Postmodernism Eating Itself

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: If a society tolerates all types of speech and political expression it will be challenged and subverted by those who wish to suppress freedom and tolerance.  In order to defend the tolerance of a society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.  If I’m reading the article right, he said that while outlawing intolerant speech would be undesirable, rational discourse should be used to help maintain the popular dominance of tolerant principles – that intolerance defends itself by suppressing rational discussion.  But that at the end of the day, a tolerant society must reserve the right to say a dangerous enough expression of intolerance is illegal and can be suppressed.  I expect the way that was written into post-WWII German law would sit well with him, whether the actual application of those laws would or not.

I’m not here to discuss the plus and minus or the exact nature of how to best adjudicate the tolerance v intolerance in an ideal society.  Taking the paradox only on its face but not going all the way to the conclusion he offers.  And having done that, I want to look at a phenomenon affecting modern politics that can serve as an example of the paradox in action.

The current flavor of fascism is a direct result of the very postmodernism that it postures against.  There are other factors and influences, especially the “therapy culture” that emerged in the boomer generation, but in the course of my life, this is the one I’ve seen time and again.  The tolerance that was used to justify this intolerance was grounded in postmodern values.

Postmodernism has many aspects, but I’m going to use the broadest version here.  Modernism was the idea there are right ways to do things, truths that can be discovered and known.  Postmodernism was about uncertainty, vagueness, and especially the idea there are multiple “ways of knowing” – functionally, that opinions can be as valid a view of reality as facts.  The cry of the postmodern fascist, when they have lost the bully pulpit and know they’ve lost the argument as well, is a Lebowksian, “That’s just, like, your opinion, maaan.”

The Sokal hoax was, on its face, convincing enough.  Given that Sokal himself is part of that raft of neo-nazis and enablers in Epstein Pal Krauss’s new book, I suspect there are valid arguments that his stunt was bullshit from go.  It was meant to illustrate that postmodernism bad, reality is in facts and concrete things.  And yet the Krauss cohort is a clown car of people who habitually and fiercely ignore good strong science that refutes their biases, and that use flimsy and handwavey science to support what they want to believe.  “Facts don’t care about your feelings” cries lil Benny Shaps on monday, “Your intolerance hurts my feelings” on tuesday.

Faux News popularized opinion-as-reality.  It’s possible to cherry pick reportage of factual things to support ideological positions, but it’s so much easier to spew propaganda when you realize “somebody said a thing” can be “news.”  Then it’s Editorial Page: the Ostensible News Network.  You can’t say anything anybody says is wrong, because that’s just, like, their opinion, man.  I’m using my freedom of speech! You hates freedom?

I’ve heard this play out so so so many times at the street level.  In my high school classrooms in 1993, in the arguments of randos on buses, in arguments with people I know.  Person expresses factually wrong idea, is shown to be wrong, and says it’s an opinion, or even cites the first amendment.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels to me like a natural extension of the idea that all opinions about truth have some validity – an essential postmodern idea, embraced by the masses without ever acknowledging the source.

There were variations on this that predated my youth, but based on the attitudes of teachers and adults and opinion-havers of the world as I observed back then, it seems to me that it was an idea whose promotion began with 1960s mysticism, developed into therapy culture in the 1970s, and stayed with us in that form ever since.  Liberal schoolteachers were big fans of the idea, trying to encourage kids to debate because that’ll make us smorter.  I got smortified off having to hear what skinhead Ron thinks about the just society.

The funny thing is, I don’t even think the idea is wholly lacking in validity, nor is postmodernism itself as a larger package deal.  We’re all so powerfully influenced by our cultural environment and personal situations that assumptions about the nature of any given phenomenon can seem like Objective Truth when they are no such thing.  And yet, those feelings and perceptions have a power that creates a sort of reality, a sort of truth, which is in some ways the only truth we can truly apprehend.  Agnostic shit.

But the postmodern justification of and promotion of fascism shows the weakness of this liberal idea, employing it to ultimately work against itself.  Fascist propaganda was just opinions which are all valid, until fascists won control of the media, the government, the church, big business, etc etc.  At that point, all opinions are no longer valid.  Fascist propaganda is “fact” – and fascist control of science publication and journalism means there is no official source you can point to that isn’t soon to express only the facts that the Aeternal Reich wants you to see.

It’s sad how George Orwell, Karl Popper, and any number of other intellectuals going back to the dawn of the written language can call these things out, illuminate them so clearly and simply a child could understand them, and yet collectively we fall for the trick unto the end of (our) time.  Fascists working against education is certainly part of that, but there is a flaw in the human animal that is doing no small amount of the work for them.

We’re not as smart as we like to think we are.  When you see the fancy talking heads spouting big words in defense of callow bigotry, using lofty language to make it seem like black is white, bad is good, up is down…  You’re seeing smart people outsmarting themselves.  The flaws in their thinking are obvious as all hell to you and I, but they are fucking impervious to truth.

Reality is what we make it and we are what that reality makes us.  The vast majority of this country’s media is painting the picture of reality the Kochs and the Murdochs and Muskerbergs want people to see.  It’s everything around them.  They are swimming in hate speech and propaganda nonstop, all day all night, cradle to the grave.  It used to just be radio, TV, and newspapers.  Now it’s algorithms in social media sorting people into camps that can be marketed to more effectively, fueling division and strife, and even genocide if it makes the page views go up, makes money for the shareholders.

As much as they’re my hated enemies, I don’t blame US conservatives for having shit ideas about basically everything.  It’s the world as they know it.  A perversion of liberal principles, unashamedly hypocritical.  Contradictions don’t mean a thing, because this stuff thrives on goldfish memories.  The human animal is not as smart as we’ve wanted it to be – as every flavor of modernism supposed we would one day be able to achieve.

But being unintelligent does not mean you deserve to be misled.  Blaming fools for being fooled is letting the foolers off the hook, and in this situation, those foolers are just the worst motherfuckers in human history.  Hook their fucking asses.  I don’t know that we can ever really beat this type of shit, but I do know we have to keep trying in any way we’re able for as long as we can.

If the world goes nasty, you owe it to yourself and the people you care about to make your own piece of that world as nice as possible.  Just sucks knowing what you’re up against in that fight.  But power on my people.  I love you.

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Ruining Lives for Fun and Profit

note:  my RP by comment is still going and open for two more players.  see this post.

Debt is a motherfucker.  Our society is usurious as all hell, stealing from the education system to leave people innumerate and cutting so much slack to “legitimate” businesses that they all degenerate into con jobs and pyramid schemes, abusing people’s lack of savvy to run up egregious debts on them, run them ragged for life on the debt treadmill.  It’s not sustainable; the subprime mortgage scandal was caused by lending imprudently, the idea you could keep the bullshit rolling on stone blood forever.

I myself was a victim of “legitimate” businesses selling debt on lies.  It was student debt, racked up to obscene amounts through interest I was never ever going to be able to pay off.  While Shitler and his Shitbirds have taken a wrecking ball to student loan forgiveness and income-based repayment programs, as of this moment, my own forgiveness is still safe because it was part of a court case against various for-profit schools that used misleading material to make us think employment was much more certain and would be much more well-compensated than it actually was.  I’ve got some kind of long-term deferral waiting for the forgiveness to be processed.  Thank fuck, and here’s hoping there doesn’t come an executive order to overturn that court case as part of the Arbeit Macht Frei Act of 2027, to pump up the population of debtor’s prisons.

Many other USians are not so lucky, having been all lined up to get their debts forgiven under Biden policies that were hammered by conservative assholes.  Even a fucking three year old knows that “no backsies’ is sacred.  Don’t tell us we’re getting loans forgiven and then renege.  That’s injustice, motherfuckers.  Anyway, the latest evil evil fuckshit to come from on high is that any student loans in default are being sent to collection agencies.

Have you heard of collection agencies, or are you from one of the hell countries where these things are real?  A business that is incentivized to keep you from paying as long as possible while also abusing you into paying as much as possible, created this creepy system where they make feinting attempts to notify you of the debt for a while, shots across the bow, while running up whatever they thought would be a cool interest rate.  Then they start the harassment, the repossessions, the wage garnishments.

Considering the staggering size student loan debts can run to, this is a recipe for hounding people to suicide or homelessness or other terrible situations and harms.  These motherfuckers are ghouls.  They live in golden palaces and sleep in the down of sacrificial doves, but it’s not enough.  The view from heaven only satisfies if they are looking down on eternal torment in hell.

I am bothered by this because of the certainty that my own loan forgiveness is in their sights, that they’re going to kill it the second they can come up with a way to do so.  But much more than that, I am bothered on behalf of the people who are suffering through this policy right now.  It’s like, I’d be bothered if I might get shot, but not nearly as much as seeing someone else shot in front of me.  That’s how I feel about the victims of this policy.

I had some chipper motherfucker tell me once that Biden’s loan forgiveness programs were buying votes.  Well, who makes for a better world, somebody who buys votes by making lives better or someone who buys votes by making lives end?  But this is what ameriKKKa wanted.  Torment.  Hell.  Because it’s always gonna be someone else’s suffering right?  Never you, no sirree.

It’s cool to see people show up big for protests, but I know those are the people who voted.  And all the bitches who sat it out, they’re driving by oblivious.  Get out of the way, you old hippies with your illegible handmade signs.  I need to get to my third job to toil away the rest of my life because doncha know both sides are exactly the same and things couldn’t possibly be worse under the one the nazis liked so much.

Feeling tired.  Anyway, Shitler keeps making regular people into desperate motherfuckers with nothing to lose, which is exactly the kind of people he needs to be fearing.  I’m glad the fear centers of his brain seem to have been replaced with aluminum amyloids and jelly beans.  I’m glad he won’t see it coming, because it’ll be more likely to land next time.

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The Worst Goddamn Show

i did the obvious photoshop, if not particularly well.  enjoy.  for better post, hit Previous button.

if i was fauci i’d be hatching terrorist schemes to bomb republican politicians.  this’d be my jolker origin story.  i’d kill the motherfuckers.

but i’m not him, and he’s just an old dude who was doing a reasonable job in unreasonable times, so orngdolf shitler lives another day.

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President Cal Worthington

There used to be a legend among used car salesman, and many of you may have remembered him the instant you saw the title of this post, even if you haven’t thought of him in thirty years.  Cal Worthington was the classic disreputable piece of shit motherfucker in that field, which I can reasonably infer from the fact he got ran out of entire states on rails, for burning too many people.

Or maybe some other crime; I don’t know the whole history of the situation.  I just know that’s not the kind of business that normally involves moving every few years and living out of hotels.

He had memorable commercials.  You can probably remember the jingle if you’re old like me and from one of the states where he ran the operation.  Cowboy hat, exotic animals that would all be referred to as “his dog Spot.”  When he was in Washington his dealership was in the last city I lived in, which he called “Federal Way, the only way.”

Anyway, if we’re gonna have a blatant criminal for prez, whose shenanigans were well-known decades ago, why can’t we dig up that guy?  He’d probably get his face ripped off by a chimpanzee before he wore out his welcome too.

Cal Worthington for president.

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Primary they Asses

My union talked me into writing to my representatives thru a web form, and the responses have trickled in.  Clearly just had a machine or intern look at the subject matter vaguely and send robo-reply.  On the web form all three required an honorific but the senatorial old ladies only had mr. and mrs.,  while the congressdude had other options.

For the senators I chose mrs. but also used masc legal name.  First senator with a robo reply “corrected” it to mister.  Kinda like, fuck all y’all.

I’ve said before I’m ok with dems taking some bad deals when they’re in the weak position, negotiating however they can to reduce the damage of nazi policies, but if they act at all like they consider a demographic an acceptable loss, or worse, show enthusiasm for nazi ideas like fuckface newsom, we must brutally primary their asses back to whoville.

And if the dem establishment rams a shit candidate through?  I think they’re a few decades overdue for a riot at their convention.

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Prison Labor Will Set You Free

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

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Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

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Life List: Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

A lot of people – myself included – have drunk the kool-aid,
Prevaricating propaganda about how ivory-billed woodpeckers
Really are extinct, gone forever.  And yet, the last time that
I hiked the Appalachian Trail, what did I behold?  ‘Round the
Largest oak tree I’ve e’er seen, a convocation of the beasts!

Furiously they beat their beautiful wings, roaring above me,
Over oaken boughs that had been pecked most righteously.
Obviously I would have taken a picture with my cellphone,
Like I know how this all sounds, but you must believe me!
Such is my luck, I had no battery.  And then they were gone…

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They say we shouldn’t do April Fools jokes anymore, but mine are pretty obvious and harmless, right?  I don’t know.  I’ve never gotten an amazing response to them, and the joke may be years overdue for retirement.  Still, I didn’t have any better ideas for a post today, so here you go.

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Getting Bullied

On the post Getting Terrorized, I talked about this a little, but not as much as I’d meant to.  Our country was taken over by your high school bully.  This is what has happened.  There are people who look at a bully and think, great, we need somebody like that to keep the dweebs in line, or to show the bitches they ain’t shit, or whatever.  Or just think, that guy creates a tough environment, which is what we need, so people can get hard or go home, burn the losers, allow the winners to reap the rewards of their righteous might.

What’s wild to me is that many victims of bullying share this mentality – become bullies themselves, or the enablers and fanboys of bullies.  If that wasn’t you, great.  I don’t get these fools.  I know a guy that did a lot of primary research on gamergate, and found a very informative chat log.  The one thing GGers had in common was feeling frustrated in their attraction to women.  There were actually cisgender lesbians in that chat, which may surprise you.  But more relevant to this discussion, whenever a stereotypical bully came into the chat and started calling people slurs and nerds, basically shoving them in lockers, they welcomed their new bully overlords.  Few had the spine to tell off somebody with bully swagger, even though it was an entirely online situation – jock muscles didn’t figure into it.

And so you see the incels / PUAs / MRAs and their juniors flocking to fascism.  Andrew Tate could literally call them shit, to their faces, and they’d accept it.  These are a non-zero amount of people who voted orange last november.  Bullied bully fans.

And then there are magats that are just bullies themselves.  Your high school bully never changed.  They just learned to hurt people in more socially acceptable ways.  A non-zero amount of them became murderers, the majority are just republican.  Which might as well be murderers, to be fair.  Cruelty is the point, hurting those they perceive as weak gets them off.

Of the quarterish of USians that voted bully, many of them are not bullies proper.  They’re para-bullies.  Second string bullies.  The people who didn’t bully you, but did laugh when you were bullied.  Thoughtless, social cowards, creeps.  But not active bullies themselves, unless their victim is extremely powerless against them – like infants, or small animals.  I’m guessing the average GOP wife abuses her children, or animals, or disabled people, in small ways whenever they can.  You know.  The kind of nurses you pray you won’t get when you’re laid up at the hospital.

Hey maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those fucking shitheads are just outrageously foolish rubes.  Easily led sheep for the sacrifice.  What is it, conservatives.  Are you fools or fascists?  Ain’t no third option under your big nasty tent.

I meant to talk about the guys in office (or privileged to be in the criminal syndicate), not the voters.  I just get mad and lose focus.  Yeah.  Orange man bad.  Not even a man.  There is no agenda except brutality and brazen theft, and cruelty for you and I.  Cruelty specifically for anybody who thinks cruelty is bad.  The cry of the bully, when confronted with their moral superiors: “Ya think you’re better than me?”  Yes, I know I’m better than you.

Motherfucken jeffrey dahmer was arguably a better person than the current president.  Huge piece of shit, thought his orgasm was more important than the human lives that he stole.  But ya know, scale matters.  No question orange worm has a massively higher body count – including so very very many of his own followers!  And he’s such a soulless gasbag I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s killed people for sexual pleasure.  He’ll probably be bragging about getting away with it by the time midterms roll around, just to test how badly they’ve broken the political system by then.

Ahh… still still still, too mad.  Gotta cool it.  Gotta cool it.

Would anybody be terribly disappointed if I avoided political topics for a good long while here?

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Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

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We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

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