JMA-PSOS

Denis: He capitulated within an hour


Ionel: F*ck yeah! Another win for #1!!!! U S A, U S A!!!! To be fair, Mr Petro was probably reminded of the billion dollars in "aid" his country gets from US and that he is just as a small monkey sharing a cell block with THE 800-lb gorilla that doesn't ever use vaseline.


Denis: yes there probably was a reminder that all civilization is organized violence, and the US govt is the biggest source of such violence. The 800 lb gorilla wears a suit, but he is bursting at the seams more and more, showing the gorilla muscle underneath that was always there.
Perhaps even someone as far up as a Colombian president has been duped into actually believing neoliberal fairy tales of social contracts, human rights, United Nations, objective justice, and whatever other fairies and elves linger in the minds of the pearl-clutching upper crust. If so, that’s a shame for Colombia’s toiler class.

But the good news is that it can be a free lesson for other target countries (Panama, Denmark, Canada). Should any PM or dignitary think about dunking on the brute in some press release or a paid NYT editorial, they can see how fruitless it is. They might humble themselves before the powerlessness of their station, and choose to go along with their country’s subjugation. I’m sure it’s why Justin chose now to leave; he knew the next PM would be the one to usher in the formality of the situation Canada has always been in. The illusion of sovereignty has been at the pleasure of the 800 lb gorilla, and it seems the gorilla would like to dispense with that illusion.
A movie scene showing how light-hearted fanciful illusions of civility ultimately end in ape nature, red in tooth in claw:
https://youtu.be/WslVufiZbRQ?si=i2dJ1pCky98ZXy77



Ionel: At a higher/meta level, you're right about civilization being organized violence. On the "US govt" being the biggest source of such violence, I would downgrade that to "one of the biggest" to give credit where it's due (i.e. other autocracies or semi-democracies that also pushed their weight around under a thin veneer of self-ascribed righteousness for the past century of the Pax Americana).

My biggest quibble is not so much around the closing gap between US govt propaganda and realpolitik, but around the fragility of the much-vaunted US Constitution and the way in which it is being tested and (as some argue) slowly dismantled from within by a rapidly shifting balance of power in favor of the executive to the detriment of the other two branches. Mind you, this did not start under 45 (who only accelerated the imbalance), but it goes as far back as Honest Abe, FDR and LBJ who flexed just as much if not more than 47.
That (more than ever before) the current executive is just an avatar of all that is dark and crass about today's world, late capitalism, the military-industrial complex and/or the tech oligopoly and/or big (borderless and amoral) business/money, only further obscures the bleak reality and any sane vision to tackle the increasing chaos in the near future.

I get a feel that we're now reliving in a very palpable way the takeover of the Praetorian Guard, the puppet emperors they installed, and the crash brought about by the Justinian plague and the "barbarian" invasions of the late Roman Empire.

BTW, I liked the artistic feel of that clip you shared, even though IMO, it obscures too much any message it is actually trying to project through the multiple twisted mirrors it holds to our society, mirrors that keep bouncing around and distort any original signal/image.

On the theme of humanity and chaos, at an even more meta level, I wrote about it in a blog entry a few months ago (and amended it twice since): https://ionelv.dreamwidth.org/136126.html


Denis: the US Constitution is a social construct and myth. It is always true so long as we say it is true and actually believe it to be true, same as parallel universes and angels shuttered in Heaven. It has no tangible reality from its inception.

The first birth defect would be that the Constitution does not explicitly define who or how gets to determine what is Constitutuonal and what isn’t. The Supreme Court gave itself this power in Marbury v Madison as an act of realpolitik. This singular issue brings the same problem as Protestants who believe in Solo Scriptura even though it never says to do so in said Scriptura.

I would argue that the Constitution wasn’t meant to be actual legal framework to hold anyone accountable to anymore than the Declaration of Independence or the Federalist Papers. It’s prose. Again, it only became legal precedent and binding through the historic acts of Marbury v Madison. That was the self-creation of a minor deity and false god that lives in the hearts of many American.

Within its own little world of legalese, I would say it has been violated as early as John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Act. But the numb-skullery of the Constitution, in the Marbury v Madison world, is that Congress can create as many unconstitutional laws it wants, and executives can act as unconstitutional as it wants, up until it has been challenged and defeated in Supreme Court. This is first a reactive approach that allows the Devil to sin as much as he wants so long as he outpaces legal bureaucracy, which is very easy to do.

And of course there is the numb-skullery that the final decision is simply a majority vote of 9 judges. All the rich tapestry, lofty ideals, grand abstractions, comes down to a simply majority vote. AND!!! The same issue can be flip flopped from constitutional to unconstitutional or vice versa if you simply have a different set of 9 people. Whether slavery or abortion is constitutional depends on who is on the voting committee of 9. If you don’t like the decision, wait a decade for one of them to die, add a guy you like, then set up the same legal challenge again and hope for a different outcome. This does not sound like some objective truth of immutable reality. It sounds like political ratfucking with more steps.

The particular violations you reference (executive overreach, the caesarfication of the president vis-a-vis war making power, etc) are nothing compared to the inherent contradictions of this blind and deaf god called the constitution. While it still has its zealots among gray hairs, I am glad that the young dumb poors have dumbed their way into profound Truth: fuck the Consitution. It is a blind and deaf god that does not serve the living people today.

We are going through a time when the founding myths of the world order are no longer meaningful or relevant to the people. The constitution is just one diety among a pantheon of foundation myth deities which include: WW2 as existential good vs bad, individualism, rationalism, and the idea of economy itself. These gods have fewer believers than before. The constitution will not save us anymore than Gilgamesh will. “The old world is dying, the new world has yet to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

chaos is a human construct. It, like infinity or the concept of first mover/cause, is a limitation of rational thinking. Entropy is a way of heaping math on top of this gray matter short circuit, same as limits and infinitesimals, same as statistics. And even same as how “I don’t knows” of cosmology are given grand titles like “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Even bad baby behavior is promoted to the scientific title of “colic”. The quantification of the frontal lobe’s limitations are like those medals on North Korean generals. Pomp and grandeur that ultimately signify nothing.

Another faltering world-myth is the relevance of rational thought. Rational thought makes a great slave but a poor master. It can help us achieve the goals of instinctual drive, e.g. how do we trick mammoths into falling off cliffs so we can eat their flesh. But it is no substitute for instinctual drive. It cannot tell us what is fundamental morality and purpose anymore than it can answer what effect has no cause. Even the rational science of psychology will say that most of the time we are operating off lower instinct not rational higher thought.

And so it is no wonder that a world dominated by science wonder boys is so morally bankrupt and even self-contradictory to the point of madness. Rational thought is a good slave but a poor master.
And listening to rational thought isn’t any different than listening to blood instinct. Rational thought is the work of a particular kind of meat, while instinct comes from cruder and more evolutionarily “proven” meat. Either way we’re just doing what the meat tells us.


Ionel: 1. US Constitution: Your (whole) analysis is a very nihilistic and I sense a bit facetious too. Yes, the USC is a somewhat deified by many and the originalists are but stans for whatever they think it meant 200 years ago, and the Supremes often overstep and are all too human when they twist themselves and the USC into pretzels to push their personal agenda, but the non-constitutional or weak constitutional alternatives are even worse (e.g. a legal corpus and governing process that sways wildly with each legislature sitting as it does in Israel or a country fully at the executive’s whims as it does in Russia or China where their constitutions are closer to what you are describing).

Yes, the USC is one of the hardest if not the hardest constitution to change in the world. That I think is it’s biggest weakness, but the solution is definitely not to chuck it forever or ignore it.
That the young’ns don’t like it or don’t even know or acknowledge its purpose and power is more proof of the rising idiocracy than of USC’s supposed irrelevance.

2. SCOTUS: I agree that Marbury was a gross overreach that created a minor demiurgic deity and its aftershock is still felt today in the ethical morass in which it still wallows. I fully agree with Biden’s proposal to improve it. Baby steps: we must always learn to walk first before we run because every time humanity trying running first, it fell flat on its face again and again.

3. Chaos and entropy are human constructs: I fully disagree. I think your view of these two concepts is too rigid by getting stuck on the technical (and seemingly arbitrary) definitions instead of seeing what they represent: a way of categorizing order and disorder in the variety that they present themselves in our everyday and perpetual variety. We can quibble about how much order and disorder can be quantified, measured and systematized, but you can’t deny that they do exist from the smallest to the largest scales.

4. Rational thought vs instinct: RT is not irrelevant or a boil on a musquito’s ass, or simply inferior to instinct. If it were so, or if we were to mainly choose instinct over rationality, we would still be swinging from trees, bumping into walls inside dark caves, prostrating to the sun/moon or other random objects, or following like lemmings the siren song of larger brutes with bigger sticks. Oh wait…

And today’s moral bankruptcy is both a periodic theme of humanity and an overblown crisis fomented by self-appointed saviours that at best claim instinct yet failing to realize that this instinct is highly derived from steeping since birth in a marinade of morality derived from thousand-year old goat herders that wandered in the desert for generations, told tall tales, stoned people to death and murdered women and children to serve an imaginary idol artificially constructed and remolded repeatedly and highly ironically by a priestly self-serving class.