ecosophia | How Not To Do Magic: The Saga Continues

It's been a while since we've checked in on the efforts of the soi-disant "Magical Resistance" -- that is to say, the people who still haven't gotten over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, and are expressing their rage and hatred by way of magical rituals rather than public tantrums of some other kind. Partly, I'm glad to say, that's because they seem to have learned one of the basic lessons of magical practice, which is that being public about your workings is a great way to let other operative mages know how to mess with you. Since the spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to use magic to keep Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, the Magical Resistance has been much quieter about its intentions and ritual texts. I'm pleased to see this; any indication that the very low standard of magical competence in modern American society has risen a bit is worth celebrating.

That said, the efforts of the Magical Resistance to hinder the Trump administration don't seem to have been favored with any greater level of success than before. The latest and most obvious example of this, of course, is the end of the Mueller investigation. For more than two years now, a great many of the people who hate Donald Trump have been insisting at the top of their lungs that Mueller would inevitably find some suitably gaudy collection of impeachable offenses in Trump's conduct in office. At least some of the people who were busy casting spells to bring Trump down, to judge from their comments on various online forums, loaded a great many of their hopes on Mueller -- and, to judge by the rituals they were using back when they were being public about it, an equally large share of their magical efforts. Those clearly didn't do much, and there's a useful lesson in operative magic to be drawn from their failure.

The core of that failure comes from their choice of intention. Those of the Mueller-centric spells I encountered, back when such things were being made public, focused nearly all their rhetoric on the ideal of justice. That's a perfectly valid magical intention, but like most other perfectly valid magical intentions, it has a catch: you really do need to be sure that justice is on your side.

In a criminal investigation, justice includes such basic elements as fairness, impartiality, and a willingness to suspend judgment until all the facts have come to light. The goal of a just investigation is to punish those who are actually guilty of the charges made against them and to vindicate those who are innocent. If you say instead, "I hate the defendant, therefore he must be guilty of the accusations," that's unjust; if, more cynically, you say, "I hate the defendant, therefore I don't care what the facts say, I'm going to insist that he's guilty of the accusations," that's also unjust. The attitude of the Trump-haters toward the Mueller investigation was one of these two -- I'll let my readers make their own speculations as to which one -- and I can promise you that if you perform a magical working for justice motivated by one or the other of these deeply unjust attitudes, you are not going to like the results.

And of course that's what happened. As far as I can tell, the outcome of the Mueller investigation was, technically speaking, a success for the Magical Resistance, in that justice did in fact happen. That is to say, an innocent man was cleared of false accusations made against him by his political enemies, and some of the people who helped to spread those accusations have suffered a great deal of public embarrassment. That's entirely just. If that wasn't what the Magical Resistance had in mind, why, that's what happens when you're insufficiently careful about the intentions you choose for your working.

The moral to this story? Justice isn't whatever you want it to be, neither is magic -- and if you're not sufficiently careful with either one, you can very efficiently kick yourself in the backside.

Current Mood: contemplative

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From: (Anonymous)

"That is to say, an innocent man was cleared of false accusations made against him by his political enemies"

Since not a single page of the Mueller report has been published, and not a single page as far as we know has been furnished to any member of Congress, it seems premature to make either general or specific conclusions about what the report contains.

As of last night, the only information available to the public was a four page letter about the report from the Attorney General, and a statement that the report is at least three hundred pages long.

When and if we have the opportunity to learn in detail, from the horse's mouth, what the report actually says, we will be in a better position to discuss whether the investigation is complete and whether it exonerates anyone of anything.

From:

ecosophia

The attorney general's summary, as required by law, summarized the findings of Mueller's report, and specifically stated that the report exonerated Trump of the charges of collusion made against him. Furthermore, when the letter was made public, Mueller did not dispute that finding. I think that's pretty conclusive. Still, Mueller's investigation has played so large and emotionally loaded a role in Democratic rhetoric for the past two years that I won't be surprised if twenty years from now, there are still people trying to find some way to spin its findings to permit Trump to be retroactively impeached...

From: (Anonymous)

I found this on brins blog

“Just a reminder of what pundits have been too stupid to point out... that the only thing the Mueller Report "cleared" Donald Trump of was direct collusion with Kremlin acts of war against the American Republic during 2016. The Trump Tower meetings and WikiLeaks and calling publicly for Russian hacking... they were bad, but always the weakest parts to prosecute.

That's it. Nothing else is exonerated.”

The dems might still have something to work with.

Re: outcome of Mueller investigation

From:

ecosophia - Date: 2019-03-31 03:14 am (UTC) - Expand

From: (Anonymous)

… and if the full report doesn't show Trump as a bought agent of Russia, will you shift the goal posts to "the report is heavily redacted?" And if redaction isn't evident, will it be "Photoshop editing?"

– Godozo

From: (Anonymous)

Previous inadvertently anonymous comment about waiting until we can read the actual report was written by me, Deborah Bender. I don't feel like figuring out how to post it under my own name.

From: (Anonymous)

You would think that after a while people would get frustrated or even bored when they keep doing the same thing and not only not getting result, but literally getting the *opposite* of what they are working towards.

There must be some other driver.

Question: I see that Andrew Yang has, at least for the time being, caught the attention of the Trump meme crowd. Which likely also includes the magic practitioners. Do you think they will jump to him? And if so will they have the moxy (mana?) to pull off a win?

AV

From:

ecosophia

One of the oddest things about pop-culture magic in today's America is the frantic enthusiasm with which its practitioners move the goalposts so that they can keep on pretending that their magic is doing something. I'm not yet sure I have a handle on what's behind it.

As for Andrew Yang, it's way too early to tell. It's possible that the /pol/ crowd is pushing his campaign in an attempt to mess with the Democrats.

From:

avalterra

Mess with the Dems? Maybe, but what I've read is that the /pol crowd is disappointed in the Donald and saw him as the last hope. So when Rogan put Yang on and introduced his $1000/month for every adult in America they thought, "Well heck, he is as bad a candidate as every other candidate but with him we get $1000/month!

It's being seen as the ultimate black pill response.

AV

(no subject)

From:

ecosophia - Date: 2019-03-30 02:21 am (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2019-03-30 09:33 am (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

From:

ecosophia - Date: 2019-03-30 04:42 pm (UTC) - Expand

From: (Anonymous)

You look at Mueller's back trail, he did a whitewash of Al Quaeda after the 1996 bombing. He did a whitewash of the Clintons after they took a half billion dollar bribe from Microsoft's competitors to sic the Justice Department on Microsoft and, oops, broke the dot.com boom. He covered for Epstein. No big takedowns behind him, just whitewashing guys the establishment wanted him to whitewash. Busting Trump's lawyers would have been effective if Trump wasn't so deeply comfortable with high-level staff turnover. No great killer instinct in Mueller.

But can the D party call it off? I doubt it. Trump won an election by saying he opposed the bipartisan consensus in favor of lower wages through high immigration. Sure, he lied, he's forming committees to focus H1B visa immigrants at any remaining high wage jobs. But Trump won saying different. If he isn't broken, we might see one, many, a thousand Trumps. So the whole establishment is out to get him, left and right. On the right, you can fight for lower wages with a clean heart and a calm mind, go home and watch the Godfather: This is the Business We Have Chosen. On the left, you help the bosses fight for lower wages and the whole soulful egregore of Leftism hates you, and your own soul revolts against you. You can't back down. A party of the left fights for lower wages and gets caught, it's like The Strange Death of Liberal England when England's Liberal party got caught.

From:

ecosophia

It amuses me no end that none of these claims about Mueller surfaced until he didn't do what the Democrats wanted him to do. One of the reasons the Left fails so often these days is that this sort of political retconning keeps them from learning from their failures -- and that, in turn, guarantees that they keep making the same obvious mistakes over and over again.

From: (Anonymous)

The Department of Justice recently announced it is reopening it's investigation into Jeffery Epstein, including evidence that he was let off with a light sentence thanks to improper political influence. The DOJ is particularly interested in why he was allowed to take a plea deal to one of the lesser sex abuse charges in return for a widespread investigation into child sexual abuse, sex trafficking, money laundering and tax evasion being completely shut down.

It gets even more interesting when you consider Epstein's ties to the Clintons. FAA flight logs show that Bill Took at least 26 trips on Epstein's private jet, the aptly named Lolita Express. Several of those trips were to Epstein's private island resort, known as Orgy Island, while Secret Service logs obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that every time Clinton flew to Orgy Island, he left his Secret Service security detail behind and he was required to sign waivers saying he was aware of the risks and would not hold the Secret Service responsible if anything happened.

Ever since these documents came to light, people have been asking why he would do such a thing. There have been reports of girls as young as 12 years old being gang raped both aboard the Lolita Express and on Orgy Island, while American law enforcement officers, including agents of the Secret Service, are subject to mandatory reporting requirements if they have reason to believe children are being sexually abused and there have long been suspicions that is why Clinton insisted on leaving his security detail behind whenever he went to Orgy Island.

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of the reopened investigation into Epstein.

Re: Mueller- not a killer prosecutor

From:

ecosophia - Date: 2019-03-31 05:47 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

ill_made_knight

I caught this on the teevee the other night.
https://www.pbs.org/video/special-report-full-doc-1553565292/
the brief discussion at the end was interesting.
oh and off topic and a bit tangential, but rather amusing
https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2019/3/15/empires-crumble-episode-11-we-are-losingheres-why

From:

ecosophia

Well, as I don't like to watch little colored shapes jerking around on glass screens, I'll let someone else wait for that brief discussion at the end. It's endlessly funny, on the other hand, to see Rhyd Wildermuth denouncing toxic social justice crusades, given his attempt to launch one not that many years ago.

Still, it figures; he's a gay white man, and these days gay white men are the latest whipping boys for the social justice movement. It doesn't seem to have occurred to many people in said movement that they're hard at work alienating one of the most wealthy, influential, and well-organized sectors of the soon-to-be-former progressive coalition, the group that did most of the heavy lifting in the successful struggle for same-sex marriage. Nor, I suspect, has it occurred to them that their opponents are very well aware of this, and are rubbing their hands together and laughing.

That is to say, the social justice version of the rescue game has reached the circular firing squad stage of its life cycle. We're coming within sight of the point when all that's left of the movement is a dozen disabled lesbian vegan transwomxn of color sitting in an otherwise empty room, waiting for one of their number to say something, so that they can all ostracize xer for being an evil something-or-otherist.

Edited (typo) Date: 2019-03-30 04:55 pm (UTC)

How Not To Do Magic: The Saga Continues

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