The New Civil War (ongoing): Charlottesville

I know a lot of you out there think I'm going overboard with talking about a civil war, another civil war. Not just talking about it but writing about it as well (that story starts here: "Day One") but, while that story is fiction, the idea that there is a new civil war coming is not.

It's already here.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that in the future, historians are going to look back and say that the Second Civil War began in Charlottesville, VA. In many ways, it's the first confrontation, the first confrontation where the Nazis came in with intent to kill. And I don't just mean the terrorist incident with the car.

If you haven't watched this video, you need to.

Just to be clear, none of what I'm saying is because of that video. The video is just research that backs up what I was already saying.

Look, I am not advocating for a war. The thought of that scares the shit out of me, because there won't be any battle lines this time, not physical ones. There will be no armies that meet and clash in the way it happened in first civil war or in WWI or WWII. This will be a war fought in the streets of our cities all across America, often between regular people. It will be a war of terrorists attacks being performed by Nazis and those on the Alt-right. There will be no safe zones.

Can it be stopped?

I don't know.

The consensus, currently, among historians and military people who study this kind of thing (including civil wars currently being fought in other countries) say we're at about a 35% chance of a full civil war, but one of the leading minds on the subject (I forget his name and am not going to go back and look it up again now) puts us at a 65% chance of a full civil war.

One thing is clear, we can't stop it with Trump #fakepresident in office, and we probably can't stop it with anyone from the GOP in office. In fact, as I'm writing this, Bannon has just  been given the boot by Trump and Breitbart is going to war with the #fakepresident over it. I don't even know if that's figurative or not.

What I know is this:
Right-wing nutjobs have been arming themselves for decades. A huge number of the Nazis at the "rally" in Charlottesville were armed to the teeth. That guy in the Vice video was pulling out weapons as if he were Gimli in Jackson's rendition of LotR. They are prepared for violence and they want violence.

The Nazi faction in America is still growing, still getting stronger, and they want an ethnic cleansing. They want an America for white people. At some point, unless they are put down first, there's going to be a concerted effort on their part to attack minority groups with the goal of killing them.

The Left needs to be prepared and, right now, I don't think that we are. We somehow think this is all going to blow over or that real violence, really real violence, isn't going to happen, not here, not in America. Well, it's already started and it's just going to get worse. I mean, hell, various white supremacist groups are going on and on about how glad they are that they made the first kill and how she deserved it. And she was white! Wait till they start on the people they really want to go after.

If you're going to go to a protest, you need to take precautions. Minimally, I think that involves buying some Kevlar or some kind of body armor and probably wearing a helmet. Yes, I'm being serious. The white supremacists are armed and armored! You need to protect yourselves.

The time for trying to be in the middle is over. This is not going to pass without people taking a stand against it. It's time for those of us who believe in justice and liberty for all people to stand up for it. It's time for those of us who believe in what the nation was founded on to stand up and fight for it.

Most of all, it's time to deliver a message to the GOP that they need to get off of the fence. It's time for them to quit using their mealy mouths to condemn Trump #fakepresident while doing nothing about it and trying to work with him to further their own hate agendas. Either stand with Trump #fakepresident or stand against him. And, if they're going to stand with him, they need the message that they will go down with him.

What I know is this:
If you want to stop this war before it really gets going, it requires strong action now. Strong action NOW. Not more talk. Action. For some of you, that action is talk; it's speaking up. Now. It's time for the first civil war to end, for racial injustice to end, for white supremacy to end.

What Johnny Rotten Got Wrong

Recently, Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols, came to the defense of Donald Trump, saying Trump is exactly the kind of anti-establishment person we need in office. Johnny Rotten has an incorrect view of what the establishment is. Trump in almost every way represents the establishment and everything he has done so far, and tried to do, has been to support and further ingrain that establishment.

See, the establishment isn't about politics; it's about money. It always has been.

Look, I'm not saying that politics aren't wrapped up in it, but it's not politics that the establishment is built on. From the beginning, the very beginning, it's all been about money. That's why there was a revolution. "Hey, you ugly king over in England, you're taking our money, and we don't like it!" There's a reason why virtually every one of the founding fathers were rich dudes. And some of those families are still in politics, so it can be confusing, but it's still all about the money. The politics just help control the flow of the money.

The Koch brothers are a perfect example of this. They are super rich and a huge part of the modern establishment. In order to keep themselves as much super rich as possible, they employ politics. They themselves are not politicians; they just buy them and keep them in their pockets (the super rich always have big pockets, deep enough to keep a politician or two stashed inside) and use them to shift policy the way they want it to go.

[I wonder if the Kochs spend more money on politics (including funding campaigns) than they would "lose" if they just left well enough alone, because they spend mega-money on politics (yes, mega-money is a "thing"). I have a hard time with the idea that it's actually profitable for them in a purely monetary sense.]

From that standpoint, the government, also, is not the establishment. The reason that Trump and the Republicans are anti-government has nothing to do with "standing up for the little guy" and everything to do with keeping the government out of corporations, because the government, prior to Trump, has been standing up for the little guy the most it has since, probably, the 60s. Corporations, then, are a big part of the establishment. After all, according to the Republicans, they're people, too. (And we don't want to huwrt the witty feewings of those super wich cowpowations.) The Republicans aren't about less government because they want to protect the freedoms of "the people;" they're about less government so that they can more fully take advantage of the people and suck them dry of all the money they have.

Here's an important distinction:
Hilary Clinton doesn't come from money. Sure, she has money now, but she doesn't come from money. Neither does Obama. It allows them to operate from the perspective of normal people. Trump, though, comes from money. Enough money so that the "small loan" of ONE MILLION DOLLARS (though it was actually more) that his father gave him when he was starting out was somewhat equivalent to the 20 bucks your grandmother used to send you on your birthday. That is to say there is no equivalence.

Trump is the establishment. He comes from money and has spent all of his life being around only people with money. He has gathered around him in the White House more money than has ever been there before. He has made the White House more establishment than it has ever been, full of people who want to get rid of government regulations (regulations that protect regular people from being taken advantage of or harmed by the establishment) so that they can make even more money than they already have. It's all a profit game for him.

Don't be distracted by the noise. Trump is not here to bring down the establishment. Not even Bannon wants to bring down the establishment. These are guys who believe in money, and getting rid of obstacles to making more money, and controlling your lives. They might want to bring down the government (Bannon certainly does), but they want the Establishment to stay right where it is.
On your backs.

My Apolitical Life

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you guys out there think I'm "political." As things stand at the moment, I could certainly understand that perception; after all, I've been writing some pretty politically charged posts, lately. However, the idea of me being "political" is one of the most outrageous thoughts anyone could have, which is why I never have that thought.

Probably what killed politics for me -- maybe I should say "who" -- was Thomas Jefferson. Seriously, what an ass.

Oh, yeah, a lot of you, probably most of you, are saying right now, "But he was a great man!"

And I just want to say to that: Not so much.
In fact, he was so much not a great man and so ashamed of himself over how he handled his presidency that he didn't want to be remembered for it. At all.

And you're all saying, "But! But! Declaration of Independence!"

Okay, sure, the man could write, but, really, he did his best work when he wrote the Declaration and it was all downhill from there.

Actually, the Declaration is the root of the problem. See, I believed it. As a kid, I mean. Well, I still do. "All men are created equal." ALL humankind are created equal.

I was a really patriotic kid. It was a thing my teachers would comment on to my mom, even, about how much I knew about the Revolutionary time period and the people involved. Yeah, the Revolution was one of those things I got into sometime after dinosaurs. Dinosaurs at four. Astronomy at five (which started out being related to dinosaurs). The Revolution at six. Because, hey, it was 1976, so I started reading books and books and books -- lots of biographies -- about the Revolutionary War and the founding fathers.

So, we have this document, see, that says "all men are created equal," and we fought a war over it to gain independence from a government that treated us unfairly and, then, after winning that war, we doubled down on slavery because of "politics." And I get it. I mean, I understand why Washington and a few of the others decided that the new nation was too fragile at the time to deal with that issue and felt the need to put it off till later, but... BUT!

Thomas Jefferson, the man who WROTE "all men are created equal" would not defend that. Didn't even believe that. He kept his own children as slaves and refused to free his slaves even on his deathbed, while many, if not most, of the other founding fathers had done at least as much as that, but Jefferson refused. He adamantly refused to free his slaves even upon his death despite the urging of many of closest friends and allies. Basically, Jefferson's life and lifestyle didn't match his rhetoric, and the whole thing really soured "politics" for me. I mean, if you couldn't trust Jefferson... Well, who could you trust, right?

Actually, in high school, I became a great admirer of Alexander Hamilton. Not that that was enough to make me like politics.

It's not really politics that are the problem; it's the politicians.

All of that to say: None of this is about "politics." It's not about Republicans and Democrats. It's not about the Right and the Left. It's not even about Conservatives and Liberals. It's about what's right and what's wrong.

And I don't mean what's right and wrong as defined by some (usually false) sense of Christian moralism. I mean what's right as defined by the ideals we (theoretically) ascribe to by being American (which I will define narrowly as someone who is a citizen of the United States of America), the highest of which is, "All men are created equal."

Honestly, we weren't ready for that idea when Jefferson tossed it out there. Obviously, Jefferson wasn't ready for it, either. But he did toss it out there, and we've been fighting to reach that ideal ever since. Fighting for the innate right that each person should get to choose how to live his or her own life without someone else coming along and saying, "No, you can't do that," for no reason other than that that person doesn't choose to live that way.

Look, the USA is NOT a Christian nation. It never was, and it was never intended to be. If you believe that, then you believe a lie. In fact, the whole idea was that this would very definitively NOT BE a Christian nation. That's how the Constitution was set up: to allow people to live and believe as they want to live and believe. It is the fundamental principle that our nation was founded on.

I find it egregious that people like Trump and Bannon want to eradicate decades worth of work toward actually achieving that goal, not a goal of freedom (though it is that, too) but a goal of equality. I find it even more egregious that "Christians" have embraced their philosophy of hate and discrimination.

So, no, this is not about "politics" for me. It's about standing up for what is right and good. It is right and good that all men and women should be treated as if they were created equally, because that is what we say we believe. To my mind, the ones opposing equality (the racists, the misogynists, xenophobes), they're the ones who are unAmerican. Trump doesn't know or believe in American ideals and he wants to take away and kill the one thing that really has made America great. It's up to those of us whole believe in what "America" stands for to oppose him. It's not about politics.

Voting by Mob Mentality

Okay, so, this is one of those posts where I'm going to be talking some psychology. I'm going to be working from some general principals, and I'm not going to be citing references. That's because I'm not looking up any new information, not that I would probably cite references even if I was. Basically, if you don't trust me to know what I'm talking about, you should do your own research to verify the things I'm going to say. Or even if you do trust me to know what I'm talking about. I frequently do verification research even on people I trust. Heck, I do verification research on myself all the time just to make sure I have the details correct before I actually post something.

Facts matter. Science matters. Stay educated.

Here's an example of why you should research:

Common sense and general accepted practice over the last decade or so says that group efforts results in better work than individual efforts. This is why teams have become such a thing in business and in schools. The problem is that research shows that group tasks result in overall inferior work because the work is dragged down to the level of the least competent member of the group. It's one of those things where you can't go faster than the slowest member of your team. Basically, rather than the work being elevated by the more competent members, the more competent members have to dumb down to operate on a level with the least competent members.

And that goes against conventional wisdom of how these team efforts work, so people keep proponing group efforts over individual efforts because they don't bother to look at the science. So, go ahead, go look at the research and the data, the actual science. Stop listening to conventional "wisdom."

Speaking of humans in groups, one of the principles of psychology and sociology is that people in groups, also, tend to become, let's say, less intelligent as the groups get larger. Groups of any sort tend toward the lowest common denominator. [As a complete aside, this is an important thing to acknowledge when you look at the FACT that Republicans tend to be less intelligent and less educated than Democrats. The lowest common denominator on the Republican side of things is MUCH lower than on the Democrat side of things.] This is how mobs start, because people of lower intelligence are more easily riled up, but, once one gets a few people riled up, it spreads through the group. It is literally like an infection.

Recently, The New York Times published an article in which Satan (oh, I mean, Steve Bannon) is quoted as saying that the media didn't understand the forces that drove Trump into office. I think he's right. The media didn't understand what was happening at the time -- but, then, no one did except, perhaps, Trump and Satan himself (oh, I meant Bannon again) -- and they still don't understand now. However, it came to me the other day, and it was one of those "d'oh!" moments where you have to wonder why you didn't see it sooner, especially since the correct comparisons were being made.

Trump got to office on mob mentality. Seriously, think about every Western you watched as a kid and remember the lynch mob scenes and how the crowd was chanting, "Lock her up! Lock her up!" Oh, that's not what they were chanting? Same thing, though. Trump riled up a mob, formed a posse, and rode out to get himself someone to lynch. And got elected to the highest office in the world on the energy of what amounts to no more than a lynch mob. Only, this time, there is no white hat to step in between the mob and the instigator and talk them down. As if that has ever really been a thing anyway.

The problem with mobs, though, is that they take a lot of energy to keep going. On their own, mobs are short-lived entities that begin to dissipate from the fatigue of the individuals within the mob. In short, it's easy to get a mob all worked up (you can look at Trump's rallies to see that), but they take energy to keep them going. They take somewhat constant agitation.

Trump needs the mob. He needs his posse. His lynch mob. This is not just the energy that keeps him going, that he feeds off of (it is that, too); this is the energy that is keeping him in office. As long as the mob stays riled, the Republicans will fall in line behind Trump and whatever insane thing he is doing. Republicans have come into the realization that to go against Trump is to go against the very people who got them into office, and they can't risk offending those people, because the mob will turn on them just as quickly as it goes after liberals and Democrats.

Because Trump needs the mob, he has to continually agitate them to keep them riled up. This is, at least in part (the rest of it is because he has no impulse control and can't stop his tongue and his fingers from saying whatever stupid thing comes into his head), the reason Trump says and does outrageous things that have no basis in fact or reality, like demanding an investigation into voter fraud. It doesn't matter if the claim is ludicrous, because it keeps his base riled up and mob like. The mob has no logic or thought. It reacts to Trump on emotion and faulty instinct.

What, then, is the answer to the mob issue? How do we get people to slow down and actually apply thought and logic to Trump? [As if most people (and those people in particular) use much thought and logic to begin with.] I don't have a good answer to that. Generally speaking, the way to stop a mob is to let it play itself out, but Trump seems especially good at keeping his base agitated and in play for him. And, honestly, part of that is due to us, those who are standing against Trump. When we react to something Trump has done, like the Muslim travel ban, it serves to foment his followers without much work from him, allowing him to go off and do things like hosting special screenings of Finding Dory [I bet Trump feels a special connection to Dory and her inability to keep anything in her head.] or, you know, put Satan on the National Security Council.

The other thing that can stop a mob is a sudden shock to the system, so to speak, something which instantaneously catches the mobs attention. For that, it's possible that Trump could do our job for us, not that we should count on that.

At any rate, I think it's important to know what you're dealing with and that it's probably pointless to engage with Trump supporters in any kind of rational discussion. You can't reason with a mob. Or with someone in an abusive relationship. It just makes the person defend the abuser, put the person on the same side with the abuser. You have to wait for them to realize they are being abused and be ready to confront it. That's the current state of Trump supporters. Eventually, Trump will do something that will affect each of them personally, then you'll see them get it, get that Trump is a liar and a cheat and has just been using them for his own profit.

Eventually, Trump, already the least liked President a week into his presidency, will have no one left on his side... except Republican politicians (>cough< McConnell >cough cough< Paul Ryan >cough<) whose heads are stuck too far up Trump's ass for them to get away.

I Am the Middle Ground

Someone told me the other day, "You need to come to a middle a ground," in relation to my recent political posts and thoughts. I need to come to a middle ground. Hmm...
Actually, I've been told similar things by a lot of Trump supporters, that I am not being tolerant of them and their positions. To that, I say that it is not actually okay to be tolerant of other people's intolerance, that's equivalent to saying that it's okay for the guy down the street to beat his children because it's none of your business what goes on in his house. However, that's not exactly legally true, as you might be accountable if you know there is child abuse going on and didn't do anything about it. Basically, though, this:
Being tolerant of other people's racism is not being tolerant of alternate worldviews; it's participating in racism. In other words, it doesn't make you tolerant, it makes you racist.

Just like not reporting known child abuse can make you accountable for that crime even though you had nothing physically to do with it.
Funny how that works, isn't it? (Yes, for the impaired of you out there, that's sarcasm.)

As for me needing to find a middle ground, let's look at that:

Our nation was founded on the stated belief that "all men are created equal." That was our stated Declaration and reason for our Revolution. So that creates for us a Middle Ground that looks something like this:

(L=liberal, C=conservative)

Of course, that's not how we actually started out. It was a good ideal, but our nation started with a "small" problem that the Founding Fathers were unable to deal with. As such, the wheel looked like this:

It took about 80 years for the social liberals in the government to turn the wheel. And a war. That led us to this:

That lasted through the 1960s, when social liberals, again, managed to turn the wheel to something like the first image:

Of course, that didn't happen without a lot of... turbulence..., to put it lightly. And social conservatives have been pushing back against it ever since. In fact, they have been pushing back against everything that social liberals have done going back to FDR. Newt Gingrich sort of led the charge in the 80s, but it really picked up in the 90s as a response to Bill Clinton's Presidency. What we have, now, is something that looks more like this:

Now, this is where the racism comes in with Trump and those who voted for him. If Trump and his cohorts (people like Steve Bannon) get their way, they will turn the wheel back to the pre-60s wheel with the C at the top. It's already going that way with laws being passed in some states (like North Carolina) which disenfranchise African Americans. Trump supporters, whether they "feel" racist or not, are actively participating in putting in place people who want to enact policies to bring this about:

So... It doesn't matter how you feel about yourself and whether you feel like you're racist or not -- even people like Steve Bannon, David Duke, and Richard Spencer claim not to be racist -- it matters what actions you take. Supporting Trump means you support a racist agenda, an agenda which promotes white supremacy, and that puts you in the racist camp, or Team Racism. And I wouldn't put it past Bannon and friends to want to flip the dial back upside down all together.

The point, though, is this:

In a world where we consider slavery to be wrong and equality to be right, 

this world:

Then I am the middle ground. The problem is that those on the Right, conservatives and fundamentalists of whatever sorts, have pushed their bar so far to the right...

(and in a world where white cops can routinely shoot unarmed black men and not suffer any consequences for it, we are certainly far, far into the Racial Inequality section of the Social Justice Wheel)

They have pushed it so far to the right that I now seem to be standing on the far left. To them. Because I haven't moved. I'm still standing in the same place where I believe in equality for all men. All people.

People, this is where we make our stand, a stand for equality. A stand for "all men are created equal." If we allow the Trumps and Bannons and Farages to spin the wheel back around so that the Conservatives are in ascendance, it will likely take decades to move it back to a place where equality for all is again a goal. We can't let that happen.

This is a time for standing up for what is right, not look to meet conservatives somewhere in the middle, because in the middle is already too far from equality. A Trump presidency is wrong, not because he's a Republican (he's not), but because he and his ilk represent and perpetuate an evil on the world, and we can't step aside and let that happen in the name of "finding the middle ground."

We are the middle ground, and we need to claim it and hold fast to it. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

__________

Additional Note:

You may have noticed that there is nothing on the liberal side of my Social Justice Wheel:

That's because we've never been there, so I'm not really sure what's over there. I think conservatives have the irrational fear that it's some form of socialism or communism (even though they really have no idea what those terms actually mean), the ultimate evil to many, many conservatives. [I got called a communist recently on FB for posting a quote from Abraham Lincoln about racial equality.] However, if I had to guess, I would guess it would be something like this:

Clearly, we are nowhere near to approaching that! And it may be the thing that social conservatives fear the most. I mean, if we let women be equal to men, we might have to admit that they sometimes ought to be in charge.