18 school shootings in 45 days. The United States ought to mourn for years.
Maybe this is the reality: Republicans and pseudo-liberal capitalists have decided that it's every man for himself. It's too late to save the world, the planet, the refugees, the public schools, and our children.
So they might as well just get theirs now, and do it smart and shrewdly: hegemony, deception, duplicity, manipulation, inflated capital, expansion of power creating legal entitlements, gross consumption, imitation, cults of celebrity, substitution of the trivial for content. Let the weak fall where they may. Nothing can be done about them, anyway.
Stay ready to change course instantly when the winds change. Survive and thrive and the let the rest be lost. The elite will adopt tribal isolationist positions and values.
[from Eudaimonia, an online journal, article
by Umair Haque
...we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.
...a predatory society: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes,
Why are we experiencing societal decline?
We are corrupted by consumer/capitalist entitlement, extremist libertarian-socialism, and weakened by familial, cultural and social deterioration of ethical values
...They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.
...We must be, then, operating under a perpetual and dangerous assumption: that the worst that can happen isn’t very bad.The worst, we imagine, still lies within the bounds of sanity, reason, and normalcy: kleptocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, populism, a difficult period of turmoil, sure enough — but a passing thing, that will soon enough be fixed and patched up
...The strongman can only become the strongest one if he is the exception to all of society’s norms, values, and rules. And in a society with a broken social contract, what are those worth, anyway? [why Trump prevails: it's over and we decent naive clods don't get it]
... Transgression becomes instititutionalized into subjugation
- school shootings, opioid epidemic, homelessness, old-age poverty, capitalistic predation, meta-junkie consumption, techno-predation, necro-patriarchial-social institutional expansion, nuclear war, environmental devastation
3-23-18 From the NYT, David Brooks' column,
"Speaking as a White Male"
But the notion that group membership determines opinion undermines all that. If it’s just group against group, deliberation is a sham, beliefs are just masks groups use to preserve power structures, and democracy is a fraud. The epistemological foundation of our system is in surprisingly radical flux.
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