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[ by Charles Cameron — not hookers: one Playmate, one porn star, both sex-workers of one or another kind ? ]
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Pravda on the Checkout Line – nice title — Politico Magazine — note last on the right, middle row

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In Scaramucci on symmetry, I quoted James Fallows:

I argue that “projection,” in the psychological sense, is the default explanation for anything Donald Trump says or does.

Projection means deflecting any criticism (or half-conscious awareness) of flaws in yourself by accusing someone else of exactly those flaws. Is Trump’s most immediately obvious trait his narcissistic and completely ungoverned temperament? (Answer: yes.) By the logic of projection, it thus makes perfect sense that he would brag that he has “the greatest temperament” and judgment, and criticize the always-under-control Hillary Clinton for hers.

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I just came across what looks to me like a perfect example of Trumpian projection — if you’ll grant me that Trump, via his friendship with David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, proactively influences the front page of that rag-mag.

Here we go:

last on the right, middle row, above — a closer look, a clearer image

See there at the foot of the page?

She Ordered Me To — pay HUSH MONEY to hookers

That’s under a general header:

24 Years of Cover Ups and Crimes Exposed

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Oh dear, and Donald Trump, according to the sworn testimony of Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, in Federal Court, caused considerable moneys to be paid to at least two young ladies, one a porn star and director, the other a Playboy Playmate of the Year if that falls under a different category, to buy their respective silences on his alleged affairs with them, the payments being made in time to avoid any sordid revelations in the immediate run-up to the 2016 election..

Time, methinks, for the Enquirer to rerun that front page with a few of the details switched to reflect the Federal-bench-approved Truth.

[ by Charles Cameron — a cascade from dangerous words to deathly deeds ]
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There’s this tweet from Donald Trump, and it’s one among several like it:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Certain media outlets are listed as enemies, which is pretty close to calling them targets..

Remember Nixon‘s enemies list?

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Okay, then there’s this tweet, from Alex Jones of InfoWars:

On Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, Alex Jones tells supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready against antifa, the mainstream media, and “Chicom operatives” https://t.co/OBHSFc3ofC pic.twitter.com/ntQbh9IKxz

— Media Matters (@mmfa) August 14, 2018

Let’s give that a little more context — Alex Jones ups the ante:

We’re under attack and you know that, and you pointed out mainstream media is the enemy.

But now it’s time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag. I know the Justice Department’s crippled, a bunch of followers and cowards. But there’s groups, there’s grand juries, there’s — you called for it and it’s time politically and economically and judiciously and legally and criminally to move against these people. It’s got to be done now. Get together the people you know aren’t traitors, and aren’t cowards, and aren’t hedging their frickin’ bets like all these other assholes do, and let’s go, let’s do it. Because they’re coming. Now, in your wisdom you may be playing possum and waiting for them to come in. But America needs to know that they’ve got their little pathetic commie red teams ready. And they’ve got their targets picked out: the sheriffs, the judges, the police chiefs, the patriots, the veterans, the talk show hosts, everybody. And everyone’s going to be amazed when they come and when those cowards come and it’s going to hit in the middle of the night, and they’re coming. And they’re coming. And they’re coming.

They think they can really take down America. And this is it. So, people need to have their battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides and you got to be ready because the media is so disciplined in their deception. Antifa attacked all these people at the White House, beat up reporters, beat up women, children, no coverage. And they’ve got discipline folks, they’ve got criminal discipline because they’re a bunch of followers.

I’m suggesting with this DoubleTwweet that Alex Jones is the compulsive “id” of Trump’s repeated attacks on the “faux” media as “the enemy of the people” — essentially putting a target on the backs of those media listed, and their hournalists..

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In the historical background, almost buried in the hiss of defective memory, we hear the voice of Nikita Khrushchev. As the New Yorker points out:

Nikita Khrushchev, in his memoirs, observed that Joseph Stalin, his despotic and bloody-minded predecessor, referred to “everyone who didn’t agree with him as an ‘enemy of the people.’”

And here’s our chance to find out what that phrase, enemy of the people, may lead to:

“As a result, several hundred thousand honest people perished,” Khrushchev said, underestimating the number of dead from Stalin’s mass repressions by many millions. “Everyone lived in fear in those days. Everyone expected that at any moment there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night and that knock on the door would prove fatal.”

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Now that’s a dangerous cascade, don’t you think, from Trump’s identification of certain “enemies of the people” via Alex Jones’ call for regular folks to have their “battle rifles” ready — via Khrushchev’s finding an earlier Russian echo of Trump’s phrase in Stalin’s, to Stalin’s tens of millions dead..

Take a deep enough breath..

Synonyms for shiver, the noun:

tremble, quiver, shake, shudder, quaver, quake, tremor, twitch

There’s quite a bit of poetry in that list. And..

Shiver, the verb:

shake slightly and uncontrollably as a result of being cold, frightened, or excited.

I’d say that cascade frightens me, with maybe some excitement peering out from behind the fright, just because in it there’s a premonition of conflict.. oh, and fright rhymes with excite..

Let me let you in on a secret: the poetry may be a distraction from the fright, but if so it’s a welcome distraction.

[ by Charles Cameron — prophecy, prediction, and the news cycle ]
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Prophecies can be news — in this case, the almost-prediction is in a piece by religion-savvy reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey in WaPo:

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Nope.

Okay, we guess wrong — and sometimes when we guess wrong, we do CYA maneuvers to avoid admitting it. Hal Lindsey has been updating his 1970 bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth, with its nudge in the direction of a 1980s rapture for some time — with royalties increasing every time the likely (but no man knoweth) date of Armageddon is delayed, ca-ching! —

Lindsey also predicted that the European Economic Community, which preceded the European Union, was destined (according to Biblical prophecy) to become a “United States of Europe”, which in turn he says is destined to become a “Revived Roman Empire” ruled by the Antichrist. Lindsey wrote that he had concluded, since there was no apparent mention of America in the books of Daniel or Revelation, that America would not be a major geopolitical power by the time the tribulations of the end times arrived..

so this is just a brief reminder that prophecies, predictions &c can easily make news when they are made, but fail to make the news when things don’t work out as expected (see our unintended consequences pages for related materials).

Well, is Kim Jong-Un still among the living? Has Trump exercised restraint with all those hellfire missiles at his disposal — and a notoriously fractious temperament?

Thank God, I suppose.

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I’ll collect further examples of failed prophecies and predictiosn here.

[ by Charles Cameron — suggesting a lessening of TV Trumpery and its critiques ]
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In a tweet earliee today, I suggested that the close reading of a text can be highly rewarding, a point I made most forcefully in Close reading, Synoptic- and Sembl-style, for parallels, patterns.

Key to a close reading is the “language” in which a given writer or speaker clothes their words.. “language” here being used both in the sense of their metaphors and forms (which is why I’ve been collecting sports and other metaphors, ouroboroi and other forms) and in the sense formulated by Witty Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (PI).

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers us a list of regular language games as Wittgenstein uses the term in PI:

reporting an event, speculating about an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story, reading it, play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating, asking, thanking

I want to suggest that we could usefully think of language games in terms of the philosophical, ideological, partisan, religious or psychological drivers that propel them.

Further, in the case of Trump, we might observe that the language game he is playing is not the one his critics on, say, MSNBC, are basing their own critiques on.

And here’s the great advantage: once we’ve analyzed the differences between Trump’s language game and aims and those of his critics, we could close shop. We wouldn’t need this constant barrage of Fox and MSNBC news on the topic — any new utterance of his or Giulianis of note could simply be indexed to the sub-para describing that particular disjunction in language game, and basta! — the rest of the news “oxygen” would be available for the discussion of other topics.

As a subset of that para — I don’t suppose Mueller xxwill want to take every piece of “off the cuff” Trumpery as intended as real “truth” — “all that is the case” –he’ll surely see it as entertainment and distraction — chuff and chaff — and zero in on the key statements of the President’s worldview, viewing them as exemplars not of “truth” but of a language game to be analyzed and evaluated as such. Having zeroed in on these relatively few key phrases, many of the many critiques offered by Trump’s accusers.

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Wittgenstein asks what all that we consider to be games have in common, and decides they share a family resemblance but — in my words, here — the cousins on one side of the family have little (a polite word for “nothing”) in common with the cousins at the other end of thr spectrum.

If the Olympic Games included language games in their list of sports, Giuliani‘s reference to FBI agents as stormtroopers wight win long jump gold.

Here’s Jonathan Chait in Giuliani’s FBI ‘Stormtroopers’ Smear Is the Key to Trump’s Authoritarian Mind-set”>:

In 1995, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre signed his name to a fundraising letter referring to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents as “tjack-booted government thugs.” The implicit association of American federal law enforcement with fascists provoked a furor. Former president George H. W. Bush publicly resigned his NRA membership in protest; LaPierre had to apologize.

Last night, in the midst of a long, deeply incriminating interview, Rudy Giuliani called FBI agents “stormtroopers.” Here was the president’s lawyer, not an outside lobbyist, comparing federal law enforcement to Nazis directly, rather than indirectly.

Stormtrooper vs jack-booted government thugs is an interesting comparison (& makes a fine DoubleQuote), and Chait’s “implicit association of American federal law enforcement with fascist” in hth cases exemplify just the kind of language extremism we should be avoiding in our policy debates.

Chait’s continuing half-paragraph illminates the arcane workings of the media machine in processing such things:

The Washington Post’s account of Giuliani’s interview noted the remark in a single sentence, in the 30th paragraph of its story. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Politico accounts of Giuliani’s interview did not even mention the stormtrooper remark at all.

There are times I wish for sanity.

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Okay, that was third and last in this series.. Previously:

On negative space in the painting..

On negative space, private morality in the public square

This:

Wittgenstein’s language games and the public sphere

[ by Charles Cameron — sadly but explicably unable to fall in love with the world population ]
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I’ve been thinking about the appropriate scale of the world as it appears in different styles of reporting. The issue here is what happens when you zoom down from the abstract, group, to the individual, personal level.

Ava Olsen, perceived at the appropriate scale at which to view the world as a whole

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My tweet:

Note to journos: when you take the wide view ("school shootings 1950-2016"), it's abstract and much smaller than the world – when you fo us on one 7 yer old (Ava Olsen eg ) you capture the actual size of the world, albeit a tiny fraction, & the appropriate compassion response.

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) February 5, 2018

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My tweet explained — I hope!

A lot of journos take the wide-angle or “30,000 feet” view, dealing with a group or preferably larger community’s situation, eg “The Middle East after ISIS“, it's abstract and much smaller than the world – when you focus on one 7 yer old (eg Ava Olsen) you capture the actual size of the world, albeit only a tiny fraction of it — but with the appropriate level of compassionate response.

This is important becaus at full size, ie at the individual level, your writings elicit the appropriate compassionate response, which is key to our humanity, while at the more abstract and removed (“30,000 feet”) scale, both Ava herself and the appropriate compassion go missing.

And we desperately need the full appropriate compassion to be elicited, for the individual but for the individual at the group level!

I suspect, FWIW, that this is also, essentially, a quantity vs quality issue.

So 100 to 1 abstract, high level reporting will show the world, but garner only 1% of the appropriate compassion in readers (I know, it’ll do better than that, but only by a little), whereas 100 to 1 personal level reporting will garner the full compassionate impact — even with only 10% of the reportage, still the equivalent of 10 times the reportage at the abstract level — which then needs to be multiplied up to the abstract level.

image borrowed from one of a few dozen sites, then altered

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So we need a preponderance of individual focus, but also an individual to group zoom — even when the group is humanity as a whole.

The best news: We can improve our capacity for compassion

QED