luka

Well-known member
Interesting to compare all that to how *wrong* Burroughs was about leaders of the future - he predicted "no more Stalins, no more Hitlers":



Whereas what we actually have is a breed of ultra-confident showmen and tricksters, resolutely ignoring the advice of experts, even openly scoring them, and pushing whatever buttons they damn well please while a rapturous crown whoops and cheers.

Those showmen are a reaction to the technocrats so saying he was wrong is wrong.
 

luka

Well-known member
Also I'm by no means sure I understand Trump as a phenomenon. In terms of what forces and interests really underlie his power. Thinking in terms of the puppets thread, I'd like to have a better grasp of exactly what machine he's fronting. In some respects it's an insurgent machine, for all that it smooths the path of traditional power elites like banking and oil.
 

luka

Well-known member
So the right's equivalent of Soros, the Kochs, opposed his rise for instance. The rise of Trump has been underthought. Everything I've read has been trite and hand waving.
 

Leo

Well-known member
there's a hardcore bass in this country who felt left behind: lost their factory jobs, not able to adapt to the information tech economy, increasingly surrounded by people from other lands who didn't look like them, speak like them, act like them, pray like them, etc. nostalgia for when things were "good". while they struggled, they felt Washington turned its back on them, bailing out banks instead of helping them. Washington establishment became the enemy, the swamp.

trump zeroed in on that sense of being aggrieved and, being the con man he is, exploited it: the ultimate outsider, the successful businessman who vowed to drain the swamp and build the wall to protect the base from those invaders from abroad. he was brash and loud, not some cultured snob who looked down on them.

to the base, trump largely does not represent the republicans, or the right, or conservative values. he represents their desire to blow up the Washington, to get back at the establishment, to stick their fingers in the eyes of the educated coastal elites.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The epochal struggle of our age isn't some great biblical clash of good and evil, or a traditional binary like the left and the right or Islam and the West, but between two rival gangs of bastards. One of which appears to be winning at the moment, because it has expertly portrayed itself as being on the side of "the people", while identifying its rivals as "the elite".
 

luka

Well-known member
Well yes, this is why I keep repeating he thing I read on a conspiracy website that this is a war in heaven. There is a very serious rift, or rifts within the power structure, a rift climate change will only exacerbate, and when the dust settles we're likely to be living in a very different world, for better or for worse.
 

luka

Well-known member
Well then I guess he was right for a time.

It's not an insight unique to Burroughs and neither am I so sure that era is definitively over. Gravitys Rainbow described the same situation and, inspired by Burroughs http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control
Even the teal school of business management we were talking about on the extinction rebellion thread yesterday works with the same framework. The green phase which precedes teal is essentially that of the system.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
there's a hardcore bass in this country who felt left behind: lost their factory jobs, not able to adapt to the information tech economy, increasingly surrounded by people from other lands who didn't look like them, speak like them, act like them, pray like them, etc. nostalgia for when things were "good". while they struggled, they felt Washington turned its back on them, bailing out banks instead of helping them. Washington establishment became the enemy, the swamp.

trump zeroed in on that sense of being aggrieved and, being the con man he is, exploited it: the ultimate outsider, the successful businessman who vowed to drain the swamp and build the wall to protect the base from those invaders from abroad. he was brash and loud, not some cultured snob who looked down on them.

to the base, trump largely does not represent the republicans, or the right, or conservative values. he represents their desire to blow up the Washington, to get back at the establishment, to stick their fingers in the eyes of the educated coastal elites.

 

Leo

Well-known member
Ah, the always positive thinking American, in contrast to the doom-sayer "old" european like me. Or something like this has been posted not long time ago.

ha! I'd like to think I'm relatively positive about most things, but our political situation here (and perhaps everywhere) seems broken to the extent that if it can ever be fixed, it will be very difficult and take a long time to do so. once people lose faith in the institutions (non-partisan career government employees, the courts), I think it becomes really difficult to restore it.

it'll certainly be worse in the short run.
 

luka

Well-known member
The central thrust of it, that a kind of turnkey totalitarianism has already been successfully instituted, is correct. The stuff about aliens I'm not decided about. Might not be true.
 
Top