for Trump’s Mob at least, welcome to Orwell’s world.
For everyone else, there may be some questions worth asking for the long-term (because the short-term may be shaping up ugly).
Excerpt From the Awesome Conversation
So to fix everything that has gone wrong since, oh, the 15th Century, you would like to take away self-determination — self-concept; pursuits of autonomy and competence along one’s own selected career and leisure paths; multicultural, multiracial, multi-religious tolerance — and replace that freedom for the person (“pro-choice”) with bureaucratic organization and force. ?
Re. Renmembi (or Ruble): I think the dollar will be fine if or when what’s bothering America finds its way back to integrity.
So-called “secular progressive atheists” comprise but one segment of the nation, but one might suggest that many like the late Christopher Hitchens (“Do you need God to be good?”) may well be forward of our national culture, and no less so than Thomas Paine was forward of his surrounding political culture in his day.
Re. Roe v Wade. I try to stay out of the trap, it has so many thorny questions, but much in its day had to do with coat-hanger abortions, health of the mother, justice in the shadow of rape, and all that. Why do we believe that “back there” is always and somehow (mysteriously) better than forward of the present?
“Capitalism” and “Communism” (and “Socialism”) have become dogma and successful political policy is (or perhaps should have been [the world’s been looking different to me lately]) is a thing well argued and hammered out into cooperation and greater integration across any given unit of geopolitical space.
What is the difference between a Free Man and a Slave?
Or a Citizen and a Loyal Subject?
Do most of the world’s political leaders believe that the most awful of medieval horrors (slogan-driven mobs; vast public ignorance; a nobility clouded in the contents of pressed sachets; pestilence for all on the streets; that sort of Monty Pythonesque thing) should be out ahead in our global future, or might some prefer to disagree?
There should be a chat somewhere online about the look of a good global tomorrow.
Inspiration: an older gent’s complaint from Oklahoma about a brush with two drifted young people possibly wanted for crime elsewhere.
Here’s the reflection From the Awesome Conversation –>
A reminder at this point: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ (10/4/2019). It’s hard believing the post has aged more than a year. Nonetheless, we have a large complex system for about 328 million people, and there’s a level of chaos in it served by criminal networks. The old “hippies” that would go on to “find themselves” may have distilled down to a wretched lot without a forward-moving cohort for channeling. The two cultures, criminal and not, glorified drifters and made an industry of the set loose young a long time ago. It still looks pretty on stage —
The American reality has not been so pretty for or with those so lost and rattling around desperate for basics and belonging.
Children, pretty much, depending on connections, family, and personal issues may be thrown into a . . . nothing, actually, deeply impersonal and mercenary, and one may wonder what that’s like today, so much attention having been paid to the “Baby Boom” generation and some successive as cohorts. Whoever they are now, they were all in it together (at Woodstock or Altamont or the Isle of Man — or places as meaningful in their generational journey).
Where are today’s American “set loose young”?
I’ve been at this desktop for so many years that I may even wonder at the look of the latest in disaffected lost youth. Sneakers, jeans, backpacks, and gadgets? Who holds on to what? How? Where are they going? What’s open (beyond the Amazon depot — or is that it?).
It’s about 10:30 a.m. EST here, and the reading listed immediately below has been prompted by Right Wing Nuts intent on repeating the latest in medieval conservative gossip circles . . . and I’m not sure they’re even doing that or anything other than inserting off-the-hook agitation and propaganda by way of accusations and false claims.
For the record — and this time — and concerning the Pennyslvania vote, no evidence has been brought to bear to prove that the incumbent and now lame duck President Trump and those who voted for him have been treated in the least measure unfairly.
In my opinion, and I know I am not alone in this, the President and his backers and supporters have chosen to delay the Biden Transition and degrade America’s democracy.
For the aggravation and energy involved (and that pesky measurement of cardiovascular health), I’m going to curtail for myself the idea that a human may compete with computers when it comes to assembling focused lists.
We’ve all been through this Man v Machine a few times in the past two centuries or so.
On Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion to create a worked-for-Trump blacklist. My conversational partner suggested that such a list would bring us back to Stalin. So, From the Awesome Conversation –>
It would bring us back to McCarthy.
We should live in a meritocracy with fine American judgment on the part of executives and managers throughout, but I’m certain we don’t.
The tension on which I have at times focused has been that between an incumbent or resurgent feudal absolutism — and all that implies — and a revolutionary democratic modernity.
Lists, nods, and whispers better define the former.
In life’s realpolitik, of course, most respond to the needs of family and friends first, and our friends are often people to whom we may relate, i.e., if enabled, we’ll hire the kind of people with whom we would like to work.
It has been said of whacked out paranoid Stalin that at the end, he felt he could not trust even himself.
On the political censoring of others and the question “Why?”
Narcissism.
For the malign and controlling, the process starts with “Narcissistic Mortification”, moves to covering (the damaged self) and splitting (an heroic new self). Along the way, these guys — “malignant narcissists” — bust through normal boundaries and limits and become deeply controlling manipulative (as with “gaslighting”). The Left-Right axis may be accidental or involve an attractive dogma, but the “grandiose and messianic delusion” that compels the peacock (or, sometimes, the fireman who sets the fire so that he may show up and put it out to public acclaim) always ends in the want of “unlimited narcissistic supply”, i.e., public acclimation, adoration, and validation without end. The cause matters less than the psychology.
The “Great Leader” has primarily his image to defend (so no free press as the stakes rise) plus always the want of astounding approval. Around them, the system becomes controlling, and around them, the seduced pick up the traits.
The professionals — like Jerrold Post — in the democratic west engaged pursue a dispassionate inquiry into political extremism.
A part of my journey has involved Soviet/post-Soviet issues, so I latch a little bit to the Communist legacy in the support of dictatorships. A look at the famous graduate of the Patrice Lumamba school may be revealing as would a look-see at the World Peace Council. While Moscow diminished the Communist Party in Russia, under Putin, it was to take up a hybrid 19th Century view a post-Imperial Era nationalism anchored popularly in a revived (and unfathomably corrupt) Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Army. The “blood and soil” format is recognizable and the stance persistently illiberal.
If possible, we should all choose the flag in the middle, as it were, but with sides, we (at least in America) Left-Far-Left and Right-Far-Right. I regard Left Fringe (who shout down their opposition) as holdovers from the Soviet Era and “The Party” way of doing business; the Right Fringe reminds of other reactionary movements, i.e., fascism in Europe and, perhaps, the “America First Party” in domestic politics in 1943.
In the way of some older men growing gray and tired, my patience for writing longer copy — and responding to endless online arguments — may be growing thin, so above I hope I’ve telegraphed a statement about political bullying, the sometimes ironic destruction of freedom by those who most pretend to represent it, and the related plundering of states by their own leaders. The “by any means” Far Out Left has indeed shouted down its favored targets, time and again, and it has carried forward from Russian anti-Semitic traditions its own brand of Jew-hate (reading recommended from other history: Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism, Cambridge UP, 2009), but Orwellian Left seems to me far from the moderate liberalism known to the best of America’s Democratic and Republican Parties.
Similarly, one cannot overlook the effects of 9/11 (2001 for kiddies) on both the promotion of necessary state security organizations and (less necessary) reactionary nationalists. On that tack, Erdogan, Orban, and Trump suffice for examples of a want of return to a medieval and frequently ugly political absolutism. All who would become dictators cannot wait to get their mitts on a state’s army and treasury — and then have at it with their perceived competitions — while “the people”, Left or Right leaning, may be seduced by dogma and made ready for plundering and damnation, and much to the delight of breathtakingly enriched family and friends.
I will have to find again historian Richard Pipes’ observations on Russia’s struggle with constitutional monarchy and with the concept of sovereignty. For the most part, Russia’s assertion of sovereignty considered property and persons alike in its dominion, and proof would be the right to destroy either at will and with impunity.
Think of that when you reflect, if ever, on Russia’s behavior across the so far long nine years of the Syrian Tragedy.
Europe chose a different direction in its comprehension and — in the end — consideration of others.
Inspiration: calls from the Right Far Right for an election “do-over”.
From the Awesome Conversation
To do it needs evidence, and no valid or reliable evidence for recount has yet to surface. Accusation and innuendo (from a president who lies to wives and everyone else) remains — and will be found — insufficient for delaying the calling of a carefully and highly secured election.
Now anyone can be wrong, and most of us will examine things we’ve done, have a look into our souls, and ask if the problem might be with ourselves rather than external forces. We query ourselves and experience either guilt, rightfully, or good conscience, rightfully. That integrity within ourselves is part of our being free to be Americans.
We don’t shout the other fellow down.
Our Left and Right fringes with immoderate human components want to have the world always their way. It’s their response to some perceived political impotence. Most of us want a world — and politics — that work OUR Way Together. So we compile (valid and reliable) data, and we go over our sense of ethics, morals, principles, and values — and we argue. That’s been more the right way of doing things — and getting GOOD things done.
From the hinterland far up north:
WASHINGTON — For 40 hours, President Donald Trump fumed in private and tweeted his grievances in all caps.
When he at last emerged, it was to stand behind the presidential seal in the White House and deliver a diatribe most notable for his litany of false statements about the election and his attempt to cast doubt on the integrity of the democratic process.
And so the incumbent President Trump has inspired Republican doubt —
Then the Trump campaign then got lucky: The case was assigned to a federal judge who had been appointed by President Trump just last year.
But when the arguments began, and the Trump campaign was presented with every opportunity to come forward with evidence, it had none whatsoever supporting its claim — so the Trump-appointed judge had no choice but to throw out the lawsuit.
Even sources like Fox and the New York Post that have been favorable to the conservative framework have questioned President Trump’s political perception.
I’ll agree that leftward spin attempts to conflate the President’s attitude with laxity toward these groups, but that these groups find hope with Trump and number among his supporters — and they have grown with his presidency — tells us about the character of his mission despite the harness that comes with high office.
Trump’s enthusiasm for Alex Jones, his several felons (start with his initial selection of “campaign manager” Paul Manafort), and his positive relationship with conspiracy theories tell us about us and what we are willing to endorse.
Post-Election — and the FBI will soon publish a report on domestic terrorism that includes an assessment of white-supremacist threats — race and religious issues will continue to fester in America despite so much progress made through civil rights and other activism across decades. They will do so — we will have this region of domestic conflict — because of the resonance between “camps” set up by those who foster and harbor fear and hate in relation to their chosen targets among fellow Americans.
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