Archives for category: authoritarianism
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Who Wants What

August 14, 2025 //
0

Mind what you wish for,
for it might happen…

Putin wants to survive while Trump wants the same thing.
Xi also wants Putin to survive…

Without Putin(ism), Europe wouldn’t spend a dime on weapons. On American weapons!
America would have to develop and maintain alone the hardware needed to keep Xi at bay.

Once Putin gone, the Russian people will completely turn their attention towards Europe.
Leaving the ‘Chinese model’ stranded. In limbo…

What do we want?!?
Who cares?!? But now, that you’ve asked…

We want America back!
The already great America…
The one wise enough to save Europe from itself. Twice!
The one wise enough to help Japan back on its feet after WWII.
The one wise, and brave, enough to defend South Korea.
The one wise enough to understand that behaving like a bull in a China shop might be fun. For a while… but inexorably produces a fine mess… Specially when the bull owns much of the china being traded in that shop!

America does have a huge responsibility in maintaining the world in a working state. For the simple reason that America’s wealth depends, directly and indirectly, on the smooth functioning of the increasingly integrated world market.
Forgetting this, and concentrating your attention on ‘particular interests’, vested or not, is nothing short of blinding yourself. Of shutting reality out!

And we want Europe back!
Europe has already done the same mistake America is about to commit.
Behaved like the bull in the China shop. Literally. Then, overwhelmed by the consequences, left out without clearing up the mess.

Finally, but equally important, we need China – along with all other ‘wishful thinkers’ – to learn.
To understand that behaving like a bull in the China shop, even if you do it at home, doesn’t help anybody. Not in the long run.
Everybody, including the bull, ends up in tatters…

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

Blunt sociology

July 5, 2025 //
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Deeds?
Or individuals?
What do you see first?

Most of you are more likely than not to be familiar with the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ metaphor.
My straw borrowed the shape of a book. Erich Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Aggression.
At some point, when discussing the differences between Skinner and Freud, Fromm asks more or less the same question. His point of interest being different from mine… his thoughts follow a different path from mine…

So? What do you you reckon?

I feel the need to remind you a few things.
Fromm, a famous psychologist, had a PhD in sociology.
I, an engineer, have a BSc, in sociology.
Skinner, the entire behaviorist school of thinking, was contemporary with the dissolution of ‘God’.

Once the camel’s back had given way, things have started to fall into place.
Those who see ‘individuals’ first are psychologists, at heart, and those who see ‘deeds’ are sociologists.

‘So Skinner should have been a sociologist?!?’

I would never go as far as telling people what any of them should be doing!
I leave that to Marx’s followers. To all those, in general, who are confident enough to do it. I’m sure this is a wrong thing to do but I’m not here to judge. Only to express a few considerations.

‘You don’t tell people what to do, only what to NOT do! Semantics…’

There is an old story which sheds some light on this problem.

A teacher gave an after school assignment:
‘Do a good deed. Come back tomorrow and share the experience.’
John:
‘At a traffic light, sounding the right kind of beep, a blind person was already halfway across. A runaway truck was fast approaching without a sound. I pulled the person out of the danger. They was very grateful.’
Kevin:
‘An elderly lady was approaching a traffic light which was about to change. There was no chance in hell that she could have made it. I hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her across. She screamed and kicked like hell. She had no business on that side of the road. I felt ashamed and I left her there.’

Skinner, the behaviorists in general, do not care about ‘intent’. ‘I have no clue about what’s going on inside people’s heads. All I know, and can ‘measure’, is what they do. How they behave. In any given circumstances after whatever conditioning had been exerted upon them’.

Which makes a lot of sense, right? Specially for an engineer…

Freud, on the other hand, puts the onus on the manner in which each individual ‘digests’ – ‘internalizes’, according to the lingo – the whole history of interactions (conditioning?!?) they have experienced on the road towards their present state.

For Freud, behavior is something to be studied in order to understand the individual while for Skinner behavior is something to be fine-tuned.

Not so different, from my perspective.
Both Freud and Skinner somehow forget about the elephant in the room.
Who studies the individual? Who makes the (psycho)analysis? Who attempts to fine-tune ‘the behavior’?
I’m not going to go any further. And ask ‘why?’. What’s the end goal of any of those individual ‘experimenters’. ‘Motives’…
I’m no psychologist.

Being an engineer, I’m more interested in consequences. In what comes out…

In what we, ordinary people, have to survive in!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, skin in the game, teleology

Progress?!?

April 17, 2025 //
0

2010

“Former Pennsylvania judge Michael Conahan has pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy charge for helping put juvenile defendants behind bars in exchange for bribes.
He is accused along with former judge Mark Ciavarella of taking $2.8m (£1.8m) from a profit-making detention centres. Mr Ciavarella denies wrongdoing.“

2024

““Conahan’s actions destroyed families, including mine, and my son’s death is a tragic reminder of the consequences of his abuse of power,” Sandy Fonzo said to the outlet. “This pardon feels like an injustice for all of us who still suffer. Right now I am processing and doing the best I can to cope with the pain that this has brought back.”
Similarly, Amanda Lorah, who at age 14 was wrongfully imprisoned as part of the scheme, told WBRE: “It’s a big slap in the face for us once again.
“We had … time taken away from us. We had no one to talk to, but now we’re talking about the president of the United States to do this. What about all of us?”“

2025

“President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated that he’d like to send U.S. citizens who commit violent crimes to prison in El Salvador, telling that country’s president, Nayib Bukele, that he’d “have to build five more places” to hold the potential new arrivals.
Trump’s administration has already deported immigrants to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison CECOT, known for its harsh conditions. The president has also said his administration is trying to find “legal” ways to ship U.S. citizens there, too.“

Back in 2020

“The question was posed, “Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?” A lady named Bev answered it this way:
“You all don’t get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.
They don’t give a shit what he does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals, that’s it, period.
He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.
The fact that people act like it’s anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
If you keep getting caught up in “why do they not realize this problem” and “how can they still back Trump after this scandal,” then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It’s fuck liberals, that’s pretty much it.
Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they’ll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense?
Because they’re not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it’s irrelevant. Fuck liberals is the only relevant thing.
Trust me; I know firsthand what I’m talking about.
That’s why they just laugh at it all because you all don’t even realize they truly don’t give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.
It’s just a side mission story that doesn’t matter anyway.
That’s all just trivial details – the economy, health care, whatever.
Fuck liberals.
Look at the issue with not wearing the masks.
I can tell you what that’s about. It’s about exposing fear. They’re playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.
You’ve got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness because that’s what they believe strength is, hatred of weakness.
And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred.
And I’m not exaggerating. Believe me.
Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that’s what proves they’re strong, their passionate hatred for weakness.
Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness.
They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they’re in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance, and to them, that’s an obvious sign of weakness.
Kindness = weakness. Honesty = weakness.
Compromise = weakness.
They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn’t hate weakness as much as they do.”

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

Threading on Ice

March 18, 2025 //
0

If it walks like a duck…
James Whitcomb Riley

By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar. Lenin and his closest lieutenants hastened home after the German authorities agreed to permit their passage through Germany to neutral Sweden. Berlin hoped that the return of anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort.

Do you remember the story about the early American Colonists “gifting of blankets and linens contaminated with smallpox” to the native inhabitants of the place?
It worked, to a degree, because the natives had no prior experience with the disease. Their immune systems had no prior experience with this pathogen. Which had been construed as an opportunity by those who had cooked up the plan, even though – in those times – nobody had any idea about ‘immunity’.

Lenin was also effective towards pulling the Czarist Empire out of WWI. Do we really care whether he was aware of the fact that he had been used as a 5-th column by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s strategists?

Do we learn anything?

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, teleology

A reminder

February 1, 2025 //
0

History never repeats itself.
Only keeps teaching a lesson until we actually understand it.

‘In 1936, Hitler boldly marched 22,000 German troops into the Rhineland, in a direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler offered France and Britain a 25 year non-aggression pact and claimed: “Germany had no territorial demands to make in Europe” ‘.

“In the summer of 1938 Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland into Germany. At this point Hitler was aware that the Allies were desperate to avoid war, and thought it likely that they would appease his demands.
Hitler threatened war over the issue of the Sudetenland. On 29 – 30 September 1938 the British, Italian, French and German leaders met in Munich to discuss the issue.
The Allies agreed to concede the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for a pledge of peace. This agreement was known as the Munich Pact.”

“On May 3, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin fired Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov, who was Jewish and an advocate of collective security, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, who soon began negotiations with the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Soviets also kept negotiating with Britain and France, but in the end Stalin chose to reach an agreement with Germany. By doing so he hoped to keep the Soviet Union at peace with Germany and to gain time to build up the Soviet military establishment, which had been badly weakened by the purge of the Red Army officer corps in 1937. The Western democracies’ hesitance in opposing Adolf Hitler, along with Stalin’s own inexplicable personal preference for the Nazis, also played a part in Stalin’s final choice. For his part, Hitler wanted a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union so that his armies could invade Poland virtually unopposed by a major power, after which Germany could deal with the forces of France and Britain in the west without having to simultaneously fight the Soviet Union on a second front in the east.“

What is the lesson here?
That each tyrant believes they can outwit all other tyrants.
That tyrants are convinced they can outwit democratic alliances.
That, in the end, all authoritarian regimes fail. Abysmally. For the simple reason that inability to accept their own faillings makes all authoritarian leaders incapable of coping with change. Unable to adapt. Unable to evolve. Hence all authoritarian regimes are inherently fragile.

And who suffers the consequences?
We do. All of us. “World Wide Wars”, remember?

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

Einstein

January 31, 2025 //
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“Insanity is doing the same thing
over and over again
and expecting different results”
Rita Mae Brown

“Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

First celebrated as a brilliant physicist, Einstein had later been recognized as an ‘all rounder’.
So much so that he was found ‘guilty’ for other people’s words.

Rita Mae Brown?!?
Why bother mention her? If you want ‘to back’ up such an important saying, you’d better come up with a really famous ‘promoter’. Preferably a dead one…

‘And your point is…?’

On January 27, the day when Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago, I shared this on FB:

Some people took exception. Interpreting this as an allusion to what’s currently going on in the US, they asked me to ‘be specific’.

“I don’t protest the protesters but their particular way of doing it. Without any consideration for the ‘collateral damage’ and turning a blind eye towards the already experienced facts.”

My point being that Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism. Germany wasn’t the first country where large scale pogroms were organized.
Pogrom is a Russian word. “To wreak havoc, to demolish violently”.
The way I see it, ‘pogrom’ is not only a tragedy – for both victims and perpetrators – but also a symptom.
A symptom that something is amiss in the society which allows it to happen.

To protest something is fully justified.
If unhappy about something, one is fully entitled to try to prevent that something from happening. Again…
But it would be ‘unreasonably’ to ‘prevent’ it in a way that will be even costlier than the ‘feared development’. Particularly ‘unreasonably’ if the method had already been experimented!

Those supporting Hitler were ‘protesting’ the Versailles Treaty.
Just as Lenin’s Bolsheviks were protesting what had happened during the czarist Russia.
Hitler and Lenin protested by perpetrating crimes even more heinous than those they were protesting.

They should have known better.
Those who supported them, of course… for it was the supporters who had ultimately experienced the consequences!
After all, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the simple fact that this time it is the others who are at the receiving end of what’s going on doesn’t make it right. In no way better than what we have experienced. And continue to… The misery experienced by the others does not annihilate ours!

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Choices we make, effective communication, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

A warning

January 26, 2025 //
0
Celebratory meme posted by ecstatic Trump 47 supporter a few days after the inauguration.

True enough.

Only living in a world where everybody is scared… isn’t that much fun!

Not even for those who have managed to amass all the money in the market.

As somebody who has lived under both communism and not yet free market capitalism I must stress that there’s little difference between communism and monopolistic capitalism presented under the guise of democracy.
Between a social order where all power – political, economic, social, you name it – is concentrated in the hands of a few self selected people pretending to protect the interests of the people. A social order described by those calling the shots as being a ‘popular democracy'(?!?).
And a social order where all power – …. – is concentrated in the hands of the few people who have amassed all the riches in that particular society. And who, behind manipulated -and no longer liberal – democratic mechanisms pretend to protect the interests of the people.

The problem with both situations being the fact that a few people – no matter how capable and/or well intended, if that is the case – cannot manage, over a sizeable amount of time, such a complex thing as a society. Period.

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crises, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, effective communication, Frames of mind, In English, Mutual Respect, skin in the game

The Difference

January 20, 2025 //
0

Being able to ‘see the difference’ is what makes us able to considerate.
The result of our considerations…

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to spot the difference between a spot and a curve.
You don’t even need to be able to read…

Every adolescent steps out of the straight and narrow. Time and time again. And is told by his elders to toe the line. Until they learn that stepping back into the fold is easier than remaining an outlier for the rest of their natural life.
Only the fold is no longer were it used to be… It has reached its current position because those who had the guts to explore have done that for the rest of us. Experimented being outliers. So that we, all of us, did not have to experience every possibility before choosing where to go next. They, the outliers, found out what was ‘out there’ and told us.

I’ve already made a few considerations about the two pictures above. About some of the differences between the top and the bottom ones. I’ve left the main one for today’s post.

We do have a certain bias towards conformity. We do, socially and statistically speaking, tend to follow the trend. Like all other social animals.
After all, no society/herd can function – as a group, when all its members behave ‘outlierly’. So much outside the trend as to buck it.
The difference between the top and the bottom ‘graph-s’ being the attitude towards the situation.

The top one comes with the ‘normal’ bias. Each normal individual does have a certain ‘something’ against the ‘outlier’ situation and a certain affinity for the comfort of being trendy. But we have learned to respect the outliers, for as long as they don’t hurt us. For as long as they don’t rock the boat so much as to get us seasick.
The bottom graph states from the beginning that only the outlier opinion is valid. That no matter how many people continue to follow the trend, they are wrong. Even worse, they are insignificant. Hence disposable.

OK, there have been instances when the trend was leading in the wrong direction. Quite a few.
Yet people have somehow managed to survive. They stuck together, realized the outliers who kept warning them were right and followed them out of the dire situation they found themselves in.
But in each and every situation where an outlier had declared the rest of the ‘mob’ to be insignificant/disposable, and had enough traction to act upon their convictions, the situation had to become worse before people realized they had to change tack.

Before the people had realized they were following the wrong outlier!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, skin in the game

Retribution

December 18, 2024 //
0

The Government you elect
is the Government you deserve.
Thomas Jefferson

We are currently convinced that ‘an eye for an eye’ is an excessive – abusive, even – form of justice. But in its time, it was a very progressive principle.
Do not exert more punishment than the original damage.
NO MORE than an eye for an eye.

We don’t need more chaos. We need more consideration!

The likes of Trump are turning the tables on all of us!

Yes, some of those pushing left-side issues have jumped the shark. Not in the sense that the issues themselves were worthless but in the manner used to pursue them.

The likes of Trump have done nothing else but appropriated that very same manner of conducting business.

““The late Phyllis Schlafly, whom I worked so closely with, used to say, ‘If you get to claim and frame the argument, you almost certainly get to win.’ In other words, if you take their framing, it’s a woman’s right. Are you gonna put women in jail? No. It’s about a baby. Now, what do we do? Frame the argument. Own the argument,” he said.”

Recognize the lingo? The line-up of arguments?

Only this time the method is used by Ed Martin. The Trump nominee who wants to jail women for having abortions.

While the hard right argues for a blanket ban and the hard left argue for a no holds barred policy regarding abortion, real people have a hard time trying to lead a normal life. The extremes keep pushing for their stated goals while we’re stuck in a kind of limbo.
Watching them as if mesmerized by their antics…

Consideration rather than more chaos would come in handy at this point!

https://edition.cnn.com/kfile-ed-martin-rnc-platform-committee-anti-abortion-exceptions/index.html

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Categories 1989, authoritarianism, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Trust, fear, respect

November 13, 2024 //
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He was my friend. We trusted each-other.

He was huge. 150 pounds of muscle. Pitch black.
Some people feared him. Specially when seeing him for the first time.

He had earned the respect of many. Canine friends in the park. People who had come in contact with him.

Respect is a tricky thing.

Fear is simple. Not that different from love. Somewhat contrary…
Trust is simplish. After enough time spent together, you learn whether you can trust the other.
Respect, on the other hand….

You cannot respect something/somebody which/whom you find repulsive.

You can ‘trust’ a bully to make your life miserable but you cannot respect them.

Do you fear a bully?
Not necessarily. You don’t need fear to avoid a danger. You only need to understand what’s going on.

Then what is ‘respect’?
Something you learn about. While trust is something you learn to.
Trust is something to be rather felt while respect is something you experience with your mind. First and foremost.

Furthermore, nobody fakes trust. Unless presented as ‘respect’.

Why have I chosen an animal to illustrate this post?
Because ‘fear’ is what drives awareness. Fuels conscience. And, as far as evidence suggests, it is widely felt in the animal kingdom.
Our family. Our only home in this world!

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, authoritarianism, awareness, effective communication, In English, Mutual Respect, teleology, Trust
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