Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Prem Chandavarkar]

On 07-Jan-2021, at 11:55 PM, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, 
> yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I 
> had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
> 

My sense is the mob at the Capitol is an act in a scene that is yet to play 
itself out fully, and it is still wide open in the way it will play itself out. 
 As Adam Serwer argues, the invasion of the Capitol by a mob was not an attack 
on democracy, it was an attack on multi-racial democracy.
>

The question is whether we view democracy as a means by which a community 
fulfils its destiny, or is it a means by which a community constructs and 
sustains itself as a continual work-in-progress?  

If it is the former, then we start with pre-defined notions of community, which 
means we are trapped within racial and other social divides.  Which means the 
scenes at the Capitol will continue to be replayed in other forms.

If it is the latter, we have to deal with the question Hannah Arendt raised: 
the need to construct an inclusive public commons that is inherently political. 
 On this, there is still clarity to emerge, in both theory and practice; and we 
will continue to repeat what we just saw until we have clarity on this point.

Best,
Prem#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Molly Hankwitz]

To all,

Thank you to everyone on this thread for airing their views! I live the
image of death flowers, and the wit and optimism; the critical flow. So
essential to our mental health.

Here is Mike Davis in New Left Review—

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/riot-on-the-hill?fbclid=IwAR2fzAQuY58gDiCN2qexHzMQWdIcw6VP1bUv3ZI4L8NTMyPfOJ7I7zbxg94


Molly

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 9:17 PM Brian Holmes 
wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:27 PM Vesna Manojlovic  wrote:
>
>> As someone from an (ex) country who went through "this", let me tell you:
>> it can be both/and.
>>
>> Vesna, I am glad you wrote. Throughout these years I have thought of
> other peoples' experiences in the former Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Poland,
> in Russia and so many other places (NL, etc) beset by the global fascist
> surge.
>
> You are right: new things are going to unfold while the bullshit continues
> and worsens.
>
> The question of how to deal with the "death flowers" is the essence of it.
> They can't exploit any more. There's no man to kick, there's no woman to
> rape. Ultraviolence is the immediate escape hatch when someone asks for
> minimum accountability.
>
> I would like to know what other people think. US society is experiencing
> some kind of pathological tremor, and it's synchronous with all kinds of
> other places around the world.
>
> When I spoke of a "total social fact," it's exactly the kind of political
> sequence that Vesna is talking about. That's the breakdown of a bad social
> order in favor of a worse one. And then the question of how you move
> forward when the breakdown has occurred.
>
> It's hard for someone from the outside to believe that certain things
> happened in the 90s, even when they know. Maybe I had so many friends in
> the former Yugoslavia because I know so many things about the place where I
> come from.
>
> be well, Brian
>
>
>
>> Here are some takes from twitter that say the same as Brian, thou:
>>
>> Solitaire Townsend:
>> https://twitter.com/GreenSolitaire/status/1347115498924871680
>> &  the
>> whole thread:
>> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347115498924871680.html
>>
>>
>> " 'death flowering': it happens when an old tree is diseased
>> and rotting from the inside.
>>
>> Trump, Cruz and the GOP in the US and other 'strongmen' attempts
>> around the world - they are death flowers
>> White supremacists - death flowers
>> INCEL misogynists  - death flowers
>>
>> The chaotic growth, bursting energy with no direction, the urgency
>> against
>> losing entitlements, they are dying and know it, deep down. This isn't
>> their world anymore.
>> Epicormic growth isn't sustainable. It's desperation.
>>
>> But, here's the kicker. You can't wait for a death flowering tree to just
>> fall. Foresters will get their axe when they spot them,
>> because these trees can infect and damage the forest itself. They are
>> dangerous and their rot might pass to other trees.
>> You gotta chop them down.
>> Those death flowers are destructive and need felling."
>>
>> & Bill McKibben
>>
>> "I can't quite figure out how to say this, but 24 hours later it feels
>> like there's something potentially healthy about what happened yesterday.
>> The festering wound is out in the open now. The pus reeks, but at least
>> it's open to the air. It's harder to gaslight people in daytime."
>>
>> https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1347273450872832003
>>
>>
>> Your tweeting correspondent,
>> Vesna
>>
>>
>> --
>> community, cooperation, commons, squirrels // http://becha.home.xs4all.nl
>> nature, anarchy, utopia, un-anthropocene // https://www.unciv.nl //
>> @Ms_Multicolor
>>
>> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

-- 


molly hankwitz - she/her
http://bivoulab.org
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Brian Holmes]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:27 PM Vesna Manojlovic  wrote:

> As someone from an (ex) country who went through "this", let me tell you:
> it can be both/and.
>
> Vesna, I am glad you wrote. Throughout these years I have thought of other
peoples' experiences in the former Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Poland, in
Russia and so many other places (NL, etc) beset by the global fascist surge.

You are right: new things are going to unfold while the bullshit continues
and worsens.

The question of how to deal with the "death flowers" is the essence of it.
They can't exploit any more. There's no man to kick, there's no woman to
rape. Ultraviolence is the immediate escape hatch when someone asks for
minimum accountability.

I would like to know what other people think. US society is experiencing
some kind of pathological tremor, and it's synchronous with all kinds of
other places around the world.

When I spoke of a "total social fact," it's exactly the kind of political
sequence that Vesna is talking about. That's the breakdown of a bad social
order in favor of a worse one. And then the question of how you move
forward when the breakdown has occurred.

It's hard for someone from the outside to believe that certain things
happened in the 90s, even when they know. Maybe I had so many friends in
the former Yugoslavia because I know so many things about the place where I
come from.

be well, Brian



> Here are some takes from twitter that say the same as Brian, thou:
>
> Solitaire Townsend:
> https://twitter.com/GreenSolitaire/status/1347115498924871680
> &  the
> whole thread:
> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347115498924871680.html
>
>
> " 'death flowering': it happens when an old tree is diseased
> and rotting from the inside.
>
> Trump, Cruz and the GOP in the US and other 'strongmen' attempts
> around the world - they are death flowers
> White supremacists - death flowers
> INCEL misogynists  - death flowers
>
> The chaotic growth, bursting energy with no direction, the urgency against
> losing entitlements, they are dying and know it, deep down. This isn't
> their world anymore.
> Epicormic growth isn't sustainable. It's desperation.
>
> But, here's the kicker. You can't wait for a death flowering tree to just
> fall. Foresters will get their axe when they spot them,
> because these trees can infect and damage the forest itself. They are
> dangerous and their rot might pass to other trees.
> You gotta chop them down.
> Those death flowers are destructive and need felling."
>
> & Bill McKibben
>
> "I can't quite figure out how to say this, but 24 hours later it feels
> like there's something potentially healthy about what happened yesterday.
> The festering wound is out in the open now. The pus reeks, but at least
> it's open to the air. It's harder to gaslight people in daytime."
>
> https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1347273450872832003
>
>
> Your tweeting correspondent,
> Vesna
>
>
> --
> community, cooperation, commons, squirrels // http://becha.home.xs4all.nl
> nature, anarchy, utopia, un-anthropocene // https://www.unciv.nl //
> @Ms_Multicolor
>
>
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Keith Sanborn]

Dear John,

There is a difference between a fascist coup attempt lead from above and a mass 
insurrection. 

Keith 

> On Jan 7, 2021, at 5:05 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> 
> LOL John Young...Congressional rituals appeared overly dainty and passe, it 
> is true...
> 
> To Felix...
> 
>  is willing/able to use the new slim majorities to enact transformational
> change. I think there is a strong inclination among the Obama centrists
> who seem to be dominating the new administration to see Trump as an
> aberration -- creating by the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or some
> other force unrelated to them -->
> 
> Yes, very true...a resurgence of the coastal elitism which Trump railed on on 
> behalf of his base.
> 
>  Trump.>
> 
> Attempt to bring about "certainty"?
> 
> 
>  implement change, rather than simply 'restore decency'>
> 
> Let's hope Biden's presidency will not simply slip into this role only...as 
> he, while more comforting than wild Don, 
> can be anemic...
> 
>  changes if
> taken seriously>
> 
> I believe yesterday was an ingenious smokescreen invented by Trump & Co...as 
> patriotism...to obscure the fact that in the last two weeks Trump 
> has auctioned off the Arctic wilderness to fossil fuel companies...
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/trump-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-lease-sales
> 
> and ended endangered species protections for wolves
> 
> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gray-wolf-removed-endangered-species-act/
> 
> and is currently trying to limit civil rights for minorities -
> https://worldnewsera.com/news/us-news/justice-dept-seeks-to-pare-back-civil-rights-protections-for-minorities/
> 
> "The Trump administration has long sought to eliminate protections for groups 
> at risk of suffering such impacts, 
> arguing that the Civil Rights Act as passed by Congress only safeguards 
> against intentional acts of discrimination."
> 
> Elvis is leaving the building...!
> 
> Molly
> 
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:31 PM John Young  wrote:
>> Yesterday was thrilling for its replication of 1968 in challenging 
>> status quo across many stolidities of thought, behavior, belief, 
>> acceptance, complaint, compliance, modest defiance, embrace of 
>> bipartisanship, hypnotic left-right cum socialist-capitalist ifatuous 
>> deology, intellectual vacuity secured by tenure and perquisites, 
>> condescension toward the unlearned, prattling of stale truisms, idle 
>> sophistry of argument, ample funding of compendia of little read 
>> volumes of propriety and profiteering.
>> 
>> 68 tipped the rancid tub of placidity and before injection of 
>> precarity entered the cliche-driven market, there were a few years of 
>> turmoil, some fatalities at Kent State and the West Village, a few 
>> break-ins at FBI offices and blood splatterings at military bases, 
>> levitation of the Pentagon, trials of celebrity dissidents, police 
>> bombings of Philly rowhouses, seeds of feminism implanted, sexual 
>> liberation of birth control narcotics. All this before the aging 
>> rebels were enlisted by academia to herd the young upcoming teens 
>> into chutes of branding and alumnae funding.
>> 
>> The Capitol Liberation, brief as it was, got widespread media play 
>> almost effortlessly, followed by resulsive outpouring of 
>> opportunistic bray about democracy at risk, which by today had become 
>> as stale, rancid and deflated of novelty and significance as days 
>> before the Georgia election.
>> 
>> Congress pulled an all-nighter then left town with nothing to show 
>> for the squeals of rhetoric about Capitol Police failure, 25th 
>> Amendment, impeachment, clipping Trump's social media wings, 
>> amounting to who the fuck cares, let's get back to Covid-19 agoniste.
>> 
>> Is January 2021 to finally supplant May 1968 as navel gazing of the 
>> best and brightest (cliches abundant)? Sleepy Joe and silent Kamala 
>> do not appear to be prepared to combat Pence pardoning Trump than 
>> Gerald Ford Nixon. Bring up the bodies even if QAnon and ilk.
>> 
>> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
>> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
>> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
>> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
>> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
>> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Molly Hankwitz]

LOL John Young...Congressional rituals appeared overly dainty and passe, it
is true...

To Felix...



Yes, very true...a resurgence of the coastal elitism which Trump railed on
on behalf of his base.



Attempt to bring about "certainty"?




Let's hope Biden's presidency will not simply slip into this role only...as
he, while more comforting than wild Don,
can be anemic...



I believe yesterday was an ingenious smokescreen invented by Trump &
Co...as patriotism...to obscure the fact that in the last two weeks Trump
has auctioned off the Arctic wilderness to fossil fuel companies...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/trump-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge-lease-sales

and ended endangered species protections for wolves

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gray-wolf-removed-endangered-species-act/

and is currently trying to limit civil rights for minorities -
https://worldnewsera.com/news/us-news/justice-dept-seeks-to-pare-back-civil-rights-protections-for-minorities/

"The Trump administration has long sought to eliminate protections for
groups at risk of suffering such impacts,
arguing that the Civil Rights Act as passed by Congress only safeguards
against intentional acts of discrimination."

Elvis is leaving the building...!

Molly


On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 1:31 PM John Young  wrote:

> Yesterday was thrilling for its replication of 1968 in challenging
> status quo across many stolidities of thought, behavior, belief,
> acceptance, complaint, compliance, modest defiance, embrace of
> bipartisanship, hypnotic left-right cum socialist-capitalist ifatuous
> deology, intellectual vacuity secured by tenure and perquisites,
> condescension toward the unlearned, prattling of stale truisms, idle
> sophistry of argument, ample funding of compendia of little read
> volumes of propriety and profiteering.
>
> 68 tipped the rancid tub of placidity and before injection of
> precarity entered the cliche-driven market, there were a few years of
> turmoil, some fatalities at Kent State and the West Village, a few
> break-ins at FBI offices and blood splatterings at military bases,
> levitation of the Pentagon, trials of celebrity dissidents, police
> bombings of Philly rowhouses, seeds of feminism implanted, sexual
> liberation of birth control narcotics. All this before the aging
> rebels were enlisted by academia to herd the young upcoming teens
> into chutes of branding and alumnae funding.
>
> The Capitol Liberation, brief as it was, got widespread media play
> almost effortlessly, followed by resulsive outpouring of
> opportunistic bray about democracy at risk, which by today had become
> as stale, rancid and deflated of novelty and significance as days
> before the Georgia election.
>
> Congress pulled an all-nighter then left town with nothing to show
> for the squeals of rhetoric about Capitol Police failure, 25th
> Amendment, impeachment, clipping Trump's social media wings,
> amounting to who the fuck cares, let's get back to Covid-19 agoniste.
>
> Is January 2021 to finally supplant May 1968 as navel gazing of the
> best and brightest (cliches abundant)? Sleepy Joe and silent Kamala
> do not appear to be prepared to combat Pence pardoning Trump than
> Gerald Ford Nixon. Bring up the bodies even if QAnon and ilk.
>
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
>
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder]

The point we can all agree on is that it is too early to tell.

I think there are two main open developments, in terms of immediate
political dynamics. that will decide the direction this takes.

The first is whether the republican party will fracture, because,
clearly, not everyone is having a change of heart suddenly. Yesterday,
after the house reconvened, the majority of republican representatives
still voted to reject the electors from Arizona (57%) and Pennsylvania
(65%). This was not enough to stop the certification process, but it's a
very sizeable number. And it represents the mood of broad swaths of the
public. A you-gov snap poll [1] indicated that only 60% see "the
storming of the Capitol building as a threat to democracy", and among
republicans, the number drops to 27%. That does not mean that the rest
openly supports it, but a vast majority of republicans do not see it as
a major event. Whereas 93% of Democrats do.

[1]
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/07/US-capitol-trump-poll

Of course, this is a small poll taken in a very fluid situation, but it
doesn't immediately indicate that the politicians in their gerrymandered
districts have much to fear for now. Also, the stock market did not
signal immediate panic, further reducing short-term pressure.

The other question is if the democratic party, and Biden in particular,
is willing/able to use the new slim majorities to enact transformational
change. I think there is a strong inclination among the Obama centrists
who seem to be dominating the new administration to see Trump as an
aberration -- creating by the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or some
other force unrelated to them -- and go back to the status quo before
Trump. The only area where there seems to a real political will to
implement change, rather than simply 'restore decency', is climate
change, which, of course, would be a catalyst for much wider changes if
taken seriously.

But without deep change, the structural forces that created both popular
resentment at the decline of living standards and elites who feel they
don't need democracy any more, are not going away. And given the
extremely fractures media landscape, better messaging will not do the
trick.







On 07.01.21 19:25, Brian Holmes wrote:

> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to
> come, yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have
> happened. I had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly
> like this.
> 
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the
> world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we
> left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged
> in political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits
> posturing from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from
> the rhetorical playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s.
> But then the play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out
> by crude, stupid and very obviously manipulated people. They were
> directly incited by the highest powers, via social media for sure, and
> television, and radio, and print journalism, and above all by the
> hottest channel of all: live rallies. The theater had consequences. The
> possible became real. And so a choice between conflicting realities
> could finally occur.
> 
> Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk,
> there was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented
> the uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious
> planning for collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close
> look at an inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid
> and delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet
> this time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence
> and McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution,
> Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's
> people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil
> of Trumpism.
> 
> When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle
> and San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that
> climate change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at
> the Capitol, it became obvious that a politics based on staged and
> calculated insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and
> institutional breakdown.
> 
> Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it
> would be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total
> social fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective
> ritual in which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with
> the charismatic or magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a
> dynamic ritual with 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[John Young]

Yesterday was thrilling for its replication of 1968 in challenging 
status quo across many stolidities of thought, behavior, belief, 
acceptance, complaint, compliance, modest defiance, embrace of 
bipartisanship, hypnotic left-right cum socialist-capitalist ifatuous 
deology, intellectual vacuity secured by tenure and perquisites, 
condescension toward the unlearned, prattling of stale truisms, idle 
sophistry of argument, ample funding of compendia of little read 
volumes of propriety and profiteering.


68 tipped the rancid tub of placidity and before injection of 
precarity entered the cliche-driven market, there were a few years of 
turmoil, some fatalities at Kent State and the West Village, a few 
break-ins at FBI offices and blood splatterings at military bases, 
levitation of the Pentagon, trials of celebrity dissidents, police 
bombings of Philly rowhouses, seeds of feminism implanted, sexual 
liberation of birth control narcotics. All this before the aging 
rebels were enlisted by academia to herd the young upcoming teens 
into chutes of branding and alumnae funding.


The Capitol Liberation, brief as it was, got widespread media play 
almost effortlessly, followed by resulsive outpouring of 
opportunistic bray about democracy at risk, which by today had become 
as stale, rancid and deflated of novelty and significance as days 
before the Georgia election.


Congress pulled an all-nighter then left town with nothing to show 
for the squeals of rhetoric about Capitol Police failure, 25th 
Amendment, impeachment, clipping Trump's social media wings, 
amounting to who the fuck cares, let's get back to Covid-19 agoniste.


Is January 2021 to finally supplant May 1968 as navel gazing of the 
best and brightest (cliches abundant)? Sleepy Joe and silent Kamala 
do not appear to be prepared to combat Pence pardoning Trump than 
Gerald Ford Nixon. Bring up the bodies even if QAnon and ilk.


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Flick Harrison]

The more I watch about this event, the less it looks haphazard and disorganized.

Sure, there’s a certain goofiness to a guy with a viking helmet sitting in the 
speaker’s chair… and there didn’t seem to be a clear physical plan once the mob 
got inside.  But those are minor details. The Fascist organization, like 
Occupy, is distributed and diffuse.

This event reminds me of a shambolic version of the vote to make Hitler supreme 
dictator, when non-Nazi legislators were beaten on the steps of the Reichstag.  
The methods and the goals were similar.  We are all lucky this one failed.

But think about this:  with a few minutes’s difference, or with a few more 
exits blocked, imagine the mob making it to the Joint Session before the 
members were evacuated?  What would they have done if they had taken the entire 
US elected government hostage (some rioters were seen with handcuffs)?  What 
were they planning to do with the NOOSE they had constructed outside the 
building?  Why do you think the Qanon kook who was shot in the neck and died, 
really took that bullet?  Because things were much closer to catastrophe than 
it perhaps looks.  From what I can tell from the imagery, the shooting took 
place just outside the barricaded doors of the House Chamber itself.

One woman on the mall said she wanted to see Pence and the Members “dragged out 
by the ear and forced to make Trump president.”  This isn’t a random desire: 
it’s the the entire purpose and momentum of the Trump movement since he 
announced his re-election campaign in January of 2016.  If they had captured 
and physically threatened those Members, they might have held a sham vote with 
their 138 traitor congresspeople and declared victory.

The clear plan, and coordination, was big, and real, if distributed:

1 - Trump announces that the election will be rigged, almost from the start of 
his campaign - during debates he tells Proud Boys and other paramilitary 
fascist groups to “Stand By."
2 - A sustained assault of media and protest pushes the idea that Biden will 
cheat, and various other conspiracy theories.  This has national media (Fox, 
OAN, etc) and grassroots media (including said Viking Helmet guy, the “Qanon 
Shaman.”)
3 - This assault is supported by Russian state media and covert actors, adding 
fuel and direction to the fire
4 - Trump rejects the election results immediately and this whole network 
supports him
5 - Various elected officials coordinate to attempt a disqualification of the 
winning votes, and rally support for a physical rejection of the Biden victory
6 - 138 Members of Congress stand ready to reject Biden’s win during the 
validation vote
7 - Trump urges the mob to seize the Capitol building during the vote
8 - Capitol Police utterly fail to prepare for the riot / insurrection attempt
9 - Trump, as commander-in-chief, holds back federal security forces
(8+9 demonstrate and ramp-up the loose coordination of white supremacist 
patriarchy, as historically designed, to empower authoritarian impulses against 
socialists, women, IBPOC etc through state instruments of force)
10 - During the insurrection, those 138 members of Congress stand ready to form 
a provisional government, with Trump in command.
11 - Oops, they missed it by a few minutes, back to the drawing board - hardly 
anyone is detained in the Capitol, so they are free to resume their 
insurrectionist activities immediately.

> On Jan 7, 2021, at 11:51 , KMV  wrote:
> 
> I think (and hope) you are right, Brian.
> 
> In response to this comment:
> "The TV cameras, few as there were, were literally outside, observing, 
> clutching
> their pearls, while a thousands social media cameras were inside, doing,
> celebrating."
> 
> Worth noting that the rioters targeted the media during this event, and 
> destroyed equipment: 
> https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1346944475478814720?s=20 
> 
> 
> Inside, they left messages of violence against the media as well.  
> https://twitter.com/AnthonyQuintano/status/1346963370205970432?s=20 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:29 PM seb olma  > wrote:
> Brian at his best, thank you so much for this!
> 
> Best,
> 
> Seb
> 
>> On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes > > wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder > > wrote:
>> I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
>> on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
>> clear that this event was made on, through and for social media
>>  [...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
>> I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
>> 
>> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
>> 
>> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[David Mandl]

> On Jan 7, 2021, at 2:59 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> And, once Trump is out, many of the worst will crawl back into their lairs 
> and breed little swastikas. (I looked but did not see any swastikas in the 
> crowd).

A "Camp Auschwitz" T-shirt with (an English translation of) "Arbeit Macht Frei" 
comes pretty close:

https://forward.com/fast-forward/461617/auschwitz-shirt-capitol-mob-nazi-antisemitism/

   --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
david.ma...@gmail.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Vesna Manojlovic]

Brian, all,

On Thu, 7 Jan 2021, Brian Holmes wrote:


In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, 
yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have
happened.


As someone from an (ex) country who went through "this", let me tell you:
it can be both/and.

Here are some takes from twitter that say the same as Brian, thou:

Solitaire Townsend: 
https://twitter.com/GreenSolitaire/status/1347115498924871680
& the whole thread: 
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1347115498924871680.html



" 'death flowering': it happens when an old tree is diseased
and rotting from the inside.

Trump, Cruz and the GOP in the US and other 'strongmen' attempts
around the world - they are death flowers
White supremacists - death flowers
INCEL misogynists  - death flowers

The chaotic growth, bursting energy with no direction, the urgency against 
losing entitlements, they are dying and know it, deep down. This isn't 
their world anymore.

Epicormic growth isn't sustainable. It's desperation.

But, here's the kicker. You can't wait for a death flowering tree to just 
fall. Foresters will get their axe when they spot them,
because these trees can infect and damage the forest itself. They are 
dangerous and their rot might pass to other trees.

You gotta chop them down.
Those death flowers are destructive and need felling."

& Bill McKibben

"I can't quite figure out how to say this, but 24 hours later it feels 
like there's something potentially healthy about what happened yesterday. 
The festering wound is out in the open now. The pus reeks, but at least 
it's open to the air. It's harder to gaslight people in daytime."


https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1347273450872832003


Your tweeting correspondent,
Vesna


--
community, cooperation, commons, squirrels // http://becha.home.xs4all.nl
nature, anarchy, utopia, un-anthropocene // https://www.unciv.nl // 
@Ms_Multicolor

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Molly Hankwitz]

Dear Felix, Brian, Seb, et al,

I would not say that it was a great thing that happened, but it certainly
was an 'ok' thing to have happened, especially if you believe in
representational democracy.
Conditions that prompted Trump to take advantage of his "base" back in 2016
-- poverty, lack of education, lack of digital infrastructure,
unemployment, farm problems - and which have raised the spectre of depleted
rural populations (see tons of press across the States including the
NYTimes on this subject) still hold true. For one, Trump, despite his
"love" for them, has done '0' to help them. No vaccines rushed in when
rural states became the most beleaguered, for instance. His gameplaying
with them and manipulation of them is not to their advantage, but fuels
some other need - the need for a leader to speak to them - the need for a
father figure whatever...not to mention that right-wing authoritarian,
mostly white male, but not only...and far right fascist groups have long
existed in their own wierd fashion. These people have a voice and they need
to be able to feel that government buildings which their (probably
increased) taxes paid to build, belong to them in some way. Obviously they
had support - from the 100 Repubs inside - whose lives are far more bizarre
and contradictory than the poor saps believing in Trump and Trumps
presidency (they will probably not benefit too much from wilderness
drilling - this is getting into semiotic landscapes). Their lives have been
won on the premise that elections could be won. Now we know, and we know
more than we ever did, that Republicans shout voter fraud while gerry
mandering and suppressing the vote. We know now that they are willing to
take that already fraudulent set of declarations all the way to the top of
the democratic ladder - in order to besmirch not only the election
processes "held dear" but the incoming Biden presidency. (Solnit states it
right)
And by calling the 2020 election unfair, and by extension then, all
elections as they now stand as possibly fraudulent, they are sending us
backwards ad infinitum.

The "insurrection" was televised and looked bad from all sides. Chants of
"we will be back and we will be armed" only speak to the NRA and so forth
fueling gun power. (again Solnit nails it)


   - If you believe in democracy as being representative of all the people,
   then you need to allow people to express themselves, even if they are
   delusional. "These liberties come from our Creator...no where else".
   - I'm glad the cops weren't more violent than they were. That would have
   made everything worse because this mob likes to be victim.
   - I'm glad they got to "revolt."
   -  I'm glad their faces were unmasked on TV (not because of Covid, but
   because we could see them) and that they are in the news as ruffians and
   anti-democratic. They look and act worse than ever. They do not look heroic
   or even righteous.

And, once Trump is out, many of the worst will crawl back into their lairs
and breed little swastikas. (I looked but did not see any swastikas in the
crowd). They will do what they have been doing for years in places like
Idaho, Texas, Montana, Michigan - planning the great insurrection of
powerless white men who want power.

What remains to be seen is - will rural states gain economic relief, Covid
relief, educational relief. Will these same people be given numerical
evidence of how much Trump ripped them off and can they be turned to the
Left, such that their rage against "the government" is directed in a more
productive way?

Molly




molly hankwitz - she/her
http://bivoulab.org


On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 11:29 AM seb olma  wrote:

> Brian at his best, thank you so much for this!
>
> Best,
>
> Seb
>
> On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes 
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:
>
>> I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
>> on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
>> clear that this event was made on, through and for social media
>
>  [...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
>
>> I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
>>
>
> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
>
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come,
> yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I
> had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
>
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the
> world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we
> left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in
> political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing
> from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical
> playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the
> play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[KMV]

I think (and hope) you are right, Brian.

In response to this comment:
"The TV cameras, few as there were, were literally outside, observing,
clutching
their pearls, while a thousands social media cameras were inside, doing,
celebrating."

Worth noting that the rioters targeted the media during this event, and
destroyed equipment:
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1346944475478814720?s=20

Inside, they left messages of violence against the media as well.
https://twitter.com/AnthonyQuintano/status/1346963370205970432?s=20





On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:29 PM seb olma  wrote:

> Brian at his best, thank you so much for this!
>
> Best,
>
> Seb
>
> On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes 
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:
>
>> I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
>> on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
>> clear that this event was made on, through and for social media
>
>  [...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
>
>> I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
>>
>
> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
>
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come,
> yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I
> had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
>
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the
> world of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we
> left behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in
> political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing
> from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical
> playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the
> play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid
> and very obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the
> highest powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and
> print journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live
> rallies. The theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a
> choice between conflicting realities could finally occur.
>
> Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there
> was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the
> uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for
> collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an
> inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and
> delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet this
> time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence and
> McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution, Trump
> sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's people - the
> real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil of Trumpism.
>
> When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and
> San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate
> change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol,
> it became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated
> insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown.
>
> Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would
> be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social
> fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in
> which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the
> charismatic or magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic
> ritual with all the density, complexity and precarity of lived experience.
> It is a real force because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It
> is a total fact because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a
> society's core affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is
> and how it works.
>
> The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm
> the peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically,
> was a challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures,
> values and aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy.
> This was not a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though
> that was what everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was
> dynamic, open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what
> it actually did.
>
> It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had
> occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this
> way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to
> actually legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and
> the Senate. Not just Trump, but three 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[seb olma]

Brian at his best, thank you so much for this!

Best,

Seb

> On 7 Jan 2021, at 19:25, Brian Holmes  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder  > wrote:
> I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
> on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
> clear that this event was made on, through and for social media
>  [...lots of other very cogent observations here...]
> I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
> 
> It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.
> 
> In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come, 
> yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I 
> had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.
> 
> The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the world 
> of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we left behind 
> the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in political 
> theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing from Senator 
> Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical playbook 
> developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the play-acting 
> devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid and very 
> obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the highest 
> powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and print 
> journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live rallies. The 
> theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a choice between 
> conflicting realities could finally occur.
> 
> Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there was 
> no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the uprising 
> also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for collective 
> violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an inchoate, yet 
> very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and delusional. Sure, we had 
> seen these folks already, many times. Yet this time there was no equivocation 
> as to who was leading. When Pence and McConnell took their last-minute stand 
> in favor of the Constitution, Trump sent his thugs to oppose them. And with 
> their actions, Trump's people - the real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally 
> lanced the boil of Trumpism.
> 
> When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and San 
> Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate change 
> was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol, it 
> became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated insurrectionary 
> rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown.
> 
> Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would be 
> realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social fact." 
> The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in which 
> the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the charismatic or 
> magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic ritual with all the 
> density, complexity and precarity of lived experience. It is a real force 
> because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It is a total fact 
> because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a society's core 
> affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is and how it works.
> 
> The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm the 
> peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically, was a 
> challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures, values and 
> aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy. This was not 
> a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though that was what 
> everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was dynamic, 
> open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what it actually 
> did. 
> 
> It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had 
> occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this 
> way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to actually 
> legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and the Senate. 
> Not just Trump, but three decades of Republican mendacity and opportunism 
> were pushed aside. And that event did not merely happen over social media, or 
> on talk radio, or on the Hannity show. It was not just another piece of 
> calculated political theater. It was a society-wide event: a total social 
> fact.
> 
> Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something extremely 
> interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his communications 
> for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant step towards 

Re: made for TV, made for social media

[Brian Holmes]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 2:32 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:

> I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
> on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
> clear that this event was made on, through and for social media

 [...lots of other very cogent observations here...]

> I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.
>

It's too early to tell. However there is an opposite interpretation.

In my view, far from being a harbinger of possibly worse threats to come,
yesterday's events were the most positive thing that could have happened. I
had hoped - dreamed - that we would see something exactly like this.

The reason why is that through these events, we as a country left the world
of "harbingers" and "possible threats" behind. Simultaneously, we left
behind the pretense that populist Republicans are "merely" engaged in
political theater. The day began with the usual push-the-limits posturing
from Senator Ted Cruz and his allies: yet another page from the rhetorical
playbook developed by Newt Gingrinch in the early 1990s. But then the
play-acting devolved into an ugly insurrection carried out by crude, stupid
and very obviously manipulated people. They were directly incited by the
highest powers, via social media for sure, and television, and radio, and
print journalism, and above all by the hottest channel of all: live
rallies. The theater had consequences. The possible became real. And so a
choice between conflicting realities could finally occur.

Amazingly, no bomb exploded, no automatic weapons came out at dusk, there
was no massacre. The pretense of "political theater" that fomented the
uprising also took the place of, and disallowed, any serious planning for
collective violence. Instead the entire country got a close look at an
inchoate, yet very dangerous mob whose worldview is paranoid and
delusional. Sure, we had seen these folks already, many times. Yet this
time there was no equivocation as to who was leading. When Pence and
McConnell took their last-minute stand in favor of the Constitution, Trump
sent his thugs to oppose them. And with their actions, Trump's people - the
real, unequivocal "deplorables" - finally lanced the boil of Trumpism.

When the Western forests burned and smoke hung for weeks over Seattle and
San Francisco, it became obvious to a majority of Americans that climate
change was real. Similarly, when the windows were shattered at the Capitol,
it became obvious that a politics based on staged and calculated
insurrectionary rhetoric leads to real violence and institutional breakdown.

Rather than subjecting it to a media-theoretic analysis, I think it would
be realistic to see yesterday's electoral count event as a "total social
fact." The phrase by Marcel Mauss refers to moments of collective ritual in
which the pragmatic administration of functions coincides with the
charismatic or magical expression of values. For Mauss this is a dynamic
ritual with all the density, complexity and precarity of lived experience.
It is a real force because it tests out the validity of social fictions. It
is a total fact because it upholds, but to some extent also transforms, a
society's core affective and cognitive assumptions about what the world is
and how it works.

The pragmatic function of yesterday's certification ritual was to confirm
the peaceful transferral of state power. Yet what it became, dynamically,
was a challenge to and subsequent re-affirmation of all the procedures,
values and aspirations attached to the society-wide practice of democracy.
This was not a monolithic, mythical, predetermined ceremony, even though
that was what everyone was fearfully hoping it would be. Instead it was
dynamic, open-ended, touch and go, extremely vulnerable. And look at what
it actually did.

It reconfirmed, in the evening, the about-face of political power that had
occured in the morning, when the results from Georgia came through. In this
way, it opened up the possibility for a Democratic administration to
actually legislate: to move transformative laws through both the House and
the Senate. Not just Trump, but three decades of Republican mendacity and
opportunism were pushed aside. And that event did not merely happen over
social media, or on talk radio, or on the Hannity show. It was not just
another piece of calculated political theater. It was a society-wide event:
a total social fact.

Not only that, but from the media-theoretic viewpoint, something extremely
interesting did occur: Twitter censored Trump and blocked his
communications for 12 hours. The anarcho-capitalist media took one giant
step towards accepting their integration in the overall political process.

So we dodged a bullet yesterday, for sure. And something a lot more
important may potentially have happened.

There comes a point where you have to be counter-factual, you have to
engage in what Mauss calls "magical thinking." You have to take a role in a
theater that 

Re: Rebecca Solnit: Call it what it was: a coup attempt (The Guardian)

[Vesna Manojlovic]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/07/what-happened-in-washington-dc-is-happening-around-the-world

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Rebecca Solnit: Call it what it was: a coup attempt (The Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/06/trump-mob-storm-capitol-washington-coup-attempt

Call it what it was: a coup attempt
Rebecca Solnit

I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume that it will not 
prevent the Biden presidency, it certainly intended.


‘On Wednesday, a coup attempt was led by the president of the United 
States. A rightwing mob attempted the coup in the form of a violent riot 
that stormed the Capitol building. They disrupted the proceedings that 
would have completed the recognition of the election of Joe Biden and 
Kamala Harris. Those proceedings had been disrupted earlier by elected 
officials bringing forth bad-faith claims that the election was not 
legitimate and should instead produce a continuation of Trump’s 
presidency. This too was a coup attempt, an attempt to violate the 
constitution and override the will of the voters in this election. 
Inside and outside were two faces of the same thing, and both were 
fomented by the leaders of the Republican party and by the US president. 
The mob outside would not exist without the politicians inside. Those 
insiders will make noises of horror and repudiation, but they own this.


Had Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders recognized the 
legitimate winner of the election in early November, had there been no 
challenge to a legitimate election from inside the government, there 
would have been no mob. Having failed to suppress enough votes to 
guarantee a Republican presidential victory, the Republican party and 
the Trump administration decided to try to suppress them retroactively. 
Trump invited the mob and whipped it up for months and set it off today, 
as surely as if he’d lit a bomb’s fuse.


I call it a coup attempt because, though I assume it will not prevent 
the Biden presidency, it certainly intended to, and is part of a 
campaign to delegitimize and thereby weaken the incoming administration. 
It was a long time coming, building up for years with white rage, 
especially white male rage fueled by everyone from Trump himself to the 
National Rifle Association, Fox News and the various rightwing pundits, 
the Republican party, the various faces of white supremacy, and the 
far-right groups such as the Proud Boys. It is a rage against the fact 
that other people might be equal under the law, that women and people of 
color might also govern as power begins to be distributed more equally, 
the same rage that attempted to delegitimize a black president with 
birtherism and obstruction. It is a rage against equality.


Democracy is a set of agreements to make decisions together and respect 
the outcome whether you like them or not. The kind of violence we saw on 
Capitol Hill is authoritarian, a way to try to force other people to 
submit to the will of the perpetrators. This violence comes from the 
white men who were long the only people with power in this country 
imagining themselves as marginalized and oppressed outsiders because 
others might also have power and a voice. We saw these kind of men last 
summer, when they invaded the Michigan capital while carrying 
semiautomatic rifles and saw them again when a handful of them were 
arrested for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. We saw 
them in racist shootings from the Texas border to a Pennsylvania 
synagogue.


This coup attempt was built by the more and more uninhibited ideology of 
violence we have seen again and again, in the mass shootings that became 
a norm in 21st-century America, the fetishization of guns and gun rights 
that made the killing machines and the death they inflict far more 
common, so that death by gun recently overtook death by car as a leading 
American way to die.


As I write, I hear a Republican leader on TV say “Remember we are the 
party of law and order,” and, of course, the riot going on in the 
Capitol is technically lawless, but “law and order” as a rightwing 
slogan means that they are the law and they impose their version of 
order. Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the 
rules, you follow them, I change them at will and punish those who don’t 
obey, or, if I feel like it, those who do because I can. Frank Wilhoit 
once said: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition … There 
must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside 
out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” They are 
demonstrating that nothing binds them and that they expect to have 
whatever they want. Entitlement is too demure a word for this.


Authoritarianism is always an ideology of inequality: I make the rules, 
you follow them, I punish those who don’t obey
What is at stake in America today is the outcome of an election. But 
it’s also the rule of law and the rights of voters. And in the end it’s 
also about the authority of facts and evidence and history and science, 
that no one has the right to override those things for personal gain. 
Trump’s 

Teaching Into the Void- on 'Blended' Learning and Other Digital Amenities

[Donatella Della Ratta]

Dear Nettimers
happy new year all
Would love to share with you my reflections on hybrid learning/teaching
and, overall, on our screen life
Just out with INC LongForm, thanks to Geert and the amazing INC team
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2021/01/06/teaching-into-the-void/
I look forward to your feedback
best
donatella



Donatella Della Ratta
twitter @donatelladr
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

made for TV, made for social media

[Felix Stalder]

I followed, like many others I presume, yesterday's events in Washington
on TV (cnn) and on social media at the same time. And it seems pretty
clear that this event was made on, through and for social media. The TV
cameras, few as there were, were literally outside, observing, clutching
their pearls, while a thousands social media cameras were inside, doing,
celebrating.

And from what I saw, it was an overwhelming success. What everyone said
was impossible, it happened. The certification was delayed. Protestors
-- some of them very well known figures -- walked, quite leisurely, into
the core of the democratic institutions to subvert its more fundamental
process (transfer of power) talking triumphant images, edged on by the
president (we love you!) and aided by the police who clearly had great
sympathies for the protestors, taking selfies with them and helping them
to disperse once all the pictures had been taken. And some of the
pictures are truly iconic, hard to unsee.

This was clearly not an accident, not by the protestors, not by the
police and not by the supportive politicians who more or less continued
afterwards as they did before. This is part of a strategy that has
consistently showed itself to be more resourceful, more versatile, more
popular and more audacious than outsiders imagined.

Yes, the certification is bound to be completed. Yes, the democrats also
have the slimmest of majorities in the senate. But the narrative of
Trump against the political elites just got even more convincing to the
indented audiences and it got more radicalized. With the tacit support
of the police, the right wing militias are growing, standing by as a
force of intimidation for everyone else.

But I'm far away, maybe miss-reading this entire thing.







-- 
| || http://felix.openflows.com |
| Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt |



OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: