the 2022 Election
| notes, excerpts, TEXTS, images, links FROM 1 MYA to the end of the Upper Paleolithic: from gesture to language Sttes, markets, patrimonial power systems: civiizations individuation and markets enlightenment developmental policies: Fr. the Great New Testament to Freud |
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hatred and terror that drove people to such violence were shaped by
social tensions and religious beliefs, but the passions themselves
derived from deeply rooted fantasies, extravagent in their evocation of
demonic lovers and Satanic revels. These fantasies shared, for the
most part, a standard structure and a similar set of primary themes. p.
7
Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011: Patrimonialism, until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms throughout the world. |
PISA Math Scores, 2003 - 2015: 20 Nations
Detroit News, May 2, 1937
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| 1.
First, the disintegration of the cognitive performativities of
modernity itself: the "human" side of human capital.
Decognification, disindividuation: Trump's rhetorical performances seen
from the standpoint of literacy and cognition as contingent not
normative cultural-historical developments. This disintegration*
is comprehended within the framework of Figure 0. The election of
Donald Trump** is a lagging indicator of this disintegration of
cognitive performativities. Preceding his election ws the decline
of mathematics competence indexed by the PISA data, which indicate that
a catastrophic decline in cognitive performativity preceeded and made
possible the fascist-patrimonial victory of Novemmbe 2016. 2. the explosion of fascist performativities within the orbit of the GOP (Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism: "The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism."). The brutishness in language and behavior that are the chief characteristics of Trump's mass-oriented performances must be understood as manifestations of something of great ontological significance. The sado-sexual eigenvector of “Trump” performativities goes back to the Know-Nothing roots of the GOP (Gniepp), later 19th century anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political rhetoric, the lynching for rape discourse, the southern strategy, and the infamous Willie Horton episode in George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. Trump's performance coming down the stairs ("They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.") and the plaint of one of his supporters ("He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting") should be placed in this broader context. Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment (the inner logic of GOP sado-sexual rhetorical performativity). The paranoid-schizoid position (Klein). Fascism and racism. Fascism and patrimonialism. Fascism reconsidered as a theoretical construct. |
3.
Third, the assault on rational-bureaucratic institutions--an assault on
the very idea of science-based professionalism and public
service. Max Weber's concept of patrimonialism* covers the
phenomena labeled as corruuption and cronyism in the Trump
administration. Marie Yovanovitch describes how a modern polity
is being subverted by fascist insurgencies within the state.**
Patrimonialism does not imply fascism, but fascism American style circa
2016 -- ?? replaces rational-bureaucratic formations with patrimonial
networks. The assault on the Capitol was the most dramatic
. . . , but at its most profound (and here one must take Steve Bannon
seriously) the deconstruction of the state is the destruction of the
major institutions of modernity. 4. Fourth, the triumph of nihilism as the socio-cultural engineering project of global corporate networks of unimaginable reach and power, generating an entropic process of disindividuation. Mass consumption as a mode of absorption and transformation of the organism. The fiction of freedom, the subversion of individuation, the inner logic of addiction, the commodification of distress, the infantilization of public discourse . . . in short, the dissipation of the species homo sapiens sapiens into a proliferation of effects. DSM-V as the operating manual of the post-human ontology. The incredible shrinking self. This is the new Democratic party whose rhetorical vector is liberal not progressive (the triumph of commerecial republicanism over the civic republicanism of the New Deal).* *Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell, 2003). In a nutshell: civic republicanism incorporates a concept of bildung (republican virtue); commerial republicanism does not. |
| from Wikipedia By c. 50,000 – c. 40,000 BP, the first humans set foot in Australia. By c. 45,000 BP, humans lived at 61°N latitude in Europe.[8] By c. 30,000 BP, Japan was reached, and by c. 27,000 BP humans were present in Siberia, above the Arctic Circle.[8] By the end of the Upper Paleolithic Age humans had crossed Beringia and expanded throughout the Americas.[9][10] |
Map of Homo Sapiens Migration (from Wikipedia) (
Immigration to the U.S. in the Late 1800s