Cobb

The Myth of Trumpism

Q: Would you consider Donald Trump to be a visionary leader?

A: No.

Donald Trump is a boss. He yells people into submission. For a certain class of people over a certain class of problems, this is a very effective style of leadership. It is not visionary.

You want to get 300 tons of concrete moved to a construction site? You don’t ask Laura Dern to be your leader. You don’t ask Barack Obama to supervise the operations of a coal mine. You want to send troops into battle? You don’t put Nancy Pelosi on the comms.

There are all kinds of tasks for which Donald Trump is unsuitable. But there are many for which he is effective. People tend to forget that the presidency of the US calls for more skills than any one person can individually possess.

I think the President does a poor job of delegating authority which is how any leader extends his effectiveness beyond his individual capacity. I think this quality was evident during his campaign. However what his supporters wanted wasn’t a team player to get along in Washington DC, they wanted somebody with the hardheaded boldness to shake things up in no uncertain terms. They wanted an outsider. They wanted somebody to shake up the status quo. That’s what they got.

One more thing about ‘visionary’. When we talk about leadership, a visionary must articulate their vision and then execute. Anybody can have a ‘vision’. But they must be true to that vision, they must continually convince people that vision is attainable and they must deliver. When JFK said put a man on the moon, it was visionary. The point was that he delivered because he convinced enough people to accept that vision, be true to it and made it possible to achieve.

Achievement of a vision makes one effective as a leader. But the vision itself needn’t be attractive. The Nationalist government of South Africa had a vision for their society that they achieved. Their vision was inspired by the failure of American Reconstruction and the effectiveness of Jim Crow. They perfected that systematic vision in a theory called Apartheid. They delivered.

With that in mind, a lot of foolish people claim that Donald Trump, bigot that he may be, has a similar vision of White Nationalism for America. That is far from the truth. He simply yells people into submission and cannot effectively delegate. This is not an effective style of leadership for the legal subjugation of millions of people.

Donald Trump is not a visionary leader. There is no ‘Trumpism’.

----

Consider the following:

I don't think Trump has considered the merits or demerits of the geopolitical balance of power provided (or not) by NATO outside of the shallow question of how much the US pays for it.

Interestingly, I think this very thin logic is actually appropriate for the standing down of US military forces, because quite frankly Americans have no clear idea what our boys should be doing in the world - and that includes defending treaties. There is no domestic consensus, and he promised no vision. He received no mandate from his constituency other than the most simplistic 'support the troops'. The most dimwitted fool could see that America's enthusiasm for violent engagement, even against ISIS in Syria, was over. The US had been telegraphing rules of non-engagement even to the Russian military in Syria since its very beginning in 2013, when Syria's documented possession and use of chemical weapons - Obama's Red Line - was crossed. We backed down. It was a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East that Trump never questioned.

Who would call Trump's Space Force a strategic vision? Who would call his sending regular army to the southern border a strategic vision. Trump is bereft of strategic visions - he could simply listen to 40 hours of Rush Limbaugh and figure out what level of Republican talking points he needed to address and beat Ted Cruz into submission. He did just that.

Ted Cruz thought the American Right was a quiet majority that could be cultivated and respond to his values. Trump proved the American Right was disjointed, chock full of anger & frustration and vulnerable to a hostile takeover. That is precisely where the Republican Party is right now, an organization hollowed out by a hostile takeover running on oppositional fumes and innovating nowhere.

In Defense of Aquaman

Somebody asked me, because why I dunno, which superhero I would rather be. For some reason I have been thinking about them, and it occurred to me in a flash that I'd like to be Aquaman. There are several things that he has in his favor.

Firstly, Aquaman is genuine. He doesn't wear a mask. He doesn't have a secret identity. He doesn't pretend to be somebody he is not. He is genuine royalty.

Secondly, he's not some alien coming to Earth to save puny humans from themselves. He is genuinely from the Earth, from the legendary Atlantis - the most perfected Earth city ever.

Aquaman is not the first superhero you think about. That's good. He's got better things to do. He's not slumming around like Clark Kent or Peter Parker hanging out at some newspaper just looking for trouble. He doesn't believe in nation building or any ideology. He's just hanging out with his fish friends.

Aquaman doesn't have any arch-nemesis always threatening him. He's not burdened with the problem of killing somebody off so he can have peace. He's not psychologically co-dependent on some evil twin psyche. He doesn't have any rivals in his own domain.

Aquaman doesn't have ridiculous powers. He can't single-handedly destroy cities. His powers operate at the heroic level, not at the god level. So he can be trusted not to let his whim and failure wrack too much destruction.

All said, I like Aquaman, who is clearly an environmentalist, defending the seven seas.

Faith vs Reason: Will Atheists Eat a Christian Meal?

 

Q: Despite being a sinner, could a Christian still be honest and objective enough to examine the moral attitudes of atheist progressives and leftists, and form conclusions accordingly?

A: It’s almost impossible.

Look up my questions to atheists. You’ll find that I get opprobrium because ‘small a’ atheists tend to suggest that there is nothing more to their atheism than a denial of God and that for someone who practices faith essentially has insufficient moral standing to investigate their morality. This implies, basically, the Hitchens argument which is as follows. The presumption that the faithful can be forgiven their sins (by a non-existent entity) undermines every moral system the faithful can have. Because assertion of a falsehood as true implies anything is true. So anything clerics dream up as ‘the will of God’ can be justified regardless of its inherent good or evil.

The Hitchens argument is reasonable and absolutely nails hypocrites. But it doesn’t address the moral or psychological origins of the disciplines of faith. There are a lot of other implications here as well that it’s difficult to get atheists to discuss, but we can in the comments.

Progressives and Leftists. Well let’s start with Leftists.

‘The Left’ is essentially the Marxists or the Frankfort School devotees. I think they are overly materialist and tend to be authoritarian. Even ‘authoritarian’ in the way that German intellectuals can be, which is in that way of mastering a technical scrum and expecting that the less capable will fall in line. There is a certain lack of libertarian sentiment in that line of thinking as I see it. That is the difference between a Leftist and a ‘classic liberal’. So I tend to think of such people as incompatible with religious freedom in that they are not likely to accept more than one moral master, nor would they borrow or share. Again, this is a kind of totalizing sentiment.

Of course Enlightenment liberalism (and natural philosophy) are under a broadside attack from the Progressives. I see them as unilaterally shallow and completely dismissive of any idea that true freedom has ever existed prior to the years of their births. This would be ok if they had a decent track record of institutional reform. But I perceive that Progressives are more likely to be ahistorical in their attacks against Christianity and more than a little susceptible to anti-Semitic tropes.

What I would like to discuss with atheists is the usefulness of art which is wholly created out of someone’s mind as a symbol of moral teaching. Consider the moral universe of Star Trek. Can any science fiction be morally instructive even if it asserts the falsehood of faster than light travel? Can any fiction be morally instructive if its characters never existed in actual history? Doesn’t that make authors of fiction atheist prophets? I think some atheists fail to distinguish between facts and truth in that the search for truth doesn’t begin and end with findings of fact. To do so is to be shallow, moreover it is an admission to the trust of human instinct in all decisions that are unproveable. What is that other than faith? I try to draw the equivalence between cosmology and/or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the search for God. I set these equivalent. The will of God = the laws of nature = the inherent structure of the universe.

Given that equivalence there is no core principle of the existence or non-existence of ‘god’ that is relevant. What is relevant is the ethical and moral discipline of the schools and adherents. And I think a careful study of history will show the syncretism between Christian ethics and natural philosophy in the development of the West. To me, a proper vision into this shows no conflict between faith and reason. Just as there are fallacies of logic, there are heresies of faith. The existence of these don’t negate the ability of these systems to reveal truth.

I am interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m getting a clearer picture of what we don’t know about the ways in which we think. And I am convinced that a refreshing study of the history of philosophy and the history of religion can clear things up as we advance our understanding of what thinking actually is, what believing actually is, what conviction actually is. This being the core idea in pressing back the unknown, I tend to be dismissive of Progressives and Leftists who seem to have no positive use for any history before the 20th century or respect for the development of the humanism they claim.

I have been instructed in many forms of Christianity and I respect the historical idea of Christendom as well as the aims of Catholicism which means ‘universalism’ as well as the general idea of monotheism over polytheism. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Catholic church is not fundamentally evangelical, and the same holds true for Judaism. I am a student of the Tao, and I have essentially made peace with the universally understood mystery “Thou art that.” My contention is simple. Moral truth is like an excellent complex meal. It takes much skill to prepare it and generosity to serve it, but everyone will enjoy it and be nourished by it. We have all evolved in the same way, if we are not defective, it’s impossible for us not to.

I say it's almost impossible. What I really ask is will atheists eat a Christian meal?

The Stoic vs the Activist

Q: Can we reconcile Stoicism with Social Justice?

A: No.

Stoicism works against the premise of social justice, which is that there are populist movements that can and must re-engineer society on the outskirts of law.

I think the fairest assumptions that can be made about social justice is that there are permanent classes of people whose social status is set in stone and cannot be advanced without sustained social and political action in defiance of the established law and order. This is the difference between justice and social justice.

The difference between social justice and charity is that social justice is always secular. I think this is partially because of a naive construction on behalf of those in favor of social justice against organized religion. The Western understanding of the separation of church and state is prepared for organized religion with the supremacy of secular law over canon law with an understanding that there shouldn’t be much mutual overlap. We certainly should very well understand that a state that meddles as much as a church is oppressive and a church that rules as broadly as a state is oppressive. If we already have a free press, then what is the role of social justice activists? It seems to me that they are a fourth leg, superfluous to the three legged stool of the state, the free press, and the church, disruptively encroaching on the aegis of all three.

In any case the Stoic, aligning himself with the laws of nature, seeks to guide himself and his concerns to recognize his responsibilities to those laws of nature. This is something that works towards continuous incremental understanding and self-improvement, not towards outward activism that seeks to coerce others. A Stoic is a citizen whose deportment is disciplined and moral and works well within a libertarian context. You don’t need to coerce a Stoic, he will not defy nature. But the business of the state (law) and the church (canon law) is to coerce. The business of the press and free education is to persuade through rationality. The Stoic might be best employed there.

Since the Stoic ultimately achieves the serenity to accept the things he cannot change, the courage to change things he can change and the wisdom to know the difference, he is ultimately reconciled with the law and with canon law. He will defy injustice in either with courage or serenity. But this is manifest through the virtuous character of the individual, not through the sloganeering of activist groups. For whom does the social justice activist work? For those who cannot work for themselves. And what standards can the social justice activist stand by if neither law nor canon law suffice? So how can that ever be consistent over time in any society, much less in accord with the unchanging laws of nature?

The Stoic sees this as an individual journey which of course can make use of the study of principle, of rationality, of ethics. It is, after all, a search for the truth of the laws of nature. But the Stoic understands that any individual’s capacity to become righteous comes at an unpredictable pace and quality. It therefore cannot be demanded of the public at large by any activist group. The wisdom of Diogenes, for example, can only be approached by students of Diogenes - here we are many hundreds of years later and how many people have approached such ancient and timeless wisdom? It cannot be externally demanded.

One must ask of the social justice activist why they are not content to work to reform the law, or reform the canon law? The answer can only be that they are impatient. And why cannot they be satisfied with their own individual defiance of these? The answer can only be that they would be lonely and individually ineffective. They therefore must take the stage and dramatize their own struggles collectively speaking to the masses and take hope that the masses will similarly act up. But whatever principles they seek to defend are either in line or out of line with the laws of nature - and these will be known to the Stoic and anyone who seeks truth. So it must be concluded that they simply protest too much. Doesn’t the slave know he is denied liberty? Doesn’t the robbed know he has been deprived of his property? Doesn’t every victim of every crime know the injustice done to him? The law is sufficient to see all of this, either secular or canon, and if not, certainly the individual done harm. But this seeing and knowing is not sufficient to the activist. The activist wants to take part and take credit for seeing what anyone can see and then take issue with the laws for not being panoptic and expedient.

It is the distance between the law and the individual conscience that is liberty. If that gap is closed by any means, it is overreach. The individual must wait because he would have no license to act of his own accord - to right any wrong done him beyond the scope of the law, to use his immediate sight to correct any error. A law covering any gap that is not secular law or canon law would then be ‘social law’ and that would always be, like the other two, coercive. Where then would be individual freedom? Let the individual have space to act in his own defense. Let him have room to interpret the laws of nature and act accordingly. Keep the activist clear of this space every man must have to rationally consider his position and act accordingly. Without that space for individual agency, which is certainly presumed by the activist ‘in solidarity’ with the benighted masses, there is no freedom. There is no liberty. There is only waiting upon the machinations of social justice. That space space for action belongs to the individual, not the activist crowd. The individual is the atom of society, not the social justice partisan.

 

The Modesty Point

If you interview someone. If you talk to someone about themselves. You will get one of two variations of confidence. The modest confidence and the bold confidence. It's difficult to know which one to trust.

What strikes me at the moment is that the person who is modest is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or quite aware of people who are superior to them in the context of the subject being discussed. The person who is bold is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or completely unaware of people who are superior to them. Which to trust? There is also the matter of the interlocutor. The modest person may consider that the interviewer is smart and is asking questions they already know the answer to. The bold person may consider that the interviewer needs instruction and context. On the other hand, the modest person may assume that the interviewer may know nothing and be embarrassed by a frank discussion of facts. The bold person may assume an interactive Socratic confirmation or disconfirmation.

I tend to be bold and make no assumptions about the interlocutor. I expect both theoretical and experiential disconfirmation. My interest is 'Chinese'. What can the two of us do with what we have?

Joker

The first thing to know about 'Joker' is that I watched it all the way through, which is something I could not say about 'The Master'. I am tempted to call 'Joker' art, and 'The Master' pornography. Joker is intriguing and not entirely uncomfortable as brutal as it can be. It's a story we are familiar with; we know how it ends more or less. With this poor schlub transforming into a murderous maniac. In 'The Master' I had no idea how far off the rails the characters might go and that became entirely too uncomfortable for me.

The madness of the Arthur Fleck is accelerated by his desire to do for others. As much as he does, he can never do enough, and so naturally he feels that he doesn't exist. A comedian, a clown a showman, his ego only exists in the happiness he can extract from others. The laughter he possesses physically takes him over into uncontrollable spasms. They hurt as he wheezes up the last gasps of what could be laughing coughing and/or crying. He cannot control it. He laughs at the most inappropriate times, when the irony of life is cruel. But he resists his dark sense of humor. He is excused for what seems to be a disease. He has never been happy a moment in his life and yet from this self-pity he attempts to bring cheer. It only works for children. The adults in Gotham City are on edge and do not laugh at their own misfortune. There isn't a country song within a country mile. The blues don't exist here - it is all urban jungle, smoke, concrete and gritty bricks.

the rumors that I have heard but not listened to say something is wrong with the message this film sends to {incels, black women} but that's crazy talk. I won't even pick up the tangent. For all the social significance this film has and whatever that may be, I still say it is art, capable of sparking imaginations different ways. That is the exact opposite of commerce which is magic and technology, i.e. that which is calculated to bring a specific and perfectly predictable result from its consumer.

Hear hear for art.

A Memory of Banking Before Computer Networks

I’ll talk about retail banking in 1980 when I was a teller.

First of all, banks opened at 10am and closed at 3pm, and they were never open on the weekend. If you needed cash only a very few banks had ATMs and there were no ATM networks to speak of. The protocols for Cirrus and the others had yet to be invented and adopted. Also, if you traveled, there would be no banks in say Las Vegas that were the same as your banks in California. No banks were licensed to do business across state lines. So you really needed a credit card, and they were hard to come by. Most people used travelers checks.

So banking was slower and geographically limited and it meant a great deal if you had a credit card or American Express card. There was no Discover. There were no debit cards that were acceptable outside of your bank’s ATM network, and bank ATM networks went bank by bank (until around 1986 or so). So the idea of using a bank card at a supermarket was ridiculous. To get a credit card for a gas station or a department store was a huge privilege. There weren’t many general purpose credit cards.

Nobody had automatic overdraft protection. If you bounced a check, the branch manager at your bank would get a greenbar report of all of the overdraft checks and he would approve or deny an overdraft according to his familiarity with your account and business.

Ordinary checks written say to your supermarket could take several days to clear. This was called float. It was relatively easy to float a check - so you’d write a check on Monday and you could be reasonably certain it wouldn’t hit your bank until Thursday or Friday. And of course there was no banking on the weekend, so you could easily float a check over the weekend. There was no bank by phone, so if you didn’t know how to balance your checkbook you couldn’t just go to a phone booth and dial your bank. You had to find a branch office near where you were and wait in line for a teller, and a teller would tell you your balance. If you were lucky, they could tell you which of your checks cleared and were paid.

You wouldn’t know how your stocks were doing unless you read the paper (the WSJ of course) on a daily basis. Interday trading was unheard of. You had to call your broker and hope he would take your call. But I digress.

Deposits also took a long time to clear, so you could deposit a check on Monday and it wouldn’t clear until Wednesday or Thursday. If it was drawn on a bank from out of state, they might even put a 2 day hold on it or give you partial credit.

Very few tellers had cash counting machines and they were unreliable. So cash deposits were counted by hand, twice.

There was a world of bookkeepers, clerks, typists, stenographers, secretaries and receptionists who handled the bureaucracy of every business. So if you had sloppy handwriting, you couldn’t get an entry level white collar job, period. I ended up at the bank because I got one question wrong on an accounting test for the Beverly Hills equivalent of WeWork in 1980. My girlfriend got a job as a receptionist (lowest on the totem pole, you had to be cute and have a good telephone voice). BTW, there was no voicemail, no email, no fax. You had messengers, couriers and other schleping bagboys delivering telegrams and such. There was no encryption. People had to be trusted.

In other words, altogether things were slower and people had to be trusted more.

 

The Hubris of Globalism

I’m writing from California in English, but I hope people can see and recognize this wherever they are. It affects all of us.

In our consumer society, a host of goods and services that originate outside of the borders of our nation are made available at low cost. Capital can easily move across borders and take advantage of lower labor and commodity prices.

You can get tea. You can get sugar. These things are not produced locally. You can use GPS. You can send email anywhere on the planet. You can get green paint from a global market of chromium. You can get coffee, chocolate and bananas. You can get orange juice in the winter. You can share cultural references to superheroes that people in other countries will understand. You can benefit from international standards. You can play videogames or watch cartoons that originated in Japan. You can buy furniture made of hardwoods from South America. You can buy a t-shirt made from cotton grown in China and woven into fabric in Nigeria with a clever slogan on it invented by an American.

Globalization means that in your job you are not just competing with your fellow countrymen, but you are competing with people anywhere in the world who with the same skills. There is no ‘grading on a curve’. It means whereas your country might have had employment in every industry, that now the whole country may become specialized into a few industries. It means at some point, certain subjects will no longer be taught in school because your country doesn’t make that, it just buys that.

Globalization means that in your economy you are not just subject to the wealthiest people in your country who speak your language, but that your life is influenced by the wealthiest people in the world who may not care about your language, your culture, your religion, your education, your family or your neighborhood. They simply make deals with the wealthiest people in your country and that’s all they need to care about. It means when you buy their products and they fail, you can’t sue them or even bring them to court in your country. You’ll just be dealing with their agents in your country, but not the big boss who will never go to jail.

Globalization means that in your city, if it is a big enough city, or your college if it is a big enough college, that you will have to deal with gentrification. Not just affluent people from the nice part of town, but from the spoiled rich families across the globe. So in your neighborhood of nice houses, suddenly that one house on the corner now sells for a million dollars. And then Airbnb has people buying up houses to rent out to wealthy tourists, and soon there’s nothing your city council or mayor can do about it. Then their kids can afford to pay full tuition but you have to take out a loan, and there’s nothing the administrators at your school can do about it.

Globalization means you can buy bananas and coffee and chocolate, but you can’t afford college or home ownership. It means you can wear cheap clothing but you can’t get a job in manufacturing. I means you can play cool videogames on your iPhone, but if it breaks nobody in your country can fix it, so you have to get extended warranty insurance so they give you another one.

Globalization means the death of local control. And surprise surprise, the death of local politics. And if you vote to exit this regime, you are mocked as a stupid, regressive, racist, ass backward patriot, uncivilized barbarian to be ignored in the new world order. Becuz progress. Becuz the planet matters more than you. Becuz you can be cancelled.

Globalization is the Bitcoin where nobody anywhere knows who the inventor is, and nobody can be called into account because they can be anywhere in the world or even disappear from the world but the system keeps going. Globalization is the Black Mirror of the 21st Century.

The only thing that beats globalization is nationalism. Your laws, your language, your culture, your elected officials, your borders, your army, your flag, your cities and towns, your schools and neighborhoods.

Nationalism isn’t racist. Nationalism isn’t xenophobic. Nationalism means your sovereignty comes first, not the new world order. It means your democracy gets to decide exactly how much foreign exchange happens. It means international trade has to be negotiated, not just accepted blindly. It doesn’t mean we stop teaching foreign languages and literature in highschool. It means your citizenship and your civil rights don’t take a backseat to the rules of any other global cabal on the planet. It means anyone and everyone who does business in your country will be accountable to the laws and courts of your country. It means local people make choices and everybody else has to respect those choices. Nationalism is anti-colonialist. Nationalism is anti-imperialist. Nationalism means a limit on hubris. Nationalism means when some fanatic tries to organize the Xs of the world into a global revolution, he won’t be able to topple nations, because nations will be respected and nations will be strong.

Or not.

It’s up to you.