POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

What's auto-Orwellianism? Pardon my lack of understanding, but my experience of Orwell is principally coloured by his essays on leftism in England, so I may have a different impression of what Orwellianism means that other people do.

Aw, come on man, you've seen the term "Orwellian" deployed in media. It usually has its ultimate derivation from his single work "1984", and while the term is more diluted and generic in colloquial usage, I'm using it in a sense that picks out important features of the 1984 governing ideology and the concerns about political language and totalitarianism Orwell had as a thinker. Orwellianism then is the top-down manipulation of language and thought with the design of eliminating the possibility of dissent or disloyalty. This can involve the twisting of language into a set of partisan shibboleths rather than communicative tokens, the simultaneous or serial adherence to mutually-exclusive ideas or beliefs, and their coordinated and centralized inculcuation into the populace by a domineering government or party establishment. Among other things.

Auto mean "self" and as a prefix usually signifies reflexivity. Where Orwellianism is definitionally vertical ("top-down"), to the point of being one of the original allegory's weaknessess according to many critics, auto-Orwellianism would be horizontal. It would be self-directed but also social and communal in replicating Orwellian processes. If there is a conceptual distinction between insurgencies with charismatic leading figures (e.g. Garibaldi, Mao, Castro) and those organized around "leaderless resistance" (e.g. Islamic or white supremacist terrorism in theoretical, idealized forms), in analogy auto-Orwellianism would kind of map onto the latter.

While the traditional Orwellianism of course remains an essential feature of movement conservatism and the Republican Party (can you get a purer case study than the Pennsylvania GOP trying to argue against the constitutionality of a law they unilaterally passed a year ago?), we have entered into the queer circumstance of elites and common clay alike becoming equalized through this cognitive horizontalism. Each individual becomes an agent of their own indoctrination as well as the interpenetrative maintainance and development of group norms and ways of knowing. As, for example, seen in Fox News' struggle to avoid falling into the whirlpool of its viewership's moods even as it continues to pursue its mission to hierarchically shape their worldviews and agendas. Despite its strong Murdoch-influenced editorial bent, the audience increasingly shapes the nature and scope of the content an organization like Fox is prepared to generate. I was actually shocked and thankful Fox News quickly (if VERY equivocally) pivoted away from Trump as soon as the voting was done and has at least reprogrammed to devote more time to attacking pandemic regulation and the - presumptively - incoming Biden administration. Had they not called Arizona early (apparently with Daddy Murdoch's personal approval) and instead went full bore on the election being stolen by George Soros, the ChiComs, the Venezuelans, urban socialists, Pelosi, AOC, Harris... we would be in a distinctly worse place today (and tomorrow).

So, like, imagine if Big Brother spent all day watching TV and posting on social media, the Inner Party forgot if or whether they were at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and the proles got agitated enough about rumors of traitors in the Party allowing Emmanuel Goldstein to chill out at a London townhouse that someone at the Ministry of Truth decided it was true and the government, with Big Brother's approval, leveled half a city borough trying to root him out. Someone should write that book...

Which, to be reductive about my themes these past years, TLDR: They're all bug**** crazy now.

It's worth studying how conscious lies and pretensions become mass delusion.


Reflecting further on the Flight 93 essay - and I was remiss in not establishing what Flight 93 the author referred to - this end-of-era Soviet protest song is pretty much what all the reactionaries are singing along to.

Colonel Vasin has come to the frontline
And brought his young wife along
Colonel Vasin has rallied his corps
And told them: "Let's go home"
We fought this war for seventy years
We were taught that life is a fight
But the intelligence has just reported
We fought ourselves all this time.

And I have seen generals
They drink and eat our death
Their children are going crazy
Cause there's nothing left that they don't have
And our land lies in rust
Our churches are burnt.
If we want to have a home to return to
Now is the time to return

Our train is on fire
There are no buttons to push
Our train is on fire
There is no place to run to
Long ago this land was ours
Before we got trapped in this war
And it will die if it is nobody's
It's time for it to be returned

And the torches are burning around us
It's the rallying of all perished troops
And people who shot our fathers
Are now making plans for our youths.
We were born by the sound of marches
We were threatened by jail
I say it's about time we stopped crawling.
We have returned to our land.

It's barely metaphorical for Confederate rage, just tweak the lyrics slightly.

With the Texas lawsuit, most focused on sleazy Paxton, but the statistics cooking was even more comical. One in a quadrillion and the Bolsheviks still won.

Well, our convicted Nazi gangster also succeeded in running away, despite the police announcing that his chances were fewer than one in a trillion. Granted, a trillion is a significantly smaller number than a quadrillion, but it shows that you can never be certain with Socialists and National-Socialists.

I hate to break it to you, but this has been the received wisdom for years.

At some point in the next few weeks, there should be consideration given to a thread covering the new Biden/Harris administration, yes? Cabinet nominations, for instance, are currently ongoing and certainly generating a lot of controversy.

Just a thought...

A Trump Thread was started on Jan. 20, 2017, so we might as well start a Biden thread on Inauguration Day.

I don't know anything about the author, but I tip my hat to a quality bit of 18th century political satire:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...rom%20%251%24s

It's Petri, she's the resident satirist at WaPo.

Yep....Republican lawmakers are such a great bunch of people, that every effort should be made to bend over backwards to work with these morons, despite the fact they want to destroy democracy. Here's an idea:

Put these idiots on trial for sedition.

I noted sometime in the past two years that our winning the governor's office in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in 2018 offered us an appreciable security in flipping those states back. Lucky breaks and tiny margins in multiple states were our shield this cycle. But Democrats can't be expected to win decisively every time.

Republicans know that treason doth never prosper, for if it do...