Sections
Introduction
1. Summary
2. Crisis
Files
A. Selections
from January 26, 2018.
Introduction:
This is a
Nederlog of Friday,
January 26,
2018.
1. Summary
This is a crisis
log but it is a bit different from how it was the last five years:
I have been writing about the crisis since September 1, 2008 (in Dutch, but
since 2010 in English) and about
the enormous dangers of surveillance (by secret services and
by many rich commercial entities) since June 10, 2013, and I will
continue with it.
On
the
moment and since more than two years
(!!!!)
I have
problems with the company that is
supposed to take care that my site is visible [1]
and with my health, but I am still writing a Nederlog every day and
I shall continue.
Section 2. Crisis Files
These
are five crisis files that are all well worth reading:
A.
Selections from January 26, 2018
These
are five crisis files that are all well worth reading:
1. Are the Supremes About to Give Trump a Second Term?
2. Neoliberalism Is Taking a Steep Toll on an Entire
Generation's Mental
Health: Study
3. Doomsday Clock Now '2 Minutes to Midnight' as Trump Drives
Up
Nuclear and Climate Threats
4. The Blood Feud Among British Conservatives
5. The Rise of Fascism in a Brave New Digital World
The
items 1 - 5 are today's selections from the 35 sites that I look at
every morning. The indented text under each link is quoted from the
link that starts the item. Unindented text is by me:
1. Are
the Supremes About to Give Trump a Second Term?
This article is by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman on Truthdig. It
starts as follows:
The US Supreme Court may be
about to make a second Trump term inevitable.
The nine
“Justices” have just heard oral arguments in an Ohio voter registration
case. If their decision goes with Secretary of State Jon Husted, it
would mean Republicans like him throughout the United States will be
able to scrub from the voter rolls millions of citizens, merely because
they are suspected of wishing to vote Democrat.
In Ohio
alone, millions of Ohio voters have tried to vote on Election Day over
the past four presidential elections, only to find their names were
erased from the poll books.
What’s
technically at stake is whether the federal government has the right to
demand fairness in purging voter registration rolls. Or will the
secretaries of the various states be free to purge whomever they want?
Incidentally -
I am Dutch, unfortunately - I had not read the term ¨Supremes¨
for the ¨The US Supreme Court¨ before, and I like it. And this is
the beginning of an interesting article, the point of which is
clarified in the next section:
In 2004,
then-Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell stripped some 309,000
voters from the rolls, and nearly all came from heavily Democratic
cities – Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo. In Cleveland nearly a
quarter, 24.96% of all voters, were removed from the voting rolls.
Blackwell
simultaneously served as co-chair of the state campaign to re-elect
Bush/Cheney. Despite the obvious conflict of interest, Blackwell was
officially in charge of running that election. The election was decided
by less than 119,000 votes, giving George W. Bush a victory over John
Kerry, who never said a word.
That is, by simply excluding
voters from voting (generally for bullshit
reasons, as the article explains) it is indeed quite possible,
in the present USA, that the Republicans win elections and indeed
have won elections simply by excluding voters.
There also is another part involved here, namely that the
Democrats and the Republicans tend to run around the same number of
voters, at least in presidential elections, and indeed also
that there is in the USA only the effective choice of a Democratic or
Republican candidate for the last 100 years or so, and these parts are not
treated in this article, but indeed it seems to be a fact
that Republicans win elections essentially by excluding - usually
Democratic - voters from voting.
This article ends as follows:
Last month
Trump suddenly, without explanation, abolished the commission. But as
investigative reporter Greg Palast has shown, the registration
stripping has been moved into the Department of Homeland Security.
Where Kobach’s commission was opaque, now the partisan purge process
will be essentially invisible. State officials who refused to provide
critical information to Kobach may now have no choice with DHS.
In other
words, America’s Trump-run FBI/KGB/Savak apparatus may now have the
power to silently and invisibly remove enough potential voters to elect
and re-elect whomever it wants.
That might
include not only Trump, but Husted, who is running to become Ohio’s
lieutenant governor, and Kobach, who wants to be governor of Kansas.
This and
much else could turn on the Supremes’ decision on the Ohio case. Should
Husted’s right to purge whomever he wants from the voter rolls be
confirmed by the Court, our sham elections will become an even bigger
charade.
Yes, I think
this may well be correct, and Greg Palast - who
has been mentioned in Nederlog several times before - is an interesting
man with interesting points about the American elections, indeed since
quite a few years.
And this is a recommended article.
2. Neoliberalism
Is Taking a Steep Toll on an Entire Generation's Mental Health: Study
This article is by Jacob Sugarman on AlterNet. It starts as follows:
Are you a millennial prone
to self-criticism? Is your sense of worth inextricably bound to your
professional standing and achievements? Do you suffer from acute social
anxiety or are otherwise fearful of being judged by your peers?
The source of your
unhappiness may not be chemical or emotional but a product of our
economic system. According to a study
from Psychological Bulletin, neoliberalism is
producing generations of young people who are increasingly demanding,
both of each other and themselves.
I say. Well...I dislike
neoliberalism (and see below, for a clarification), but I also am a
psychologist, and while I know that among psychologists it is
possible to ¨prove¨ things
with sixteen or twenty ¨experimental subjects¨ simply by testing the
empirical associations of things A and things B (smell of meat, taste
for meat; advertisement, interest in things advertised etc. etc.) and
indeed also neoliberalism and unhappines, as pointed out above.
But in fact this was one
of my reasons (back in 1980 (!)) to conclude that psychology
is not a real science:
The fact that almost
any random association between two - very often quite
ill-defined - kinds of things can be ¨tested¨ and ¨verified¨ by
psychologists, indeed always (that I knew) with 16 or 20 ¨experimental
subjects¨ that almost always were first-year students of psychology,
on the basis of the very arbitrary argument that ¨if 90 or 95%
of our experimental subjects agree¨ - 18 out of 20 students of ca. 18
years old, in practice - then the proposition we try to
establish may be regarded to be proved as true.
I could say a whole
lot more, but the facts as sketched in the previous
paragraph were as sketched (in the late Seventies), while it
also was a fact that both the numbers (around 20)
and the kind of the ¨experimental subjects¨ (always first-year
students of psychology) were systematically never mentioned in
the ¨experimental reports¨ that again were the basis of ¨scientific
psychological essays¨ that were published in the psychologists´ trade
press (i.e. the
psychological journals, normally).
In any case, for me
the association <neoliberalism, unhappiness> is very probably a
whole lot less certain than it may be for Jacob Sugarman, and
one major reason is that both terms that are involved are quite
vague.
Then again, Sugarman does
raise the question:
So what is neoliberalism,
anyway? Despite what the pundit class might have you believe, it's more
than a glib
pejorative for the policies of corporate Democrats and the
GOP, although both parties have embraced a neoliberal model to varying
degrees. Mike
Konczal offers the following definition at Vox:
"'Neoliberalism'
encompasses market supremacy—or the extension of markets or market-like
logic to more and more spheres of life. This, in turn, has a
significant influence on our subjectivity: how we view ourselves, our
society, and our roles in it. One insight here is that markets don’t
occur naturally but are instead constructed through law and practices,
and those practices can be extended into realms well beyond traditional
markets."
As Meagan
Day points out in Jacobin, meritocracy and neoliberalism often go
hand in hand. If the whole of society can be reduced to a series of
market transactions, then individuals become commodities in direct
competition with one another.
Well... yes indeed
(perhaps), but it is precisely because I have met years and years of
the extreme (and often intentional!) vagueness of the
meaning(s) of the term ¨neoliberal¨, my own solution is that most
- not: all - supposed ¨neoliberals¨ in fact tend to be this,
indeed mostly without ever realizing it:
Neofascism is a. A social system that is
marked by a government with a centralized powerful authority, where
the opposition is propagandized and suppressed or censored, that
propounds an ethics which has profit as
its main norm, and that has a politics that is rightwing, nationalistic, pro-capitalist,
anti-liberal, anti-equality, and anti-leftist,
and that has a corporative
organization of the economy in which multi-national corporations are
stronger than a national government or state, b. A political philosophy or
movement based on or advocating such a social system.
And yes: This
definition is my own, as is this definition of fascism
(which is a bit different from neofascism) - and yes, I do know
a lot about fascism.
Then again, I would
have more or less the same argument against the association
<neofascism, unhappiness>, for even if ¨neofascism¨ is rather
clearly defined, it is not defined in psychological terms and
besides ¨unhappiness¨ still is as vague as ever.
Here is the last bit
that I quote from this article:
"Since the mid-1970s,
neoliberal political-economic regimes have systematically replaced
things like public ownership and collective bargaining with
deregulation and privatization, promoting the individual over the group
in the very fabric of society," Day notes. "Meanwhile, meritocracy—the
idea that social and professional status are the direct outcomes of
individual intelligence, virtue, and hard work—convinces isolated
individuals that failure to ascend is a sign of inherent worthlessness."
Well... yes
and no. I agree that the neoliberals or neofascists (and my definition
is at least a reasonable definition, which is something that rarely
happens in journalism as described by the above quotation, but that is
about the extent to which I agree).
And also, while I think that the sociology
of meritocracy is pretty confused (as you may find by imagining the
differences between a black man of 20 with poor parents and an IQ of
145, and a white man of 20 with rich parents and an IQ of 145), I am a
psychologist who does believe that
there are genuine mostly psychological
differences between individuals in tems of ¨individual intelligence, virtue, and hard
work¨.
So all in all I think the thesis of this article is rather
questionable, especially because of the vagueness of its terms.
3. Doomsday
Clock Now '2 Minutes to Midnight' as Trump Drives Up Nuclear and
Climate Threats
This article is by Jessica Corbett on Common Dreams. It starts as
follows:
In response to
rising nuclear tensions and concerns about inadequate action to address
the climate crisis, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced
"In 2017, world
leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear
war and climate change, making the world security situation more
dangerous than it was a year ago—and as dangerous as it has been since
World War II," said a statement
from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
I say, and I take this quite
seriously, for I know about the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist
since more than 50 years, and I trust them.
Here is more:
"North Korea's
nuclear weapons program appeared to make remarkable progress in 2017,
increasing risks for itself, other countries in the region, and the
United States. Hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions on both
sides have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or
miscalculation," the statement continued. "On the climate change front,
the danger may seem less immediate, but avoiding catastrophic
temperature increases in the long run requires urgent attention now."
I think all of the above
is quite correct. Here is the last bit that I quote from this
article:
"It's always
sobering to be reminded just how close humanity is to destroying itself
with nuclear weapons," noted Paul Kawika Martin, senior director for
policy and political affairs at Peace Action. "The majority of the
world is quite ready to live without the constant fear of nuclear war
hanging over our heads, but the nuclear-armed nations of the world are
acting like children who only follow the rules when the rules suit
their perceived interests." Thursday the hands of the Doomsday Clock
have been moved and it is now just two minutes midnight, a signal to
the world that international scientists and policy experts are
increasingly worried about the likeliness of global catastrophe.
Yes indeed. I agree
with everything said here, indeed including the thesis that ¨the nuclear-armed nations of the world are
acting like children who only follow the rules when the rules suit
their perceived interests¨.
And this is a recommended article.
4. The Blood Feud Among British Conservatives
This article is by Jörg Schindler on Spiegel International. It starts
as follows:
"Things are bloody
awful at the moment," says historian Anthony Seldon, adding that even
the Suez crisis in 1956 seems minor in comparison to Brexit. If you
think about it, Seldon says, things have never been this bad in the
Tories' 230-year-history -- and things could get worse yet. If the
party doesn't "loosen the buttocks," Seldon says, a socialist might
soon move into 10 Downing Street.
I say, which I do because
I did not know this. And I should add that since I dislike the
Tories a lot, for me this is good news.
Here is some more:
These are dark days for the
Tories, and that's not just a product of the harsher than normal
winter. The primary reason is that the government has essentially
stopped governing in the wake of Theresa May's unnecessary move to
gamble away her absolute majority in snap elections in June. Since
then, every member of her cabinet has been primarily focused on saving
their own skin. May, meanwhile, has become the anti-Midas: Everything
she touches seems to turn to led instead of gold.
Meanwhile, the people are
turning their backs on the Conservatives, with many bolting to a Labour
Party that has adroitly learned how to exploit seven years of Tory-led
austerity. The health care system is on the verge of collapse, the
housing shortage has become so acute that the number of homeless people
continues to rise and the gap between rich and poor is widening.
And while Labour, under the
leadership of socialist Jeremy Corbyn, has risen to become the party
with the largest membership in Western Europe, the Tories have been
hemorrhaging members.
I take it this is mostly
correct, but I mostly do not know. Then again, here are two
numbers that are almost certainly correct, and that do show how
far the Tories have fallen: In the 1980s there were over one
million members of the Tory Party; in 2017 there are some
70,000 members of the same party.
Here is the end of the article (after skipping considerable amounts):
The victorious Brexit camp
has also long since disintegrated into splinter groups, ranging from
those who want to see nothing change in the country's relationship with
the EU to those who want everything to change. And that is before the
most crucial negotiations with hated Brussels have even taken place. To
prepare for that next phase, May is set to deliver her next major
address on Brexit in the coming weeks. Expectations on the Continent,
however, are low. Few in the EU believe it will shed much light on the
British negotiating position.
Back at home, the
electorate is also mumbling noticeably. For the time being, the prime
minister is acting as if the whole Brexit issue is exaggerated. To
demonstrate that she also wants to save the planet with her
climate-friendly policies in addition to everything else, May just days
ago visited some wetlands in southwest London. There, she peered into
binoculars to look for endangered species. She also could have just
looked into the mirror at home.
That is, it seems to be the
expectation of Spiegel International that the Conservatives will loose
the next election. I do not know whether that is correct, but I do
hope it is.
5. The
Rise of Fascism in a Brave New Digital World
This article is by Jeff Einstein on the Off-Guardian and originally on
Digital Apostate. It starts as follows:
We are watching Huxley’s
dystopian vision of a Brave New World controlled by
state-sanctioned addiction unfold right before our eyes. And true to
Huxley’s prescience, we rather enjoy it. The only surprise is that the
operative pharmacological agents he warned against aren’t delivered in
pill or liquid or other physical form, and we don’t call them soma or
heroin or crystal meth or crack. They’re delivered in bits and
bytes instead, and we call them media. Consider…
- The average American
household has only 2.75 people, but 3 TVs and 6 Internet devices.
- The average American
family spends more money each month on media consumption than on
groceries or electricity.
- The average American
consumes 12-15 aggregate hours of digital media per day.
- The average American
child consumes more than 10 hours of digital media per day.
- The average American
smartphone is checked every 6-12 waking minutes.
- 70% of Americans
binge view.
I think the above
quotation is quite correct (except for Huxley´s
suggestion about ¨a pharmacological method¨), and indeed this is a
quite interesting article, that also seems to be written by someone
who started as a digital enthusiast but who is now a
digital apostate (which also seems a decent sketch of my own
development).
Here is more:
The jury is in and the
verdict is irrefutable: A pervasive and pernicious meta-addiction to
all things media and all things digital has emerged over the past
generation as the default condition of American
life, the rule rather than the exception. We are
born into and live our lives in a completely immersive screen culture
whose primary directive is to search for, find and ingest media all day
long — virtually every waking minute.
We carry pocket-size TV
screens with us everywhere we go, and more screens of various sizes
greet us wherever and whenever we pause: at home in our bedrooms,
kitchens and living rooms. At work in elevators, reception areas and
atop every desk. On the road in gas pumps, airline seats, taxis,
airports and train stations. At play in bars and restaurants. In
school, in the doctor’s office and just about everywhere else.
Yes, I think that is a
decent sketch (when joined to the italics in the previous
quotation). Incidentally, it doesn´t hold for me: I never had
an e-phone and don´t want one; I never had a TV since 1970; I have only
one internet device; I spend far less time on the digital media; and I
don´t binge view. (But OK - that´s just me.)
Here is more:
Our kids are hooked on
media before they enter pre-school. Digital media shape and define our
lives at every stage and in every possible way. We are, per media
ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to
Death, forever swapping electrons in a Brave New Digital World where
none of us will soon be able to find or fashion context or meaning for
our lives beyond the High-Definition bits and bytes we consume
virtually nonstop through all our digital devices.
Our meta-addiction to all
things media and all things digital is passionately non-partisan and
politically correct to a fault — but also perfectly attuned to protect
and promote the interests of the corporate, government and academic
power brokers who yield it so effectively. Like all late-stage
addictions it moderates and controls almost all of our personal and
social debates, and narrates virtually every facet of our lives.
I think that is also
correct, at least of the majority of Americans. Here is again more:
The same digital
technologies of scale that created millions of jobs and powered the dot
com boom of the late 1990s now destroy far more American jobs than they
create. The same digital technologies of scale that gave rise to
the Wall Street and digital media cultures now all but guarantee
periodic financial calamity and the steady erosion of civil liberty.
The same digital technologies of scale that promised utter
accountability and transparency have turned forensic accounting into a
growth industry, and are now common license for corporate,
government and academic executives to rob us blind while they barricade
themselves behind an opaque veil of impenetrable complexity and
bureaucratic inertia.
The above quotation is
again mostly correct, in my view. And here is more:
Like the old Fascism, the
new Fascism comes wrapped in the strident language of identity politics
and tribalized victimhood. But this ain’t your daddy’s Fascism. The new
Fascism is hip, stylish, thoroughly inclusive, immensely entertaining
and powered by thousands of server farms and billions of microchips. I
call it eFascism, and define it simply as the religion of the state in
21st-century digital America.
In fact, Jeff Einstein seems to
be doing in this article what I did in the end of 2012:
See my Crisis:
Christmas sermon: Hypotheses about CF+SS that is from December 25, 2012.
Also, the ¨CF+SS¨ is in fact short for ¨Corporate Fascism +
Surveillance State¨, which shows
that indeed my thoughts went rather like those of Jeff Einstein.
Since then, I have myself defined both fascism and
neofascism, and the last definition (which also occurred above) I
repeat once more, because I think it is a good definition:
Neofascism is a. A social system that is
marked by a government with a centralized powerful authority, where
the opposition is propagandized and suppressed or censored, that
propounds an ethics which has profit as
its main norm, and that has a politics that is rightwing, nationalistic, pro-capitalist,
anti-liberal, anti-equality, and anti-leftist,
and that has a corporative
organization of the economy in which multi-national corporations are
stronger than a national government or state, b. A political philosophy or
movement based on or advocating such a social system.
And this is certainly a better
definition than Einstein´s - ¨eFascism¨ =def ¨the religion of the state in 21st-century
digital America¨ - although
I also like the term ¨eFascism¨ (but neofascism - as defined -
is certainly a better definition).
Then there is this:
eFascism embraces and
embodies the very essence of addicted excess, an institutionalized
orgy-porgy of mass psychosis deliberately manufactured and invoked by
the constant and relentless release of media-induced dopamine and
endorphins in all of our brains almost all of the time. It’s no mistake
that the rise of secular Fascism in the early 20th century coincided
with the rise of electronic mass media.
Where democracy was the
primary political bias of print media, fascism is the primary political
bias of electronic media
Fade out, fade in: A
century after the rise of secular Fascism we think it’s normal to
consume electronic media almost every waking minute of every day
because we’ve been told for decade after decade to stay tuned and
because everyone around us now behaves the same way. We think it’s
normal, but it’s the kind of normality that ensues only when the
inmates — the biggest addicts — take over the asylum.
I think this is too
vague and too sketchy, although it goes in the right directions. Here
is more:
The true bias of digital
technology is neither personal empowerment nor freedom. The true bias
of digital technology and eFascism is the efficient and accelerated
consolidation of institutional power and wealth among those
institutions — corporations and government agencies alike —
already far too powerful and far too wealthy. The real bias of digital
technology benefits most those massive corporations and government
agencies that singly and together already manage and manipulate
terabytes of data each and every day.
But the above is quite
correct, I think - and indeed Einstein is also right in
blaming both the ¨corporations
and government agencies¨.
Then there is this:
Fascism should more
appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and
corporate power — Benito Mussolini
What we call government
regulation these days is in fact corporatism at work, little more than
a tool-driven marriage of convenience among incestuous alumni of the
same Ivy League MBA programs. Witness the fact that the financial
institutions deemed too big to fail back in 2008 are — for the most
part — twice the size and only half as accountable today, not in spite
but precisely because of government regulation.
Contrary to what the ruling elite of the Brave New Digital World tell
us time and again, too big to fail isn’t just another unintended
consequence of a bad plan. Too big to fail is the
plan.
Yes, I think this is
also mostly quite correct - and indeed I knew Mussolini´s
quotation, which may have moved me in 2012 to speak of
¨Corporate Fascism¨, although I do not know anymore (i.a. because I
wrote some 1800 Nederlogs
since 2012).
And there is this:
Thus no surprise that the
typical image of addiction-driven eFascism manifests not in a pair of
iron boots but in a perfectly white smile and a paralyzing torrent of
fatherly advice. It preaches freedom of choice but — like every other
addiction to every other narcotic — obliterates the only real freedom:
the freedom not to participate, the freedom to
simply walk away.
The same eFascism is the
driving meme of every grade level in just about every school and
is baked into just about every job description. It comes from
everywhere at once all of the time without respite, and it marginalizes
or destroys anything else — like common sense, freedom, democracy and
religion — that preaches moderation and restraint (the true enemies of
both addiction and eFascism) as critical and indispensable components
to the quality of life.
This is a bit overstated, at
least - as is illustrated by the fact that I, for one, do not have
and do not want to have: a cell-phone, a television, a Facebook
account, an Apple or a Microsoft operating system, and more, and the
same holds for some intelligent others.
Here is yet more:
Under eFascism, the
self-serving scoundrels in corporate board rooms, the self-serving
scoundrels in government and the self-serving scoundrels in academia
are all the same self-serving scoundrels at different stages of their
careers.
Yes, I think this is also
correct, and in fact I do have quite decent reasons to think
the above about Holland (where I live), for a thesis like the
one articulated in the last quotation was also
made in 2006, indeed after first uploading my review in 2002: ¨Aantekeningen bij "De illusie
van democratie"¨ (This is Dutch, but rather good - and the sources
are mostly pensioned (!!) Dutch professors of politicology, sociology
or law.)
Here is the last bit that I quote from this fine article:
Under eFascism, Oscar
Wilde’s definition of the cynic as the man who knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing will soon define us all.
The sad truth is that
most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or
evil. Hanna Arendt
Yes indeed, and I agree
with Arendt´s quotation.
This is a fine
article that is strongly recommended.
Notes
[1]
I
have now been
saying since
the
end of 2015 that
xs4all.nl is systematically
ruining my site by NOT updating it within a few seconds,
as it did between 1996 and 2015, but by updating it between
two to seven days later, that is, if I am lucky.
They
have
claimed that my site was wrongly named in html: A lie.
They have claimed that my operating system was out of date: A lie.
And
they
just don't care for my site, my interests, my values or my
ideas. They have behaved now for 2 years
as if they are the
eagerly willing instruments of the US's secret services, which I
will
from now on suppose they are (for truth is dead in Holland).
The only
two reasons I remain with xs4all is that my site has been
there since 1996, and I have no reasons whatsoever to suppose that any
other Dutch provider is any better (!!).
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