Rain in Iran

Neocon Rain Kills

When all the talk in Washington and the western establishment neoliberidiocracy is to reign in Iran, the mass of ordinary decent people should be getting public media stories about how the rain in Iran is the same as the rain in Africa or Nebraska. (Poetic metaphors here, in case you were wondering.)

Nima Al-Khurshid had a talk with Ray McGovern (here) on possible Iranian state action to retaliate against Israeli attacks on Iranian officials. Do the Israeli’s seriously think they can righteously target the leaders of other nations for de facto assassination by bombing in Damascus ?

Of course they do. Or they convince themselves they are righteous by self-delusion, aggressive PR and generations of indoctrination in their schools and military service traditions. If you do not know about this already I can recommend Miko Peled’s book “The General’s Son” for as good an insider’s candid account of Israeli indoctrination as you can find, and how banal it is in its evil.

No one should deny the state of Israel the right to self-defence, but they long ago stepped well past legitimate self-defence, and have become an apartheid terrorist state. Only the other day, shame on me, did I learn Israel had been a pretty staunch supporter of the former South African apartheid regime. The things you learn! That’s so F$\ast$-ed up. Israel has lost moral legitimacy. In having done so the leaders of the nation have harmed their own people far more than any Hamas, PLO, or Hezbollah resistance attack ever could. Little do they know.

The world is afflicted with people who can only see harm in visible material reality, people in general never look to the spiritual harm that emotionally violently afflicts generations. All the Millennial and Z-Gen Israeli youth who have become twisted sociopaths and virtual right-wing racist fascists. That’s the deepest harm. It takes a courageous person to pull back from right-wing extremism and denounce violence and racism. Their ego needs to take a big hit, they need to develop genuine empathy for their former perceived enemy, and regard them as human beings, and that courage is rare. It is far easier (perhaps paradoxically?) to be cynical, hateful and nihilistic.

Why paradoxical? Because in the longer run cynicism and hatred are extremely costly, and extremely damaging to society. The harder road to take of peace and forgiveness is only initially hard, in the long run it leads to friendship, happiness, safety and prosperity.

Anyhow, I left this comment for Nima and his audience:

@22:30 when you can so easily “.. blend in with the indigenous…” like a Lloyd Austin this is not so much a “deep state”. It is an open transparent corruption of an entire nation. The USA is in this wise no more a republic nor a democracy than Iran or Nth Korea. There is only supposed to be two layers separating the mass of US citizens from who gets appointed to the “deep state” — their locally elected officials and the primary elections which create the pool for the election of those representatives. In reality the US citizen has no say in who gets appointed to the deep state because they really have no say in the root level of the primaries.
      It is “deep” for sure, in the sense of ingrained and infested with liars and psychopaths. But the deepest rot is at the base level, your electoral system and how anti-democratic it is. One very reasonable measure to show it was democratic (necessary but not sufficient) would be the probability distribution of prior earned income of the representatives. It’d be gaussian and centered on about the average US worker wage.
      There is a little paradox or irony here: your base level of sham democracy is controlled by the top level. The USA (and all other neoliberal run nations) need to remove that top level control. “Seize back the state” is not a call for violent revolution, nor overthrow of government, it is a call for non-violent means to seize control of the base level, in the USA that would be in the primaries, so you get a fair say in who gets on the ballot.${}^\ast$
      Never think that this deep state is solely a consequence of the idiocy or greed-for-power of your government representatives. The USA as a collective people (led by the not so pure and saintly small group of “founding fathers”) once had a good idea to establish a representative democracy, but never actually managed to implement the ideal. We cannot blame the average US citizen for the present diseased state of US politics, but we can sure as heck blame every single person with agency in the USA for not lifting a finger to do something about it in their own small insignificant way (e.g., by engaging with family and friends on these issues, to generate groundswell for non-violently overthrowing neoliberalism and Its Mont Pelerin bred ilk) — because it is only the small actions of all people working together in harmony that can erode such a corrupt system, unless you are all prepared to sit idly by and wait for accelerationism to “work” its havoc through more poverty and death by neoliberal austerity.

${}^\ast$Note that in other countries it is actually harder than this! New Zealand could find it harder than the USA to destroy neoliberalism from the grass roots. We do not have open primaries. We do have proportional voting, but it actually entrenches the importance of political partisanship. You have to be a party insider to have a say in who gets on the ballots.

McGovern Mentions Poverty

Ray said there is a passage in the Bible where Mary speaks. Something about Jesus coming to fill up the poor with riches and leave the rich without. He interpreted it literally, which is always a sad mistake. Interpretations of any holy scriptures should be at first allegorical, if you want to overlay some literal meaning you’d better be careful, since as the enlightenment supposedly taught the common people, the literal interpretations make the scriptures inconsistent. In my autistic (I suppose?) naïveté I thought everyone understood this (I do not talk to people enough to know much popular conception and opinion). My comment:

@33: [cough!] that was not really what Biblical scripture was teaching. The idea was Jesus would “fill up the poor” with riches “of the Kingdom” — meaning spiritual virtues, which are far more valuable than material riches, for they are how decent civilization endures for all, not just for one. If you focus on material wealth and material riches you will miss 99% of the meaning in holy scriptures of all denominations. The point being, material prosperity is terrific too, but you only achieve that justly for all people with spiritual prerequisites — trustworthiness, honesty, compassion, love, kindness, forgiveness. When we achieve fair prosperity for all, counter to mainstream economics ideas, the rich disappear, not because God or marxists vanquished them nor Keynes’s ghost euthanized them, but they disappear because they become nothing but the “middle class” — but willingly, because they too gain a spiritual capacity and so spend their wealth upon the poor.
     However charity does not eliminate poverty, only governments can eliminate nominal poverty (deficiency of tax credits), since the government is always the monopoly issuer of the tax credits, either by fiat or by state chartered banks through credit circulation. Governments are the direct cause of nominal poverty, but little do people running the government know. If they did know they would also know how to immediately eliminate all nominal poverty their currency system causes (by employing for public good all people seeking to exchange their labour for the tax credit who cannot find employment in the private sector). The point of all that is to note we will never have decent governments until a significant critical mass of ordinary people are also spiritually alive.
      A materialistic greedy society will have a materialistic corrupt government that will not even wish to understand the source of unemployment is the State. (Unless miracles occur, and the greedy somehow undergo some “emergent complexity”" and collectively flock to altruism. 😂)
      The state is the cause of all unemployment in the currency it monopoly issues, but is then also the sole body that can eliminate all the unemployment it created. The purpose of imposing tax liabilities is to drive demand for an otherwise worthless currency, this creates people seeking to earn the currency (aka. unemployed) the purpose of this is not to leave anyone unemployed, but to hire all the workers the State just created by imposing tax liabilities. Residual involuntary unemployment is a simple policy mistake, a tragic one.

Foreign Policy Perverse Homeopathy

I am not opposed to medical homeopathy and naturopathy, but I am against these practices being applied exclusively without scientific backing. Even as placebo they could be effective in treating mild conditions that are partly psychosomatic.

However, in foreign policy establishment circles there is something similar that is totally pathological. Chas Freeman said it in one line on a recent Neutrality Studies episode . My comment:

@28:00 this was a great one-liner: Israel has sought security by terrorizing Its neighbour. It’s almost a universal law of stupidity. A sort of psychopathic foreign policy perverse homeopathy — “Yo, what hurts our neighbour must be good for them and will bring peace by ’like cures like’, they just need a little more hurt, give us some more time y’all.”

Social Media Note

For anyone who cares to know, I abandoned Twitter last year, partly because personally I had lost a woman I considered my one true love and soul mate, so was emotionally unable to cope with much of ordinary life, and the pain has not faded, eight months later, and shows no sign of ever fading. They say “time heals all wounds” but I am amassing evidence this is not 100% true. But also because I no longer consider Twitter/X to be an ethical platform, if it ever was, it certainly is no longer.

It is not even clear the “social” aspect of Twitter is effective. At least not for anyone with less than a million or so followers. So it is not a social platform. It is he/she who gains the most celebrity who speaks the loudest. That’s not democracy, that’s not populist. It is a magnification of the worst of a capitalist winner-take-all type of system.

If you think Twitter/X is a public space, frankly you are an idiot.

Yet what is a nobody like me to do with their activist energy? I do not know what is best, I have not been at the macroeconomics justice activist game for long enough to be an expert on effective methods. For now I am just thinking working on some projects and talking to one or two people who have some influence is a fair start.

Ultimately though, I think public media has to grow up and become the voice of the people, as befitting the purpose public journalism was once thought to serve. It is no longer a voice of the people, it is a groupthink vehicle manufacturing consent for the neoliberals.

Those who comprehend MMT know this more than most.

What deep state ills have your tax-payer dollars been up to funding recently, huh?