The horn-wearing Q-shaman carrying a six-foot spear with an American stars and stripes flag tied just below the blade has been arrested. Gee, how on Earth did they manage to track him down so quickly? A triumph of detective work.
It’s too daft to laugh at, as they say up north (England, UK, that is).
It’s all very worrying, though. I am seeing a tendency on the part of certain conservative voices to blame others, ‘the radical left,’ for this. ‘Radical left’ here refers to anybody to the left of where they are. The media, journalists. They have a downer on Vice President Mike Pence too. The claim is that there were members of the ‘radical left,’ Antifa and BLM, at work to turn a peaceful protest violent. We can just how peaceful the protesters are from the violence of their language. But fine, let’s track all the miscreants down, put names to faces and see. I’d throw the book at them.
I'm also seeing a lot of crying and outrage about censorship coming from people who lie, abuse, provoke division, spread hatred and incite conflict. I’ve been confronted by such people in the past. As I told one such character who, launching ignorant and offensive views calculated to provoke and upset, whined at me about the left being afraid of debate and enemies of free speech, I believe in good speech. You can say what you like, but I am not obliged to lend you my ears and waste my time wading through a cess-pit of half-truths and misinformation multiplied to a factor of whatever by prejudice, bigotry, and bile you have. It is patently obvious that such people are wreckers, out to break up connections, links, and solidarities that may serve to marshal an effective counter-public to entrenched power.
I have better things to be doing with my time than engaging with ideologues of this ilk. Garbage in, garbage out. Sad to say, there is no reasoning with. There are some strange worlds out there. But we shouldn't be surprised. Shakespeare wrote of the world that was emerging in his day, a world in which foul is fair and fair is foul. With the ‘death of God,’ the loss of an overarching moral framework, individuals are free to choose their own gods. It’s just that these gods may well be devils, and certainly may be experienced to be such by other individuals. Without a common objective standard there is no way of evaluating the competing claims advanced by rival gods. That’s why the political conflicts of the modern world are increasingly taking the form of religious wars. I shall say more about this later.
The age has been far too permissive with respect to the rights of individual self-assertion vis the public good, the former identified as the realm of freedom, the latter identified as a realm which is inimical to individual liberty. We need to renew respect for public domain - and ensure public servants and officials do so too - elevating the public mind and nurturing the public imagination. The public can never been a mere aggregate of self-choosing individuals, but this is precisely what has happened as a result of identifying freedom with subjective choice in the private sphere. The consequences of this false philosophy are now all around us. The pooling of all that we have in common issues in an enhanced, richer, liberty. To which, I will quickly add that I see that pooling proceeding democratically, as against any techno-bureaucratic managerialism entrenching and extending the corporate form. Of course I see what libertarians are afraid of here. The only problem is, in seeing each, any, and every collective form for the common good as inimical to individual liberty, they make it easy for anyone with a 'great reset' mindset to assume control in the political realm. There are real problems in the world that require effective treatment. By denying them or ignoring, entering politics to block and subvert those seeking to address them, serves only to make it likely for these issues to be appropriated by the very collective and bureaucratic forces whose power and control really are inimical to freedom. The libertarian right set out deliberately to undermine the state and public regulation in order to free market forces. Only the most naïve could not have seen that the principal economic agents in the market were the transnational corporations. The same people who are now bleating about globalism and globalists have been the most aggressive proponents of a free market deregulation designed to unfetter corporate forces, forces combining private priorities and global reach. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sight of such ideologues now threatening ‘leftist’ social media companies like Facebook and Twitter with anti-trust legislation. In other words, the people who pretend to loathe ‘big’ government now want to use government and the force of law to bring the corporations their economic liberalisation unleashed to heal.
The word ‘hypocrisy’ doesn’t begin to do the situation justice.
Twenty five years ago, studying economics at masters level, I issued a stark warning of the advance of the corporate form. Many others had been issuing the same warning well before.
In this work, I argued that the war between public and private, socialism and capitalism, was a phoney war, and that privatisation and deregulation under neoliberal regimes – which were very ‘big’ governments indeed – were not about privatisation but the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. This was an undemocratic socialisation that proceeds outside of the democratic realm, within capitalist relations, imposes its systemic imperatives on it to constrain the public realm – and political choices - externally. Privatisation was always an ideological misnomer, to the extent that the extension of the corporate form entailed the gradual erosion of private property. The corporate capture of the state follows as a matter of course, and is merely the visible image of a much deeper, invisible, and systemic process.
There has been an aggressive and relentless four decade and more agenda to hand control and power over to a small number of corporate agents and now, having succeeded, the political right is in meltdown over Trump being banned by a privately-owned company. Who on Earth could have anticipated that the alienation of economic control and power would extend to the informational realm too! And so we now see demands for anti-trust initiatives. That, I suspect, will take some very big government and law to effect. The people who loathe government and law now call upon government and law to take on big business. The people who argued this over the past century were … well, democratic socialists, the people branded mad Marxists and extremists. Such politics is riddled with incoherence. The political right is bankrupt. The real scandal for me is that the Left is too absorbed in language games, identity, and culture to constitute an effective alternative. People are crying out for a genuine public community. It is screamingly obvious that that is where the Left need to be focusing, restoring connections with ‘ordinary’ people. Effective, legitimate government is effective, legitimate government in being based on the principle of self-assumed obligation, be it ‘big’ or ‘small.’ The particular scale is for citizens to decide, in accordance with their ends, determined in public exchange.
The irony, both ludicrous and bitter, is that the people who are now complaining the most about corporate elites and censorship have been complicit in the imposition of the systemic purposes and interests of large capital on government for four decades. And now, having unleashed the beast, they warn of the ‘Great Reset’ and an encroaching ‘corporate communism’ under the auspices of corporate elites. They are catching up to where I was twenty five years ago in warning of the corporatisation of public business under the corporate form. Of course, they have enjoyed huge tax cuts along the way, which was precisely what they were after. Like all greedy people, they suffer from short-sightedness. They now need to be made to see the results of their own handiwork. They are the authors of their own ills, and need to own the problems they have caused. The problems are self-authored, and these people have neither the nerve nor the nous to own them and take responsibility. They are big on personal responsibility, so long as it involves divesting individuals of collective social supports and letting the devil take them on the market.
I don’t need to frighten myself with nightmares about the coming ‘great reset.’ It is patently obvious that a globalisation of anarchistic economic relations with a tendency to crisis, contradiction, stagnation, conflict, and breakdown will generate a demand for order and control. The real question concerns how this is to be done. I’ve argued all along for a democratic socialisation, but the most powerful political forces of the age have fought tooth and nail to prevent this. That leaves only some form of a techno-bureaucratic managerialism under the corporate form. You can cry ‘globalist’ and ‘elitist’ all you like, but these are objective trends and tendencies that demand effective collective intervention, the very thing a libertarian ethos cannot achieve given its identification of each, any, and every collective purpose as an infringement of liberty.
As this article argues, if there is anything “Orwellian” about any of this, then it is that the libertarian conservative right in the United States and Europe who are re-framing as “leftist” and “anti-democratic” the for-profit, privately controlled “free market of ideas” they have religiously and relentlessly pushed for decades. It is also abundantly clear that the people citing Orwell’s 1984 have either not read the book or don’t understand it, or understand anything beyond the simple lines gleaned from Ayn Rand. If they read at all, they read to confirm what they already believe to be true, not to learn anything.
I called out BLM as I did Extinction Rebellion and their fetish of law breaking. And I did so vociferously and at length, in defence of rational freedom and the commitment to a genuine public life, a commitment prosecuted by the active, informed, and associated citizenry, not by enlightened vanguards ('alchemists of revolution' and 'would-be universal reformers' (Marx) on their way to becoming the bureaucrats of knowledge/power, or enabling/sanctioning others to become so. (links below). Always but always there is a need to be aware of the danger of rhetorical exaggeration and appropriation. Frame politics in terms of necessity and survival, and advance moral imperatives in the absence of moral referents, and not only will your cause fail, it will be taken over by those who think themselves able to do a better job. Bad process and bad precedent has an inherent tendency to backfire. I've called out the bad process of the contemporary left, and it did nothing for my popularity. It's called leadership. Leadership is about taking people where they need to be, not giving them what they want. This era has lost the public sensibility. I am now seeing people on the right who are more concerned with the hypocrisy of liberal left leaders who apologised for or supported the protests and demonstrations and riots of 2020 than with showing some leadership themselves. This way lies civil war.
‘'Who were the people warning us for decades about the excessive power of centralized corporate control over media and information? About the threats of this centralized control to democracy? “Libertarian” Trumpites now complaining so vociferously? Reagan Republicans? European Conservatives? No. It was academics and the political left, saying that the excessive power of news organizations such as Fox News, CNN and the New York Times, and the excessive power of social media platforms, are dangerous.
And what was the standard reaction of the political right when researchers and media reformers expressed basic concern over the concentration of power in our informational ecosystem? That we were naive, free market-hating Marxists with no grasp of how things work “in the real world.” That we were scared that our worldview would be thrashed in the “marketplace of ideas.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the real world.'
What I really want to see is a Left in politics that moves away from the divisiveness and impossible demands of identity politics and back towards the socio-economic realities that affect and concern and bind a common humanity. A Left that combines critique with construction, and ditches a politics of permanent protest to develop constructive models of an alternative society and, most importantly, draws increasing numbers of people into its support, not as protesters, but as citizens. At present, all I see is an endless power/resistance cycle, with existing power conceived as parents and its resisters as children. The classic example here is Thunberg’s ‘putting pressure on those in power’ to act. That’s not politics, that children playing up to get their parents to give them something. Push that politics of resistance to extremes – as in the war of attrition that has been played out in public these last few years – and the adults may well strike back hard and, in so doing, reveal themselves to be infants themselves. That is what happens when, instead of cultivating the public imagination and virtues, there has been a concerted attack on the public realm, identifying ‘government’ as the enemy. One side denigrates ‘government’ relentlessly, another side appeals to it endlessly (whilst also making a fetish of ‘peaceful’ law breaking). All the time, respect for and commitment to government and the public realm diminishes.
Lose politics and the means of doing politics properly, and you will have no option but to be fighting each other in the streets. And the ‘moderate’ ‘centrists’ are no option, either, given their own studied avoidance of asymmetries in power and resources.
I’m standing firm for the way I reclaim socialism and reframe conservatism so as to re-establish the commonalities between individuals as associated citizens of a genuine public realm, their politics bound by a commitment to a greater end.
I read the riot act on politics and ethics and don't suffer libertarian parasites who assert to themselves the right to see the true and the good as they see fit. As for this Q-shaman, I now suspect his lawyer will now be reaching for DSM-5. The system he loathes will now provide his best chance of defence. Just like the anti-government libertarians are now demanding anti-trust legislation to be employed against the media giants they unleashed. I'm wondering if there is a National Association of Shamans concerned to distance themselves from this crank. If there isn't, they should form one now and make an example of him. So that's the age, then, conspirituality. Gee, makes my old medieval association of reason and faith seem positively sober and sane. But we are all free to choose the good as we see fit. And by God do some take free rein in doing it. So how, when the true and the good is mere subjective choice, do you rein them in? The law and the police hold the line, I suppose. I can see where that ends.
An age of libertarian parasitism is imploding. I'm glad to say I made precisely these points throughout the year, up to and including the Extinction Rebellion protest at the Cenotaph. Damn all free riders on the public realm.
As for this debacle, you look for leadership and clear statements of condemnation from people, and all you see is apologetics, 'whataboutism,' deflection, and even outright support and cheer-leading. I'm looking for someone on the right who has the nerve to call this out, as I did with respect to the protests, demos, rioting and XR law breaking these past two years. I don't care about the cause or the principle. Take it as read that everyone with a political axe to grind believes that God/science/nature/history/truth is on their side. I have my causes and principles, just as others will have theirs. These do not override political process. The end should orient the means and ensure their appropriateness, and not justify any means. Bad process never ends well. I've warned the left/environmentalism on this, no doubt losing support among that group of people. I don't hesitate to call it out whatever the stripe of the politics. Effective and enduring solutions are based on a genuine politics - a politics of dialogue and exchange with a view to a consensual devotion to a common end. Break that up, and there is only endless dissension without resolution.
I think I know where this comes from - the 'death of God' and the consequent absorption of one and all into a sophist world of endless power struggle in which victory goes not to truth - teased out in dialogue - but to the loudest voice and strongest arm and biggest guns. The modern world has theologized politics so that the normal course of political exchange has turned into a Manichean struggle between the self-righteously right and good the irredeemably evil. In relativising the absolute - God, the transcendent standard of truth and justice - the world has absolutized the relative. Individuals choose the true and the good as they see fit and, making it their god, cannot compromise. The truth is non-negotiable. This is NOT the temper of politics. Politics IS about dissent and disagreement with a view towards compromise and agreement for a greater supra-individual good. I hear cries of "liberty" and see only the men as gods delusion, rendering politics a form of theological warfare. I've had enough tough words to say about this with respect to the environmental cause I advance, so I feel entitled to call it out with respect to this assault on the US Capitol. I want to see the restoration of politics and the generous, if vigorous, give and take that that involves. I argue vehemently against evasion, too, since this strikes people as an attempt to deny the voicing of grievances. There is an awful lot of disconnection and deflection that needs to be openly addressed here. People of all persuasions are feeling that forms of governance in politics and economics are neither serving them nor the public good, and the personifications of those forms are the visible targets of this anger. That's where I put the emphasis - the reconstitution of genuine publicity, one in which government and governed are connected, as against the abstraction of power and control. Forms need to be brought back within popular control and comprehension. But not by force. Force merely ensures the re-alienation of power and control in the hands of the most assertive and the most aggressive. I make that point generally. There's a great need to take the fear out of politics, not least the fear of the other. I read someone describe Kamala Harris as a 'monster' for her commitment to equality. I really have no idea what she was arguing, but have no doubt she is not a monster. No one is a monster for having differing political views. I notice this same dehumanisation of others going on among environmentalists, identifying people who drive, fly, eat meat, live, breathe, exist as 'carbon criminals.' This is precisely what I mean about a bogus religiosity. The 'death of God' has torn a huge hole at the heart of the meaning space of modernity, and it is being filled by all manner of cult and conspirituality. The emphasis is on individual sin and collective punishment, untempered by mercy and forgiveness, and cut off from transcendent hope and redemption. It's a recipe for universal hatred.
These are dangerous times, with so many so utterly lacking in political courage and moral fibre. You want to go playing these bat-and-ball games taking politics to the streets? That’s called civil war isn't it?
It's at times like this that you can have some understanding of what Erasmus felt in his last years, as the religious wars of the Reformation were about to tear Europe apart for two centuries. New gods now, but they demand human sacrifices all the same.
As for 'conspirituality,' I take this as the revenge upon the 'I'm spiritual but not religious' crowd. They are not alternatives, they require each other. Without form, structure, ritual, and practice in a social context, spirituality can be any jolly-robins people like. I want to see more discipline and self-control back, not this pick-and-mix nonsense on the part of people who think liberty is merely the ability to pronounce the word and do what the heck they like. Not in the religious handbook, where freedom is service and sacrifice to others; not in the science handbook, where freedom is the appreciation of necessity. God's plan of justice, nature's laws, take your pick - they may well be one and the same. Any boundless liberty is not liberty at all, it is a licence which can never be satisfied outside of the pram in which a baby thinks the world revolves around himself or herself.
Congratulations, 2021, just over a week old, and you are definitely up to the challenge of being even crazier than 2020.
In the opening of my original Dante book - and it is still there - I quoted an old Marillion song: "where are the prophets, where are the poets, where are the visionaries?" That line is from the song "Fugazi." "This world is totally Fugazi." It's a term which, politely, means messed up. I quote it as evidence that radicals seeking to change the world have a transcendent vision of a true order of the world. We have to affirm that transcendent standard. Too many people are drifting away from realities and disappearing down the rabbit hole.
It's the enablers, facilitators, apologists and downright supporters who interest me in all this. And the same goes for all the other crowd making a fetish of protest and law-breaking. Where are the people who are going to reconstitute public authority and reinvigorate the public imagination? 'They still don't know what's coming,' I hear someone say. I don't know if that is a warning or a threat.
When you look for clear statements of condemnation and find only apologetics, 'whataboutism,' and outright cheerleading and support. Of too many now it can be said, "I supported the bomb, the match, and the wick, but not the explosion." More worryingly, there are all too many who do support the explosion.
Medievalists spent a lot of necessary time this week pointing out the dangers of alt-right misappropriation of medieval symbols, fully on view during the Capitol siege.
The prevailing GOP argument seems to be “yes there was violence and now you must be lenient or we will get much more violent and that will be your fault”
We are entitled to hold those who lied for Trump in contempt and, importantly, to account. Because these people cannot be appeased, only checked.
Decent Republicans should:
1. Demand Trump resign.
2. Support impeachment and conviction.
3. Support Pence invoking the 25th amendment.
And Vice President Pence should announce that his first act as president will be to give several Capitol police officers the Medal of Freedom.
- Bill Kristol
And here is Officer Egene Goodman, the man whose saved the Senate.
The Pandemic President is arguably the most dangerous man in America; jealous, petty and greedy, an unforgiving narcissist, a vindictive ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic homophobic racist, a serial liar and sexual predator and proud of it; an Islamaphobic sociopathic, megalomaniac, demagogue; a capricious bully and self serving nepotistic con artist without a shred of conscience. I put it more eloquently here Pleonexia and Public Life (against the moneyed nihilism corrupting public life. I know there are people who think that I have been lenient on Trump and his supporters. I haven't. My view is that things are much worse than people who project all the ills of the age on Trump, as if the removal of Trump will bring a return to normality. That normality is fractured and was long before Trump showed up. He merely read the writing on the wall, the big capital letters that mainstream politicians and 'moderate' voters chose not to see, and misinterpreted them to narrow ends, intensifying division and feeding off hatred. He's not the only one who has been doing this. And I well understand the point about being cowed in an abusive, violent relationship, the show of violence as a warning and threat of more to come if you don't submit. That seems to be the message coming from certain voices on the right. My message is not to be cowed, but not to play at revolutionary politics. I've been engaged in politics since eighteen and the Miners' Strike. I admired Tony Benn, read his books, saw him speak. But I read widely. I read Michael Heseltine's autobiography, and took particular note of his comments on the revolutionary threats issued by Benn to excite his audiences. Did Benn think, Heseltine asked, that conservatives would retreat in face of such threats, and cower under the tables. No, they went back to the Shires and prepared to fight and fight hard to resist and to win. Benn was a great speaker but, in the end, what did he have behind him? Don't fight a war unless you are capable of winning it. And remember the three rules of politics 1) if you make an argument, someone will argue back; 2) the more vehement you are in making an argument, the more vehement will be the reaction; 3) there is no escaping the first two rules. And politics is the ground of adults, not children appealing to parents to do something for them.
I’ve been monitoring how many conservatives, who are big on defending the police against ‘progressive liberals’ and ‘left mobs.’ I wanted to see how many of them expressed remorse over the death of US Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick. Conservatives who do not support Trump did. Those who do support Trump didn’t, being more concerned to condemn the hypocrisy of the Left for condemning the US Capitol insurrection. I sharply criticised the protests, demonstrations, and public desecration of the summer, and at length. Is it too much to expect conservatives to do likewise with this assault on the centre of democratic governance? It seems so.