politics

Geotrickster’s 10 Year Anniversary

/ geotrickster / 4 Comments
Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary

On the fourth of April it will officially be the 10 year anniversary of this blog. If it was another 10 years older backdated in time it would have been called part of the ‘Blogosphere’. Thankfully, that did not happen. I will be traveling on the fourth of this month, however. So instead I am going to upload this at a time when much of the world is in April Fool’s Day. It seems fitting. In that 10 years there have been 223 posts, well, now 224 I suppose. Not a bad clip.

My original purpose with this site was to serve the following purposes:

  1. Practice for policy idea writing.
  2. Working through issues I wasn’t sure about yet. A first testing ground so to speak.
  3. An online resume of sorts (see publications tag).
  4. To provide a repository for all the articles I either did not want to publish through someone else due to needing a custom tone or could not get published elsewhere (a formerly much more common arrangement).
  5. To be funny and casual about stuff treated with way too much seriousness elsewhere.

Once I began publishing externally much more frequently, the amount of analysis on foreign policy decreased massively, with domestic and philosophical posts growing, and even a few fiction pieces too. Aside from this though, the original 5 points seem to have largely stayed intact.

A lot has changed since Spring of 2015. Otherkin no longer rule the internet, replaced by a medley of domestic terror-coded ideological otherkin. A global pandemic ran rampant and unleashed the contradictions of late neoliberal breakdown. A carnival barker became President twice in a nonconsecutive manner, the first since Grover Cleveland to do so. In the interregnum between these terms a vegetative fossil held the presidency, but since much of the media liked him there was a coordinated conspiracy to pretend that this was not so. Greater multipolarity in world affairs, something that was basically inevitable from the Great Recession onwards, went from the primary world issue in the background to very much the forefront. The failure to establish a left populism, undone by postmodern moralism and puritanism and tied to the rotting corpse of a liberal establishment, led to the rise of a right populism which is far dumber than the left that should have been born from Occupy but wasn’t.

And then came signalgate to really ram home one consistent theme I have always hammered on this site: it is not primarily malicious competence that is responsible for so much of what you see, but a kind of autopilot incompetence. Notice too how a scandal that should be overwhelmingly directed against Mike Waltz in particular seems to be intentionally obscured by the very media that broke the story, likely because they find his uber-hawk establishment positioning the most palatable of anyone in the government and fear his replacement. Freedom of will? Human consciousness directing the species through rationality? These are the most overrated concepts in all of the humanities. We do not assign this special status to other species, and it makes our observations of their behavior far more objective.

So on the surface everything changed. But if you were paying attention nothing really unexpected happened at the macro scale. The empire was in decline when I started, it still is now. The planet is suffering under incredible loss of biodiversity and conditions of accelerating climate destabilization, same as it was then. Neoliberalism was a discredited force everywhere but finance and the media 10 years ago, and now its often even discredited there too. These things were always going to happen no matter what individuals or even specific countries were wielding the most power, though the rate of the change might differ between variables. Trump is an accelerant.

But just because real life is fatalistic doesn’t mean its predictable! Far from it. This site has the name it has because of my fascination with trickster figures in mythology. They remind us that the murky reality of moral ambiguity that we live in is random and fun in at least equal proportions to its more dire and tragic elements. To quote Dasha Nekrasova from before her podcast went fully unbearable: “Stay alive- something retarded might happen.” These are words to live by.

I would like to think that in these 10 years I have been consistent. Always willing to admit when I make a bad call (Russia won’t invade Ukraine outside of the Donbass/Crimea areas, Hillary will pull out a squeaker in 2016, Syria won’t fall to foreign states-*though in my defense I always carved out a Turkish exception to that one as a hedge, which sadly turned out to be correct). Want to dunk on me, those predictions are all still here. You can search for them. But I have had a greater number of correct calls too in the same time frame (A second Karabakh War with advantage this time for Azerbaijan, the always lingering dangers of the Israel Lobby on crafting viable foreign policy, US recognizing Moroccan rule over Western Sahara, the increased importance of Panama and the Arctic for geostrategy, other countries invoking their own form of R2P to justify war-no longer leaving this as an Atlantic only causus belli, and the missionary/military uses of social progressivism, to name just a few).

If there is one criticism anyone can rightly lob at me which I will proudly accept as true it is that I am a geographic determinist. I am. And if I am doing my job, other people will see why this apparently reductionist position is the pinnacle of material philosophical rigor and policy planning priorities. When accepting geographic determinism, people can virulently disagree on policy but still do so rationally and respectfully, knowing at least that all sides share a common physical reality. The animal is made by ecology.

So with a decade on here passed what are my favorite entries and which were the most popular?

Most popular is easy to prove as I have access to the data:

Oversocialization: An Alternative Social Media Theory, Geotrickster’s Official Rankings of DnD Editions, For Every Cheney Gained, a Million Voters Lost, seem to be the most consistent view getters, in some cases years later. I have even seen one of my lines from the most recent of these appear at random throughout the internet (the one about the party of FDR being replaced by a bunch of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View).

Considering that there are hundreds I can choose from for my personal favorite I am just going to go with what hits the memory banks first as entries I am personally most proud of. These would be:

How to Write a Generic International Relations Article (from the first month no less and which apparently made my former doctoral advisor break out into laughter when he saw it during a meeting), Speculative Realism’s Mongolian Debut, Going Along With the Coyote Conquest, 17th Century Survival Tips for a Hysterical Age, Designing the Ideal International Relations Education, and Delving Down to Prospect (fiction!)

As for the future? I publish more often off this site than on it these days, but there will always be things that need a personal touch or that cannot be fiddled with by editors, things that fill the liminal spaces between clear cut genres and acceptable discourse, and books no one else wants to review. So long as that is the case, I will be here.

A Subcontinent of Toddlers

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment

You do not have to be the biggest fan of how the Trump Administration negotiates. You can, like myself, see the blustering towards Canada and Mexico in particular as extremely counter-productive, to say nothing of the clownish (and possibly dangerous) Gaza proposal. But the Europe stuff…come on, that’s fucking hilarious.

Vance scolding them in both just and right ways as well as ways reminiscent of the liberal internationalists he rightly despises served as a wakeup call that the End of History was over. It had never really begun, of course, but certain parts of the planet (Canada, Northern Europe, American media liberals) had bought into this self-flattering fiction because it centered the deindustrializing parts of the world as still, somehow, the primary drivers- perhaps even protagonists- of history. But when someone finally said this was not true out loud, the self-vassalized classes of Europe publicly wept. The American elite may be a cynical, fractious, and even ignorant bunch, but they have a theory of governance and diplomacy. Europe, so used to being a satrapy, has seen its once more accomplished elite become complete colonial recruit subalterns. Their best and brightest, the people allowed into power, genuinely believe this post-power politics shit. They weep when the mirage crumbles.

Frankly, its pathetic.

Were I European I would find this both funny and disturbing. I would immediately demand people who actually know about how the world works represent me, and appoint people to the foreign policy apparatus accordingly. I would castigate all the trendy postmodernists (closet liberal ideologues) and hard-constructivists (also closet liberal ideologues) for what dogs to America they really are and their role is gutting training for actual honest and forthright policy makers. The failure to prioritize a regional Europe over global ideological crusades has harmed EU countries at least as much as it has the US. Arguably more considering the backwash of the refugee crisis from Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

But since I am not European I merely need to sit back and watch, appraising how fast a society high on 30 years of pure ideology goes through the stages of withdrawal and grief.

I previously mentioned how (northern) Europeans in particular have a strange smug entitlement and unearned sense of self-importance when their only real impact on the 21rst Century seems to be outliers of enshittification to domestic political realignments. This might be worse than that, though. The pathetic Chamberlain-at-Munich analogies and blind faith in a bill of goods the US is (thankfully) no longer selling reflects an inability to even think of a future, only a romanticized and ahistorical past. Statecraft isn’t about bringing into being the hideous undulating many-tentacled beast of German Idealist philosophy, where human thought creates reality through a mystical immaterial process yet to be explained, it is about medium term solutions to immediate problems while understanding permanency is fleeting. It cannot be a playground for navel gazing. People have clashing interests. Always have, always will.

The Age of Discovery and the subsequent Age of Victorian imperialism is long since over. Coasting along as ducklings in America’s wake somehow enabled many in Europe to believe that they had transcended history and were still vital global actors. But the unlearning of statecraft actually meant they were stumbling in to being its victims.

The world today resembles not the dreams of the 90s, but the pre-Discovery balance of power. The great civilization-states of the east are back and growing their influence. Europe, meanwhile, has reverted to its older position of being the western peninsula of Asia. The faster the Europeans can grow up, the faster they can adapt to this new reality.

The Postmodern Right Is The Next Wokeism

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

One of the things that initially surprised me after I wrote Woke Imperium, was that so many more left wing people wanted to engage affirmatively with it than right wing people. A big part of it was because it was they who had first seen their causes taken over by the easily manipulatable moral panic-types. The easiest people to drive to support needlessly aggressive policies around the world are human rights activists, after all. But another element of it, I think, was that many right wing people read it and correctly had their warning bells go off. I compared The Great Awokening to the Reformation to start, particularly the Puritan experience in early American and 17th Century British history (an analogy I am quite fond of), declared it to be a direct successor of the Reagan-Bush Jr Era Moral Majority, and implied that such moralistic impetuses to sell imperial expansion would likely evolve into a post-woke and possibly even anti-woke sequel.

Regular readers of this site know I have been a constant critic of postmodernist social justice since the start and long before it became the cool thing to do. This even predates the blog itself, dating back at least to Kony 2012 if not even before, with my teenage undergraduate disdain for what is incorrectly called ‘critical theory’ and elaborate and obfuscatory language used to ’empower’ (make the writer sound smarter than they are) that did anything but. They will also know that none of this collective cultural insanity of the past decade plus has ever once tempted me to become conservative or to throw my left-populist economic views under the bus. In fact one of my persistent critiques of wokery was that the longer it went on the more obnoxious the inevitable right wing backlash to it would be. People with a progressive/whiggish view of history seem incapable of understanding that all things come in cycles rather than ascend some linear path.

The desire to become a moral majority is hardwired into American culture, be it left, right, or center. And all present in effect the same danger. The triumph of slave morality in the service of the suppression of dissent. The sterilization of public space to avoid psychological discomfort. The fear, quivering in the shadows, that ones own faction does not have a monopoly on ethics. ‘Just Be a Good Person,’ can be easily swapped out for ‘Just Be a Normal Person,’ etc.

One can simply disavow moralism, adopt an amoral power-based view of the world that reflects polycentric reality, and be done with such fears entirely, but I digress.

Currently, I am busy with other longer-term projects, but I am also on the side paying attention to certain trends with the assumption that I will in the future be writing another examination of moralism in the service of neconservatism. This time, I suspect, it will be about the right. We have also seen a discussion, if one can call it that, online of what the ‘Woke Right’ is. Usually and laughably this entails a conservative old guard lashing out at younger conservatives who take a dim view of Israel and are increasingly interested in class politics. This is some opposite-world territory, as it comes from the faction attached to a sentimental and identity/grievance politics based world view where the U.S.-Israel security arrangement is viewed as a positive and even necessary feature of global stability. This is also a faction that believes that identity (in the form of Christianity, ‘based-ness’ or whatever) is more important than class and logistics. That is quite literally a copy/paste of left-wokeisms priorities, if for ostensibly different purposes. It is the Republican Boomer establishment that is actually the Woke Right here. The difference now is that the evangelical phase of the 80s-2000s was so loathed and backfired so badly once it went down with the Bush Ship that it will be quite some time, if ever, that Jimmy Reptile and all his friends are back in the driver’s seat.

This leads me to begin (without yet coming to firm conclusions) to speculate as to what exactly the right-wokeness will be. I can tell you this much, it will be a compromised merger of multiple trend, as no single one of the following has anything remotely approximating popular or institutional support. The goal of the right-moralists will be to create what they will inevitably and pretentiously refer to as a ‘Hegelian Synthesis’ out of a variety of these trends. They will most likely fail to establish this as official policy, but they will absolutely create a kind of virtue-signaling side economy of Crusader Pepe profile pic approved ‘alternative’ media that people are expected to show deference to if they want to be in the club.

The Catholic Convert Inquisition

For many Millennials and Zoomers, and especially that most cursed demographic of those between the two, converting to Catholicism is all the rage. All hipsters become Catholic, after all. That need to moralize while also being part of a community is creating a seething underbelly of young fogies ready to RETVRN to before Vatican II. Seemingly utterly oblivious to the contradictions of joining a ‘universal church’ that is meant to spread across all the cultures of the Earth while simultaneously railing against globalism is a self-contradictory position, but it is no different from the woke left’s fantasies that one day they would take power (Ha!) and replace the bad rapacious capitalist American Empire with Socialism’s True Children.

This cannot become a dominant faction on its own because the majority of Catholics (i.e. not recent converts) do not share any of the bizarre fixations this new group has and largely sees them as an unwelcome imposition.

Anti-Woke Media Kulturkampf

Because wokeness was so obnoxious and invasive, and embraced by so many corporate and government actors, it made a very easy target. An entire right wing griftosphere arose where some of the dumbest midwits on this planet were able to make bank embodying the principle that a stopped clock can be right twice a day. They infest social media and youtube, giving the most superficial and warmed over takes possible and whining that they are somehow an opressed class because the establishment that once courted them hates them now. Even as our Silicon Douche overlords pivot away into courting the right, they will still trot out this talking point for a year or two to come.

This cannot become a dominant faction because they are utterly dependent on those they criticize to even exist. As wokeness continuous to decline back into its pre-Tumblr migration status as a holding tank for mentally ill shut-ins and losers, all of its cultural cache and any pretense of punching up against the establishment is gone. Big tech kissed the ring. The era of the coding pronouns-in-email gendergoblin is over, the new era of the neofeudal techno-popes has arrived. Thus, in time, the anti-woke will be seen as the woke content creators are, tools of an establishment and dupes of fashionable trend chasing.

Israel

While Israel is hemorrhaging support across the public’s ideological spectrum, the fact that left wingers mostly come out hard for Palestine means that the reflexively anti-woke knee-jerkers often have to double down into a Boomer-style love of Israel and performative philosemetism. North Atlantic Jewish communities become a kind of pet cause of such people in the way that (a monodimentional image of) African-Americans became The Elect of the left. Censorship and cancelling have been perfected by AIPAC-aligned actors in a way the cultural left could only dream of achieving anywhere outside of Reddit and Bluesky.

This cannot become a dominant faction because the younger people are, the less infatuated they tend to be this foreign state whose interests, we are constantly told, must be placed before our own. But the bipartisan support for treating this strip of land in the Levant as sacrosanct is strong enough that The Olds will hang on as long as possible, and make their funding contingent on continuing such policies.

Zoomer Moral Panic

I have talked about this one before so I will keep it brief. If there is one thing Gen Z loves, its setting up arbitrary guard rails to creative expression, public policy debate, and cultural output. When their brood mother, Tipper Gore, shat them out her foetid womb she began to suckle them from the Teet of Cancellation, whispering in their ear all the while that to be made psychologically uncomfortable was literal violence and stochastic terrorism. This attitude is not simply a left-wing and female coded affect, as it is in the (equally cringe but for different reasons) Millennial generation, but pretty standard across the ideological and gender spectrum of Gen Z.

This cannot become the dominant faction because Zoomers are a smaller and poorer generation than any other. They won’t be buying their way to the heights of lobbying without help. But they are pulling from a long and recurring American tradition here, so they will find help if they seek it.

…

I believe the key to predicting the longer-term trends of the Right Wing Turn will be found in a merger point between the above factors. It is too early in this process for precise soothsaying, but for now I will venture this: the common point that all of the above factors share is moral sanctimony and virtue signaling in service not of social justice and equity as we are so used to these days, but for a nostalgic dream-cosmos of ‘normality’, which truly meets the definition of Nostalgia For an Age That Never Existed. It is an attempt to force a type of cultural conformity which has given up actually appealing to the masses but rather seeks to dictate the terms of public expression in the vain and ultimately doomed hope that politics is downstream of culture, rather than the opposite. It will appear to succeed for a few years as the hangover of the Woke Dark Age still lingers and we all settle our scores with the cancelers of yesteryear, but will inevitably inspire rebellion and became an equally poorly dating experiment as the one it sought to replace.

In this way I view it as The Hays Code 2.0. When Will H. Hays took on the job to ‘clean up’ film for the sake of 1920s WASP America he saw himself as fixing a problem that was existential. He succeeded to an immense degree, with interracial couples and foreign cultural practices heavily censored, and even married couples being forced to be depicted as sleeping in separate beds. Jokes about the clergy were haram, as was fictional violence towards children. One could state that film in this era still had some bangers, and it did. But compared the experimental breakouts of the early 20s and the true golden age of cinema (so far as I am concerned) in the 70s and 80s, its pretty weak stuff on the whole. Most of the best films from the Hays Era came from outside of America for a reason.

Despite this apparent success, in the end, Hays was directing all his energies towards a non-issue while the totally unrelated structural forces of the economy were barreling towards an unprecedented collapse. So too will the right wing culture warriors of today ignore environmental devastation, rising inequality, and the dangers of elite overproduction in order to score some cheap points and easy clicks. The future they are building is one of spectacle and distraction, not of serious policy. A set of priorities that unites all culture warriors in a poststructuralist consensus moderated through clickbait Catholicism. The modern right may be in denial about this, but it is every bit as postmodern as the post 1968 left became. And therefore every bit the useful idiot of establishment tastemakers, surveillance advocates, and warmongers.

As for when the Hays Wokes and their Postmodern Right turn their glowing eyes towards actual hard policy- especially foreign policy? This may well be a topic for something more serious, professional, and substantial in the future. I certainly have some ideas. If you come across any especially interesting examples, feel free to send them my way. I am starting a collection. I suspect that ‘defending Christendom from the Muslamic Hordes’ will be a big part of it.

Those who are easily scandalized, regardless of their ideology, are the easiest to manipulate and build consensus around. What could be of more use for an increasingly neofeudal society than to keep neighbors at each others throats rather than teaming up against their lords? The more things appear to change, the more they actually stay the same.

For Every Cheney Gained, A Million Voters Lost

/ geotrickster / 2 Comments

Look, I know there is a deluge of unthought pieces all jumping on the post-election fallout train. So out of respect for your time and mine I will keep this extremely short and to the point. There will be no flowery exhortations or attempts to make some greater point about existentialism or transformative moments or whatever.

First point, per the NYT of all places:

German style fascism or 19th Century American eugenics this is not. I have my concerns with another Trump administration and will vocalize them when they become relevant, but racial and identity politics is over for the left and liberals alike. They are hemorrhaging everyone demographically. No one likes to be constantly lectured by an upper class of HR managers. Trump is making gains across the board with minorities, Democrats lose everyone without a college education. The PMC doubles down while everyone else jumps ship.

Stemming from that point: Harris didn’t lose because she was a racially diverse female. She lost because she was a terrible candidate untested by a primary in this cycle, who had badly lost an amazingly well funded primary last cycle. She, along with being unable to to see American interests as distinct from Israeli ones, will go down as Biden’s biggest mistake. Harris could have differentiated herself from Biden’s ever more unpopular administration once she had it in the bag too, and refused to do so. A primary would have likely removed her and had someone more capable of running at the national election.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib won their reelections by a comfortable margin. The largest concertation of Arab Americans in Dearborn Michigan voted for Trump and heavily for Stein. While I am not going to say most elections are foreign policy elections, it plays a much larger role than the chattering classes think. It may have been the geographically decisive element of the 2016 election when considering that counties in swing states with high War on Terror casualty rates broke for Trump even when they had been for Obama before, and absolutely underlined the 2008 blowout. Candidates perceived as more hawkish have lost continuously since 2008 onwards.

Before the 2016 election Chuck Schumer said: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The party has never moved on from this mindset. Which is insane considering how much it has already cost them. When Bill Clinton killed the party of FDR in 1992 he replaced it with a party of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View. This meant no one was looking out for working class interests. Are the Republicans going to? Of course not. But they can signal that they are and embrace some trade protectionism to help domestic industry, and this tiny rhetorical concession comes across as preferable to many than Democratic waffle and outright disdain for everyone who doesn’t live in a media-saturated metro area. Meanwhile, many popular poverty-alleviating policies were phased out recently, leading to a massive increase in child poverty. All while defense budgets continued to balloon and Harris not only received the endorsement of Dick and Liz Cheney but actively touted and campaigned with it. This was a promise of more stupid wars of choice, funded possibly by austerity at home. We might still get that with Trump, but he didn’t promise it on the campaign trail.

The American elite desperately needs a foreign policy reality check. Elections and parties pale in comparison to diminishing industrial and economic capacity compared to so many proportionally growing states around the world. The age of liberal hegemony is over. Its legacy is ruined lives at home and abroad, a massive privacy breaching surveillance state, offshoring of industry, global instability, and a Pentagon that can not even be audited. The more one runs to defend this rotting system, the more one will be punished for it electorally. Voters may not know what to do about the problems, but they know they are there. This puts them ahead of most of the media and financial elite. The more centrist candidate has lost every Presidential election in the 21rst Century with the possible exception of 2020 (and that one had Biden tied in with unions at least in a break from typical Clintonian trends).

Who even was the President the last few years? In actuality? It was obvious to everyone outside the lib-media bubble that Biden’s brain was not functioning as early as the last election. The rapidity of the decline only grew. Up until it became undeniable in the most impactful Presidential debate in history the media denied this was the case before suddenly about facing and saying it was obvious there was a problem. Has Jake Sullivan been ruling us the entire time? Or has the system just been chugging along on auto pilot?

All of these points save the last one were made in the aftermath of 2016, including by myself. Libs refused to listen. Their media echo chambers cast all contradictory information as either false or simply deny it exists. And they have the gall to still pretend they are the most informed and best educated people in society. They are in fact as indoctrinated as any megachurch parishioner. The American people and the world at large may deserve better than Republican chauvinism, but the Democratic coalition is not better overall and significantly more out of touch with people outside of their immediate social circle. They have shown, time and time again, an utter inability to learn and adapt. I am already expecting a doubling down of everything they did before. Blaming voters, blaming minorities, blaming foreign countries. Everyone but themselves. But they have only themselves to blame.

And you know what? It works for a lot of them. NGOs fundraise more when Trump is on office. The media secretly loves him as more people watch dying legacy networks and consume legacy print when he is their bogeyman. They profit directly from ‘resisting’ him. Every bit the reality show actors that Trump is, the loyal opposition has an opportunity to fundraise like never before. I’m sure there are some of them who even like losing, it being so lucrative and without the dangers of having to take responsibility for policy failures.

Just remember that politics is local before its national, and systemic before it is partisan. You can work with your neighbors to make life better near you more effectively than voting at the national level will ever deliver something. And in international politics America’s fading protagonist syndrome should not blind us that systemic trends continue onwards independently of what voters think. In my own small way I remain working towards envisioning a foreign policy of realism and restraint which can benefit the average citizen and reign in an out of control establishment. I have and will work towards that goal regardless of the figurehead party in power.

My somewhat controversial take in realism and restraint circles was that Harris would be better for us, as her inevitable failures would drag both the Democratic establishment and the neoconservative Republicans down with her, whereas a Trump Administration causes opposition to further rally around neoconservatism, and while it might adopt our rhetoric but escalate in the Middle East, making us look like fools. I trust none of these people and you shouldn’t either. So this is not ideal for me. I can only hope Vance influences Trump to keep Lina Khan in the government. She is the one genuinely good thing in American administrative governance in the past decade. If she ran for high office I would support her.

Anyway, I never had a strong read on this election or how it would go. Under duress I made a prediction: Harris wins electoral, Trump wins popular. If my prediction was wrong I had to post some 2016-2020 lib cringe. So here, my penance:

P.S.

Deep down inside you know Hillary is secretly happy, and Meatball Ron is utterly devastated. If politicians can be cynically calculating, why can’t voters? Play the long game everyone, opportunities always abound. Look for them wherever they may arise in the chaos of events