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All governments are democracies. No government ever existed except by virtue of the fact that the people it ruled didn't rise up and tear it down. This includes oligarchies like America. This includes totalitarian states of all stripes. Americans have decided, either through activism or the lack thereof, that this imperial fascist political melanoma that shits on the whole planet including most of its own citizens is exactly what we want.

That there are decent people here who don't want America to be what it is, is not an indictment of oligarchs or evidence that our democracy is flawed. There just aren't enough of them to make much of a difference, on balance.

One of the few remaining sources of hope I have (not for 2020, as we are as good as done for, this year) is my (probably wrong but it's mine and I love it) theory that the political forces that currently favor Trump do so not because they are intrinsically evil (at least not all of them), but because Trump is one of the few politicians in America who absolutely refuse to play by the rules. Everyone and their dog and their dog's dog knows that the system is hopelessly fucked, so promises to patch it or whatever don't resonate. People want people who will play outside the rules -- even if their actions are destructive or oppressive -- because saying "fuck you" to the system is more important than anything that can possibly done from inside the system.

I say this is a source of hope not because I think burning everything down is the only way out of this mess, but because it would mean that as soon as someone on the left figures out that they, too, can succeed by breaking all the rules and being a flagrant revolutionary, there might be a path to victory for them, too. And Sanders doesn't qualify because for all his bluster at the 1% he still fundamentally believes in and preaches all this "nation of laws" business that obviously isn't a big seller these days.

What bugs me is that anyone who tried to publish Common Sense these days would be laughed off the stage because "we don't need no stinking reason in America" and "don't be such an intellectual". And the fact that the Democrats never actually make any arguments against the philosophy of fascism, they just sort of dither around why its various expressions might be unpalatable in some cases. Ronald Reagan's lumbering corpse continues to beat American Politics over the head 40 years later, but where are the Democrats saying that "Government isn't the problem"? All they ever say is "ok ok government is the problem but maybe it's a necessary evil? please?"

I would most agree with that assessment, vex.

Though I don't think they're especially in the tank for the Trump Train per se, more that any kind of wealth distribution scares the shit out of them more than Trump does. Which is, you know, exactly the same mistakes the centrist and conservative parties in the Weimar Republic made with the Nazis. They were so scared of the KPD, and to an extent even the SPD, that they were willing to countenance political arrangements with Hitler in order to keep them both locked out.

Which worked out great for Germany, in the long run.

Germany ultimately got its head out of its ass. But it took ... well, we all know what it took. I'm not sure the same rules apply to America, though. If/when we go full-tilt Nazi, who is going to stop us?

It's getting real hard for me to see this charade as anything but the crystallization of our political arrangement into an actual imperial-fascist state where the "loyal opposition" is nothing but a cowcatcher for clearing political opposition from the tracks. The DNC isn't "fucking up", it's doing exactly what it's designed to do: defuse progressive political movements no matter where they come from so the Trump (or whoever) Train can boil ahead at full steam. And I don't think Bernie is being railroaded here, I think he's very much part of that mechanism, even if he doesn't realize it.

just be the apologia you wish to see in the world

In my eminently humble opinion, it all comes down to a basic miscalculation on the part of Sanders and his followers, not that I don't personally appreciate 90% of his platform. He does in fact have a large support base, but he's tapping into systematically disenfranchised voters' frustration, not a coherent or particularly viable constituency. He preaches a lot of policies that are terrifying to the keepers of the status quo, but he insists on using only status-quo-approved methods of rising to power. Sure, he's center-left to the rest of the world, but in America his platform literally is revolutionary - and revolutionary platforms don't get enacted by elections, especially not elections that are wholly owned subsidiaries of the existing power and economic structures.

Of course, I'm not saying Sanders would fare any better if he got on his fundraising channel and told people to start burning things down - he is far from a revolutionary in fact, he's just trying to do things that, in America at least, can only be done on the other side of the kind of meltdown he can't endorse.

As for the DNC, they are as always playing it too safe. They didn't lose in 2016 because of a "divided base", which is a phrase that implies they would have won without all the animosity between Clinton and Sanders. They lost because they steadfastly refuse to stand for anything. They would have lost 2016 just as handily if Sanders had never shown his face, because a message of "let's just everyone calm down and act like adults, and maybe we can just bomb fewer poor brown people into oblivion, and if it isn't too much trouble, maybe we could let fewer Americans die of disease and exposure" doesn't give anyone a reason to get out of bed, let alone go vote. And this is why they are going to lose this year, too. Not because Candidate X or Y sticks around long enough to spoil the field, but because the DNC will see to it that whoever is nominated is in no position to make demands of the status quo. And that won't motivate anyone except accelerationists to hit the bar.

I'm just sad that this isn't the end of the world.

It seems like a sad thing that there was a state of such innocence that was lost, but on the other hand, if we hadn't lost it, I wouldn't get to know the joy of hating incels.

Honestly this kind of thing just keeps feeding back into my amazement that a lot of the myths our society is based on keep lining up allegorically with real events.

It's probably 2 ways of talking about the same thing, but I both agree and disagree. I don't think we will ever find some "special sauce" that "is" the seat of consciousness, or enables it in any real way. After all, conscious experience is qualia. If we can point to something that generates it, then we're still just pointing at some stuff that has popped up in conscious experience. So I take back what I said in my previous wall of text because I was bad at expressing it. There can be feeling without a feeler, because when you get down to it, the feeling is the feeler. My sense of awareness isn't a byproduct of brain activity, it is that it is. Cue spooky music.

[The phenomenon of consciousness-as-experienced is the feeling of the executive in action]

My opinion: consciousness is the interaction of multiple systems. There is an "executive" decision maker that is probably not obviously deterministic (see PRNGs) that links these systems together. The phenomenon of consciousness-as-experienced is the feeling of the executive in action. Consciousness as a phenomenon cannot arise in the absence of the executive OR the absence of multiple systems. That is to say, both are necessary. I don't think both are sufficient, but I don't know what would constitute necessary and sufficient conditions for the phenomenon of consciousness, and we would need to create a strong AI iteratively and ask it when it woke up to be able to figure it out.

I'd object to this interpretation on the grounds that "the feeling of x" is meaningless without something doing the feeling. Consciousness per se can't be, simply, "a feeling" or "an illusion". Against what backdrop does this feeling or illusion appear? How can an illusion be anything at all without someone falling for it?

With detailed real-time brain scans, neurologists are able to observe with surprising accuracy not only the moment a decision is made, but which decision has been made, up to 7 seconds before the person being monitored is consciously aware of having made any decision. What does this say about consciousness? One interpretation is that conscious experience arises as an artifact of brain activity, and our conscious experience has little or nothing to do with the actual functioning of our minds and it probably has no real relationship to our executive function.

As a person who (probably) has a brain and has spent some time fighting it and learning from it, but almost no education in real neuroscience or psychiatry, my opinions here are likely to be vacant musings. But I would prefer an explanation that says that the apparent gap between making a decision and our "conscious awareness" of having made it is really several seconds of egotistical verification, re-verification, double-checking, and self-reassurance that occur in response to an event that arises more spontaneously than we think it does, and we really are aware of that decision at the moment it occurs but we don't let it into the gates until we are satisfied that we Really Do For Sure Know That We Know It.

That is, a large amount of what we think is conscious experience is just circular thoughts puttering around in our heads to give ourselves the security of thinking we're somehow in control of something. But conscious awareness isn't an executive, it's an observer. There is only what is happening, and the mental distance between that and our awareness is just a tangle of insecurity and doubt.

As to "Cosmic Consciousness", I think it's probably a thing in some way. It's just a useless thing to consider as such, because it's the kind of thing that we can only talk or think about in terms of concepts, and concepts don't defy categorization like such consciousness does by definition.

we are all, except maybe rong,

I doubt anything that is recognizable as "you" could survive.  But maybe if you reduce "you" to "the phenomenon of being aware", that could survive. Like you've said, even the moment to moment continuity of identity under normal conditions is illusory, so it may be that no matter how much of you dies with the body, it still *feels* like you keep going.

I'm all for spitting vitriol at people who willfully misgender anyone, including by repeatedly using the wrong pronouns. But when it's an honest slip, or someone who is new to the particulars of whatever situation they're in, it shouldn't derail the whole conversation unless the person obstinately refuses to adjust their behavior - because, if they're a person who does that, there's little point in any sort of conversation with them. Someone who outright refuses to respect other people's identities is unlikely to have worthwhile opinions in other areas anyway.

But it's true there's disingenuous tactics used, and it's maddening. People who don't support Buttigieg are immediately cast as homophobes and can't live it down, people who don't like Hillary or Warren are immediately regarded as sexist for no reason except their lack of political support. I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that identity is by far the primary motivator for a lot of people. Buttigieg should be president because he is gay; Warren should be president because she is a woman. And, people project their own motivations onto others so if someone doesn't support Buttigieg, in their minds it must likewise be because he is gay. And of course it happens everywhere, not just political campaigns. It makes it impossible, sometimes, to have substantive conversations because anyone with an identity ticket becomes immune to criticism of any kind because identity overrides every other aspect. And you can't even talk about this state of affairs, because identity per se is supposed to be the only issue we care about.

Had some trouble finding a solid definition of "YT saviour" through google. Is it perhaps a reference to something like "YouTube Savior"?

YT =  "white"

also,



I was called a racist the other day for making fun of leprechauns.