Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 55

How's it Going There?

Well, this is the year I start the novel I've been talking about. It's not gonna be done right away, but I've been taking copious notes. Also a short story collection. It will have a few pictures, so unfortunately, I'm not sure it will be so cheap (again). 

 A GOP Congressman died from Covid. Given that he's part of the party that's into trying to kill as many colored people and blue staters as their policy. Fun. Well, there's the vaccination that all GOPers are cutting line to get. 

 How's that going? Well since Trump's beyond incompetent, he's fucking up the rollout too. Apparently it will take 10 years to vaccinate everyone at this pace. Not that each state isn't messing up (good on WV and SD! but NY and CA, wtf?), like taking a break on weekends... uh, hurry up, because this is the moment that you should. 

If only he wasn't so busy pardoning people who he thinks fit his authoritarian stature (and can rally with him, I'm guessing). Also white power. Cops shooting unarmed people? That's a pardon. 

Not that any of this changes when he leaves (that grift is strong with the GOP, Cruz raising then taking money from GA is fine with me... not that the dem consultant class doesn't have something to answer for[1]). That city block that was blown up? Yep, the cops knew he was getting ready to blow something up. Also the cops came and saw a woman with two guns next to her. Didn't shoot her. I wonder why...

Also what would have happened if this a mob of non-whites non-MAGAt wearing fools stormed a store. Not this, for sure. But I know here in WA we're taking in Idaho and other red state overflows, and I can't help but think that we shouldn't. You want to live free and die, do it in your house. And we all know exactly how the red states will react if the shoe was on the other foot. Suddenly our sins will be our own alone. 

Not that the US is failing alone. Japan, (remember that article I linked? About how Japan controlled things by focusing on superspreader events?). Well they're failing right now and trying to catch up. And apparently, given their issue with social control, nurses are quitting for being ostracized (don't worry, we're pretty bad in many ways to our HCW, and that's before the PPE). btw, I'm not sure if the recent rise is because of the new British variant (does it make spread easier outside of suprspreader events? Maybe). Apparently that doesn't affect the vaccine, but it will still hurt many.

Oh, and Germany has its issues with Covid deniers and now has a surge of covid. I'm guessing they see the Goebbels like force behind all these conspiracies. Spain, meanwhile, will list all people who refuse to have a vaccine and will let other countries know about them. Probably should do this to all vaccinations, IMO. Could be that we need to ask and see proof before someone enters. Oh, and the UK is seeing worse numbers while soccer there is being stopped. Brexit!

[Above, UK, EU and US deaths per 100k are about the same. But me thinks, the US can win this one.]

How about something good? Argentina has expanded women's health. 

Something bad? War in Yemen will continue as planned (and no, I don't think Biden will be better on this one, unless we all hold his feet to the fire). Our helpers in other countries are being stalked (and I'm sure they'll have a chance to come to America for their sacrifices... right rightwingers?) and what do we provide them in exchange for all this?

Not sure, but whatever vacuum that is, Someone will fill it.

 That's it for now, I'll get back to writing people. Oh, watching Good Detective on Netflix. K-show. Real good. 

[1] This thread speaks of Lincoln project and how that's a grift for centrists. Fair. But remember 100M spent in states where that money hardly moved the needle. The Dem consultant class is mainly grifters too, never forget (unlike Stacey Abrams, who actually built something worthwhile. Give her the 100M and we'll see better results)

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More From Cancel Culture

 I think most know my views here. I don't condone mob crap, but the powers that be (and their courtesans) love calling out cancel culture, not because they actually care about free speech, but because they don't like who's doing it. So, here's an example of clear cut cancel culture, that is, stifling of the press, of free speech and what do you hear? Nothing. 

Like I said in Heart So White, most of the people screaming about cancel culture just like punching down. Of course, I'm all about open discussion and I'm against mob cancellations, but these people are fine when such things happen and it's for power. Or, don't say a word against the likes of cancel culture as an actual cancel culture because it benefits them. 

Shame. But at least the first link above explains why there were so few pictures of the pandemic. To me this means there's simply even more blood on Trump's hands. I still don't get why he wanted to kill so many Americans. Incompetence only explains so much. 

And he could still have stolen a lot from us. 

One possible reason is that neo-feudalism that we're either slow-walking towards (if centrists had their way) or racing towards. It requires a lot of sacrifice form the poor, as well as the shedding of "excess" populations. This, I suppose, was something Trump instinctively understood. 

Your thoughts?

 

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Back to Normal.

 Well, there was the bombing in Nashville (anti 5G? Who knows?) and now a mass shooting. The Pandemic is still raging around, but it looks like many think we're back to normal. Sigh. That mass shooting was done by a Green Beret with PTSD. From what early reports show, it was completely random. 

Yeah, as an ex-Green Beret, this does come as a shock, though veterans have been behind some violent groups (and the attack on police from the Boogaloo boy in Cali, was it?) that have been in the fore, none were GBs (that I know of). Will have to see more on the reasons behind this shooting, though we may never find out. 

 Be safe out there, the normal might be back. 

 

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On Voting.

While it's probably clear to most anyone that our current voting system, from the electoral college (winner takes all) to the unequal house of reps (also favors the smaller pop states) to the Senate, are all flawed and don't provide proper representation (oh, and I'm sure the right will get on the fact that the Constitution requires one rep per 30k people... any day now) and allow the crazies to hold more power than they should. 
Fair, but most first past the post elections tend to favor the 2 party system. Now, I've always been a proponent of ranked voting, but, apparently, there's a better way. Here. Approval voting, where you just vote for everyone you like. The person with the most votes still wins. I think that's fair. Will allow for a better way to break the 2 party stranglehold. Thoughts?

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The Classics Won't Save Us

Read this article a short while ago. Well, at the start of the pandemic, to be exact, and I was pretty taken by it as it reflected much of what I thought at the time, and still think. Indeed, with all my talk about the failures of the west (when it comes to this pandemic), I sense that part of the current lot of sickness is a result of this "Classics" say it all belief. [1] Whether it's manifesting itself as a conspiracy theory or general dumbness [2].

Of course, I read the classics. One must, even from a "know your enemy" POV. And the classics from around the world (I'm not talking just western here) all have some similarities (the ode to power, being the biggest), though some are a little more self-aware than that. But one must read them with more than a eye to gaining status or confirming status. 

Your thoughts?

 

[1] It's complex, of course. Some on the right or the center who scream "western values teach the classics" probably don't actually know Socrates, and his dissenting views, they just want something white. They are usually the same lot who think statues of confederates are actually history and not the whitewashing thereof, so take what they say with a grain of salt. But since that is the loudest cohort, and the most powerful, it's valid to take them at their word. Furthermore, there are some who are aware of the classics and (either knowingly or otherwise) will oversell it as humanities, that is all of humanities and the first article takes that to task (fairly, IMO).

[2] Trump, I'm sure has no clue what a classic is, outside of the fact that he may think it a white thing to like. But Newsom and Cuomo, both fuckups in their own right, have few excuses. There are others with higher education (Ivy, whatever) who use the classics as a way to status signal, rather than truly understanding them (and, besides, aren't the classics usually just very good propaganda for the powerful of the past?).

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Seattle and It's Sordid History

Indeed, this land is already taken, but note how many times it's been stolen. Here's a thread on the WWII internment camps and how they were merely an excuse to steal land (those who pushed it the hardest gained the most from it, OFC) from Japanese-Americans. For example, there's the fact that Bellevue square was stolen in that land grab and owned by the same family that was all for an all white PNW as well other sordid things. 
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How's the Pandemic Where You're At?

Seems like Seattle might get hit after being smart (and getting a little lucky) early on.  We're pretty good about mask wearing, so that might help a little. And deaths-wise, King County doing pretty well. How are things where you're at? How are the conspiracies where you're at? Wanna hear as much about it as possible. Be safe.

Side Note: violence against BLM is still going on. Right now some appears to be of the "in the courtroom" kind, but remember what happened to so many in Ferguson. Be safe all of you out there in the struggle. 

 

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mRNA Vaccine

Seriously will be reading more on this modern day miracle, but this story on a woman who made it happen is pretty impressive. Give her the Nobel.

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The Twittering Will Continue Long After Trump

The machine that it is, the algorithms that increase or promote a certain kind of virality, is anathema to decent discourse. [1]

Witness:

Not the best comment, but the liberal twitter mocked the whole "second-hand" experience, as if families don't have their own lived through trauma and histories? Yeah, some of it can be mythological and that aspect can be countered, but not crap like this. 

Again, the discourse it pretty bad out there. And that means on the left or the right (the right being much much worse, of course, because even this doesn't compare to QAnon).

[1] Yeah, I know, First World problems as there are real deadly consequences to social media elsewhere (and to be fair, given the increase in suicides, here as well).

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On trump.

Article here (found at a place I used to frequent (now banned...)) on Trump and his craziness. Good points, that at the start when many were saying (hoping) that he would be constrained by the office this happened:

When Christie arrived at Trump Tower, he was met by Trump’s then consigliere, Steve Bannon. Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.

With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.

The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.

 well put. And he also brings up one of the popular things about Trump (and the reason he was voted in on 2016, is that, unlike the Dems, he wasn't saying everything is fine, he was saying he would fix things.

The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war.

One of the things that was genuinely appealing about Trump in 2015 was that he said something that everyone knows but that American politicians avoid acknowledging because it is too downbeat.

This truth is that the infrastructure of the richest country in the world – the roads, railways, bridges, dams, tunnels – is woefully substandard. Trump said this and promised to fix it. Polls showed that two-thirds of voters approved.

All truth, though I would say he was speaking in rhymes.  For example, when he said our cities look third world, he implied infrastructure needed to be improved, but also that there were too many dark people (thus his hatred for cities in the end). 

But not sure I agree with Trump and war:

Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?

His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.

But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.

 I mean, Trump escalated war by economic means, made places like Yemen worse, and heightened tensions with Iran (lucky there wasn't a war there, tbf). And sure one can say nothing was really started, but he did increase spending there, so how can one say this is "misgovernment"?

And as for infrastructure, that too is hard to explain (especially since Trump would know that this could only help him). Could it be that the tribal monster Trump decided to ride, the one that he perfected in Pro-wrestling and that he now knew was the reason all these people loved him required something else?

There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The “alternative facts” that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly.

I agree with this tribal take, and would take it further. It's not just trump but the corporate edifice that requires something like this for one to be successful with their career today. Sure, in such structures there are sane areas, but there is a level of crazy that's required. 

His followers, like old Stalinists desperately tacking to the shifting winds of the Moscow line, agreed that Trump’s opposites were equally brilliant.

I dunno, some aspects of Stalinism (and totalitarianism, though corporate structures, like I said, are totalitarian as well) are here but comparing the two doesn't make that much sense IMO. Perhaps it's that liberal need to compare the right's authoritarianism with commies (since the right so easily taints anything the left does ass commie-like even if it isn't), but it's not helpful IMO. But sure, he has instincts that are authoritarian. 

That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

This is going off the track here. No, it's not clear that all voted for him because of those tendencies. If the debates showed us anything it's that people actually thought he was a normal prez and that the MSM had whitewashed all his tweets and his actions to make him look presidential. When he acted like he did, no filter, a lot of people were shocked and didn't like it. Only people who followed him closely could tell how big of an aberration he was.  

What people did know was that he was responsible (well it was the Dems, and they fought for it, but given the MSM's uselessness, and Trump's parroting of the extra 1600$ as well as how he sent out letters saying it was him, many believed that Trump made that happen, again, if you followed things closely you'd know it wasn't true but the uninformed knew otherwise) for extra cash in their hands. [1]

And this gets to the heart of matters. If democracy doesn't provide for people their daily bread (whether it's mod dems being little cry babies and giving the GOP everything they want or the GOP being straight evil and cutting off all money to the people) they will look for anyone who will give them what they want. I complain about the both sides narrative, but no one follows the fights in DC and they will see any fights that prevent money getting to them as "DC being useless". 

 Furthermore, though the article seems to want to blame much on Trump, and it has pointed to the rich vein in Amerikkana that he tapped, it places far too much blame at his feet (the interplay between Trump's actual populist instincts and the GOP saying naw, fuck you only tax cuts and regulation cuts). 

Covid is another point. I wonder if perhaps the pandemic hadn't struck red states as hard as they have now before the election (in terms of deaths, not cases). Georgia will test my theory that Trump and the GOP will suffer for that. This despite the fact that I  think that people who experience such tumult know enough to blame those who actually deserve blame (rather than, say, blaming someone weaker than themselves). Such major changes (though, one can say only 1 in a 1000 Americans have died so far) cause change, but in different ways than we suspect, especially in barely functioning failed states. 

Your thoughts?

[1] There still isn't enough evidence to say what swayed the election, but I think this was a biger deal than almost everything else.

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