Not Strategy but Symptoms

 So, things are a mess. But here's an interesting take on Trump from Andrew Wortman: 

"Trump's 2 a.m. meltdowns and dictator cosplay aren't part of a predetermined strategy--they're collapse. A malignant narcissist, weak and unhealthy, colliding with the one thing he can't escape: DEATH. And his team knows it, which is why they're going full-fascist now. As a psychologist, I can tell you: when malignant narcissists lose control, they don't fade quietly. They escalate exponentially--rage, smear campaigns, humiliation, projection, even violence. Every move is about punishing those who expose their weakness to claw back control. This isn't 'toughness.' It's disintegration. In my field we call it narcissistic mortification: the sheer terror, shame, and dread of being forced to confront one's own fragility. To them, it feels like annihilation--as the false self they've lived behind for decades shatters. 

Mortification hits with both physical and psychological shock--chest pain, burning, panic, humiliation, obsessive thoughts. They feel exposed, worthless desperate. That desperation is what fuels the meltdowns you're watching play out in real time like an SNL skit or horror film. For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can't sue death. He can't cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It's inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he's powerless--and the panic shows in every crazed rant and wild attempt to project control. That's why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting into heaven, legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist's deepest wound--and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can't escape the end.

The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he's spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he's gone, he can't spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation--with no power to control the narrative--is devastating. When narcissists face both mortality AND exposure, collapse deepens. They don't reflect or accept responsibility. They deflect, rage, lie, smear, and escalate authoritarian grabs. Anything to keep the mask intact just a little bit longer--no matter who gets hurt in the process. 

So when you hear, 'Many people want a dictator,' understand: it's not strategy. It's the desperation of a cornered man. His inner circle knows his health is failing, which is why they're sprinting to consolidate power for Vance and others before Trump's decline makes it impossible. And this makes him even more dangerous. A collapsing narcissist doesn't calm down--they grow increasingly volatile, reckless, impulsive, and destructive. His unraveling is personal, but its consequenes--given then office he occupies--will not just be national, but global. History shows what happens when leaders in collapse drag nations into their death spirals. The personal breakdown of one man becomes political crisis for millions. That's exactly what we're seeing now. 

Trump's rants aren't strategy. They're symptoms. His unraveling isn't just about him--it's about the danger of what desperate men do when humiliated and terrified. As a psychologist, I see this clearly: Trump is unraveling. And he wants to take America (and the world) with him. Trump isn't 'playing 4D chess.' He isn't following a plan. He's mentally unraveling--and when men like him unravel, they burn everything around the down. That's the terrifying moment we're in. And it's everything those of us in mental health warned about for years." 

If it helps, Craig Calcaterra has a bit of a consolation for the doom: 

"I've said it before, but reading all the medieval history books I've been reading lately has been so comforting. Makes you realize that there have always been mad and incompetent kings and they almost always die in ignominy, and everyone piles shit on them for centuries after they're gone."

Okay, it's barely consolation, but I do find it helpful to know it's not the only time this has ever happened, it's just the only time anything like this has ever happened to us as it bubbles up to affect our own politics and policy. People have endured far worse, and we might actually get to the other side of it all relatively unscathed. Well, except that while Trump's pitching a fit, other baddies are doubling down on war big time, climate change isn't going anywhere, and the CDC is in shambles, all while vaccine uptake is tanking, and Covid is spiking.  

In Demetre Daskalakis' letter of resignation from the CDC, he wrote: 

"The recent term of reference for the Covid vaccine work group created by this ACIP puts people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader. Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults." 

And so it goes. 

Staying Informed and Sane

 Who I'm reading to get through this mess (among many others):

#1 - Timothy Snyder

Yesterday's piece, "The Logic of Destruction," should be read in full, but here are some important bits:

"The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide the with services are conspirators within a 'deep state.' We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes. All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. ... The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. ...They will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump's deliberately destructive tariffs, adn will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. ... The economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan's ark. ... 

Trump's tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump's attacks on America's closet friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible. ... [These oligarchs] are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted." 

So, yikes! It doesn't look good for us here no matter how you slice it. As long as Trump is in power, Canada is in danger. Snyder calls for Trump and Vance to be impeached, but so far I don't see many standing up to him beyond Sanders and AOC. That's not enough. Beyond that, he calls for government workers to keep working until officially fired to slow the process down. Muddle up the works as long as possible. 

#2 Heather Cox Richardson

Wading Through the Fetid Swamp

Charlie Angus is on a role. The NDP MP has a book excerpt in The Walrus explaining the rise of neoliberalism starting from Reaganomics.     

The rules of the neoliberal game advise to take advantage of or create a crisis in order to shrink governmental oversight, bust any strikes, lower marginal tax rates so the wealthiest pay very little, reduce or obliterate corporate regulation or allow dubious self-regulation, and privatize the shit out of public services. Naomi Klein did a great job explaining it all in The Shock Doctrine, which he mentions. 

Mr. Angus says, 

"The crisis of the 2020s is something different than a lingering cultural stasis. The reality is that the political, environmental, and economic forces unleashed in the 1980s have finally caught up to us. . . . Operation Break the Working Class has created a generation of billionaire oligarchs form the stolen wages of the American working class. . . . To find our way out of this mess, it is necessary to confront the false history of the 1980s. Historical amnesia is not accidental--it is a political construct. If you scratch the sheen of '80s nostalgia, the underlying socio-economic fractures are readily apparent. These contradictions in the popularized narrative constitute a dangerous memory."

No Going Back

Conflict, climate, and covid are showing us the worst of ourselves, but it might be what we need to find our collective humanity.

Tiberius wrote:

"The old world is no longer dying, it is dead. There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags. 

I know what the inside of skulls look like now. I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off. I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know. I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive. There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear. 

On the Fog of Covid

There's nothing normal about our lives right now. Simple precautions could change the rate of illness, disability, or death, but that would mean leaders opening themselves to lawsuits if they admit any error.

The term "fog of war" refers to how much is unknown and unknowable - the uncertainty of things - when planning or executing a battle. In war, predictable norms of behaviours are gone, and people have to walk into a situation without a clear sense of what might be about to unfold, and others have to make decisions to guide their choices on the ground. How do you make proper decisions when everything is topsy-turvy, and there's barely a modicum of possibility that the path you choose is the right one? 

We're living in a scenario of normlessness and absurdity no matter how much effort people put towards the big return to normal. It's chaos, not because we don't know how to stop this virus - we really do - but because officials won't make the hard choices because of uncertainty around the level of vitriol and riots and lawsuits that could be the result of implementing any precautions anywhere. The right path leads to health and safety for the many, but potential trouble for the few who are in charge. We are being led by some of the weakest leaders imaginable. (The darker conspiracy-level concern is it's all an intentional way to reduce the population in order to better cope with the famines we'll have in the throes of climate change.)

Culture of Uncare or Pandemic of Inhumanity

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe coined the term "culture of uncare" to explain intentional efforts to sever links from one another and from the environment.

She calls it "severing links," but the word that comes to mind is alienation. We've been alienated from our environment, from our work, from others, and from ourselves. The neoliberal capitalist system has been far too successful at breaking us away from our own sense of integrity, of wholeness, as it works to turns us into unquestioning cogs in the machine.

This manufactured uncaring, the loss of a capacity to care, is at the heart of why we can't actually do anything about climate change, or covid, or all the horrific conflicts going on right this minute. Marx predicted that capitalism would naturally, eventually, self-destruct as inequity got too extreme for people to accept. But that was before (just before) we understood that burning fossil fuels could have a profound effect on the stability of our ecosystems. Marx wrote about alienation in 1855, and John Tyndall started looking at how carbon dioxide concentrations change the climate in 1859. Now we're frozen in place, watching industry continue to expand while the world literally burns. We won't make it to the glorious end of capitalism. 

Supporting Atrocities

This is an excellent 7 minute video explaining WHY the U.S. and U.K. and other wealthy nations so strongly support Israel's current atrocities. No spoilers. Just watch it!  (h/t Adlie)

ETA: Yianis Varoufakis explains that, 

"apartheid, whether practiced in South Africa or Palestine or Israel, is always going to procure violence because it's a violent, misanthropic system. . . . The criminals are Europeans, us, every single member of our German society, our French society, our Greek society, United States society. We have participated in this crime against humanity over the decades by keeping our mouths shut. . . . Collectively we must take the first decisive steps towards peace, and that is the destruction of the state of apartheid, just like we did in South Africa."

It's Going to Get Worse Before it Gets Even More Worse

Times are dark. Try to find moments of calm and humour to get you through the day.

Covid is out of control. It's nothing new, but more and more are being affected in irreparable ways, taking out teachers and doctors and all sorts of necessary workers. It's harder to avoid when almost nobody else wears a mask. One-way masking only protects so far, and I know many people just getting their first infection now despite always wearing a mask. I've suggested to the region that we could use a post-Oktoberfest month of masking - just four weeks, and just in healthcare facilities, schools, stores, and public transportation to reduce case loads, since our entire city has been a full on superspreader event of frantic frivolity. But that's not going to happen despite the recent surge of hospitalizations. And people won't do it if other people won't do it in a downward spiral of disease. When I asked my class to mask, my dear, sweet professor put one on immediately, then realized nobody else was, and sheepishly took it off again. He wanted to do the right thing, but couldn't stand up for me alone. He wasn't quite that brave.

Kim Molloy's astute prediction: "The next phase of this pandemic is 'you should have known' from the systems and 'you should have warned me' from individuals." 

Teaching the Conflict

If I were explaining it all to a class of 15-18 year olds - and I would because they need to know, here's what I would say: my imperfect lesson with my own stance front and centre but wide open for debate and disagreement, and in a way that would just take up just one class because kids need help to understand the issues and a place to openly discuss it and ask questions, but without it overriding the curriculum significantly.

Remember being told "two wrongs don't make a right"? It was a probably a long time ago. I haven't heard the saying in eons. But I think we need to bring it back. Consider what you think. 

First, some backstory. This is the clearest brief video I could find, but be aware it's seven years old. 

Age of Absurdity

We're skipping gleefully into the most absurd period in history. 

The philosophical notion of the absurd came from Camus. It grew legs with existentialists after WWII when the youngest and fittest men were sent to be slaughtered in war. The streets of Paris were full of widows and grieving mothers and broken men. The question of the day was, How can we make sense of our lives and our place here and our idea of justice with all this going on?  

I wrote more about it at length as I struggled with decisions foisted on me during my cancer years that left me with chronic issues. The answer from Camus is to stop trying to make sense of it all. Embrace the absurdity of our lives. We always have the option of leaving it behind, so if we choose to stay - famously if we choose coffee over suicide, then we have to acknowledge the world despite the weight of our knowledge pushing us to escape it through self-deception and cultural deception. All our choices are always a crap shoot, and at the same time, they're always our responsibility even though we can't possibly know how things will turn out, which, at the same time, takes the weight of that decision being the best choice off our shoulders. Outcomes are all out of our control, but we must try to do right anyway. We're taking a test without every having taken the course.

Stop the Lucrative Cruelty in Yemen

There was an online rally with some impressive speeches about the war on Yemen today, what Yanis Varoufakis referred as a form of "lucrative cruelty." Here's the full video, and below are some of the words I found most impactful.

Biden was front and center when the US got involved in 2015 as the US war machine aided a unilateral attack on Yemen led by Saudi Arabia and UAE with American military support. Trump made it all much worse, but Biden is back with promises to stop it. (A good run-down of the beginning is here by Al-Adeimi.) "Biden needs to stop the logistical, intelligence, and military support to Saudis and lift the blockade so food and medical services can enter Yemen" (Ro Khanna). 

A third of bombing missions strike hit non-military targets, and 9.5 million children have no access to water, food, or basic sanitation (Finucane).

Ahmed Al-Babati, a soldier who was arrested for protesting the war, said we "must sacrifice our comfort for others' survival."

Cornel West gave an impassioned speech linking the police murders in the US with Wall Street crime and the Pentagon militarism. "It doesn't matter the color or gender of the President or Vice President. The poor, the workers, the hungry, must be the center of their focus."

Esa Mighty followed that with some spoken word that is worth hearing at 27 minutes in. 

Daniele Obono: "It's complicated, but not inevitable. These are the fruits of political choices. Don't complicate what is simple. 250,000 are dead. 80% are living in poverty. Two-thirds depend on aid."

Shireen Al-Adeimi: "In Canada, we need to stop arms manufacturing in London, Ontario [GM Defense]. In the U.S., Biden must lift the blockades. Every ten minutes a child under five is starved to death."

Jeremy Corbyn ended it: "$90 billion of arms have been sold to Saudi Arabia, and even more to neighbouring countries. We must act to stop the supply. In the U.S. Senate, Sanders helped passed the War Powers Resolution. In Britain, the government refused to act, but a lawsuit suspended sales temporarily. But the War Powers Act is not enough. It means that parliament can decide IF we go to war. Profits are being made from the killing of children. . . . We need a global movement with the confidence of a vision of a world without conflict. The U.S. can afford anything except levels of inequality that exist. . . . No child's life should be ended by bombs raining down on them from worldwide companies."

War is a Terrible Back-Up Plan

Noam Chomsky is certain that the only two things we should be worried about right now are climate change and nuclear war. Adam Ellick and Jonah Kessel's article in the NYTimes from last month, "From North Korea with Dread," is terrifying. Some think it's not something to fear because of course the U.S. will win against them, but, living less than 500 km from Washington DC as the crow flies, we would definitely be affected by just one lone strike on American soil. The claim that North Korea wouldn't be dumb enough to strike at all against a country so much more powerful is somewhat eradicated by the video at the link.

The citizens interviewed, albeit largely prompted by the interpreter and some unnamed guy in the background, seem to view themselves as ants in a colony, willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group. One young woman explains that "we all die eventually." Some of the people interviewed looked terrified and refused to speak, and it's hard to say if they were more afraid of the American reporters or of being caught speaking freely or of the prospect of impending doom. So who's to say what they really think. They repeated many times that the entire country has signed up for military duty, willing to fight on the front lines, but it's not clear to me how much that matters now that we have nuclear warhead and drones. And citizen support of war isn't necessary under a dictatorship except in an attempt to appear benevolent. But they want to be sure we know they're all in.

The video is frustrating in its lack of clarity, which might have been improved with a reporter familiar with the language at least enough to ask questions without prompts required. But maybe that's against the rules anyway.

Jeffrey Lewis, in Foreign Policy, backs up some of these concerns,

"We're like hack screenwriters who have written ourselves into a corner. We don't know how to write the happy ending, so we're looking for a deus ex machina to appear and solve it for us. At the moment, that's China. But that's not a very plausible ending, not even for a fairy tale. And so the war talk goes on."

North Korea did many terrible things to the U.S. before it had nuclear weapons, so it's not inconceivable it won't act now if we can't get Trump to settle down. Yikes.

ETA this interview with a South Korean general discussing what war would be like with North Korea:

“I try to explain to the Americans — if we have to go into North Korea, it is not going to be like going into Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s not going to be like toppling [ex-Iraqi President Saddam] Hussein. This would be more like trying to get rid of Allah....I have had the opportunity to speak to North Korean soldiers who have defected to South Korea — and you cannot imagine how indoctrinated they are. These are people who have defected, and yet there is still an innate belief in their system which is close to ridiculous....North Korean pilots would likely use their planes in kamikaze-style attacks, since the aircraft are too old to reliably fly well over long periods of time. That matters since the North Korean air force has around 1,000 planes. Plus, North Koreans receive 100 hours of training on how shoot a weapon a year starting at the age of 14, underscoring how militarized the society is.”

So, there's that.

On Freud and Einstein's Correspondence

Lately people have been talking more of the rise and fall of Freud's psychotherapy and his philosophies. Some write him off completely because many of his psychoanalytical claims have been discounted through a more rigorous scientific method than Freud employed, but it's not good philosophy to discount an entire person for some incorrect claims. If we did that, we'd lose many of the old guys to misogyny or worse. We have to consider the merits of each idea. It doesn't matter if Freud is a genius or a hack; it matters if there's a seed of an interesting concept in anything he wrote. Others claim that he shouldn't be considered because he wasn't the first to write about many of the ideas he discusses, but if that's our criterion for our reading list, shouldn't we toss all those "footnotes to Plato"?