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While the concepts of evolution were abstracted from observations of changes in biological phenotypes through geographical and chronological space, the concepts involved with biological evolution, such as winners survive and losers disappear, are as applicable to other spaces in which entities find themselves in competition, such as political systems.

This came to mind while reading the latest Sullivan noir analysis of today’s American society:

And the reason this dystopian scenario is so credible is not just the fault of these political actors. It’s ours too — thanks to the impact of social media. I think we’ve under-estimated just how deep the psychological damage has been in the Trump era — rewiring the minds of everyone, including your faithful correspondent, in ways that make democratic discourse harder and harder and harder to model. The new Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, is, for that reason, a true must-watch. It doesn’t say anything shockingly new, but it persuasively weaves together a whole bunch of points to reveal just how deeply and thoroughly fucked we are. Seriously, take a look.

The doc effectively shows how the information system necessary for democratic deliberation has, in effect, been jerry-rigged in the last decade to prevent any reasoning at all. It’s all about the feels, and the irrationality, and the moment, which is why Trump is so perfectly attuned to his time. And what’s smart about the documentary is that it shows no evil genius behind this unspooling, no sinister plot deliberately to destroy our system of government. One of the more basic motives in American life — making money — is all you now need, the documentary shows, to detonate American democracy at its foundation.

For Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, the business goal quickly became maximizing and monetizing human attention via addictive dopamine hits. Attention, they meticulously found, is correlated with emotional intensity, outrage, shock and provocation. Give artificial intelligence this simple knowledge about what distracts and compels humans, let the algorithms do their work, and the profits snowball. The cumulative effect — and it’s always in the same incendiary direction — is mass detachment from reality, and immersion in tribal fever.

There is nothing that guarantees or sanctifies the American political system and, therefore, American society. Despite the cries of the false prophets, to drive home the point, God has never come down and printed on a rock, America will always survive, nor, for that matter, America is perfect.

But that belief in our invincibility is what drives too many of us. Here we are, in a mad struggle to impose ideologies from both ends of the spectrum, as if they had been literally handed down from on high.

And that is a small, but significant, part of the problem: that we know. That we know what God thinks, that we know how to reorder society because of some leftist text, that we know because Alex Jones^[1] huffed and grunted out a message that confirms what QAnon seems to be saying, because Trump contradicts himself and reality and we know that must really mean something.

Enough! Enough!

Our hubris, our arrogance, makes us think we know how to run society a priori, and that absolutism is part of what forces people to join our political cults simply out of self-defense. The other side is out to take away certain rights – and the veracity of each of those claims that rights will be taken away doesn’t matter – and therefore everyone who values those rights has to join the other cult.

I’m angry, I’m upset, all over what I think is the result of a number of people greedily vying for power. That’s a subject for another post, because my brain is starting to freeze up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the contretemps ordinary Americans find themselves in. I think Professor Turchin would say that since we lost our last avowed existential enemy, the Soviet Union, and therefore the overriding reason to stick together (asabiya, to use his terminology), we were doomed to see all the unleashed egos and hubris from both ends of the political spectrum collide in an awful melee. The arrival of the Web appears to have exacerbated the event. And – in a topic for another post – I suspect compartmentalization, which is a fancy word for saying I’m not responsible for anything outside my bailiwick! has its part of the blame to bear as well.

Will American society survive the Web? I don’t know. Stay tuned – but don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

¹ Alex Jones of the horrific show and web site InfoWars.

Trump in 2016:

Trump in 2020:

.@GOP We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices. We have this obligation, without delay!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2020

Why does blatant hypocrisy matter?

Because it makes people that you’d like to trust deeply unpredictable. If you say, but I know I’ll always know what he truly will do, factions happen. You’re in the good faction one day, then this hypocrite does something you can’t possibly stomach, and now guess what – you were wrong, and now he’s going to take care of you.

In bad cases, he may rub you out.

Hypocrisy is all about trust. Trump and McConnell’s breathtaking hypocrisy should see them deported to Russia.

My Arts Editor loved their playing. I’m wondering if the five kids are actually one. But who wants to check? The mystery is enchanting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCAFfX_va_I

… about individual decisions and autonomy. Soap-box occupant Erick Erickson, who annoys me with email that he thinks will entice recipients into sending him money, manages to play to his fringe-right audience, if not to truth:

Every time Americans turn inward against each other, it is because of the Supreme Court. From Dred Scott to Roe v. Wade and a variety of points in between, the flaw of our constitutional republic is letting an oligarchy of five black-robed masters impose the morality of Harvard Yard on 350 million of their fellow citizens.

The Civil War was caused by SCOTUS? The Civil Rights movement? Creationism? Abortion?

SCOTUS may become involved, but don’t mistake them for a motivating force. The motivations are various, but indisputable: loving wealth over justice, racial hatreds, religious manias, broken intellectual arguments. SCOTUS may get involved, but it’s inevitably at the tail end of the story, not the start. To blame SCOTUS for divisiveness is to play to an audience preconception, not to honestly interpret history.

We are here, at this moment particularly, because of something too few want to say out loud. One of those oligarchs decided to gamble with her own life, impervious to calls for removal, so that she could try to shape the balance of the United States Supreme Court.

There are so many things wrong with this broken paragraph that I’m not even sure where to start. Oligarchs? Few, if any, of the Justices are extensive landowners or chieftains of industry. Was Ruth Bader-Ginsburg (RBG) a doddering fool, no longer competent to evaluate the legal arguments presented? Not that I heard, not a whisper. Just how was RBG reshaping the balance of power of SCOTUS, when all that can happen is that she is, at best for Democrats, be replaced by another “liberal justice”?

And did RBG really gamble her life by staying on the Court?

Really?

How was she risking her life? She wouldn’t get pancreatic cancer if she retired? What, has there been an advance in oncology that slipped by me?

This dark and brooding paragraph, which seeks to inflict blame for the chaos that seems incipient on liberals, is based wholly on a series of falsehoods for which, quite frankly, Erickson should be ashamed – or seen for the unblushing partisan that he is.

She could have left while Obama was still there. But no, Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided to hang on through a pancreatic cancer fight hoping to use herself as a rallying cry for the left to mobilize in November and shape the election.

Now, thanks to her pride, we’re going to get more riots.

Uh huh. Sure. But hang on, let me just say one name: Merrick Garland.

Given the unrestrained hypocrisy of Senator McConnell, I could easily see McConnell refusing to review, much less vote on, any replacement for RBG. Sure, Obama had two justices confirmed – but Kagan, the second, was confirmed in 2010, when Democrats dominated the Senate with 57 members. In the next Senate, Democrats barely had a majority at 51 – and Democrats can be fractious, especially if they’re, at least in part, consulting their consciences.

So, if I were to continue this intellectually and morally flawed line of reasoning, RBG might have been able to resign with hopes of being replaced by a liberal through 2013.

But why?

According to Erickson, to satisfy the political requirements of a political party.

This, from a defender of the right wing, the shrine of individual rights. I don’t need to go on; it’s simply a hypocritical stance.

But Erickson wants to avoid the moral taint that has come to plague the entire Republican Party. He (and if he wishes to dispute it, he’ll have to disown his insane remark about Trump Derangement Syndrome) and the Republican Party support President Trump, a man documented as the veritable Father of Lies, with 20,000+ lies in less than 4 years. This is how they’ll all be known to history: power-hungry hypocritical liars, pushing anti-science and anti-rational ideologies on a nation that could ill-afford them.

Therefore, he’ll throw the blame on a dead woman who can no longer defend herself. A woman who certainly should have the right to decide when she’ll retire.

A woman who may have wanted to believe that the Republican Party was still the home of honorable people.

So, yeah, this was the morning’s entertainment: an immediate attempt to throw the blame for the irresponsibilities of the Republican Party onto the shoulders of a woman who served her nation to the best of her very considerable capabilities for decades. That’s her reward.

But that’s how a true politico rolls these days. Any bullshit to make the other side look bad. It’s too bad; Erickson has done better in the past.

An early version of a TARDIS, as it’s a lot roomier inside than out. I kept waiting for an Olympic size swimming pool to show up.

Non-Stop New York  (1937) is an odd, comedic, tension movie that comes off a little flat – although some of that is the quality of the print. Jennie Carr, aspiring British dancer, is in New York for a stab at her dream job. The night of the closing of the Broadway show she’s working in she runs into charming young lawyer Billy Cooper, who invites her to his place for a meal.

When she discovers a homeless man is taking advantage of the food, she chases him out, and then gets chased out herself by other men crowding into Cooper’s apartment. The next day, as she’s leaving for home on a passenger liner, she learns of Cooper’s murder and the arrest of the homeless man, named Abel.

Appalled, she tries to persuade the Captain of the liner of the situation, but when it comes out that her baggage contains stolen jewelry, she ends up with her own problems: stuck in a British prison for six months. Meanwhile, despite world wide appeals – no, really! – no one can find the mysterious woman Abel claims could clear him, and he is sentenced to the electric chair.

The killers are waiting for Jennie to get out of prison. They don’t need her dead, just discouraged, but her moral sense comes to her rescue and she manages a visit to Scotland Yard, which, unfortunately, is fairly disbelieving. Then there’s nothing for it but to find a way onto the Non-Stop New York, a literal flying boat, complete with outside balconies for the more adventurous flyer.

Well, the killer is waiting to take the closest thing to a witness down, but Scotland Yard is there, too, and soon we have a fake General of Paraguay, a con-man, and Jennie frantically circling the plane, all trying to survive.

Too bad about that prodigious young musician and his interest in muffling his sax with part of a … parachute.

There are some interesting elements here, but they don’t come together because we don’t really develop an empathy for the characters. Perhaps the most charismatic character meets a swift end; some characters who suffer death are barely accorded the honor of cardboard; Jennie is a little too chittie-chatty without being interesting, and, indeed, her slightly amoral mother could have gotten more screen-time to the benefit of the story.

Still, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, even if the plane had me hooting with laughter.

Georectification:

[Archaeologist Peter] Gavette explains that a great deal of work is now being done to georectify old maps and aerial imagery on top of new maps to see if changes over time might be identified. Georectification is a process by which images, including aerial and satellite photographs, geophysics data, or scanned maps, are coordinated in order to determine the exact location of structures or landscape features. The technique is especially helpful for visualizing how places change over time, particularly when building remains are absent or overgrown, or when the topography of an area itself has shifted due to human intervention or natural events. “We’re lucky to have a wealth of cartography for the island because of its military history, so we are able to look at it through multiple layers and levels,” Gavette says. [“Letter from Alcatraz,” Matthew Brunwasser, Archaeology (September/October 2020), p. 6 of the link]

The death of Justice Ginsburg makes me sad and troubled, not only for her family, but because now we may have some more national misery. Between the frantic emotional requirements of a President desperate to swing a comeback, and the master hypocrite, Senator McConnell (R-KY), already promising the Senate will hold hearings on any nominee sent to it, it does not promise to be a pleasant time leading up to the elections.

Or, possibly, miserable even after, even if Biden wins.

Let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume he has a whit of self-discipline. So what are the forces in play here?

There’s the open SCOTUS seat, obviously.

And there’s the election, with the Trump cult and fellow travelers who cannot convince themselves that Trump is worse than anyone who carries a Democratic Party card, the doubtful and the dubious.

How does Trump play the game?

Does he rush a nominee to the Senate in order to avoid a probable, but not guaranteed, lame duck session to put his nominee in SCOTUS?

Or does he hold off? Maybe he even hints that there’ll be no nominee if he doesn’t win the election? That should electrify his cult, and even draw some moderate Republicans back. Notice that, of course, if RBG had survived until late January, the result would have been the same – but, regardless, the game dynamic has changed.

The real question, of course, is what that might do to the independents who hold the power in this election, and who’ve been leaning – steeply, in many cases – towards Biden. Many, possibly most, are so disgusted with Trump that nothing will induce them to vote for him. This is especially true in 2016 Trump voters who’ve since rued that decision. They’ll never come back. Their disgust with Trump, and themselves, won’t permit mind-changing.

But there are several moves possible here. How about the Senate confirmation vote on Election Day? Wouldn’t that be exciting?

And there are down-ballot considerations. Senator Collins (R-ME) enraged the Democrats of Maine by voting to confirm then-nominee Kavanaugh. Could she consider a vote against a Trump nominee as a chance at redemption and reelection? She currently trails her challenger, Sara Gideon, and is doubtless feeling the pressure.

But Collins already has a record of deficient loyalty to Trump (TrumpScore: 67%); this game is harder to play for more loyal incumbents who are in trouble, such as Loeffler and Perdue of Georgia, Tillis of North Carolina, and Graham of South Carolina, where the Trump base would be enraged, or appointee McSally of Arizona, who practically licks Trump’s toes (i.e., a TrumpScore of 94%). They have less room to maneuver, but if a flawed nominee is sent their way, they may be tempted to vote against, in an effort to appear responsible and worthy of reelection.

Yes, in a nauseating way, the future weeks could be very interesting. Putin is no doubt reveling in our foolishness. May the US Army remain on guard.

This is why I expect President Trump to make his way to Switzerland before Jan 21st rolls around and he becomes vulnerable to being … arrested:

Unlike the federal court system, which often allows prisoners to remain free during the appeals process, state courts tend to waste no time in carrying out punishment. After someone is sentenced in New York City, their next stop is Rikers Island. Once there, as Trump awaited transfer to a state prison, the man who’d treated the presidency like a piggy bank would receive yet another handout at the public expense: a toothbrush and toothpaste, bedding, a towel, and a green plastic cup. [“The People v. Donald J. Trump,” Jeff Wise, New York Intelligencer]

Only a great arrogance would restrain him from pulling a Marc Rich. And he may have that arrogance. But that might turn out to be one of his greatest mistakes. It can be hard to be charismatic from a prison cell. So it’ll be Switzerland for him.

And then he’ll harangue his cult from afar. Beating him in November won’t shut him up, I fear. We’ll just have to learn to ignore him and his cult members.

Rest in Peace, Justice Ginsburg. You’ll never be forgotten.

I gotta agree with this guy Friedman:

"The people I like the best are the people that are less successful because it makes you feel so powerful. I always say it. Never go out with a successful person."

This guy is so broken inside.pic.twitter.com/fWFtcxu9yW

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) September 18, 2020

Trump is all about satisfying his primitive emotional desires, the more primitive the better.

This makes my head spin.

It’s been reported that Attorney General Barr would like to put someone in the pokey for sedition, and so I  have an idea for him:

A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections, according to several people familiar with the matter as well as internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.

But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process. [The New York Times]

Perhaps I’m naive, but it seems to me that deliberately distributing false, dangerous medical advice while holding an influential government position in order to further political ambitions should be considered sedition. It weakens the citizenry, making them vulnerable to foreign powers.

At best, it’s dereliction of duty.

Have at it, AG Barr. Protesting to be treated equally is hardly sedition; indeed, it’s encouraging the United States and its constituents states and municipalities to follow its own rules. I recognize this may be hard, as everyone appears to be washing their hands of it – if you’ll forgive the medical humor – and chasing after your ideological allies is always a painful business, but I’m sure we have full confidence that you’ll charge on ahead, full of that old Justice Is Blind To Ideology fever.

Ummmm … ummmm … AG Barr? AG Barr? Are you there?

Either it’s leering, or it’s really regretting signing with that talent agency.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971; aka Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, as I saw it, in the theater, on its original release), is an execrable addition to the Godzilla mythos. The primary conceit, not to mention the message, which is driven in with a nail set, is a monster, perhaps originating from outer space, that feeds on smog and pollution, and is composed of minerals that can combine and change form when the opportunity arises: Hedorah.

Godzilla has martial arts!

After demonstrating some rather ugly ways to kill people, the local humans try to destroy it using a pair of monstrous electrodes, luring the giant, leering sludge pile between them and meaning to hit it with the output of a power station, but during a tussle with Godzilla, the circuit is cut. Fortunately, a slightly acid-burned Godzilla is able to use the electrodes to convert his chronically bad breath into electricity of the right frequency and help destroy ol’ Smoggy.

This could have been a romantic date, if ol’ Godzy hadn’t tried to set fire to Smoggy right off the bat!

Throw in a scientist who lost an eye to the walking vomit-pile and babbles science-nonsense; his son, who has a telepathic connection to our favorite guardian of Earth; a rather unique approach to making Godzilla fly; and some 1970s-style, LSD-influenced digressions, which are probably unique to the mythos, and this one was painful to watch. The models were nice, I must say, but as usual, the characters are flatter than a chunk of cardboard, and the dialog is even worse.

Give this one a miss unless you’re a completist. If you’re a completist, this one may require alcohol.

On Religion Dispatches, Chrissy Stroop remarks on an underhanded rhetorical trick currently in use by evangelical leaders:

In any case, whether in more or less secular or overtly religious form, the rhetorical trick of grasping moral authority by claiming to be outside of or ‘above’ politics—as if any such thing were possible with respect to social issues and their accompanying human conflicts—works depressingly well for America’s right-wingers, who understand that many Americans will accept the claim. Further, in both its secular and religious incarnations, this type of rhetorical power play serves to uphold white supremacism.

To my mind, both secular politics and religion exist, in large part, to guide the conduct of those who they can reach. As religious texts are always open to varying interpretation – as attested to by dozens of wars – and, more importantly, often function as Rorschach tests, it seems only natural to equate the two in terms of category. The primary difference between regular politics and that of religion is that the latter is making the claim – specious in my view – that their reading of the divine texts means that they have the divinity in their corner. This leads to mad fanaticism, followed by blood and burning at the stake.

And, folks, I do not exaggerate.

Now, this isn’t to say secular politicians can’t be rigid in their ideologies. They come in just about any stripe you can name, too. People do love their cults. But, in this, again these two occupants of this category are roughly equivalent: rigidity very often corresponds to a greed for power and prestige. The thirst for importance envelopes many people. President, pastor, priest – they can all love power, and put forth ridiculous assertions in hopes of creating that power.

Given all this, Stroop’s following remark is quite disappointing.

While I am inclined to agree with Megan Goodwin’s claim that religion has “always been politics, full stop,” unfortunately, many otherwise savvy journalists and commentators forget that “the personal is political” when it comes to religion. They seem to sign on to a tacit agreement that anything Christians label “religious belief” shouldn’t be examined or criticized, regardless of the impact powerful conservative Christians’ politics have on those who don’t share conservative Christian beliefs. This is often accompanied by the nonsensical positing of a clear division between religion and politics that allows conservative Christians’ claims to be above politics to go essentially unchallenged, thus reinforcing the (white Protestant inflected) Christian supremacism that pervades American society.

Those journalists need to get up on their hind legs and show some grit. There are no Pulitzer Prizes for groveling to your interview subjects.

It’s the duty of journalists to uncover the unseemly side of all things, and religion is simply full of it.

Paul Fidalgo of the free-thinkers’ site Center For Inquiry, and a Master of Snark:

Ronald F. Inglehart writes at Foreign Affairs about a huge global decline in religion since 2007. “As unexpected as it may seem, countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt and have lower murder rates than more religious ones.” That is not unexpected.

I’m sure I’d like to rant about this a bit, but I’m too muzzy this morning.

Some people think for themselves, and some people think about themselves – only. Here’s a sadly preventable tragedy, which may still be ongoing:

Only about 65 close family members and friends were on the guest list for a bride and groom’s rustic wedding celebration in a small Maine town in early August.

But the nuptials began an outbreak now traced to more than 175 reported novel coronavirus infections and also to the deaths of seven people, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

The cluster of coronavirus infections that originated from the Big Moose Inn outside Millinocket on Aug. 7 continues to grow in Maine, state health officials said, after guests flouted social distancing and mask guidelines. Now people who have no association with the party have died, including six residents of the Maplecrest Rehabilitation and Living Center in Madison, Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah said in a news briefing Tuesday. [WaPo]

And the most responsible?

It appears that the RNC back a few weeks ago generated little more than a small bounce for President Trump, as this Gallup poll suggests:

Maybe having your prospective daughter in law scream into a microphone isn’t inspirational after all?

After the big drop off between June and July, Trump has only gained a little bit of approval back. This correlates with FiveThirtyEight’s aggregate polling:

I interpret the slight narrowing as an incumbency effect: folks, particularly those who voted for Trump in 2016, don’t really want to believe in the magnitude of their error. Add in some campaign advertising, and even his recent debacles don’t move the needle. Such is the power of a cult over the minds of its followers.

But this poll for Minnesota from ABC News/WaPo is so shocking that I don’t really believe it:

The image is from the ABC News/WaPo press release.

But, sure, let’s go with it. The state has seen a great deal of chaos over the last 9 months, and much of it associates with President Trump, whether or not that’s a fair assessment. We may be seeing reactions to the latest revelations, such as Woodward’s latest book & tapes, as well as the anonymously sources reports of his disdain for the military.

This could be a move towards a 20 point avalanche for Joe Biden, who I suspect many consider a representative of a more sane era, when serious people ran the government, generally told the truth, and offered civil service leadership. Trump may, indeed, be wasting money in Minnesota, if, in fact, the Trump Campaign ad buys are in earnest.

But it does raise the question of Wisconsin. While our neighbor’s composition is certainly different from Minnesota’s, it’s not all that different – mostly white, with cosmopolitan as well as rural areas. So why are Biden and Trump within – barely – the margin of error? Or is the error “the other way” and Biden is, in reality, up by 8 points?

The anticipation between Election Night and the day the counting process is finished will be a killer, I tell ya!

Scientific American – which I do not read – is offering up some advice:

Scientific American has never endorsed a presidential candidate in its 175-year history. This year we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly.

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

Remember Hurricane Harvey, which poured record amounts of rain on a suburb of Houston because it moved slowly? It appears Hurricane Sally may do the same thing:

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI):

.@realDonaldTrump is the most transparent president in history. pic.twitter.com/NSRohCgh4K

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) September 15, 2020

And how many Congressional subpoenas has Trump and his cronies ignored and delayed and disputed?

I find it a little jarring to have come up with a thought that I figure hasn’t been discussed much, sit on it for a while, consider incorporating into a story, and then have someone else pop out an entire book on the subject.

Such are the wages of sloth, eh?

As very imperfect as our American system may be, it is at least nominally grounded in the idea of merit: that those who do better, whether they work harder or more cleverly, providing more value than their competitors, end up with greater rewards. My highly informal understanding of history tells me that this system succeeded the prior system of mercantilism, a system in which yesterday’s winners would automatically be tomorrow’s winners in the arena of commerce; people born at the bottom of the heap stayed there, and those born at the top stayed there.

Right up until the folks with the pitchforks and bad tempers showed up.

But something I’ve never seen discussed – until last night, at least – is the down side of meritocracy: the losers of the great economic competition.

Certainly, some folks don’t mind being a little frog in the pond, regardless of size. To some extent, religion can function to ameliorate feelings of inadequacy, particular in mainline sects which emphasize unconditional love from the Divine. Indeed, speaking as an agnostic, this may be one of the more important, if underappreciated, benefits to religion – although, since it’s an evolved rather than designed part of religion, it is also … vulnerable to manipulation.

I ran across this last night reading the latest missive from Andrew Sullivan. He, in turn, is reviewing, or perhaps riffing on, a new book by school teacher, researcher, and former blogger Frederik DeBoer, The Cult of Smart. I don’t have it yet, and I’m all excited to write about it, so I’ll let Sullivan give an introduction, rather than more properly wait around:

There aren’t many books out there these days by revolutionary communists who are into the genetics of intelligence. But then there aren’t many writers like Freddie DeBoer. He’s an insistently quirky thinker who has managed to resist the snark, cynicism and moral preening of so many others in his generation — and write from his often-broken heart. And the core of his new book, “The Cult of Smart,” is a moral case for those with less natural intelligence than others — the ultimate losers in our democratic meritocracy, a system both the mainstream right and left have defended for decades now, and that, DeBoer argues, gives short shrift to far too many.

This isn’t a merely abstract question for him. He has grappled with it directly. As a school teacher he encountered the simple, unavoidable fact that some humans are more academically gifted than others, and there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. He recalls his effort to teach long division to a boy who had managed to come a long way socially (he’d gone from being a hell-raiser to a good student) but who still struggled with something as elemental as long division: “At one point he broke into tears, as he had several times before … I exhaled slowly and felt myself give up, though of course I would never tell him so. I tried to console him, once again, and he said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ And it struck me, with unusual force, that he was right.”

I, very briefly, worked as a GED tutor in a group situation, and one of the adult students really seemed to be innumerate. He had learned some tricks to get by, but doing anything beyond addition and subtraction seemed to leave him completely baffled, at least until he reverted to his tricks. My point?

In a society based on competition, there are inevitably losers. And some won’t accept it.

So let’s do a reset. Let’s review societies, in the abstract.

What is the purpose of societies? Societies, at their most basic, and like most human organizations, exist in order to continue existing. That is, in order to accomplish any higher order goals, they must continue to exist.

Because of this, they must take care of their members. I use the phrase take care of in a rough sense: existential protection from threats both natural and human-based, i.e., aggression; provision of leadership or equivalent coordination service; guides to behaviors in order to secure the society from self-destruction; etc.

Within this web of responsibilities there are many approaches to implementation, such as capitalism, communism, monarchies, etc etc, each based on its own set of principles. In an ideal world – which we’re not – members of societies could and would move between them in accordance to their perceptions of how they meet their needs. By their feet, societies would live and die. Because of the messiness of human nature and the limitations of geography, emigration does not happen to that extent.

And so when American society chooses a meritocracy, and as DeBoer and Sullivan are pointing out, not taking good care of everyone, we can start to see how unfettered capitalism and its companion, meritocracy, besides their fault of often leading to monopolies, also cause American society to falter and fail at one of its most important tasks: taking care of all of those it claims.

Now, Sullivan and, apparently, DeBoer use this to beat up on Sullivan’s current preoccupation, the politically far left approach to reality called critical theory, and is propensity of ignoring genetic realities in favor of a tabula rasa approach to humanity, but that doesn’t interest me here.

What does interest me, without any real facts but just impressions of the third-raters who make up the GOP these days, is how those who have lost out badly in the meritocratic scheme of society are distributed across the political spectrum. I shan’t go into it, but it does seem to call out for someone to look at it: properly embittered, fed false information, told their failures is a scheme by others, rather than their own failings. It’s a fascinating hypothesis, and yet I hope it’s false.

Back to DeBoer and my ad hoc theory of society, it’s an interesting approach to justifying a number of projects currently considered anathema by the conservative side of the country, such as single payer healthcare, UBI, and etc – although the two I mention are not necessarily bugaboos of the entire conservative movement, but of conservative leaders who, for reasons of self-interest or rigid ideology, reject them. The increasing popularity of the ACA, and some comments I’ve seen online concerning UBI from rural Americans, suggest more flexibility in these areas than conservative leaders might care to admit. I mention them to suggest change, given the proper argument and setting such as this provided by DeBoer, may be a lot closer than we think – and more acceptable than might be thought of at one time.

The trick, I think, is not to confuse the primary system chosen by society for the complete ends of society itself. That may be the key intellectual error of American society and its leaders.

I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to The Daily Kos, but I do find their campaign coverage, which includes reports on public polling, interesting, because while the numbers are sometimes their own numbers – through the Civiqs polls – more usually they’re citing other polls, so I feel that I’m getting something from outside of the progressive epistemic bubble, a bubble which is not nearly as water-tight as the right wing bubble, and certainly not as irrational, but is occasionally even more irritating.

But something I see nowhere else is their analysis of campaign ad spending. I may have mentioned this before, but it’s worth noting that they – by whom I mean Kerry Eleveld of the Daily Kos Staff – seem puzzled by the irrational approach that a Trump Campaign Organization, which by all rights should have money coming out of its ears, is spending in these critical weeks:

I quit reading Two Lumps years ago, but my Arts Editor pointed me at this example today, which made me laugh.

Some lovely delicateness.