"The Cruelty Is the Point": Trump And Many Of His Followers Delight In The Suffering Of Enemies
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-point-president-trump.html"Cruelty Is The Point": The Scam That Keeps Giving To The Rich - And Thieving From The Poor
https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/10/cruelty-is-point-scam-that-keeps-giving.html"The Deadly Oppression Of Black People: Best Pax Posts"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2018/05/christopher-columbus-was-pimp-and-sex.html
General George Washington Orders "Complete Destruction" Of Iroquois Settlements
Alan: It is widely supposed - across the political spectrum -that Conservatives are hard-nosed realists with abiding belief in the fallen nature of their fellows.
Therefore, according to The Received Wisdom, they are right to be suspicious, right to be cautious and ready to lash out in self-protection.
Therefore, according to The Received Wisdom, they are right to be suspicious, right to be cautious and ready to lash out in self-protection.
But "conservatives" make the fundamental (and highly paradoxical) mistake of signing off on economic inequality, the same inequality that degrades the lowest class into survival-violence and lunacy-violence.
And so the stacked economic deck which conservatives hope will persuade the ungodly rich to pay for their protection is, in fact, what causes their need for protection in the first place.
It has always been this way - vassals submitting to their Lords in exchange for the Lord's protection.
But now, for the first time, the uneducated are no longer confined to "the farm," "the fiefdom," "the estate," or "the manor."
Now the uneducated have "social media" with which to stoke-and-share their passion for falsehood, rumor and gossip.
In a word, "fake news" and "alternative truths."
What truths they did possess were accepted on authority.
They were never trained to conduct intellectually rigorous research under aegis of Reason.
The Scientific Method which tries to prove its own hypotheses false may as well belong to a parallel Universe.
What truths they did possess were accepted on authority.
They were never trained to conduct intellectually rigorous research under aegis of Reason.
The Scientific Method which tries to prove its own hypotheses false may as well belong to a parallel Universe.
Conservatives have no interest in truth unless it comes under the rubric of "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."
Truth strikes "true believers" as a form of weakness.
A right-wing friend whose chain emails I fact-checked for the better par to two decades finally confided "I like being partially right."
Carl Jung
Truth strikes "true believers" as a form of weakness.
A right-wing friend whose chain emails I fact-checked for the better par to two decades finally confided "I like being partially right."
Republican presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, the living American who has served longest as a White House senior staff adviser, observed: “The Republican philosophy might be summarized thus: To hell with principle; what matters is power, and that we have it, and that they do not.” “Where the Right Went Wrong"
"Where love rules, there is no will to power,
and where power predominates, love is lacking.
The one is the shadow of the other."
Carl Jung
And so, believing only in pragmatic power, the uneducated (for whom Trump professes his "love") take advantage at every turn - lying, cheating, making sure their Know-Nothing veils-of-illusion are so tightly woven as to be impermeable to the threats of Truth - the assaults of Truth.
Why does Truth bode threat and assault?
Because Truth spotlights a "Social Contract," "The Common Good," "The General Welfare."
Truth, like The Lord's Prayer prioritizes "the first person plural" - the collective.
"We, the people."
Truth, like The Lord's Prayer prioritizes "the first person plural" - the collective.
"We, the people."
Lamentably, "the rich" got that way by focusing the radical primacy of individual interest and, in pursuit of pragmatic, self-centered and self-protective objectives, they have always understand that Truth threatens their "moated castles" and "siloed ideologies."
The religion of The Ungodly Rich is self aggradizement; their pseudo-religious mind control is the infallible doctrine of Trickle Down; and their heart's desire, their heart's desire.
No one else's. (The others have been made into wage slaves because it costs The Rich less money - and less work - than actual slavery. Let the slaves take care of themselves!)
They are, emphatically, not their brother's keeper.
No one else's. (The others have been made into wage slaves because it costs The Rich less money - and less work - than actual slavery. Let the slaves take care of themselves!)
They are, emphatically, not their brother's keeper.
"The Hard, Central Truth Of Contemporary Conservatism"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspo
The American System is designed to be oppressive. - even deadly.
Its "handlers" prefer that "the undeserving poor" die unnecesarily painful deaths at an unnecessarily early age.
The American System is designed to be oppressive. - even deadly.
Its "handlers" prefer that "the undeserving poor" die unnecesarily painful deaths at an unnecessarily early age.
Its "handlers" prefer that "the undeserving poor" die unnecesarily painful deaths at an unnecessarily early age.
The Cruel Old Party: The GOP’s Passage Of Trumpcare Is Unprecedentedly Callous
Is Ortega y Gasset The World's Most Important Modern Philosopher? (Most Discerning Prophet?)
G. K. Chesterton: "The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies.
The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer.
But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
G. K. Chesterton: "The merely rich are not rich enough to rule the modern market. The things that change modern history, the big national and international loans, the big educational and philanthropic foundations, the purchase of numberless newspapers, the big prices paid for peerages, the big expenses often incurred in elections - these are getting too big for everybody except the misers; the men with the largest of earthly fortunes and the smallest of earthly aims.
There are two other odd and rather important things to be said about them. The first is this: that with this aristocracy we do not have the chance of a lucky variety in types which belongs to larger and looser aristocracies.
The moderately rich include all kinds of people even good people. Even priests are sometimes saints; and even soldiers are sometimes heroes. Some doctors have really grown wealthy by curing their patients and not by flattering them; some brewers have been known to sell beer.
But among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of G.K. Chesterton Posts
http://paxonbothhouses.
By Adam Serwer
October 3, 2018
The Atlantic
The Atlantic
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.
Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant childrenseparated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
ADAM SERWER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, covering politics.
"It's Time To Replace The Phrase "American Conservative" With "American Cruelist"
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