Posted by: AGelbert
« on: November 07, 2024, 02:05:47 pm »👉 Emojies by AGelbert. 👈
Nov 06, 2024 By 🕯️🗽🕊️ Chris Hedges
SNIPPETS:
Donald
Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative -- destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare. 😞
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness. ... ...
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them. ... ...
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.
Full article:
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cultural-despair
Reality based Comment (one of several):
Schrodinger’s Cat Nov 6
I may be naive, but I doubt mass movements and strikes will matter. The two brands of the corporate UniParty corrupt government will simply bail out the corporate oligarchs directly, just like they did in 2008. The citizens are nothing more than items to be fleeced by them now and they will be treated like the Palestinians once they have nothing left to steal from. The USA is a criminal enterprise run by a handful of robber barons.
Nov 06, 2024 By 🕯️🗽🕊️ Chris Hedges
The Politics of Cultural Despair
The Mourning After - by Mr. Fish
SNIPPETS:
Donald
Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative -- destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next. Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumpeted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base - 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare. 😞
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness. ... ...
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them. ... ...
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.
Full article:
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-cultural-despair
Reality based Comment (one of several):
Schrodinger’s Cat Nov 6
I may be naive, but I doubt mass movements and strikes will matter. The two brands of the corporate UniParty corrupt government will simply bail out the corporate oligarchs directly, just like they did in 2008. The citizens are nothing more than items to be fleeced by them now and they will be treated like the Palestinians once they have nothing left to steal from. The USA is a criminal enterprise run by a handful of robber barons.
I learned a new phrase today. It applies, not only to those mentioned in the article, 
"helping society" by trying to ban books that offend them), but to 
world
sales and profit margins. 
Government institutions placed ideology above
INTEL Roundtable w/ 🕯️🗽 Johnson & 🕯️🗽 McGovern: Weekly Intel Wrap
Anti-Empire Project
SCOTT RITTER
.
addresses the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 17, 1961
rejecting it. 
rise to the occasion and seek to purify ourselves by embracing fact-based knowledge and, thus empowered, engage in the kind of public scrutiny that free speech and a free press enables, we will have a chance to make the kind of changes needed for our survival.
censor them. 
ruling class who hold prestigious positions at cultural & educational institutions despite 
Arrest
Israel 
😵☠️🥵😱 
