The Self-Fulfilling Half Full Glass

 Another letter to friends:

Hello Gentlemen,

It seems that a number of us are circling around a similar theme -- Is the human condition hopeless?  Should we therefore give up on humanity and just worry about our narrow corner of the world and the small sliver of time that we have left before we pass on?  Alternatively, we can reject nihilism and make our own purpose and meaning as recommended in the podcast that Glenn circulated (see transcript here):

Chabon understood why a person would feel that way about the world, and, in particular, about the world right now. Chabon had felt that way himself once, too. But he also knew, having lived here on Earth for a while, that nihilism is a dead end — no path out. The alternative need not be false hope, or even the belief that the world is not essentially broken and absurd. The alternative is to make your own purpose and meaning, whatever the situation.

I'm right now in the middle of another article with a similar theme -- Sneer if You'd Like, But Engineered Solutions Are a Lot More Plausible Than Behavioral Change in 2022.  This is reminiscent of Jerry's writing on transhumanism -- i.e. we've got a better chance of solving problems technologically than politically.  Excerpt:

I have become, against my will, quite fatalistic about solutions to social problems that require any kind of widespread public buy-in. And though I’m somewhat antagonistic to the cultures that tend to advocate for engineering solutions, such as those of Silicon Valley or the finance industry, I feel drawn to such solutions because social change seems so impossible. We’re riven by partisanship and internet-fueled culture war, we don’t trust institutions or each other, and in my anecdotal experience the rise of casual nihilism - the bitter, I’m-joking-but-not-really insistence that everything is broken and can’t be fixed - is rising fast. All of that in a winner-take-all socioeconomic system that incentivizes being selfish. It’s not a combination that lends itself to a lot of hope. So I dream of moonshots.

Reasonable people can have differing opinions on how best to proceed.  Personally, I sense a rising consciousness of the need to be more constructive and less nihilistic.  Let's call it the doctrine of the self-fulfilling half full glass, or something like that.

Hugs,
Dan

Channeling Sorrow -- Insurrection Edition

I've been deeply saddened by the Democrats embrace of Dick Cheney as an ally in the debate over the "insurrection".  I choose not to hate Dick Cheney and the Democrats who have embraced him.  They may be genuinely trying to get society to a better place by joining ranks against Trump the demagogue and his rowdy followers.  With that charitable spirit, let's examine the issue at hand. Here's what a friend said:

In both your 1-4-22 piece titled “The January 6 Non-Insurrection” and your March or April 2021 piece “On Republicans” you opine that the mob that invaded the Capitol on 1-6-21 was “unarmed”.  The police officers and others who were injured by the mob’s hockey sticks, baseball bats, crutches, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, bear spray and stolen police batons would surely disagree with your assessment.  Just because guns were not used does not mean the mob was unarmed.

First of all, there was no bear spray and no fire extinguisher used on January 6, in spite of mainstream media reports to the contrary:

Washington (CNN) April 27, 2021  The Justice Department on Tuesday abandoned the idea that pro-Trump rioters had used bear spray against US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick during the January 6 riot, a major change after implying for weeks that bear spray, not pepper spray, had been deployed...  The clarification came a week after Washington's chief medical examiner ruled that Sicknick had suffered strokes and died of natural causes a day after the attack...  The narrative was already muddled by prosecutors repeatedly citing the bear spray, unsanctioned speculation from the former US attorney who led the probe, exaggerated statements from law enforcement and inaccurate early press reports about a fire extinguisher hitting Sicknick.  [CNN]

More significantly, how do riots involving "hooligans" (friend's term in a previous email) who killed no one compare with acts of state sponsored war such as Pearl Harbor and terrorist acts of mass murder (Kamala Harris)?  I guess one can make the case that Dick Cheney's invasion of Iraq on false pretenses was well intentioned, and that the Japanese in 1945 and Al Qaeda in 2001 were foreign actors and therefore somehow less of a threat than homegrown hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks, but it seems a stretch.  

With regard to the definition of insurrection, here is another perspective:

No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for “a coup .” In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting “go home.” Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the “chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.” We saw none of that on January 6th

Glenn Greenwald describes the danger of overreacting to scary news:

The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress ... hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists" are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.

 

Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable. 

 

Where is this “insurrection"? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. Copying the Bush/Cheney model of keeping fear levels high by constantly issuing vague warnings of looming violence and doom, the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate "heightened threat” warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden's inauguration; no violent protest erupted once COVID lockdowns were eased due to social media provocations; none happened on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack; there was no right-wing violence perpetrated in connection with the commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high. 

This is really important to me.  I want to cry for my country. Have we come to a point where hooligans armed with crutches and hockey sticks are equated state sponsored war costing millions of lives and mass murder of thousands of innocent people carried out by terrorists?  Do we dehumanize tens of millions of Americans as violent racists based upon a minority of hooligans (probably egged on by the FBI)?  Let's love another and not assume the worst about our fellow humans.

The January 6 Non-Insurrection

 The January 6 Non-Insurrection

It's now clear to me what happened with regard to the riot on January 6.  I am indebted to Darren Beattie of Revolver News for providing a coherent explanation with a ton of supporting evidence including video from the capitol area on January 6 and in the days leading up to the riot.  Informants and operatives connected to the FBI removed the barriers around the capitol and herded people leaving a Trump rally into the capitol building.  This was captured on video and the leaders have been disappeared from public view, including one who was on the FBI most-wanted list until his identity was revealed by Beattie.  The people were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the government, despite widespread news reports to the contrary.

There may have been other legal, political, and military intrigues about, but the riot was designed to discredit these, not implement them.