Why Joe Biden Must Win

Disclaimer: regular readers may have noted my tendency to avoid talking directly about current events and those shaping them, and this piece will make no exception to that rule. What I write, I will write in terms of the concept of what the President should be in an ideological sense. The word ‘ideological’ often has people rushing to formulate their defences but I mean it not in a political sense but rather in the sense of the overriding concept. My personal politics, I hope, will play little or no part in this. I back policies from both the left and the right and if I were to vote I would, generally, vote more to the left, not in an ideological sense of ‘right and wrong’ but rather in greater sense of right and wrong, i.e. morality removed from reflection.

In the next few days, we will find out who will occupy the White House for the next four years. The choice is between two men, current president Donald Trump and former vice-president of the Obama administration, Joe Biden.

We are currently experiencing one of the worst moments in recent history with a global pandemic effecting both the lives of people and the wellbeing of the economy, the two intrinsically linked in ways which make me feel queasy and question the road that has led us to this point where human life has a monetary value.   Whilst both candidates have the same circumstances, the approaches have been very different.

One value which Joe Biden has is the ability and desire to work out, not compromises, but rather a bi-partisan agreements to try to do what is objectively ‘best’. This cost him greatly with the Democratic Party when Mr Biden stated that he had worked in the US Congress people segregationists. This was seen as a betrayal of modern Democratic Party values, those of Ocasio-Cortez et al as, to them, the younger members of the Democratic Party, one should be blindly led by their ideals. Mr Biden’s point, it seems, was lost. The point that he was making was that, although he despised the values of the men, they were all elected members of the Congress and thusly were obligated to serve the electorate by working together. The attacks on Biden have centred on the absurd and innuendo.

1. Yes, he stutters, that is not as Trump and the Conservative media would have you believe, due to age and mental decline, rather it is due to his brain working too fast for his mouth to keep up with
2. He mistook his wife for his sister- this was a big point as at a rally Biden turned and said ‘this is my sister’ when it was his wife. Many took this to be a sign of mental decline, however, if one actually listened to what Biden said, Biden said ‘they switched on me’, meaning that they had planned to be on the left and right respectively and had, for whatever reason, ended up on the other side. In political speeches, one usually has everything to a fine art, remember Obama used to speak to school children with a video prompter and Obama is one of the smartest Presidents ever.
3. Hunter Biden’s laptop. Fresh in the memory of then FBI Director James Comey coming out just before the 2016 election to report that they were investigating the missing e-mails of Mrs Clinton (seriously, she screwed up badly there), the conservative media have created, or are trying to create, a new scandal. The story is thus, as reported by Fox News. A man who runs a computer shop, a man who is legally blind, says that Hunter Biden brought in his laptop and gave it to him. The blind man looked at the contents of the laptop and informed the FBI. The FBI assigned an agent who used to work on child pornography cases to investigate the laptop and Hunter Biden.  The Fox News anchor (who recently suggested to tech CEOs that if people badmouth her online, they should be fired) then asked a Republican member of Congress why an FBI agent who used to work on paedophilia cases is investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop. The member of Congress bit the innuendo and suggested, indirectly, that Hunter Biden is a paedophile. The fact that the information came from the former Mayor Rudi Giuliani whose close associates have been proving by US intelligence to be Russians passing off misinformation was not deemed a salient fact in tis story of blind shop workers and paedophiles.        

These are currently the three main arguments against Joe Biden being elected. As one can see, they seem removed from the reality of a pandemic and economic collapses. President Trump, in his rallies, has stated that the liberal media are obsessed with ‘covid, covid, covid’ for now but on the 4^th of November (the day after election day) they will cease to report on the virus. This led, amusingly, to President Obama stating that Trump is ‘jealous’ of the media coverage covid is getting.

When Trump speaks of the virus, he brings to mind Eric Hoffer’s notion that ‘rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength’. Trump does not speak of the virus as being what it is- a global pandemic, rather he talks about it in terms of himself. He lambasts Governors from Democratic States saying they hate him personally (to be fair, many probably do) and that their policies are driven by this. Instead of looking for a universal fix to the pandemic, Trump is only concerned about how it effects him personally. Yet Trump is not as stupid as many believe, he knows that this is not the way to win and so he has sowed doubt into the democratic process. He has repeatedly said that they only way he can lose is if ‘Sleepy Joe’ fixes the election. He has stacked the Supreme Court of the United States with people who will support him as he is a Republican. Judge Kavanagh released a paper arguing that the result of the election cannot be ‘flipped’ by counting postal votes, post-dated on the election but arriving fewer than three days later. His paper was full of errors and showed a lack of understanding of not only the law (he got the names of policies and laws wrong) but also the electoral process. Until all the votes are counted there is no ‘result’ to flip! That is the democratic system as stated by the constitution of the United States of America (I’d expect better from an alcoholic rapist). Once great Republicans were ousted by Tea Party candidates whom Mitch McConnel (the ‘our one plan for the next four years is to prevent the re-election of Obama’ Mitch) leads, to whom self-interest outweighs human rights. Every policy of the Republican Party has been about division- separating the US from ‘the other’ (Iran deal, World Health Organisation (WHO)*, NAFTA, supporting anti-black policies although it is important to note there is no conclusive evidence that Trump is a white-supremacist, even if white-supremacists seem to think so, etc.), Republicans from Democrats, rich form poor etc.

Whilst Biden’s politics may not be for everyone, and why if Kamala Harris was a white man she would be seen as just another self-important politician, he brings to mind the story in the bible where two women claim a child to be theirs. When Solomon decides the child must cut in half so both can share, one lady says that the other should have the child so as not to harm the child. Whilst Trump seems keen on tearing the child apart, whilst the Republican Party egg him on from the shadows, Joe Biden seems to want to save the child and keep the country united. Yes, a lot of the appeal of Trump was that he is not a ‘politician’ (an argument he uses now absurdly as he is the President) I would argue that many of the politicians we hear about in the  media are not representative of the whole and I would argue that a great politician, a great President, would be about working together to form a unified front to do the best for all, and this is what Joe Biden is, one of the last great true politicians.

Vote!

‘till next time  

*The only country who can withdraw from the WHO is the US. The reason Trump wants to do so is that China pays less than the US. This is true but is caused by the Reagan administration freezing membership dues in the 1980s meaning that all countries only have to pay 1980s prices meaning that the rest of the money must come from donations. Despite this, the WHO budget is the same as one big hospital is the US.        

Normal and The Other

When I was a little child, I would have people coming up to me and saying, along the lines of, ‘you’re so weird, what’s wrong with you? You’re so weird’. As one can imagine, as a child this was very unpleasant, and I would get upset. Then, as I grew a little, I started to think, what was happening and why was this happening so? If we break down what was happening, a child aged between 3-10 was having people 20,30.40-60+ years older than them approaching them to say unnuanced unfavourable analysis. This then led me to analyse what was happening- people who assumed that they were ‘normal’ (as we saw the other week, there is no form of madness greater than the assumption that one is ‘normal’)  approaching a child to express their negative assessment of the child. This, it seemed, was acceptable behaviour to them. To me, it seemed rather peculiar for the comments were not constructive and were being made by adults greatly my senior leading me to ask, how can such cruel behaviour be seen as normal? I then studied the individuals more to see if I could discern any patterns (there were enough of them to formulate a real theory!). The people, I observed, acted in a manner very contrary to how I acted, behaviours which one would define as immoral, to use the standard definition, yes behaviours which were accepted by the wider society but seemingly of a moral bankruptcy. I also noted a contradiction in their behaviour, often they would praise me but would offer, as a caveat, some criticism of me, just as the people in Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’, would praise Prince Myshkin, hope for his approval, and then say, ‘oh, but he is such an idiot!’.   

By the time I was 15, I had realised that a person only has to answer to their self and their God, and if both are one and the same then it would be more convenient (I say ironically) and then when I was 20/21, I read an old interview with Bob Dylan in which he asked what was wrong with being misunderstood?, a question I was unable to answer (to this day).

In his book ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’, the pioneer of psychology (I won’t say psychoanalysis or he will be grumpy as, it seems, such terms were once used to denote one field of study and is now used, without any understanding, to cover all branches of psychology), wryly notes that psychological analysis has shown that there is no fixed notion of ‘normal’, i.e. normal does not exist within nature.

I have no desire to touch upon my work from a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about how hell is other people as it challenges a hegemony and how hegemonies are formed, rather let us look at why people of much greater years feel the need to confront a child. The answer, it seems, stems from one’s development. The Ancient Greeks thought that the noblest task was to spend one’s life learning who one truly is (know thy self), I would hazard that this does not go far enough for once one knows one’s self then surely the duty of the individual is to try to improve upon one’s flaws, but, anyway, if the task is to know one’s own self, a task almost improbable, then if you are of an unformed character, if one’s personality is not strong enough to withstand self-critique then, as with the noble ostrich, one’s best course of action is to bury one’s head in the sand and create walls of lies and self-deceptions, walls, as with the parable of the house built on sand, lack a secure foundation and one starts to live in fear of the walls (let’s continue the biblical theme) coming tumbling down at the sound of a whispered voice, as with Jericho, and leaving one gazing into the broken unformed darkness of their self, a self which as Freud and Jung note has both a light side and a shadowy side. If given the choice between facing their own truth or assaulting a child then, sadly, it seems most will assault the child. Whether this is conscious or unconscious I do not know but the fact, it seems, remains, as long as we accept another as being a totality in it-self then we cannot abide by notions such as a hegemony and normalcy in the supra-personal sense and thusly we are forced to realise that we are not part of a whole, rather we are individuals who conform to the concept of who we are as an individual as oppose to the, frankly, odd behaviour of denying the truth of who we are to create a façade to ‘fit in’ with a hegemony which may be immoral and rotten to the core.          

‘till next time

Evidence of Things Seen

The German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said that, ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world’, but what does that mean and what bearing does it have on the world over 150 years since Schopenhauer passed away? Well, regular readers will be able to answer this for me. 1) 150 years is nothing as the same behaviours exhibited now were exhibited thousands of years ago and 2) the entirety of our existence (by which I mean perspective of our existence) is subjective.

‘till next time

I kid, the above points are true and enable us to step beyond where we were before. We all know what facts are. Facts are things which have been proven to be true, right? Again, regular readers will be screaming at me (or tutting over their tea), you have said so many times that facts are not really facts, they are just opinions which enough people like and so call fact, after all we do not even know if existence, itself, is real!

Indeed, you are all too quick and smart for me! So, let’s continue. If we have established that existence is subjective, 150 years is no real difference from 4000 years and facts are not what the dictionary would define as fact (note: some dictionaries now has both the figurative and literal meaning of the word ‘literally’ listed as correct usage) then we can attempt to unpack the meaning of Schopenhauer’s words using the current world (note: modern is also a subjective term).

We know so much, we know that the earth goes around the sun, we know that viruses can be airborne, we know that liberal intellectuals lack the ability to sway a whole populous, and yet people still argue against these facts. When it was shown that the earth goes around the sun, and empirical evidence was presented, the facts were denied. The reasons why, we can only speculate on, but it seems that there was pseudo-religion at play. What do I mean by that? Well, many people use their ‘religion’ to justify their own thoughts, beliefs, and, possibly most crucially, insecurities masquerading as prejudices. If, indeed, the earth went around the sun and not vice-versa then this would mean, not only was the earth not the centre of the universe, nor was God a being which put human life above all else, but, most tragically, that they might be wrong. And thusly the evidence of things seen we put to one side in preference for one’s own beliefs/insecurities. Now, one might be thinking, why would one do this? And we have to be careful as it may not be conscious. Unconsciously people may protect themselves against truths that they lack the integrity of character to withstand, most notably, that the earth goes around the sun and not them. Thusly, we must be careful not to assume that it might not be a case of people ‘won’t’, rather that they ‘can’t’. The pioneering psychiatrist Carl Jung (whom Freud wanted to turn into a Junger version of himself, tee hee) said that unless we bring the unconscious to the fore, we will be led by it and call it fate.

So, anyway, you are thinking, please come to your point whilst we are still Jung (groans), and I will.

Let’s bring to mind a recent example. You may recall the case study of the lady who was bullied by her workplace, who presented official documents to her workplace who rejected them as they had heard something contrary from a colleague. Let’s unpack this:

• A lady presents to A official documents which have gone through many key people to create
• A speaks to a friend who says that the documents are not correct
• A has the choice- agree with the official documents or agree with their friend.
• A dismisses the official documents and sides with their friend

This behaviour seems irrational, but it can be easily explained. A has chosen their friend over many years of knowing each other.  A is then presented with empirical evidence which contradicts their friend. A has a choice- side with the empirical evidence (the closest thing we can get to ‘fact’), or side with their friend. They view their friend as a person who they trust and to say that their friend is wrong would be to say that they themselves may be wrong in their assertions regarding their friend. Subsequently, as A cannot/will not be able to say that they were wrong in their judgement of their friend, they side with their friend over the official evidence presented.

This is just one example, but the simple principles can be extrapolated and used for other examples. Watch the news tonight and ask yourself if it fits in with any of the current news stories.

‘till next time  

Hell is Other People…But Why?

In Jean Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos, three people are put together in the same room. Each of a different temperament, the three find the situation intolerable although, when given the chance to leave, they opt not to do so, just as Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonist comes to depend upon the raven to break his solitude, so do the three depend upon each other to offer them an escape from their own lives.

We often hear people being described as ‘strange’, or ‘weird’ or other synonyms which denote ‘different’. People are treated as though there is ‘something wrong with them’, when they are simply acting true to their own nature. As we have covered, frequently, society depends upon the process of hegemonizing in order to function. This functionality is not to do with the mechanics of a society, rather to do with the individual peoples within the society. Thusly, as we have seen in too many examples to list, a society will formulate around the personality of one or more dominant personality and thusly this will be considered the ‘norm’.

If the dominant personality is a good personality, then this can be seen as a good thing, however, often, the personality is not so. As it is usually those who are the most insecure who seek the spotlight, so does the society form around the personality of the narcissist, or sociopath, or etc. as Butler writes in her novel, The Parable of the Talents:

‘Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.

To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.

To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery’

And thusly, if a society is formulated around a dominant personality, then this is where is starts to get interesting.

Throughout history we have read about the weirdoes and freaks, usually the one’s who change the world, who are shunned by society. The reason why the said are shunned by society can be seen in the above. When one forms an unhealthy community, as illustrated above, the hegemony of the community is formulated around an acquiesce with the bad personality. Once this is in place, the individual forgoes the right to be an individual and conforms to the hegemony so in order to ‘fit in’. Thusly, if one comes along who does not conform to the hegemony, that one is seen as being an outsider and ‘weird’.

Let’s think about this for a moment. On one hand you have people who have sacrificed their own individuality to conform to a hegemony, and on the other hand you have one who remains true to their own individuality. The former is playing a role which, after constant use, comes to define their personality, and in many ways, becomes them. They shift away from their own true self to become different, however, their own, unreconciled, true self remains, buried deep down and thusly the personality is never formed completely, it will always remain fractured, and the individual will always be in a state of flux, trying to conform to the dominant hegemony. The later, the one who is authentic, will continue to live as their own true self, conforming to who they are, not what society demands them to be to fit within the hegemony. This seems contradictory to speak of ‘conformity’ within the individual, but as Albert Camus brilliantly states, to paraphrase, once one becomes one’s self, one exists within the concept of their own self and thusly, in Camus’ sense, ceases to become a ‘rebel’ as they are conforming to the concept of the rebel. Thusly we can extrapolate from Camus and say that once we become our true self, we conform to our true self.

The greatest madness that one can posses is to believe that one is ‘normal’ as is defined by the hegemony as a hegemony is defined by the individual sacrificing their true self to a dominant ideology or way of being. Ironically, it is those who are considered ‘weird’, who have remained true to their own self, who are the least weird, the least mad, as they are the ones who have conformed to their own true self, whereas, those who label the others as so, are the ones who are exhibiting the signs of madness in their sacrificing of their true self, and the possibility of reconciling their disparate threads of personality into a true concept of self, who are truly mad.    

To return to the original premise, and Sartre’s notion from Huis Clos that ‘hell is other people’, the reason why this is thus is because other people challenge our notions or normalcy, something we will touch on another time, and, due to this we are forced to conform to an unhealthy environment, as opposed to trying to make a healthy environment where all personalities can thrive, not only the biggest, and often, worst.

‘till next time  

Murder Most Foul: Why Revolutions Fail, and How to Make them Succeed

We live, it seems, in unprecedented times. In the last few years, for the first time in history (i.e. the advent of the written word) we have found out some shocking and startling things, three of which I will list now. Note of warning- these things are so unexpected and so shocking you best be, not just sitting but, lying down. And they are:

1. People don’t like to be sexually assaulted
2. Regardless of skin colour, people have feelings
3. Some people’s truth is that they are the opposite to their birth gender

Shocking, right? What an age we are living in! A true age of enlightenment (roll over Kant, tell Voltaire the news).

So, let’s have a brief look at these and what is being done about them.  

A few years ago, a movement started, called #MeToo, after it was revealed that there are sexual predators in Hollywood. Despite both men and women speaking up about how they were assaulted, the movement quickly fell in line with pseudo-feminism. Feminism, to me, should be about one thing- the realisation that people are not superior or inferior to one another based solely on gender. For example, a woman may be as good, if not better, a CEO than a man. Fair enough? I think so. With this in mind, one can stipulate that gender bias is, well, absurd and the best person for the job should be given the said job, regardless of gender. However, many feminists that I have spoken to have outlined the following argument- men think they are better than us, we are better than them. This, as you can see, is not feminism, rather it is called hypocrisy.

The same is not relegated only to gender rights. Since the murder of a black man, at the hands of the police, there has been, quite rightly, public outcry. Why was this man killed? Would it have been different if he was white? Black people then took to the streets to protest. Yes, there was some looting and crime, but this was a minority case and should not detract away from the larger substance of what happened. Black people said that enough is enough and they will not be treated this way anymore. Black people courted white people for support and, by and large, received it. Some white people went along with it because it was the cool thing to do, but many supported out of a truth, and that truth is skin colour is just that- a colour of one’s skin.  During the protests, every time a black person was beaten by the police, there was a public outcry yet during the same time, a Native American had his face turned into a Picasso painting by the police yet there was no public outcry, nor did the police offer a full investigation into, alleged, police brutality. As we saw in the previous example, it seems, that many of these movements are less about revolution of equality and more about self-interest. During the 1960’s, the world’s most famous (and in my opinion, best of all time) actor, Marlon Brando joined in the civil rights marches. He was called a ‘nigger lover’ and his box office was impacted, however, Brando stood up for what he believed was right and was adored by many black people for doing so- here was a man who put what is right above self-interest! Years later, when winning the Academy Award (Oscar) for The Godfather, Marlon Brando sent a Native American lady in his place to read his rejection of the award on the grounds that Native Americans are mistreated by Hollywood.  Sacheen Littlefeather was booed off stage and Brando was vilified by both whites and blacks for using his celebrity to raise issues concerning human rights abuses.

Yes, one must admit that there is an inherent race bias in American culture- for example, many liberals speak of ‘people of colour’ which, essentially means, ‘not white’, so it can be brown or black or yellow or green or etc… and even in this the colours are lumped together- brown can be from India or it can be from Mexico, for example. When people speak of ‘Americans’ it can often be seen as shorthand for ‘white people’. What do I mean by this? Well, in America there are subsets of citizens. You have Americans, you have people descended from black Africans who call themselves ‘African-Americans’, you have descendants from Jewish settlers who call themselves ‘American-Jews’, you have Italian-Americans whose ancestors originate from Ukraine (tee hee) and so on and so forth. The definition of a nationality is the country which one is born into. Ethnicity is not to do with nationality and this point, it seems, gets confused. People think that as their ancestors came from Asia that they are ‘Asian-Americans’. This is not true; they are Americans who have an Asian ethnicity. This, often, leads to a system where to so-called sub-sets isolate themselves from their fellow Americans by only interacting with other Asians or blacks or etc.

President Obama hosts online forums to discus race relations and every one which I have watched has only featured black people, and this is why the revolutions fail- because self-interest supersedes the common interest of all.  Women’s councils only allow women to join, human-rights forums only allow, as we have seen with Obama, one skin colour to participate. Whilst these revolutions are called ‘human rights’, it is only about the interests of those who participate- quite often leading to contradictions and hypocrisy.  Just imagine how powerful it would be if men and women stood together and said ‘we are equal and demand that we be treated so’, or if when a Native American is battered by the police, the black community said, ‘no, they are one of us’, and blacks and whites stood alongside the Asians or the Natives et al.

These changes will be unlikely to come through the media, politicians or even the legal system. As we have seen recently, Republicans in the US are trying to force through judges who will repeal Roe Vs Wade and make abortions illegal, at the same time, the Trump administration has a docket waiting for the supreme court to adjudicate on to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA or ‘Obamacare’) leading to the question- why fight so hard to protect the life of an unborn child only to, if the child is too poor for health care, willingly let it die later?

It is clear that any changes must come about by people putting their self-interests to one side and standing, united, not divided by the arbitrary walls we put between us such as race and gender, and say ‘we are humans, we deserve human rights’.

And finally, on the third point, throughout history women have thought themselves to be men- the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Queens had fake beards put onto sculptures of them, and, often, to succeed one has to take on the, oxymoronic, male ‘qualities’, and this is seen as normal- traditional male dress (pun intended) such as trousers were taken up by women and then designed for women so, if this has been going on for thousands of years why are people so shocked to find that there are males of the species whose truth is that they are female?   

Yes, all of these problems listed above stem from fear and insecurities, which we don’t have time to go into here, but a simple mantra which can make all of the difference is thus:

People are just people.

And if this is taken up then maybe revolutions will actually succeed.

‘till next time