I think we’re raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They’re not a decade old, and they’re being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they’re being taught that it’s important to have views, and they’re not being taught that it’s important to know what you’re talking about. It’s important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more importantly to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it.
The thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy is that it will always, without fail, come with inefficiencies, mistakes, faults, foibles, or, in the classic rightwing phrase, “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Inevitably, it also comes with measures that infringe liberty and even constitute tyranny.
Leave it to Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance to enunciate the rightwing view on bureaucracy, a view that is diametrically opposed to the libertarian view. According to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which criticizes Vance for his “disregard for the constitutional balance of powers and the rule of law,” Vance stated in a 2021 interview: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.” It would be difficult to better capture the rightwing view on bureaucracy than that.
The perfect demonstration of this rightwing perspective is with respect to the Covid crisis. Every day throughout the crisis, rightwingers would exclaim, “Fauci! Fauci! Fauci!” in their articles, speeches, podcasts, interviews, and other presentations. They would complain about how Anthony Fauci was implementing destructive and tyrannical polices in his roles as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical advisor to the president.
Anthony Fauci
What was the rightwing solution to such policies? Their position was summarized by the words of J.D. Vance — fire Fauci and replace him with a rightwinger, one who would supposedly make better decisions and implement better healthcare policies than Fauci and other leftwing bureaucrats who were in charge of healthcare.
The same phenomenon occurred on the state and local level. Every day throughout the Covid crisis, the Internet was replete with rightwing articles, podcasts, and the like criticizing the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the vaccine requirements, the social-distancing requirements, and other policies and practices that violate the principles of a free society.
What was the rightwing solution to all this Covid tyranny? J.D. Vance sums it up perfectly: Fire the healthcare tyrants and replace them with rightwingers.
The thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy is that it will always, without fail, come with inefficiencies, mistakes, faults, foibles, or, in the classic rightwing phrase, “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Inevitably, it also comes with measures that infringe liberty and even constitute tyranny.
Thus, anyone can spend every day for the rest of his life pointing out the faults and failures, inefficiencies, and anti-freedom measures of both federal and state bureaucrats. That’s what was happening throughout the Covid crisis. It was never difficult for rightwingers or anyone else to come up with bad, inefficient, and tyrannical things that federal and state bureaucrats were doing as part of their anti-Covid crusade.
Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush.
Having studied and written about the nightmare of those prisoners and Guantánamo for so many years now, it’s been supremely jarring to see the term “learned helplessness” re-emerge in connection to the current unnerving state of American politics and the 2024 presidential election.
Karen Greenberg first wrote for TomDispatch in January 2005. In that piece, she and a co-author had 37 grim questions (“Why was one of the first tasks of your administration finding a place — Guantánamo Bay — that was meant to be beyond the reach of the courts?”) for Donald Rumsfeld. In case you’ve forgotten, he was then secretary of defense for President George W. Bush. Their focus was on what had already come to be known as “the torture memos” produced by that administration to deal with prisoners taken in the post-9/11 Global War on Terror. And all too sadly, that term “torture” was anything but an exaggeration. For endless years, Greenberg and other scholars did their best to uncover the full horror story of American torture at the CIA’s global “black sites” and elsewhere, and she’s written rivetingly about that nightmare ever since.
Given the degree to which this country created a full-scale offshore system of injustice and the horror of the kinds of torture it employed on prisoners in that never-ending war, it’s surprising how little any American official ever truly paid for planning such acts. Still, no one should be surprised to learn that, however hidden those torture sites were, torture itself somehow managed to enter our all-American world. In fact, today, TomDispatch regular Greenberg, whose new book with Julian Zelizer, Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, has just been published, offers a vivid look at how one aspect of the planning and committing of torture has — without anyone (other than her) noticing — spilled over into our everyday world. Of course, Donald Trump, like every president before and after him, kept that horror of an offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay open. If reelected in 2024, given the grim planning for a future Trump administration already underway, I wouldn’t be faintly surprised were we to end up with a whole new set of “torture memos” of an unpredictable kind. Tom
Imagine my surprise when, nearly eight months ago, commenting on the state of the country as it approached the 2024 presidential election, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted that “Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations.” Unbeknownst to most Americans, that term, “learned helplessness,” was profoundly and inextricably tied to this country’s disastrous post-9/11 Global War on Terror and, in particular, its horrifying torture program. Yet there it was, being used in a new context — one that, while perhaps altered by the president’s recent decision not to run for a second term, has been employed with remarkable frequency in the intervening months, especially recently, when it comes to this country’s presidential future.
As the pundits weighed in on Joe Biden’s abysmal performance at that June 27th debate with Donald Trump and cast doubt on his prospects for reelection, “learned helplessness“ was used over and over again in the days leading up to his withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Two days after the debate, for instance, The Economist, focusing on Biden’s refusal to declare himself a non-candidate for the presidency, concluded that “many [Democrats] have fallen into learned helplessness,” as evidenced by the gap between their private doubts and their public assertions.
Writing for the San Francisco-based progressive daily, 48hills, Bruce Mirkin chastised the Democrats for choosing hopelessness over hope. “Instead of ‘yes, we can,’” he wrote, “the instinctive response from a good portion of the folks who should be helping to defend democracy seems to be ‘no, we can’t.’” He then labeled the party’s inaction “learned helplessness.” Jordan Zakarin, writing for the Center for American Progress Action’s Progress Report, extended that diagnosis from “the worst debate performance in modern history” to the larger moment in Washington. He pointed, for instance, to Attorney General Merrick Garland having “slow-walked prosecuting Donald Trump.” “It is,” he concluded, “a learned helplessness,” a “preemptive surrender.”
The question is: What should we make of the concept of “learned helplessness”? Where did it come from and what are the remedies writ large? In this distinctly disturbing moment in our history, is it possible that an all-American version of despair and hopelessness has changed in light of Joe Biden’s backing out of the presidential race?
The Psychological Concept
To better understand the sudden shower of references to “learned helplessness,” a little history is in order. In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term while conducting experiments with dogs. He had accidentally stumbled on the fact that dogs that experienced electrical shocks without having any control over starting or stopping them were ultimately rendered strangely passive. They proved unwilling to move, even to escape further mistreatment.
After more experiments demonstrated that being subjected to severe pain or stress did indeed induce a state of inaction in dogs, Seligman then turned to humans and discovered that individuals who had suffered an act or acts of trauma and abuse continued, well after the painful incident, to show signs of depression and anxiety that rendered them completely unable to act. They continued to exist, he discovered, in a state of profound resignation and inaction, long after the traumatic moment in which they found themselves powerless. Afterward, they were convinced that nothing was under their control, that any action they might take would be futile, and that failure was inevitable, should they even try to act. (Later studies suggested that some elderly individuals might also experience such a state of profound resignation and inaction in response to “stressful life events,” at times in association with dementia.)
But here’s the truly strange thing: more than three decades later in the years after the 9/11 attacks, Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush.
Whatever the truth of this latest incident, and whatever long term aims it might be used to further, this “strategy of tension” has an immediate political agenda already becoming clear – and it’s as predictable as ever.
Further limit social media/free speech
Normalise constant surveillance
Attacking free speech is the ever-present, eternal agenda that comes before everything else and it’s been a real pile-on the last few days.
Those outside the UK might not have heard, but it’s been a violent week in the UK. Here’s a quick rundown of the official story so far:
Four days ago a 17-year-old allegedly walked into a children’s “Taylor Swift dance class” (whatever that might be) in Southport and started stabbing little girls, wounding 10 and killing 3.
It was initially reported the boy was a muslim immigrant.
This story was, however, reversed within hours, the new story “revealing” that he was actually born in Cardiff, the son of Rwandan immigrants. He was named as “Axel Muganwa Rudakubana” late yesterday.
His religious affiliation, if any, seems not to have been firmly established.
Another young man was, allegedly, arrested later while in possession of a machete and balaclava at a vigil for the victims. He was, again, reportedly Muslim.
This, allegedly, resulted in what are described as protests and riots, the destruction of a brick wall outside a mosque and the burning of a police van.
Further alleged riots subsequently sprang up in London and Hartlepool.
This is the current narrative. None of the details has been substantiated as yet, so how much you decide to believe is your personal preference at this point.
At OffG we reserve the right to be sceptical. Of everything.
There are a lot of unanswered questions, and the current level of “mourning” by government institutions and groups in no way directly affected by the tragedy always has a taint of the performative that shouldn’t be too quickly conflated with insincerity or worse.
And, of course, all of this is coming hot on the heels of the Manchester Airport incident, where police officers and Muslim youths allegedly clashed violently in as yet obscure circumstances.
Then, as now, both sides were provided with adequate rage-bait to get them worked up.
Whatever the truth of this latest incident, and whatever long term aims it might be used to further, this “strategy of tension” has an immediate political agenda already becoming clear – and it’s as predictable as ever.
Further limit social media/free speech
Normalise constant surveillance
Attacking free speech is the ever-present, eternal agenda that comes before everything else and it’s been a real pile-on the last few days.
The Hill headlines“Misinformation floods social media in wake of breakneck news cycle”, Sky News went with“Southport attack misinformation fuels far-right discourse on social media”
ABC News reports: “Online misinformation fueled tensions over the stabbing attack in Britain that killed 3 children”
The Byline Times collectively scolds society’s negligence: “‘We All Need To Consider Our Role in the Wild West of Social Media Hypercriminality’”
The BBC asks“Did social media fan the flames of riot in Southport?” and Telepgraph answers very much in the affirmative, cutting right to the heart of the matter [emphasis added]:
Unregulated social media disinformation is wrecking Britain – Free speech must come with accountability
So you can put the blame for the monumental evil of 20th century totalitarianism squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson. This megalomaniacal madman, who was the very worst President in American history, took America into war for the worst possible reason: Namely, a vainglorious desire to have a big seat at the post-war peace table in order to remake the world as God had inspired him to redeem it.
The Indispensable Nation meme originates not in the universal condition of mankind and the nation-states into which it has been partitioned. Instead, it stems from an erroneous take on the one-time, flukish and historically aberrant circumstances of the 20th century that gave rise to giant totalitarian states in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the resulting mass murder and oppressions which resulted there from.
What we mean is that Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were not coded into the DNA of humanity; they were not an incipient horror always waiting to happen the moment more righteous nations let down their guard.
To the contrary, they were effectively born and bred in April 1917 when the US entered what was then called the Great War. And though it did so for absolutely no reason of homeland security or any principle consistent with the legitimate foreign policy of the American Republic, its entry tilted the outcome to the social chaos and Carthaginian peace from which Stalin and Hitler sprung.
So you can put the blame for the monumental evil of 20th century totalitarianism squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson. This megalomaniacal madman, who was the very worst President in American history, took America into war for the worst possible reason: Namely, a vainglorious desire to have a big seat at the post-war peace table in order to remake the world as God had inspired him to redeem it.
The truth, however, was that the European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a risible pipe dream.
Indeed, the shattered world extant after the bloodiest war in human history was a world about which Wilson was blatantly ignorant. And remaking it was a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited—even as his infamous 14 points were a chimera so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.
The monumentally ugly reason for America’s entry into the Great War, in fact, was revealed—if inadvertently—by his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House. As the latter put it: Intervention in Europe’s war positioned Wilson to play,
“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World. From Wilson’s historically erroneous turn—there arose at length the Indispensable Nation folly, which we shall catalog in depth below.
For now, suffice it to say that there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention.
It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists—when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.
Belgium, Germany, Greece, Latvia and Portugal will test the new vaccination card in a variety of formats, including printed cards, mailed copies and digital versions for smartphones. Critics called it a ‘direct threat to freedom.’
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.
(Children’s Health Defense) — Five European Union (EU) countries in September will pilot the newly developed European Vaccination Card (EVC), which “aims to empower individuals by consolidating all their vaccination data in one easily accessible location.
The pilot program marks a step toward the continent-wide rollout of the card, according to Vaccines Today.
Belgium, Germany, Greece, Latvia and Portugal will test the new card in a variety of formats, including printed cards, mailed copies and digital versions for smartphones.
The program aims to “pave the way for other countries by harmonising vaccine terminology, developing a common syntax, ensuring adaptability across different healthcare settings, and refining EVC implementation plans,” Vaccines Today reported.
The plans will be made public in 2026, “extending the EVC system beyond the pilot phases and enabling broad adoption across all EU Member States.”
The European Vaccination Card (to make life easier propaganda)
September 2024 in 5 pilot countries: Latvia, Greece, Belgium, Germany, and Portugal. The card aims to empower individuals by consolidating all their vaccination data in one easily accessible location. pic.twitter.com/GQmE1JcWh8
According to Vaccines Today, the EVC program seeks to leverage “the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic” and foster “innovation in vaccination management,” with the goal of “taking crucial steps toward a more resilient and health-secure future.”
Vaccines Today described the GDHCN as a “citizen-centered method of storing and sharing data,” rather than a system that relies “solely on public health systems.”
Greece’s University of Crete is coordinating the EVC project alongside 14 partners from nine countries — and with 6.75 million euros ($7.3 million) in funding from the European Commission’s (EC) EU4Health program. The EC is the EU’s executive branch.
MCViewPoint 
