Civil Commotion

The biggest scandal of all, however, is not even the corruption of the Trump administration. It’s the inaction of Congress.

The founders were well aware that the government they were creating could end up with corrupt or unethical leaders, all the way up to the president. That’s why the Constitution gives Congress tremendous power to investigate and even remove officials in the executive branch.

Yet the current congressional leaders — the Republican leaders — have refused to do so. They have shirked their duty to act as a check on the president and his appointees. They have instead defended Trump and made excuses on his behalf. They have enabled the most corrupt administration of our lifetimes.

David Leonhardt, New York Times

This is why I urge voting for the annihilation of the Republican Party next Tuesday, voting for its complete, utter, irrevocable destruction, voting for its disappearance into obscure footnotes in grade school history books, like the Bull Moose Party.

None of which is to say that I am opposed to a conservative party; I am a conservative myself. The Republican Party is not a conservative party, however; it has degenerated into a pack of nihilist vandals. The two most plausible candidates to lead a revived conservatism are John Kasich and Jeb Bush¹. I know. Both men support policies with which I disagree, too. But both are pragmatists and, more importantly, neither is blinking-neon crazy.

On the Right, nowadays, that’s saying something.

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¹ I once thought Lindsey Graham belonged on that list — but what a submissive and craven character he has turned out to be!

I am convinced that most of the turmoil in the world can be traced to an epochal paradigm shift in human thought, and that it is driven by two irreversible trends. First, the Abrahamic faiths are dying and, second, automation and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work or, more prosaically, the skills needful for self-sufficiency. These trends, in turn, have made possible the rise of reactionary vandals such as Donald Trump, whose appeal is to those made anxious by changes for which they are unprepared.

The falsity of the Abrahamic religions is too well-established to belabor; those who doubt that should acquaint themselves with modern Biblical scholarship, or pickup and read a copy of John Spong’s book, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism. Whether or not Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is true is not, really, an interesting question any longer; they are false, one and all, and the matter is settled.

And the progress of industrial automation and artificial intelligence is in plain sight of anybody with eyes to see. A Ford factory in Brazil now assembles automobiles scarcely touched by human hands. The clerk who once shuffled paper at Sears is now unemployed, and so too is the guy who hawked washing machines. And that steadily-dwindling number who have jobs are … worried; they know it’s just a matter of time.

Bricklayers are worried in Japan, because there is now a robot which does that work, too. Nor can the day be far off when that robot is building homes in your hometown.

What is more, unlike previous industrial and social transformations, there does not appear to be a lot of brand new manual-labor spinoffs. The rise of the Interstate Highway System, for instance, created millions of entry-level jobs in the fast-food and hospitality industries. The disappearance of conventional retail is at least creating jobs in Amazon’s warehouses, but many of those jobs are going to be eliminated by robots over the next decade.

And automation isn’t creating new jobs for anybody — except programmers.

And so the number of marginalized people grows. The Devout are ridiculous and embarrassing, and the skilled are no longer needed except as objects of study by … programmers.

Thus Trump, a demagogue and amoral cynic who exploits the frustrations of the unskilled and increasingly irrelevant. Thus Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers, too, the would-be letter-bomber and Synagogue shooter, respectively — men for whom the modern world has no place during the years that ought to be the most productive of their lives. Their numbers are growing, and so will their violence.

An Irish referendum to repeal the ban against blasphemy is expected to pass by a 70%/30% margin.

IRELAND’S BLASPHEMY REFERENDUM has gathered attention from the international media in the usual here’s-your-update-on-Catholic-Ireland way.

Despite what’s expected to be a very low turnout, the reference to blasphemy is looking to be removed from the Constitution by a resounding majority of 70%/30% breakdown.

Has it ever seemed strange to y’all that science doesn’t require special legal protections, but religion does? The reason, of course, is that the conclusions of science have a pedigree, tens of thousands of observations by tens of thousands of different individuals, and tens of thousands of subsequent refinements as a hypothesis is transformed into a theory. But religion, always, is undocumented make-believe and superstition.

So … good for the Irish! it wasn’t so long ago that Ireland was merely a minor department of the Catholic Church, and it’s good to see even them turning their backs on those predators.

If only those people at Tree of Life Synagogue had been armed! It’s their own irresponsible damn fault so many of them were killed!

It defies my comprehension that anybody, anywhere, can regard Trump with anything but loathing.