Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "The Jimmy Dore Show"
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Comment part 2
However here are some of my thoughts on democracy and how it can work.
In observing certain social animals, like ant colonies and bee hives, it is apparent that certain capacities are actualized of which the individual animals themselves are incapable. These are sometimes referred to as emergent functions, some of which are assumed to come about because of the activation of certain epigenetic potentials in the genome given the proper protein to initiate them. This is debatable, however the functions themselves are easily observable.
Humans are also capable of emergent functioning -- in a political sense. Here is an example of this in action:
We are all familiar with a type of game of chance that one sometimes comes across at a charity event or perhaps a county fair. There will be a large urn or similar vessel and it will contain tens of thousands of jelly beans or marbles or gumballs or something. And typically you make a donation or buy a "chance" and then you make a guess as to how may jelly beans are in the urn. Of course it is impossible to count the jelly beans and it is also very difficult to even make any kind of accurate estimation. So usually thousands of people will make a guess and put it in a box and then the most accurate guess wins a prize, like a car or something.
Well as it turns out: the average of all of the guesses is almost always (actually "always", but I am hedging) more accurate than the best guess. . . .
Now it is true there is no one obscuring parts of the urn or extolling the virtues of certain sets of numbers or otherwise lying to the guessers with false narratives about the jelly beans or the process of guessing. Of course there is no Donald Trump, or FOx news, or CNN spinning false narratives about the jelly beans or telling you that there is a large grapefruit unseen in the middle of the urn that is displacing patriotic American jelly beans, so it is not exactly the same thing as a democratic vote on legislation or some other political decision.
Yet I do believe that this human potential could be brought to bear in a political scenario: if, for instance, something like fines and imprisonment or perhaps huge fines and banishment where the consequence for presenting anything but verifiable facts as evidence in arguing for or against any particular collective democratic decision.
And perhaps, just maybe this collective talent could also be mobilized on a level of finer granularity by calling into question the false narratives and other deceptions of the power-elite and their legions of sycophantic wannabes to themselves be objects of observation and study as is now happening via the decentraization of political commentary and criticism made possible by the internet.
So, potentially, democracy may still have some very significant tricks up it's venerable sleeve, only this time, tricks for the good instead of the in the service of evil. And perhaps some day we could be supplemented in these quandaries by the kind of advanced AI and machine learning that can beat the champions at GO. A game that seems to me, to be very like our political process.
Democracy and the so called representative democracy, democratic republic or constitutional republic are very different things.
They are forms of democracy. In most cases minus the democracy part. When people blithely state that we live in a democracy it is incorrect and misleading, like most of the paradigms that the public is continually bombarded with via the corporate news.
A republic is just a way for the plutocrats to stay in power and still have people think they are in a participatory democracy. The only democracy in US government is that of congress, and they are 98% owned by the power-elite that decide who will run and fund their reelection campaigns with the legalized bribes of their campaign contributions.
There is representation, but not for you and me. We live in a farce. Are you not paying attention? Do you think that this cheating is something new? Your "representatives" are not there to represent you, they are there for the most part to make sure that the voices of the people never get heard, and if they get heard to never be acted upon. Or if they are once in a blue moon forced by popular uprising to act for the people, soon as the masses disperse they will dismember the body that threatened their power one discontent at a time, jailed, disappeared, or simply smeared and ignored by the corporate media. Have you not been present? Look around. . . .
Representative democracy is a convoluted fraudulent conception. Democracy is something that we are continually told we have, which we do not.
We have democracy in the same sense that the slaves, women, citizens without land, and foreigners had a democracy in the golden age of Athens. Only they knew that they did not have a vote or any real participation in the government. Most Americans do not know that.
It should be obvious to anybody with the slightest ability to perceive what is actually going on that this is a conceptual illusion that is used to mislead and quell the disenfranchised mob. Bring on the super-delegates, the Iowa national delegate formula, the electoral collage, the PACz and Citizens United -- a democracy would not abide these contaminants, or entertain their adoption for even a moment.
A democracy and the state we live in are two very different things. In a democracy the one with the most votes is not the loser like in the USA. The courts have decided that even determination of who will be the candidates, such as occurs in the legendary smoke filled rooms of the DNC and RNC has no legal obligation to be fair or democratic in our two party system. . . . ???????
We live in a kleptocracy with a democratic shroud over it, and most people, like almost all people, do not understand how their rights and money are being stolen from them by corporate pilferage and plunder. In fact our present government is functionally a cryptofascist kleptocracy in which all real power, control of the men with guns and uniforms, the state, and the economy is held by a small group of lying psychopaths. Like Robert Mercer,, the Koch brother, Bezos and the mob of banksters that suck up the wealth of the nation like vampires and offer nothing but bullshit and corruption in return.
We have known forever that it would be best to get all money out of politics if the most ethical and fair government is what you want. We have known forever that proportional representation is superior to winner-takes-all seesaws. We have known that the banks are incapable of regulating themselves and that the wealth of the nation is being sucked up by the military industrial professional political worker complex, that the drug war is a farce that has created the first billionaire criminal organizations. In our hollowed out lives, news has become entertainment. And the fantasyland they present to the public is a poor substitute for what should have been the golden destiny of mankind on earth and in regions beyond.
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@ssn90 To me it is totally frightening that so many otherwise apparently normal and even good people have fallen for his authoritarian bull. But even someone with virtually no political smarts, if exposed to the actual facts should be able to come to a conclusion that is not against their own best interests. The main problem is, as you mentioned the amount of disinformation that is served up to the public as factual. Even if the facts are correct, the entire milieu of their narrative is often diversionary and false. But look at this fact: The biggest polluter in the country is Koch Industries. Since the right-wing radicals under Trump took over, they no longer have to follow EPA guidelines at all regarding what they dump into the water table and our streams and rivers. Have you ever visited the Appalachian coal regions, especially in PA. Streams with no life at all, forests that grow to forty feet then all die because their roots hit poisoned water, roads so thick with coal dust from trucks that every car that passes raises a toxic black cloud. Community after community devastated by pollution and economic collapse, yet they go on stripping, go on burning the crap for electricity, and there are no miners at all anymore, none that go down into mines that is. The people that own these big mines do not live there. They wouldn't live there is you paid them. Trump lied about clean coal. The entire idea of clean coal is ridiculous yet these devastated communities are some of the most staunch and violent Trump supporters anywhere. It leads one to conclude that the vast majority of Trump supporters cannot tell reality from the disinformation planted in their heads, and the disinformation coming from a source like PBS and a Trump rally are not even in the same universe. Trump is a lying, thieving, draft-dodging, mental defective. That is apparent to anyone who just looks at the real facts and ignores the hype.
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Here's the news: A compulsive liar has been lying, and the people who report about the compulsive liar are shameless, and apparently brainless rumor mongers trying to gain ratings to increase the profit they make selling commercial time. Both the compulsive liar, the networks, cable networks, and popular mass media are almost entirely owned by the same people who own the various politicians (including Trump). They present an apparent adversarial relationship to the clueless public who is continually brainwashed by their spin and lies 24/7. This fake dichotomy: liberal/conservative, pro-trump/anti-trump, religious/pragmatic, up/down, right/wrong, true/false is continually infused into the collective awareness, in order to keep them divided and in conflict, so that a hand full of megalomaniac auto-compulsive psychopaths and their deviant sycophant enablers (including police and military that are willing to violate the rights of private citizens) can maintain the stranglehold they have over the wealth and destiny of humanity. And you all fall for it continually -- continually. . . . even the smart ass critics among you are deluded by the human nervous systems natural tendency to divide everything into two opposing vectors, simply because the nervous system itself operates on opposing charges we have designated as positive and negative in the ionic sphere. The reality is that almost no one has anything outside of the magic circle of these dichotomies to say. Not that I expect anything objective (outside of the scientific disciplines and even that is stretching it) out of humanity at this point, but you should at least know were you stand, if you are capable of that. You stand firmly on the shores of delusions made real by acts they inspire.
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Prediction: We will figure out exactly how they cheated, then we will figure out the next way that they cheated, and the one after that, and so on: with a factual and rational narrative about the qualities of people who would do such things. We will even say, "They said it couldn't happen here.": out of ironic gallows humor. Maybe at times their cheating will be so outrageous that hundreds of thousand of people will march or occupy something, but amazingly, almost miraculously Mitch and Lindsey, and the rest of Caligula JR's little unholy Greek chorus will retain their offices, and they will go on cheating and bullying and claiming that the law is what ever they think it is at the moment. And we will figure it all out.
And you will make it funny and entertaining.
But now we have reached a point in politics where: as in the attempt to transcend one's own habitual mode of mental functioning: knowing doesn't matter. You may know that the associative functioning of the thought-centric mind is mechanical, but that doesn't transcend or transform anything.
So it is with our political system.
We have known forever that it would be best to get all money out of politics if the most ethical and fair government is what you want. We have known forever that proportional representation is superior to winner-takes-all seesaws. We have known that the banks are incapable of regulating themselves and that the wealth of the nation is being sucked up by the military industrial professional political worker complex, that the drug war is a farce that has created the first billionaire criminal organizations. In our hollowed out lives, news has become entertainment. And the fantasyland they present to the public is a poor substitute for what should have been the golden destiny of mankind on earth and in regions beyond.
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In the sixties we saw that "There is no problem until there is trouble." The power elite and their misanthropic syncopates are not only out of touch, they are objectively insane in their behavior and the policies they establish. We thirst for justice, and after the possibility of a golden future for mankind. But they have no thirst for justice -- because -- they write the legislation, and it has become a legislation of privilege and legalized crimes, that is ultimately enforced by low level sell-outs and authoritarian types who have a taste for using the petty authority granted to them to push people around, lie in court and get away with murder. Or at the very least, stand with the blue mob's code of omerta.
Now people say, myself included, there are a lot of good cops. True that, but bad cops are just as common now, and the good cops ain't doin' shit about it. So functionally they are all pretty bad in total.
I don't know about you, but I have never in my seventy years needed a cop for anything. I've reported thefts: nothing came of it.
I have however gotten a few traffic tickets when I was young, for basically having a hot car and a pretty girl next to me. There was no need at all to break the law, they just were so full of hatred/envy -- Really.
I was arrested for pot in college by an undercover scumbag that everyone knew was an undercover scumbag, who simply turned in drugs to a state narcotics officer and said I sold them to him. Like everyone else the scumbag did the same thing to, I was given the choice of pleading guilty and doing a few weeks in jail or facing over ten years in prison.
I am not black, I was not poor, I didn't even have very long hair, which was a real reason for discrimination back then.
When I was in high school I wore a black armband for the VietNam moratorium. I was told to leave school for the day. I went to a local dinner and a young off duty cop asked me why I wasn't in school. I told him and he threw me to the ground and started strangling me.
Every cop I have ever seen testify in court, just out and out lied. They had it all written down, what didn't happen, with such impressive notes about times and what not
I don't think that my experience is anomalous. I think it is pretty representative of most people.
Now I just treat the police like they are all potentially violent insane people, who may or may not bite. Police in America is really, mostly an alternate venue of taxation. All most all of us would be better off without them.
Doesn't it cost more to imprison a man than to give him an ivy league education? Innocent men in prison is money in the bank for these reptilian brained psychotics, we call our leaders, the politician, and our real leaders, the politicians' owners. The banksters, and the hidden money, the insiders, the power elite.
They are pretty much assholes.
But they control the men with the guns.
But not all of them, thanks to the second amendment.
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Trumps supporters being mostly lower class and upper class and not much of an in-between illustrates the blinding flash of the obvious that Trump supporters are either multimillionares . . . or fools.
Not because to be poor, is to be a fool, but of course (I feel the need to spell this out here because you can never underestimate the comprehension of random people, but I am not implying an assumption that you personally need it spelled out) because to be poor and a Trump supporter is to be a fool, if you consider people who harm themselves to be foolish.
On the other hand, IF the world was actually structured and worked in the manner that most Trump supporters of low income believe it does, then their Trump support would make perfect sense. We are talking vectors here, the specifics are irrelevant.
In fact, one objective look at the so-called political systems, and their underpinning, that populate our planet should inform the observer that what is happening is just window dressing on barbarism, it's just a theater of the mind, a velvet glove on an iron fist.
I don't know of any system of government or rule that rises above the idiotic, or so it would seem, if the object of the system is to optimize, as much as is possible, all honorable aspects of human existence, and to curtail those commonly deemed as undesirable, the present systems of governance found on earth are archaic trash: just an excuse for the same old kleptocratic autocompulsive psychopaths, to further inflate their already vein-glorious miniminds in the vacuous reflections of the sycophants that surround and enable their insanity because of their own highly deviated and corrupted survival impulse.
They wish they were a real boy, but despite the world of suffering they create by trying to fill their truly vacuous lives with babbles of all types, real life eludes them, and always will.
Even ole' Socrates knew that a person that seeks power should never be trusted with it.
Human political culture is a joke. An eighth grade class could come up with a better system than the battered whore the banksters and one percent -- have afforded the world. It's a joke, a sin, and a wasted opportunity to evolve our culture into one that would nurture the greatness that humanity could be. But we ain't great, and we never have been, though for sure, an individual here and there, now and then has been -- great that is. Though to tell you the truth Alexander wasn't, and neither was his teacher Aristotle. Two utter failures that the world has adored for over two millennia. So wad ya gonna due -- aye?
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Face it Jimmy: you can get as creatively angry as you want. I'm sure it is somewhat satisfying or at least mollifying. But Jimmy, come on, you are not a violent cretin that is basically a psychopath in a thousand dollar suit willing to go to any means to preserve their wealth and privilege -- so -- your protestations are ultimately futile unless you can stimulate a movement that can overcome the propensity of those you find so egregious (and who wouldn't find them so) to ultimately back up their desires by ordering about men with guns, who are only doing their duty? Yeh, that duty. . . . the one that doesn't look a graft horse in the mouth? Hey, you better respect the man-with-the-gun's authority, or they can get very testy, very quickly. Oh, sorry, you are actually in no to little danger. Mitch says, what he and Trump says: goes. He said he's sure you will figure it all out in retrospect.
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