Here we are into December, into the Christmas season. That has been turned into something weird by a lot of people, although I refuse to buy into any of that. I love Christmas time, the whole season around it, despite the general warpage of much of it by some people.
I have not gone back to do some kind of retrospective review of past writing here around the Christmas season, but from memory, I probably have gone through quite a bit written musing about the many ways so many people here in my country have done quite a lot to warp and distort the holiday, and an extended period of time preceding Christmas day itself. One ironic twist in that is that the more the holiday is warped, by many people, the more likely they are to ignore and dismiss the traditions of observing Christmas as a period (see “the 12 days of Christmas”, which is not just a silly song for the season), declaring the whole thing done and over with as soon as the Christmas day rituals are done. By that, I mean, opening wrapped gifts, eating a bunch of food, and maybe watching some television.
It is more sad than funny to see how many people squawk about how they hate Christmas, hate, even while, if you really look closely, it seems apparent in probably a large portion of those cases that what they really hate is all the array of weird cultural distortions of the modern American Christmas. Of course, these days, even the word hate is a tricky one as it seems to have become a severely abused word.
Another sad item is to see the bizarre distortions that cause some people to go bananas about Christianity and Christians, when what sends them into whatever statements and attitudes they have going in that area usually seems to revolve around matters of people sanctimoniously rattling on about being Christian, while effectively being profoundly anti-Christian, when you get right down to the reality of what they think, say, and do. Look around and observe your own examples you find involving people doing things like lamenting and condemning “the intolerance and hate” of “Christians”, and ponder what’s going wrong there.
I wish a good Christmas to all, in all its complexity of old pagan observation of the Winter Solstice and celebration and observation of the birth of Jesus, and all the more modern aspects of it, with the decorations and lights, gifts, and music, with hopes that everyone will embrace the reflection and essence of goodwill and love and fellowship. These things are important and real.
Part of the season, the whole general “holiday season”, is, of course, the period of the Christmas season (the real Christmas season, not the whole side item of the “consumer season of consumption” that keeps getting pushed into an earlier and earlier startup), is also the lead-up to the end of the year and a beginning of a new calendar year, a good time for general review, reflection, and assessment.
All of that continues to be problematic, with all kinds of broad and fairly horrendous psychological distortions in the public psyche. It continues to be nearly impossible to realistically write about any public matters without once again mentioning the ongoing pandemic of the bipolar political disorder. Two full years after the 2016 US presidential election, mobs of people continue to exhibit what I can only regard as symptoms and manifestations of serious mental illness regarding that whole circus and its repercussions. That is not a joke, and it is not hyperbole.
I know that has been an ongoing subject here for me, but it keeps going, and this has to be cleaned up. I would think that everybody reading this with some objective perspective knows all about it, because it is just everywhere, watching people bending themselves into mental pretzels trying to rationalize notions in their heads that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton was actually a good choice to be President of the United States. I can’t get over it, the idea that anybody with any sense could look at those two people and not run screaming in revulsion and horror, yet, with the pervasive bipolar political disorder, and the grip of the nonsense telling them that we have “a two-party system” (constantly fed to them by the two political parties that have seized power), there it is. It keeps going.
Beyond all the running problems of all that, it keeps coming up here because, as I also keep saying, new events and situations keep arising to feed the insanity.
A big one is the news that President Donald Trump announced that he would be withdrawing US military from the country of Syria, where they never should have been in the first place. I would expect this to be greeted as a rare bit of sanity and an astonishing case of the current President actually doing something right. This appears to not be the case, in general, with all kinds of public noise including phrases like “the current madness of Trump regarding Syria!”.
The US military, to put it simply, invaded and occupied Syrian territory, doing this even as all sorts of people high in the US government, right up to the President at the time (Barack Obama), were steadily making pronouncements saying the head of the Syrian government “must go!”, still another case of “regime change” neocon madness of the kind that has been going for a very long time now, to take any country in the world where the government is not following orders from Washington DC and either seize control of that government, or simply destroy the place and throw it into hellish violent dysfunctional chaos.
Off in the margins, outside the propaganda and idiocy on display in the supposed “legit news media”, rare voices state the obvious, like talking about some of the public statements about this move that make no sense at all. There was one, from a prominent US Senator (of the Club R membership, in this case, although that is a detail item) about how this is “a gift to Syria, ISIS, Iran, and Russia”, among other things.
Just referring to “ISIS” is an issue all its own, as it appears from everything I can gather about the confusing mess there is that there seems to be a large and complicated messy assortment of armed factions battling, including an array of different groups that would generally be called “terrorists”. A common aspect among all that is groups having a goal of overthrowing the Syrian government, or seizing control of large parts of Syria and instituting their own hellish sort of rule, or both. Look beyond the barrage of propaganda here in the US, and many people practicing actual honest objective journalism have been reporting that at least some of those warring factions are supported by the US government, maybe even created by parts of the US government, for the purpose of overthrowing the Syrian government, even while the people of the United States (and the rest of the world) are fed propaganda nonsense about “fighting the terrorists” in Syria as the justification for the military invasion, occupation, and warfare in another country on the other side of the world.
It’s incredible to see how many people swallow the contradictory nonsense about how the US military is there, must be there, in Syria, to “fight the terrorists”, basically the groups who went into Syria from other parts of the Middle East to spread mayhem and death and seize control and overthrow the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, even while they are steadily fed (and accept) noise about “Assad must go!”. It boggles the mind to see how many people, including people who I would have thought were much smarter than this, swallow it all and never see the obvious contradictions and blatant nonsense and outright lying.
Many people still buy all that, joining the mob frenzy shouting that indeed Assad must go because he’s an evil dictator who attacks his own people with chemical weapon poison gas, despite the facts of the matter reported by serious journalists about each of the alleged cases of “Assad gassing his people!”, examined and analyzed and reported at length, clearly indicating what complete nonsense the stories about “Assad and the Syrian military attacked civilians with chemical weapons!” have been.
We still get “news” about the “Syrian civil war” when it appears to be fully a matter of outside forces going into Syria and launching attacks aiming to seize control of Syria, not some sort of “people’s uprising” of Syrians battling their evil dictator. In fact, while it is easy to be simplistic and overly broad about this kind of thing, from what I can see, it looks like actually Assad is generally well regarded by most of the people in Syria as a respected and fairly benevolent leader of government. If you have been wading through all the saga about Syria for the last several years, it should be noteworthy to observe how, as the Syrian military has fought off terrorist groups seizing parts of Syria, the news here in the US has referred to “the fall of <insert Syrian city X>”, like this was some terrible defeat and disaster for the people of Syria, and completely ignoring the reality you have to search to find in objective news elsewhere, that the people living in those places were overwhelmed with relief and joy as the Syrian military finally drove out the deadly lunatics who had seized and controlled the place where they live.
The whole thing is a years-long horror show of malevolence and insanity, and for the most part, people here in the United States have either little to no idea about what has been happening in Syria, or, worse, notions about the story there that are so profoundly wrong, so upside down and backwards, that it’s shocking.
Good luck finding anything in the news here about a fundamental “root cause” of the start of the whole “Assad must go!” campaign, a proposed natural gas pipeline running from Qatar to Europe, which, surprise, Assad refused to allow to run through Syria.
You won’t hear much about that in the normal diet of US “news consumers”, along with another part of that story, woven in a crazy complex web of propaganda and confusion, which is to notice that Russia, in general, and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, suddenly assumed the image of evil dictator trying to take over the world right around the time, by sheer coincidence, that the Russian military went to the aid of ally Syria to fight off the terrorist groups coming in and attacking, with the Russian military coming to help, in Syria, at the request of the Syrian government.
Meanwhile, the US military went into Syria, completely and explicitly against the wishes of the Syrians, supposedly to “fight the terrorists” (which, again, seem to have, in some of the many factions involved, the support of the US government!). There, the Orwellian doublespeak nonsense included things like referring to some what would otherwise be called “terrorists” as not terrorist groups, but, rather, “the moderate opposition”. In escalating levels of insanity and blatant deception, appalling numbers of Americans here somehow don’t see all this as what it is, even as situations have arisen where we have the powder keg insanity of the US military and the Russian military coming into situations of conflict, because the Russians had the unmitigated gall to attack the armed groups inside Syria attacking the Syrian people and Syrian military trying to overthrow the Syrian government and seize territory inside Syria, even while, stay with me here, we are inundated with statements and “news” about how the US military is supposedly there “to fight the terrorists”!
So, all that comes up again, given the news of the current President announcing that the US military will withdraw from somewhere it never should have been, and the reactions from some people about how terrible this is, “the madness of Trump”. I will repeat a point I keep trying to get across (pretty much completely ignored), about how many people put themselves in positions of being completely in line with the whole neocon cult, even as they somehow regard themselves as being so completely in opposition to “those Republican neocon warmongers” when something like the subject of the Iraq wars comes up. The level of cognitive dissonance in some people is shocking, overwhelming levels. I don’t know how their heads don’t explode.
Another new item is somewhat of a recycling of not a totally new subject, a web article “reporting” that, to summarize, asserts that anybody who voted for Jill Stein to be President in the 2016 election was a duped victim of Russian propaganda to attack our democracy and steal the election for the Russian agent/puppet Trump!
This is such insanity it almost becomes comical, although the humor is pretty dark, because this is not fiction, this is really being reported as serious news, and worse, much worse, passed along and propagated through the WWW by otherwise serious and intelligent people.
The broad theme of communication is a subject here, given the broad and terrible situation of how much happening in the world is so overwhelmingly confused by tangled webs in sheer nonsense, lying, and distortion, with the obvious problems (at least obvious to many of us) of how much of it is all intertwined.
A huge part of that tangled mess is the mob insanity about Russia and Putin, which now runs through an assortment of insane narratives, an all purpose general bogeyman, with Russia being put on center stage in the ongoing neocon games aimed at any nation in the world with a government not “playing ball” in one situation or another (Russia hardly being alone there).
The epidemic of bipolar political disorder plays a large part, with situations like Jill Stein daring to seek to be elected President while not being part of the “two party system” club, which rules everything, despite the old and obvious information that there is no “two party system” in US government except to the extent that power has effectively been seized by the two completely dominating political parties involved.
When we got two completely and utterly horrendous party candidates from these two organizations, all the usual nonsense about “third party” candidates came forth again (and again, anybody outside the club is “third party”, no matter how many parties are actually involved, an item of absurdity of its own).
In the club D world, masses of people have gone completely insane in refusing to face the fact that the Democratic party, against the will of so many people who wanted someone else, offered up a candidate who was so terribly wretchedly awful that she lost the election to Donald Trump, for god’s sake. Instead of stepping back and facing that, astonishing scenes play out as people have latched on to the completely bonkers narrative of idiocy that Mrs. Clinton could only have lost because “Russia and Russian agents attacked our democracy and stole the election for the Russian puppet Trump!”.
We still have the appalling insanity of the narrative that says that because Wikileaks actually exposed a large ugly pile of nasty misconduct by Mrs. Clinton and associates, not only in the process of selecting the Democratic party candidate for President, but many other things (including her conduct as Secretary of State), Julian Assange must clearly be a Russian agent, complicit with Russia agents “hacking our democracy” (ignoring everything about that which says there was no such “hacking” and that the data transfer involved must have been a direct on-site transfer of data, most likely to some USB connected storage device, by somebody with direct access, probably disgusted by what they knew of what was going on).
As we wind up this year approaching Christmas, it really is beyond sad, and truly appalling, to see people locked in the same general threads of madness, complete with all the complex entanglements (like the way obsessive mania about Russia and Putin as bogeymen run through more than one mess). For one thing, just the way the same general subjects require repetition here, because they just keep going, is annoying. I mean, although I don’t want to take even more time repeating the general summary of the Ukraine farce, that still continues to have the same problem of a massive portion of the American population having swallowed whole an entire narrative about Ukraine that is almost entirely wrong. Just recently, I watched a stream of more web one-liner commentary from a string of people yammering about “when is Putin going to give back Crimea?”, completely oblivious to the referendum vote in Crimea where over 90% of the voters approved a resolution to separate from Ukraine and ask to rejoin Russia, after the coup that overthrew the elected President of Ukraine, probably with many reasons of their own, no doubt a big one being that they wanted the protection of the Russian military to stave off the violence being directed their way (much like what was also directed toward the eastern regions of Ukraine) to burn the place to the ground and wipe out everyone who objected to the coup in Kiev and still wanted the President they had elected.
Trying to talk about these subjects I’ve just skimmed, and many others, just triggers all kinds of irrational and flat out delusional nonsense and squabbling from people whose bondage to one line or another of political dogma and assorted propaganda creates all kinds of problems. Just today, I’ve encountered more of this, finding people seemingly completely unable to grasp a simple point, and not only that, but taking things that are said and not only not understanding, but somehow asserting that what was said was something very different, even completely opposite, to what was actually said. This kind of thing can be so completely absurd, sometimes prompting complete non sequiturs, that it really can be difficult to tell if it’s a case of somebody just behaving as baiting trolls, or they genuinely are that obtuse, and in some cases this happens with people who, in another context, seem to be intelligent people.
This, now, just takes us right back to a repeating subject, but this keeps coming back to the general bipolar political disorder problem that splatters its lunacy all over virtually any subject, public issues, private matters, world events and the most trivial things, polluted by the people in the grip of that insanity. Even bringing it up to people caught up in that triggers nonsense about “sides”, this side versus that side, or, sometimes, absurd non sequitur silliness about supposedly suggesting some kind of “false equivalence” between “the two sides”, still not getting that “sides” have little to nothing to do with what are true facts, or lies and fiction, and what makes sense or is complete fucking nonsense.
The good news, buried under the mass insanity, is that more and more people are apart from all that insanity, and are trying their best to see what is what as it is, what is actually true, what actually makes sense, apart from the mental illness I have been addressing. The problem, the challenge, is how to communicate and reach the people who have lost their minds to the groupthink mob madness, and somehow break the spell.
Posted by John Eagan 
Noise 