You Can't Make This Stuff Up

[ecosophia]

I got forwarded a link today to one of the latest vagaries of the soi-disant "Resistance" -- for those who don't keep track of US political chatter, these are the people who haven't yet got over the fact that their candidate lost the 2016 election. You can read the original here if you like; the short version is that some of Donald Trump's opponents have convinced themselves that if they all stop spending money, that will bring the US economy to its knees within a few days and force Congress to either impeach Trump or force him to resign. 

Yeah, I know. Do you remember when you were two, and Mommy wouldn't give you a bowl of ice cream, and you told her that you'd hold your breath until you turned blue if she didn't give it to you? I thought of that too. 

What's more, they're not just going to stop spending money -- no, they're all going to run out and buy all the things they'll need for the next month, and then stop spending money. No doubt the retail sector of the economy will be shaken right down to its core by getting all that money in advance.

I'm frankly starting to wonder if somebody in the Trump administration is cooking up schemes like this and the comically inept project to cast a hex on Trump I discussed here a while back. I can't think of a better way to keep the Democrats busy spinning their wheels, so they don't do the things that might actually win them the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential election: that is to say, figure out what cost them the 2016 election and stop doing it; and then get busy with some old-fashioned grassroots organization and outreach aimed at winning back the voters they ignored just that once too often. 

On the other hand, I really do hope that the people who are proclaiming this business on Twitter go ahead and follow through on their plan. Three or four days into it, when it starts to sink in that a few tens of thousands of disgruntled Democrats changing their buying habits won't even rise out of the statistical noise, it might just begin to sink in that we don't live in a tantrumocracy, where whoever shrieks the loudest about their hurt feelings gets to tell the rest of us what to do -- and that if you want to make change happen, you really do have to learn something about practical politics, roll up your sleeves, and get to work making the machinery of representative democracy do what it's there for. 

Comments

[mattsplatt]

Beautiful! Thank you. I needed a good laugh today. :-D

[ecosophia]

You're most welcome, but I'm only the messenger. A pity the comedians in question will never realize how funny they look...

[fluiddruid]

Hello John,

indeed there seems to be some sort of mass mental and emotional breakdown going on in this country. The sheer size of it is more disturbing than amusing.

As for the people who shriek loudly, last Sunday I was at a shopping mall when I saw a well dressed man walking along the aisles and shouting "F**k Trump!" repeatedly. Seeing otherwise intelligent people having uncontrolled fits of rage in public really bothers me. I just don't understand it.

The working theory is that the election of Trump doesn't fit into the narrative of social progress, hence it is the "Progressive" side of the Democrats who are most upset.

If I get a chance to capture a live Progressive I might try to interview them and ask why they feel that way.

[ecosophia]

I think the myth of progress is at least an important part of the issue, but it may go a little deeper than the cognitive dissonance caused by Trump's election -- significant though that is. The myth of progress failed long before Donald Trump decided to go into politics. Think of everything we were supposed to have by now -- cities on the Moon, cheap limitless fusion power, cures for cancer and the common cold, and so on endlessly -- and none of it happened. Instead, we've got a society in visible decline, a biosphere in crisis, a long list of failed promises, and a future that's getting grimmer by the day -- and in their heart of hearts, I suspect a lot of the privileged "progressives" know that their own lifestyles are at the heart of the problem. Thus the collective nervous breakdown; it's much easier to shriek obscenities at Trump than to come to terms with the accelerating failure of the entire progressive dream...

(rolls eyes so hard they stick)

[kimberlysteele]

So if their Apocalypse doesn't arrive on schedule, they're going to try to bring it on themselves. Nice.

Re: (rolls eyes so hard they stick)

[ecosophia]

True enough. I really do wonder, though, how many of them know perfectly well that their latest tantrum won't do anything more significant than all those pink hats on parade in January of last year, so they can engage in over-the-top virtue signaling and still know that their jobs, their benefit packages, and all the other benefits that accrue to the privileged in our society will still be there for them...

[(Anonymous)]

I was in grassroots politics on the left for a long time. Every so often, somebody would make an angry call for a general strike, and everybody with common sense would roll their eyes: here we go again, and now the meeting's going to run late because Blowhard Bob just had to posture. There is, oddly enough, a traditional form associated with stupid calls for a general strike. Every blowhard delivered their call with the same general method, starting with the invocation of the glorious left of the 1930s.

This is the oddest-looking call for a national strike I've ever seen. It looks a lot more like earthquake preparedness, or siege preparedness, than strike-calling.

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted. I really do wonder what motivated the people who started it.

[(Anonymous)]

Sometimes I wonder if there's a social engineering experiment going on to test the gullibility of the population. Jese Nelson, singer in the pop band Little Mix, posted a picture of herself with her hair in braids or dreadlocks or something. She was accused of appropriating black culture, it spread on the internet and the media picked up on it. Whatever you think of the concept of cultural appropriation, the whole premiss depended on Jesy Nelson being white. Look up photos of Jesy Nelson and you will see the problem with that. The fact that thousands or tens of thousands of people got swept up in this and went along with it without asking the obvious question worries me more than most things.

[ecosophia]

Hah! I hadn't heard of that. You may be right.

[(Anonymous)]

I frequently see academics on social media publicly in plain sight saying that Trump supporters are "uneducated" and "ill-informed". Supporters' opinions, therefore, don't count (apparently, but their votes still matter in reality).

These intellectuals are so unwilling to lend an ear to working class people. You just see post after post of venomous hatred directed at Trump and "his enablers" (all of whom must either range from plain ignorant bumpkins to vile fascists).

This hysteria even bleeds outside of the USA into Canada, the UK and Australia! Mouthfuls of saliva are ejected as they fling their hands about in the air, loudly denouncing Trump in a restaurant (true story, I hate to say...).

[ecosophia]

There's good reason why the intelligentsia don't want to listen to the working classes. The policies the intelligentsia have supported for the last half century are the reason why so many people in the working classes have been driven into destitution and despair, and the intelligentsia know this. They've thrown the working classes under the bus so that they and their privileged friends can get cheap goods and services, and all the while preening themselves about being the good people, the caring people, the compassionate people. No wonder they're going into hysterics now that it's being pointed out.

[(Anonymous)]

I think a lot of this stuff, if not most of it, is virtue-signaling. For example, the other day talking-head Rachel Maddow played on her show a clip of children crying for Mami, and summoned a few tears. A reader of a liberal site noted that when she heard the clip, she had to run to the bathroom and vomit, then spent the next two hours crying nonstop. Whatever we may think of U.S. immigration policy, or Trump, I think most of us would agree that that’s a pretty unusual reaction to the problems of people you’ve never even met.

Not to be outdone, another reader wrote in to say that SHE had been crying for the last several days. Then came one who’d been crying since the election—with breaks, one hopes—and by now they’re probably up to “I’ve been crying since Trump was born!”

And remember, these are the people who brag about being part of the “reality-based community.” (To be fair, being part of a reality-based community is damned difficult in the U.S.)

You didn’t see that with the conservatives when Obama was in office. They whined about him nonstop, and annoyed their friends and relatives with nonstop tasteless jokes about him and his wife (they seemed to hate her even more than they hated him), but they did always maintain at least some connection to reality.

[ecosophia]

Hold it -- they're claiming to belong to the reality-based community? That was Karl Rove's line, from that famous interview with Ron Suskind. What you hate, you imitate, indeed!

[(Anonymous)]

Let's say this does work and starts disrupting the economy (which seems very, very unlikely): how many of them would stick it out? I could see a lot of them chickening out if this actually does anything. After all, the fallout could very well include massive disruptions to their privileges....

[ecosophia]

Oh, granted.

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds like all those attempts back in the day to bring down gasoline prices by having folks not buy gas on Wednesday (or whatever random day they would pick), as opposed to, say, just using less gas. Plus ca change...

[ecosophia]

Bingo -- it's exactly the same sort of, er, logic.

[grokrathegreen]

Just watched a couple of my super progressive (sub variant: permaculture) friends out themselves publicly as Trump supporters, to a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Interestingly one compared Trump to Snape from the Harry Potter series: I think the meaning being a good guy who is willing to seem like a bad guy for a greater good. Bodes very poorly for the Dems. I am continually shocked by the poor performance of doing politics from the Dems at present, it is amazing to me that a powerful and numerous faction in a major Nation can be so daft. Whom the gods would destroy I guess...

Trump 'supporter' is an interesting turn of phrase, isn't it though? What interests me is how few people act luke warm about Trump; which makes the most sense to me, as he is such a mixed bag. It seems as though public performances about him are encouraged to be all the way to one side or another. You can freak out at him, or pledge loyalty, and in either case at least get a comprehending response. But try to sort out good from the bad of his chex mix of policies in public and wait for confused frustration.

Most interesting, the way the left is willing to abandon the higher ground when they could claim victory. Tell me, am I remembering a decade ago when being a hardcore lefty meant being opposed to interventionism and globalization? If the pattern holds your prediction about Trump swiping victory out from under the Dems on ending reefer madness make a comedic amount of sense.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who occasionally agrees with Trump, it's hard to avoid being dragged into it. Express support for one thing, and you have to deal with people shrieking about everything, because they can't get that he's a mixed bag.

[neonvincent]

According to Fortune, the same group that cast binding spells on Trump also cast them on the National Rifle Association. The NRA heard about this and promptly turned it into a fundraising appeal. Most observers thought the NRA had gone (even more) soft in the head, but they were actually responding to something real.

NRA's response

[(Anonymous)]

The NRA’s droll response is here: https://www.nraila.org/articles/20180615/dc-area-witches-unite-for-gun-control-hurl-curses-at-the-nra

So… It strikes me as a bad idea to use magic without understanding the issues or the titular opponent. (Heinlein’s grok comes to mind as a prerequisite.) How much backblast, overspray, and ricochet will these people generate? And do they even know about the “raspberry jam” rule?

[(Anonymous)]

The thing I always find amazing about these sorts of ideas is that it apparently never occurs to these people that changing a government (or anything else) using such methods is much, much harder than changing it at the ballot box (assuming that option is available to you). If you live in a more-or-less functioning democracy and you can't get enough people to show up and vote your way once every few years, then there is no way on Earth that you can hope to get enough people to support you in much more difficult actions - actions that might involve some actual hardship and sacrifice on their part.

As I put it to a friend once: "If they won't join you at the ballot box, they're certainly not going to join you on the barricades". It didn't go down well.

Dunc

[ecosophia]

That's an excellent point, and supports the idea that it's all just a matter of virtue signaling and make-believe.

[auntlili]

Okay, I'm going to play Devil's advocate and say that a proper national strike might be an effective way to get Congress to do something very specific -- although probably not impeach the President, because if the Democrats really wanted to do that they'd be pursuing any of several actual breeches of law rather than the Russian kabuki. The French have had effective national strikes. The thing is, look at what this article asks you to stop buying. Food and medicine? Why? If you want to boycott bottled water, do it now and forever. It's a great idea. Why not stop buying from the industrial food chain now and forever, and instead support your local farmers? What they're saying has the feel of a penance. Like "okay, let's go on a crash diet and give up all that fun shopping for a week and then, because we're good, we'll lose a ton of weight and an embarrassing President and life will be wonderful again."

I went to a zazen retreat once and at the end of it, participants were given the floor -- Quaker-style -- to say whatever they wished about the experience. One woman stood up and said that she had come to the retreat determined to let go of her traumatic past once and for all, only to find that she really missed the drama. For me, that's what this is. After all, how is a brief boycott going to shut down the electric grid and the water supply? There are a million ways to make sustained and meaningful change in your life, to benefit what is good and weaken what is destructive, and to validate the dictum "l'union fait la force." But although effective over time, that kind of change is not dramatic, and these people would really miss the drama.

[fluiddruid]

They probably don't want to support their local farmers because they think that the farmers are evil racists.
I've read a few articles recently about two university professors from California who proclaimed that farmers' markets were "insidious white spaces".

basically doing nothing

[dfr1973]

So, they aren't actually cutting their spending, just shifting it in time ... making this an empty gesture in addition to looking like hypocritical virtue-signalling. As for reality sinking in, I would not hold my breath on that one. This self-proclaimed "resistance" seems to go out of their way to avoid the simple reality that too many of us voters were never going to vote for Hillary (unless it is a vote to indict).

That being said, since the Democrat party looks to still be actively avoiding reality, I will write in Cthulhu. Trump bombed Syria, and that is a deal-breaker for me.

Re: basically doing nothing

[ecosophia]

No question, there are valid reasons to vote against Trump. If the "Resistance" was interested in building a political movement and winning elections, they might even pay attention to those!

[(Anonymous)]

I found the part about "this evil, fascist government" potentially shutting down utilities in target cities particularly amusing. As a utility worker myself -- at a good, socialist municipal utility ;) -- I have something of an understanding of how utility systems operate...and the author of the original post obviously does not.

The mindlessness and immaturity of the tantrum is rather sad.

David, by the lake

[ecosophia]

Well, there's that. Interestingly, that's the first thing my wife Sara thought of, too.

[(Anonymous)]

It's the cluelessness that gets me. There's clearly no understanding (or any desire to acquire an understanding) of how the political system works, or the economic system works or any system for that matter.

A case in point occurred last year in the neighboring state of Vermont. The bank president of Union Bank in Saint Johnsbury became aware one day in January of 2017 of a small group of protesters outside his bank beating a drum and holding signs protesting bank investment in the oil pipelines (this was during the height of the Keystone protests). He sent out the branch manager who discovered the protesters were aiming their displeasure at the Union Bank in southern California. The Vermont bank is not associated with them in any way as they are a local bank. This was explained to the protesters who then asked where the nearest branch of Bank of America was located. The manager said that to the best of his knowledge there were none in the state of Vermont.

*poof* End of protest.

It would have taken very little effort on the part of these people to do research in order to find out where best to aim their efforts but apparently they couldn't even be bothered to do that. So no, it's not surprising that there are DT opponents convinced if everybody ceased shopping (and of course everybody must surely be like them) the US economy will drop to its knees with the POTUS promptly launched on his perp walk. Once he's gone then we can all start happily shopping again and life will be good.

*sigh*

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

Hah! Thank you for that story. Yeah, it's pretty much par for the course.

[drhooves]

The Long Descent appears to be picking up steam. 2025 is going to be a huge swing to something radical, and probably far worse than what we have today. Eight years of Obama (and angry conservatives) and eight years of Trump (and frustrated liberals) are testing the limits of political extremes, and the savior that rises up to save us all will likely be granted far more political power than is healthy.

Television especially seems to be the medium used to draw the battle lines. Clear and critical thinking requires putting mass and social media on "Ignore".

[ecosophia]

It'll be interesting to see what happens. My guess is that 2021 will be the crucial year. If Trump wins reelection easily, as I suspect he will, the impact on his opposition is likely to be as huge as the impact of FDR's massive victory in 1936 was on his opposition. In that earlier case, American politics changed decisively, and a vast number of policies that had been supported by both parties before 1932 were entirely off the table after 1936.

[(Anonymous)]

"I'm frankly starting to wonder if somebody in the Trump administration is cooking up schemes like this and the comically inept project to cast a hex on Trump I discussed here a while back."

Wouldn´t surprise me, if there is one thing The Donald is good at, it´s trolling.

However, it could also be a trick by the Democrat establishment to avoid the real organizing efforts - since that would threaten them too, being more a Sanders thing. "Pink hat protests", Science Day...all their protests strike me as tokenist. The only real thing the Dems are doing is the Mueller probe, which is an elite-bureaucratic thing (and won´t take down Trump anyway, as it looks).

Rather funny, since the Democrats insist that Trump is a cross between Louis Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Boris Badenoff. If he *really* were all those things, I think the Dems would be six feet under by now!

[ecosophia]

Well, yes. If this were actually the kind of fascist regime the anti-Trump movement insists it is, they'd have been dragged out of their beds at three in the morning by uniformed thugs, and their bullet-riddled corpses would have been tossed into a mass grave a few hours later. That's what real fascism is like -- and watching a bunch of privileged intellectuals preen and posture in front of mirrors, pretending to be heroic fighters against fascism in the serene knowledge that they risk nothing by doing so, is sourly amusing at best.

our two-party system

[(Anonymous)]

I've been struggling to find a footing for years now as a citizen in a democracy with Party-Cosmos and Party-Chaos as the only viable options given how the system is constructed.

Most of the time, I wish everyone in politics and citizenry had more capacity for nuance and dancing in the grey areas. There are solutions available to our problems in that space but it requires reframing from "us" and "them" (who are all citizens and stakeholders in solutions) to "we all" and asking the questions about what successful solutions look like if it's not set up as one side winning and sticking it to the other side. And also asking questions about how solutions look when they need to meet minimum requirements of people who may value different things.

Even the comments here feel like they originate from "us vs. them", however we all fall on the political spectrum. I would hope we all here can model the kind of discourse we'd like to see more broadly.

Re: our two-party system

[ecosophia]

I've been brooding over the same issue of late, and may have something to suggest in a future post.

General strike

[(Anonymous)]

I just read the article. Wow. It sounds like a strange combination of general strike (called "national strike" in the article), consumer boycott and survivalism. It was obviously written by somebody who is completely clueless about politics, including traditional protest/leftist politics.

Also, what makes the person think a general strike is even *possible* at this point? A classical general strike (as opposed to "the labor unions call a national work stoppage as part of the rules of the game") is only one step removed from a revolution, which explains why even Trotsky advised not to toy around with the idea - if you call a general strike, you´d better be serious about it! A general strike to force a GOP congress to impeach Trump...wow! Just wow! If taken seriously, that´s a call for adventurist political suicide.

But of course it isn´t serious, and at the end, the blogger who quotes the article simply recommends another round of protest marches, which actually sounds more sensible given the circumstances... In today´s America, people are more likely to strike in support of Trump...

Tidlösa

Re: General strike

[ecosophia]

True enough. I don't think that anybody who's promoting this notion has bothered to think things through at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Not suprised at seeing stuff like this coming from P.Z. Myers. He is (or used to be) a Big Deal in the Internet Atheist movement, and has the same childish, smarter-than-thou style that the rest of that scene had. About ten years ago, the same blog you just linked had a series of posts encouraging its readers to sneak consecrated hosts out of Catholic churches and mail them to Myers so he could subject them to (his words) "extremw cracker abuse". Wonder how many Catholics became Atheists after Myers blasphemed and insulted their religion...

[ecosophia]

Good gods. I'm not a Catholic, and that sickens me.

I wonder if Myers has taken his hatred of the Christian god to its logical extreme and become a Satanist. That would make sense of that action...

That icon!

[avalonautumn]

I laughed long and hard at the icon of a child wearing a crown and crying! OMG. That just hit the nail on the head without any words needed! Thanks for that.

Also, "tantrumocracy"? Brilliant.

Re: That icon!

[ecosophia]

Thank you! I grinned when I saw it.

[(Anonymous)]

With respect to a link for parallels in the previous administration: https://shadowproof.com/2018/06/15/separation-immigrant-families-part-deportation-obama-now-trump-expanding-practice/

With respect to further thinking on "us" vs. "them", I met a woman who spent the better part of a year in genuine mourning/depression after the last election. My suspicion is that this might have something to do with an American identity that all of a sudden is shattered by reality, although the article pointed to above might suggest (if it's simply pointing to one example, and not an isolated example) that it's not so much that reality has shattered an illusion as that it has been the reality all along and that the current administration is shattering the illusion that it hasn't. Whatever the reason, some people do take this to heart. My observation is that some will then identify with that feeling so strongly that they lock anything out that doesn't reinforce it. I think it's unfortunate, because it makes conversation difficult if not impossible.

The second point I'd like to make with respect to "us" vs. "them" is that for me it is important to seek a third perspective. American politics is polarized. There is no backing down. There is a shutting down, of discourse, and periodically, of the government itself. I can't see a solution by picking sides. I look at things from a different perspective. The questions I ask are, How is this based in nature, and how is it based in spirituality?

In The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene (2018) Luce Irigaray contributes a chapter which contains a good summary of the first part of this perspective.

Ecology is very fashionable nowadays. However, just as the Western man pretended to dominate nature, to subject it to a culture presumed to be of higher value in relation to nature, today he intends to care for nature. Even if this gesture looks more ethical, it is nevertheless still inspired by a sense of absolute power toward life more than by a respect for life ...

Now, the first ecological gesture is to live and situate ourselves as living beings among other living beings in an environment that allows life to exist and develop. Before willing once more to be the masters of the world, it would be advisable to wonder about what being alive signifies, and whether we really are living, or how we could be or become living. Any other approach still corresponds to that of humans placing themselves outside the world in order to be capable of controlling it, for better or for worse ... The question which must be asked is thus: How and why does the culture that we have constructed, especially in the West, not correspond to a cultivation of life itself, but is a culture which serves values that more often than not do not preserve life? To claim one is an environmentalist before questioning our cultural tradition does not really make sense.

Here is a summary of the second part:

We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of the social order; that if the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build around us. Literally so. What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche? Like inside, like outside. In the eleventh hour, the very physical environment suddenly looms up before us as the outward mirror of our inner condition, for many the first discernible symptom of the advanced disease within. ... in the course of our generation, many proud traditions of protest and reform have grown as depleted as the life-resources of the environment may soon be. It is the energy of [spiritual] renewal that will generate the next politics, and perhaps the final radicalism of our society." Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) xxii-xxiii. (Roszak actually used the term "religious renewal", since he was writing in a period where lively alternative religions and religious practices were springing up, but he uses the term "religious" and "spiritual" interchangeably. For example, a little further on he'll speak of "spiritual regeneration".)

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking of stuff you can't make up, there are more embarrassing revelations coming out about the Obama administration and it's immigration policies. It seems they engaged in the same practices when it came to the children of illegal immigrants that the Democrats have been loudly criticizing the Trump administration for.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/19/photos-obama-immigration-detention-facilities/

[(Anonymous)]

I read the call for the national strike and my immediate response to the author amounted to, "Awww, sweetie. Does your mommy know you're out all by yourself?"

Or, in short, your chosen illustration. :-D