Continuendo...The Power of Sheer Stupidity

 

Around about 1850, John Stuart Mill, regarded by many to be the smartest person ever, who spoke English as a "native tongue," told friends: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives...

Amplifying the nostrum, Mill continued: "Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . .

"There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power."

Pffffft! The Theory of The Social Atomizer

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY EIGHT

ONE HUNDRED SIXTY EIGHT

That's the number of hours in a week. That's the number of hours every media "channel" or source has to fill, 52 times a year. Do the arithmetic: 8700+ hrs per year. Times the apparently COUNTLESS "channels" available--certainly in their tens of thousands, and you have The Programmer's Dilemma.

And NO DEAD AIR! There's gotta be something "on" them at all times. The Eyes have it.

So we see why anything anybody offers to fill that ravening maw of time, for public consumption, is swiftly and uncritically snatched up, circulated, and promulgated, no matter its veracity, or credibility, or verifiability.

We maqy therefore also see why it has become increasingly difficult to rebut and refute unfounded or spurious allegations, when they proliferate and are promoted as valuablecommodities.

And we may also see why "mediated reality" is the only "reality" we know, anymore, and it is fractured into a billion pieces, each carefully directed at what the particular "being" your traceable behavior indicates you to be will believe.

I call it "The Theory of Social Atomization," which describes social manipulation at levels we are customarily NOT comfortable talking about. To understand it requires abandoning the ("learned") skepticism of subliminal suggestibility--the "I Can't Be Hypnotized" syndrome.

For more than 100 years, the "best & brrightest minds in in individual and group psychology have been employed at what J. Ellul (1964), the French sociologist, called "the Formation of Men's Attitudes."

My patience with such arcana wanes with the advancing dark. I wanna come back to this later. My nightly dram of swingle malt Scotch beckons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_Men%27s_Attitudes

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Why DO the Dems "Play Fair?"

 

One frequently hears complaints that the Dems are gormless because they don't abuse "the rules," and play 'dirty' the way the GOPhukkkerz do.

It's true. The Dems do "play by the rules.

That's because the Dems don't HAVE "power." So they HAVE to play by the rules.

There are two factors:

1) they don't have the votes in Congress (or caucus discipline), and

2) as the Party of the 2nd (and Lower-class) Citizens, they don't have the cachet, status or standing to assail the big money, even IF they had the desire.

Democrats aren't so much a "party" as they are a portmanteau of occasionally hostile, constantly competing, minority interests scrabbling for the scraps the GOP deign to distribute.

Democrats require BIG majorities to initiate or instigate big changes. That majority hasn't been available since Raygoon and the GOPhux split the FDR coalition on Race and Civil Rights.

The GOPhux need only one vote to alter the structure of the whole country.

The GOPhux have a Party mantra from which they seldom deviate: Fuck the poor. The Dems' factions don't have enough in common to agree on a single (albeit sotto voce) unifying principle that the troops can rally around.

"Social justice!" is great but it doesn't have the "popular" resonance of "fuck the poor."

MY Post-Halloween Catholic Costume

 

Holy Day of Obligation?

Early November is a busy time for RC hagiography. Today, Nov. 1, in the Roman Catholic ecclesiatical calendar, is "All Saints' Day," the antithesis of "Hallowe'en" when the unquiet dead are said to move about. "All Saints' Day" celebrates the quiescent, honored departed, who gained Heaven on the first try.. There are literally uncounted/ uncountable THOUSANDS of them, many martyred, who come in for hagiographic attention. The next day on All Souls' Day (Nov. 2) all the departed are remembered.

Nov. 1's also the anniversary of the first time, of many, I was ever sent home from school.

In Cleveland, OH, in the suburbs of which I grew up in the 50s, children in Roman Catholic schools were encouraged to attend school on Nov. 1 costumed as either their favorite, or their namesake, "Saint." In my case, there are LOTS of "Saints John:" Chrysostom; Damascrne, Revelator, the Baptist, etc. There are literally dozens of 'em. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John)

But my father decided my "patron Saint" would be "John, the Baptist," who was martyred by being decapitated at the whim of the Babylonian whore, Salome.

So, that year (3rd Grade), my father--who had a mordant sense of humor to go along with an agnostic sensibility--decided to send me to school as St. John, the Baptist's HEAD.

He got a large, aluminum, baking dish, cut out a hole in it for my head, slipped it around my neck (after dulling the edge), wrapped the rest of me in a "blood-stained" sheet, and off I went.

And back I came.

With a harsh note from the parish priest about blasphemy.