The Invisible Counterpoint

Paul Krugman, at his blog,  has just explained  why austerity-favouring politicians in Britain might well get re-elected. He writes: Well, you could blame the weakness of the opposition, which has done an absolutely terrible job of making its case. You could blame the fecklessness of the news media, which has gotten much wrong. But the truth is that what’s happening in British politics is what almost always happens, there and everywhere else: Voters have fairly short memories, and they judge economic policy not by long-term results but by recent growth. Over five years, the coalition’s record looks terrible. But over the past couple of quarters it looks pretty good, and that’s what matters politically. This is the common sense understanding of how people work that liberals generally (always?) prefer, that they're basically good but have certain weaknesses that make them exploitable. He's wed to it, unfortunately, so that if it was only one quarter that looked pre...

Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote about the Republican victories in the midterm election, saying essentially that it really doesn’t matter if one party wins or loses because without systematic change, either way we’re headed for doom. Specifically he wrote:  This is not a “seismic shift” in favor of the Republicans or the so-called conservative agenda, no matter what John Boehner and Mitch McConnell may say this week. Reading an off-year election result as an indicator of larger societal trends is like interpreting a blizzard as evidence against global warming. The political clock is already ticking toward 2016, when the pendulum will swing in the other direction and Democrats are nearly certain to win back some or all of what they just lost in Congress. If the human conundrum known as Hillary Clinton runs for president she will be the prohibitive favorite; Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. No, what the dire 2014 midterms re...

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One) 
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little, vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an independent self apart from her. His life was on the line, and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life ... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this means making him into someone who would be to any sane outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what life would confront him with. The rest of the world does not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding oblivion! What of if i...

Lloyd's new article is up at www.psychohistory.com. You'll note a couple of changes in this latest work from what he's 
written before. After a quick first read, these two stand out: Current: Kennedy soon needed a new war to consolidate his defensive masculinity 
pose, increased the U.S. military spending the largest amount in any 
peacetime, and then committed 16,300 U.S. soldiers to Vietnam. When he 
went to Dallas, where there were many highly publicized death threats 
to kill him, he needed still more “toughness,” and told his wife, 
“Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, 
nobody can stop it.” “His Secret Service aides told him he better put 
up the bulletproof plastic top on his limousine, so he specifically 
told them not to do so,” committing suicide to demonstrate his 
hypermasculinity. ( Global Wars to Restore U.S. Masculinity ) Here, Kennedy is hypermasculine, even in suicide demonstrating his toughness. Before: ...

"In modern democratic nations, we usually don't actually kill our leaders; we periodically throw them out of office and replace them with revitalized substitutes. But the decline in potency of the leader, his inexorable abandonment of us as we grow still is felt today. This is because the leader is a less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who tells us to do what we tell him we want done, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are regularly sacrificed when the leader is under attack." (Llooyd DeMause, Psychogenic Theory of History) ...

The U.K. has cut back expenses hugely and fired millions. It will certainly go into a major Depression. As Tony Blair said when asked why he hit his one-year-old baby: "You have to discipline them!" Lloyd ("U.K. Cuts Back Gov't Expenses," realpsychohistory, 21 Oct. 2010) - - - - - The U.K has unveiled a new National Security Strategy this week --- mostly about cuts in defense spending, and making sure that future efforts are tied to specific national interests and defense goals. It seems hard to argue with this. The U.S. needs to do the same thing. -------Jim (response to post) - - - - - You may all have read it already, but here's Paul Krugman on the cutbacks: Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday and the rhetoric 
that accompanied the announcement might have come straight from the 
desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President 
Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the farmers, ...