Which God Are You Voting For?
As the US nears the end of a race that started with a vacant stare, we’re all wondering how it’s going to end.
It seems there is a single issue that is weighing on the minds of many voters be they for the Red or Blue Team.
Being from the UK I often get the colours mixed up because they’re the opposite in the UK. The Red Team in the UK is the (nominally) socialist one who sing with some gusto “We’ll keep the red flag flying here” at their party conferences. The Blue Team in the UK is the (nominally) conservative one, and they’re more likely to ask you to keep the noise down at the back.
If you’re on the Red Team in the US you will see Kamala Harris as being some cog in a well-oiled machine that represents the interests of corporate America over and above those of the people. You will be afraid there will be no end to the growing entrenchment and concentration of power in the hands of a global elite who are, most definitely, not your friends.
If you’re on the Blue Team you will see a radioactive threat in the glowing orange figure of one man who is going to usher in a new age of tyranny and despotism centred around his dictatorial self. He’s said to be practically Hitler, or the anti-Christ. Trump, being a felon of the wrong skin colour1, would definitely not be worthy of the gold casket treatment at his funeral.
It seems to be a choice of two ‘Gods’ - a Blob God embodied as a kind of powerful elite committee and a single God-King embodied in a fetching shade of orange in the person of Trump. Harris in this perspective is merely a prophet of the Blob. She’s a cipher who says whatever she is told to say, appearing lost without the teleprompter, and few, if any, have any idea of the real person behind the cackle.
Have a listen to this song (6m 41s) by Nanowar of Steel. It’s very funny. We see Odin having decided to be a ‘gentler’ God who now promotes IKEA and good furniture over more traditional Viking pursuits. Maybe there’s a parallel here?
Do we want superbly crafted flat-packed TV units or do we want more adventure (meaning?) in our lives?
The sad tale of Peanut, that lovable little rodent, who in the last week has been shuffled off his mortal nuts and is now scampering up the great pine tree in the sky, is also illustrative of the essential difference.
A whole posse of Law Enforcement types descended on Peanut’s house to rid the world of the grave danger that Peanut posed to all and sundry. They were armed and dangerous, with guns and red tape, in their quest to keep us all safe from unlicensed domesticated squirrels.
This is the world represented by Harris.
It’s a world of massive governmental overreach and control with rules and regulations meant to delimit and constrain every aspect of our lives. It elevates micro problems - the Peanuts and microaggressions of this world - to the status of almost existential threats and acts swiftly and powerfully to contain the ‘problem’.
Other serious problems like a more or less porous border? Not so much.
Would Trump do any better? Would he be able to rein back on some of these absurd excesses and tackle real problems instead of endlessly focusing on squirrels or having the right proportion of skin shades in your organisation’s employee group photo?
I’ve no idea really, but the indications are that he would at least attempt to do so.
Trump might well (we might imagine) want to spend taxpayer money to chop off the dicks of rapists, but at least he wouldn’t be spending that money in an effort to make them feel better about themselves as they pursue their fantasy of becoming a woman.
In the past few days I’ve read some interesting articles that explore some of the general themes. I’m sure there have been many more written, but you can’t read them all.
The first one lays out the case for why Trump is a bigger threat to freedom of speech than Harris.
Yassine focuses on Trump’s aggressive stance towards the media with his threat to remove their ‘licences’ and sees that as a bigger threat to freedom of speech than the explicit calls for regulation of the internet (and also curtailment of the first Amendment) from the Democrats. It raises the interesting question of whether some curtailment of ‘professional’ media is more dangerous than some curtailment of the (modern) public square. In my view, these are 2 quite different beasts, but it does go some way to explaining why Democrats can view Trump as a bigger threat. Of course, with a ‘professional’ media that is so incredibly biased to ‘your’ side, then any attempt to bring it back into balance will be seen as a threat.
The 2nd one, and the article that inspired today’s Riggerations, comes from Chris Bray.
In it Chris makes a very good point about an essential difference between the two political positions; one seems to represent enervation whilst the other seems to represent excitement and energy.
In some respects we’ve all known about this for ages. It is a standard meme that the ‘left’ can’t meme.
The choice seems to be between endless humourless scolding generating a grey sludge world of depressingly uniform and bland opinion and a more liberal, liberating, and somewhat more risqué environment in which we can live with a bit of colour and sparkle (and are also still able to tell jokes).
Harris’ campaign is trying to ‘turn the page’ and present her as a candidate for ‘change’, but that’s kind of hard to sell when the change you represent is change from yourself. She has, after all, been supporting Biden for the last nearly 4 years and “more of the same, but better” is not really a ‘change’ now, is it?
But isn’t Harris representing ‘joy’ with her campaign speeches full of smiles and laughs and even cackles? The joy of even more dead unlicensed domestic squirrels? The joy of even more big government and regulation? The joy of having every last impulse to create and innovate stifled by red tape? The joy of being only allowed to say what is deemed permissible to say? And doubtless the euphoria we must all feel when a man becomes a woman.
Ann Coulter drew our attention to a fascinating perspective from Bill Otis
Otis puts forward the view that Harris represents the side of America that hates itself. It hates its history and wants everyone to drown in guilt. Guilt of the past and also guilt of the present as typified by artifices such as “systemic racism”. It’s a worldview that is almost omnipresent throughout the entire system (what else is DEI except an attempt to address this ‘guilt’?). It has completely captured almost every university, every school, every TV show and movie, the legal system, and corporate America (ESG anyone?).
It represents a cultural colonisation of breath-taking proportions.
It will take years to undo the damage this insufferable and stultifying worldview has wrought.
A vote in this perspective is seen as a choice between more of the same and the only candidate who stands any chance at all of beginning the long, painful (but necessary) process of rolling it back.
In a very similar vein we have Colin Wright’s article
in which he argues that the very pervasiveness of ‘woke’ throughout everything means that ‘woke’ is not a standalone issue, but affects everything.
I very much agree with him. I’ve argued before that the ‘models’ of reality we carry around with us affect and inform everything we do.
What’s fascinating (as it very often is) are the comments. Those who disagree with Colin’s perspective here either minimize the influence of ‘woke’ or simply present the ‘devastating’ argument that Trump is bad. The TDS view seems to be that specific policies (or worldviews) are almost irrelevant; one should vote Harris coz Trump really really bad.
For me, then, this election represents a choice between two diametrically opposed worldviews. The control and influence of the global machine (would, for example, the Democrats oppose the WHO’s plans for seizure of the world’s ‘health’ responses?) vs a return to more of a focus on empowering individuals to live the American Dream (as opposed to empowering more individuals to live the impossible dream of becoming the opposite sex or some other weird genderthing).
Standing above all of these things, and standing against the grey sludge of bland uniformity of thought, is Freedom of Speech. Of all the things to protect or preserve this is the most important. We can never be truly ‘free’ (not that we can really be that anyway) without it.
It is the engine for being able to carve out a life you want to live and not the life you are allowed to live.
More succinctly, perhaps, do you want a God with a sense of humour, or not?
It’s a choice between Sam the Baggage Handler and the guy who can catch rockets.
It’s the choice between Peanut and perfidy.
It’s a choice of the kind of ‘freedom’ you want, now and going forward.
Are orange people not an oppressed minority in the US?
It's even more fundamental than that.
Harris, and all the things associated with her side, represents Death. Not the Reaper as a final mercy, but Death of all things. Death of the future, because it will have been cancelled. Death of history because it is ideologically wrong. Death of the present too, weirdly enough, because the present exist only as the 0-dimensional concept between future and past.
Grey sludge is very apt. Organic material that stopped decomposing, and just sits there.
Trump, warts and all, represent Life. Messy, noisy, untidy, also promising and dangerous in equal amounts, and carried onward by the interplay of Order - because life is ordered and creates order - and of Chaos, because life is chaotic having no other meaning or purpose than being.
As such, Trump and Orban and many other like them offers the chance of a new dawn for Western civilisation as a whole, rather than the slow degrading wasting away administered by the Hillarys and Harrises.
And since you mention vacant:
"There's no point in asking, you'll get no reply
Oh, just remember I don't decide
I got no reason, it's all too much
You'll always find us out to lunch"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6GDdKrQ8EI
It's like the lyrics were written specifically with Hollywood celebrities and the current crop of the Democrats in mind.
Last night I was thinking along these terms, although perhaps influenced by the recent Diwali holiday my thoughts ran to how Trump’s enemies have made him into Ravana and how they imagine his supporters envision him to be Ram. (I think despite the populism and rallies and huge flags on the back of pick up trucks, Trump voters are less likely to make idols of men and more likely to instinctively understand the difference between personality and character. Because we are all assholes too— or sinners if you want to put it in religious terms— and we aren’t fooled by a wolf in sheep’s clothing saying “Baa” real persuasively.