The Lies at the Heart of Our Dying Order

God help us.

@ Escher

God won’t help us. He just told me so. (eye roll)

Our order was created in 1946. Its not just Neo-liberalism but all Liberalism.

Liberalism claims are being proven to be untrue and unworkable just like communism. Some core ideas are:

“men and women are the same and are interchangeable”
“all races are the same and should all live together”
“a country is an economic area”
“everything’s based on rationalism and materialism and is purely a calculation of economic self-interest”

The Altright is winning because it is offering identity and meaning and group belonging to white people, when liberalism only offered confusion, self-negation and lonely individualism

Speaking of the CIA pushing the claim Putin interfered in the election, the FBI is saying the CIA is talking nonsense and the Republicans are splitting along ideological seams over the CIA claims.

We might very well see a power play intra-Republican Party between the Cold War Warriors such as McCain and the Internationalists who want to bury the hatchet with Russia and focus on China.

The other power play is between the CIA and FBI, but the FBI in the past has always bitchslapped the CIA down when it got uppity and had far better intelligence inside the USSR than the CIA did and saw its coming collapse.

Trump’s first 100 days will likely be spent bitchslapping the Cold War Warriors and CIA into towing his line.

Decision making is based on emotion, not reason. If people were rational, they would embrace degrowth. And the people who support degrowth could fit in a small ball park.

You missed the rest of my sentence obviously. I said that people also have an emotional component to their decision-making. It is of course very easy to decide that the ideas your emotions have led you to (as you claim), others are irrational for not also adopting those ideas.

The AP is reporting that CIA director Brennan has somehow rolled Clapper and Comey into the Putin fixed the election for Trump bandwagon and the claim that Trump was a willing accomplice is stated. This news came from Brennan not Clapper or Comey so it’s unclear what actually was discussed or agreed upon.

A soft or a hard coup may be coming.

Mandos thinks that most Americans are too stupid and/or too undisciplined to be able to keep from having their thought process confused by. et al, excessive and unfocused verbiage, manipulations by professional spinners, deliberately dishonest paraphrasing, and celebration of their own internal psychological dysfunctions (which, in fairness, seem to be the only areas of specialization remaining to many, but especially to the left), , then that must be taken as absolute proof that NOBODY has the mental discipline, training, and focus to do an accurate, dispassionate, and , yes, rational analysis of anything.

Mandos is just projecting his own limitations onto everybody else. Got therapy?

You are wrong to say that socialism failed (pls note that we’ve never had communism in any country). The socialist countries – and I speak from personal experience, having lived in more than one – were simply strangled economically (not that there weren’t internal problems, too). It was Truman’s policy to destroy the socialist bloc – and it finally happened in late 1980s. In the meantime, those countries were subject to sanctions, embargoes, endless propaganda, covert funding of the opposition… how can you of all people not be aware of all this? Again, not to say that there weren’t any internal problems… but to keep repeating the silly mantra that socialism failed is just journalistic malpractice. Having lived there and now for many yrs in he west, I can see both sides – and it is just not that simple. Unfortunately, this false black/white view is perpetrated by both the ideological right and opportunistic left in the US.

The reason people lose faith is because the people we are supposed to trust (government) are fucking liars and traitors. Trust? Surely you jest. I can’t get beyond it.

I guess I’ll try to finish reading. I can’t guarantee it though.

Ian, I recently came across your blog while brooding about the Trump win and the unfolding collapse of my country. Good stuff, and a welcome perspective to consider in the dark days ahead.

As 77,000 voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania made abundantly clear last month, life is not going well for millions of angry fellow citizens, despite our government’s warmed-over official stats touting an “economic recovery” that’s every bit as fake as the news Trump supporters have been passing around on Facebook. Unfortunately, the Democrats are complicit in this—NAFTA, the attempted TPP, almost no anti-trust enforcement, banking laws repealed and then the big banks bailed out when they misbehaved, with no prosecution of the white-collar criminals running them. (And of course a big expansion of the Orwellian surveillance state under Obama, the very same Constitutional law professor who criticized his predecessor’s tiptoeing into warrantless wiretapping.)

Meanwhile, the invisible hand of the free market, despite 16 years of Democrats occupying the white house out of the past 24, has been squeezing ever harder around the throat of the average citizen. As Thomas Frank sums things up in his outstanding book Listen Liberal, “Today we live in a world of predatory bankers, predatory educators, even predatory health care providers, all of them out for themselves.”

The problem is that there are no ready solutions to the predicament so many of our countrymen find themselves in. And when that happens, so long as people have a vote and even more so after they finally acquiesce in giving it up, the likely outcomes are grim.

—Adapted from my essay this week, “Requiem for the Republic”:
http://blog.edsuom.com/2016/12/requiem-for-republic.html

@Ed Suominen,

Are you writing in from the U P ?

StewartM,

If race isn’t real, then how can 23 & Me tell me my race given a drop of my saliva? Amerikaner is right – it takes a lot of education to make a man more ignorant than an illiterate peasant.

You want to believe that while the western elite is corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, and rotten to its very core, that it is still correct in its worldview, even where that differs from the consensus of our received wisdom; that while it is “not even wrong” in every technical discipline where it’s been tested, that it might still be basically correct, honest, and accomplished beyond measure in others.

Too much has happened. The rich and elites have stolen too much, lied too much, betrayed us too much, too deeply, too often. The toothpaste can not be put back in the tube. People are beginning to realize that it is either them or us. We either put them down or they will put us down. It is that simple.

@BlizzardofOz:

If race isn’t real, then how can 23 & Me tell me my race given a drop of my saliva?

They can tell from your DNA your skin color, or nose width/length, or things like that, and tell you that you’re (for instance) “white”. That does *NOT* mean there is such thing biologically speaking, as a “white race”.

The exterior attributes that were used to classify people as “Caucasian”, “Negroid”, “Mongoloid”, or any number of false categories don’t track with equally inheritable traits that you can’t see, like blood type or the ability to taste PTC, or others. If we could see these traits like we see skin hue, hair kink and color, and nose length, we’d classify the Scots and West Africans and Australian aborigines together (hey, they have similar prevalence of the same blood type), or say that the Chinese and Japanese can’t be of the same race (vastly different concentrations of PTC-tasters). Especially there can’t be any “black” or “Negroid” race as Africans show more genetic variation than everyone else; people in nearby villages can show greater genetic differences than a Chinese has versus a German versus an Amazonian Indian. Genetic diseases like sickle-cell anemia also don’t respect the old racial boundaries; it also can be found in populations in the Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, India, and parts of South America.

What you see in the exterior attributes that were used to construct the traditional “races” are examples of convergent evolution. People of different pedigrees from different population groups who moved to the same environment were affected by natural selection to develop the same adaptations, like skin hue (caveat: only if they made the transition to agriculture) or nose length and width. So they ended up looking like each other, on the outside. The fact that they ended up looking alike because they shared the same environment does not mean that they are biologically related, any more than a marsupial wolf is biologically related to the placental wolf because they look alike due to the same convergent evolution. The fact that they can test your DNA and say “you have white skin” doesn’t mean that you are genetically similar to other people that have white skin, or that these form a biologically valid group that share the same pedigree or originated from any common ancestor.

I found this:
http://www.debbyirving.com/qa/is-race-real-or-not/

and this;
http://www.understandingrace.org/about/index.html

Kudos to StewartM

@StewartM
OF COURSE we throw out the baby with the bath water. How can we not? When we are lied to we can no longer believe ANYTHING the liars say. That is the big evil that the liars commit, not just that they line their pockets at our expense, but that TRUTH CAN NEVER BE HEARD.

“The fact that they can test your DNA and say “you have white skin” doesn’t mean that you are genetically similar to other people that have white skin, or that these form a biologically valid group that share the same pedigree or originated from any common ancestor.”

Haha that is exactly what the studies show. This is amazing sophistry bravo

Liberals would do better to just accept the true race science and work to destroy human difference honestly.

@ Kim Kaufman
Wow, it goes back to 1860, interesting.

From The Boston Globe article;

IDEAS: Where does the term “double government” come from?

Glennon: It comes from Walter Bagehot’s famous theory, unveiled in the 1860s. Bagehot was the scholar who presided over the birth of the Economist magazine—they still have a column named after him. Bagehot tried to explain in his book “The English Constitution” how the British government worked. He suggested that there are two sets of institutions. There are the “dignified institutions,” the monarchy and the House of Lords, which people erroneously believed ran the government. But he suggested that there was in reality a second set of institutions, which he referred to as the “efficient institutions,” that actually set governmental policy. And those were the House of Commons, the prime minister, and the British cabinet.

Anyhoo, thanks for the link.

StewartM gives a very good description. From a genetics point of view, race is nonsense. It is true that certain genetic markers show up more often in certain populations, and these can be used to give you some idea of where you come from. They do not tell you who you are.

I remember learning a very long time ago that whale hemoglobin was very different from human hemoglobin in all the non-essential bits. But in those dealing with oxygen transport they were pretty much the same. The reason being that if you or a whale can’t transport oxygen, you’re both dead. And that’s the crux of the story here. If it’s important, it’s conserved and shows little variation. If it’s not, the opposite is true. If there is some marginal advantage like darker skin color in sunnier climates, then this adaptation can show up, and does, even in geographically isolated populations. But the takehome lesson is that genetically we are far, far more similar to each other than we are different, to the extent that individually we can be genetically more similar to someone from a different population than the one we happen to find ourselves in.

As for “race science,” that’s pretty much a white suprematist tell, and an oxymoron.

@ John Poynton

Newton’s laws were disproved by Einstein.

Unfortunately, you completely leave out context, which would clarify what Newton couldn’t have known.
And that’s just the beginning, but I leave that for you to deal with.

Re: Trust in the military…

I’m not sure Americans really trust the military so much as they have become dependent an image of the military that they believe they need: “Protectors”. Goes back to the Indian Wars and beyond.

This is one reason why, if Trump is denied the presidency (unlikely, but there has been a whole lot of unlikely in this year’s electoral pageant) there would almost have to be an interim government fronted by a “respected” (possibly retired) military figure. Who would that be?

I can’t think of one off-hand, but I can think of plenty of war criminals and worse who have betrayed their oaths and duties and thus ought to be disqualified.

The other thing is that Trump has his own stable of generals who no doubt seek to gain from his ascension, and they would no doubt fret that their own advantage was thwarted if Trump is denied the presidency. What would they do? If they issued a call to arms, would anyone respond? If so, who?

This is what could trigger a civil war. Not that the people would rise up on their own to fight one another over who sits on the throne, if anyone, but that one faction of the military would fight another for their own advantage — and of course both the contending factions would refer to it as “preserving, protecting, and defending the constitution.” Because of course they would.

On the other hand, I doubt there’s all that much personal loyalty toward Trump among his stable of generals, and if the right one emerges from the scrum to serve as the face of an interim government, then Trump and his gang can be sidelined.

Chaos would ensue just the same, but it would likely be over pretty quickly.

As for the lies underpinning the dying order? Absolutely.

Anything taking the place of the current decadent order, however, would be just as filled with lies, wouldn’t it?

Ancestry is a biological concept, but race is not. Race is how we choose to behave in relation to surface differences. Race would still be a social construct even if Irish people and Japanese were separate species that couldn’t produce children together. By “social construct”, I mean it in this sense: if any voluntary choices exist at all, then how we behave with regard to visible markers of likely different biological ancestry is one of those choices. There are obviously people — I mean, we have them arguing right here — for whom this is very emotional distinction, that they then retroactively attempt to justify by data-mining phenotypically superficial changes over time. I think that emotionalization of ancestral difference — aka racism — is very much a social construct, a tempting one for some, and a tendency we have no choice but to purge.

Much more interesting than the content of the “race” concept is the reason for the emotional tendency towards racist thinking exhibited by some of the participants here. I suspect it may have to do with different conceptualizations of love. If your underlying paradigm of love is openness, the breaking of boundaries, the sacrifice of comfortable barriers, etc, etc, then racism is an anti-love horror. If your underlying paradigm of love is one of encirclement, enfolding, comfort, immersion, then you’ll have a tendency to look for things to “encircle”, of which superficial visual differences, retroactively justifiable through “race science”, are a very easy category indeed.

@ BlizzardOfOz

You can identify a man’s race by sight (“Caucasian” => white

Wrong. Indians (India) are classified as Caucasian, last I checked. Oh, but wait, their also Asian.
Damn, confusing no?

Trump has moved away from the Jokers, Penguins and Riddlers surrounding his Gotham Tower to the more friendly territory surrounding his Mar-A-Lago redoubt in Florida. He is continuing his victory tour thanking his supporters and a large group of vets there and in Alabama. The large crowds are still chanting ‘Lock Her Up’ which is a good sign people know where the lines are drawn in this conflict.

His spokesman answered questions about the demand that he submit to depositions for the troublemakers who are suing because they were roughed up at his campaign rally’s, he answered with this statement.

Trump Will Not Be Deposed!!!

The other big promise that I think you are missing is that focusing monetary policy entirely on inflation will lead to greater prosperity. This shift occurred at the end of the 1980s. It obviously failed but it’s great for lenders!

It’s too easy to fall into well-worn paths … the phrase “the lies at the heart of our dying order” was just too tempting.

The concept of race has existed since time immemorial, ever since the day when humans gathered in bands, then into clans, thence into tribes, and finally into nations. A more polite and less politically charged term is “ethnicity.”

Whatever you call it, it is a quick and dirty way of saying “these people are the same as we are” and “they are not us, but someone else.”

Also since time immemorial, each race has thought itself to be the best on Earth, most blessed by the gods/God, superior to all other races, and thus destined to rule over other races, with the other, inferior races, not being the most blessed, not having much say in the matter… and in some cases, being destined for extermination.

Historically, we see it everywhere. You are probably most familiar with the idea from the Old Testament of the Bible, where the Hebrews first declared themselves the “Chosen People” of the “One God,” and then proceeded to exterminate every Canaanite they could get their hands on…

Similarly, the various empires of the day were racial empires, with the ruler surrounded mostly by his own people, and even in the more enlightened states, the rulers of the same race being left in place as satraps.

Of course, as time proves, every race that has ever believed itself the “best race” is proven quite wrong. Most such peoples have a golden age, when they are able to take advantage of whatever resources nature granted them, or technological advantages their ancestors developed, to rule over other races for a time, and then as is the way of the world, they decline, and others rise.

The “Germanic” peoples had they heyday in the days of the collapse of the “Mediterranean” empire; their advantage was that they were barbarians at a time when it was quite advantageous to be barbaric. They peaked at the time of Charlemagne, went into decline, and had a second Golden Age with the Age of Discover/Exploration/Colonization. But the rest of the world has slowly caught up with them, and they are on the decline.

What we are seeing from the Alt-Right (“The Monsters,” as I simply call them) is the final paroxysm of death, in which the dying thing tries to take out everything else around it. It is an especially potent paroxysm, as the racial theories of the defunct German Reich combined with the sad, pathetic remnants of American White Exceptionalism to form a most potent and toxic witch’s brew of beliefs and ideals.

And of course, it all has come to a head at the absolutely worst time, when these Monsters are now poised to gain power of the last, sad, declining, but still immensely powerful Superpower State the world will ever see…

The ironic thing is, of course, that these Monsters believe themselves to be the purest of all human races, which is of course drivel. The purest humans (Homo sapiens) of course, are Africans. Europeans are all mixed with Homo neandertalensis, making them in fact a mongrel race; those who are descended from the northernmost groups are also the most mixed, with the highest percent of Neanderthal genes.

So really, this is the last hurrah of the Neanderthals… which is why, I suppose, it is so easy to compare the Monsters with cavemen… because really, they are the closest thing we have today that was related to the archetypal cavemen…

@Mandos: thank you for all you’ve written here about ‘race’ as a social construct. spencer wells in his ‘journey of man’ books and videos (on youtube now, i think) for national geographic, traced the first human as a san bushman in the kalahari desert by following the ‘relatively unchanged’ Y chromosome markers. he called it a ‘non-racial story, but a ‘cultural story’, not a ‘biological’ one as he traced the various journeys of early man (not sexist, but referring to the Y chromosome) as having adapted to different climates, light intensities, and so on. in the photos of the oldest san busman he could find, i swear you could see every human cultural/ethnic feature on his beaming face; glorious!

@ Stewart M: thank you, a well.

‘racialism’ is almost always wrong-thinking, too, as in: ascribing traits to a ‘race’ or ethnicity as monolithic.

@ BeenThere: thank you. stir in the modern coups in VZ, and the ngo/cia soft-power coups in the remaining bolivarian nations, including the degraded socialism in brazil, and the hideous bombing and strafing campaign that mexico gave the zapatistas (with the help of the IDF). clearly, the bidness of the empire is to quash any socialistic tendencies. thomas mountain writes that eritrea is one of three remaining socialistic nations (he doesn’t name the other two), and the hegemon and human rights (cough) agencies, and NGOs like the accursed avaaz, are fomenting for some military r2p continually.

The title is “The Lies At The Heart Of Our Dying Order”.

But nobody wants to talk about that, better to have yet one more endless round of arguments over identity politics. Very fitting.

It was always BS, smart working class people (highly self educated and smart) knew that. I knew that. I was jumping up and down against Bill Clinton, Bill Hawke, Keating, Langey …and of course Bliar when they sold out ..let alone Thatcher and Reagan…

How can you have capitalism when no one can buy any products?

Even the ‘China’ model was BS, it damaged badly China’s natural development, turned it away from developing manufacturing and a scientific/technical base to meet its own needs into a ‘cheap workshop of the worlds elites’ with all the environmental and resource issues it now faces.

Apple was, and is, the worst of the worst. Steve Jobs creating an anti-wage coalition to drive down US technical workers and moved all its manufacturing into China…for the tax advantages of course.

So we ‘squared the circle’ with debt, letting banks (etc) create unlimited money..wow… that worked so well.

Hugh,

I’m curious as to your definition of real versus fake science. I suspect that your beloved science of global warming would not compare favorably to race science. Now of course race (like global warming) being a politically charged subject, it has attracted charlatans and propagandists. But that doesn’t mean that race itself doesn’t exist in nature, or can’t be studied. Race is something that’s evident to all humans, at least until you subject them to a lifetime of indoctrination that actually colors don’t exist, bigot, they’re just different frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s also something that has been studied with more success and predictive power (as 23 & Me demonstrates) than global warming studies.

It’s ironic that you would cite Hannah Arendt, a Jewish non-scientist, on this subject. Jewish intellectuals have spearheaded the race-doesn’t-exist movement, while themselves being members of the most fanatical racial-purity cult in world history. Does Arendt mention the existence of her own race, preserved in diaspora for 2000 years through the most extraordinary measures, and which developed a measurably higher intelligence due to eugenic practice? Or does she gloss over it? At least you didn’t cite her co-ethnic Stephen Jay Gould, whose study that purportedly exposed the fraud of racial classification using skull measurements, was itself later discovered to be a fraud — the progenitor of today’s fake-news media denouncing the scourge of fake news.

«It made a few core promises: [ … ] These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple.»

They have not been lies: the core premises happened for a large minority of the population, affluent middle class property/business owners, retired or close to retirement, and for an overwhelming majority of campaign donors.

Neoliberal policies have been quite popular. The congressional majorities and presidents who have enacted and implemented welfare “reform”, non-enforcement of immigration law, TARP, debt bubbles, PATRIOT, Iraq war, non-enforcement of securities law, offshoring, government run murder squads, much lower taxes for the rich, they have all been re-elected

«For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.»

That has also happened, but for *elections* the experience of  «most of the population» is largely irrelevant: what matters is the experience of a plurality of *voters*, who get to shape congressional or parliamentary majorities, and of *donors*, who get to shape who is nominated as candidate.

Democracy works only for people who vote and donate to campaigns. In a democracy the majority of voters (and donors) win, the others lose.

«The neoliberal Democrats abandoned the defense of the interests of the poor and the working classes in the early 1980s.»

That was when the historic base of the democratic party, the irish/jewish/italian working class, turned into property owning middle classes.

«The most prominent journalists and pundits and economists have hired themselves out as useful idiots, useful to the plutocracy, useless to the rest of us.»

Some of them have started to realize that they made a mistake:

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2015/04/why-didnt-i-get-rich.html
«journalists/columnists of a certain age (meaning ones not much older than me and younger) are coming around to the realization that the economy is screwing them, too.
There was a moment when a lot of them (we’re talking ones at elite outlets, not your random small town paper) thought they’d done everything right, would become celebrities, and get Tom Friedman’s speaking fees. The economy sure was working for them, and screw everybody else.»

Does Arendt mention the existence of her own race, preserved in diaspora for 2000 years through the most extraordinary measures, and which developed a measurably higher intelligence due to eugenic practice?

Let me explain something to you, Blizzzzzy babybee. The “eugenic practice” here was applied by the outside world through its relentless and often murderous opposition. Under those conditions, dumb Jews died, and the average IQ rose.

This has been another in the series Simple Answers to Really Easy Questions.

«we don’t have a democracy, and elections do not equate to democracy.»

It surely isn’t an athenian-style democracy…

Still it is an imperfect limited-sovereignty representative democracy, and the elections “work”: they allow the voters and campaign donors to veto the faction of the elites that they object to most. In the recent USA election it turns out that the voters objected most to H Clinton, and the donors objected most to B Sanders.

@BlizzardOfOz,

Jews are a “racial purity cult”? I have seen blond-haired blue-eyed EuroJews, Afro-looking Ethiopian Jews, pretty-dark-themselves Arab Jews, etc. Oh, and . . . some dark eyed dark haired EuroJews who are darker skinned than some white-looking Arab Jews that I have seen.

So where is the “racial purity” in this “cult”?