When many or even most people utter the phrase “politics-as-usual,” perhaps accompanied by a grimace, a wry smile, or a slight shaking of the head, they mean that aggression, arrogance, authoritarianism, bullshit, bullying, coercion, dogmatism, evasion, gaslighting, idiocy, oppressing the poor and the weak, pandering to the rich and powerful, thought-control, and venality are not only to be fully expected in everyday political life, but are in fact essential features of everyday political life.
In other words, many or even most people think that everyday politics = politics-as-usual = political clusterfuck.
Take, for example, the latest political news as reported by the New York Times:
- The Supreme Court Partially Allowed Trump’s Travel Ban. Who Is Still Barred?
- Spurned by Trump, Senate Democrats Take a Harder Line
- Stepsister, Yes; Grandma, No: U.S. Sets Guidelines for Revised Travel Ban
- Selling (or Not) the American Health Care Act
- Pence to Replace His Chief of Staff
- U.S. Seeks to Keep Closer Tabs on Chinese Money in America
- Trump, Amazon and ‘Internet Taxes’: What Did He Mean?
- Trump’s R.S.V.P. to Macron: Yes to Bastille Day in Paris
- Trump Nominee Who Wrote Bush-Era Torture Memos Is Scrutinized
- White House Warning Halted Syria Chemical Attack, Officials Say
- In Blow to ‘Clean Coal,’ Flawed Plant Will Burn Gas Instead
- F.B.I. Agent Charged With Lying About Oregon Standoff Shooting
- As Affordable Care Act Repeal Teeters, Prospects for Bipartisanship Build
- Passengers Flying Into U.S. to Face More Scrutiny, but Laptops Allowed
— In other words, it’s nothing but aggression, arrogance, authoritarianism, bullshit, bullying, coercion, dogmatism, evasion, gaslighting, idiocy, oppressing the poor and the weak, pandering to the rich and powerful, thought-control, and venality out the political wazoo, 24–7.
Politics-as-usual and political clusterfuck, right?
But it gets even worse.
If we think back only six short months, we’ll recall that PRE-POTUS Donald Trump’s two majorly mindfucking slogans during the appalling Punch-and-Judy puppet show that masqueraded as the 2016 US Presidential campaign were:
“Make America Great Again!”
“Politics As Usual Is Bad Business!”
In other words, The Potentate of Politics-As-Usual, aka Dr Trumpolini, aka The Grand Wizard of MINDFUCK, was telling us over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that he’s actually against politics-as-usual.
Therefore, not only do many or even most people think that everyday politics = politics-as-usual = political clusterfuck, but also it’s an essential feature of the political strategy of those who control and benefit most from politics-as-usual and political clusterfuck, to convince us that they’re actually against politics-as-usual.
Moreover, Trump is only the most egregious, world-class example of this.
In fully bipartisan spirit, virtually all politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, and absolutely all members of the military-industrial-university complex that constitutes The Deep State, together with its lackeys, the big-money media — including, sadly, The New York Times and The Washington Post, who are just as complicit in this, in their own special big-money way, as Breitbart and Fox News are in theirs — are playing exactly the same Wizards of MINDFUCK game.
So politics-as-unusual is every bit as clusterfucky as politics-as-usual.
This in turn is a perfect example of what’s known in logic as “contraries” as opposed to “contradictories”: contradictory propositions cannot both be false and cannot both be true; but contrary propositions, although they cannot both be true, can both be false.
Politics-as-usual and politics-as-unusual are political contraries: equally clusterfucky and equally false .
— Which, incidentally, also demonstrates yet again the deep relevance of logic to politics.
But I digress.
Back now to the equal but opposite, i.e., contrary, clusterfuckyness of politics-as-usual and politics-as-unusual.
It’s absolutely true that politics-as-usual= political clusterfuck.
The Big Lie is that everyday politics = politics-as-usual.
In other words, they’re telling us:
(i) that they and they alone know what the essential nature of everyday politics really is,
(ii) that they and they alone can fight politics-as-usual, and
(iii) that we should go on and on and on passively letting them clusterfuck up our political lives, perpetuating politics-as-usual till the crack of doom, precisely by means of our being endlessly fooled into believing they’re actually against politics-as-usual: that is, precisely by means of our being endlessly fooled into believing that politics-as-unusual is better and less clustercfucky than politics-as-usual.
So how can we fight back?
Here are four ways.
First, we can absolutely refuse to accept The Big Lie that everyday politics = politics-as-usual, by absolutely refusing to believe 99% of what the Democrats, the Republicans,The Deep State, and its lackeys, the big-money media, tell us, and by critically thinking for ourselves.
Second, we can absolutely refuse to believe those who try to fool us into believing that politics-as-unusual is any better or less clusterfucky than politics-as-usual.
Third, we can absolutely refuse to engage in any sort of aggression, arrogance, authoritarianism, bullshit, bullying, dogmatism, evasion, gaslighting, idiocy, oppressing the weak, pandering to the rich and powerful, thought-control, and venality in our own everyday political lives.
Fourth, we can absolutely engage in woke progressive politics by collectively enacting the seven-part political program described below.
And as always, to anyone who says that this is impossible or just can’t be done,
Je vous dis, merde!
***
“Je vous dis, merde!” (literally, “I say to you: shit!” or more loosely, “You’re so full of shit!”) is a morally and politically defiant slogan invented and first published by an early 20th-century Catalan anarchist who used the nom de guerre “Miguel Almereyda.” Almereyda, who was murdered in a French prison in 1917, was also the father of the famous French film director Jean Vigo, who immortalized the same slogan in his breakthrough 1933 film, Zéro de conduite, aka Zero for Conduct.
Here is the seven-part platform of The Wake The Fuck Up! Party , aka The WTFU Party, aka Up Against the Wall, Philosophy-Fucker!, aka UAW/PF —
1. Universal Respect for Human Dignity (URHD):
· Human dignity is the absolute non-denumerable moral value of every member of humanity, and everyone ought to try wholeheartedly to treat everyone else in a way that is sufficient to meet the demands of respect for human dignity, especially including (i) alleviating or ending human oppression, and (ii) actively engaging in mutual aid and mutual kindness.
2. Universal Basic Income (UBI):
· Anyone 21 years of age or over and living permanently in the USA, who has a personal yearly income of $50,000.00 USD or less, and who is capable of requesting their UBI, would receive $25,000.00 USD per year, with no strings attached.
3. A 15-Hour Workweek for Understaffed Non-Bullshit Jobs (FHW-for-UNBJs):
· Anyone 18 years of age or older who is living permanently in the USA, who has completed a high school education, and is mentally and physically capable of doing a job, would be offered an eco-job, paying a yearly wage of $25,000.00 USD, for fifteen hours of work (three 5-hour days) per week.
Thus anyone 21 years of age or older with a high-school degree and who is also mentally and physically capable of working, would have a guaranteed yearly income of at least $50,000.00 USD if they chose to do an eco-job.
The rationale behind the three-year gap between (i) being offered an eco-job at 18 and (ii) beginning to receive their UBI at 21, is that every young adult who has finished high school will have the option of pursuing three years of part-time or full-time free higher education without credentialing, i.e., for its own sake, after high school, before making longer-term decisions about what I call job-work and life-work.
***
Here are a few more details about UBI and eco-jobs.
(i) The UBI is to be paid by a monthly stipend check.
(ii) Eco-job income is not taxed.
(iii) For all individual yearly incomes of $50,000.00 USD or under, no tax will be levied; hence for someone receiving their UBI and also doing an eco-job, no income tax will be levied.
(iv) For all individual non-eco-job incomes, for every $1.00 USD earned above the standard UBI of $25,000.00 USD, the monthly UBI stipend is reduced by 50 cents, until the recipient’s UBI is reduced to zero; hence for those individuals with yearly non-eco-job incomes equal to or under $50,000.00 USD, the maximum UBI + non-eco-job income sum is always $50,000.00 USD.
(v) For all individual yearly incomes over $50,000.00 USD, for every $10,000.00 USD earned, that surplus income is taxed at the rate of 1%, with the highest surplus income tax rate being 50%; hence the maximum surplus 50% tax rate starts at individual yearly incomes of $550,000.00 USD, and applies to all higher surplus incomes.
***
4. Universal Free Higher Education Without Credentialing (HEWC):
· Everyone would be offered, beyond their high-school education, a free, three-year minimum, optional (but also open-ended beyond those three years, as a further option), part-time or full-time universal public education program in the so-called “liberal arts,” and also in some of the so-called “STEM” fields, including the humanities, the fine arts, the social sciences, mathematics, and the natural sciences.
· For many or even most people, their HEWC would fall between (i) the end of their high school education at age 18 and the corresponding availability of eco-jobs, and (ii) the beginning of their UBI at age 21.
· But HEWC would be open to anyone with a high school degree, no matter how old they are, provided they are mentally and physically capable of doing the program.
5. Universal Free Healthcare (UFH):
· Every human person living permanently in the USA will receive free lifelong healthcare.
6. 2-Phase Universal Open Borders (2P-UOB):
· Phase 1: Starting in 2021, there will be universal open borders with Canada and Mexico, and everyone who moves across those borders and then claims residence in the USA, will receive temporary or permanent residence in the USA and also full membership in the system of UBI, FHW-for-UNBJs/eco-jobs, and UFH in the USA, with the precise number of new temporary or permanent residents to depend on the current availability of (i) adequate funding for UBI, eco-jobs, and UFH , and (ii) adequate living accommodation, in the USA, provided that all new residents also fully respect the human dignity of everyone else in the USA and elsewhere in the world.
· Phase 2: Also starting in 2021, the USA, Canada, and Mexico will collectively form a Global Refugee Consortium (GRC), with three-way open borders to any political refugee, economic refugee, or asylum seeker from anywhere in the world (aka “global refugees”), who will receive temporary or permanent residence in the USA, Canada, or Mexico, and also full membership in the system of UBI, FHW-for-UNBJs/eco-jobs, and UFH in the three GRC countries, with the precise number of new temporary or permanent residents, and the precise distribution of new residents among the three members of the GRC, to depend on the current availability of (i) funding for UBI, eco-jobs, and UFH , and (ii) adequate living accommodation, in the three GRC countries, provided that all new residents also fully respect the human dignity of everyone else in the GRC and elsewhere in the world.
7. Universal No-Guns (UNG):
· No one in the USA, including police, internal security forces of all kinds, armies, and intelligence forces of all kinds, has the moral right to possess or use guns of any kind, for any purpose whatsoever, because the primary function of guns is coercion, and coercion is immoral.
· UNG would be implemented by repealing the Second Amendment to the US Constitution in 2021 and then universally banning the possession or use of guns thereafter.
I’m also assuming that Universal Public Education (UPE) — universal free access for all human persons of any age to good public education up to the end of high school — already exists in most countries, and needs no further justification.
Where UPE does not already exist, it would automatically become a necessary part of the seven-part WTFU Party package, thereby making it a eight-part package.
***
Mr Nemo, Nowhere, NA, 30 June 2017
The WTFU Party is a sub-project of the online mega-project Philosophy Without Borders, which is home-based on Patreon here.
