News of The World: 19 October 2024
What a crazy fucking week! On Monday, we were treated to Donald Trump’s dance party, a 39-minute mug-n-sway session to popular dance hits like Ave Maria, Hallelujah, and Memories from the musical Cats. Sure, DJ DT “spun” the Village People’s YMCA, which should be enough for us to assign the former president to the drool ward. Between the mug-n-sway and the daily word mulch that spills from his mouth, it is pretty obvious that Donald J. Trump is little more than a Trojan horse for J.D. Vance and someone very, very special – Donald Trump, Jr.
According to The Guardian, Trump, Jr. and Vance are tight bros. When Trump’s list of possible vice president candidates was being drafted, Junior put his buddy Vance at the top of the list and lobbied hard. Junior has pull. Not only is he Trump’s son, Junior is the guy overseeing hiring for a second Trump term. And, according to The Guardian, Trump, Jr. is Vance’s number one pick for VP if a President Trump can’t finish his second term, something which is pretty much a lock given Trump being one stage away from drooler.
I figured Vance as Trojan horse all along. Those inside the campaign and especially the Trump family knew long ago that Trump was crumbling. They saw his hands shake as he held the proverbial car keys way before Trump started babbling about driving to Springfield to save the cats and dogs. They and the party, stocked with MAGAs, have known for months that the man was mentally unfit for office. Same with the moneymen, who had their one-on-ones with him before they started shelling out cash for his campaign and allied PACs.
Figuring Trump would go bonkers or die before he finished a second term, they found someone who is young and inexperienced enough to control, someone with deep ties to wealth, particularly Silicon Valley wealth and it’s far-right power players, a gang that has been very upfront about their loathing of democracy and desire to be the plutocratic ruling elite. So, the Peter Theil production known as J.D. Vance makes a lot of sense. And so does Don, Jr., a person that those in the MAGA orbit see as acceptable to the moron masses.
The Vance/Trump, Jr. combo is much more frightening than Donald Trump. Trump is dangerous – no debate there – but he is also petty. His vision for America is his vision for Donald Trump and his appetites. That’s why he gets caught up in scams. The USA is not a tool for him to use, but something to plunder. Thus, he shills Trump coins and Trump sneakers and Trump bibles. That’s why he blatantly broke the law by overcharging the US government 300% to house his Secret Service detail at his hotels and resorts. If power, true power, is your goal, you don’t shill shit or swindle nickels and dimes.
Vance, Trump, Jr., Thiel, and the rest are thinking much deeper and further than Donald Trump. They want it all, not just in the near term, but for decades to come. They are all young, in their 40s and 50s. They see themselves in charge for another 50 years, at least, if not for a millennium. They are not shy about this. They talk empire and are very clear what their role in their empire is. They are also clear about what our role will be. You don’t need to read The Republic or a dystopian novel to figure it out. They will tell you.
As bonkers as the United States is: The Philippines. Sara Duarte is the Vice President of the Philippines. She is also the daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, who “is facing an investigation by the international criminal court (ICC) for crimes against humanity over his bloody ‘war on drugs’”. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. is the President of the Philippines. He is the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
The younger Duarte is so pissed off at the younger Marcos, that she left his cabinet and is now waging a verbal war against her former partner. She – no woman of the people - claims that Marcos, Jr. – no man of the people – has betrayed the people. She doesn’t care about the people. She is angry that Marcos, Jr. isn’t defending her dad against the ICC’s charges. In language she learned from her father, Sara Duarte has threatened to cut Marcos, Jr.’s head off, and to dig up his dead father and throw his corpse into the sea. If she makes it to the top slot, she’s pledged to jail Marcos, Jr. and his family, restart the “war on drugs,” and punish all those who oppose her and her family.
It does get worse.
Worse in the United States would be a tech plutocracy, a smoothly run regime without the outer chaos of anything “led” by Donald Trump. Worse is American (and the world’s) citizens used as the tech plutocrats’ guinea pigs. Let me give you a seemingly trivial example:
Elon Musk has long claimed that his Tesla cars are “full self driving,” though what “full self driving” (FSD) means to Musk changes every time he is challenged. To start, Musk advertised that FSD was pretty much the same as full self driving, i.e. a setting that made his vehicles “autonomous.” This was and has never been the case with Tesla’s FSD. At best, FSD is standard “auto-pilot” with a few advances and, as anyone who has used auto-pilot knows, auto-pilot is not self-driving.
So, when challenged, Musk cops to FSD being fancy auto-pilot, sort of. Typical of Musk, he dances, poorly, around his claims. Distancing himself from meaning, while not betraying his marketing message. And he has good reason for doing this. If he cops to FSD being a marketing scam, he opens himself up to lawsuits and investigations, which threatens his leadership of Tesla and the company’s value. He admits that he’s been selling snake oil and he pretty much kill his company. So, Musk dances, poorly.
The lies and dances should not obscure the worst of the FSD fiasco: Elon Musk put powerful technology out in the world without sufficient testing, while telling people that it was many things it was not (safe, easy to use, full self driving). He not only uses his customers as guinea pigs, but makes anyone who use roads (and even sidewalks) as test subjects, something none of us signed up for.
Musk and his cohorts call this “libertarianism” and “freedom,” as if they have absolutely no obligation to do anything other than what they desire for whatever reasons that they want to. They subscribe to something that the philosopher Max Stirner called the “conspiracy of equals,” a state of being where the strongest survive not just by burying and controlling the less powerful, but where the threat of “mutually assured destruction” keep the powerful in check. There’s no need for laws or regulations, Stirner says, when other powerful people are ready to kill you the minute you challenge them.
Combine Stirner with Machiavelli, Kissinger and a misreading of Sun Tzu, and you wind up with the Silicon Valley best seller 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, author of The Art of Seduction. Also popular among hip-hop artists, 48 Laws… teaches that power is achieved by lying, manipulation, using disinformation, and general shittiness. It is completely amoral, dividing the world into three camps: Dominators, dominators-in-waiting, and the dominated. And it has sold tens of millions of copies.
Greene’s philosophy gives pseudo-intellectual heft to practices like Zuckerberg’s “move fast, break things” and the Silicon Valley favorite "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission,” which should read “It’s easier to say ‘Fuck them’ and count your money than it is to get permission.” This is what gets us Musk’s FSD, Musk using other people’s land for Space X without their permission, social media with no controls to protect kids from victimization, unregulated Uber and AirBNB, etc. It gets us this “digital experiment” where powerful technology has been unleashed on us before we had any chance to prepare for it, learn about it, get training to use it, create ways to process all the information that gets thrown at us, and so on. The tech barons gave babies machine guns and left us to play…while they watch and take notes.
Dark? Yup, but take this Stirner-esqe, Greene-inspired ethos and back it with authoritarian power and dark is an understatement.
So what else can I tell you to bum you out? Oh oh there’s a big drought in South America and the Amazon is drying up. That’s fun. Cuba has no power, literally. Good times. The Middle East is as violent and chaotic as it’s been in my life time. Simply paradise. There’s a lot of bad shit going down in the world, but isn’t that human history?
Because I occasionally go into coach mode, it might surprise some of you that I am a lifelong pessimist. That doesn’t mean that I am not hopeful that we can organize to change things for the better. I know that we have the ability to change things, as I’ve seen it happen. I’ve spent my life working for change. I read about political change, everything from revolutions to organizing to get a new stop sign and crosswalk. I know that when people organize and fight, they can succeed. I also know that there’s much, inside and outside of us, that keep us from acting. The failure is not that we can’t act, it is that we often don’t act, by choice. That difference between can’t and don’t (or won’t) is why I am a pessimist, not a defeatist or a cynic.
My pessimism is what keeps me level. It is what grounds me enough so that I know that I can act, not just in grand gestures, but modestly to make real substantial change, change that seems little but is really quite impactful, such as getting a stop sign on a dangerous intersection, with crosswalk to make it safer for people to walk to the store or kids to ride their bikes to the park. That kind of change not only makes people’s daily lives better, but it tells us that change can happen. And it can be built on.
I temper my love of Emil Cioran, philosophical pessimism second funniest guy, with the experience of Jane Jacobs, the New York City activist who successfully battled Robert Moses, one of the most powerful men in New York’s history. Jacobs started small, dove into research, armed herself with facts, relentlessly organized, and stopped some of Moses’s worst plans for the city. In the pessimistic world of New York City politics, she “put her head down” and did the hard work of organizing people and creating change. She and many others prove that darkness does not mean the absence of light.