[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Merle Lefkoff]

Thanks for the video John.  The last authentic voice in the Presidency.
I'm proud to have called him my boss for a year and a mentor for many
more.  I too am gravely disappointed.

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 2:15 PM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:

> Glen,
>
> I suppose it isn't really fapping <https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/> if
> one shows good brinkmanship :) The troubles our political institutions
> met during the 2016 election, via weaponized social media technologies,
> no doubt point to a serious vulnerability in our democratic process, and
> no doubt one that is being studied by more resourceful and intelligent
> people than I. IMO, the field was prepared long before the seeds of chaos
> and distrust were sown.
>
> Over the entirety of my life, and with the complicit consent of our (mostly
> boomer) citizens, a devious narrative took hold that the American people
> were not intelligent enough or capable enough to reason about the events
> of their world, much less govern themselves. This perspective is too often
> parroted as an axiom in political conversations, where one might say,
> "Yeah, but do you really think that Joe Smoe on the street can...". This
> cultural self-shaming strikes me as having a three-fold purpose:
>
> 1. to lull the participants of a democratic republic into sitting back, taking
> a load off, and letting someone else drive for a while. The responsibility
> of governing oneself is hard work and *you deserve a break **today*.
>
> 2. to invoke nation-wide Stockholm syndrome where individuals come to believe
> that since some abstract daddy or expert is better equipped to think
> about politics, it's better to leave the thinking to those abstractions (Chomsky's
> commissar argument <https://chomsky.info/dissent02/>).
>
> 3. to cultivate better consumers.
>
> Unfortunately, a democracy cannot function this way but it seemed to be Ok
> for a short time. The *career guys *functionally operated as *daddy *and
> we could cheer them on from the comfort of our television sets. In effect,
> politics became a spectator sport.
>
> As far as I can tell, this wave of disenfranchisement found purchase in a
> crucial transition period from Carter's administration into Regan's. Hippie-cum-yuppies,
> in the face of the enduring hardships of the era: cold war, peak-oil,
> failure in Vietnam, the rise of international terrorism, crisis of
> confidence <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58>, etc... did what
> any raised on superhero and GI Joe comic-book loving American would do,
> they took the blue pill
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill>. Regan offered
> America a return to the *good times*, cultures of protest withered away,
> and soma was had by all.
>
> Abroad, neoliberalism (à la Regan, Thatcher, and Ayn Rand-loving Alan Greenspan)
> became the dominating strategy for the west over developing nations.
> Leadership wrt democratic ideals and stewardship of our own republic was
> ceded to objectivists <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism>
> believing in the cake of their own success bias. Meanwhile, at home, the
> public was weened from nutrient-rich information sources[!] and
> transitioned toward propaganda-driven rhetorical forms, emulating the
> successes of advertising culture, and through this shift, our sound-byte
> culture was quickened.
>
> What makes the actions to delegitimize our trusted institutions so insidious
> is that the critique isn't wrong. For a brief period in the '90s and
> leading up to the WTO/IMF protests in Seattle, political unrest was
> beginning to wake from its nearly two-decade-long slumber. Discontents
> (realizing the vanishing prospects for their own creation of wealth,
> imminent environmental collapse, and the wholesale exploitation of
> developing nations) formed grassroots movements to confront the irresponsibility
> of Regan-era *good time* thinking. Well, at least until the unfortunate
> events of 9-11 epiphenomenologically nipped all movement in the bud, and
> ushered in an *era of terror*, and like a good family, the public banned
> together to support the suspension of even the most basic of civil
> liberties.
>
> When you say, "As I understand it, the attack was a successful use of *active
> measures*. The objective was to find *extant* rifts in US society and
> exploit them. This resulted in a sophisticated data science-driven attack
> on platforms via technology like Facebook", I sympathize and can only
> feel grave disappointment that this is the legacy we inherited. Fixing
> things, as far as I can tell, will require investment in the capability
> of the American people and the disruption of a program to produce good
> consumers. Short of that, I don't know what the next steps will need to
> be, but I suspect those steps will involve a good therapist.
>
> Jon
>
> [!] Paralleled almost symbolically by world-wide and aggressive campaigns
> to
> market substitute breastmilk
> <https://www.projectcensored.org/5-the-bottle-baby-scandal-milking-the-3rd-world-for-all-its-worth/>
> .
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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