Coalition of a Hundred Countries goes to War for Regime Change in the United States

Dateline: MOSCOW, Year Three After Trump—Three years into Trump’s presidency, a “new coalition of the willing,” of over a hundred countries led by Russia, China, and Europe declared war on Trump’s “rogue regime,” citing in a public statement: “the lunacy of allowing the American nuclear arsenal to be controlled by a manifestly insane and senile president, a dysfunctional Congress, and a delusional or apathetic American public.”

“The situation is just like George W. Bush’s declaration of war on Saddam’s Iraq,” said Putin at a press conference in Moscow, speaking for the Coalition. “Except that unlike Saddam, Trump actually has stockpiles of WMDs. We, too, seek regime change in defense of civilization itself. But this time the regime that must be eliminated by preventative military action is obviously Trump’s in the United States.”

When reminded that Trump never gassed his own people, whereas Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988, Putin said, “Yes, but remember that time when Trump ordered that all the bridges in the United States be firebombed, because Trump had heard a rumour that a guy named Fred Bridgeman in South Dakota had called him fat? Remember how Trump had targeted bridges solely because that fellow had the word ‘bridge’ in his last name? And remember how Trump had neglected to warn the commuters, so that the bridges were destroyed along with the millions of Americans who were in the process of driving across them?

“Or remember that time when in broad daylight Trump raped a journalist in the middle of a White House press conference and then bizarrely denied that he had done so, calling the video evidence provided by the hundreds of cameras present ‘a big lie cooked up by failing news companies’?

“Or how about that time when Donald Trump ordered a nuclear strike against South Korea, mixing up the South with the North?

“Yeah, there’s only so much insanity and instability a civilized world can stand.”

Putin was pressed about why Russia would join the New Coalition of the Willing when Russia reportedly had personal leverage against Trump. Putin reminded the questioner that he had played his “Trump card, so to speak,” but it had backfired.

“You remember when we leaked the golden showers video, so to speak (again). Trump was caught with Russian prostitutes and we added that footage to the financial kompromat we had on him. When we secretly ordered Trump to help Russia take back our territories in Eastern Europe and he refused, we sent the video to Wikileaks. But after the world saw Trump with the pissing prostitutes, Trump said it wasn’t him but an actor with a bad wig.

“And that was that. The media went on to the next Trump scandal, since there was a new one every five minutes. We never bothered revealing the financial conflicts of interest Trump has with foreign banks, because most Americans wouldn’t understand them or care. For the same reason, the U.S. government doesn’t attempt to prosecute Goldman Sachs or other colossal banks for fraud, because the complexity of the case would put a jury to sleep.”

Putin was asked whether he thinks the Coalition can possibly defeat the American military machine. “Of course we can,” said Putin. “For decades, Americans have fought only fake wars against pipsqueaks like Saddam, terrorists in caves, or Stalinists in Grenada in 1983. Americans love to consume toys for their pleasure, not to make war. They’ll quickly surrender and the world will breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of Trump.”

For his part, a defiant Trump dared the Coalition to invade the United States. “Let them come!” he said at a Rose Garden press conference, holding a machine gun, his nose covered in cocaine. “Then they can say hello to my little friend!” There was tittering in the press pool and Trump said, “No, not my junk—which I can assure you all is yuge. This machine gun I’m holding—this is the little friend I meant. And the rest of the world can say hello to it. When they get here.” 

Sign on Trump’s Lapel Provides Running Tally of his Lies

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C. Year One After Trump—An anonymous member of President Trump’s staff fastened a digital sign to Trump’s lapel whenever Trump has been set to speak to the media, to stop reporters from having to flail about, guessing whether the president is lying.

“It started because I got annoyed watching the TV news,” said the staffer. “The anchors and pundits kept asking why Trump was saying that the sky is green, that two and two are five, or that his inauguration crowd was the biggest of all time. They just couldn’t figure out what Trump was up to—as if no politician had ever lied before! Or as if no legit psychopath had ever held high office!

“I just got sick of watching these fools on TV dancing around the issue, too timid to reckon with reality, just asking tedious questions like, ‘Why would the President say this when he must know it’s demonstrably false?’ or using euphemisms like Hilary Clinton’s gem, ‘Trump lacks the temperament to be president’—because it’s more polite to speak of ‘temperament’ than about Trump being literally a predator like a shark or the Terminator killing machine, a bona fide psychotic narcissist and, of course, a compulsive liar.”

To spare viewers from “having their time wasted by these clueless or cowardly news folks” and to “hold the baby journalists’ hands and steer them to the truth about Trump,” the staffer began affixing a battery-powered sign to Trump’s lapel. The staffer would listen to Trump speak in an interview, speech, or press conference, and editorialize by remote control.

For example, when Trump told ABC news that he’ll launch an investigation into massive voter fraud in the U.S., the sign on Trump’s lapel lit up with a message that scrolled across the small screen even as Trump himself was speaking. The message read, “Mother of all whoppers! The psycho Trump fears that a woman, Hillary C., beat him by three million in the popular vote—coincidentally the same number he says are voting illegally.”

And in his speech at CIA headquarters, when Trump accused the media of lying about his inauguration crowd size, the lapel sign read in blaring red letters, “Yuge lie! Psycho Trump can’t lose in a dick-measuring contest with a black man like Obama.”

Asked why he or she prefers to be anonymous, when Trump surely knows who is putting the LED sign on his suit, the staffer said, “Of course Trump doesn’t know! If he did, I’d be dead. Trump carries a laser blaster at all times. And if Trump knew, do you really think he’d leave the sign on and continue to lie like a madman?”

The extent of Trump’s obliviousness has flabbergasted the rest of the world. “How can Trump still not know about the sign?” asked a Democratic Congresswoman. “How can no one on his team be telling him that he’s being clowned over and over again, that everyone on earth now has a running breakdown of his every boast, evasion, distortion, slander, and confabulation, of every act of vain posturing or brazen pandering he clumsily undertakes?”

Clarice Foggarty, fellow at the Brookings Institution, theorized that “No one dares tell Trump about the sign for the same reason no Iraqi told Saddam Hussein he had no weapons of mass destruction.” In an authoritarian regime, she said, “the emperor is always wearing clothes even when he’s stark naked and his genitals are visibly flapping in the breeze. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself headless.”

As to why President Trump evidently can’t himself see the infamous sign, one psychotherapist speculated that Trump “effectively lives in the fiction he constantly spins. Trump can’t see beyond the hyperbole, according to which he’s a billionaire because he’s the greatest businessman ever, and he’s president because he’s a Batman-like hero who can do no wrong. Anything that contradicts that preposterous self-image can’t register in Trump’s conscious mind. If Trump suddenly could see himself the way practically everyone else sees him, his head would melt from the epic cognitive dissonance.”   

Trump Orders Obama’s Presidency be stricken from the Historical Record

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C. (Crazy Town)—President Trump signed an executive order, commanding that every sign be erased, that Barack Obama had been president.

Trump ordered the military to destroy everything from stamps bearing Obama’s facial likeness, to news recordings of Obama’s speeches, to political cartoons about Obama.

The President added that anyone caught saying that an African-American was ever president of the United States would be sued personally by him.

“Repealing Obamacare is only a stepping stone,” said Trump’s spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway. “Talk about alternative facts! You liberals in the media actually think an African-American was president for eight years. But show me the evidence he was ever in office, once we’ve finished tossing that evidence into the memory hole.”

According to Democratic Senator Lillian Lillyliver, “You see, Republicans erred in attempting to tar Obama by informally naming the Affordable Care Act after him. Now they have to deal with the mess of trying to repeal and replace it, just because that healthcare bill is associated with Obama’s name, since Republicans evidently want no memory to survive that Obama had ever been president.”

Asked why she thinks Republicans are so opposed to that memory, Lillyliver said, “Methinks it’s because Obama’s as black as Trump’s heart.”

“President Trump seems to be taking a page from the pharaohs,” said Egyptologist Manuel Mysterioso. “If a pharaoh wanted to destroy his predecessor’s legacy, he obliterated every trace of it, by chiseling the former pharaoh’s face from relief sculptures, for example. And so future generations would forget that that detested pharaoh had ever lived. The belief was that our spirit resides in some physical form so that if you destroy the form, the spirit—and thus the intangible memory—dissipates.”

“It’s a case of ‘Hear no evil, see no evil,’” said one political analyst. “You know: out of sight, out of mind. If you don’t have to be reminded that something awful happened, you can pretend it never did. Why it matters whether a neoliberal president like Obama has light or dark skin is anyone’s guess. That’s a matter for a psychotherapist. I mean, Obama bent over backward a thousand times to accommodate the insanity from the far right. And the Republicans deliberately stonewalled him from the get-go to prevent the public from forming the conviction that a civil, democratic government can function as an alternative social arrangement to a capitalistic marketplace.”

“I’ve already forgotten who was president before me,” said Trump. “You say it was a ‘man of colour.’ Does that mean he was just someone other than an invisible man, someone who wasn’t colourless?” After the euphemism “person of colour” was explained to Trump, the president said, “Oh, so he was black, you say, an African American. I see no evidence there was any such person who used to sleep in my bed.

“In fact, the very notion that there are people with non-white skin seems farfetched to me. I’ve never seen these dark-skinned people you speak of. Is this like the myth that there are hordes of non-millionaires and non-billionaires polluting the earth? Where are all these losers supposed to be hiding? My Cabinet’s composed mostly of millionaires and billionaires, because there’s no one else in my world. And how can I step outside my world and still be me?”  

Why is there Something rather than Nothing?

Why is there something—anything at all—when there could have been just nothing? The early modern philosopher Leibniz first posed this question, which Grünbaum, a philosopher of science, recently called the Primordial Existential Question. But what exactly is this question asking?

The question’s initial context is Leibniz’s cosmological argument for God’s existence. That argument is essentially that the Principle of Sufficient Reason demands an ultimate explanation that naturalistic science can’t offer. Reason cries out for a metaphysical explanation of all existence, not just for causal explanations which posit one contingent thing or state of the world to account for something equally contingent. Such partial explanations can never be fully satisfying, since if the series of natural things is infinite and so every part of the world is adequately explained in terms of some other part which causes it, one question yet remains to be answered: why is there anything in the first place, rather than nothing at all? The whole of nature must be understood in terms of something unnatural, some necessary being that lies outside the causal chain. That necessary being is supposed to be God.

The standard, logical response to this argument is that it commits the fallacy of composition. Just because something applies to a part doesn’t mean it applies to the whole; just because finite, contingent phenomena are usefully explained by positing causal relations between them, doesn’t mean the whole universe which contains all those phenomena as its parts is just as usefully explained as being an effect of some cause, a product of a necessary being. Causal explanations are inductive in that they’re based on our many experiences of regularities that hold in the interactions between finite, contingent things. You eat a hot dog, the mustard spills and lands on your shirt, staining it. The one event causes the other, under the right circumstances. But we occupy only one universe and haven’t even once experienced the whole of it. So the metaphysical or theological account that the whole of nature must be produced by a supernatural being isn’t as reliable an explanation as an inductive one of a pattern connecting some parts of the natural whole.

This response, though, amounts to little more than casting aspersions on Leibniz’s argument, since the response is consistent with Leibniz’s main point. The whole point is that scientific, probabilistic explanations are limited to the finite and contingent parts of the world, but that reason in general can ask a further, metaphysical question. The issue, then, is whether reason extends beyond science or reliable, probabilistic, quantifying, experience-based logic. If we think of reasoning pragmatically, interpreting reason as the more or less useful tinkering with mental models, we needn’t discount metaphysics or even theology because it’s not a branch of modern science. True, just because we can ask a speculative question doesn’t mean we can reason usefully about possible answers to it. Still, the point about the fallacy of composition begs this deeper question. The typical critic of the cosmological proof scientistically dismisses the metaphysical question of whether the entire causal chain making up the natural universe’s history is itself something that could be explained at all and would be explained only by positing something supernatural. Certainly, just because causal explanations work in one context, doesn’t mean they work in another. We have no experience of other universes, so we don’t know why one would have resulted rather than another; we have no objective basis for assigning probabilities to something compared to nothing, so we don’t know whether without God there should have been nothing at all, because nothingness is supposedly simpler than a natural series of causes and effects. This is all true, but is so only as far as it goes. Again, we have no empirical grounds for speaking with precision about being or of nonbeing in general. We haven’t quantified such entities and we can’t run experiments to test hypotheses concerning them. But this doesn’t mean a metaphysical question about natural things in general is irrational or irresponsible.

CIA Digs up Dirt on President Trump, forms New Planet

Dateline: WASHINGTON, DC—In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s denigrating the American intelligence community, the CIA dug up a planet of dirt on Trump, altering the Earth’s gravitational field.

The American intelligence community was united in its assessment that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s emails to attempt to give Donald Trump an advantage in his campaign against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

But Donald Trump, apparently unaware of the CIA’s track record, preferred to go to war with his own intelligence services than admit his election was potentially tainted by that foreign interference.

Experts have formulated numerous hypotheses to explain Trump’s bizarre, arguably treacherous relationship with Russia. “Most people would be terrified to insult the CIA,” said psychologist Anne Funnyface. “But if someone were sufficiently narcissistic, the desire to be widely admired could theoretically outweigh that natural fear. Alternatively, Trump could be wholly ignorant of the Star Wars Empire-like nature of the war machine he’s crossed. That ignorance might be due to his infamously low attention span.”

Whatever the cause, Donald Trump praised Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s criticisms of the CIA’s assessment of the DNC hacks, called the American intelligence services politicized, and has forgone receiving the traditional Daily Brief from the Director of National Intelligence.

In retaliation, the CIA tasked a fraction of its sinister forces to undermine Trump’s presidency the way the United States has sabotaged half the planet’s governments over the last seven decades. What the CIA didn’t count on was the colossal extent of embarrassing materials available on Trump’s upbringing, finances, business practices, and marriages. 

The dirt the agents discovered eventually amounted to a planet-sized edifice the size of Mercury.

Said one CIA operative, “We had to work with geologists and then with NASA to handle the mountains upon mountains of dirt that we dug up on that guy. At first we just piled up the black-ops dossiers to blackmail the traitor Trump. But then the dossiers added up to mountains that altered the skyline along the eastern coast. When planes began crashing into the mountains, we turned to NASA to transfer the embarrassing secrets into the stratosphere whereupon they began to orbit the Earth, forming a new moon. We added tidbits to that moon until it became a planet. The juicy secrets just kept coming, so can you blame us?”  

Before the intelligence agencies could knock on President Trump’s door, informing him that they have a hundred trillion ways to blackmail him should he persist in talking nonsense, the weight of Trump’s sins bore down upon the Earth, threatening us all with gravitational waves that pulled millions of buildings, cars, animals, and people into outer space, creating a ring around what became known as Planet Trump.

Two years passed until President Trump chanced to look up and ask whether anyone else noticed there’s a new planet taking up half the sky. But Trump refused to concede that this other world is composed entirely of dirty secrets that could ruin his presidency a trillion times over.

“Why would the CIA want to go to war with me?” he asked at a news conference. “What have I ever done to them and when has the CIA ever taken such petty or aggressive military action against a democratically-elected leader?”

Upon hearing that, the journalists’ heads exploded and Trump cried foul when some of the brain matter stained his Brioni suit. 

The Paradox of Moral Obligations

What is a person, fundamentally speaking? A person is a creative void facilitating a fractal tripling of natural forms in the symbolic and technological realms. The void in each person is functional, not physical: while we aren’t absolutely empty, we’re defined by our fictions, such as by folk conventions about our identity as supposedly unified, immaterial selves or spirits. In evolutionary terms, animal brains became more sophisticated over a long period until the cerebral cortex developed, becoming a brain within a brain that initiates a spiral of abstraction in mental space. The higher, primate brain is biologically discontinuous from the environment, by way of its isolation within the skull, but the cerebral cortex has autonomous and global, holistic access to the rest of the brain, providing the person the power to veto his or her emotional impulses or instinctive reactions, and to imagine strategic models of the environment. These models are pragmatic idealizations and thus, strictly speaking, fictive; in science, they’re called “ceteris paribus,” meaning that their generalizations pertain to the counterfactual scenario in which certain factors falling outside the model’s purview don’t interfere with the modeled regularity. That is, the model is about only a small part of the world that’s isolated by the imagination, even though in reality that modeled part is entangled with the whole of nature. Despite our having a substantive neurological identity, then, we’re effectively hollow as persons in that as we model ourselves as well, we retreat to evermore rarified reifications, including daydreams and theological speculations. While we seem to ourselves to be the universe’s starring attractions, we’re vacuous in our existential homelessness and chameleonic flexibility We can survive virtually anywhere because we’re so lacking in a fixed identity and are so detached from nature that we’ve devised an objective stance towards the outer world, which has empowered us with technological applications of our models that have reshaped the environment to our benefit.

Whereas an animal is like a robot in lacking much hidden, mental depth, a person’s mind is master of the symbolic niche. That mind and niche are physically nowhere, as such, and so we’re the proverbial ghosts in the machine. We’re cognitively detached from stimuli and from our animal side, and so we’re liable to feel alienated and forlorn, oppressed by our understanding that the world that’s given rise to such freaks as us must be godless and out-of-whack. We boast of our spiritual depths, making esoteric religious pronouncements such as that the ultimate material (Brahman) and Self (Atman) are one, that matter and mind are aspects of the same thing, that our personal identities are masks worn by ultimate reality and that each of us, therefore, is fully God. And we war over the contradictions between our religious fictions, not willing to face the truth that was put best and most recently by the so-called existential philosophers and psychologists. At most, matter and mind are one in that what we usually think of as mind is entirely imaginary, and so the former cancels out the latter; the fictitious mind isn’t nothing at all, mind you, but it’s an embarrassing lie, an instrument used by greater forces to marshal our skills for the next round of mass extinctions and evolutionary transcendence. And at best we’re divine in that we’re godlike tools for transducing natural stimuli into symbolic representations and for imposing the products of those idealizations onto nature in the forms of our artifacts. Far from making us worthy of being revered, our divinity is likewise an indignity: our omniscience and omnipotence depend on our ability to form Voltron-like megamachines, that is, social collectives or mass minds which are inevitably oppressive in their hierarchical composition. Thus, our personal capacity for enlightenment is typically shortchanged, as a minority takes command and sets about oppressing and infantilizing the masses; the rulers become especially godlike, corrupting themselves in the process, while the bovine herd idles, numbing itself with bestial diversions.

The Moral Conundrum for the Enlightened Few

If this is our existential reality or if some such account is, at least, the most compelling philosophical story about the meaning of our species, we face an ethical conundrum. The enlightened person must be poised between feeling compassion and disgust for us all. On the one hand, we have every reason to pity ourselves and others, since we’re all trapped as playthings of monstrous (unguided but creative) natural forces and elements, and our vaunted spirituality is ironically a form of profound emptiness (fictitiousness). There is no substantial unifying self, but only a mammalian brain that dreams it’s a god, which fiction ironically brings divinity into functional being, as evidenced by the results of our artistic imagination, scientific objectification, and technological industry. So we’re each more or less deluded and lost. Shouldn’t we therefore help each other find ourselves? Wouldn’t nobility consist in the humility needed to recognize that since we’re all victims of the same existential grievances, we all need help, and vanity must be due just to a crass sort of narrow-mindedness? The ethical task would seem obvious: to elevate each other however we can, not putting ourselves before others, but recognizing the universality of our struggles. 

President Trump Confined to White House, Refuses to take Revolving Door

Dateline: WASHINGTON, D.C.—After much legal wrangling, President-elect Donald Trump and his children, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr. divested themselves of their holdings in Trump's dozens of companies so that they could carry out their duties as president and as top advisors without the taint of blatant conflicts of interest. But after their term in office, they found it impossible to physically leave the White House, because they refused to use any of the hundreds of revolving doors back to the private sector, these being the only doors leading out of the building.

After the formation of the military-industrial complex in the aftermath of WWII, the White House was outfitted with a plethora of revolving doors, with at least one in every room in the complex. Each of those doors returns the public official to a lucrative position in a think tank, lobby firm, or bank where the former politician can legally sell his or her political connections for private gain. Once the political favours are cashed in, the private citizen returns to the public sector via one of the many revolving doors, to procure a new round of connections.

Political analysts have speculated that because Trump and his family lacked political experience prior to Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, they were unaware that selling their holdings in their corporation was futile as a means of avoiding conflicts of interest, unless they planned to remain in the White House indefinitely.

“There’s no other way out,” complained Donald Trump, weeks after his term as president ended. “That’s what they don’t tell you. To leave you have to take one of the revolving doors or you’re stuck here forever.”

Donald Trump has been stuck in a White House broom closet for two months and three days. To his immediate left is a revolving door to the Fox News Corporation, which has offered him a leadership role in its television business, but Trump has refused to leave in that fashion for fear of having a conflict of interest.

“Did I act as president, knowing I’d have all these business opportunities afterward to enrich myself beyond my wildest dreams?” asked Trump, rhetorically. “Did I give Fox News special access while I was president, under the unstated assumption that they’d return the favour after I left office? Isn’t that the way to skirt the law and make a sham of our democratic republic? Well, not Trump! I’m the most ethical person who ever lived. So I’m staying in the White House until they figure out a way to install a door here that doesn’t revolve round and round between the government and a quid pro quo in some private enterprise.”

The head of the American Institute of Architects has weighed in on the matter, saying “There’s just no way to install such a door. If you tried to put a nonrevolving door in the White House, the thing would collapse under the White House’s gravitational pull. There’s just way too much power there for any such door to withstand the pressure to revolve round and round like a perpetual motion machine.”

Ivanka Trump attempted to limbo her way beneath a half-closed window, but injured her back in the process and has been confined to a White House medical facility for weeks after her term as advisor to President Trump ended.

The incoming president has expressed annoyance that Donald Trump and his family of advisors have refused to leave. “It’s time for them to go,” said the newly-elected president. “I’ve got work to do rebuilding the country after the apocalypse Trump dumped on us. They should take the cushy jobs they’re being offered as unofficial rewards for their ‘service’ in this Kafkaesque, Huxleyan nightmare we call a nation, and go.”

American Hypocrisy Fuels Interdimensional Starship

Dateline: WATERLOO, ON—A team of scientists and engineers at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario has invented a technique for converting American leaders’ hypocrisy into fuel to power an interdimensional starship.

Thorsten Dillydally, leader of the team of researchers, was led to his hypothesis after sitting through press coverage of the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, which tilted the election towards a Trump victory of the presidency in 2016.

“I noticed something strange about the coverage,” said Professor Dillydally. “The hypocrisy was off the charts. I mean literally, I pointed my chutzpah meter at the television and the meter blew up in my face. It dawned on me that effrontery of that magnitude is scarily powerful. The trick was to harness it for some greater good.”

The professor theorized that “ordinary hypocrisy occurs when someone pretends, say, to have never smoked even though they’ve actually smoked maybe a few times in their life. But what if someone has the gall to declare she’s never, ever smoked even though she’s smoked literally a trillion times, has cloned herself and forced the clones to smoke at all hours of the day, has in fact twelve cigarettes dangling from her mouth at the very moment she says she’s never smoked, and on top of all that she's the very inventor of the modern cigarette and owner of all cigarette companies?

“When the ratio between what’s said and what’s factually so is 1:1,000,000,000,000, the energy levels are potent indeed, meaning they’re cosmically significant. That is, when you say you’ve never done something, but you’ve actually done it at least a trillion times, there must be some untold form of energy that could support such an awesome display. Or so we hypothesized.”

In the case of Russian meddling in the American election, the professor set about reading something he called “books,” to confirm his suspicion that important information was being left out of the corporate media reports of the event.

“It turns out,” said the professor, “that while both Democratic and Republican politicians as well as the pundits and Washington press corps were busy playing the victims of Putin’s assault on their democracy, the United States is the world champion in subverting elections. For decades, the CIA and American Special Forces have spread disinformation and orchestrated coups or assassinations in almost every country on Earth. From the stage-managing of foreign elections in client states, the bribery of foreign leaders, or the orchestrating of coups in the Philippines, Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, Vietnam, Guyana, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Guatemala, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, Bulgaria, Albania, Russia, Mongolia, Bosnia, Iran, the Congo, Ecuador, Greece, and most other parts of the world; to Washington law firms’ support for dictators in oppressing their people and marginalizing their opponents; to using the NSA to spy on the EU, UN, World Bank, and IMF; to vitiating America's own elections by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and demagoguery, no country’s meager resume of covert activities comes close to the digest of America’s accomplishments on the subject of subverting democracies.”

Indeed, researchers at the Perimeter Institute learned that the American government wasn’t content with picking winners and losers just in our present timeline, but funded a project for building a time machine so that CIA operatives could travel to the distant past and to alternative realities to spy on foreign human and alien leaders and to meddle with their countries’ elections.

Confirming that the Chutzpah Ratio of one-to-a-trillion held in the case of the American political class’s response to the Russian hacking, Professor Dillydally still lacked a technique for harnessing the awesome energies he assumed could only have been responsible for such lopsided hypocrisy. While watching the news coverage, the professor “noticed that the American officials who feigned to be aghast that any country would stoop to such an unholy feat of diabolism, to tamper with another country’s election, invariably cried as they did so.”

Posing as janitors, the researchers collected samples of those tears at press conferences, analyzed them under an electron microscope and made their breakthrough discovery: swimming and thrashing amongst the water, lipid, and other molecules were tens of billions of miniature crocodiles.

“These ‘crocodile tears,’ as we’ve come to call them were the key,” said the professor. “They’re like the singularity in a black hole, great masses compressed to a tiny size, thus containing enormous potential energy which we tapped to create our interdimensional fuel.”

The team’s starship is set to launch to realms unknown on April Fools’ Day, 2020. 

The Irrelevance of Scientific Determinism

Freewill is a conundrum. We feel free, as though we can control ourselves and decide what to do rather than being forced along a certain path like a leaf blowing in the wind. But we can’t understand how we could be free, because understanding involves positing causes on top of causes and analyzing one thing in terms of something else. A fallen leaf moves along a certain path, because the leaf is blown by the wind. And why does the wind blow? That’s because of differences in atmospheric pressure. But why does wind blow this way rather than that? Well, that’s because the wind encounters objects in its path, including the curled-up shape of the leaf, which create pockets of turbulence and eddies. And why is the fallen leaf curled up so that it spins as it blows? That, in turn is because the leaf is dead, and so water and minerals no longer flow through its veins, preserving its former structure. And so on and so on until the process of understanding one event encompasses the history of life on Earth and the causes of our planet’s formation in the story of the whole universe. The one event of the leaf’s swirling in the breeze pales next to the immensity of what you have to know to understand why that event happened as it did.

Indeed, biologists and neuroscientists already have sufficient knowledge of how the body works, to render nonsensical our feeling that we have freewill. Yuval Harari summarizes some of the relevant findings in Homo Deus. Brain processes, he points out, are either deterministic or random. A neuron will fire either in response to stimuli or spontaneously due to the intrinsic uncertainty of the chemical factors involved such as the timing of the release of neurotransmitters. Virtually never-ending causal chains and randomness don’t leave room for personal autonomy. Moreover, although an action may be uncoerced, we don’t choose our desires. What we want is caused either by our genetic programming, by the formative environment in which we learned how to behave as children, or by the accumulation of our experiences. Desires have unconscious causes, as is shown by the fact that scientists observing brain activity can predict what a subject will do before the subject is consciously aware of her decision.

Also, with respect to what scientists can empirically confirm, there is no such thing as the single, essential self, let alone an immaterial spirit; instead, the brain is divided into regions that have different, sometimes conflicting functions. As Harari puts it, there’s the experiencing self, the part of the brain that processes moment-by-moment stimuli, and then there’s the narrating self, the part that gives meaning to experience by telling us what to think or feel and by ignoring most of the information processed by the experiencing self. We identify with our inner monologue because it adds meaning to our life. “It doesn’t matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas,” writes Harari, “and that it is rewritten again and again, so that today’s story flatly contradicts yesterday’s; the important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death” (299). Finally, says Harari, we cling to the fiction of a soul, of a single self that bears ultimate responsibility for our actions, because we can’t bear the alternative that everything we do is in vain. “Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused” (300).  

Instead of challenging the scientific deconstruction of the self, I want to consider two meta-questions. First, is the notion of a scientific theory of freewill even coherent or is instead personal freedom naturally impossible from a scientific point of view? Second, what would a free creature look like in nature, speaking hypothetically? How would this creature’s internal components have to be arranged to liberate it from the rest of the world so that we could reasonably think of it as being both free and real? 

Clash of Worldviews: The Meaning of Trumpism

MODERATOR: Good evening and welcome back to Clash of Worldviews, the show in which we try to get to the bottom of big issues. You may have heard that President-Elect Donald Trump is a charlatan and an ogre, and that Hillary Clinton is crooked and phony. But Trump’s election has cast doubt on so much of our conventional wisdom that we’re still wondering—as though lost in a wasteland—just what the true meaning of Trump’s election might be. To help answer that question, we’ve asked Adam Garnett, famed liberal humanist and Hillary Clinton supporter, and Fred Gulpa, a Donald Trump supporter and self-described member of the alt-right to be with us to discuss the matter. Gentlemen, who would like to begin? What is Trumpism all about? 

ADAM: In a word, Trump is about himself, while his supporters are about having a laugh at the country’s expense. They’re not downtrodden, these older white working class folks; they’re just venting because they’ve fared badly under globalization, they know the days of exclusive white power or imperialism are over, and they mean to take the country down with them. If they can’t rule any longer like they used to in the first half of the last century, they’re going to pollute the discourse with their vulgarity and send a bull into the china shop.

FRED: So “they’re not downtrodden,” but they’ve also “fared badly under globalization”? Which is it, I wonder? You see how the elites can’t even think straight? No wonder they were ripe for being humiliated by Trump and by the rise of the alt-right!

ADAM: I meant that these Trumpists have benefited from governmental support. They’re part of the middle class, but they’d like to blow up the social system, thus committing collective suicide by voting against their economic interest. Trump, in other words, isn’t an expression of revolt against the powers that be. Instead, he’s a rogue power, an agent of anarchy.

FRED: Keep telling yourself that, Adam! Keep patting yourself on the back. You’re one of the good guys, right? Not some useful idiot to plutocrats.

ADAM: And who are you, Freddy? What vile hate speech will you treat us to this evening? I can hardly wait to plug my ears.

FRED: Yeah, because you’re a feminized liberal who can’t stomach the naked truth. You think Trump’s supporters are all morons and only liberals have reason on their side. That’s where you’re wrong. Many of Trump’s voters aren’t highly educated, but that doesn’t make them stupid. Just look at what foolishness was wrought by Clinton’s neoliberal class of professionals: they’re the Ivy Leaguers but they got it all wrong. Their polls, their history lessons, their self-serving analyses were so many paper tigers squashed by the juggernaut Trump. You think Hillary Clinton deserved to win, because she was the more rational and responsible candidate. That’s what that euphemism was about: Trump supposedly lacked “the demeanor to be president.” But you know what Hillary Clinton lacked? An honest bone in her body. She couldn’t speak the unpopular truth to the public and she lost because hardly anyone trusted that she would change the United States for the better.

ADAM: And what will Trump do? Wave his magic wand and make American great again? Is that supposed to be some profound truth he told?

FRED: Trump doesn’t speak in fancy academic double-talk. I’ll grant you that. His language is seldom precise, but the essence of his diagnosis was highly negative and thus accurate. Trump’s view of America’s standing in the world is apocalyptic, as even the Democrats pointed out. Maybe Trump exaggerates for rhetorical effect, but his main point is that the United States isn’t doing well on the whole. That’s the truth that Hillary Clinton couldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, because she had to own Obama’s legacy. The public no longer respects the system, they were disappointed by Obama who ran falsely as a change candidate, and they wanted a leader from outside the corrupt establishment who would at least have a fighting chance of effecting radical change.

ADAM: Who is supposed to benefit from Trump’s administration? Surely you don’t mean the older blue collar whites who have been misled by Republicans for decades. Surely you’re aware that the Republicans have used social wedge issues to stir up animosities and compel these folks to vote against their economic interest. Surely you understand that trickle-down economics just further enriches the top one percent while everyone else falls further behind, that a smaller government with fewer taxes gets out of the way only of giant corporations which are already as powerful as some entire countries, but that the little guy may need government support if he’s going to survive globalization.

FRED: But he’s not going to survive globalization. Again, that’s the sort of dark truth you don’t want to hear. The system that maintains the economic status quo is rigged against him. That’s the system that Obama and Hillary defend as the technocratic managers they are. That’s the system we want Trump to destroy.