Posts Tagged ‘dictatorship’
On a couple of repulsive dictators, mostly
So in my old age I’m finding that the world is going to pot. Under the circumstances I’m lucky to be living in Australia.
Of course the world is much more than China, or the USA, or Russia (in population order), but these are the potty countries I’m referring to – or to be fairer and more accurate, the countries with the pottiest leaders – that I know of.
China has Xi Jingping, the first of the scumbags – not necessarily in order of scumbuggery. He’s in a battle of sorts with his military leaders, apparently because they’re not being warmongering enough. The USA has Trump – need I say more? And Putin – it’s now more or less official – has failed in his brief military operation against Ukraine, with a loss of men, or drone fodder, coming up to 2 million. Not that psychopaths care about such numbers.
Of these three horrific scenarios, the one I’m probably least willing to look at is the Trump shite. So… well let’s, look at Putinland. I’ve been watching The military show on Youtube, which can get quite technical at times, but they generally present a scenario of Russian failure. This is of course what I want to hear, but I’m also quite skeptical. The Russians surely aren’t this stupid. I’m surprised that Putin has miscalculated so badly, but I just can’t see him giving up after having invested so much in this invasion. And yet… if he had something more substantial to throw at the Ukrainians, leaving aside the nuclear option, he surely would have used it by now. And surely, even Putin’s position must be less secure after such devastating losses.
So… I’ve been watching more of The military show, which presents the devastation being wrought upon Kiev – so maybe they’re not being so one-sided, though it’s clear this is no Russian propaganda show, to put it mildly. I just hope their stuff is accurate. Recently they’ve presented ‘the most dramatic naval upset in modern history’, no less – that being the destruction of Russia’s naval blockade in the Black Sea. Ukraine, as even I knew, has long been a massive wheat and corn exporter to many NATO states, as well as China and other rather powerful countries. When the war started, those exports were reduced by almost 50%, and things were looking very grim for the country’s ability to fund its defences. However Ukraine and its allies appear to have outsmarted and out-manoeuvred the Russians, using mines, artillery and missiles – a ‘defensive triangle’ (watch The military show for details), and then developing its unmanned drone defence/attack systems with a rapidity that has apparently astonished the military world. They seem to be underwater drones, or not, pardon my ignorance, and they were designed to attack en masse. A second iteration of these drones, far more powerful than the first, has been launched successfully, and Ukraine’s exports have more or less completely recovered. And much of this response happened within the first year or so of the war! They’ve described it as ‘one of the most successful blockade-breaking operations in modern history’. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s been much competition – I’m such a spoiler.
So, hats off to Ukraine, in a situation in which the US ‘superpower’ under Frump has been mostly less than helpful, and NATO seemingly bound up by a less than helpful bureaucratic structure. Meanwhile, how is Mr Pudding faring after all these years of anti-Ukraine warfare – arguably starting in February 2014? Well, it seems that, though he’s nowhere near winning, he’s also nowhere near giving up. In fact, it seems he can’t give up after all his rhetoric and all his losses. This just can’t be all for nothing. And that of course is a dangerous situation indeed, because there is only the nuclear option. He can’t win otherwise, he can’t go on forever, but then, how can the nuclear option be a win? It won’t of course, so the whole thing becomes a monument to stubborn stupidity which can only end with the end of Putin. It’s truly tragic for the Ukrainian people, and the Russian people too.
So let’s look at China, which I’ve not really been focussing on (nor Russia really, for why focus on god-awful governments that are far away and you can’t do anything about? Hmmm). One website called China Update has the headline ‘Total Annihilation’, just in case people aren’t paying attention.
So apparently a couple of the top military figures of the country have been arrested by China’s dictator, Xi, and what with other brutalist changes, the military leadership ‘group’ has now been reduced from seven to two – but effectively one. Meanwhile a long-term anti-corruption drive, aka Bullshit Incorporated, has been fuelled by Xi’s paranoia and hubris, and has left ‘command chains fractured and experienced leaders sidelined’, which has supposedly degraded the country’s capacity to ‘conduct complex operations, particularly against Taiwan’. That sounds promising for Taiwan, but my impression over the years has been that Xi really really really wants to attack Taiwan and kill people there, and to do it yesterday. The reports I’m hearing about the situation, though, are confusing and conflicting. He likes ‘anti-corruption’ purges apparently, and he has, over time, trimmed down the political and the military leadership, the latter to just two. All of which can only make one laugh, or cry, at the Orwellian newspeak. We mock the North Korean title for its country – the Korean Democratic Republic – but surely the Chinese government, or leadership, calling its country ‘communist’, is even more risible, considering that communism is meant to be about collective control and sharing of government, labour, resources, etc. On that definition, China must surely be about the least communist nation on the planet, and more than 1.3 billion more Chinese people are being hoodwinked than North Korean people. And surely a large proportion of them know they’re being hoodwinked, but – what can they do? If you’ve lived such a lie all your life, that lie just becomes the reality.
So the number of party members who have been removed or disciplined for corruption during Xi’s rule has increased year on year, and it would be impossible to tell whether this purge has been fair given the lack of oversight of of what is essentially a dictatorship. And according to the video referenced below, Xi has managed to concentrate more power in his own hands, at least militarily, than any previous Chinese dictator of the ‘communist’ era (or at least since Mao, the greatest mass-murderer the world has ever known). He has also presided over a massive increase in military expenditure, with obviously ominous connotations. I mean, what could this ballooning expenditure be for?
I worry for Taiwan, which was experimenting with participatory democracy, according to Jess Scully’s hopeful Glimpses of Utopia.
References
Democracy probs in the USA
If you don’t want kings, limit the power of your Prez, or better still, change your system
I’ve written about how the US political system seems much more susceptible to demagoguery than, say, Australia’s version of the Westminster system, not to mention that of Canada, or Britain, or the governments of the Scandinavian countries – a fact that, it seems, many US pundits haven’t recognised, though some may just be recognising it now.
However, I might be focussing too much on problems instead of considering solutions. This is important as no democratic country is immune from the sort of government over-reach (to put it mildly) that the US is currently dealing with. I’ve recently had Mallen Baker’s ‘dangerously reasonable’ videos recommended to me, and his review of the book How democracies die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, has convinced me to get a copy, as I’m getting the impression that conservative intolerance seems to be sweeping through the WEIRD world at the moment – in spite of Australia having decisively voted to re-elect its centre-left government recently, something which took many by surprise. The mess in the USA seems to have been a central factor. That way lies horror. But just a few days ago the major capitals of Australia held well-attended anti-immigration rallies, in which neo-nazis were apparently involved, which surprised many of my friends and myself, living as we do in a bubble of moderation, as well as satisfaction and pleasure regarding the multicultural environment we’re now living in. We’re all old enough to remember how different it was some fifty years ago.
So Baker reflects on the aforementioned book, and the state of democracy, 80 years after the fall of nazism in Europe. Perhaps the first feature of democracy maintenance is civility, and mutual recognition that a free and fair system of elected government needs to be maintained, and sometimes reformed in line with a society that itself is never static. Lapses in civility and fairness are warning signs that need to be heeded. Spurious attacks on opposition politicians, unsupported claims about election rigging, partisan manipulation of electoral boundaries, violent and inflammatory rhetoric, attacks on civil liberties and the so-called ‘fourth estate’, manipulation of the law to silence critics, these are the most salient issues – but they are most concerning, as I’ve often said, when a great deal of power is given to too few, or even to one ‘I alone can fix it’ individual. This is the massive weakness of the US political system, which shrieks at democrats outside of that country but is hardly noticed by those within it. This is the USA’s tragedy, not Trump’s advent.
The principal problem, of course, is the Presidential system itself, and as long as it is retained, with all its powers, privileges and immunities, the USA will be vulnerable to the kind of takeover that’s currently occurring – a takeover that seems to be only temporarily blocked by the courts, a blockage that I’m sure the current administration is trying to overcome. And of course the courts too – especially the Supreme Court, which clearly has been given too much power – are systems that can be and will be politicised, as this downhill spiral continues. To my amusement/bemusement, AI offers solutions:
The US finds reform difficult due to ingrained structural issues like the Electoral College, and the difficulty of passing constitutional amendments, which are exacerbated by a lack of collective imagination for what comprehensive reform looks like. Additionally, some voters believe the system is inherently “rigged,” making them skeptical that procedural fixes can work, while others feel that small procedural changes are inadequate for addressing deep-seated problems and building social cohesion.
I note that this AI guy makes no mention of the presidential system – clearly he was born and bred in the USA. So, if they won’t jettison this disastrous system in favour of something more collaborative and issues and policy-based, rather than personality-based, we’re left largely with tinkering, but important tinkering. So, what of this Electoral College? It’s a system of 538 ‘electors’ whose role is supposed to be quite minimal, in that they simply represent the winner of the vote count in their electorate. There are 538 electorates, and the winner of the overall vote count (of electorates, not voters) wins the Presidency. Thus it’s possible, and has often happened in recent times, that the winner of the Electoral College is not the winner of the popular vote. Strangely, but not at all strangely, every time this has happened, the less than 50% popular winner has been a Republican.
So the Electoral College system is clearly not a fair system, it has a Republican bias which appears to be increasing. This means, in effect, that the national vote, and so the nation itself, is becoming increasingly less democratic. This isn’t partisan bluster, it is fact. The Electoral College problem should be able to be fixed in a non-partisan way, as it should be the case that an overwhelming number of the electorate would want elections to be fair. However, when a nation is fundamentally divided into ‘two tribes’, each fuelled by contempt for the other, and one of those tribes has gotten the upper hand vis-a-vis rigging, democracy has clearly failed. And this Electoral College problem is exacerbated by gerrymandering at the state level, always carried out by Republican-held states.
There’s also the effect of party discipline and solidarity upon its members, the expectation that people in government will be team players. In Trump’s case he was supposedly a Democrat in earlier times, though never active, never having to display loyalty or team discipline. In the run-up to the 2016 federal election he was at first ridiculed or dismissed by most leading Republicans, but the populist rhetoric of his speeches, violent and abusive though they often were, gained him a strong following among the ‘left behind’, or the deplorables, as Hilary Clinton termed them. So gradually the Republican Party as a whole got behind him, because, it seems, winning was more important to them than policy coherence or party discipline.
So Trump became President in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and the nation survived, despite a less than effective handling of the Covid crisis, and two impeachment inquiries based on solid grounds. His obvious fomenting of an uprising and a violent attack on Congress after his 2020 election loss, resulting in the arrest and criminal conviction of almost 1300 people, would have prevented him for standing for office in any other democratic country, surely. Instead he received no punishment whatever, and was able to pardon virtually all the other offenders, a disgraceful situation that seems to have been ‘swept under the rug’. Could any other western democracy have stood for this? And allowed the principal perpetrator to recover ‘supreme power’?
Anyway I’m having technical problems with my blog or browser or something at present so I’ll send this off and try to continue with it next time.
some thoughts on the Ukrainian tragedy
M Carney and V Zelenskyy with their Action Plan for the Implementation of the Agreement on Security Cooperation between Ukraine and Canada.
I’m by no means an expert on international affairs, though of course I’m interested in humanist, peaceful, equitable solutions to what’s happening in troublespots such as Ukraine, Palestine and the USA, to name the only three that I know a little bit about at present, but I have to admit that the very sight of Putin, Trump or Netenyahu or their minions on my screen has negative impacts on my health, as I’ve always been a bit overly emotional. So I’ve been both chillaxing and better informing myself recently by listening to articulate, intelligent, calm (above all calm, even humorous!) members of the commentariat (mostly female,) discussing these troublespots and troubling characters (mostly male).
So, with that, let me return to the Putin-Ukraine horror-show. Russian troops began their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, though you might say the 2014 annexation of Crimea was Putin’s prelude, and the pre-2022 aggression in the Donbas region helped to clarify his entirely hostile intentions, not to mention the build-up of troops and materiel on Russia’s border with Ukraine in the preceding months.
It could be argued, and Putin would certainly argue, that Kievan Rus was central to the ‘development’, mostly through warfare, of the pan-Russian nation. These irredentist views of a Greater Russia that needed to be revived and presided over by Vladimir the Great have been central to Putin’s grand vision. To strengthen his claim, as least to his compatriots, he concocted a Ukrainian government infested with neo-nazis intent on wiping out the Russian minority in the eastern Donbas.
So when the ‘denazification’ invasion came, from the Belarusian border in the north, threatening Kiev, with accompanying attacks into the Donbas and threatening Kharkiv, and in Crimea, it looked, at least for a moment, that the claim by Belarusian president and Putin puppet Aleksandr Lukashenko (among others) that Ukraine would belong to Putin within three days would be proven.
But the march on Kiev was stalled and soon abandoned, to the whole world’s surprise it seems, and the reasons remain murky, and were probably multi-faceted. They include – bad weather and poor reconnaissance regarding terrain; Ukrainian attacks; fuel shortages and maintenance problems; poor planning, organisation and communications. The long delay before the initial march southwards allowed Ukrainian forces and individuals to prepare sniper and other attacks. Russian forces began a retreat from Kiev only three months after launching their northern invasion.
Currently, some three and a half years after the war began, Russia has control of some 20% of Ukrainian territory. The death toll, especially on the Russian side, is extremely hard to pin down, given Putin’s obsession with disinformation, but at least 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with another 8 million or so being internally displaced. Of course their have been multiple human rights abuses, and ICC arrest warrants have been issued for Putin and other Russian officials.
Putin has been in power in Russia for well over 20 years now, having eliminated all opposition and bolstered and clarified his dictatorship. However, this invasion and war has clearly endangered his position and indeed his life. One might fancifully compare it to Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in the 1940s. If the advent of Trump, a product of the world’s worst democratic political system, had not supervened, and a more NATO-supportive and decisive US President had been elected in 2020 and/or 2024, Putin’s fate would have been sealed. Instead we’re forced to witness what we’re witnessing.
The USA’s floundering, destructive horrorshow is essentially a reprieve for Putin, though it’s always possible that Trump will flounder in the direction of liberation for Ukraine. Of course that can’t be counted on. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has just visited Kiev and given a rousing speech with promises of financial and military support, and even the possibility of ‘boots on the ground’. We need much more of this.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO, and it should be. It seems that some NATO countries are reluctant to accept Ukraine’s membership at this time of war, which seems to me cruelly crazy. It’s also worth noting that Ukraine came very close to NATO membership in the pre-Yanukovych era, though popular support for the move was low. Today, unsurprisingly, it’s at an all-time high, and NATO membership was been a priority for successive governments since 2014. So why the delay?
Apparently there’s this thing called a Membership Action Plan (MAP), which is the Royal Road to NATO membership, and this has been touted for years for Ukraine, but fear of Putinland seems to have been central to the delay. Here’s what the Latvian foreign minister had to say on the issue, in April 2021:
We are watching closely as Russia draws troops to Ukraine’s borders. It is not clear at this time what this is: a show of force or real aggression. But there is every reason to worry … Ukraine has been trying to join NATO for 15 years by obtaining a Membership Action Plan. Apparently, it is time to provide this Plan to Ukraine [!]. This will be at least a signal from us [NATO] that Ukrainians will not be left without support. I will definitely support this decision…
You would think that Putin’s aggression would’ve stiffened the resolve of all NATO nations to include and support Ukraine. Pusillanimous is the word that comes to mind. And this has clearly cost lives.
Putin has to be defeated, kicked out of Ukraine completely. He, for one, will never compromise, and is completely incapable of negotiating in good faith. As various pundits have pointed out, withdrawing now, giving up, will likely be the end for him, with all the suffering this has caused to so many Russians. We – the west, NATO, the democratic world, whatever, need to go full bore at finishing this war and offering Putin nothing. He’s a criminal of the worst kind and always has been, throughout his adult life. The Canadian PM has shown the way, and we must all offer what we can, for humanity’s sake.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Kyiv_convoy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine–NATO_relations#Popular_opinion_in_Ukraine
the USA and Ukraine: disasters and tragedies
This was a children’s hospital in Mariupol, Donetsk
I’ve become more or less convinced that listening to United Staters commenting on their own political situation is pretty much a waste of time. Outsiders have a much more objective perspective…
Oh, that’s right – I’m an outsider! Lucky me!
Seriously, how many US pundits complain about their presidential system, the massive power it wields, the massive immunity granted to it, the massive amounts of money thrown about in their circus campaigns, the ridiculous ‘individuality’ of it all? How many compare their massive rich-poor gap with that of other WEIRD countries, the massive, and surely related, incarceration rates, the lack of per capita expenditure on public education, health and welfare? What they do go on about is how the ‘greatest nation in the known (or unknown) multiverse’ has somehow come to this. The ‘world’s richest [and therefore most successful] nation on the planet’, ‘the world’s greatest (and first modern) democracy’ (that one’s a real staple, spoken with a kind of glazed expression, like a mantra they’ve been chanting since kindergarten – and it’s bullshit, they were a country economically based on slavery at the time of their first election, and they didn’t allow half their population to vote in federal elections until 1920).
The fact is, the US politico-social system is SHIT. And that’s an understatement. Nations that have been persuaded, or well-nigh forced to emulate it (South Korea is a tragic example) are suffering the consequences.
What we need – all the WEIRD and developing countries – is to get completely away from ‘I alone can fix it’ wankers (pretty well all of them being men) and towards collaborative, preferably female-dominated piloting of the ship of state, with always a concern, more than anything, for the ‘left-behind’, those disadvantaged through no fault of their own. The tedious shifts from so-called ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ governments, each intent on demolishing what went before and leaving their own egotistical mark on things, should be replaced by gradualism, consensus and collaboration, with, always, fingers on the pulse of the populace, their needs and reasonable aspirations. That might require eliminating men from government, at least until they learn the error of their ways….
Anyway, I began this post wanting to say that the best commentaries on US politics are definitely coming from outside the country (and this might be the case for analyses of any country – if only those inside the country were prepared to listen!). I recall reading that people always exaggerate their skills and abilities, and downplay their failings, as in some respects a ‘healthy’, or evolutionarily successful, approach to making their way in the world, and that if you really want a more accurate view of them, ask their frenemies. I suspect the same goes for nations…
The tragedy of the advent of Trump, is that he’s an outcome of a massively flawed politico-social system that won’t be reformed ‘any time soon’, as they’re fond of saying. And it coincides tragically with the reign of a far worse individual, Vladimir Putin, a psychopathic thug with vast volumes of blood on his hands already. The current ‘negotiations’ with Putin are of course a very sick joke. Putin isn’t negotiating, his aim – to destroy Ukraine as an independent nation, whatever the cost – will never change, and Trump and his minions’ flailings signify nothing. What Ukraine needs from the USA, in concert with Europe, is armaments, fighters and 100% support. Ukraine has to win this war, so Trump’s second term, with his pusillanimity and love of dictators, has been disastrous for that nation. It’s all very unedifying and hard to watch, even from afar…
matriarchy needs work – please consider
dreams dreams dreams
We’ve surely all heard that patriarchy began with agriculture, but I don’t think there’s any solid evidence for this. The Australian Aboriginal societies weren’t agricultural, but according to many early anthropologists and white commentators they were profoundly, even brutally patriarchal. Take this description:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …”
George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878
Just about all of these early descriptions are from men, so I’m a wee bit skeptical here too (and for a very different description, see below)
My interest in this topic – I mean the origins of patriarchy – goes back to the chimp-bonobo contrast. What brought about this patriarchal-matriarchal divide on opposite banks of the Congo River between one and two million years ago? If it was essentially an environmental divide, with the bonobos benefitting from an abundant, largely frugivorous food supply, could it be that Aboriginal societies, divided by more than 200 different languages, might also be divided by more or less fruitful environments, where gathering was more or less key and hunting more or less incidental, leading to different cultural norms? Aboriginal people have been generally defined as nomadic, but they also had their own tribal lands and sacred places, the nomadism simply referring to a lack of fixed dwellings.
Some, perhaps most, anthropologists have found that Aboriginal culture is generally divided upon gender lines:
Diana Bell in her book “Daughters of the Dreaming” reported, after spending many years living with Aborigines in Central Australia, that there was no patriarchy or matriarchy but “Under the Law, men and women have distinctive roles to play but each has access to certain checks and balances which ensure that neither sex can enjoy an unrivalled supremacy over the other. Underlying male and female practice is a common purpose and a shared belief in the Dreamtime experience; both have sacred boards, both know songs and paint designs that encode the knowledge of the dreaming.” This was not as predicted by Gimbutas but is [a] more gender balanced society.
Some rituals are performed by both men and women. She tells of how men, grateful for being shown a woman’s dance, promptly return the favour by painting up their own boards and bodies and showing the women one of their own dances. In these dances they were exchanging ritual knowledge of the country and its Dreaming painted on their bodies and their boards and spelt out by the patterns their pounding feet make upon the earth. At one point the women picked up the male boards displayed and danced with them while the men called out approvingly “they are your dreamings now”. But this does not mean that there is not secret knowledge, private to each gender. In such displays, something is always held back, kept for people of the same gender.
Jani Farrell Roberts, Aboriginal women and Gimbutas, c 2000
If this is a reasonably accurate account of pre-colonial Aboriginal practice, we may be looking at societies that can’t be easily pigeon-holed as patriarchal or otherwise, which is difficult for me, as I’ve tended to argue that gender equality is kind of unnatural, like measuring the two genders on a balance of scales or a see-saw. The scales will either tip in favour of patriarchy or matriarchy, so we need to go for matriarchy as the more humane approach, based, just for starters, on all we know about history.
And bonobos.
As to history, most of it is about men, because it’s overwhelmingly been men who’ve started and fought in wars that have transformed human society. Let’s mention a few instigators, as well as slaughterers via policy – Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Pope Urban II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Leo Victor (Leopold II of Belgium), Timur….
There’s plenty others, no doubt, but why make ourselves sick? How about the women warriors and presiders over slaughter?
Let’s see – Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, Fu Hao, Cleopatra, Isabella of Castille, Wu Zhao, uh, Margaret Thatcher…
It’s a struggle to find anyone who caused human suffering on anything like the level of the males. Maybe they just weren’t given enough power, but I doubt that. Whatever the case, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that 99% of the human slaughter that has occurred throughout history has been at the hands of only one gender.
Having said that, humanity doesn’t seem to be getting the message, what with Xi, Putin, Trump, Kim Jung Un and co. Planetrulers.com claimed that there were 57 dictators worldwide in 2022, all of them male (though they really should have included Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s dictatorial Prime Minister .
So the history is bleak, as is much of the present, and the worst of it is that this can drive a sense of fatalism, or ‘what’s the use’-ism, so…
What can we do? Of course, the internet has the answer, sort of. We certainly have no option but to take the long view, and work work work, even if it’s just talking, arguing, making the obvious points. Sometimes even to women – I’ve written, ages ago that Margaret McMillan, the prolific and highly regarded Canadian historian, on giving a Q and A after a talk about the history of war, was asked whether more women in leadership might make a difference to that tendency towards warfare that has so characterised our history. Sadly, she rattled off the usual extremely dumb response – sorry Margaret but I get so tired of it – that this and that female leader was just as bad as the men. Of course! That’s because it’s not at all about individual men and women – it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. It’s bonoboism versus chimpism. It’s about changing the overall structure of society. And that is, of course, Very Big. A very big task. A very necessary task, though, in my humble opinion. Not because we won’t survive without matriarchy – I have no idea whether we will or not – but because we, and the environment we so dominate, will be so much better off without patriarchy. That’s something I’m entirely convinced about.
I’d ask everyone to just think about this, just for starters.
References
http://www.witch.plus.com/7day-extracts/aboriginal-women.html
Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, 1983
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
reading matters 3
Will he go? Trump and the looming election meltdown, by Lawrence Douglas, Professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought, Amherst College
Content hints
- failure of impeachment, high crimes and misdemenours, rigged voting, media scum, sleepy Joe, election hoax, treason, fraud, shades of 2016, tweetstorms, dictator worship, Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán, the USA’s quaint constitution, pathological lying, Presidential authority to ban media, Trump as weak authoritarian, foreign interference, catastrophic scenarios 1,2,3, the unforeseeable, the electoral college and faithless electors, uniquely awful system, hacked elections, profoundly antidemocratic outcomes, gerrymandering, swing states, 12th amendment, enemies of the people, problems of peaceful succession, civil war, hang on, bumpy ride.
Trumpdagistan: the new fundamentalism
The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others, but it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
A recent Point of Inquiry podcast has again turned my attention to what I should now call Trumpdagistan, a more or less dictatorial state that borders Canada and Mexico, which for various reasons I shouldn’t really be concerning myself with, as I live very far from the country and have never had any intention of visiting it, even if I had the means. It just seems to be a kind of ghoulishness on my part, my version of addiction to rotten.com, if that website still exists.
As a completely non-religious person, I’m obviously opposed to any interference of the state by religion, that terribly bad explanation of any and all phenomena. Trumpdagistan, even before it was renamed, was the most religious of all the democratic countries. Their national god is Guard, who guards Trumpdagistan against all evils, including secularism, the world’s primary evil, according to Billy Barr, the dictatorship’s chief toady, who believes that all morality derives from the book of Guard.
Whilst the wanker in the white palace (WWP) is very unlikely to believe in Guard (for his self-obsession is all-consuming but exhausting, as it basically consists of constantly puffing hot air into a balloon full of holes), he recognises the usefulness of a national god in much the same way as every previous dictator has. So he’s happy, indeed delighted, to unleash his toady on secularism and more particularly, secularists. Free-thinkers, in the words of Stephen Dedalus.
The WWP and his toadies have made every effort in their few years of control to create a compliant, Guard-worshipping judiciary, especially at the very top, the Supreme Court. As the Point of Inquiry podcast has pointed out, that court is now stacked with Guard-botherers, more or less bent on overturning the separation between politics and religion, through particular interpretations of the country’s much-worshipped Constitution which somehow bestow a kind of second-class citizenship on secularists. It’s unclear, however, how the Constitution can be so interpreted.
In any case, the WWP’s ‘administration’ has managed to promote two more religious right-wingers to the Supreme Court, for a total of five – just another couple of bricks in the wall, so to speak. The much-worshipped constitution of the former USA actually has very little to say on religion. The first amendment to that constitution, as it pertains to religion, says only this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
That’s it. It’s since been known as the ‘establishment clause’. The rest of that amendment, also quite brief, deals with freedom of speech, without particular reference to religion. The only possible ambiguity in the above clause is ‘respecting’, which could mean ‘having respect for’ or ‘with respect or reference to’. Neither interpretation suggests that the constitution, or the bill of rights, supports any religion; rather it clearly supports keeping out of religion, or maintaining a separation between religion and law-making. And yet, mischief-making religionists, some of them rather powerful, have tried hard to distort the simple meaning. Take the late unlamented Justice Scalia, who in one forgettable judicial opinion came up with this gem:
The establishment clause permits the disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
Of course the clause has nothing whatever to do with permitting disregard, it simply avoids permission and prohibition equally. Nothing could be clearer. What Scalia seems to be wanting the clause to say is that the law should disregard and so not protect polytheists, atheists and the like. This defies any serious interpretation.
And so we come to the toady. He’s apparently a catholic, and believes that secularism is the principle cause of the ills that Trumpdagistan is suffering from. Those ills don’t, of course, include white collar corruption, which he avidly supports. To their credit, many other catholics are condemning Barr’s evidence-free claims, but in Barr’s Trumpdagistan, a collection of writings penned many centuries ago by scores of individuals of widely varying views and experience, and known today, at least by some, as the bible, is the only source of morality for all humanity, and will no doubt be installed as the basis of all Trumpdagistani law. All of this is making the WWP very popular, if polls are to be believed, so expect much more of it in the future. What would Thomas Jefferson think?
Laws are more important than constitutions, get it?
Watching proceedings from afar against Trump and his blundering bovver boys, I become more agitated than I probably need to, but I quite often find my frustration directed more at the prosecutors than at Trump’s mostly contemptible allies. For example, MSNBC commentators and many of their guests, not to mention Nancy Pelosi, are still claiming that the crime here is bribery, when it’s clearly extortion, which is generally considered a more serious crime.
So what’s the difference? It should be obvious. A bribe generally involves appealing to a person’s venality. It’s usually presented in positive terms, as in ‘I’ll make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice if you just do this dirty job for me’. Extortion however is presented in more menacingly negative terms – ‘if you don’t do this dirty job for me, you’ll really really regret it’. Now, it’s notable that the infamous phone call from Trump was relatively polite, which is why he’s trying to characterise it as ‘perfect’. After all, by his boorishly bullying standards, it probably was. The near-polite asking of a favour, then, might be characterised as a bribe, but what was happening behind the scenes, directed by Trump, was definitely extortionate. That’s why focussing on the phone call as the main incident is definitely a mistake, and that’s why Giuliani, Mulvaney and Trump himself need to testify, and should of course be made to, and jailed immediately if they refuse, as should happen in any nation worthy of respect.
But this would only happen if the matter was being dealt with in court – where of course it should be dealt with.
Americans are profoundly worshipful of their constitution and their founding fathers. Indeed they seem to have been fine, upstanding, as well as colourful fellows. It’s my view, though, that given current circumstances, they’d have been the first to realise that the constitutional provisions for dealing with a law-breaking, rogue President were wholly inadequate. This isn’t surprising – experience is the best teacher in these matters, and the US experience has been mostly of Presidents priding themselves on being ‘gentlemen’. This is the only silver lining of this presidency, that it has exposed manifold inadequacies of the constitutional presidency system.
Constitutions are guides to how governments are to be constituted. I don’t think the framers of this or any other constitution ever imagined that later followers would expect that it constituted the entire law under which the head of state operated. That, to me, is virtually proven by the vague and minimalist treatment of the legal liabilities of the President in the US Constitution. Surely the founding fathers took it for granted that the President would be subject to all the laws of the land that any other citizen would be subject to. How could it be otherwise for someone in leadership, someone expected to set an example? Even minor infractions would be seen as ‘the thin end of the wedge’, and generally this is the case under the Westminster system.
The worst argument that could possibly be given for the kind of immunity granted to the US President is that he’s too powerful to be charged with a crime. You might call this the Putin argument (or the Stalin, Ghengis Khan or Ramses II argument, or name your favourite dictator). The argument hasn’t improved over the last 3000 years.
The boy in the white palace 4: extortion for dummies
Beneficence is always free, it cannot be extorted…
Adam Smith
Jacinta: I’ve been bemused by the sloppy way, IMHO, that the boy king’s adversaries – the Great Patriots – are handling their strategy for the defence of the realm. Some are still using the Queer and Daft (Q&D) term quid pro quo, as if that’s going to be an effective rallying cry for the country’s GPs. In fact it’s so feeble that the boy’s courtiers and epigones are happy to use it themselves, saying quid pro quos are great things, very handy for the MAGA cause….
Canto: Yes but I do notice that some of the more quick-witted GPs are almost at the point of considering, in a consistent way, a more obviously criminal term for the lad’s crimes. Whoduv thunk it? Unfortunately they’re not quite sure which crime to bruit about.
Jacinta: And Q&D terminology is still de rigueur for many, especially the courtiers and epigones. The two more serious, and accurate, terms for the crimes being particularly focussed on – re impeachment….
Canto: And impeachment’s a process we’re going to have to deconstruct – to use a shitty po-mo term most appropriate for the occasion – in another post.
Jacinta: Indeed – the two crimes being whispered way too softly by the GPs are bribery and extortion, with bribery being, unfortunately, the most favoured. But the Great Patriots are wrong.
Canto: That’s bad.
Jacinta: I think the only reason they prefer bribery is because, apparently, it’s in the SACUSA…
Canto: Scusi?
Jacinta: What? Oh yes, dummy, the Sublimely Awesome Constitution of the USA. Get out from under your rock, mate. It’s apparently mentioned in the SACUSA as one of the high Crimes and Mis Demenours you’re not allowed to consort with. We’ll look into that later. But I think extortion’s the thing, to set before the wee king, because, well, it’s much more nasty-sounding. I also think it’s more accurate. Off the top of my head, it’s about demanding money – or a thing of value – with menaces. And the boy king doesn’t need money – he’s been rolling in it since he was in his nappies, according to the New York Times. He’s far more in need of something to trounce his enemies, so that he can stay in the White Palace until he’s all growed up – and that’s a long long time.
Canto: Is he still in his nappies d’you think? I’ve heard rumours…
Jacinta: Well, I don’t think I’d have the stomach for that piece of investigative journalism, but it would certainly raise a stink if that were true. But here’s the thing. Ukraine has a new leader, with an overwhelming mandate to beat off Madame Putain and fight internal corruption. It’s a vastly important, and simply vast, country lying between La Putain and his or her designs on Europe, and it desperately needs an alliance with the USA, Europe and any other region it can ally itself with, but their President, when he came to office, hadn’t yet cottoned on to the fact that the USA is an ex-democracy and that its wee king had googly eyes for La Putain. ..
Canto: So he was ripe for extortion, I get it. The boy loves La Putain and wants to be like him, master of all he surveys, so he wants to have the Ukraine slay his rival, so he menaces them with a range of shite – saddling the country with being behind interference in his ascension to the throne in 2016, refusing to have an alliance with it, and with-holding funds and weapons, in the hope that La Putain will invade, slay the putative wrong-doers and share the spoils with the wee laddie.
Jacinta: Yeah, something like that. But let’s just get back to demanding a thing of value with menaces. I think it’s pretty straightforward.
Canto: Yes, others use the term coercion, but it’s the same thing, and it definitely applies in this case. The boy’s courtiers even drafted exactly what they demanded the Ukrainian Prez had to publicly say about the poor wee Biden boy and his nasty papa.
Jacinta: It’s time to look more closely at what the SACUSA has to say on the matter. Impeachment gets a mention very early on (Article 1, Section 2), but the nub of the matter is expressed, albeit briefly, in Article 2, Section 4, entitled ‘Disqualification’:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
So only two actual crimes are specified, which is a wee bit disappointing for dealing with the Most Powerful King in the Multiverse – but I don’t want to get into the impeachment disaster here, we’ll save that for another post. For now I’ll just say that ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanours’ however vague, was surely meant to cover more than nothing, and extortion sounds pretty lofty as crimes go. So let’s look more closely at extortion.
Canto: I have one dictionary definition here: ‘the practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats’. Sounds like just the Right Thing.
Jacinta: Yes, and what the boy-king wanted to obtain was far more valuable to him than all the gold in Ukraine….
Canto: Encyclopedia Brittanica gives the definition as ‘the unlawful exaction of money or property through intimidation’, but in an article about white-collar crime it describes extortion as ‘a threat made to obtain a benefit from either a private individual or a public official’, and the threat here made by the boy and his courtiers, was ‘if you don’t invent something to besmirch the reputation of my domestic enemy, or announce that he has a reputation as a criminal, you will have no alliance with our mighty kingdom, no aid or support in defeating your enemy, La Putain (my own true love), and your people will die in great numbers, crushed by his or her mighty fist’.
Jacinta: Hmmm. A more clear-cut and extremely serious case of extortion could hardly be found. A girl-boy lawyer would win the case with a few hours’ training, except that the king is apparently above all law. He’s only subject to the law’s feeble sibling, impeachment.
Canto: I note that one of the Royal lad’s acolytes, one Nikki Hayley, has sought to churlishly dismiss the affair by pointing out that Ukraine finally received the aid, so no problem. However, the above definition points out that the threat is the crime, not the success or otherwise of the threat.
Canto: It also should hardly need pointing out that Ukraine finally received the promised aid because the scheme against the country was being leaked out – the lad’s courtiers had learned about the whistleblower complaint – not because there was a change of heart. In fact it’s widely believed that mirabile dictu, the withered boy has never managed to develop a heart, the poor sod.
Jacinta: That’s ridiculous, a piece of fantasy emanating from the Deep Kingdom….
Canto: We should operate on the boy to find out – we need real, pulsating evidence. I’m even prepared to do it under anaesthetic. I’d like him to do us a favour though…