Professional Left Podcast Episode 942: What Is Effective Protest (No Kings Edition), Or "The Maccabean Revolt And All That"

“"I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid." -- Harlan Ellison.

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In The Beginning...

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- William S. Burroughs, "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" with a big h/t to Neo Tuxedo for this quote.

For the record, I am perfectly aware that the roots of our long and tortured political history go back to Beringa, Eric the Red and Strom Thurmond quitting the Democratic Party in 1948 to form the segregationist States' Rights Democratic Party also known as the "Dixiecrats" (note:  The Dixiecrats were later dissolved and then gradually reconstituted into a much larger, more powerful and better-funded segregationist party called "The Republicans".)

But because this post will not be one billion words long, it will not cover anything like a territory that vast.  (I just told you that to trick you into reading this far! Insert Evil Laugh here!) So pedants and "whatabouters" take it elsewhere, preferably to Blogger or Wordpress where you can start your own blog and publish your own sweeping and comprehensive history of American politics.  Which I will gladly read and carp about :-)

Instead what you'll get for the price of admission is a simplified overview of  "How We Got Here" spanning roughly one human generation:

In population biology and demography, the generation time is the average time between two consecutive generations in the lineages of a population. In human populations, the generation time typically ranges from 22 to 32 years.

Let us begin.

Crazy Old Bigot Fires Up The Bush-Off Machine*

From the WaPo:

Cliven Bundy has officially left the Republican Party herd

BY PHILIP BUMP May 27 at 2:16 pm 

Rancher Cliven Bundy, who you may remember from American politics circa April 2014, has officially left the Republican Party...

Because amazingly, scrapin' them "Bush/Cheney '04", "McCain/Palin '08" and "Romney/Galt '12" bumper-stickers off'n your truck and declarin' that you're really an Independent -- wheee!haaaaw! -- still continues to completely bamboozle a lot of the expensively accoutered children and PR flacks who call themselves "journalists".

*(If you are not familiar with the Bush-Off Machine, I commend this post from 2010 to your attention.)

At Play in the Fields of the Sturgeons

I am sincerely delighted any time I find evidence of a new generation discovering the power of posing science-fictiony questions.

When a new crop of cultural speculators are glimpses walking beneath the vast dome of a great, literary cathedral, brushing lightly against the spindizzies, ansibels, mass drivers, sandworms, bussards, galactic emperors and allotropic iron torpedoes left behind by the Elders of a Dying Genre, never realizing that the curve of that firmament and all of its furnishings were not naturally occurring phenomena phenomenon phrenologist :-), but has been carved out of the unforgiving marketplace more than a generation ago at a half-a-penny-a-word by battalions of hungry pulp scriveners whose names are now mostly forgotten (unless, of course, they had the foresight to cook up, say, some insanely profitable cult)...

Is Time Us, Space Them?
By Robin Hanson ·
(This post co-authored by Robin Hanson and Katja Grace.)

In the Battlestar Galactica TV series, religious rituals often repeated the phrase, “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.” It was apparently comforting to imagine being part of a grand cycle of time. It seems less comforting to say “Similar conflicts happen out there now in distant galaxies.” Why?

Consider two possible civilizations, stretched either across time or space:

Time: A mere hundred thousand people live sustainably for a billion generations before finally going extinct.
Space: A trillion people spread across a thousand planets live for only a hundred generations, then go extinct.
Even though both civilizations support the same total number of lives, most observers probably find the time-stretched civilization more admirable and morally worthy. It is “sustainable,” and in “harmony” with its environment. The space-stretched civilization, in contrast, seems “aggressively” expanding and risks being an obese “repugnant conclusion” scenario. Why?

Finally, consider that people who think they are smart are often jealous to hear a contemporary described as “very smart,” but are much happier to praise the genius of a Newton, Einstein, etc. We are far less jealous of richer descendants than of richer contemporaries. And there is far more sibling rivalry than rivalry with grandparents
or grandkids. Why?
...

... apparently never realizing that 10,000 amazing, maddening, glorious possible answers to their questions can be found moldering silently away between the lurid covers of 10,000 ancient books and magazines scattered here and there in the dusty corners of the dying American Empire.

Some aging Boy or Girl Scout please gently slip a copy of "Time Enough for Love", "The Martian Chronicles", "Universe", the "Foundation" trilogy, "Dune", "The Demolished Man", "Venus Plus X", "The End of Eternity", "Bring the Jubilee", "When the Sleeper Wakes", the "Uplift" series, "Scanners Live in Vain", "Childhood's End", "The Left Hand of Darkness", "City", "The Mote in God's Eye", "The Marching Morons", "With Folded Hands", "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" or one of a dozen dozen other masterpieces into their pockets or onto their Kindles.

Years and years from now, they'll thank you for it.

Rock On

What Digby said.

about this issue.