The Fascists add Another Line

First they came for the undocumented aliens,
      but I didn't speak up because I was not an undocumented alien,
Then they came for the refugees and the Muslims,
      but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a refugee or Muslim.
Then they came for the Hispanics near the border,
      but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Hispanic living near the border.

Really, this gets creepier and creepier.

And yes, I’m camping. Just not in a remote area, so I can access the Internet this time. It’s still on the drizzly side here, so I’m doing inside stuff waiting for things to dry out a bit more before heading out on my bike.

Political Tipping Points

They have two main characteristics:

  1. It is an accurate term. When a tipping point is triggered, change happens fast.
  2. The exact mechanism of the tipping point tends to remain hidden until the tipping happens.

If, when it’s all over, you could go into a time machine and go back a few years, most people would find your news from the future surprising.

Consider the case of the USSR and its empire. In 1980, it seemed as strong and long-lasting as ever. Afghanistan had just been invaded, and the USA and its empire had been forced to accept this (because challenging it would have meant challenging the USSR directly, a big no-no in the nuclear era). Even in 1986, the USSR and its empire had a semi-permanent air to them. Yet by the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen.

Or consider the case of Suharto in Indonesia. His dictatorship was tolerated because at least the economy reliably grew. Then the banking system collapsed, in no small part due to the regime’s own crony capitalism. When Suharto went cap in hand to the USA, his normal benefactor, he discovered to his dismay that years of patient activism on the East Timor issue had made him mostly toxic to Congress. He got no bailout, Indonesian society quickly turned on him, and he was compelled to resign.

And so it may be with Trump. He’s managed to turn the GOP into a party of his slavish followers. However, much of this following in Congress is coerced; many GOP congressmen secretly dislike Trump. They only play along because he has them cowed.

If, as I fervently hope, the GOP gets severely punished by the voters in November, this may force a recalculation: Republicans in Congress may well see it as being more to their political benefit to distance them from a doomed cause than to ally with it. Such distancing becomes increasingly likely if the Democrats launch investigations of Trump and these investigations uncover dirt.

Suddenly, many of the GOP may well realize that their toast is buttered on the side opposite they thought it was. At that point, the end will come surprisingly (to many) quickly for Trump.

Or it may happen sooner or later than that. I’m merely speculating on one possible mechanism, and as mentioned earlier, the mechanism often remains hidden and unperceived to most.

The one difference is that Trump is unlikely to merely resign. His ego won’t support such an option. He will either have to be removed against his will, or he will end his life because he won’t be able to live with the existential crisis that acknowledging his own fallibility will produce.

Authoritarians Do the Strangest Things

Fourteen years ago, the “Church” of Scientology was establishing a web presence consisting of hundreds of eerily conformist “individual” web pages for its members. (The site in question is now long gone, of course.) I don’t know how many people were stupid enough to fall for it, but it was beyond me how such an effort could prove even remotely convincing.

Now Amazon is stealing that page from the Scientoligists’ playbook, this time with Twitter accounts instead of home pages. Again, it’s beyond me how anyone could find this even remotely convincing.

Then again, I’m an anarchist in a world of capitalism and government fans. Maybe most people really do find it convincing when people say stuff even though it’s transparently obvious that it’s being coerced out of them?

At Last, a New Job











The Risk of War is Increasing

As predicted, the deal with North Korea has basically crumbled.

Now we move on to one of the other predictions in my earlier post: the stage where the deal makes the world less safe from the risk of war, because it means Trump realizes he was Baby Kim’s rube. Not only that, the deal crumbled at the moment when the noose really seems to be tightening around Trump’s neck with respect to the Mueller investigation, giving Trump an even greater motive towards bellicosity. There’s nothing like war to distract the masses from a domestic scandal, after all.

Tom Nichols doesn’t seem to think this is likely. I wish I could be as sanguine as Nichols on this one. Yes, Nichols is correct in that Trump is no master at quantum multidimensional political chess; events of the past several years have shown clearly that Trump is barely capable of playing political checkers. But Nichols is also a conservative and a member of the defense establishment, which will naturally tend to lead him to turn a blind eye to ideologically (and career-wise) inconvenient insights about ruling classes’ propensity to use war for domestic political purposes.

So while I certainly hope Nichols will be proven correct (and he might be, Trump is definitely incompetent), I can hardly be sure about that.

How to Create a Pedophilia Scandal

  1. Create a religious dogma where the only acceptable sexual orientation is heterosexual,
  2. Place on all a burden of expectation that one will marry the opposite sex and raise a family,
  3. Have a single exemption from this burden if you take a vocation in the church,
  4. Create a power hierarchy in those vocations,
  5. Promote the idea that said hierarchy should be unquestioningly trusted (including with children), then
  6. Act shocked, shocked, that said hierarchy is full of self-hating gay men who abuse their authority for sexual gratification.

Why the Blue Wave Will Be Irrelevant

The explanation touches on this principle.

Analogous to how fascists (and Trumpism is a form of fascism) believe that whatever the fascist leader says is by definition always right, fascists believe that only political outcomes that create fascism can ever be legitimate. Therefore any election that undermines Trump’s power must by definition be illegitimate.

A blue wave election will be said to be the result of millions of illegal aliens voting, the result of foreign collusion, the result of Deep State collusion, or any number of other pretexts. Even if the winners are allowed to take office (and it’s an open question if all of them will be), the resulting Congress, and anything it does, will be “illegitimate” in Trumpist eyes.

The same will apply to any presidential election in 2020 that fails to return Trump to office, or to place Trump’s annoited successor into office. It will be “illegitimate.” Odds are high that Trump will declare a state of emergency and refuse to leave office if he runs and loses in 2020. And that’s if he doesn’t declare one and try to override a Democrat-controlled House or Senate first.

Ultimately, the only solution is likely to be a willingness to fight Trumpism via various means of direct action. For the time, I do plan to support electoral means of reining Trump in, but I don’t expect widespread success.

I’m mainly doing it for sake of argument so that I can confront liberals later with an example of the demonstrated impotence of their chosen method: I chose to suspend my doubts and help you try it your way, it didn’t work, now can we discuss other means?

I only hope that this works. A big part of me worries that liberals are in general so terrified of taking any personal risks that they will by and large opt to choose submission to fascism over struggling for liberty.

A Good Political Sanity Test

Can you see the many parallels between Donald Trump and the regime (first Chávez, now Maduro) that rules Venezuela?

It’s not biased to either the left or the right. The politically deluded on the right will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Trump’s misdeeds. The politically deluded on the left will find it difficult or impossible to acknowledge Chávez’s or Maduro’s. It’s an equal-opportunity screen.

If you are not for liberty and against authoritarianism, then you and I really don’t share that much in common, sorry.

If So, I Move to Linux on a Commodity Machine

If Apple is really going to dump real keyboards, I will stop using their products.

Per the article, yes, Apple’s current keyboards have very little travel. As such, they have very poor tactile feedback and I find them unpleasant to use. I haven’t bought an Apple keyboard for a desktop machine in years, and if I’m using my laptop on a desk, I will plug it into a real (classic IBM Model M) keyboard using an adaptor.

If I’m traveling, I put up with the suckiness, because basically all laptop keyboards suck. The laptop form factor dictates the small travel that makes them suck.

But if Apple makes its laptops emulate the awfulness of a stupidphone, game over. The lack of real keys is one of the big reasons why I refuse to get a stupidphone.

And yes, “stupidphone” is a much more accurate term for the things, considering:

  • Non-existent tactile feedback, as already mentioned,
  • Very limited battery lifetime,
  • Bulky, awkward size,
  • Poorly-coded, software-based user interface that makes use as a phone more awkward than a traditional cell phone.