Make America Somalia Again.

Link on à-bas-le-ciel: https://youtu.be/iWz3ds_uz1Y

Link to the same video on my comedy channel, Zel from the Cove, although with hilariously different hashtags: https://youtu.be/laGvRSUi4TQ

In Politics and in War, Every Allegory is a False Allegory: the Pencil and the Long Polearm.

❝We should never forget that politics concerns survival, and not only in the narrowest sense of food and shelter: how we are to have meaningful lives is a category of questions that must be asked and answered politically.  Without politics, these words mean nothing at all.❞

"In our philosophy of education, you must know this: some will say that the best way to train a new recruit is to begin with a long, wooden pole, showing him how to use pikes and polearms to then progress by degrees through swords and maces, until you reach the point of instructing him on the art of survival with the smallest knife, finally showing him how to struggle with his bare hands, when he has no weapons at all.  There is another philosophy that begins with what is closest to one's own skin, proceeding step by step through the use of weapons that are more remote, so that the reflexes that are first learned with the bare hand later come to be practiced with a knife, and then are extended to swords and spears. Each ability is a preparation for learning the others, but each can be an obstruction to gaining competence in the others, also.  Some instructors would say that the students who've mastered combat at a stave's distance will never really learn to fight with their bare hands --and, vice versa, those who've mastered the method of the knife may be stuck with a misleading way of thinking about the motion of a long spear."

"Sometimes the problem may simply be that confidence in one skill results in a contemptuous attitude toward studying another, but in many cases people earnestly try to learn a new art (setting confidence and contempt aside) only to find themselves trapped in a way of thinking, a way of perceiving, and a way of moving --from moment to moment-- that they can never quite overcome.  One man may drive a car as if it's a truck, another may drive a truck as if it's a car: the reflexes of the body and the habits of the mind cannot be easily learned again, starting from a blank sheet of paper.  Instead, all too easily, one set of skills provides a template for the text, distorting and limiting our learning, even as we imagine ourselves better prepared for each new challenge by whatever we'd learned before. What we learn from the science of peace cannot easily be applied to the science of war, nor can an inference be made from the art of war about any other art."

"Each skill fails as an analogy for the others, just as learning to draw with a pencil fails to train you to sculpt with a chisel and stone.  Hypothetically, at least, an artist might lose some of his ability to draw in gaining the ability to sculpt, as the reflexes react in a very different way, from one moment to the next, and the eye is trained to see differently --while the hand and the eye condition the mind to think differently.  The placement of ink on paper is a process of addition, whereas the chiseling away of flakes of stone creates an image through subtraction."

"This thing we call democracy: should people learn what it is at a spear's distance, as a kind of allegory for what's most immediate to them (what is, frankly, involved in their own direct struggle for survival) or should they begin with learning the equivalent of 'fighting with their bare hands', to later try to master the art that's more indirect and remote? The negotiation of international treaties, and all the bombastic abstractions used to justify the beginnings and endings of wars, does the study of these things provide us with an education in what we need to know to engage in direct democracy, at the local level?  The disputes at city hall about sewage treatment plants, parking spaces, or the dotted lines on the map within which the police tolerate overt prostitution and drug dealing, would any amount of experience in this theater prepare you to deal with the history of America's Cambodian Wars, or the possible future of America's Chinese Wars? What we learn from subtraction cannot be applied to addition, not even as an allegory: practice with the chisel doesn't prepare us for the use of the pen."

"Who, today, has the preparation (with the hand or the chisel or the sword) to bring about a revolution in our system of education, or in our system of policing, or even to recognize the revolution that would be necessary in both, in response to the simplest complaints about police brutality?  You cannot pretend that this is one art, with a mere difference in scale: drawing may be extended from a small page to cover a large wall, and sculpting may be extended from a small stone to a huge boulder.  We are not merely extending in scale, when switching between the bare hand and the sword."

The answer, as is so often the case in political philosophy, is really a critique of the question: "No matter how many hundreds of students you have in the martial arts, no matter how carefully you may track the outcomes of their education, you will never be able to measure out a definite conclusion on the matter, as to whether you should begin at the end or end at the beginning.  Whether it is better to begin with a long spear or a short blade depends entirely on the interest of the student (most likely, in our history, a teenage boy, although now these things include all others, in gender and age).  If the student is, at the beginning of the process, fascinated by fighting with spears, his enthusiasm for beginning at that end of the spectrum will be more important than any asymmetry in how easy it may seem to extend the skill of the bare hand outward (to the spear and the sword) as opposed to inward (from the long pike to the palm and fingertip)."

"In politics and in war, every allegory is a false allegory: we do not learn by extending one skill to another --but we think we do.  Most often, the student and the teacher both presume that they are applying what they learned with one thing to another, but, in fact, they are starting again with each weapon in learning an entirely new art: what we imagine to be a difference in scale entails a difference in style, in skill, in substance, with the profundity of that difference being obscured by sharing the same category.  We fool ourselves into thinking the same skill is shared by the butterknife and the sword, and we have fooled ourselves for centuries into thinking we understand democracy because we understand politics.  Politics is a long polearm."

Now this next part I wouldn't bother explaining to these birds, as they learn by observation, neither working with teachers nor working as teachers themselves, but I say to you, as one ape to another, that this delusion exists for a good reason.  We are not extending the student's skill, in moving from one sense of scale to the next, but we are extending his or her interest: the teacher must know how to stretch the student's interest without moving beyond its limits into disaffection, demoralization and boredom.

If someone is fascinated by what they can do with a pencil, an educator might motivate them to take up the tedious process of working with a chisel and a block of stone, although the enjoyment of one provides no valid template for the other: it is the interest in learning that is extended from one skill to the next, not the skill itself.  There are some teenagers who are fascinated by the abstractions of human rights; they are motivated to study politics by their first awareness of "crimes against humanity" on an enormous scale (becoming engrossed in the drama of televised tribunals, for example).  The educator's role, then, is to extend their interest, step by step, down to the smallest scale of the local prisons, orphanages, hospitals and schools, where the abstract discourse about "human rights" simultaneously becomes both more and less absurd. If a student only cares about the tangible difference they can make in the real world, they will need to learn how this is related to abstract questions of philosophy and remote examples from ancient history, whereas the student who approaches politics primarily through philosophical reasoning and the study of history will need to learn how this becomes meaningful through the struggle they can engage in with their own hands. Whether it is better to first understand the work of your own hands or the far end of the spear is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, some other teenager might be motivated to study politics by a particular example of police brutality that impacted his own life, or by the simple recognition that the prisons, hospitals and schools he has seen for himself (in his own neighborhood) are not awful by mere happenstance, but as a consequence of definite political decisions that could be studied and become known.  In this case, the teacher should work to extend the student's interest outward, although the skill needed to understand politics at each successive scale (at each "order of magnitude") cannot really be applied to the next.

Something that seems inspirational at a distance could become a tedious chore when it is so immediate as to require the work of your own hands; but, for another sort of character, taking pride in his or her own handiwork seems natural, whereas abstractions on the horizon are inscrutable rather than inspiring, offering only an unwanted distraction from the task at hand.  It is the teacher's art to extend the student's motivation from one skill to the next, even if that student's motivation is no more altruistic than fear, yearning for revenge, or the desire for money, fame, power, respect and sex.

We should never forget that politics concerns survival, and not only in the narrowest sense of food and shelter: how we are to have meaningful lives is a category of questions that must be asked and answered politically.  Without politics, these words mean nothing at all.  Without politics, we neither contribute to a civilization nor subtract from it.  Without any connection to a polity, we live and die like spiders, each one tending its own web: whatever brings us joy or sorrow is merely self-indulgence, with no significance beyond the limits of the tiny, woven trap where we find ourselves perpetually at the center.  A meaningful life begins and ends as a political position; a meaningful death is a political statement, whether in peace or war; you do not choose your face or your fate, but what we decide, politically, is who we truly are.  And I say this with real sympathy for all the teenagers who tried to study political philosophy, with or without a teacher, and ended up with only the most meaningless preparatory courses (and pep talks) on how to be a social worker, a journalist, or a legal secretary.  It was the meaning of life itself they were reaching out for --even if their only motivations had been fear, revenge, money, fame, power, respect and sex.

So I ask my court of impatient judges: "Can you really tell me that it would be unreasonable for the people of New Orleans to tear down the justice system they've got, and to experiment with creating some other system, however slapdash, in those conditions?" […]

[This is not the end of chapter five: the narrative now returns to New Orleans, with a tale of police brutality and political incompetence that makes these questions of local democracy and reform of education seem much more urgent and much less abstract.]

Freelee Killed Charlie Kirk.

It has been more than ten years since Freelee's video dared to ask the question of whether or not meat eaters deserved to live, with the reciprocal (more blunt) implication being that all non-vegans should be compelled to be vegan or else (in her words, not mine) deserved to die.  Within the vegan movement, people still talk about this video as if it were yesterday, but it was many yesterdays ago, and I'd have to presume that people under 25 would now have no memory of it at all.  Of course, it must live on through satire.  #satire #comedy #satireisnotcomedy #vegan #vegans #veganism #charliekirk #erikakirk

Everything you're saying is a lie: political science, how not why.

"I'm making a statement about a type of danger that doesn't arise from false facts. It doesn't arise from factually incorrect information. It's a more profound problem in our attitude." A fifty minute lecture on how to think about politics, in ways both shallow and profound. And, yes, it just happens to include a critique of Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

"The problem is not that you believe the wrong things, but that you blame the wrong things: this is an error in the precedence of your reasoning."

LINK: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3dYtFlbp5j9ZG9yKrr7fF4

14:37 "What these people didn't suspect, during those years, when money, fame, power, respect and sex seemed to be so easily gotten (by becoming a mouthpiece, by becoming a leader for the vegan movement)… what they did not suspect was that when the freak show stopped there would be no show at all."

In a culture of cocaine addicts, for example, the one man who refuses to use cocaine is insane.

[A question from a member of the audience:]

Did you wish death upon Anna Scanlon, saying you hope her lupus will kill her? 

[More than one person has this name: the particular Anna Scanlon being alluded to was interviewed by the mainstream press in 2018 because of a court case with an internet personality then called the Vegan Cheetah.  Hopefully this doesn't cast a shadow over the lives of several unrelated people with the same name who, I notice, now pop up in response to the same google searches.  If you wanted to know more, you could take a glance at my old video, Where are they now? Vegan Cheetah (Charles Marlowe) —a video that has over ten thousand views, reflecting the scale of his former fame, although he is now forgotten.]

——— 

On the contrary,

I told her, "Hell is real, Anna: there are neither gods nor souls, and yet here I am, trying to lead an army, to break down the gates of hell."

["People like you are trying to pray your way out of hell, while I'm trying to kick down the gates and fight my way in."]

Quite a poetic statement, under the circumstances:

https://a-bas-le-ciel.blogspot.com/2023/08/anna-scanlon-is-scumbag-and-hypocrite.html

By all means, feel free to send me a link to some of your writing, Brandy.

I'm easily impressed.

———

Speaking of that, I just read through it and at the end, you mentioned her condition but it didn't look like you wished death upon her, if that's the email she was talking about, unless there is something I haven't seen. I don't quite understand what she did to you that was so bad though.

———

Anna Scanlon is (1) dishonest, (2) insane and (3) motivated by malice.

You will find I am the opposite of these three things.

My honesty may offend you. But I'm honest. I do not even claim it's a virtue rather than a vice, this kind of honesty. But I'm honest.

My sanity, also, is obnoxious to everyone, because I live in a cultural context that requires me to be insane. In a culture of cocaine addicts, for example, the one man who refuses to use cocaine is insane.

And, finally, you will figure out —sooner or later— that I am not motivated by malice, despite the rather salacious titles that often adorn my articles and youtube videos.

I repeat my request for an example of your own writing, Brandy: I am not interested in talking to you if you're an anonymous person with no ambition to accomplish anything —and you would first need to be ambitious as a writer to accomplish anything at all.

Repercussions: will there be consequences for a century of indigenous identity fraud? Other voices on the pretendian problem.

This one is only five minutes long, but includes an interesting hypothesis about spiritual bankruptcy, emphasizing the extent to which fraud of this kind is motivated by intangible factors, not merely career opportunities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ozv5bd7gC0

This video, above, was supposed to deal with the fate of Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and the participants apparently cannot deal with that question directly, but instead veer off into declarations about abstractions and the narration of generalities.

Here's a longer discussion, without a focus on any one case study (although Turpel comes up as an example).

Note the use of the word "tentacles" within the first few minutes of this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6LyHSXxt8Q

Nobody is dealing with the unholy pentacle of (1) money, (2) fame, (3) power, (4) respect and (5) sex. I've said many times that merely identifying as a medical student changes the experience of your university years: just telling people that you will be a medical doctor in future changes the way you're perceived, even if you're penniless and powerless while you're still in school. The effects of pretendianism are much more profound.

To what extent people like Turpel-Lafond should be analyzed as cold blooded manipulators and to what extent they were hot blooded but genuinely insane remains unasked and unanswered.

❦ Addendum ❦

I would just note: she has not stopped lying.  After paying a $10,000 fine and admitting to "a series of false public claims about her accomplishments and history" Turpel-Lafond has proceed to tell new lies that are impossible to reconcile with already-public evidence.  Not all of the lies are… genetic in character: "For example, she claimed to have authored a book that was never published, claimed to have received an honorary degree that she never received and claimed to have a degree that she hadn't earned."  The source here only dealt with lies she's told "since 2018" —which is really too little too late.  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/experts-question-meaning-turpel-lafond-reported-dna-analysis-1.7276028

It is interesting that nobody asks what her husband has ever had to say about this matter: one way or another, he knew.

Prolegomena to a Massacre: revolution and the reform of education.

In the plainest language possible, let me ask: if "the establishment" isn't good enough, why not just improve it?  Whether we're talking about the justice system, the health care system, or the education system, there will usually be some number of intransigent people within the institution who will make it impossible to improve if we do not destroy it first --or, temptingly, if we do not destroy them first.

This is a temptation most revolutionaries indulge in, sooner or later, as you may have noticed: a massacre is more easily carried out than systematic reform. And the results may seem more immediately gratifying to the supporters of the revolution even if (in the long term) the violence accomplishes nothing positive at all.

The promise of revolution is reciprocal with the reality of institutional intransigence: in our ignorance, we choose to believe in one as a desperate attempt to deal with the other. If you complain that the system of divorce courts (or tax paperwork, or parking tickets, etc.) is needlessly complex (needlessly costly, corrupt, unfair, etc.) every expert in the field will tell you that a revolution would be required to compel anything (or anyone) to change. And they say this knowing that they represent one and the same intransigent establishment that the revolution would massacre. I wonder if I have ever met a single university professor who did not --in this way-- advocate for their own extinction. They are dinosaurs demanding asteroids do the hard work for them: it would be so much easier to disappear than adapt and evolve. Institutions cannot change because the people within them do not want to change: the intransigence of individuals creates the need for a revolution where nothing revolutionary is necessary at all. These same dinosaurs demanded that we defund the police, not evolve with them, entailing two extinctions --a disappearance with a difference.

And institutional resistance to change can come "from below" just as much as "from above": in some cases, wealthy bureaucrats may support fundamental reform while lower echelons of the staff resist it, whereas, in other cases, the elite controlling an institution refuse to change while all the other employees demand it.

If you were to answer the question of why a particular prison can't be improved, your research is unlikely to reveal a cabal of millionaires who have been benefitting from its mismanagement, intentionally sabotaging every attempt at improvement --although, I admit, such a thing would not be entirely unprecedented, if that turned out to be the case for the particular prison you were investigating. When I was in Cambodia, I knew a few researchers who insisted, dogmatically, that they'd seen instances of corruption in medical programs that really were at this level of cartoonish supervillainy.

If you were to interview the teachers at a school that's commonly admitted to be the worst in the city of New Orleans, each one may offer several different explanations for what exactly has gone wrong with the institution, or they may stand mute, dumbfounded, and offer no explanation at all.  Some of the teachers may be activists demanding change, some may fight against efforts to improve the school (as contrary to their own interests) but --generally-- they will never suspect that they themselves are the problem that must be fixed. Their analysis will always indicate that the source of the problem is upward, outward, elsewhere, beyond. Some will feel that the students cannot be blamed, others will feel that blaming the students is essential to their dignity as educational professionals.

The teachers themselves, the policemen themselves, the judges themselves… it is certainly very easy to blame particular people without any understanding of what's wrong with the institution, without any detailed diagram of how it should be improved. Perhaps we do not even have metrics to measure improvement. Perhaps we can neither quantify the incompetence of the people we're firing, nor the competence of whoever we're hiring as their replacements.

It couldn't possibly be that we're unsystematically hiring people who agree with our own political biases, just like that other regime did before. It couldn't possibly be that our notion of "reform" is nothing more than one generation of nepotists replacing another. In this way, when revolutionaries use themselves as the standards of excellence, their revolutions fizzle out after merely eliminating particular people who fail to live up to that endlessly flexible, utterly subjective standard, without any substantive innovation ensuing to create better institutions with better measurable outcomes. The only outcome they care about is replacing one elite with another that (in some sense) resembles themselves.

Understanding education and credentialization as the engine of social inequality, both creating our elites and creating our consent to be ruled by them, the challenge of appointing better-qualified people who will be responsible for the creation of the next generation of better-qualified people seems incredibly daunting to aspiring revolutionaries and reformers alike. The problem cannot be reduced to a schematic assessment of what any given institution "is".

Our residential school system in Canada (that is only now being denounced as genocidal in the popular press, after several generations of noncommittal eyebrow-raising) would seem eminently respectable if examined only as a blueprint --as a mere schematic.  The quality of education provided to our indigenous people (be it "residential" or not) was deplorable if measured by its outcomes; but who indeed was measuring the outcomes? To whom was it obvious that the blueprint was misleading? The schematic view of a social system tells you only what it "is", not how it works: a blueprint of some oceanside hotel-and-casino might look like paradise --or, if detailed enough, could be an anthropological study of the perfect society. Paradise for some. Genocide for others.

What exactly is right with the best school in Japan and what is wrong with the worst school in Louisiana is difficult to depict in a flowchart (and may be completely concealed when looking at a primary source document in detail: comparing the actual textbooks used, comparing the actual exams written, for example).

What is wrong with Communist education, Christian education, etc., may not be visible in a flowchart at all. And, despite my cautioning against the tendency as too often entailing massacres, the thorough analysis of any given institution may conclude by thoroughly blaming the particular people who happen to be teachers after all.

The incompetence (or evil) of particular authority figures may be a more meaningful target of critique than anything that we can truly say "is" the institution, existing as something separable from those all-too-human forces. In politics, we often say reform when we mean replace: if the Communists replace all the Christian teachers, have they reformed the system of education?

The most inefficient way to improve a prison, a school system, etc., is to demolish it first, planning a new one with nothing but a blank sheet of paper soon thereafter. If you don't have a definite idea of what went wrong with the system you've just demolished, it's entirely possible you'll make all the same mistakes over again, or create an institution that's even worse for unrelated reasons. The aesthetics of an emergency can serve as a substitute for a plan, or even a new idea; and in the absence of an actual revolution, these demolitions can create a convenient emergency. Inefficient and inevitable, in equal measure.

The French demolished the Bastille without any plan for a better prison system: we may demolish innumerable institutions to overcome the intransigence that has made them immutable without any expectation that we can do better than our ancestors did before. And the French still celebrate the anniversary of that demolition, in 1789, without celebrating any supposed improvement in prison conditions thereafter. The revolution liberated political prisoners, yes, but then made new prisoners out of new political enemies: the Marquis de Condorcet died in a prison cell (and a prison system) no less medieval than the one that existed before 1789. The darkness of the dark ages does not end with demolition, but only with light: the darkness that defined the Bastille was not yet destroyed --not yet made obsolete by any better idea. The new regime was not ashamed of the barbarism of the old prison conditions, they merely replaced the people in the prisons: we had not yet started to regard ourselves as barbarians, burning down one Bastille to build another.

The intransigence of our elites, the intransigence of our bureaucrats, the intransigence of employees at even the humblest level, can make it so difficult to bring about improvements (or even to experiment with new solutions for longstanding problems) that some kind of demolition starts to seem necessary from the very first phase --in the absence of any understanding of what exactly the institution's problems might be. Whether we're talking about decentralizing schools or collectivizing agriculutre, this revolutionary inefficiency is always (always!) justified with promises of future efficiency --short-term brutality justified with promises of future liberty.

When you increase the scale of the problem and speak of many different institutions being demolished all at once, you find yourself talking about a revolution, even if you have no idealized notion of what "better thing" should be built upon the rubble after the demolition is done.

The particular kind of revolution I'm discussing is the destruction of the system of education that entitles the rulers to rule, while training others to resign themselves to be ruled.  It is the unquestioned "ordering" of society (putting some people in the position of making decisions and others in the position of following commands) that is challenged, questioned and then redefined in a revolution, as I'm using the word. I would emphasize that word "unquestioned" before "ordering": almost nobody researches the education that creates police officers. It is incredibly rare for students to read the PhD theses of their professors, questioning how they became qualified. And politicians research neither one.

Disassembling the gears of a working clock is quite an easy, relaxing activity, if you undertake the task with the assumption that you'll never need to reassemble it again. It is much more stressful for someone who is aware that each element they remove will need to be replaced with another part that works equally well, if not better. To repair clockwork, if purely destructive, is child's play --not unlike political reform.

If we now demolish all of the fossil-fuel-burning power plants, we might optimistically imagine that they'd be replaced with something better, but optimism isn't nearly so powerful as obsolescence. When we have something new that really is better, the significance of abandoning and demolishing the obsolete model does not resemble this "revolutionary inefficiency" I've been warning you about: if decentralized education or collectivized agriculture actually had been more productive (while also being less oppressive, or liberating in some sense of the term) there would have been nothing revolutionary about either one. Improvements to efficiency can be integrated into every level of society as innocuously as the invention and improvement of the wristwatch. Instead, like Galileo's theory of the tides, it was their inefficiency that made them revolutionary: these ideas were a challenge to the elite (as Galileo challenged the Vatican) on the basis of a theory that didn't work --or didn't even exist.

The Maoists persecuted innumerable teachers without ever coming up with a better idea of what exactly a teacher ought to be; they found it easy to condemn the Confucian tradition, but never came up with a new idea as to how they should organize the system of education. They ended up imitating the Americans. Look, now, at the revolution in Vietnam, that was even more expressly anti-European and anti-American while wrestling with a similar mix of Confucian and Buddhist traditions: did they, with their one hundred million minds, produce a new model for education, while the Chinese, with their one billion, have failed to? As shallow and insincere as the excuses for students interrogating and killing their teachers may have been, nevertheless, in studying even the most laughable failures in the history of revolution, we're left with the profound question of what makes a teacher a teacher, what makes a judge a judge, and so on.

Merely assigning new commanders to an army could never be revolutionary, not even if the old commanders are put on trial for crimes against humanity --not even if an insurrection in the barracks massacres a generation of generals. If, instead, you change the system of military education while redefining the criteria for advancement (i.e., how leaders are selected, how enlisted men can earn their promotions, etc.) then you may be looking at a real revolution, even if nobody fires a shot.  Revolutions (big and small) question the credentials that define the elite to then create new systems and standards --rather than merely replacing particular people.

At the risk of repeating myself, I say again: in a revolution, as I'm using the term, the unquestioned order of society becomes questioned, and some attempt is made to redefine how people are prepared for their positions of power, even if it is the power of a schoolteacher, a policeman, a prison guard, or a judge.  There may indeed be a meaningful question to be asked of what makes a good soldier, who is deserving of promotion, and of how this might now, in the 21st century, differ from any prior century, entailing sweeping institutional reform.  Would we be willing to ask the same question of teachers, professors, doctors, police officers, prison guards or any other positions of authority, in our times?  And would we be willing to deal with the intransigence of those who'd be opposed to anyone even daring to ask that question?

In the creation of Afghan democracy, if the American army had torn down the government of the Taliban in the capital and chased out their soldiers from the larger towns into the countryside while allowing the whole population to continue to be educated (only) in Taliban schools (madrasas, etc.), how much cultural and political change could have possibly ensued?  How much or how little democracy could have been created, at the cost of so many billions of dollars, if the Taliban had just retained control of the schools? It is easy enough for Americans to say, "the future of democracy in Afghanistan relies on education", implicitly meaning that it relies on worldly, scientific, atheistic education intended to undermine the legitimacy of the Taliban, and yet it remains very difficult for Americans to say the same thing about themselves: to admit that the future of their own democracy relies on education --and on a type of education that would disrupt the cultural assumptions and religious traditions of their own great-grandparents. We cannot yet see our own barbarity: that the American people could conquer and civilize themselves remains unthinkable.

This kind of disruption cannot happen just once: if it does, democracy disappears within a generation, as it did in France after Napoleon.  The intransigence and immutability of educational institutions (and of the people in power within them) is a recurring obstacle to democracy, even if we are just considering the task of sustaining an already-existing "paper democracy" without any great ambitions for it to be more profoundly democratic.

Neither in Afghanistan nor in Canada will you find schoolteachers with the iconoclastic spirit necessary to challenge the next generation to do what the last one could not do for them. Instead, you'll find only dull-eyed conformists who are, within their own cultural milieu, equivalent to the Taliban.

If we're holding an academic debate about the possible future of some "exotic" country, every expert standing at the podium will readily admit the absurdity of creating "formal democracy" in the absence of "necessary" cultural and educational changes for the masses, but we're reluctant to question the extent to which we're living in a merely formal democracy ourselves, with the specific nature of that formality hinting at "necessary" changes that have yet to unfold.

Throughout the decadent west, the praxis of democracy relies on new phases of "disruptive" education withinin each generation, just as much as it does in poverty-stricken countries trying to make their first transition from dictatorship to "paper democracy".  In our private lives, also, taking responsibility for our actions is not a lesson we learn just once; in our public lives, what it means to take responsibility (for the fate of the republic, shall we say, to be a bit outré) is something we must learn again and again, within each generation, and in the transition between generations even more.  We are too close to the problem to see it clearly when situated comfortably within our own culture, in the same way that parents refuse to see the problem with putting their own children into football and ice hockey leagues, no matter how many life-altering injuries ensue: familiar evils ensconced in tradition are asserted as morally good, and are demanded of the school system (how could they possibly neglect the teaching of these sports, that meant so much to our parents and grandparents!) while absolutely nobody is concerned with how education might be failing to prepare their children to present a complaint at city hall --or even to deal with a routine police interrogation.  It is much more comforting to preach the virtues of democracy to Myanmar than to preach it to ourselves.  It certainly gives Americans a sense of pride to reproach the Russians and the Iranians for the tenuousness of their claim to being a democracy (merely because they have elections, "on paper") and it might be humiliating, instead, to reflect on what we have in common with our enemies.

The shallowness of democracy in Afghanistan indicates the depth of educational and cultural change that would be "necessary" for democracy to function there. The shallowness of our own democracy has similar implications for our own immediate future --implications that are neither discussed nor dreamed of.

We would rather not think through the cultural and educational requirements that would make our own claims to democracy more than mere fiction; we are reluctant to recognize that we might lack the very accoutrements that separate the civilized world from savagery --by which I mean the self-serving justifications that grant us our unflappable sense of moral superiority when we compare ourselves to the Chinese, for example.  When our thoughts turn to the hypothetical future of Myanmar or Afghanistan, no civilized person would propose that they merely change the procedures and processes within government (in "the civil service", etc.) while ignoring the procedures and processes of education and cultural change outside the government's walls. The ways in which we ourselves must still change if we are even to have democracy at the local level remain unthinkable to us.

If the police murder a man in cold blood, the ensuing debate never touches on direct democracy; generally, it never touches on what "we" must do, in governing our own deme, but only on what "they" must do on our behalf (i.e., the nameless, well-paid professionals of our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy).  We are fascinated by the nebulous abstractions of international politics and "human rights" because we presume we've accomplished something great just in choosing between two candidates for Prime Minister, leaving the whole praxis of democracy aside for the bureaucrats to carry out on our behalf thereafter. Unlike the Chinese or the Saudi Arabians, we imagine, we are not ruled over by mere men (not by aristocrats, not by apparatchiks) but instead by such fine abstractions as "human rights" --by the ideology of our unelected bureaucracy.  Any research into how direct democracy operates at the local scale of the nearest 100,000 people (i.e., a population greater than all of Periclean Athens and the Piraeus combined) will reveal the extent to which our democracy is a kind of fiction --and the fault in authoring this fiction, nightmarish in its implications, is not "theirs" but "ours", here and now. And it takes nothing less than the police committing and covering up a murder to force us to even notice the unreality of this democracy: we pretend to be amazed at former generations who thought so little about the suffering of household slaves, dismissing them as nothing more than "talking tools" (instumenta vocalia) and yet we are so comfortable with being "silent tools" ourselves (instumenta muta).

All relationships outside of the family are learned through education, all responsibilities, all roles, and, with the passage of just a few decades, formal education transforms family relationships, religious relationships, etc., just as palpably as it transforms the economy, public health, and so on.  "Teacher" and "student" are roles created by the government, along with "doctor" and "patient", just as deliberately as every military rank and honor: what it is "to be a good soldier" is ultimately the effect of government policy --and what it is "to be a good man", "to be a good father", etc., emerges in much the same way, although it is worrying for us to admit this to ourselves.  Inevitably, a revolution changes all of these things in the same way that revolutions change the notion of what is "a good policeman", "a good judge", or "a good jailer", even if there is not a single word iterating what the new standard ought to be in any constitution or manifesto.

If the education system does not change, there is no revolution to speak of: Afghanistan remains Taliban so long as the schools are Taliban, even if "a paper democracy" is created "on top", and China remains Communist so long as the schools are Communist, even if the whole country were to adopt the kind of "paper democracy" that Hong Kong now has "on top".  If we change our notion of "what it means to be a man", we must also adjust our preconception of "what it means to be a policeman" --with implications for what it means to be a good teacher in the training (and credentialing) of policemen and innumerable other authority figures.

[This is not the end of chapter 5: the text continues in another excerpt, posted to this blog a few days later with the allegory of the long polearm.]

Pretendian Politics: Thomas King v Jesse Wente.

With supporting roles for Michelle Latimer, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ1gF8sLIyU

This is one hour long so, naturally, it will be shared both on youtube and also as a podcast.

The Politics of Pretendian-ism Continue in Canada: Thomas King.

The last time I mentioned this (on Patreon) feels like a very, very long time ago.

"From 1997 to 2000, King wrote and acted in a CBC radio show, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour…" —it is really impossible for any of you to imagine how influential this was (1) for the Cree people and (2) for the tiny minority of white people who cared about the fate of the Cree people and their language at that time.

Radio itself, as a medium, doesn't matter in the same way anymore, but in 1997 it hadn't yet been devoured by the internet. And, of course, the very nature of that medium entailed that I knew Thomas King by his voice, only, and I never saw his face.

That show explicitly addressed the extent to which King was an outsider who struggled to find a foothold in Cree culture, in contrast to Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hand, who were insouciant in their self-confidence —and who spoke English with the indescribable Cree accent that many pretendians (including Buffy Sainte-Marie) have tried (and failed) to imitate. He was presented as an indigenous person who had the advantages and disadvantages of an urban education, having assimilated into English-speaking culture and lost touch with what had presumably been —at some earlier stage— his own culture. I do not recall hearing an episode in which he discussed being (ostensibly) Cherokee rather than Cree, but I did not hear every episode, and my recollection may be imperfect.

The show was both implicitly and explicitly politically provocative, while being genuinely comedic —and, above all, warm. It was a rare example of warm, well-intentioned comedy, in an era of mean-spirited (and largely self-indulgent) satire.

The recordings of that radio show are a huge percentage of "the literature" worth talking about: it was certainly more politically significant than Wapos Bay.

Here's APTN covering the news in 5 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynoyTD6u6w

And APTN discussing it in a roundtable format for 14 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPiX6SJvD4

———Appendix A———

Michelle Latimer —also a proven pretendian— worked with Thomas King on the following film and —I observe— the two have offered closely parallel excuses for their pretendianism (claiming —implausibly— that they didn't lie themselves but were merely misled by lies told to them by their own parents).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconvenient_Indian

…aaaaaand you can see Michelle Latimer weeping on stage while dramatically making false claims about her own culture, politics and ancestry starting nine minutes and thirty seconds into THIS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEl-A8_2Gk

[Other voices:] Little do they realize, when the freak show is over, there will be no show at all.

The wording, in the book, is, in fact:

The younger generation celebrates the mainstreaming of the movement, failing to realize: when veganism ceases to be a freak show, it ceases to be a show at all.

I have also described this as a kind of "game show", luring in contestants just to humiliate them on camera.

There has been less and less interest in veganism for many years now, with this genre being "the sole surviving genre" of (formerly diverse, fractious and fragmentary) vegan edutainment. I cannot say that this sort of thing is popular, but there's a lot of it.

Here is "The Militant Vegan", trying to succeed playing the same game by the same rules:

https://www.youtube.com/@themilitantvegan/videos

Both of these examples happen to be women making money out of their physical appearance via internet pornography. This is a recurrent pattern (as I've observed and discussed many times) with important political implications.