An inquiry into Fuggalu, or: How the guardians of German democracy aim to protect our democratic constitution by punishing those who argue that the pandemic response was anti-democratic
An inquiry into Fuggalu, or: How the guardians of German democracy aim to protect our democratic constitution by punishing those who argue that the pandemic response was anti-democratic
From Alice in Wonderland...“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
"The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they “own” their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!…
We [Screwtape & the Deep State of Hell] produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun — the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog”, “my servant”, “my wife”, “my father”, “my master” and “my country”, to “my God”. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots”, the “my” of ownership… we have taught men to say “my God” in a sense not really very different from “my boots”, meaning “the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services…”
And all the time the joke is that the word “Mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say “Mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong — certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says “Mine” of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say “Mine” of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest…1
Well "mine" can be uttered, because it is uttered. Doesn't mean it is true, but it can be uttered. I can also say "I am a donut." It's not true, but I can say it.
Dec 13, 2023·edited Dec 31, 2023Liked by eugyppius
'we are extraterrestrial philologists from Pluto'
Very appropriate, using an astronomical body that was redefined out its planetary existence to talk about a word, ‘democracy’, that has been colloquially redefined out of its original meaning.
Totally off-topic, but as a seventh grader in the US circa 1967, my English class used a slim blue textbook based on a Venusian coming to Earth and studying the English language. Already a science fiction fan at that tender age, it made an indelible impression on me and created a lifelong grammar lover.
Dec 13, 2023·edited Dec 13, 2023Liked by eugyppius
Democracy (at least the kind that actually takes notice of what people vote for) has - in all the Western 'democracies' - progressively become more and more of a load of fuggalu in the face of a vast and ever-expanding permanent bureaucracy stuffed full of a professional & managerial types all pre-sheep-dipped in Lefty academia. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I'll posit that government respect for the people is inversely proportional to the military power of the state. When the state has the monopoly on violence, the government is berserk, and the people's demands are completely irrelevant.
I think you pretty much nailed it when you said "That is, they regard “democracy” to be whatever procedures are necessary to yield the political outcomes they desire" in describing the wholly authoritarian leaders who currently actually wield power in most European governments. The paradox is that they are Afuggalic in the extreme, yet claim pristine Fuggality. Your linguistic exercise was fun, and really painted the whole thing as obvious dogma, a word with no meaning, a mere tool in the repertoire of the busybodies and managers whom forever conspire to control us evermore
That is an interesting point, and one that is possible to be inferred by destructive testing of the concept. Capitalism is another conceptual framework to which this also applies, as indeed Karl Marx asserted.
But at some point in the argument the admission deserves to be affirmed that what we've been referring to as democracy and democratic, well, it ain't necessarily so. I believe this is much more than simply a problem of semantics. Representative democracy is not genuinely democratic, neither strictly nor even loosely speaking. In that case, I would rather qualify the statement accordingly, and say representative democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction, since we really are not considering any truly democratic polity. This is drawn attention to in the article by the AfD's statement of their belief "that direct Fuggalu is an indispensable means of putting a stop to the Afuggalutic behaviour of government politicians."
Unless this matter is brought to the foreground and fully addressed as a matter of urgency, I fear that the hope, let alone the expectation, for freedom and justice for the people is moribund, and civilisation itself will continue barrelling headlong toward collapse.
"To make this project easier, I have turned to one of the nonsense word generators ( https://www.soybomb.com/tricks/words/ ) that for some reason populate the internet, and asked it to produce a list of fake words. On this list I found the word fuggalu, which suits my purposes well, both because it has no relationship to any English word that I know, and also because it sounds ridiculous and faintly obscene. "
There are some other words that serve the same purpose: consultation, survey, forum and so on.
As long as the outcome matches the 'programme', all is well, otherwise the smear modifiers such as extreme, far, reactionary, alt, etc. are deployed to discredit the opposition.
I'm often struck by officials who refer to "protecting our democracy," i.e. THEIR democracy, not your democracy or my democracy. (Especially when Biden did his famous Red Light speech where he spoke against "MAGA Republicans who threaten our democracy"). They need to abolish your democracy to protect their democracy.
"The Science", I first came across in Climate "Science", and clocked immediately that what it meant was ideology, a faith system. Then applied rapidly in the synthetic Covid pandemic, which confirmed I was right.
I certainly appreciate that you take seriously your civic duty of paying attention, recognising, and registering the common patterns and scenarios that play out during the operations that are routinely foisted on us. I've personally run through the exercise of cataloguing all the deceptions and orchestrations that I've know just in my life, and not only their frequency but the periodicity of their occurrence seems uncanny (I'm certain eugyppius will disagree). The maneuvers and devices employed are increasingly of the weaponised psychology category, and while the du jour crises tend to be of a biomedical and digital informational variety, in all cases, the battlefield for the opening campaign always is the mind.
Oh my goodness, what a hilariously suggestive term!
It's funny how you, and I too, equate the lack of sexual relief as so apt a rationale for autocratic behaviour, and yet one would expect a tyrant to be able to bonk their their totalitarian heart's delight!
Unless, of course, that autocratic tendency might instead be that which arises from the suppression of the sexual urge.... (reaches for a copy of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams ...)
LMAO, that’s also why those freaks hate Japanese media and like to call anime enjoyers “pedos”. Because there you actually get to see feminine, well proportioned, healthy looking females (and males for that matter). In the West you’d get fat, ugly slobs with the appropriate skin colour (=NOT WHITE), just like it is the case in gaming thanks to ESG.
The hard thing to grasp for me is that all the Western Fuggalus happen to become afuggalus at the same time, even when their Fuggalutic Texts are widely different. Some have majority voting systems, others have proportional representation systems. Some have 5% hurdles, others don't. Some are very focused on parties, others are open to lateral independent candidates. The election of governments and their powers also differ greatly. Some countries are federal, others centralized. And yet, regardless of the details, the trend is the same everywhere. This raises the question of how things could be better solved in the future when various forms of checks and balances seem to be failing everywhere. I can't even say that the Fuggalutic Text itself is the problem since it would be mostly fine when it would actually be executed. But the government can now just ignore the Fuggaletic Text or even court rulings and nothing happens.
Like someone from the CDU said the other day that they have to create new laws to solve the migration crisis and I thought that the existing laws are already being ignored so what would it even change when you have other laws nobody cares about?
We have a weird mixture of a Fuggalu and an Afuggalu. It depends on the level of government. On the local level Fuggalu and the rule of law are still working. A mayor can't just ignore the law. The federal level is a banana republic. The states are something in between
> Like someone from the CDU said the other day that they have to create new laws to solve the migration crisis and I thought that the existing laws are already being ignored so what would it even change when you have other laws nobody cares about?
Sounds like the US with gun laws. California will have some shooting and demand new gun laws to stop it. Meanwhile, California already has tons of gun laws, and none of those ones stopped it, so why would a new law stop it?
And I'm just sitting here saying "murder is already illegal, why didn't that work?"
Yes, exactly so. In Britain there was a fuss made a few years ago by the usual upper-middle-class feminist types about a law against 'up-skirting' which is when some utter creature takes a photo up a woman's dress. Lots of noise was made and eventually a special new law for the Head Girls was enacted. The problem was that there already *was* a law that prevented voyeurism, it just wasn't being enforced. The women who wanted this law aren't prepared for the practicalities of implementing it i.e. nasty men in uniform locking up criminals and using violence to do so.
I mean rule of law is a good idea in principle. I wouldn't like to live in an area which legalizes murder. Legalizing theft in San Francisco seems like one of the stupidest policy ideas ever implemented. But the system breaks apart when you see that the rules are only valid for some people and not for others, especially when the government can ignore the constitution which should keep its powers in check. I'm not for some form of fatalism that it doesn't matter at all what are the current laws. It should. Having symbolic rules nobody checks is one big part of the erosion of trust in the rule of law. Better have fewer but actually controlled rules
The thing to recognize is that if you put away the murderer (which is rare in Californication) the gun doesn’t go with them. And it was the scary gun that made the murder, not the perp who fired the (likely illegally obtained) gun.
"... all the Western Fuggalus happen to become afuggalus at the same time, even when their Fuggalutic Texts are widely different. "
Is it an over-simplification that what all Western Fuggalus have in common is that they have governments comprised of professional career politicians? Whatever the electoral details and hurdles, all governments are the same in that bribes, graft, and blackmail are the principal levers that operate the political apparatus of state the world over.
My reading of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman conveyed to me more an elucidation of how and why governments are the way they are. They all equally present readily corruptible or irredeemably corrupt politicians to international criminal interests who use flattery, cajolery and compulsion to get what they want from the nations' and the governed through the politicians, without having to gain consensus from, or even inform the governed.
I bought Perkins' book a year ago but somehow haven't read it yet. Thanks for reminding me that I should!
I'm not sure whether corruption is the big problem. The Gilden age was pretty corrupt but somehow they got shit done during this time, often through the help of a little corruption. Politicians are pretty similar in all ages and systems. I don't think that it's possible to ever create a system which only attracts non-corrupt types (or maybe I just have become too cynical over the times). Like when a manager wants to hire the most qualified applicant he often has to somehow corrupt and circumvent the 'correct' DEI approach. I'm fine with that. Corruption is often necessary to keep systems with stupid rules running. But yeah, I get that it's poison when it's scaled up too much by the politicians
I agree that corruption may very well be inevitable. But the problem is that we all have a career political profession in which corruption seems to be formalized and ennobled.
What I believe to be the greatest problem and the one with the severest consequences is that in the representative "democracies," the distance (physical and social) between the elected and the constituents is such that the career politician is immune to the consequences of their corruption. It doesn't much matter that the electorate might show the politician out the door the next election cycle when those deals struck while still in office has sold the voters and their children down the river. Where I am, every state leader during COVID-19 has either retired (the majority), or occasionally voted from office. There is even one egregious case of a politician creating an extremely high-paying international liaison position while the minister of trade, and then quitting parliament to take up that position. There's also what is obviously a conveyor belt from the defence ministry to appointments as consultants to defence industry contractors. Unsurprisingly, the media seems blithely unaware of these vulgar impertinences.
Now, imagine if we all personally knew our representative, if they have to dine at the same table as us. Imagine if they had to justify themselves daily to us, if their every deal and hand-shake was scrutinized by those who they purportedly represent. Imagine those politicians arriving home to find their cousins, neighbors, clansmen waiting for them there, because that politician overstepped the line of the authority his/her community invested in her/him. Imagine if that kind of threat of violence posed by the angered spurned or double-crossed voter base against the politician was actually legislated in favor of. Imagine if politicians entered office carrying the fear that the consequences of their decisions will be borne most assuredly and most bitterly by they themselves.
Raises the question were they always Afuggalus simply disguised as Fuggalu, and the synchronized timing of veneer shedding had more to do with Afuggalutic opportunism. See also recent Tucker/Mike Benz interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRYSKaS-XtQ
when understood as a religious context/concept, especially when its spread is multiplied to the nth degree via the internet, the various microcosmic and insular polities and laws and governmental texts are largely irrelevant.
In my younger years, Fuggalu was preached in school and, at least when viewed superficially, also practiced according to the Fuggalutic text. Meaning that people in my age cohort, which is probably not all that distant from our esteemed author´s, had a sound theoretical and practical understanding of the concept of Fuggalu. I venture to say that to anyone who had this very common degree of understanding of Fuggalu, the events starting in 2020 were, on a purely intellectual level, _very_ clearly not in accordance with the Fuggalutic texts. The problem then was IMHO not really the fudgability of Fuggalu on a textual basis, but rather a lack of sincere belief in the Fuggalutic texts, especially when the high priests of Fuggalu and Power (with a capital P) blatantly disregarded it or interpreted it beyond recognition. This lack of conviction was not only seen in the general public, but - more disturbingly - especially in the Fuggalutic class. It´s like a religion where nobody believes and everybody just goes through the motions. Such a religion could also be modified at will without serious pushback.
Fuggalu worked extremely well from the 60s onwards as it allowed a certain political class to carry out various revolutions and bring them to power. When fuggalu started to work against them (Brexit, Trump) the system had to be gelded.
To witness in the USA how blithely petty tyrants crushed the supposedly sacrosanct Bill of Rights was absolutely stunning, distressing. I still haven't recovered from the shock.
"...what they think “democracy” actually amounts to."
--------------------------
It means "we win and you lose." That sure is revealed truth now.
But you'd think, wouldn't you, that by this time in human history political discourse might've evolved a little bit past "Witch! Kill the witch!" I guess everything old is permanent.
"Specifically, our guardians of democracy have decided that “disparaging democratically elected state representatives” for their anti-democratic actions amounts to “delegitimising the state” and is therefore contrary to democracy. For this reason, their vigorous defence of democracy serves to undermine democracy and requires anti-democratic suppression at the hands of our unelected and largely unaccountable democratic guardians."
This is Orwellian enough that it would have been a spoof not too long ago. The exercise was a perfect way to illustrate the pretzel logic and distorted meanings.
Calling your critics anti-democratic in a democratic society, where the promise of democracy is through dialectic (in the Platonic not Hegelian sense), means one thing: they don't give a shit about democracy. They just want an empty buzzword that acts like a bell upon which they can rap their scepters like the spoiled, unelected tyrants they are.
Definitely. But nobody really cares about democracy. We care about being on the same page as the people around us. The machinations mean little after that.
I grant you make some good points, but at times I feel that you are deigurinating the same crucia that you accuse whitorms of doing, though perhaps with a bit more accoment and bouncienply. If you continue taking the blog towards this kind of goribby spraction, I, for one, will be forced to join the fossimized exhousinteems that have already sought more pacellowinted ground elsewhere.
how am i deigurinating these same crucia? as a first step i merely want them to state their political principles openly and in plain language. if these are „i am in charge and i get to decide and you don’t” i would consider that a vast improvement.
It's interesting and depressing to sit here watching Western democracies eat themselves. The ending of the post-war consensus, the decline of American power, the rise of the internet as well as the resurgence of China and Russia. All these things happening and the pandemic failed to stop them. The huge Ponzi scheme that is western banking will fall at some point. The general public will get to the point where they have little left to lose. The mega rich and corrupt elites are actually few in number and there will come a time when they will have nowhere to hide. People are pretty stupid but even so, we can all see what "they" have done to western democracy and how crazy with power and money "they" have all become. Scary times lie ahead...
This. "The Federal Administrative Court … has ruled that criticism in this vein constitutes a breach of the civil servant’s duty of loyalty to the constitution, and the state may sanction the ex-officer by reducing his pension …" The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (USA) are on line one. They say, "Ha, beat you to it, Germany!"
Modern "democracy" is when 3/4 of the Irish tell their government they want immigration restricted and their Justice Minister Helen McEntee says "I appreciate your concerns. (Also anti-immigrant memes are now illegal)."
From Alice in Wonderland...“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
perfect.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
Imagine being a translator and your editor hands you that one.
You guys do not get it, but it is very simple: democracy is dangerous for our democracy.
(humor is also very dangerous for our democracy)
Oh yeah, we saw that study. Because right wingers make their fascist ideas accessible through humor. Fascist ideas like...leave me the eff alone.
“leave me the eff alone”
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Keep poking the bear....
"The sense of ownership in general is always to be encouraged The humans are always putting up claims to ownership which sound equally funny in Heaven and in Hell and we must keep them doing so. Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they “own” their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!…
We [Screwtape & the Deep State of Hell] produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun — the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog”, “my servant”, “my wife”, “my father”, “my master” and “my country”, to “my God”. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots”, the “my” of ownership… we have taught men to say “my God” in a sense not really very different from “my boots”, meaning “the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services…”
And all the time the joke is that the word “Mine” in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say “Mine” of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls, and their bodies really belong — certainly not to them, whatever happens. At present the Enemy says “Mine” of everything on the pedantic, legalistic ground that He made it: Our Father hopes in the end to say “Mine” of all things on the more realistic and dynamic ground of conquest…1
Well "mine" can be uttered, because it is uttered. Doesn't mean it is true, but it can be uttered. I can also say "I am a donut." It's not true, but I can say it.
Because it IS their [political unit composed of a population that votes for representatives]. They own it. Body, and (in their opinion) soul.
It's straight out of The Screwtape Letters.
'we are extraterrestrial philologists from Pluto'
Very appropriate, using an astronomical body that was redefined out its planetary existence to talk about a word, ‘democracy’, that has been colloquially redefined out of its original meaning.
it was originally "Mars" but I thought about precisely this and changed the text.
Totally off-topic, but as a seventh grader in the US circa 1967, my English class used a slim blue textbook based on a Venusian coming to Earth and studying the English language. Already a science fiction fan at that tender age, it made an indelible impression on me and created a lifelong grammar lover.
All the western nations are doing the Fuggalu Buggalu.
The Electric Fuggalu!
Dammit. Beat me to it.
You deserve the like for claiming it, even if you were a little too slow-footed this time to get it down before Matthew McWilliams did. :-)
Democracy (at least the kind that actually takes notice of what people vote for) has - in all the Western 'democracies' - progressively become more and more of a load of fuggalu in the face of a vast and ever-expanding permanent bureaucracy stuffed full of a professional & managerial types all pre-sheep-dipped in Lefty academia. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
I'll posit that government respect for the people is inversely proportional to the military power of the state. When the state has the monopoly on violence, the government is berserk, and the people's demands are completely irrelevant.
I think you pretty much nailed it when you said "That is, they regard “democracy” to be whatever procedures are necessary to yield the political outcomes they desire" in describing the wholly authoritarian leaders who currently actually wield power in most European governments. The paradox is that they are Afuggalic in the extreme, yet claim pristine Fuggality. Your linguistic exercise was fun, and really painted the whole thing as obvious dogma, a word with no meaning, a mere tool in the repertoire of the busybodies and managers whom forever conspire to control us evermore
"That is, they regard “democracy” to be whatever procedures are necessary to yield the political outcomes they desire"
This is the most accurate and concise definition of the word I have come across so far, and should be used as a definition across the online Right.
"Democracy is a bridge you cross over..." (and leave behind) as someone once said.
Many political philosophers note that democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction (as does "liberalism"). See Kenneth Minogue for one.
That is an interesting point, and one that is possible to be inferred by destructive testing of the concept. Capitalism is another conceptual framework to which this also applies, as indeed Karl Marx asserted.
But at some point in the argument the admission deserves to be affirmed that what we've been referring to as democracy and democratic, well, it ain't necessarily so. I believe this is much more than simply a problem of semantics. Representative democracy is not genuinely democratic, neither strictly nor even loosely speaking. In that case, I would rather qualify the statement accordingly, and say representative democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction, since we really are not considering any truly democratic polity. This is drawn attention to in the article by the AfD's statement of their belief "that direct Fuggalu is an indispensable means of putting a stop to the Afuggalutic behaviour of government politicians."
Unless this matter is brought to the foreground and fully addressed as a matter of urgency, I fear that the hope, let alone the expectation, for freedom and justice for the people is moribund, and civilisation itself will continue barrelling headlong toward collapse.
Indeed. Well said. And despite being a logophile, "Fuggalu" is a word I had previously not encountered - what does it mean? Searches reveal nothing!
And yes, I think the West is done for, slain by its own hand. We no longer have any belief. In anything.
eugyppius wrote:
"To make this project easier, I have turned to one of the nonsense word generators ( https://www.soybomb.com/tricks/words/ ) that for some reason populate the internet, and asked it to produce a list of fake words. On this list I found the word fuggalu, which suits my purposes well, both because it has no relationship to any English word that I know, and also because it sounds ridiculous and faintly obscene. "
Thank you!! I do like it. And also love nonsense words.
"Slavery is freedom."
Somebody wrote that sometime.
There are some other words that serve the same purpose: consultation, survey, forum and so on.
As long as the outcome matches the 'programme', all is well, otherwise the smear modifiers such as extreme, far, reactionary, alt, etc. are deployed to discredit the opposition.
I'm often struck by officials who refer to "protecting our democracy," i.e. THEIR democracy, not your democracy or my democracy. (Especially when Biden did his famous Red Light speech where he spoke against "MAGA Republicans who threaten our democracy"). They need to abolish your democracy to protect their democracy.
You will carefully notice that these are by and large the same people who tend to use the expression, "my truth."
Very good, and don't forget The Science™ !
"The Science", I first came across in Climate "Science", and clocked immediately that what it meant was ideology, a faith system. Then applied rapidly in the synthetic Covid pandemic, which confirmed I was right.
I certainly appreciate that you take seriously your civic duty of paying attention, recognising, and registering the common patterns and scenarios that play out during the operations that are routinely foisted on us. I've personally run through the exercise of cataloguing all the deceptions and orchestrations that I've know just in my life, and not only their frequency but the periodicity of their occurrence seems uncanny (I'm certain eugyppius will disagree). The maneuvers and devices employed are increasingly of the weaponised psychology category, and while the du jour crises tend to be of a biomedical and digital informational variety, in all cases, the battlefield for the opening campaign always is the mind.
I swear our society is being demolished by unattractive, angry, under-orgasmed humans...
"Pudgy" and "pasty" are the adjectives that spring to mind.
Under-orgasmed needs to be in the DSM/ICD manuals.
Oh careful, they’ll create a vaccine to prevent under-orgasm.
Hehe, I'm thinking you could strike it rich selling such a vaccine.
And if it's in pill form, just consider the pranks.
Lot of non parents running European countries.
" ... under-orgasmed ..."
Oh my goodness, what a hilariously suggestive term!
It's funny how you, and I too, equate the lack of sexual relief as so apt a rationale for autocratic behaviour, and yet one would expect a tyrant to be able to bonk their their totalitarian heart's delight!
Unless, of course, that autocratic tendency might instead be that which arises from the suppression of the sexual urge.... (reaches for a copy of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams ...)
“hypogasmic”?
LMAO, that’s also why those freaks hate Japanese media and like to call anime enjoyers “pedos”. Because there you actually get to see feminine, well proportioned, healthy looking females (and males for that matter). In the West you’d get fat, ugly slobs with the appropriate skin colour (=NOT WHITE), just like it is the case in gaming thanks to ESG.
The hard thing to grasp for me is that all the Western Fuggalus happen to become afuggalus at the same time, even when their Fuggalutic Texts are widely different. Some have majority voting systems, others have proportional representation systems. Some have 5% hurdles, others don't. Some are very focused on parties, others are open to lateral independent candidates. The election of governments and their powers also differ greatly. Some countries are federal, others centralized. And yet, regardless of the details, the trend is the same everywhere. This raises the question of how things could be better solved in the future when various forms of checks and balances seem to be failing everywhere. I can't even say that the Fuggalutic Text itself is the problem since it would be mostly fine when it would actually be executed. But the government can now just ignore the Fuggaletic Text or even court rulings and nothing happens.
Like someone from the CDU said the other day that they have to create new laws to solve the migration crisis and I thought that the existing laws are already being ignored so what would it even change when you have other laws nobody cares about?
We have a weird mixture of a Fuggalu and an Afuggalu. It depends on the level of government. On the local level Fuggalu and the rule of law are still working. A mayor can't just ignore the law. The federal level is a banana republic. The states are something in between
> Like someone from the CDU said the other day that they have to create new laws to solve the migration crisis and I thought that the existing laws are already being ignored so what would it even change when you have other laws nobody cares about?
Sounds like the US with gun laws. California will have some shooting and demand new gun laws to stop it. Meanwhile, California already has tons of gun laws, and none of those ones stopped it, so why would a new law stop it?
And I'm just sitting here saying "murder is already illegal, why didn't that work?"
Yes, exactly so. In Britain there was a fuss made a few years ago by the usual upper-middle-class feminist types about a law against 'up-skirting' which is when some utter creature takes a photo up a woman's dress. Lots of noise was made and eventually a special new law for the Head Girls was enacted. The problem was that there already *was* a law that prevented voyeurism, it just wasn't being enforced. The women who wanted this law aren't prepared for the practicalities of implementing it i.e. nasty men in uniform locking up criminals and using violence to do so.
I mean rule of law is a good idea in principle. I wouldn't like to live in an area which legalizes murder. Legalizing theft in San Francisco seems like one of the stupidest policy ideas ever implemented. But the system breaks apart when you see that the rules are only valid for some people and not for others, especially when the government can ignore the constitution which should keep its powers in check. I'm not for some form of fatalism that it doesn't matter at all what are the current laws. It should. Having symbolic rules nobody checks is one big part of the erosion of trust in the rule of law. Better have fewer but actually controlled rules
The thing to recognize is that if you put away the murderer (which is rare in Californication) the gun doesn’t go with them. And it was the scary gun that made the murder, not the perp who fired the (likely illegally obtained) gun.
"... all the Western Fuggalus happen to become afuggalus at the same time, even when their Fuggalutic Texts are widely different. "
Is it an over-simplification that what all Western Fuggalus have in common is that they have governments comprised of professional career politicians? Whatever the electoral details and hurdles, all governments are the same in that bribes, graft, and blackmail are the principal levers that operate the political apparatus of state the world over.
My reading of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman conveyed to me more an elucidation of how and why governments are the way they are. They all equally present readily corruptible or irredeemably corrupt politicians to international criminal interests who use flattery, cajolery and compulsion to get what they want from the nations' and the governed through the politicians, without having to gain consensus from, or even inform the governed.
I bought Perkins' book a year ago but somehow haven't read it yet. Thanks for reminding me that I should!
I'm not sure whether corruption is the big problem. The Gilden age was pretty corrupt but somehow they got shit done during this time, often through the help of a little corruption. Politicians are pretty similar in all ages and systems. I don't think that it's possible to ever create a system which only attracts non-corrupt types (or maybe I just have become too cynical over the times). Like when a manager wants to hire the most qualified applicant he often has to somehow corrupt and circumvent the 'correct' DEI approach. I'm fine with that. Corruption is often necessary to keep systems with stupid rules running. But yeah, I get that it's poison when it's scaled up too much by the politicians
I agree that corruption may very well be inevitable. But the problem is that we all have a career political profession in which corruption seems to be formalized and ennobled.
What I believe to be the greatest problem and the one with the severest consequences is that in the representative "democracies," the distance (physical and social) between the elected and the constituents is such that the career politician is immune to the consequences of their corruption. It doesn't much matter that the electorate might show the politician out the door the next election cycle when those deals struck while still in office has sold the voters and their children down the river. Where I am, every state leader during COVID-19 has either retired (the majority), or occasionally voted from office. There is even one egregious case of a politician creating an extremely high-paying international liaison position while the minister of trade, and then quitting parliament to take up that position. There's also what is obviously a conveyor belt from the defence ministry to appointments as consultants to defence industry contractors. Unsurprisingly, the media seems blithely unaware of these vulgar impertinences.
Now, imagine if we all personally knew our representative, if they have to dine at the same table as us. Imagine if they had to justify themselves daily to us, if their every deal and hand-shake was scrutinized by those who they purportedly represent. Imagine those politicians arriving home to find their cousins, neighbors, clansmen waiting for them there, because that politician overstepped the line of the authority his/her community invested in her/him. Imagine if that kind of threat of violence posed by the angered spurned or double-crossed voter base against the politician was actually legislated in favor of. Imagine if politicians entered office carrying the fear that the consequences of their decisions will be borne most assuredly and most bitterly by they themselves.
Raises the question were they always Afuggalus simply disguised as Fuggalu, and the synchronized timing of veneer shedding had more to do with Afuggalutic opportunism. See also recent Tucker/Mike Benz interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRYSKaS-XtQ
when understood as a religious context/concept, especially when its spread is multiplied to the nth degree via the internet, the various microcosmic and insular polities and laws and governmental texts are largely irrelevant.
In my younger years, Fuggalu was preached in school and, at least when viewed superficially, also practiced according to the Fuggalutic text. Meaning that people in my age cohort, which is probably not all that distant from our esteemed author´s, had a sound theoretical and practical understanding of the concept of Fuggalu. I venture to say that to anyone who had this very common degree of understanding of Fuggalu, the events starting in 2020 were, on a purely intellectual level, _very_ clearly not in accordance with the Fuggalutic texts. The problem then was IMHO not really the fudgability of Fuggalu on a textual basis, but rather a lack of sincere belief in the Fuggalutic texts, especially when the high priests of Fuggalu and Power (with a capital P) blatantly disregarded it or interpreted it beyond recognition. This lack of conviction was not only seen in the general public, but - more disturbingly - especially in the Fuggalutic class. It´s like a religion where nobody believes and everybody just goes through the motions. Such a religion could also be modified at will without serious pushback.
totally agree.
Fuggalu worked extremely well from the 60s onwards as it allowed a certain political class to carry out various revolutions and bring them to power. When fuggalu started to work against them (Brexit, Trump) the system had to be gelded.
To witness in the USA how blithely petty tyrants crushed the supposedly sacrosanct Bill of Rights was absolutely stunning, distressing. I still haven't recovered from the shock.
"...what they think “democracy” actually amounts to."
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It means "we win and you lose." That sure is revealed truth now.
But you'd think, wouldn't you, that by this time in human history political discourse might've evolved a little bit past "Witch! Kill the witch!" I guess everything old is permanent.
"Specifically, our guardians of democracy have decided that “disparaging democratically elected state representatives” for their anti-democratic actions amounts to “delegitimising the state” and is therefore contrary to democracy. For this reason, their vigorous defence of democracy serves to undermine democracy and requires anti-democratic suppression at the hands of our unelected and largely unaccountable democratic guardians."
This is Orwellian enough that it would have been a spoof not too long ago. The exercise was a perfect way to illustrate the pretzel logic and distorted meanings.
The irony is powerful.
Calling your critics anti-democratic in a democratic society, where the promise of democracy is through dialectic (in the Platonic not Hegelian sense), means one thing: they don't give a shit about democracy. They just want an empty buzzword that acts like a bell upon which they can rap their scepters like the spoiled, unelected tyrants they are.
Definitely. But nobody really cares about democracy. We care about being on the same page as the people around us. The machinations mean little after that.
An unfortunately cynical but accurate view. I care about democracy. Puts us in the minority for sure.
I grant you make some good points, but at times I feel that you are deigurinating the same crucia that you accuse whitorms of doing, though perhaps with a bit more accoment and bouncienply. If you continue taking the blog towards this kind of goribby spraction, I, for one, will be forced to join the fossimized exhousinteems that have already sought more pacellowinted ground elsewhere.
how am i deigurinating these same crucia? as a first step i merely want them to state their political principles openly and in plain language. if these are „i am in charge and i get to decide and you don’t” i would consider that a vast improvement.
I was just trying out the nonsense word generator. You rock, man!
sorry, friendly fire bro
' if these are "i am in charge and i get to decide and you don’t” i would consider that a vast improvement.'
Same here. I would at least have more respect for them.
Sadly, your attempt here at farce still reads much more clearly than anything coming out of the halls of government these days!
I’m wetting myself at the absurdity in your oh so accurate post Martyn.
It's interesting and depressing to sit here watching Western democracies eat themselves. The ending of the post-war consensus, the decline of American power, the rise of the internet as well as the resurgence of China and Russia. All these things happening and the pandemic failed to stop them. The huge Ponzi scheme that is western banking will fall at some point. The general public will get to the point where they have little left to lose. The mega rich and corrupt elites are actually few in number and there will come a time when they will have nowhere to hide. People are pretty stupid but even so, we can all see what "they" have done to western democracy and how crazy with power and money "they" have all become. Scary times lie ahead...
This. "The Federal Administrative Court … has ruled that criticism in this vein constitutes a breach of the civil servant’s duty of loyalty to the constitution, and the state may sanction the ex-officer by reducing his pension …" The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 (USA) are on line one. They say, "Ha, beat you to it, Germany!"
Modern "democracy" is when 3/4 of the Irish tell their government they want immigration restricted and their Justice Minister Helen McEntee says "I appreciate your concerns. (Also anti-immigrant memes are now illegal)."