FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 2020: NOTE TO FILE
The Police State
The state of being policed
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: COMPLEX SOCIETY, FROM THE WIRES, FOR A PRICE
Abstract: Some notes on current events, on narratives of systemic racism coming to a boil. Are all current events a distraction? Perhaps some have a tale to tell that is worth considering. Social pathologies tend to repeat. There are widespread protests and mayhem, but it has more to do with human biology and the dysfunction occasioned by generations of humans of NIMH living the biologically aberrant life. Everything that is and ever was is interconnected. That we humans cannot see the connections doesn't mean they are not the tapestry of the Cosmos we are embedded in as we strut our stuff.
TUCSON (A-P) — I watched the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still recently and Klaatu notes: 'We of the other planets... have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority [e.g. the United Federation of Planets] is, of course, the police force that supports it.... Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. ln matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk... The result is we live in peace without arms or armies secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war.'
There may be other solutions to tribalism, but his United Federation of Planets (or whatever he called it) came up with one that works. And it is not a political 'solution' as there are none. All politicians in the world can sign a solemn pledge of peace, love, and eternal beatitude (and to reduce CO2 emissions) in the name of all their people, but with no enforcement....
The price of complex society, aka civilization (which Earthlings have yet to make work), is a police state. If you long for anarchy, a state of absolutely no police force, think about living in a self-sufficient community of 20 to 80 others (Dunbar's number is a maximum), i.e. a band of humans living in nature, but largely, if not completely, isolated from others. You may occasionally kill each other, but no police or prisons involved (i.e. to avoid hierarchy, do not live in a complex society).
If all civilizations that are sustainable need to be protected and served by a police force, then, as 'we of the other planets have long accepted', Earth needs a police state (a state of being policed) too. Whether you or I like the idea (the what-is) is irrelevant if we end up burning our cities while unsustainably over exploiting planetary resources (which was Klaatu's issue in the 2008 remake).
One concern is what 'higher authority' does the police force serve with absolute power over us? The planetary life-support system? The short-term self interests of all humans (e.g. democracy where everyone can vote their short-term self interest)? Mainly the short-term self interests of those currently in power? If so, then those who want to be in power, (e.g. those of the Far Right or Far Left who are completely outside the Overton window of policy makers/voters), want to disband/defund the police who limit their violence (revolution being the only way they could come to power). And they all have narratives that justify everything they do and intend to do.
Tribal animals seek consensus. My tribe is better than any tribe that potentially posses a threat. United we stand, divided we fall to competing tribes. Millions of years pass. The name for our tribe is The People in whatever language we speak—we the chosen ones all wear white feathers in our hair. Other tribes falsely believe they are human. We know (deep down) that we are all that matters. Our narratives are true. Other competing narratives are not, so having a shared narrative, a consensus, is selected for and has been since the beginnings of perception.
Per current buzz, the Left leaning narrative that systemic, institutional racism is getting worse has been simmering for decades as it takes time for a lie to be told often enough to become unquestionably true (Americans now are less racist than in 1965 when they were less racist than in 1865). Racist ideology, however, has gotten worse as that's what politicizing the issue does. 
The fruits of political rhetoric are now being served steaming hot in democrat run cities nationwide. 'Black lives matter' is a narrative. 'Race is a crock of shit' is another. Both cannot be true. Color-think is a pathology (i.e. 'a crock of shit).
The belief in systemic racism magnified is color-think. America was engulfed in Right leaning color-think mid-20th century with the Red Scare. There were red commies everywhere, red in tooth and claw, who needed to be exposed, ousted or executed (e.g. the Rosenbergs). We are seeing a form of pathology as MaCarthyism once manifested, merely Left leaning this time.
So a similar socio-political pathology is unfolding today, as those who do not learn from history repeat it. There are differences. We call our Brown Shirts (who firmly opposed the commie fascists trying to take over Germany) 'Antifa' (short for antifaschistisch, who excel at obfuscation).
That the police are hopelessly racist and need to be disbanded/defunded is a narrative unquestioningly accepted by as many or more than were seeing Reds everywhere just seventy years ago. 
The datum to stick in your pipe and smoke on is that with one exception, all cities that are burning have democratic mayors, true believers in their tribal narratives, who understand their citizen's need for daily 'venting' (another narrative), make allowances for the looting, arson, murder and mayhem. They effectively restrain and limit police response. So is this crisis of civilization due to 'rampant and racist police repression' and 'entrenched institutional racism', or the perception of it? I don't know, same outcome either way.
Ideological polarization? How's that working to make America great again? Are health care resources equitably distributed In America? That high melanin people, who have higher rates of diabetes, asthma, hypertension, kidney disease, and obesity in the US (and more live in densely populated areas and housing, rely on public transport, and work in lower paid service jobs with no sick pay), are several times more likely to die of COVID-19 that than those having fewer risk factors, is proof of 'structural racism' (or something). Or is the medical care system racist? Are doctors and nurses who allow 3-5 times more blacks to die of COVID-19 hopelessly racist servants of a racist society?
Is structural racism the extension and legacy of a global imperial system based on the exploitation of others (including other species)? Yes, point of fact, but is this as intended by policy makers and police who are trying to figure out how to bring back slavery?
There are other narratives. Some begin, 'It's complicated, I probably don't know enough to have an opinion, but maybe...'.
Antifa, who only acts violently in self-defense (another narrative), notes the implied permission. The narrative of a racial divide serves extremists of both the Far Right and Left. A race war is their dream come true (each side has the same narrative—we win) and they are instigating civil war—payoff for decades of work sowing seeds of hate and blame, justification, victimhood and entitlement.
There may be peaceful protest by day, but after curfew the demographics change. Antifa shows up with bats, rocks, 2x4s, and incendiary devices (and rhetoric to inflame). Those who stay are those who want to be part of the rioting to come, as intended by provocateurs. Ironically, it is citizens of Left leaning progressive liberal communities (e.g. Long Island line to gun shop), who are not Far Left, that are lining up at gun stores because the narrative of 'I don't need a gun, I can just call the police' isn't working in communities near them.
The narrative that all Right leaning are racists, opposed by all members of the one true tribe (Leftists), has become a consensus narrative and therefore 'true'. Both sides tell stories, delusional and self-serving ones. Historians will have as hard a time finding the racists as they did finding the communists who were everywhere in the 1950s. That communists were everywhere was widely believed in and delusional. Pathologies happen.
I had a long line of ancestors who were featherists. They were storytelling animals: The only good people, We the People, wear a white feather in our curly black hair. We are the White tribe. Neighbors, mostly tolerated, wear a black feather in their blond hair. They are the Blacks. Sometimes they seem human. We have some narratives in common. We both know the Reds, whose narratives explain why they should kill all Whites and Blacks on sight (they think we are rapaciously driven by a craving to eat them), are evil and jealous pretend humans who must pay for their sins (there are over a 100 of us and we will fight the Reds until justice is served!!!—but they do have their good qualities when properly cooked). I'm not a featherist, though my grandpa was, but for some reason I like white feathers (micro-featherism?)—an example of structural featherism.
Extremists of every sort on the Left and Right want to destroy the system to somehow for sure replace it with a new world that celebrates them as liberators and begs them to rule while promising to serve them. The contending between the tribal Right and Left is the current system that pursues growth for its own sake. Extremists can envision destroying the system (their goal), but their visions of its replacement, from no government to a global Caliphate, are delusional. Even if achieved, for a time, they won't make complex society work, i.e. never have.
Imagine a war. Imagine you win. That's as far as most clothed apes can think. Conflict, us vs them thinking, is a race to the bottom without a viable plan to rebuild. We have been repeating the outcome for about 10k years per the past lives of humans on the planet Earth. Klaatu were are you? Could what happened to the Indus Valley Civilization happen globally?
I have envisioned a sustainable ecological civilization and it is a police state having absolute global power over all humans to limit their freedom. The higher power the police serve is the United Federation of Watersheds that listens to Nature (who has all the answers as to what works). Humans don't get a vote.
By all that we consider natural and normal, Klaatu was not. He was not an ideologue, a true believer. He asked us to give up one freedom, 'the freedom to act irresponsibly'. We prefer to burn our cities when not eviscerating a planet because we truly believe in our narratives, then after collapse and some centuries of recovery, to repeat the pattern.
Mount Rushmore was completed in 1941 by a white American sculptor who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It desecrates a site in the Black Hills known as The Six Grandfathers, a millennia-old site that was and still is sacred to the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Omaha, Arapaho, Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache tribes. It features four white men, two were slave owners, and one kept a beautiful black woman as a sex-slave. It celebrates white supremacy.
Should it be destroyed? If you don't think so, you are a racist. When the revolution comes, you will have to be put against a wall. Or consider working tirelessly to de-establish the white-supremacist, idolatrous power structure and its racist symbols NOW! BLM.
Antifa: Their will be done on Earth if not in Heaven.
8/10/2020, Note to file: My wife self-identifies as antifa, which is why I've spent more time than I might otherwise looking into the history and recent history (i.e. current events) of their activities and ideological certitudes. It also increased the probability of my attending a Black Lives Matter protest and march to the City Hall of Coos Bay as she brought to my attention a local self-appointed BLM leader whose Facebook page I had been following and so had planned to go to the protest whether she did or not. For me, going was, however, more of an anthropological outting as I am not a tribal member.
For about three hours I was surronded by several hundred people who all agreed that Blacks Lives Matter. The near non-stop chant and cant (with a bit of rant) seemed to thrill and fill participants with ecstatic pleasure. There were also speeches ranging from the passionate to the provocateur's orgasmic ejaculations which gave me no pleasure. I came to realize I am different as I seem unable to form or embrace tribal identity memes.
I realized that if I was put in a dungeon, referred to only as 'cracka', and told to write one essay everyday with a different answer to the question 'whose lives matter?' (this was the only question I heard chanted, always followed by one answer everyone else seemed to know as if from birth) and told that if I didn't come up with the correct answer in the first 100, that I would be terminated with extreme prejudice. So if 'black lives matter' is the correct answer, I would be dead in about 100 days as that answer would never occur to me.
If one of my jailers, who confessed that for a cracka that I really wasn't that bad, told me what the answer was, I couldn't explicate why, as racist ideology escapes my ability to think in terms of. If told the answer was 'black lives matter', I would end up guessing that chemosynthetic sulfur reducing bacteria at black smoker hydrothermal vents, that serve as primary producers for vent ecosystems, mattered. If forced to reference humans, I'd think about high melanin skin in areas of high UV radiation and heat such that not wearing cloths was adaptive between the tropics, but such variation is just-so details that vary with regional populations of many species that some biologists may reference using the informal term 'race' having zero political implications.
If I had to reference color I'd go with Green Lives Matter, i.e. green plants matter as primary producers of virtually all of the biosphere's ecosystems, hence green lives support the mostly parasitic/mutualist animal forms, such as humans (some of whom have red hair suggesting Neanderthal ancestry, but so what?).
In terms of 'whose lives matter', why would anyone, with the possible exception of humans, think that human lives matter? Well, as a memetic species we could evolve to be to the biosphere (Gaia) what our brains are to our bodies. We could, as Earth Guardians, help with the Nature restorancy made necessary by Anthropocene enthusiasts (if we could change). Speciation (to replace the massive species extinction of the Anthropocene) could take 10 million years, but could take less if humans come to understand and learn to live with the planet properly (i.e. change, learn to dance with the system). If we should ever get right with Nature, then currently human pathogenic hu-mans could memetically mutate to come to matter.
But I'm guessing none of my one hundred guesses as to whose lives matter most would be judged correct. But humans don't get to decide what matters. Nature decides. So listen to Nature who has all the answers. Stop listening to provocateurs, no matter how orgasmic or good it feels.
I could tell my wife what I think of antifa. If she were a Trumpster who enthusiastically attended Trump Rallies, I might go (as an anthropological outing), but either way, if I told her or anyone what I think of their tribal consensus, I could not be suffered to live if I made it impossible to be ignored. Maybe humans could just say 'no' to belief-based certitudes, even though they haven't yet.
Bright lives matter. Or not, I don't know. So should I join the counter BLM protesters? Maybe I should love and understand them both, and thereby be delivered from my psychosis (partially). But I'm an ignorant know-nothing from the hood who just doesn't get it. Another pathetic rxev olutionary. When the revolution comes, I'll be the first put up against the wall. Or not, as I could be wrong about everything, unlike all the other storytelling animals. If my rxevolution were to come, there would be belief therapists on every corner, but only for a time as when their job was done they would have better things to do aiding Nature restorancy.
8/22/20 Note to file: For the left-leaning there are several movements to champion that:
- Are anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, anti-American, and seek to remake the world in their own image.
- They seek to erase and rewrite history, destroy and rebuild social institutions, and overthrow (remake) political and economic systems.
- Their unwavering allegiance is to identity politics, ideological conformity and mass movement absolutism.
- They are seductive, appealing to marginalized victims (while fanning the flames of victimhood) who see themselves (through no fault of their own they are assured) as getting the shorter end of the stick of privilege and prosperity, and so must have more.
- For all problems there are solutions, political, and they have them.
- They look their best dressed in sheep's clothing.
- Those who dare criticize them are publicly shamed or canceled and fraudulently charged with being disagreeable, i.e. wrong, evil, not woke to the ideological narrative.
- They are masters of strategic doublespeak.
- Once those in the out-group have been established as a threat, they are automatically dehumanized and their destruction becomes a virtuous act of self-defense.
- All are united by some strain of anti-Semitism.
- They demand a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth that empowers them.
- They tell stories to each other to make sense of their social reality and truly believe that their actions are righteous.
- They begin as street-led movements whose members, whether clerics or activists, see themselves as grassroots revolutionaries—not as reformers.
- They see themselves as being above the law, driven by a feeling of belonging to a larger than life mission.
- Driven by conviction, they tear down historical statues, ban books, rename institutions, and turn opponents into unpersons.
- They share with their equal but opposite counterparts a clear vision that confrontation will lead to civil war and they, being the righteous ones, will win (their opposite differs as to who wins).
- They are victim-obsessed, ethnocentric struggles that frame every difference of outcome in terms of identity, whether in terms of political or religious certitudes, race, cultural or tribal identity.
- They are the commissars of the thought police, the connoisseurs of cultural demagoguery.
- Whether out of allegiance or fear, moderates tend, as the pendulum swings, to validate or reject their narrative.
- They are intolerant of any ideological diversity.
- They support the censoring of language to turn complex, critical, nuanced thought into Newspeak.
- They attempt to regulate speech within or outside of government, media, or the private sector to limit speech and thought among those who fail to self-censor.
1/27/21 Note to file: For a note of sanity among a cacophony of insanity, there is Daryl Davis, a compassionate revolutionary. His Wikipedia page offers many clues as to how he survived being brought up in modern techno-industrial society, unlike almost everyone else. Other ten-year-olds may be sane, but he managed to retain some grasp of reality and not be subsumed into one ideology or another.
Daryl's father, a retired senior Foreign Service officer, believed that his son engaged with the Klan because he needed to make sense of their hatred, to seek common ground, that his son "has done something that I don't know any other black American, or white American, has done." Father knows best. Not being a follower makes it much more likely to not be misled.
As Daryl says, he didn't convert anyone. Faced with reality, the what-is in front of their face, they converted themselves. This is what works. Daryl is not a scientist, but what he does is citizen science. "What I have come to find to be the greatest and most effective and successful weapon that we can use, known to man, to combat such adversaries as ignorance, racism, hatred, violence, [error and illusion] is also the least expensive weapon, and the one that is the least used by Americans. That weapon is called communication." Nobel Peace Prize anyone?
Davis is a Socrates: self-educationed without being schooled, doubt, inquiry, and exposure to what's out there beyond the prattleverse we now live in. No guns or bombs required. No 'us' vs 'them' imagined solutions. His assumption is that no two people are different in kind, and I'm guessing he would agree, considering the evidence, that humans are not different in kind from any other animal/plant/metazoan/protist/prokaryote or virus.
Whether prions or viruses are 'life' or 'living' beings, or White people are human, we can communicate about that and maybe agree we don't know enough to have an opinion. We hubris hu-mans are not functional humans as our pre-empire building ancestors would likely agree if they could view how we hu-mans of NIMH live, especially in overdensity urbanscapes, for a time.
Daryl, as benefactor of humankind, offers a video for consideration.
There are the right-leaning extremists who are not anti-capitalist, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, anti-American, but they also seek to remake the world in their own image. On all other points they are the same.
No human capable of joining a mass movement can see the above as applying to themselves or their tribal others. See Eric Hoffer’s book ‘The True Believer’ (or history) who speculated that a mass movement could do more good than harm, but couldn't convincingly name one that had.
I once had concerns about the emerging regressive left's ideology turning into another Cultural Revolution, but the term has now been embraced by the right-winged as a pejorative term for all liberals who by their reckoning are all regressive leftists. So forget any repetitive use of words in Newspeak as they change from mouth to mouth and from month to month. Reality is more about seeing/listening than thinking/opining or chant and cant.
