The main common thread between the UK elections a few days ago, and the US election next year, is simply that both countries -- like all countries -- have sizable groups of people who are either too stubborn or ignorant to listen to common sense, and they don't get it until life and the universe break one off in their asses.
Jacob Bacharach has an interesting analysis of the situation, one that for the most part jibes with my understanding of the dynamic in play. The greatest danger is not that the UK vote translates over completely as a direct repudiation of "leftism" in the US, but that the leaders of the Democratic Party, diffident even when they win, will respond as if it does, and therefore will that interpretation into existence, with the ever-present helper monkeys of the corporate media, of course. No vested interest for them in all this.
There are plenty of great pull quotes, but this stands out:
It's not just that one side "fights dirty" while the other "plays by the rules," so much as one side has a much better sense of mission and direction and focus, and they are prepared to hit it consistently, day after day. It all harks back to the old direct-mail marketing days, and as cheesy and obnoxious as those things were, they were effective. Take those marketing principles and apply them to the internets, and a society that no longer even pretends to care if the marketing claims have any substance at all, and the effectiveness has now been ratcheted up by several orders of magnitude.
Democrats will reflexively say that their diversity is their strength, which is all well and good. But from a marketing standpoint, from the position of someone trying to create a value proposition for their product, it can end up with a message that is crafted simply not to offend anyone. The first rule they tell you, whether you've invented a great new manufactured widget or written a novel, when you have something to sell, you have to ask yourself who is your audience.
Apply that logic to the Democratic platform at large, and to the leading candidates in particular, and then square that with the messages -- the marketing strategies -- each of those entities are using. Now apply it to their counterparts on the other side, whether Trump himself or McConnell or Graham or some back-bench galoot like Louie Gohmert. They're all vile and in many cases completely stupid, but they succeed because they are consistent. They know their audience, and their audience knows them.
I keep saying that every day is a vote, whether you know it or not, whether you agree with it or not. Your ballot may only show up every couple years or so, but your wallet is a daily endorsement of something, whatever it is. And as wealth and social classes, and the parties that putatively represent them, have shifted, so do the marketing strategies.
Brexit would absolutely be catastrophic for most of the British, in a multitude of ways. But they voted for it, and they should get it, good and hard. It's telling that they know how badly they fucked up, the way they keep trying to avoid actually implementing this thing they voted for over three years ago. Maybe it's time they found out and got it out of their system.
And now their health care is going to get privatized, so there's another thing we'll all have in common, a miserable racket that siphons money and sanity out of working people in order to stack it at the feet of a handful of chiselers who already have more than they can ever spend.
I don't think any of the current Democratic candidates have the high negatives that Jeremy Corbyn had -- yet. Don't you worry, whoever gets the nomination will be subject to more deep fakes and outright slander than you can imagine. You thought Hillary had baggage? Wait till they start putting out doctored videos of Biden sundowning, or Warren's voice going super-shrill, or Mayor Pete saying the n-word.
It seems like many liberals and Democrats still wish to cling to the happy fiction that Russia colluded with the evil puppet-masters at Fakebook to bamboozle good hard-workin' Americans to vote against their own rational self-interest. They certainly did engage in such collusion, but that carries with it the implication that if all those bullshit micro-targeted ads hadn't run, these good foke woulda voted the correct way.
I am but a humble messenger, but this is my message -- any candidate who sincerely believes that and strategizes accordingly is doomed. The truth is that, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once sagely pointed out, some people ain't no damned good, and they vote in that fine spirit. They weren't fooled by those fake ads, they were motivated by them.
This is the culmination of the global financial pandemic that I have been talking about in here over the past fifteen years -- wealth hoarding and inequality by a handful of transnational merchant princes. All they care about is hoarding more and more and more, and they will do and say anything to chisel one more goddamned penny. It has only gotten worse, and capital mobility has increased, and so the ever-burgeoning numbers of peons in every country have swelled, even as they have been mercilessly squeezed under the rigors of the data-tracking surveillance state.
Sound like paranoid tinfoil hattery? Okay, all you have to do is look back at all the major transgressions committed by the world central banks -- money laundering for drug cartels and human traffickers, ripping off customers and selling their identities, playing with interest rates to screw over the masses and benefit the wealthy few, with zero accountability -- to see the pattern. There is never any real accountability to be had, maybe an occasional scapegoat to be hauled off to a country-club joint for a short stretch. But the main culprits are still there directing traffic, renting politicians, etc.
Meanwhile there are ever more refugees seeking asylum from war and climate change, and the squeezed peons in the industrialized nations don't want to share the dwindling crumbs. This is why right-wing nationalism is on the rise in so many prosperous nations, as well as rising powers like India, where nearly one in every five humans live now.
People who are trying to gird themselves for 2020 should get a better prescription for their glasses. This is never going to end, not in my lifetime nor yours. The only variable that we can collectively affect is how much worse it will get. You get rid of Trump and take back the Senate and keep the House, you might have a chance to start turning things back toward sanity.
But those are tall odds, and even then you need the right people in those roles who are going to stand up and fight, not pusillanimous fake-idealists who would fight, but you see we have to consider the next election. If you stood them all together in a row, they would mostly stand around and hem and haw, waiting for someone else to take a lead that they could safely follow. The few who are willing to take a risk and speak up, like Elizabeth Warren, are promptly heckled by the ankle-biting corporate media as too strident and shrill.
How will we pay for a write-down of student-loan debt, or stopping climate change? I dunno, how the fuck are we paying for Space Force? You want to take planning tips from the usurers profiteering from student-loan companies, or from the extraction industries who make their nut befouling the planet, go right ahead and see how that works out for you.
As I've mentioned a couple times over the past year, barring some unforeseen change, I will probably be shutting down this blog at the end of next year. I am working on several personal and professional projects that are going to be taking more time in the coming months, and ordinarily I would probably just shut it down at the end of this year.
But there's this weird sense of completion and symmetry that I feel when I decide to run it through 2020. It frequently feels like I've been beating a dead horse for some time; the rotten troll that has infested American public life has sucked all the oxygen not just out of here, but out of popular culture at large. It's sad and pathetic, and underscores what kind of nation we've let ourselves sink to.
Occasionally, however, there seems to be a bit of breath in the old equine after all, and this is still a good outlet for me to test out ideas, see how they look written and fleshed out. And it promises to be an interesting -- probably too interesting, you know -- so there will be plenty to rant about. But in the meantime, it's probably not a terrible idea to take a look at real estate in Ireland and Scotland.
Jacob Bacharach has an interesting analysis of the situation, one that for the most part jibes with my understanding of the dynamic in play. The greatest danger is not that the UK vote translates over completely as a direct repudiation of "leftism" in the US, but that the leaders of the Democratic Party, diffident even when they win, will respond as if it does, and therefore will that interpretation into existence, with the ever-present helper monkeys of the corporate media, of course. No vested interest for them in all this.
There are plenty of great pull quotes, but this stands out:
In this, Labour’s defeat is not just a warning about the dangers of failing to take a stand on a critical national political crisis in an election year, but about the dangers of electoralism itself, about building a movement around casting a vote every few years.Exactly so. The reason they keep winning and beating us over the head with it is because they are at it day after bloody day. The fight is all they have, and so they have it with a consistency and constancy that can only come from a well-oiled, well-funded machine that knows its audience well and gives it to them by the metric ton. There are no true liberal counterparts to Fox News, the Federalist Society, the multitude of think-tank magazines, or even the NRA, that rail with the vigor and sprawl that all those entities (and more) do.
It's not just that one side "fights dirty" while the other "plays by the rules," so much as one side has a much better sense of mission and direction and focus, and they are prepared to hit it consistently, day after day. It all harks back to the old direct-mail marketing days, and as cheesy and obnoxious as those things were, they were effective. Take those marketing principles and apply them to the internets, and a society that no longer even pretends to care if the marketing claims have any substance at all, and the effectiveness has now been ratcheted up by several orders of magnitude.
Democrats will reflexively say that their diversity is their strength, which is all well and good. But from a marketing standpoint, from the position of someone trying to create a value proposition for their product, it can end up with a message that is crafted simply not to offend anyone. The first rule they tell you, whether you've invented a great new manufactured widget or written a novel, when you have something to sell, you have to ask yourself who is your audience.
Apply that logic to the Democratic platform at large, and to the leading candidates in particular, and then square that with the messages -- the marketing strategies -- each of those entities are using. Now apply it to their counterparts on the other side, whether Trump himself or McConnell or Graham or some back-bench galoot like Louie Gohmert. They're all vile and in many cases completely stupid, but they succeed because they are consistent. They know their audience, and their audience knows them.
I keep saying that every day is a vote, whether you know it or not, whether you agree with it or not. Your ballot may only show up every couple years or so, but your wallet is a daily endorsement of something, whatever it is. And as wealth and social classes, and the parties that putatively represent them, have shifted, so do the marketing strategies.
Brexit would absolutely be catastrophic for most of the British, in a multitude of ways. But they voted for it, and they should get it, good and hard. It's telling that they know how badly they fucked up, the way they keep trying to avoid actually implementing this thing they voted for over three years ago. Maybe it's time they found out and got it out of their system.
And now their health care is going to get privatized, so there's another thing we'll all have in common, a miserable racket that siphons money and sanity out of working people in order to stack it at the feet of a handful of chiselers who already have more than they can ever spend.
I don't think any of the current Democratic candidates have the high negatives that Jeremy Corbyn had -- yet. Don't you worry, whoever gets the nomination will be subject to more deep fakes and outright slander than you can imagine. You thought Hillary had baggage? Wait till they start putting out doctored videos of Biden sundowning, or Warren's voice going super-shrill, or Mayor Pete saying the n-word.
It seems like many liberals and Democrats still wish to cling to the happy fiction that Russia colluded with the evil puppet-masters at Fakebook to bamboozle good hard-workin' Americans to vote against their own rational self-interest. They certainly did engage in such collusion, but that carries with it the implication that if all those bullshit micro-targeted ads hadn't run, these good foke woulda voted the correct way.
I am but a humble messenger, but this is my message -- any candidate who sincerely believes that and strategizes accordingly is doomed. The truth is that, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once sagely pointed out, some people ain't no damned good, and they vote in that fine spirit. They weren't fooled by those fake ads, they were motivated by them.
This is the culmination of the global financial pandemic that I have been talking about in here over the past fifteen years -- wealth hoarding and inequality by a handful of transnational merchant princes. All they care about is hoarding more and more and more, and they will do and say anything to chisel one more goddamned penny. It has only gotten worse, and capital mobility has increased, and so the ever-burgeoning numbers of peons in every country have swelled, even as they have been mercilessly squeezed under the rigors of the data-tracking surveillance state.
Sound like paranoid tinfoil hattery? Okay, all you have to do is look back at all the major transgressions committed by the world central banks -- money laundering for drug cartels and human traffickers, ripping off customers and selling their identities, playing with interest rates to screw over the masses and benefit the wealthy few, with zero accountability -- to see the pattern. There is never any real accountability to be had, maybe an occasional scapegoat to be hauled off to a country-club joint for a short stretch. But the main culprits are still there directing traffic, renting politicians, etc.
Meanwhile there are ever more refugees seeking asylum from war and climate change, and the squeezed peons in the industrialized nations don't want to share the dwindling crumbs. This is why right-wing nationalism is on the rise in so many prosperous nations, as well as rising powers like India, where nearly one in every five humans live now.
People who are trying to gird themselves for 2020 should get a better prescription for their glasses. This is never going to end, not in my lifetime nor yours. The only variable that we can collectively affect is how much worse it will get. You get rid of Trump and take back the Senate and keep the House, you might have a chance to start turning things back toward sanity.
But those are tall odds, and even then you need the right people in those roles who are going to stand up and fight, not pusillanimous fake-idealists who would fight, but you see we have to consider the next election. If you stood them all together in a row, they would mostly stand around and hem and haw, waiting for someone else to take a lead that they could safely follow. The few who are willing to take a risk and speak up, like Elizabeth Warren, are promptly heckled by the ankle-biting corporate media as too strident and shrill.
How will we pay for a write-down of student-loan debt, or stopping climate change? I dunno, how the fuck are we paying for Space Force? You want to take planning tips from the usurers profiteering from student-loan companies, or from the extraction industries who make their nut befouling the planet, go right ahead and see how that works out for you.
As I've mentioned a couple times over the past year, barring some unforeseen change, I will probably be shutting down this blog at the end of next year. I am working on several personal and professional projects that are going to be taking more time in the coming months, and ordinarily I would probably just shut it down at the end of this year.
But there's this weird sense of completion and symmetry that I feel when I decide to run it through 2020. It frequently feels like I've been beating a dead horse for some time; the rotten troll that has infested American public life has sucked all the oxygen not just out of here, but out of popular culture at large. It's sad and pathetic, and underscores what kind of nation we've let ourselves sink to.
Occasionally, however, there seems to be a bit of breath in the old equine after all, and this is still a good outlet for me to test out ideas, see how they look written and fleshed out. And it promises to be an interesting -- probably too interesting, you know -- so there will be plenty to rant about. But in the meantime, it's probably not a terrible idea to take a look at real estate in Ireland and Scotland.
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