Good cop — bad cop

The deranged mode of politics pt. 2

The system works.

Exactly as it’s designed to work.

Pearl-clutching social justice (neo)liberals are once more trotting out the “literal Hitler” narrative, lamenting they now will have to live in fear engulfed in a fascist dystopia with suspended civil liberties (why does this sound familiar?), kangaroo courts and arbitrary detentions, forever under the shadow of a vengeful Trump.

So claims Olivia Troye, interviewed in a Swedish daily, (yes, I know she identifies as “republican”), formerly of the “coronavirus task force” and previous White House aide. Ah, the irony.

Well-meaning idiots removed from the imperial heartland wring their hands in unanimous agreement that the Trump “regime” FOR THE FIRST TIME IN US HISTORY will most likely usher in an era of terrible authoritarianism, neo-colonial and xenophobic policies, of evil deals with dictators and despots all over the world, and — the most unthinkable transformation of all — the US will now adopt economic and political policies that are harmful to the environment. Uh, you ever heard of the US nuclear weapons program?

Yes, of course, this response serves to effectively whitewash the entire establishment from Andrew Jackson to G. W. Bush.

I mean, how stupid are you people? Can you read? Do you have any idea of how the world has worked for the last centuries, or what kind of empire the United States actually is?

We’re literally looking back at three decades of totally unfettered neocolonial and imperial aggression perpetrated by the US, with millions upon millions of lives lost, and a Middle East and North Africa in total shambles due to flagrantly illegal wars of aggression based in totally outrageous lies which are now openly acknowledged by everyone — but for exposing which countless journalists and dissidents were arbitrarily imprisoned and persecuted.

Under the watchful eyes of the Biden “regime”, the worst genocide in modern history since the Congo War (if we don’t count the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan) is currently being persecuted in Palestine, made possible only through the liberal military aid and moral and political support of the US.

But you morons bitch and moan over how Trump is a convicted felon and “doesn’t respect democracy”?

You think Harris and the Democrats would have saved the world through halting climate change by curbing carbon dioxide emissions? You think the imprisonment of journalists, extralegal executions or systemic acts of terror against foreign governments is “respecting democracy”?

For that manner (and this is a disgression), nobody will halt the burning of fossil fuels without totally collapsing the growth economy. The growth economy upon which modern industrial civilization is predicated with absolute necessity demands a constant input of surplus energy (and raw materials) just to reproduce itself.

Just to remain operational, you need a constant input of energy that you’re not actually using for something else apart from actually maintaining the industrial basis and infrastructure.

And that surplus energy cannot come from anything apart from fossil fuels, because the net energy return of all other alternative energy sources, once you remove the supporting function of fossil fuels, simply isn’t adequate.

Even fossil fuels themselves, due to the degraded state of our current resources, are arguably not sufficent to maintain economic growth,

Coal is at about 50:1. Conventional oil and gas around 30:1. Solar power gives you 3:1. Wind power, in wildly optimistic assessments that do not take into account the supporting function of fossil fuels in the chain of production, land at about 14:1, but it’s probably actually around 4:1:

An EROI value of 54 was calculated for a wind farm of 150 Siemens 4 MW wind turbines (offshore) by assuming that the capacity factor was 50% (i.e. the wind turbines produce electricity corresponding to 50% of their maximum capacity) and a service lifetime of 30 years.

In a very comprehensive study of a large number of offshore wind turbines in both the UK and Denmark by Professor Gordon Hughes, the actual capacity factor was 35% and decreased by 4.5% every year, so after 20 years the capacity factor was only 15%, which gives an average value of 23% over the entire lifetime of 20 years. This means that the corrected EROI value becomes:

54 * (23/50) * (20/30) = 16. In addition, Johan Montelius showed that only about 24% of the wind energy was useful resulting in an EROI value of 16*0.24= 3.9% which is exactly the EROI value estimated by Weißbach in Figure 2.

Anyway, to maintain the energy production of a society, and thus to just reproduce the industrial infrastructure of modern civilization, you will need an EROI of around 14:1, and even at those perilously low levels, a hugely disciplined and highly organized society that functions without any significant disruptions would also be necessary.

So, yeah, Harris is not going to turn off the fossil fuel spigot without which organized industrial society cannot operate.

Because nobody CAN and nobody will. The industrial economy is a self-replicating process that like yeast feeding off of honey in a glass jar will continue along its predetermined path of expansion and collapse, and there’s precious little that any one of us can do to alter the general shape of this trajectory, simply because we live in a physical universe.

But on the other side of the aisle, alas, the morons are plentiful as well.

Trumps election victory does not mean that “the globalists and the deep state can be beaten”. Why do people like Simplicius, who really ought to know better, keep spouting nonsense like this? Does a multi-billionaire’s victorious alliance with big tech, the military-industrial complex, the mass surveillance apparatus and even neurogovernance sound like a particularly heavy blow against the ruling elite?

No. The only thing that’s happening here is the familiar old good cop/bad cop routine, yet it’s implemented in such a way that it also foments polarization and conflict on many levels among the people in general. The propaganda becomes dual-purpose. For dissidents, deplorables and the disaffected, Trump is the good cop. He’s the saviour that will change the system from within. For the large minority of neoliberal social justice warriors higher up in the economic and cultural strata, he’s literally Hitler.

For 90% of African-American women, Kamala Harris “brought joy back to our country”, and for poor and disaffected white men, her incessant cackle is like the dentist’s drill.

All of this also has the interesting effect that any and all propaganda pertaining to either candidate, all propaganda that agitates or builds morale for one faction, will simultaneously function as an incendiary provocation for the other. And the polarization is so complete, so meticulously orchestrated, that propaganda is endowed with a kind of double effect that allows the Trump agitprop machinery to simultaneously bolster the “literal Hitler” narrative, indirectly whitewashing the establishment in marketing Trump as the evil foil, while it also serves to defang and recuperate significant rebellious impulses through the widespread and enthusiastic support of the “anti-establishment candidate” among those of us that could otherwise form a meaningful resistance.

The same thing plays out everywhere across the world right now. Every incumbent party in every election held in the developed world, from Japan to Germany, either lost a good bit of seats or even had to relinquish power. All of this unprecedented, and represents significant political forces in motion — but these energies still only get expressed through the system’s integrated safety valves.

People know full well that, for a long list of reasons, things are heading towards disaster, but our attempts to address this are predetermined through the set of options we are trained to perceive, and ultimately serve to support the power structure above us. One of the kids in the IWW youth wing once asked whether there was an anarchist party we could vote for in the parliamentary elections. The question seemed perfectly reasonable to him, since that was the only path towards political change he could conceive of.

It doesn’t matter whether or not there’s a rift in the ruling class between neocons, neoliberals and nationalists. It’s ultimately not important exactly which flavor or mode of imperialism is going to predominate in the foreseeable future.

Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street still hold the reins of every major corporation in the world. Big pharma and the arms industry still own your politicians. The mass surveillance and propaganda nexus still manufactures your opinions and your emotional responses, and provides you with their pre-approved tools for thinking and feeling.

They still own you. It doesn’t matter if you happen to vote for the candidate they sold to us as “anti-establishment”, or if he happens to win an election.

It is therefore essential that to free themselves the masses who produce everything without being allowed to control the consumption of what they produce, find the means which enable them to display their creative forces and to develop themselves new, egalitarian, forms of consumption and of production.

The State and national representation cannot find these forms. It is the very life of the consumer and of the producer, his intellect, his organising spirit which must find them and improve them by applying them to the daily needs of life.

It is the same for forms of political organisation. In order to free themselves from the exploitation they are subjected to under the supervision of the State, the masses cannot remain under the domination of the forms which prevent the blossoming of popular initiative. These were developed by governments to perpetuate the servitude of the people, to prevent it from letting its creative force blossom and to develop institutions of egalitarian mutual aid.

New forms must be found to serve the opposite goal.

Kropotkin. (1913). Modern Science and Anarchy.