Blondie, Tuco, Angel Eyes (and Dirty Harry) Politics
Continuing the Wild Wild MMT Spaghetti Western series
There are metaphysical easter eggs at the end. I’m really mixing up the pasta here. I do know Blondie, Tuco and Angel Eyes are not in Once Upon a Time in the West.
Saint Bill-Reggaenomics-Mitchell was gunslinging it providing yet another correct MMT-Leftist analysis of how centrist neoliberals and weak-kneed liberal-nominal-lefties in the seats of Parliaments (who do not understand the monetary system) have driven voters into the 𖧳𖧥𖢧𖨚𖦙𖥣𖢧 crazy batcave of the far-right. It is almost unbelievably tragic, and had you asked me back in 2016 if this was possible I’d have laughed and accused you of caving in to Accelerationism. But then COVID happened and brainworms were grown, and here we are.
Let’s remind ourselves, one of the moral obligations of those we elect is to continually educate themselves about the range of powers they govern, which we grant them, in representing us. Yet we see uniform unwillingness to learn among our representatives. Partly it is the party partisan system entrenching ideologies and groupthink. Also the mainstream media narratives getting fiscal issues completely backwards (Lord help them, for they know not what they do — to paraphrase some old Leftie socialist from way back). Once one settles on a Party, their mind is closed to a lot of learning.
It is so simple to regurgitate the spew (yes, double spew, or more like continued exponentiated vomit) of the inflation bogeyman. It is known empirically to scare people. Whereas the utter horrors of unemployment, the blood and guts of it not visible in the national account statistics, go completely ignored.
There is a good reason why the Dirty Harry films appealed to even the most woke marxist critical theory drenched leftist. The people want a savoir, some power to protect them from harm. Never mind the cops & robbers or goodies and baddies theme is only marginally ambiguous in the Harry Callaghan films. (Take it for what it is, the “good guys” are more appealing when they have a naughty streak, it does not mean the superhero savoir undercurrent is any less regressive and defeating for the broad Left working class.)
Does anyone remember when the fascists in Magnum Force posed to Harry Callaghan “You are either for us or against us.” — Callaghan says, “I am afraid you have misjudged me.” All the moral ambiguity and weird politics in the movies aside, the whole idea in such modern fables that only an honest critical thought can take from is that Harry is not a person, he is not an individual. He is a character like in almost all artistic culture who is an avatar for all of us in society who want peace. To be sure, the right-wing mind can take the opposite artistic interpretation and see Harry as a wish for a real life vigilante, which means they’ve missed the whole point of the movie.
Back in the real world, there is no Harry Callaghan or Blondie waiting in the wings just to be unleashed on the neoliberal economic terrorists to save us. The whole bait & switch of Agent-Orange and the Mars-King that worked on the MAGA cult is truly an impressive feat of terrorism in this regard. Is it perhaps the greatest con-game scam in world history so far? (Or per my previous post, do these clown fascists even know they have been running a scam? The question, while perhaps pointless [since they just do not care], could be asked.)
It’s not all doom & gloom. Although AOC and “The Squad” in the USA, and in New Zealand the likes of Marama Davidson and Chlöe Swarbrick are not going to do squat on their own, if we the public back them and push them then they can at least fight more effectively against the Neoliberals. Which means fighting people in their own party too! Everyone who thinks the NZ Government needs to tax us to get their own scorepoints. Everyone who thinks people deserve a UBI — Universal Claim on Someone Else’s Labour. It also means understanding this is a Gunfight to the death for many people. Class warfare. You cannot bring nice words and promises to a political Mexican Stand-off. You need to rob one Neoliberal (the Labour Party) of their bullets, and kill the other.
It was (almost) hilarious to see Agent Orange berate and belittle Zelensky recently (dating this post). Half the things Trump said were were completely true and transparent. Not the least of which when he had the chance Trump did absolutely nothing to prevent the war. (Bizarre way to gun for a Nobel Peace prize to help provoke a war then act as the paternalistic peace-deal maker.) The Ukraine war was entirely provoked by NATO and the Washington consensus and the Monroe Doctrine paternalism and American Exceptionalism. That decrepit oligarch Putin took the bait, but he was hardly delusional in knowing he’d be able to grab the productive land and industry in the Donbas for Russian interests. The Neocon West (Nuland, Johnson, der Leyen, et al) handed it to him on a platter dressed with the wine red syrup of innocent civilian blood.
This entire episode in recent history makes Dirty Harry look like the political equivalent of a physics conference of seriously nerdy quantum physicists with IQ’s in multidimensional thought spaces.1
We must become our own saviors through collective action. The longer the delay in worker organizing, the more drawn out the pain, and the more hold the far-right will have over the working classes who lack a class conscience and dream of a superhero to the rescue. I see this as Accelerationist, so it should eventually burn out. But the number of people left in the gutter in the mean time is our collective burden and shame.
Metaphysics Ain’t Physics
A last treat for today for those who know the Ai hype machines for spitting out strings stochastically are “thinking beings” hype is hype. Here you can hear a fringe biologist talk about consciousness and mind like he knows something. I should say first off, physics is a proper subset of metaphysics — the part that can be experimentally explored.
This dude Michael Levin thinks consciousness and mind are “patterns”. To which I’d say patterns in what substrate exactly? Physics? But physics cannot generate mental qualia. This is by definition. All physics is all objective reality, even “the quantum”. So what is the medium? It is not biology since all biology is complicated physics. When we say higher level laws emerge in biology that is a statistical concept, not causal. We ignore the elementary degrees of freedom. Emergence is loss of information, not gain. But it is useful for descriptive expediency.
The underlying physical causality (such as it is — causality is a pure metaphysical notion, since physics per se has no concept of “causation”) is the law-like behavior of electrons/photons, quarks/gluons, gravity and the rest, plus initial/boundary conditions on our cosmos (which are extra-physical, or exogenous).
I had to write in all honesty in reply, to the host, Curt Jaimungal:
Darn it all Curt. This is horse𖨚𖦙𖥣𖢧. I used to think about this concept of Mind when I was a teenager and knew next to nothing, but even then knew it was as fishy as week old sardines. It is rehashing William James. But patterns cannot be conscious. Entities are conscious, which is to say the soul. But no science or physics knows of the concept of "soul" — since it is nonphysical. If consciousness and intelligence were merely behavioral ("emergent" input-output was the _only_ story) we'd not experience subjective mental qualia.
Everyone and his dog who is still tied pseudo-religiously to Materialism (either of the Realist or Idealist (Bernado Kastrup2) schools, or anything in between) is a rank idiot who is operating as a prepubescent teenage "philosopher". Or so I do say!🤣
And yes, Kastrup is a dopey Materialist. He objectifies the "universal mind" which is materialism, just not physical-materialism. “A man's got to know his abstractions!” — Inspector Harry “Dirty Theory” Callaghan.
Which is saying something, given how in the Dirty Harry films all the other actors must have been paid big bucks to not bother to practice the art of actual acting. Made Clint Eastwood look like a complete artistic genius surpassing De Niro and Phoenix.
Do yourself a favour and do not DuckDuckGo that dude. You’ll not learn anything true from him, except “Materialism sucks.” Which is paradoxically self-referential for his own brand of Idealism. And it is a brand, he is grabbing donations for his brand of Idealism.