The Trump Derangement Syndrome: real or unreal?

[jupiviv]

Way too generic

Blasphemer! But seriously, if you compare our opinions about Trump expressed here over the past few months, it's pretty clear whose remains largely unchanged.

The first one was kind of generic but the second was spot on. In fact, even I'm amazed at how accurately it predicts the Golden Golem's recent change of policy. The "good baddie" archetype of post-modern drama requires a cue for action, and it always turns out to be the perpetration of one of those universal evils. You know, the kind of thing that is just too evil to be assigned some "human" motive so it can seem gray/amoral/ends justifying means. The good baddie can shrug at the massacre of thousands of men by the (bad) baddies, then a woman gets raped and our hero decides to take them down.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

For me the main attraction of a president like Trump still stands and is being confirmed as well: as facilitator of change, not the changes he promised but the changes he might bring unwittingly: highlighting the fundamental contradictions of Washington and to some degree: the entire ideological establishment powering the "West" right now.

Some find that development "too dangerous" as if keeping alive all the contradicting, delusional policies is somehow acceptable and safe to keep hanging on to. The latest Trump moves are fundamentally contradicting, divisive and nonsensical. But exactly as being a continuation of established suicidal policy. It also shows how the seats of power work, disconnected from any "platform" one happened to have run on before. Any vocal disappointment is part of the waking up. Something has gotta give.

There's no other way forward. Something like Trump would have happened sooner or later as the system collapses slowly under its own contradictions. The dangers are more than ever exposed and not caused by electing this or that clown.

It's also interesting to see how anti-interventionists are right depicted in many main stream publications as being fundamentally racist, antisemitic , sexist and misogynist (perhaps even baby killers if they could say it). This is why I believe Solway's activism surrounding Gamer Gate is a way larger issue than just being some "nerd dispute". It's a miniature version of the larger insanity and it takes deep, dispassionate insight to see this linkage. And here I do see a link with Jupiviv's descriptions of the drama game, one which all leaders will get sucked into, being a primal seduction. It works similar at all levels; as above, as below. The "establishment" is after all ruled by emotional games, which can translate in symbolic transactions of money or status, but sometimes just only the emotion in direct exchange: buttons for others to push against a price, like at some local fair.

[Dan Rowden]

Love or hate, or anything in between, Keith, it's hard to fault this anlaysis (for me, anyway). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGFel-fhGkw

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Love or hate, or anything in between, Keith, it's hard to fault this analysis (for me, anyway). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGFel-fhGkw

Although I generally like Keith, or at least his spirit, I miss in his rant the role of the military advisers. There's a lot of evidence Trump leans heavily on the consensus of the US military command. The "stunt" might be then from the military perspective much more analogue to a "warning shot across the bow". It's not unusual in warfare: you show you're willing to actually pull the trigger but also indicate you don't want to necessarily escalate. To leave this well known element out of the equation, Keith's diatribe does fall a bit flat especially since he seems to think the Russian hacking mania is somehow more relevant news. The US shooting at the military of a state actor beyond the usual declaration of war is of course bigger news. Or at least it's a unilateral declaration that the Syrian government has lost its legitimacy as state actor.

It's unclear to me how all of this will change Russia's mind. For all we know they might have planted the chemical attack to cause more chaos in the Trump administration. It's clear that a conflicted, divided Western world and media is in their interest so I'm not putting it beyond the Russian intelligence to use or even cause as event like this. However it's all a bit low on facts and high on posturing, including nearly all media responses, including this video. The new world media order I suppose.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

It's official, after following the Trump related news in the whole spectrum of US and UK-Dutch media for a few months now, I fully endorse Kevin Solway's assessment to regard 95% of "what is published in the mainstream media about political and social issues to be fake news" or simply unreliable at the very core of it. Of course I cannot examine all topics so I deduce from all the reporting on Trump (and a few other international topics) as being indicative enough of how all other topics of any political or social relevance are being approached.

And then it has come to this: finding myself in full agreement with an article on wacko Breitbart: Comeygate Latest Fake News Hysteria for Trump/Russia Conspiracists by Charles Hurt.

So I'm going to answer the question I asked at the start of this thread: the syndrome is indeed irrational, perhaps collective irrationality itself or a vivid manifestation of it. We're actually dealing with a growing rift in society trying to defend that black is white and up is down. And all it needed was a notorious showboat to widen the cracks and energize the system, to overload it as to show its irrationality to the degree that it can only end one way: with a loud snap! But to be clear: the overload is happening especially at all currently irrelevant places: old school media, progressive politics, the SJW types and so on. Its collapse will probably be hardly noticed but as some analysis in hindsight when reality already moved on. That's the optimist scenario.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Okay Breitbart was perhaps a bit too much, even for me so lets take another, more left leaning Vox article, outlining the Derangement Syndrome or "Russiasphere" in another way.

Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia - Why liberal conspiracy theories are flourishing in the age of Trump.

[Dan Rowden]

Probably the most meaningful paragraph in that article:

There are, of course, legitimate issues relating to Trump’s ties to Russia — I’ve written about them personally over and over again. There are even legitimate reasons to believe that Trump’s campaign worked with Russian hackers to undermine Hillary Clinton. That may or may not turn out to be true, but it is least plausible and somewhat supported by the available evidence.

[Dan Rowden]

Wow, Greg Gianforte, a Trump backing and Trump backed journalist assaulting GOP House candidate for Montana is a piece of work.

The concept of retirement isn't Biblical and Noah built the Ark when he was 600 so we don't need and ought not fund retirement.

This is the current GOP. This is the current White House. Millionaire Xian Theocrats. Yay.

[Dan Rowden]

Politics is so much fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9nL6AeRraI

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Great video making the Russian aspect of the derangement syndrome more understandable: The Establishment's Russia Fixation Takes A Dark Turn: An Interview With h NYU & Princeton Professor, Stephen F. Cohen

One article from National Review (sorry but with NYT etc being as unreliable as Prof Cohen points out in detail, where to go): The Antithesis of Obstruction

• The Left loves narrative. The ever-expanding story manipulates time, space, and detail to fit a thematic framework. Political narrative has some surface appeal, but it is deeply flawed. It obscures plain and simple truth.

Great ambition, getting to: "simple" truths. Then again, I'm all for balance:

Why CIA Vets Say Putin Hates America—And Why President Trump Can’t Trust Him (Daily Beast).

That last article is interesting but might miss the point in one staggering sense: the whole misunderstanding of America=World=Progress. From Russian and also Trumpian perspective, being interested in ones own concerns is always leading. And also unavoidable. In other words: many foreigners and "new right" movements would describe American foreign policy dogma, including of course most of the intelligence community as fundamentally insincere: lead by a certain kind of ideology of some global concern. The core of the discussion ends up being: aren't people pretending to have global concerns while under the hood it's still only advancing only own interests: the "disease of conceit" (yes like that old Bob Dylan song).

On the whole topic I'm still somewhat divided. Is it really impossible to have concerns over the globe in terms of peace, climate, freedom and equality without being driven by smaller concerns only valid for your own particular circumstance? Is the power of self-deceit really that big? Or is about the megalomaniac ambitions of the self? As a thinker, it's easier to ask questions than to definitely answer them. But lets say there are just too many things pointing to a developing delusion having more and more of the modern world in its grip. But while a conservative outlook (or even any Russian one) might be more realistic, my question is more if it's viable as policy. And I really doubt that, even more so than I doubt the delusion of having universal, global concerns.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Another take on the issue I find overall fair and just, by Craig Murray: The Stink Without a Secret

• I do not support Donald Trump. I do support truth. There is much about Trump that I dislike intensely. Neither do I support the neo-liberal political establishment in the USA. The latter’s control of the mainstream media, and cunning manipulation of identity politics, seeks to portray the neo-liberal establishment as the heroes of decent values against Trump. Sadly, the idea that the neo-liberal establishment embodies decent values is completely untrue.
  
  Truth disappeared so long ago in this witch-hunt that it is no longer even possible to define what the accusation is.

Which brings me to my own analysis, in short: Trump could rise only in a place where truth already disappeared and appearances rule in its totality. Any rejection of the event is the rejection of and a mourning about what already happened and less so of what is happening or could happen.

Ironically also the post-truth era has been blamed on the Russians for example by UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon

• "Today, we see a country that in weaponising misinformation has created what we might now see as the post-truth age."

An amazing feat! Actually grasping the deeper issue and still manage to find a scape goat for it instead of doing further introspection on the mechanics of such age and its causes, its opportunities and its curse.

[Eric Schiedler]

Diebert, we can only be in a post-truth era if we were ever before in a truth era, which I would dispute.

So the quote is ironic, but not because a deep truth is known and denied, rather that it is that every era is effectively one of non-truth and finds scapegoats for the illusory change from truth to post-truth.

What I hear the pundits saying is, "We are at war with the post-truth, we have always been at war with the post-truth."

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Diebert, we can only be in a post-truth era if we were ever before in a truth era, which I would dispute.

Fair enough. But I suppose a "fact" driven and "decency" centered discourse is what is being referred to. In any case, anyone who would doubt if we were ever in any truth era to begin with would not worry about Trump in the slightest.

So the quote is ironic, but not because a deep truth is known and denied, rather that it is that every era is effectively one of non-truth and finds scapegoats for the illusory change from truth to post-truth.

That's true. Reading some of the darker passages written by the ancient Romans when they notice the decline, of morality, of decency in their citizenry, youth and senate can be enlightening. You can find these in all later, decadent and militarized stages of empire. But in the end historians see the broader, sweeping changes in retrospect and all inert, crystallized structures not capable of change. Actually not just incapable but erected with the exact purpose to withstand it. If not collapsing, it just turns less significant rather sudden.

What I hear the pundits saying is, "We are at war with the post-truth, we have always been at war with the post-truth."

Yes, it's a kind of reactionary form of idealism that way: referring to a past time which never really was, like grand pa.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The Mueller Indictments Still Don’t Add Up to Collusion

It's a bit too early for mainstream acceptance of the inevitable but the above article makes a convincing case based on public, generally agreed on facts that there was indeed a witch hunt and some collective insanity on "Russian collusion with Trump campaign". So far there's just nothing -- not even a shred of information backing it all up!

Not saying of course there isn't a lot of other stuff being dug up: fraud, law breaking or collusion with women and several other foreign governments. But this giant net cast under false pretense to see what sticks, just to take out opponents is exactly how politics work in police states and other less-than-democratic countries. This realization will take another decade to set in.

This development however will not lead to something orderly but instead increase chaos, distrust and incoherence. In other words a slow or fast collapse of the rational order which turns out to be less way rational than believed. This hurts the confidence of a nation beyond repair: a national myth in decline. So there's nothing to crow about here either.

[jupiviv]

How's it going Diebert?

It's a bit too early for mainstream acceptance of the inevitable but the above article makes a convincing case based on public, generally agreed on facts that there was indeed a witch hunt and some collective insanity on "Russian collusion with Trump campaign". So far there's just nothing -- not even a shred of information backing it all up!

I forget the source, but the Russians were found to have spent around 145k on things like Facebook ads, supposedly pertaining to the election. IIRC, the object/s of the expenditure were propaganda and disinformation, but nothing specific was mentioned like disinformation about what or against whom. I see no reason why they would bother to spend even 145k on disinformation when that is virtually much all there was, and is, anyway.

Not saying of course there isn't a lot of other stuff being dug up: fraud, law breaking or collusion with women and several other foreign governments.

It seems "Russian collusion" as a term is like "Watergate", except much smaller scale of course. I've no doubt Trump has at least had dealings with the sort of people who tend to do illegal things every now and then. Virtually all top level politicians have also had the same type of dealings, sometimes openly. That's probably why they are pretending it has to do with Russia - calling it "using money and influence to circumvent the law in order to gain or preserve money and influence" would make a lot of useful people anxious about the slippery slope.

But this giant net cast under false pretense to see what sticks, just to take out opponents is exactly how politics work in police states and other less-than-democratic countries. This realization will take another decade to set in.

In police states you just need an excuse to shoot/imprison someone, and the opposition certainly doesn't have that power. The real issue is the increasingly gaping rift between left and right in America. "Left" and "right" are euphemisms for the dynamics and interactions between people with different lifestyles and living under different conditions, within the same nation.

We are living in the twilight of industrial civilisation, which through the magic of fossil fuels provided enough resources and opportunities in a few lucky nations for things like tolerance and equality to work. Russian collusion, swamp infusion, SJWs, neo-nazis etc are all expressions of selfish denial about the world minus one's interests/desires. Of course, even denial works (for some) when enough resources and opportunities exist. The Genealogy of Morals writ mundane, but nevertheless true.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Not a bad analysis: The Age Of Trump Clearly Shows That Narrative Is Everything by Caitlin Johnstone.

This has consistently been the story throughout Trump’s presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions.(...) Trump himself, seemingly aware that he’s interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he’s “never said” things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don’t matter in this media environment, only narrative does.

.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

The popular and lets face it, often quite hysterical & unlikely sounding conspiracy theory about any direct Russian "collusion" with the American presidency appears to go down the same route all these fads go: straight down the drain after getting stale for too long.

Eli Lake in Bloomberg provides the best reflection so far: The Reckoning Finally Arrives for the Trump Resistance

But many people who should have known better went beyond suspicion and embraced conspiracy.

[jupiviv]

If Diebert is going to resurrect himself and this thrice-damned topic once again, so shall Jupithustra.

"Left" and "right" are euphemisms for the dynamics and interactions between people with different lifestyles and living under different conditions, within the same nation.

Americans’ mixed message for 2020 presidential candidates: Keep your socialist hands off our government programs.

Got that? 50% of Americans love capitalism and think that government should do more to make it better!

Here is the essence of the crisis looming over/engulfing our global industrial empire: in a functioning modern nation-state, *either* the private sector *or* the government solves society's problems. If neither sector is solving the problems that is known as a Third World Country. I unironically live in one which appears to be rapidly descending into Banana Republic status, as well as - probably in the near future - historically unprecedented bloodshed due to civil war, starvation, thirst and climate change. Which is where this planet has been steered or maintained by CAPITAL for ~200 years.

Let me repeat that - CAPITAL. Not Marxism, cultural Marxism, postmodernism, postmarxist neomodernism, corporatism, corporate culturalism, feminism, women, patriarchy, men, SJWism, reptilians, et al, but rather CAPITAL. In other words, the average chance for all people of winning on the lottery of thermal energy -powered rotary motion represented by every unit of credit. Whether said lottery bears the name of capitalism, socialism, patriotism, globalism or Wahhabism is in real terms wholly irrelevant, as recent events and trends like the one above bespeak.

[Eric Schiedler]

When Capital is properly defined, there are virtually no anti-capitalists. If Capital is the Will to Power expressed in technology and now implemented with industrialized economies-of-scale, then the effects of Capital are nearly synonymous with all of history, if it is thought of as a reaction to Capital.

More narrowly, if Capital is defined as power plants and the political systems used to support them, then even Marxists are not anti-Capitalists. They would preserve the use of power plants as much as possible.

Which is why there is no such thing as a political party called a Capitalist party, it would be redundant and undifferentiated from the others.

Humans nearly everywhere want Capital to solve their problems, i.e. fulfill their desires, despite the obvious impossibility. This means they do not demand that the legal owners of specific capital pay fully for the externalities, the full cost of the effects of using the capital, and this is the main reason that private capital is able to gain an arbitrage profit. The arbitrage profits are then displayed as evidence that they are a net benefit and can be sustained indefinitely, despite the contradictions.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

If capital is will to power expressed in technology and trade, then there's no capital without reason being the ruler, because what would represent the fundamental will to exercise power more than reason? To impose ratio on a world of conflicting feelings, instincts and chaotic events. There would be no higher assertion of power, right? All meaning happens in its wake, providing value to any imagined capital.

Which is why I started this topic, to highlight the fundamentals under Trump and anti-Trump, as they together join at the hip with their hysteria, emotion and knee jerk reacting. The challenge of Western society forms this crisis of reason, losing its grip on power, being it in capital expression or keeping a story straight while submitting collectively to narratives, those provided by a campaign from a savvy self-branding machine or the narratives constructed by opponents who woke up to a reality where they are forced to admit the world does not work like their collective fantasies demanded.

If you really put the events back in perspective, only then one understands the scale of the collective derangement: Taibbi in Rolling Stone: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin

[Eric Schiedler]

If capital is will to power expressed in technology and trade, then there's no capital without reason being the ruler, because what would represent the fundamental will to exercise power more than reason? To impose ratio on a world of conflicting feelings, instincts and chaotic events. There would be no higher assertion of power, right? All meaning happens in its wake, providing value to any imagined capital.

Any finite Capital can be applied to a rational purpose. And any or all of Capital can be put to irrational ends.

It is a consensus, rule-of-thumb truth that all civilizational advances have been made by a few conscious, masculine minds. Therefore, by definition, those advances can be copied or used by irrational, less-conscious, or unconscious people, in reaction to the effects of conscious minds.

Which is why I started this topic, to highlight the fundamentals under Trump and anti-Trump, as they together join at the hip with their hysteria, emotion and knee jerk reacting. The challenge of Western society forms this crisis of reason, losing its grip on power, being it in capital expression or keeping a story straight while submitting collectively to narratives, those provided by a campaign from a savvy self-branding machine or the narratives constructed by opponents who woke up to a reality where they are forced to admit the world does not work like their collective fantasies demanded.

If you really put the events back in perspective, only then one understands the scale of the collective derangement: Taibbi in Rolling Stone: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin

My position remains largely unchanged. It is that while the Trump political phenomenon is primarily an effect of the egotistical wishes of the general public, the cruicial factor on-the-margin is that the opposition has offered bankrupt, ill-conceived, indistinguishable or weak policies and ideas.

[jupiviv]

If capital is will to power expressed in technology and trade, then there's no capital without reason being the ruler, because what would represent the fundamental will to exercise power more than reason?

Capital is resources on the ground which we extract and then convert into trash and trivia for self-serving and deluded reasons. A single law summarises the history of civilisation, viz. every surplus incurs management costs, which increase along with it until they exceed the surplus' worth. Thus, the main effective product, goal and motivation of industry is entropy. Everything else is (effectively) window dressing, although they do not need to be.

To impose ratio on a world of conflicting feelings, instincts and chaotic events. There would be no higher assertion of power, right? All meaning happens in its wake, providing value to any imagined capital.

This is basically the old idea of order vs chaos + a potential balance between them as ideal. The rather glib fallacy there being the demand that conditional/subjective impressions be treated as universal forces.

Although consciousness necessarily imposes ratios, a lot of things - including much of civilisation - merely simulate or resemble such acts.

[jupiviv]

Chris Hedges video on Russiagate/Mueller. Probably the best take apart from Greenwald/Taibbi.

My view - basically they spent 2 years soiling themselves about one of the few crimes Trump didn't commit, and they STILL won't stfu about it. The dem party elite want to be the woke SJW HR dept of the corporate autocracy. Let us ease their passing. The (AMD) Ryzen Jesus weeps the blood of illegal orclings.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Hey Jup. Your avatar looks like the notorious Rich Evans!

If capital is will to power expressed in technology and trade, then there's no capital without reason being the ruler, because what would represent the fundamental will to exercise power more than reason?

Capital is resources on the ground which we extract and then convert into trash and trivia for self-serving and deluded reasons. A single law summarises the history of civilisation, viz. every surplus incurs management costs, which increase along with it until they exceed the surplus' worth. Thus, the main effective product, goal and motivation of industry is entropy. Everything else is (effectively) window dressing, although they do not need to be.

Well I started with a conditional: "if capital is will to power", as response to the phrase: "if Capital is the Will to Power expressed in technology".

Nevertheless your extractions and conversions still need power to turn all the wheels. Personally I would make distinctions between force and power, or raw energy and directed or processed. It's within this dynamic something as will could be proposed. A wanting, a usage, a vision, a drive beyond survival which lies at the base of the history of capital. With Marx, the process of economic circuit, as process of circulation. All power is circus as it needs to capture and harness force ("nature") and start the power cycle, the wheels of fortune and misfortune. Or lets say "use value" is part of the power cycle. Within nature the only hint of power is linked to the organic self-production. With the larger production of capital we see a larger form of self-willing, of asserting and maintaining power & power-structure.

To impose ratio on a world of conflicting feelings, instincts and chaotic events. There would be no higher assertion of power, right? All meaning happens in its wake, providing value to any imagined capital.

This is basically the old idea of order vs chaos + a potential balance between them as ideal. The rather glib fallacy there being the demand that conditional/subjective impressions be treated as universal forces.

The statement was limited to the old idea of will to power. Not sure where balance comes in. I guess anything that doesn't perish immediately would qualify as balanced too... ha! As for universal forces, not sure about those words but if one can argue for conditions or categories being universally applied in some context, at least one can start reasoning about them. The sense of order, chaos and power are such terms.

Although consciousness necessarily imposes ratios, a lot of things - including much of civilisation - merely simulate or resemble such acts.

Would you see simulation as universal then? Or are there not enough things demonstrating your stated principle yet? Or is it particular to some place?

[jupiviv]

Hey Jup. Your avatar looks like the notorious Rich Evans!

I've been a fan of Redlettermedia since watching their Star war prequel reviews back around 2010... oh blessed days when young "adult" cousins were not posting GoT/Rahul Gandhi crossover memes on my whatsapp, and I was posting about the feminist attack on traditional masculine family values on your philosophical message board! Now I'm 27 and it hurts to wake up in the morning. I have only Rich Evans' sublime laugh and Dragongirl's succulent thicccness to get me through the day i.e. chain fapping.

Nevertheless your extractions and conversions still need power to turn all the wheels. Personally I would make distinctions between force and power, or raw energy and directed or processed. It's within this dynamic something as will could be proposed. A wanting, a usage, a vision, a drive beyond survival which lies at the base of the history of capital.

What is "beyond survival"? DNA doesn't self-impose a limit on what is desired unconsciously and leave the power-willing mind to figure out the rest. Virtually all conscious thought and purpose is one rather ancillary aspect of the process of conversion from substance A to B, which shapes and directs it instead of vice versa. Minus the cheap fossil fuels they happen to dwell around, and (before that) minus the vacuum of surplus-management left by Antiquity's bickering old couple, the Arabs would still - as Diodorus of Sicily described them - be the qanat digging, fiercely independent, wine and property -hating nomads they had been for millennia prior.

Likewise for the collective/s of conscious thoughts and purposes termed civilisation et al. Beyond a certain degree of complexity and scale it turns into an unthinking, aimless force of nature shaping and directing individual minds. That degree could be exceeded even at the start, else there might be none.

With Marx, the process of economic circuit, as process of circulation. All power is circus as it needs to capture and harness force ("nature") and start the power cycle, the wheels of fortune and misfortune. Or lets say "use value" is part of the power cycle. Within nature the only hint of power is linked to the organic self-production. With the larger production of capital we see a larger form of self-willing, of asserting and maintaining power & power-structure.

The power-structure of capital is itself inseparable from the physical process of transformation, and so is any willing involved in its creation. The will must be shaped by that process or it cannot create the power structure, and eventually it must give way to a pattern resembling itself within the larger process. To remain as will it has to abandon the process and therefore the power structure as well.

As for universal forces, not sure about those words but if one can argue for conditions or categories being universally applied in some context, at least one can start reasoning about them. The sense of order, chaos and power are such terms.

People reason about universal things only to a certain extent, and that stunted reasoning manifests as delusions e.g. the idea of the balance of chaos and order.

Although consciousness necessarily imposes ratios, a lot of things - including much of civilisation - merely simulate or resemble such acts.

Would you see simulation as universal then? Or are there not enough things demonstrating your stated principle yet? Or is it particular to some place?

The ratio-creating activities of actual consciousness influences unconscious deeds or thoughts, in the same person or in many or in entire civilisations and cultures.