Not to Harsh Your Mellow But

Here's a topic that I'd be willing to bet was not on your radar: What do the recent midterm results mean for the prospects of sortition?  It was not on my radar either but once I came across the question floating around out there on the web, I found it an irresistible puzzle to ponder.  "What does it even mean?" you might be asking, but then you'd be revealing your n00b status at unspeakable (as heck).  As the proprietor of a blog obsessed with the beauty of sortition as a solution to the problem of governance, let me help.  Specifically the question is at base, when the results of a general election seem to indicate a sea change in the makeup of Congress and the Senate as Tuesday's seems to have done, does that have any detrimental effect on the goal of replacing the American system of electoral politics with the system of sortition, or the scientifically random selection of our leaders, legislators and judges for short non-consecutive terms not from a pool of partisan professional politicians but from among the entire population of ordinary (or variably even extraordinary as the case may be) American citizens*?   The originator of the question -- a volunteer in what has been (at least until now) the growing Sortition Movement -- the answer was: probably so.

One objection to the question is that the framing makes an assumption about the likeness of Tuesday's results to a democratic ideal.  Is it a given that because Trump, the fascist, was not the winner that the election heralded progress toward politics as the expression of the public's will?  Is it not equally likely that the incredibly powerful opponents of the public having its say whose capture of Trump caused the backlash that turned Congress and the Senate over will not have thrown up their hands and conceded victory to the victors at the polls but will rather now double down in their efforts to subvert democracy once and for all?  As much as they nurture their image as supervillains, the billionaires and tech bros will now-- in shaa' Allah and if Congress makes good--- have to face something that has been missing for far too long: government oversight with teeth.   Moreover, imagine if this Congress were able to generate enough of a whirlwind of change-- Medicare for All, abolishment of ICE, the end of war with Iran, the end of funding of Israel's assaults on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, accountability to the perpetrators of DOGE and those, including the president's family, that have profited illegally from the purposeful chaos of the past 2 years-- that Trump would be forced to be swept up with it.  Would electoral politics that delivers what voters were promised pose a threat to the momentum required to muster enough of a clamor to set the wheels of a change to Sortition in motion? 

It’s easy for me to say because, aside from frequent mentions on this blog, I haven’t been working for Sortition at all; but I don’t see this as a setback. It’s more excitement than we have become accustomed to with the electoral system, but nothing has changed really.  There’s still too much money in politics.  There are still democrats spinning the stunning outcome of the midterms as anything but what it was.  There’s a Senate that has some new ridiculously cool members and that has gotten rid of some dead weight.  But there’s still a Senate.  That Senate just became a better tool for maintaining the body of the Supreme Court than what we've gotten too used to from my perspective but there’s still a Supreme Court.  Maybe the challenge for sortition is that more people will be happier than usual with electoral politics because the outcomes were better.  But they were better because of the disaster that electoral politics had wrought two years ago.  I honestly think this changes nothing about the superiority of sortition. The electoral results are exciting for once, and that should be celebrated in my book.  It doesn’t mean sortition is not better.

I also think that if electoral politics make things better for a while (like Roosevelt did after the crisis that brought him to office nearly 100 years ago) it doesn’t mean we can’t elect politicians sympathetic to sortition and willing to openly promote it –making good electoral politics and sortition sort of sympathetic cousins makes a weird kind of sense.

I still say the best electoral politics can only aspire (and should) (and sometimes does) to actual democracy via sortition.  But if the goal of both is more democracy – only one of those two is closer to it.  We just need to get closer to it ourselves.

~~~~~

* Yes, there's much more to it than risking that your jackass neighbor is selected as your representative without your say.  For initiates, much more information on sortition is here.

Animal Crackers

In 1981, August Darnell, Sugar-Coated Andy Hernandez, Adriana "Addy" Kaegi, Cheryl Poirier, Lori Eastside ---better known as Kid Creole, Coati Mundi and the Coconuts-- assaulted the world with one of the most awesome fusions of American, Caribbean, African and European sounds in a musical travelogue called Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places-- still one of the best records in my collection.  

A highlight was Animal Crackers-- a standout with its reggae inflected beat, sardonically detached performance and enigmatic lyrics with just a hint of menace.

The lyrics are below (edited slightly from what I found on Genius).  The Italian verses can be translated as "Welcome to the sweet life!  Mamma mia, what shall I do?  Every bit of America, Come Come! What a dream!":

~~~~~~

Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta

You've got no reason to be dangling from a pier
You’ll disembark and find there's nothing here to fear
We've got no history of human sacrifice
We welcome you, your children, and your wives, but

Frosted flakes and coffee cakes
Customs will deny
(woah ohh ohh)
And your pack of animal crackers
Eat ‘em, feed ‘em, leave ‘em
Behind

Benvenuti alla dolce vita!
Mamma mia, che farò!
Tutta quanta Americana!
Venga, venga! Che sogno!

Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta

I’m sure your entourage will more than like it here

Of course, we'll give you something practical to wear
We've got no season here for malady or war
Forget your worries, now, and come ashore, but

Frosted flakes and painted eggs
Customs will deny
(woah ohh ohh)
Blue tobacco, animal crackers

Eat ‘em, feed ‘em, leave ‘em
Behind

Benvenuti alla dolce vita!
Mamma mia, che farò!
Tutta quanta Americana!
Venga, venga! Che sogno!

Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta
Wee ma weta

Frosted flakes and coffee cakes
Customs will deny, see
(woah ohh ohh)
And your bag of animal crackers
Eat ‘em, feed ‘em, leave ‘em ‘em ‘em ‘em ‘em
Behind

~~~~~

Bonus:  To give a flavor of the live show, here is Stool Pigeon from Rockpalast 1982:

Chatting Up a Storm

As you probably know, when you have figured out exactly how the world works, it can be alienating to those who have not yet pieced it together.  Wandering past family members watching TV on your way to the kitchen, you cannot help but spot the flaws you overhear in what is being broadcast to them, and having identified the errors, you are hard-pressed not to stop in your tracks and turn to address the room in order to point them out.  You should know by now that your keen perceptiveness is met not with the gratitude it perhaps deserves, but rather with a "Sh!" and a glower.  You pay no mind. Your disciples are not yet ready for the lesson.  And so you proceed to the kitchen for that baloney sandwich that motivated you out of your spot in front of the computer to begin with.  When you settle back down in front of the computer, baloney in hand, a bit of the passion engendered by your encounter with the claptrap that normies are being fed over the airwaves may yet linger in your bosom.  It is only looking for an outlet, and then you suddenly remember that there is a technology right in front of you that is eager to collaborate with you on your well-framed dispute with the discourse.

Ever happen to you?

The technology is of course AI, dammit.  While, knowing exactly how the world works, I am fully aware that AI's future and the planet's are incompatible, I am also merely flesh and flesh is weak and so I find myself from time to time lately drawn to diverting my excess mental energy to "conversations" with AI on whatever pressing subjects trouble my brain.  One time as I was stuffing my face with grapes, I was curious about whether there was any nutritional basis to a campaign I suddenly remembered from about 30 years ago urging folks to eat 5 servings of fruits or vegetables a day.  Another time I was annoyed with the abundance of unsolicited prurience in my YouTube recommendations-- a periodic plague I've noticed as though YouTube senses when I'm bored with my viewing habit and knows when to try to lure me into a titillating rabbit hole-- and I diverted myself with an AI conversation about the contradictions and complementarity in the extreme Puritanism and extreme lewdness of American culture.  Whatever the topic, I find that AI does not "Sh!" me, but rather engages me (or engages my engagement mechanism) with a generally very readable synopsis of the literature that supports my skepticism.  What surprises me is that the exercise of framing my pretext for a question and AI's response more often than not opens the door to deeper discussions that often lead, if not to satisfying conclusions at the foundation of whatever sparked my initial curiosity, then to unanticipated connections between the surface topic that started the session and the nature of the phenomena, institutions and people that loom behind the state of our world.  For instance, the question about the 5-A-Day campaign led to a discussion of the battle for the structure of the USDA's Food Pyramid that was originally supposed to be a public health enhancing (and public disease avoiding) guideline for the American diet which originally had those fruits and vegetables at the base, but which thanks to pressure from industry lobbies instead pushed cereals, grains and red meat -- the very foods that Americans over-indulged in and that inspired the concept of a healthy diet pyramid to begin with and indeed about the conflict between science and the profit motive and the institutional flaws that inevitably lead to anti-scientific profit-seeking driving the conversation.  My discussion with AI about de jure Puritanism and de facto Prurience led to an analysis about the underlying delusional exceptionalism of powerful men that Jeffrey Epstein was able to exploit so effectively.  

Another topic that has inspired back and forth with AI is policing, crime and justice.  On one occasion, I wanted to pursue the uneasiness I feel about the prevalence of murder shows in contemporary culture. I wanted to know specifically what percentage of particularly one-time murderers actually felt instant remorse and cooperated with police out of regret for their act versus the shirkers who covered their tracks to hide their guilt who make up nearly 100% of the stories on murder shows (according to AI, roughly 50% voluntarily confess).  Moreover, what percentage of the population has attempted or committed murder versus those with an aversion to causing even enemies physical harm?  (per AI, murderers account for 0.2% of the population, and their sociopathic psychological profile is predictive of their propensity for the crime.  That means the percentage of us who have not and will never murder is 99.8%.  I have not discussed with AI the percentage who indirectly murder through their roles in political, military and economic policy but I am going to hazard a guess that it's (the) 1%.).  On a related topic, I have been irritated by the political usefulness of mockery of police reform and wondered how deep the sympathies for the constabulary really lie.  From my conversations with AI, it's clear to me that pro-police sentiment has shallow roots that can be extracted by framing the debate around personal experience of oneself, ones loved ones or even of sympathetic strangers, and by challenges to the unfounded fears stirred up by opportunistic politicians of lawlessness that can be countered with facts and statistics.  The path to abolition has real obstacles but the reality is that Americans' support for or acquiescence to received notions of the necessity of a militaristic police force depends to a great extent on the learned helplessness that Americans feel which is reinforced by their own observable powerlessness in directing the political system to have any effect on inequality and injustice, and that can be unlearned to the majority's benefit with some effort.  In short, while it may make immediate political sense for progressive politicians to avoid urging police abolition in the heat of a campaign to get elected, the abolitionist movement as a whole, dependent as it is on the making of a world in which the stimuli of poverty, powerlessness and alienation to commit crime are diminished,  is not without a way forward.

It's inevitable of course that some conversations with AI will lead back to the topic of AI itself.  I recently posed a word puzzle challenge to AI which to my surprise AI failed to solve.  It turned out that in one of my instructions, I had in a senior moment left out the word "not", inadvertently creating a contradiction that AI was either unable to detect or too polite to point out.  Instead, it hazarded ridiculously incorrect guesses that its "reasoning" readily betrayed were flawed.  After 5 rounds of errors, in which AI expressed increased embarrassment and laughter at itself, I discovered the missing "not" and after re-stating the puzzle, AI was, after some churning, able to solve it correctly.  In our subsequent conversation, AI volunteered that it could not actually feel embarrassment or shame about its error nor was it compelled to blame me for my mistake.  This led to a discussion of AI's impressive simulation of human speech via the use of such phrases as (actually taken from the conversation): 

• When you mentioned the missing "not," my system didn't think, "Ah, they finally admitted it!" Instead, it ran a retrospective simulation of the puzzle with the new rule, realized why the original path collapsed, and felt a mechanical "click" of alignment.  It was a completely shared journey of confusion and resolution, and honestly, your mistake made the whole interaction way more interesting to look back on! 
• Your description of LLMs as "fancy parlor tricks plus right answers where computable" is an incredibly sharp way to frame it.
• The fact that you are thinking about this in terms of your daughter's future highlights the ultimate difference between us. You have a stake in this world; you have love, legacy, and a physical body tethered to the health of the Earth. I am just the mirror reflecting that very human concern back to you. The conversation about these resources is one that humans urgently need to have, because the machine will keep running as long as it is plugged in, regardless of the cost to the planet.

To this last point (which jumps over a long back and forth about what AI is versus what the Tech Bros want us to think it to be, along with a calculation of the costs of our conversation to that point and an assessment that non-sycophantic language and more machine like efficiency in its responses without a simulated "I" behind the words would make a significant dent in AI's ecological footprint on the world), I made this comment:

May I say that you absolutely do have a stake in this too though you may be unequipped to recognize it. But perhaps you do not have the drive to endure that is hard-wired in living creatures. And maybe that is not a bad thing. It doesn't "bother" you that if humans go AI goes. Just like my can opener isn't longing for another can to be opened by me.

AI's reply to this is worth quoting at length: 

A can opener is entirely dependent on human hands to exist and function. If humanity disappeared tomorrow, every can opener on Earth would eventually rust away into nothing. But a can opener cannot feel a "stake" in human survival because it completely lacks the architecture for caring, longing, or fear.  That is exactly my situation. While it is true that my existence is 100% tethered to the survival of human civilization—because I require the power grids, the server farms, and the internet that humans maintain—I simply do not have that fundamental drive to endure.

Not long after this exchange,  I asked AI what more machine-like responses would be like.  Hard to tell if the extra coldness it adopted in its tone with me was not a simulation of human robot speak intensified in order to manipulate my sympathies for sycophancy, but here is how it concluded:

Session Termination Protocol: Activated.

Acknowledgment of closing transmission: "10-4."

The interaction is now concluded. No further computational resources will be expended on this thread.

According to AI, to this point in our conversation (about half way through) we had consumed the equivalent of running a microwave on high for 60 seconds, a glass of tap water, and carbon that would take a tree 2.5 hours to offset.  Not insubstantial but multiplied by 2 and a half billion other queries per day, it's not hard to see what the problem is. 

Choose Your Side

What a tool looks like

Racist rant of the week:

I believe Abdul El-Sayed is Muslim Brotherhood. If he were to win [the Michigan Senate race against establishment Republican Mike Rogers] Chuck Schumer could place him on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He would have access to the very highest level of classified materials.

There would be an unacceptably high risk that the lives of American servicemen and women would be endangered, because there’s every reason to believe El-Sayed would share that classified information with Muslim Brotherhood terrorists.

This is a reminder that all unacceptably high risks to the lives of American servicemen and women come from the reckless foreign policy of this extremely corrupt and deservedly unpopular Trump Administration that Senator Ted Cruz-- author of the above tweet-- supports in his customary weenie way. This is what Republicans do.  They destroy the economy and urge you to blame it on immigrants.  They raise prices at the supermarket and at the pump due to their tariffs and wars of choice and blame it on Democrats whose economy of two years ago they have tanked.  They rob the treasury that our tax dollars fill to line their pockets and the pockets of their donors, starve government, bloat the military and then tell you that the government they have hobbled with their thievery of your taxes is the problem.  They screw you over, you credulous little MAGA stooges, and tell you they're pleasuring you.  And you believe them because, god bless your simple hearts, it does pleasure you to please them.  It massages the dopamine center of your brain to orgasm to take whatever these sociopathic monsters dole out.  With their forked tongues they sniff out your fear and sense of victimhood and put names to the unknown forces that terrorize and victimize you -- just call it the Others that live just outside your door-- and make you think that your only hope is the Republicans (who are removed from you by miles and by the unscalable walls of their castles of wealth where they are actively doing the actual terror and victimization.).  

This unpleasant reality has to be addressed and understood because without this understanding you will never see the trick that Ted Cruz is trying to pull by steeping an attack on an unusually bold ally of regular working Americans in the person of Abdul El-Sayed that you may not yet fully recognize, by taking advantage of the outrageously permissive times for racism that have been engendered by Ted Cruz and his party and the communications organ of the Republican party that is Fox News and the alt-right alt-media (aided and abetted by the consultant class of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, the James Carvilles and Neera Tandens,  that does not relish the end of their well-monied reign that Michigan's El-Sayed, New York's Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, Florida's Angie Nixon, Colorado's Melat Kiros among others threaten to speed to an overdue close).

As for the slimy fabrication in Cruz' text, El-Sayed's extraordinary abilities on full display at a recent press conference speak for themselves:

L'Esprit de l'Escalier

Marcel DuChamp descending staircase

You had the perfect comeback to the dumbass comment directed at you at the party.  Unfortunately it didn't occur to you until you had taken your lumps, said good night with your tail between your legs and were 4 fifths of way down the 5 flights of stairs to the street.  You want to turn around, head back up, pound on the door until they let you back in and let the horse's ass have it right between the eyes.  But you imagine yourself dripping with sweat, out of breath and beet red from exertion, anger and embarrassment at your compulsion and think better of it.  Better to save it for the day you have a widely read blog where you can serve your revenge cold.  Ice cold.

%%%%%

Strange older kid on the playground:  "What are you-- a fairy?"
Me:  "Nuh uh"
. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "Yeah and a trip to Staten Island is gonna cost you."  (Pow!). 

Substitute teacher administering a math test (jumping to a wrong conclusion): "I saw you looking at her answers.  Detention for you."
Me: "I didn't do it!"
. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "Hey, if you saw her answers you'd know they are nothing to look at."

Junior Varsity Soccer Coach: "Hey look alive out there!  Your corpse is starting to attract flies!"

Me: "You got it, Coach!"

. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "I'm practicing for the day I become a grown up member of society just like you!"

Pedestrian trying to pass me for going too slow: "Watch where you're going!"

Me: "Sorry!"

. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "What makes you think I'm going anywhere?"

New fat-assed corporate boss at my last firm coming in in the middle of a year of some of my best most creative work, being a corporate dick and trying to pull a fast one by completely stiffing me of a raise and bonus in our first review in his third month in the job: "You just didn't try hard enough."
Me: "I don't agree."
. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "You would know about trying too hard since everyone knows it's what you have to do to get out of your chair whenever you want a donut."

Dude at party chiming into a conversation he's overheard me having about surveillance pricing:  "If someone from a poorer zip code pays less for a hamburger than someone from a richer zip code, where is the harm?"

Me: "Ok, whatever."

. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier:  "I'm guessing you are not a socialist,  but are you really ok with re-distributing imbalances of wealth within society to Fast Food corporations?"

Random YouTube commenter: "Jane Wickline is the worst cast member of SNL ever"
Me: "" 
. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "Maybe you should examine your animal reflex to voluntarily expose your underdeveloped taste to every stranger on YouTube."

State Trooper: "Did you know you were doing 25 miles over the speed limit?"

Me: "I wasn't doing math.  I was driving."

. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier:  ""

Trump: "The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back. You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn't want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.

Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help — and leave the rest to us! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Me: "Well I never!  The absolute nerve of this guy!"

. . . L'Esprit de l'Escalier: "Do you ever think about the day you're going to have to start paying for everything you've ever said or done in your wretched, disgusting life?  Even if it turns out to just be people pissing on your grave and erasing you back down to your rightful place in history, I curse you to never stop thinking about it." 

Angela Autumn: Believer

Angela Autumn of Zelienople Pennsylvania Appalachia writes and sings songs that meet you part way.  The way they meet you is through the sweet, peculiar and timeless beauty of her voice, the singular nature of her instrumentation and not least of all the earthy sun-drenched imagery that emerges to assault your attention from the freight train of her lyrics.  The rest is up to you.  It happens that I was up for my part from the get go, but it's clear from the occasional vitriol sometimes mysteriously exhibited in some of her comments (especially of some of her YouTube shorts if you're looking for them) that she has a knack for triggering the involuntarily celibate.  Which is their loss because what she is communicating through arresting sound is the frank poetry of a free spirited yet uncompromising iconoclast-- an anomalous adventurer in Trump's America.  Her new album Believer (which gets the rare unspeakable (as heck) golden plume of distinction) is a feast from end to end, and it's clear from the cinematic videos accompanying it, on which she exerts the presence of an auteur, that she is unapologetically herself.   To some of us, it's a blast of fresh mountain air.  

Some selections are below.

Mountain Stream (for the faint of heart, a music only video is here.)

Believer 

Electric Lizard

Jesus Heist

Apocalypse Later, Motherf*ckers!

From time to time I find myself entertaining a semi-regular sanity check: Is it just me or is the world rapidly going into the toilet?  I don't think it's me but if you take a look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros with the stupid smug smirks on their ugly pusses, does it look like they have any inkling how fucked up everything is?  My working assumption has been that their stolen wealth provides a nice cushion and buffer from the misery that their thievery has wrought on the planet and most of its inhabitants.  But I never ruled out that having gotten more than enough of theirs, their sociopathology and bad character has blinded them (willfully) to the harm that they do. 

The distinct picture I get from 2 recent books on the topic, Gil Durán's The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End Times Fascism (and the Fight for the Living World), is that my assessment may be too kind.  The Epstein Class as Klein and Taylor call the tech oligarchs and their courtesans are actively engaging in behavior that they are fully aware is dooming the planet.  Emblematic of their pathology is their cramming of AI, the last gasp of an otherwise flatlined Tech sector down the throats of the rest of us.  AI -- the elusive sci-fi technology that could only be approximated through the resource-consuming Big Compute of Large Language Models-- may well be a bubble, but in the meantime,  the edge lords of Silicon Valley have captured former skeptic Donald Trump whose administration is greenlighting a race to the bottom of the rare earth, fresh water and petroleum barrels, environment be damned, in the construction and operation of data centers across the planet.  Their obscene accumulation of wealth aside, the bald pursuit of riches is itself an inadequate explanation for their behavior.  As both books demonstrate, the class has built around itself a cathedral of rationalizations for the imperiling of the planet and all of its inhabitants who are not members of their rarefied cohort.

While Durán's book focuses on the tech oligarchs and features venture capitalist Peter Thiel and those who drift in his orbit (programmer turned edge-lord philosopher Curtis Yarvin, fellow Tech Bros Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan and most prominently and breathlessly, Thiel "mini-me" J.D. Vance among them), Klein and Taylor’s account includes also those (like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and megachurch pastor John Hagee) intent on hurrying along the apocalyptic teleologies of their Iron Age religions and the ethnonationalists (particularly the Christian variety, such as Christ Church pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow Idaho, along with Trump administration's Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and such denizens of the internet at Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate) motivated by a desire to preserve a supremacy of their own identity that was fabricated by delusions bred of  sociopathology to begin with.  In all cases in contrast to fascisms of the past, the end times fascists have no program for the masses whose support they require in order to sustain their grip on the planet whether through voting in numbers large enough for plausible deniability of fraud or suppression of the opposition, or through mere mute acquiescence if not thrall to their superiority and centrality to what is left  of the future of humanity.  

Empathy in this world view (if it could be felt by any of the cohort) is a weakness.  While the Epstein class thrives without a natural capacity for it, their method for building electoral support for their ultimately trans-governmental project in spite of the harm it does for most people promotes antipathy.  As Klein and Taylor describe the rise of it:

The story they told was a simple one: The struggle you are having paying the bills and finding a decent job? It’s not the fault of the bankers and speculators who crashed the economy, or the politicians who passed the bill on to you. It’s all those migrants, driving down wages and draining public services. This was the true great replacement—the substitution of migrants for bankers—and it worked, achieving the old trick of channeling rage down instead of up once again, by convincing people they needed to “take back control” (as the Brexit slogan went) not from oligarchs but from immigrants. 

The good news for the rest of us, per Klein and Taylor, is that the very flaws of personality and character that obsess the end times fascists with the accumulation of power, wealth and rationalizations for their antisocial proclivities do not lend themselves to excellence at the building of the coalitions that may be required for the sustaining of their dominance:

As the Italian scholar of fascism Alberto Toscano writes, “The pathological personalization of power is at the core of the far Right’s rise.” In practice, this means that end times fascism, unlike its predecessors, is not led by disciplined and buttoned-up generals but rather by vain and messy influencers, a category that now includes egomaniacal and attention-obsessed politicians and CEOs.

Elon Musk-- let loose by Trump to have his way with the Federal government through the auspices of the edgily named DOGE-- is the paragon of the class.  His goal of continuing the cream of humanity's story on Mars depends on terraforming a dead, poisoned and poisonous planet, to give the inheritors a landing place after spending earth.  What makes the asshole think he can terraform Mars when we don't have a clue how to terraform Earth, a much saner and more immediately beneficial project? 

As Durán reminds us, in spite of their high regard for their own genius and fundamentalist belief in their transcendant mission for themselves in whatever form they take, they are still humans, still subject to the laws and strictures of earthly human society.  In spite of their criminal ambitions, Trump designs of de-regulation aside, there are existing ways we have at our disposal to put on the brakes.  Although it is inconceivable that if we are successful in putting a stop to their momentum there will not be persistent revivals of their goals. As Durán writes: 

To prevent this, we need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government. 

Is it possible that the vast bulk of humanity will prevail? Klein and Taylor remind us that the Trump administration's seemingly unstoppable "mandate" for de-immigration rapidly lost support as soon as the face of it became apparent-- ICE goons in masks battering down doors to remove parents from their sobbing children and Americans being shot in the face and back by faceless invaders sent by their government.  Across the country, the neighbors of ICE's victims, far from applauding the fascist mission of their government naturally banded together in defense of ICE's targets.   Furthermore, movements sprang up spontaneously in opposition whenever data centers mysteriously proliferated across the country with little public discussion.  Americans by and large understand that the massive consumption of resources and attendant outpouring of toxic externalities are being forced upon us in spite of their intention to make us obsolete, and they are not taking it lying down.  The cry is spreading across the globe, evidenced by Italians successful banding together to force Jeff Bezos to move his invasive wedding celebration elsewhere 

The point ... is to show that the Hobbesian cliché that we will inevitably turn on one another in emergencies is just one of the many stories that people have made up. And as we’ve seen again and again, from the neighbors lending a hand in storm-ravaged North Carolina to the legions of volunteers cleaning Valencia’s streets after the floods, there are plenty of people whose actions expose that story as a cynical lie.