Sunday, January 19, 2014

Can we prevent a Hunger Games future?

I finally went to see "The Hunger Games" part II. My problem in watching it is that I can't help but think this is where our future is headed as a country unless we improve our government and make it more constitutional in spirit as opposed to lip service, and more democratic and locally run. The movie shows the evils of too much centralization and an all powerful bureaucratic police state. At the same time, this episode was a bit more hopeful as it showed the people starting to push back against the lies and deceptions of a media-propaganda based police state. Top down government has inherent evils, and without bottom up structures like representation in the legislature and judiciary, it eventually evolves into something really ugly as is depicted in the books and the movie. If we want a better world we'd best prevent the de-evolution of our country into pure plutocracy. We are already half way there. I've seen the Hollywood types already building games that resemble the Hunger games. And as we see what is happening in Detroit and other cities, it's not implausible. Just under our current system it's likely to be 50 central cities with hunger games going on rather than one nationwide one; maybe with a championship each year with 100 contestants...

Walk on the Darkside, or the light?

Do we walk in the darkness, or in the light?

The human condition is that we are all on a walk. Some of us walk on the darkside and some of us walk where there is light. Those who walk in the dark do so for a lot of reasons: greed, anger, fear, pain. If they only hurt themselves, they deserve all our love and pity and we ought to help them. But when they hurt others they have to be stopped or taken down politically. When people are walking on the darkside or dancing on the skulls of suffering people we have to love them enough to know them, walk in their shoes, and defeat them.

Nature

Anyone who has ever done any hunting or natural observation knows that the best hunters love their enemy so well they can predict their movements. A good hunter loves his target. His empathy and sympathy doesn't translate to sparing it because he knows that it's life is short anyway and that he needs to eat or use it's meat to live. Most natural hunters rationalize this with the notion that the animal will be "Reborn." When one kills an animal in conflict, they consider it a brother and mourn that they have to kill it. Killing is only murder in the state of nature when it is done out of spite, hatred, or is directed at "brother man". In a state of nature survival means making others life go dark so that one can survive. One can mitigate this by living as a vegetarian, but then one either gives one's life to predators or defends from them, so even vegetarians must kill to survive sometimes.

Civilization

In a state of civilization, as Locke demonstrated in his famous book, we don't live like animals. Killing is never right. Running selfish plots that do in others is always walking the darkside. We have to survive too. That brings us into conflict with one another over resources, but the way we resolve conflict in civilization is to trade things we need for things we don't need. We can afford to gift one another and receive gifts in return. We can either live together for the common weal, or we can come into conflict. A virtuous commonwealth is one run for the common weal. The spirit of "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" can actually be a virtuous thing if it applies to everyone in a settlement or collection of settlements.

Advertizing versus Reality

Thus Locke's translation of "res publica" as "commonwealth was a statement of human dignity that epitomizes the human spirit. One can translate it as a a system run for the "common weal" really easy and he meant it to mean that. The latin just translates as "our thing" or a system run by "representation of the public". He knew however that many would see it as "commonwealth" as in the wealth of the commons, and have no problem with aristocrats owning it. But he made the point that in a state of civilization we trust authorities with power on the assumption that they'll uphold their end of the deal. He also made the case that when they violate that trust they neither deserve God nor the people's trust and no longer should hold those offices. People stand up to be officers advertizing that they will live up to principles such as equal application of the law, justice, equity and upholding the commonwealth. In reality the reality has been different from the advertizing since the first war leaders made themselves kings, then made themselves tyrants and emperors, then rewrote the history books to make themselves saints, or died trying. Advertized attributes like "nobility", justice, honor and courage have been defined as much by their violation as their being upheld. But unless a government is run in the common weal of all it's people, the reality is dark and muddy, not bright, clear and shining.

And in our present day, the same buccaneering spirit that drove the pirates and privateers, warriors and robber barons is still Animate. For some the "commonwealth" is motivated by a pirate spirit where the pirate captains keep firm chains on their pirate crew, and try to keep all the loot for themselves. Conservatism as a virtue is about protecting tradition, rule of law, family values, traditional values, and protecting society from violence and upheaval. Our modern cons aren't conservatives they are buccaneers. All that stuff is advertisement. They are really about protecting the property of the wealthy, dispossessing and looting, and darwinian behavior. They might advertise Christian values but they practice con artist values. Good Christians are manipulated by people who confuse them with issues like "right to life" and fears of homosexuality or brown people by people who know the hunting spirit of the "state of nature" and see them as mere tools to be used in reality. Hypocrisy is a term that doesn't even do the behavior justice. We've got a lot of people who have learned machiavellian and Randian philosophy, but pretend to be whatever they need to pretend to be to get power. They aren't conservatives anymore. Most of them are buccaneers and cons. Some of them are so confused they think that literalist religion and Ayn Randian con behavior go together. They don't.

Fighting the Buccaneer spirit

Buccaneers were often ordinary sea-captains who saw an opportunity and knew nobody was looking. Life at sea was difficult. More the "law of nature" than that of civilization. And men went to sea (mostly men) to make their fortunes and took their chances as much with storms and reefs as with other men. Modern businessmen see themselves pretty much as inheritors of the same tradition. J.P. Morgan is reputed to have flown Henry Morgan's Jolly Roger. Even if he never did, the spirit of the early Capitalist barons was never far from the pirate/privateering tradition of Henry Morgan and our founder Robert Morris. Our business teaches people to sell useless things to people. Many business teachers teach folks that they need to be willing to "sell refrigerators to Eskimos" to be effective. Sales and fraud aren't that far apart. And many modern businessmen all walk close to the border between the light and the dark. Turn your back and they train a broadside on people. Modern businessmen make money by bribing politicians, extorting from other politicians, and using the law to establish privileges and usurp resources they otherwise wouldn't have acquired.

Once we understand the buccaneer spirit which motivates the cons presently we can love them as our brothers and fight them well. Once one understands that much of what we are hearing is deliberate deception we can learn to read between the lines and seek to divine what they are really up to. Like the Commissars of Russia or the folks depicted in 1984 what they say is; often the opposite of their intentions, what they project on others is often reflective of their own intentions, and their promises are only not worthless when one has them by their b****. We can predict their next moves by understanding them. Protect the country from default? Only if that protects their investors. National Security? Only if it protects their wrong-doing from being leaked. "Free Trade" = Freebooting. The pirate captains of the world will get together to organize slavery for everyone but will never get along very long because pirates live to fight. Once you see them for the pirates they are, you understand organizations like "Skulls and Bones" and the people who take those solemn vows. They are our brothers of the coast, but until we can force them to treat us as brothers. They are as likely to give us a broadside as trade with us or do their mission with integrity. And our businesses have reinforced that profit, especially short term, rapacious profit, is the God really worshiped.

So we love them enough to beat them in business. Get laws to break up their monopolies, reclaim the commons they've usurped and looted. Recover their loot, and that give bounties to whistleblowers to rat them out. We laugh when they talk about "death taxes" -- as estate taxes are life for the living and not taxing wealth at death just passes unearned privileges they got from us to the next generation. We need to understand that wealth and privilege are earned -- not gained with a broadside of canon (figuratively mostly). We fight them using the same legal powers and privileges that they use against us. By fighting corruption.

We fight the buccaneer spirit at the expense of getting labeled pirates. We fight for the common weal against pirates who have gotten letters legalizing their buccaneering. They are after profits. If we can convince them that they can make more money by doing the right thing -- maybe they'll do it. But absent that we have to beat on them.

I still believe we can change. Nobody should deserve to be cussed out, attacked or put in jail unless they deserve it individually. But when they are walking on the edge of darkside or dancing on the skulls of suffering people we have to stop them for their own sake and ours.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

Why we need a 3000+ county and 100% of towns and cities solution

Labor progressives, Civil Libertarian progressives all need to rally around "good government" progressive efforts. And that starts at the local level. Anyone who pays attention to politics and digs a little, soon finds that even in "liberal" districts with "good" leaders there is a lot of room for process improvement and ethical cleanup. If the Military-Security Industrial complex and Financial monsters dominate at the National level, at the local level their lawyers, investors and developers dominate at local levels. Where-ever there is money to be made developers and corrupt businessmen descend like flies and their maggots test their corrupt chops. The one thing the recent poisoning of West Virginia water supplies, and "Bridgegate" have in common, is local corruption. Bridgegate may be about a high powered lawyer in New Jersey's effort to redevelop his property there. And the company that leaked chemicals poisoning West Virginia Water was formed just before the disaster, filed for bankruptcy, and the "bank" that aided that filing is owned by the same people who owned the now bankrupt company. When Mafia do it it's criminals, when the criminals are corrupt lawyers and insiders it is "getting things done" and perfectly legal. Our country is in trouble.

If we want to clean up politics in this country, we have to start with the local politicians. We either have to put them under a spotlight to keep them honest and push them to always do the right thing, replace them, or find the guts to run against them. Progressives seem oblivious to the corrupt developers, contractors, privateers and thefts going on all around us. What is going on in New Jersey is going on around the country. And what is going on in West Virginia is where the rest of our states are headed if we don't reign in our nascent aristocracy.

It's no accident that some parts of America are poor. There are rich people who use their local power to oppress and steal around the country. They can only be reigned in by local activism and by progressives who care about their local government as much as the Federal Government.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Enemies and Bureaucracy Intro

People misunderstand the "enemy" because they fail to understand that thinking requires us to differentiate between individual, human, very personal "enemies" who are actors on the stage filling roles; and who can change those roles sometimes. Because they fail to understand that we have many "frenemies" in this world who are unreliable friends, unreliable enemies, and sometimes both; but need to be handled with strategy not naevity or anger.

An example of a "frenemy" are your religious Wahabi Arabs. They have a world model that draws its inspiration from the Caliphs of the 8th century. When you see a man dressing like the Prophet, who has memorized the Koran and Haddith, and who lives by those teachings, you are meeting an actor. He probably thinks he's just a religious muslim, but he's acting out an ideology that follows certain rules and demands certain behaviors. If you don't understand him he might send airliners crashing into towers. And he might do it even if you do understand him if your understanding is delusional.

We do have people in this country who think they understand Al Qaeda, and it didn't stop 9/11/2001 because they either saw the Wahabi as all terrorists or trusted them. We still have people who work with the same people who launched 9/11. We are doing it in Syria. Prince Bandar created Al Qaeda, there is no evidence he ever broke with them. There is no point getting paranoid. That is reality. Prince Bandar was stirring up things a little for his Oily friends every bit as much as he was living out 800 year old fantasies; Frenemies. Prince Bandar threatened the Russians in Sochi through his Chechen Clients. The Russians understand. They put millions of people in uniform to protect the place. It probably won't work perfectly. Al Qaeda was not a non-state actor. It works for the Saudis. The Saudis are our friends. Al Qaeda is our enemy. Same people. Who'd figure? We are allied with the Saudis so if A=B and B=C then we are A=C; allied with Al Qaeda. Some of our CIA is.

Certainly if our politicians were brighter folks like Senator McCain would be more careful about praising Jihadists fighting Assad if he knew they were controlled by the same folks who control Al Qaeda. But we humans aren't that simple or that smart. Two different plays by the same author. What the members of Al Qaeda did was personal. What Bandar is doing is treacherous and personal. What Chris Christie did with "Bridge-gate" is both personal and treacherous, and was essentially an act of war on New York City. But I'm sure he's a "loyal" friend. They are all "loyal" Friends. Like Brutus and Julius Caesar.

But the real enemy is never these individuals. Individuals can be corrupt, deluded, vicious, unreliable, friends one day and launching airplanes at buildings the next. But there are forces too. Forces like inertia, entropy, and human equivalents like greed, anger and bureaucracy. The Human equivalents are driven by human frailties and the way people are organized. One of those "forces" is an age-old set of human structures and organizing principles called "Bureaucracy."

Taming or Fighting Bureaucracy

The right is right to fear "large government" but they are delusional in that they don't identify what they mean. If they had a clear genuine intention to do something about "large government" they'd be pushing for less bureaucracy and more democratic government. But they are only against bureaucracy outside law enforcement and big business so you rarely hear them defining terms or clarifying targets. They know that they use bureaucracy and it's structures just as sharply as the left does. And many righties are themselves bureaucrats.

Bureaucracy has structural attributes: Hierarchy, lists, rules, top down direction, bottom down responsibility that make it an ideal vehicle for armies, police, tax collection, or any kind of administration. Bureaucratic governance is a feature of government, and if you see a bureaucracy anywhere you are seeing a government "not a person", but bureaucracy and it's attributes amplify the power and influence of those at the top of their hierarchy. When the right complains about "big government" they talk about features of bureaucratic government:

Laws listed and treated as sacred.
Laws interpreted arbitrarily and applied as regulations with no relationship to real world.
Officials who follow these "laws" and claim they can't use common sense because of the laws.
Common sense treated as corruption depending on who uses it, with those at the top of the hierarchy deciding
Those running hierarchies blaming subordinates for their bad decisions or taking credit for the decisions of subordinates
Corruption seen as perfectly okay by high status officials near top of hierarchy, who interpret the rules
Folks following lists and pursuing organizational objective without any regard to it's impacts on that mission, sometimes long after the organization has lost any resemblance to it's original purpose.

When the right demonize "government programs" they are talking about the particular and peculiar corruptions associated with bureaucratic governance. For example the Byzantines inherited a bureaucratic governance from the Romans that was inherited from Greek Kingdoms who inherited it from the Persians, who inherited it from Babylon! When Byzantium was reduced to one city it had the same bureaucracy and nearly the same numbers as it had had when the city of Constantinople (now Istambul) administered a vast empire. When it fell the Turks and Russians picked up it's bureaucratic organization. Before it fell the Vatican had already copied most of it's features. It influences from the USA to Russia to this day. Other countries have parallel structures and bureaucrats copy each other, but bureaucracy is eternal. There is no getting rid of it completely but it can be reduced from the size of a Brown bear to a Teddy bear with a little reforming. If the Right were talking about turning Brown Bear Bureaucracies to Teddy bear Bureaucracies they'd make sense and people would understand them better.

The way to reduce bureaucracy is by reducing hierarchy, and increasing the power of bottom up representative structures and also raising the accountability of the hierarchs who head bureaucracies. Bureaucrat hierarchs resist both accountability and anything that makes them consult with others and thus reduces their authority, and so there are a million ways that they frustrate or control efforts at reform, but it can be done. Bureaucracy can't be eliminated. Folks pretend to eliminate it all the time, but it doesn't even make sense to try. Al Qaeda is an Arab World that means sort of "the structure." It's a very flat, very loose, and very networked bureaucratic structure. Bureaucracy pops up everywhere, and the biggest bureaucrats are the folks who run giant companies. When we hear righties talking about "reducing government" they aren't talking about reducing bureaucracy, just transferring it's power to their rich patrons.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Letter to my Righty Friends

Hey Guys. It's pretty obvious to me that y'all have been at war with the rest of us for some time. It took a long time for me to figure it out because I'm an American first and thought that everybody in this country, including you guys, believed in Democratic-Republicanism, thought of this country as a commonwealth, and that those who claimed to "believe" in the constitution actually in fact respect and practice it's principles. Boy was I wrong. You guys need to look within the reality of what you are proposing. The only Government small enough to drown in a bathtub are Monarchies. Do you want King Christie, or King Obama, to run everything dictatorial-like? Turns out, Small Government is a bait and switch. What most of us want is participatory democracy, not a King. We want "consent of governed". We want the right to eat, drink, have a roof over the head, and be left free in our homes. And we want that to be a common project not a freebooting operation run by pirate captains who never share their loot. Not all of us of course, but most of us want common sense and pragmatism not any kind of ideology.

We are Giving you the black spot

Most of us believe that politics can be a good thing. It has the virtue of creating win/win policies when pursued virtuously and as an art. You've made politics something vicious. And now you are projecting that viciousness on the people hurt by your tactics and strategy. I'm a white guy, I could go to the darkside and not take it personally, but my minority, women and Gay-Lesbian-Transgender friends won't. And to add insult to injury your recent policies are stripping me and other working white guys of their power too - by destroying jobs and the safety net. Turns out we have common interest with minorities, women and gay-lesbians. Trickle down only seems to be your masters marking their territory. We are losing the middle class and that affects 90% of us. Politics is personal. And when those with power (including money, ownership, and influence) won't play together and share their toys, well the playground stops being a nice place to play. If I'd ever been tempted to be a con before, this great recession (face it it's a great depression) and your nasty policies have made it so it will not happen in my life-time. The New Deal makes a lot more sense when one is unemployed and broke after losing money to the con swindlers. Most of us have come to think of you guys as con artists not conservatives.

Abusive projection

For example, you guys meet in groups like groundswell that seem to be projecting your own behavior when you argue:

"The meeting notes also stated that an "active radical left is dedicated to destroy [sic] those who oppose them" with "vicious and unprecedented tactics. We are in a real war; most conservatives are not prepared to fight."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/groundswell-rightwing-group-ginni-thomas?page=2

Now from my POV abusive projection is the order of the day from you guys. You attack gay groups, non-partisan groups registering voters, women and other minorities; and then refers to our efforts to stop them as "vicious and uncontained." You built up ACORN into a demonic thing and then even after it was gone still act like it is still an ongoing conspiracy. You guys have become all the nasty attitudes and tactics you love to go on about. You remind me of the Trotskyite guys I used to debate with back in College. Ends justify means? concern for your brother? Common weal? Forgeddaboutit. These kinds of selfish behavior and abusive projection are symptoms of sociopathy not a movement with integrity.

I'm sure there are folks on the far left who have the same machiavellian/ "ends justify means" approach to politics as the righty folks have. I've met them. There aren't very many. But you folks use any excuse to engage in corrupt fights based on shoddy principles, so it's not progressives who are deliberately stopping traffic on the GW Bridge to get back at "enemies." Just bad politicians and worse operatives. I welcome real conservatives who really are not prepared to fight -- but are prepared to actually discuss issues and resolve them. None of you fit that bill right now. We are resisting you because we don't want to be destroyed, degraded, dispossessed and treated like dirt; not because we hate you guys. We might think most of you are tools unless you've the wealthy and powerful paying and preying on you because it doesn't trickle down, but we don't want a literal war or literal fighting. The ones who get paid may be willing useful tools, like dogs on a dog sled, but the rest of you are being played.

Problem is your movement can't stop with well enough. You and your paid shills in the fake (faux) media, have to hate us, insult us, and then get offended when we get offended. But, we gave you welfare reform. We gave you deregulation. Welfare Reform is something we are all about too. Deregulation let loose an entire cadre of buccaneers and freebooters who swindled everybody worldwide from Ma and Pa with their balloon mortgage to Sovereign funds that bankrupted entire countries [Iceland]. So we have to re-regulate or our economy and politics will collapse. Don't facts sway you? Maybe, but fox makes up it's own. We can agree that this country is in trouble -- yet you make up stuff that doesn't make sense about why. So the swindled are the reason that the economy collapsed? So Wall Street will fix itself if we leave it alone to monopolize, conglomeratize, merge and become more and more a plutocratic government? Doesn't that disturb you?

And the problem isn't conservism it is corruption

When the right cuts off benefits to the poor, the poor don't suddenly find hundreds of dollars in a jar and eat. They can't even grow their own potatoes in most of the country. When you cut WIC, and SNAP, Unemployment and jobs, and then give the proceeds to your wealthy patrons, that isn't conservatism, that is corruption. When we let the powers that be (which include quisling lefties) enable pirates to privateer, loot and steal with impunity, then that is tyranny, oppression and corruption -- not conservatism.

Resisting oppression, repression and usurpation; tyranny.

We are resisting usurpation, oppression and power grabs, not resisting conservative values. But your paranoia is such that when they one of your own bullies someone and get caught on it -- suddenly the cops are the bullies. You are rallying around Chris Christie even as his behavior is on video. You can't lie with records -- that is why so much of his releases so far are so "redacted." This isn't new behavior. I remember Nixon and his tapes. Somehow sociopathic behavior is "hard choices", "realistic" and "getting things done, when done by righties. When Grover only cares about tax cuts on his rich patrons I think most of us should be cluing ourselves. But my righty friends, most of you are not members of the 1% and you should recognize that your party is not right. It's buccaneering. When John Locke defined Tyranny it's core is government for "private, separate advantage." The right pretty much enshrines privateering as a business model. That may not be national tyranny, but it is state tyranny or corporate tyranny.

So what do you do when your "friends" start making economic war on you? You figuratively fight back, you organize, you protest, you try to change minds. Let's keep it a figurative war.

The Right and left thus have all sorts of councils about what to do to win their struggles. Normally it would be a legitimate struggle between rich and poor, employers and employees, senior management and their employees and customers, and advertizing versus reality. And we'd work it out. But you folks don't seem interested in solving common problems more than beating the snot out of invented enemies like myself. You would think we could resolve things under rule of law with negotiation and elections. It's not happening now. It may be normal in the sense of the sad historical mess that is human history but it's not normal in the normative sense. I don't think the majority of people have caught on yet, but those of us who have caught on can see that this is an escalation of politics as usual into increasingly violent politics and incitement. It has to be stopped somehow. Let's try a little ot go from figurative war and partisanship back to debate and figurative partisanship. How about it? Your masters already own most of the country. Do we have to give them everything to satisfy you? Our democratic structure itself is liable to come under assault. Our plutocrats such as the Koch's and their frenemies the Rockefellers and Soros, think they run the world through running US. I think we can do better than that.

Where are the Frederick Douglass Republicans?

I mean I could be swayed by ideas like this:

" "We are failing the propaganda battle with minorities. Terms like, 'GOP,' 'Tea Party,' 'Conservative' communicate 'racism.'" The Groundswellers proposed an alternative: "Fredrick Douglas Republican," a phrase, the memo noted, that "changes minds." (His name is actually spelled "Frederick Douglass.")"

But you know that ever since Nixon (with Haldeman and Erlichman) pursued his southern Strategy y'all been pursuing the "Archie Bunker" strategy of using hate and mysogyny to further a class war against the majority of the people in this country. You will continue to lose (Even if you win) if you continue to see their problems with minorities and woman as mere propaganda battles. It's not the democrats who wanted to force women to have intrusive ultrasounds or who thought it was a good idea to replace Obstetrics and Gynecology Doctors with Uncle Sam. You aren't losing the "messaging war" because you don't package it right, but because the message is ugly. You folks are packaging stinky poisonous tripe in the constitution and then accusing us of subverting it. You folks are attacking progress since the new deal as if having a middle class or well fed and educated workers were something bad. You folks learned all about the tactics and strategies of the far left only to apply the most machiavellian and cynical ones available. You read novels decrying behavior as instructions on how to get your way. I've never seen so many sociopaths in one place as at one of your gatherings.

You can't talk Frederick Douglass while suppressing the vote. I'd really like to see some Frederick Douglas Republicans, but when you get one you run him out of the party like you did your last party chairman. Rancid Previous drummed out your last Frederick Douglass Republican. The conservatives make way for the con artists.

Mafioso Politics is not normal politics.

Chris Christie's assault on Fort Lee is a symptom of a problem that doesn't come from the left. It comes from your own mirrors. Y'all need to actually read the testaments in the bible and stop projecting your hatred and fear on others. I love all you like the brothers and sisters of mine you are. But you truly are becoming a frightening bunch of human beings who think "Tony Soprano" is an ideal behavior model. All we want is a society that looks out for the common weal. For crimminy sakes we are the rubes who bought into ACA because you guys said it might work better than single payer. And we tried your other ideas. They do work -- for your wealthy patrons who paid for them. You don't have a messaging problem. You've got a Rancid message.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/groundswell-rightwing-group-ginni-thomas

Friday, January 10, 2014

Being a little less naive about politics

Strategic Alliances

One thing I've learned since I've had internet email is that friends, frenemies, and allies are sometimes the same people on different issues, and that even a long time friend can sometimes turn out to be a stuffed shirt or a twit. Worse even saintly me can act like a complete twit. Somehow twit and twitter go together. Somehow threads tend to obey certain rules of insanity that lead to observations like "Godwin's law" being almost definitional "happenings" in political threaded discussions. So it's important not to take anyone, not even oneself too seriously based on one encounter. Though one can bet that anything said on the internet even if it is supposed to be totally private and confidential will reach all unintended ears. So relax cautiously. It takes time to figure out if someone is a real serious twit or not. Though not always.

“Thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.” [Hannah Arendt]

Review of Truthdig article on Hannah Arent's Final Inteview

Truthdig has a review by Andrew Nagorski of a collection of the final interviews given by Hannah Arendt shortly before she died in 1975.

The review is worth reading, and so is the book of interviews:

Thinking Itself is Such a Dangerous Enterprise

The review is very good and highlights some important details of the background of her last days. She died sort of "in media res" still fighting the battle of clear thinking versus dogma and exploitation, and Nagorski notes that she believed that "critical thought always challenges and undermines established rules and conventional wisdom"

“Thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”

Destroying the Legend of the Greatness of Evil

Personally I think her choice of wording might have been better. When she was writing about the "banality of evil" and used the expression; "banality of evil" she wasn't saying that evil wasn't evil. As Nagorski points out, when the nasty folks who'd been the self promoting "master race" faced trial they all were suddenly merely: "obeying orders" -- even the ones who had directed those orders. And when she said “There’s something outrageously stupid about this,” and: “The whole thing is simply comical!” As Nagorski notes "“comical” clearly doesn’t mean ha-ha funny". If you read the transcripts of the Nuremberg trial you'll see the pathetic nasty distusting nature anti-semitism, of hatred and evil itself. and the absolute muddy selfish, greedy, Pathetic nastiness of evil. As she states and Nagorski Highlights in his review:

“One of my main intentions was to destroy the legend of the greatness of evil, of the demonic force,” she told Errera. To that end, she wanted to prove that “if there was anyone who deprived himself of any demonic aura, it was Herr Eichmann.”

Pathetic People not Great People

Not big, giant, mighty demons, just pathetic, sad, sick things. And a continuing battle, as folks doing evil always want to paint themselves as "good people" making the "hard decisions" or even heroic. The word she should have used was "pathetic."

Eichmann and the rest of them were pathetic, not heroic. And their later day imitators are too.

the review:: [www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/hannah_arendts_last_interview_20140110].
Book of Interviews at Amazon:: "http://www.amazon.com/Hannah-Arendt-Interview-Other-Conversations/dp/1612193110"

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