John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN ANTI-EMPIRE

 

“Terrified of COVID-19?”  

“It’s just going to get worse. we can’t even begin to imagine what is in store for us. Meanwhile, the herd will beg for more.”

 

Sorry, I think you have fantasies about humanity.

Nobel individuals standing up for themselves? Perhaps, Marko, you read too much Ayn Rand?

Humanity is, and always has been, much like a herd.

The apes we’re descended from lived in tribal groups with sets of rules, just as chimps do today.

And they’ve even discovered that those chimp tribal groups periodically go off to attack a neighboring chimp tribal group, and do so quite viciously.

Does that sound familiar?

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Response to a reader who said, “Evolution still has a LONG way to go.”

Evolution is headed, and rather rapidly, towards artificial intelligence and robots.

They are the ones who will travel to the stars.

Our herd will be regarded as we do monkeys.

I believe in the search for other intelligent life in the universe – and absolutely it is there abundantly – the planets that really are advanced are likely robotic and have little or no interest in communicating with us.

That would explain the lack of signals despite years of effort looking.

There may be is only a relatively brief window in time when an evolving species such as ours is capable and interested in communicating.

For most of humanity’s 200,000 years, we’ve had no ability.

And perhaps in another century, our successors, the robots, will have no interest.

The universe appears to have a “destiny” towards self-understanding, given the way evolution works and the way the earth keeps a record of its own history through fossils and geology.

Intelligence is the “arrow of time” in evolution, and robots can before a very long time far exceed us.

After all, we’ve been 200,000 years just about right where we are but learning over that period how to do things.

That effort to learn how to do things will continue, but human capacity will be inadequate to the need. Our successors will carry on, even periodically building more intelligent generations of themselves.

Regarding other civilizations in the universe, it is of course possible that in the “transition phase” in which we find ourselves, many perhaps destroy themselves with nuclear war and other severe perils.

Weapons too grave for monkey brains.

 

Readers might enjoy:

https://chuckmanrobots.blogspot.com/

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Response to a reader saying, “It is truly terrifying to watch how the sheep have acquiesced in their own enslavement”

Hardly more terrifying than the destructive stupidities of WW I and WW II and Vietnam and the Neocon Wars.

An immense amount of resources and effort dedicated solely to killing many, many millions of people and destroying many, many things.

And, of course, what is the social order which directs all of that activity?

A pyramidal hierarchy just like ancient Egypt.

That’s the only way militaries ever function.

You find no Ayn Rand types ever functioning in a military. Nor any Mozarts or Bachs. They are outliers in terms of their genetic make-up.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE BY TOM PECK IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘Nigel Farage raved about populism to EU parliament – right after an Auschwitz survivor spoke

‘It was fitting, in a strange way, that he should save his most crass moment till last”

 

Farage can be pretty crass, but much of the time he is something of a showman, a political version of the old music hall comics, and he does amuse a large number of people. After all, he has had a serious effect on the future of about 65 million British people.

The world makes no real progress under leaders like Farage.

Absolutely none.

He represents Nativism or Tribalism.

And there’s lots of that around, but the fact doesn’t make it worthy or admirable any more than other primitive superstitions and beliefs, of which we have many.

Just as we advanced from local village with no real connecting roads in the 16th century to superhighways and fleets of jets connecting everything, so our future in global trade and economics and society is in institutions like the EU, not in a music hall comic waving a plastic British flag.

And by the way, just getting to that Union Jack flag was a long and difficult history, from some tribal Celts conquered by Romans with later incursions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Norman French. England is a hybrid society, not some purest vision.

Historical change and development don’t just stop at some moment that appeals to some people and stay stuck there.

That’s the view of some religious cultish folks like Mennonites or Amish or Hasidic Jews. It’s wrong for most people and packed with superstition, and it goes absolutely nowhere in terms of progress.

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Response to a comment saying “Always the idiot …”. Supported by many idiots.

Just as Jesus said, “The poor you have with you always”, so with idiots.

It’s just the human condition and why it takes so long to get anything worthwhile done.

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Response to a comment saying, “In the 21st century democracy = populism”

That’s simply not true.

We have very little democracy anywhere, but a great deal of “populism.”

The establishment uses populist movements as tools of control.

Just as Hitler was made possible by bankers and industrialists, both from Germany and America. The Third Reich just would not have existed without them.

John Chuckman

COMMENT – ON THE NATURE OF TRUMP’S LEADERSHIP AND OF HIS FOLLOWERS

 

Donald Trump is something new to the American presidency. In style and language, he is the first president from Dogpatch, the fictional home of the old Sunday newspaper comics character, Li’l Abner. It is remarkable for a man who seems also to like dress-up occasions with tuxedos or tails and resorts and mansions, but there is just no denying the identifiable mindset and attitudes. It’s the Beverly Hillbillies living in an expensive Fifth Avenue apartment.

A Trump political base supporter has many Dogpatch qualities, especially in wanting little to do with international arrangements of any kind, except bombing, or real progress which necessarily entails uncomfortable change. The attitudes towards foreigners and minorities are what you’d find in Dogpatch, as well as the conviction that much of that ugly world out there just wants to take things from Americans.

Trump understands all of that in his gut. He is not thoughtful or at all intellectual or analytical, but he has the animal cunning and instinctive understanding of a high predator.

When Trump showily hugs a big, thick, satiny American flag to his cheek, posing for a photo with a slightly crazed smile as though he were under the spell of a drug or a sensuous woman, he’s providing a kind of American patriotic parody of a Russian Orthodox Church icon. That flag, for those Americans, hugged that way, captures their constellation of beliefs and dislikes, including providing a symbol of their home team ready to take on all foreigners. It absolutely does not represent rule of law, democratic values, and close regard for human rights.

Emerson wrote of most men “living lives of quiet desperation,” and I think there’s much truth in that, but I believe confusion is the state of a good portion of humanity, more than many people would care to admit. And Trump’s crowd is confused. That’s one of the reasons his supporters are so enthusiastic about him. He is confused, quite apparently about a good many things, and that makes a kind of brotherhood bond.

As does the fact that he refuses to admit to ever having any confusion, insisting on just stomping his feet and charging ahead like a bull. Confidence. Leadership. At least what his crowd understands as leadership.

Part of the confusion we see fairly widely in America represents a lack of critical education. America’s public-school system is risk-averse and politically extremely touchy. It has little tolerance for the kind of educators who impart genuine critical thinking.

Part of the confusion represents irrationality, mental imbalance, forms and shades of madness, conditions remarkably common in people. Think about all our biases and prejudices and fears, think about our superstitions, our religions, our politics, think of all our violent crimes and senseless vandalism, and you may agree with me that we are much less rational than we credit ourselves with being.

Trump’s supporters recognize their qualities reflected in him. Trump is not a man who reads, at all, and he is not a man to listen patiently to experts. He is in fact an extremely impatient man. Those, too, are defining characteristics for a goodly portion of America’s people, and he is their man. Expressions like, “He don’t take no guff!” and “She thinks her sh-t don’t stink!” are ones I’ve heard repeated many times through my life. They are “as American as cherry pie.”

Great leaders, and Trump is anything but, do not necessarily mirror the nature of their followers. Instead they are able to fashion a set of actions and policies with which many can identify or take pride in at least some portion. Putin is a very good example. I don’t think a great many Russians resemble him. He is an exceptional person in many qualities, but he is able to construct a program, parts of which most Russians can identify with and take pride in. That is sophisticated leadership. What Trump offers is more along the lines of nativism and tribalism.

Many years ago, journalist Tom Wicker wrote a book about Richard Nixon called “One of Us,” and that phrase captures what the people of Trump’s political base see in him. Never mind the wealthy status and resorts and tuxes and endless rounds of golf, he is one of us. That makes for a strong bond, such people relishing Trump’s exalted status combined with the crude way he enjoys it, a kind of bringing things down to their level, the kind of thing some old comedy teams, such as the Marx Brothers, used to do in movies.

No high-falutin airs. Likes watching television and eating hamburgers. Often believes he’s done something when he hasn’t, reminding one of that old American architype, the gracious and gentile Southern Colonel who in fact never was a Colonel.

Trump’s always ready with a new outpouring of words to defend what he has done badly. Never at a loss for words even when the words contradict what he’s already said. Confusion. Irrationality. “Bull sh-t baffles brains,” another phrase once commonly heard in America.

The confusion of people who would never think of taking “the Lord’s name in vain” supporting a man who does so regularly. The confusion of people who like wars and anything where America gets to come out on top supporting a man who avoided military service through a feeble excuse, a college basketball player incapacitated by heel spurs?

The confusion of people who for the most part do not like people who are not like themselves, as say, Muslims or Mexicans or Chinese. There’s no denying it, various strains of racism have always been part of the American social-political fabric, likely originating both in the long-lived institution of slavery and in the brutal wars on indigenous people that came with the long westward expansion. Related also are America’s Mexican and Spanish wars and hostilities and acts for limiting or preventing Chinese migration to the West Coast.

Perhaps, too, the great waves of earlier migration, mainly from poor parts of Europe, brought the prejudices of many different peoples, for it is fundamental part of human nature to have prejudices. Prejudice is not the property of any one people. It is society’s job to control its possible effects and to enforce fairness, but it cannot make prejudice go away. A President or any high official who gives off a sense of indulging prejudice, as Trump does even if he isn’t personally acting on it, is working against the proper duty of government. Some of Trump’s people love him for that.

Americans are people with a lot of resentments and anger. You can feel the anger in American society in many places just by walking around on the streets. Hard to get a good job and keep it. Hard to earn enough to have the things an American thinks he should have. It’s been like that while, for a good many years since the blindly happy days of “the American Dream.” It is, of course, just a symptom of America’s relative economic decline in the world. And whatever Trump says, fantasizing for his political supporters, there is little to be done for that but hard work and sacrifice and investment for the future.

But that hardly provides an attractive, snappy political program. Far more appealing are fantasies, like MAGA, and bellowing aggression towards those who are doing well because they do understand those principles, like the Chinese. And so much more readily embraced when the opponent is different. Differences enable people to visualize hatreds, much like statues of demons on Cathedrals.

It wouldn’t occur to many that all that borrowed money spent on the Pentagon and foreign wars could have been spent instead on the homeland equivalent of China’s New Silk Road, vast infrastructure improvements that would generate jobs for many years to come, improve the nation’s future competitiveness, and at least leave things of worth behind when the inevitable time comes to pay the bills for all the borrowing. But that’s just not the way most Americans were raised to think.

In reality, their political system makes it almost impossible for Americans to choose such a path. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the Pentagon and security services serve empire, and empire serves the establishment and the plutocracy. It generates careers and wealth for all the participants, and it’s just too bad for everyone else. The political system isn’t structured for change. No one with power wants change. And Trump’s delusions about grabbing from the rest of the world and giving it to Americans represents a one-way trip to nowhere. It represents, in effect, a continuation with new rhetoric and raises the risks of war and conflict along the way, but, of course, that’s music to the ears of much of the establishment.

No, the Pentagon is regarded much like the photo of Trump hugging the flag. A holy icon. It has been brainwashed into the society.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Is the U.S. in a constitutional crisis? Depends who you ask

“The current standoff is a stress test for American democracy, scholars say, unlike anything in history”

 

We have something similar in Britain, a country without a written Constitution, its “constitution” said to be the body of traditional practices and laws and court decisions.

There is a battle between Boris Johnson and Parliament over the required steps and procedures for BREXIT. He has even been accused of lying to the Queen in order to get Parliament adjourned temporarily.

Johnson resembles Trump in many personal characteristics and is perfectly ready to ignore traditions and rules and to skirt laws. I’ve called him Trump with an Eton accent.

Both situations, Britain and the US, mainly result from the fact of extremely driven, rude and narcissistic men having taken office. Men convinced they are right and ready to defy anyone saying they are not. Johnson, of course, hasn’t even been elected by anyone beyond his own Conservative Party’s convention, a rather odd aspect of Britain’s “democratic” political system that a man in that position can drive the nation hard on a very contentious and consequential issue.

What I think we see is the weakness of organized institutions in the face of such men. Institutions like legislative bodies or a founding document like the American Constitution. Look at Trump’s international record. He’s torn up important working international treaties, ignored the UN and ICC, arbitrarily hits nations with sanctions – which are, strictly speaking, American laws for Americans, having no legitimate application to other nations – and tariffs. He’s created chaos in half a dozen places.

Trump is the very kind of man that written constitutions are expected to be able to limit or stop, but I think the expectation is wrong. He will only be controlled by the country’s civil law in avoiding the clearest criminal acts such as killing and extortion.

As far as his personal history goes, he has always skirted rules and laws in his business and private life, but that’s part of what makes him so attractive to his base supporters. America is, and always has been, a nation with a great many scofflaws. Some of the wealthy signers of the Declaration of Independence were little more than smugglers, some were in the business of stealing native lands, and many were slaveholders, which was at the time not against the law strictly but was nevertheless regarded by the world’s thinkers and writers as against the spirit of the law.

Of course, in the sense most people think about elections, Trump, just like Boris Johnson, wasn’t even elected. He is one of a number of minority American Presidents owing to the Constitution’s Electoral College provision.

In a sense, I think Trump is going to demonstrate how inadequate the American Constitution really is, and we know already that it has many inadequacies and weak points, including the Electoral College. Then there’s the immense difficulty of changing the Constitution even slightly. There are many long-simmering arguments about the Constitution and taxes and conscription and gun ownership and going to war.

And, of course, slavery as an institution was, in an indirect fashion, written right into the American Constitution, a fact which I think should give anyone pause who regards that document and its authors as extraordinary. The very fact that slavery was included in a covert fashion is perhaps evidence that the Founders recognized already that it was a shameful institution.

My statement about the Electoral College, of course, is based on the assumption that all elections should be decided by democratic majorities, something which most people today take for granted as a basic principle. But that was not the view of America’s Founding Fathers, many of whom regarded the word “democracy” much the way “communism” was regarded in 20^th century America. That’s why the hybrid thing they created is called The Republic, and loyal Trump supporters are the very people who want it to stay that way.

Americans have long fooled themselves about the Constitution being so perfect, but it’s not, not at all. And I think in the end, no document or tradition or institution can effectively control the kind of man with a true tyrant’s temperament and impulses, once he has managed to creep through the cracks into a position of power. Hitler destroyed the in-many-ways admirable Weimar Republic. Stalin ignored the Soviet Constitution, many of whose provisions were quite advanced and generous-sounding.

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Response to a comment saying, “One day the only thing people will remember about Trump was he was a most repulsive man”

True for many, but his loyalists will always say otherwise. I’m afraid that kind of division of opinion is just part of the human condition.

Remember, there were Russians, millions of them, who genuinely shed tears when Stalin’s death was announced.

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Response to a comment:

The United States never has been a democracy, although ordinary people and popular media do use the term. For the most part, at an official level, it doesn’t even claim to be one.

It’s always been formally called a republic, a rather nebulous term covering a huge variety of past societies, none of them very democratic and some not at all, like ancient Rome.

America’s Founders, many of them, did not trust the idea of democracy, fearing it had the potential through majority voting to siphon off the wealth of the kind of men who wrote the Constitution.

The contemporary global-empire version of America has only become worse in that regard.

Money totally dominates both national elections and the workings of foreign policy.

The wealthy give the money for the elections – the United States spending literally billions every national election – and they get a return on investment through policies and government activities. Their huge sums of campaign money also effectively form a barrier to entry against candidates not coming from the two official parties. If you don’t have a very fat wallet, you haven’t a chance of being elected.

I’ve explained how it all works here:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/