What makes The Handmaid’s Tale so unnerving is its plausibility.

A lot of dystopian fiction is escapist, because it feels incredible in the older sense of that word. By contrast, The Handmaid’s Tale for the US is something that could happen in a few years, or sooner.

It’s probably easier to grasp the show deeply if you grew up among the Religious Right as I did — it’s clear that many liberals have no idea just how many of them there are and even less understanding of their true beliefs and how well the show in particular reflects them.

What makes the book work, and what makes the show even more affecting, is that it’d only take a few crises for America to look exactly like that — and most liberals would be just as complacent and unaware as even the protagonists are on the show. That is, until it is far too late.

I could never be a talk show host or anything like that because I tend to say whatever comes to mind. It’s just built in. Or more accurately, it doesn’t ever impinge on my mind consciously, rather it egresses from my mouth seemingly ex nihilo.

One of the reasons I tend to be quiet is that if I speak, I am never sure what is going to emerge. Better to say nothing.

A friend of mine used to ask me, “Do you have to just say whatever pops into your head?”

But here’s the thing. It didn’t pop into my head. I only knew it was going to come out of my mouth when I heard it, just as you did.

Oftentimes, I am just as surprised as anyone else by what I hear emanating from my own face.

You might be wondering why I constantly bag on Kevin Drum and the Crooked Timber crew.

All four of you.

It’s because they represent the worst of the pseudo-intellectual left — the left that is into using “true” data they believe proves something or other, when in reality the data is (as it always is) contingent on a certain way of conceptualizing the world and the inter-relations therein. (And yes, I am using plural “data” as singular. Gaze upon my field of fucks to give, and find that it is barren.)

It might seem like I am stating something obvious. Of course, everyone has a worldview, a gestalt of understanding and comprehension, a way of making sense of the world.

However, these types don’t get this. They believe with their Excel spreadsheets and unexcelled data viz corresponds exactly to the world out there, that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would reach the same conclusions if they only knew the “truth.”

Such can be seen with Drum’s frequent and ill-informed screeds against single payer. Or the Crooked Timber’s implicit and explicit endorsement of orthodox economics at every turn.

Sure, they are better than Trump. Better than Sean Spicer. Better than Stephen Bannon. But that’s an awfully low bar. That’s like saying eating a live toad is better than eating a rotten one. Yes, it is. But…?

In other words, yes, they are preferable to the other group of clowns, but they aren’t good enough, and if that’s the best we can do, we still lose.

I call them pseudo-intellectuals because they mistake data for wisdom, an Excel spreadsheet for the truth, the scope of the extant for the limit of the possible, the map for the territory.

And since to a one they know very little about the territory, they are always fighting battles with their little Excel spreadsheets that match up very poorly to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the world and how it operates outside of whatever produces their charts and graphs.

Furthermore, they are completely unable to conceptualize that their baseline assumptions are as much myths and fairy tales (rather than the ground truths they imagine them to be) as any climate change denier’s ideas about how you can disprove mountains of verified and verifiable collective understanding with some soda bottles and alka seltzer.

That is why I attack them. They aren’t improving the world, and are in fact standing in the way of any betterment.

Their intellects are weak, their insights are poor, and their reasoning and ratiocination are deficient. Isn’t that enough?

i think most people who say the Handmaid's Tale could never happen here have basically no familiarity with the religious right

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) May 30, 2017

Absolutely true. I grew up among the Religious Right. The Handmaid’s Tale is not dystopian to them. Again, not dystopian.

It is their preferred world. Hell, I went to school with at least two girls who dressed very similarly to the women in the book and the show, just not quite as much scarlet.

(Most of the RR does not attend public school, but a few do. There were many more in my hometown that I only vaguely knew, though they were numerous.)

Experts are usually right. That is one of the things that makes them uncommonly dangerous at liminal or transitional times.

Experts also usually do just fine in their own domain, but when outside forces impinge on their Lilliputian arena they are completely unable to see or conceptualize them. This is related to (but not the same as) the above problem.

Often in my own life I’ve been able to see obvious issues that experts have missed because even though I am vastly weaker in their areas than they are, I can see far outside of what they consider to be their purview. Broad but relatively shallow often demolishes deep but narrow, and particularly in times of much uncertainly, where major re-alignments are occurring.

In short, often experts are most useful when you don’t need them, and least useful when you do.

I live in a household that makes a lot of money. Not bragging. It’s just true. Somewhere over four times the median household income — not including all the extra non-wage income that I make.

Sometimes, I find $70 or $100 in a coat pocket or pair of pants that I just forgot was there. I often make more in a day trade than many families earn in a month.

Know how inconceivable those ideas would’ve been to my family when I was a kid? Hell, we were overjoyed when one of us found a pair of dimes in the couch cushions or a quarter dropped on the ground.

Yet housing still seems expensive even to me — and I don’t live in a high housing cost area.

Where I am going with this is that I have no goddamn idea how the average American household manages to afford to live anywhere at all and still have any sort of life. If you have two kids, make the median household income, and must have at least one car to work, how can you make it?

You can’t, if you want to retire. If you want your kids to do well. If you want to do anything other than barely scrape by.

This is deeply immoral. It’s unjust. Our society is cruel, and truly malevolent to those who don’t somehow manage to do well.

It’s not sustainable. It will end badly.

Think Trump is tragic?

Just wait.

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”

-Guy Debord

This quote reminds me of the recent assertion that neoliberalism does not exist, an idea which proliferated just as one of the world’s most preeminent neoliberals — Hillary Clinton — vied for the presidency.

Was lectured by the likes of Vox et al. that there is no such ideology, that it has no proponents, no goal, and in fact is just a myth — despite it dominating the world for the last four decades.

Did I mention The Leftovers is just excellent, particularly the episodes that focus on Carrie Coon’s character?

She’s one of the few actors who can make me feel what she’s feeling.

It also does things constantly that surprise me where when I see what’s about to happen, I think That can never work. But it just does.

Can panache be understated? If so, The Leftovers has understated panache, realistic surreal absurdity and is fearlessly self-confident in its explorations of the ludicrousness of normalcy both in our workaday lives and the conventions of its own format.

People of the working class in the US, France, and other countries vote for petty thugs and incompetents like le Pen and Trump not due to racism but rather because those are the choices on offer, and they understand they are marked as disposable.

Oh, sure, racism exists among the white working class — just as it exists in the middle class, the upper class, and the rich. But you only ever hear about it in the working class.

Funny that, huh?

No one is going to commit genocide for the most part on the working class because it’s not even worth the effort. They dispose of themselves (see the opioid epidemic for an example).

The game now is to keep them as a disposable population whose labor can be leveraged as needed, but whose political power has been defanged by charges of lack of education and of racism, while the pervasive and society-defining racism is practiced by those who actually make the hiring decisions and hold the levers of power.

Amazing how many people are taken in by this obvious con, but the soi-disant elite isn’t nearly as intelligent as they imagine themselves to be.

It truly often is a good sign of a successful negotiation if both sides are moderately displeased with the results in some way or other.