#(And how extremely wrong that can go because of the weight of institutions and ideologies and history itself on everyone and everything)

[wardensantoineandevka]

Midst is about a murder the exact same way that Disco Elysium and Pentiment are about a murder.

[bloodanddiscoballs]

So I'm disabled yeah? I've talked about it a lot. You know it if you're following me.

Something I don't really talk about (on here anyway) is the complicated relationship that one can have with their family members if they are disabled and are in need of relying on family. It can be extremely easy to feel like you're a burden on your family, especially if you need them for any kind of care, whether it be physical care (feeding, bathing, medication management, etc), or financial care (transportation, living arrangements, income, etc). All relationships are work, yes even the fun ones, and it can make you feel bad if you personally feel as though you are unable to contribute as much to the relationship as the opposite party. When you're disabled, you find that you have to quantify your share much differently. Sometimes the reality is that you are not able to contribute the same as the other person, but that doesn't mean that what you are contributing isn't your version of a lot.

However, sometimes family or loved ones will make comments, be it out of frustration or because they don't realize how they sound, and you as the disabled person are left feeling as though you are a weight upon them. That, perhaps, what they aren't saying is how easy it would be if you weren't there. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it is much easier to be able-bodied because our world is so violently against our existence. It can be easy then to spiral into a pit because you're faced with a truth wrapped in an insecurity that is fueled with things that are said or unsaid, looks, and body language.

Here is the reality that I had a therapist help me with:

Yes, it can be hard to take care of someone who is disabled. It can be hard to care for anyone though, regardless of disability or lack thereof. Sometimes, we get tired, we get frustrated, and we take that frustration out on those we are closest to because they are the most likely to forgive us or let it go.

The hardships that a disabled person faces, both externally and internally, are very different from those that an able-bodied person faces. When discussing the challenges that an able-bodied person deals with, it is not possible to compare them to those of what a disabled person deals with. They are like comparing apples to oranges; they are both challenges but they cannot nor will ever be the same.

Those who have chosen to care for you, a disabled person, are doing it of their own free will. They decide every single day that they will keep doing it. They are not forced to, they do it because they care about you. There are lots of people who choose not to care for their disabled family members - this is why there are programs such as disabled housing that exist in some states so that people who do care can help.

You are not a burden any more than any other human being is a burden. You are worthy of care and love simply because you exist. There is nothing wrong with needing help. Everyone needs help, regardless of their circumstances or their health. There is nothing wrong with requiring more than someone else and there is nothing better about requiring less than someone else.

Finding ways to have conversations about this side of disability and relationships is very important. It starts with understanding the points I've made above and ends with having frank discussions with your loved ones. When someone who cares for you comments about how difficult "this all is", it is natural for our knee-jerk reaction to be angry or hurt. It stirs up this pain that we feel on a daily basis because the world is so hostile to our existence and we are supposed to feel safe at home. You feel attacked in the same way that you get attacked by strangers, by institutions, by ideologies. For a moment, the people who are supposed to be those you're allowed to lean on for help sound just like those who would gladly see you gone. This is why it is so very important to be able to find a way to say exactly this to your loved one. Opening up this conversation, asking them to clarify how they express their frustration, helping them see how they are causing a rift when it could be an opportunity to commiserate all helps craft a stronger foundation.

Sometimes, circumstances force us into a situation that isn't our ideal. I do not know of a single disabled person who enjoys being forced to lean on loved ones out of necessity. All of us would much rather have the choice as opposed to having the choice taken away. We have to adapt, it is the only way through. Part of that means making these relationships work to the best of our ability so that when things get hard, as they often do, we know that the bond isn't something we need to question when pushing through the difficult things.

[funknrolll]

Focusing on Prince and the song Avalanche: Lesson learned or....??

Hi my music lovers, today we are celebrating the birthday of the undisputed music legend and virtuoso: Prince Rogers Nelson. Since all that is happening these days, I wanted to offer you guys the chance to reflect on these crucial issues. Therefore I chose to focus only on one song in Prince's vault: Avalanche. In my opinion, this piece is quite relevant to what is happening these days. I really hope I do Prince justice. I hope we can learn something from this article and the lesson Prince taught us. Should there be anything, I missed do not think twice to let me know or contact me. Enjoy the article.

In 2002, Prince released One Nite Alone (Solo Piano and Voice by Prince). As the title suggests, the only accompaniment in this album is the piano. Today I want to offer you the chance to reflect on the song Avalanche. Avalanche. The message delivered with this song is compelling, and the lyrics were magistrally written. Moreover, as many people know, Prince was an avid reader and an extremely educated person who had a vast knowledge not only about music but also about history, in this case. Indeed, with these words, the Artist is referring to some historical events to create one of the most MONUMENTAL protests songs in music history. Before I explain this total MASTERPIECE, I need to mention some crucial points. I will never stress enough about this. We all know that Prince was a black man. However, the fact that he, in some interviews, said things like "I was brought up in a black and white world. Black and white, night and day, rich and poor. I always said that one day I was going to play all kinds of music and not be judged for the color of my skin, but the quality of my work" or quoting his song Controversy "I wish there was no black or white" etcetera... It does not mean he was not conscious and aware or proud of being black. This does not mean that he was not aware of what black people had and still have to endure and go through. Indeed, Prince was extremely knowledgeable of everything that I mentioned, and he was proud of being black, and this is something significantly present in his music, in his sense of style, in his words, lyrics, music videos, concerts, and movies. I'm making this point because I have overheard too many people accusing Prince of not embracing his blackness or even being biracial as the new york times erroneously claimed. None of these things are true. I also heard that the Artist was not aware of what black people had and still are going through and that his music was not "politicized enough." This is another big fat lie. This song is proof. Therefore, before writing and describing this MONUMENTAL song, I thought I needed to re-emphasize this significant point. By the way, Prince's mother was NOT Italian. She was a beautiful black woman. Furthermore, as already mentioned, Artist had extensive historical knowledge and was also conscious and aware of how black people have always been exploited and treated. Moreover, Prince was accustomed to speaking his mind and saying what he meant, and just by reading the superlative and poignant lyrics, we could see that the Artist was quite straight-forwarded in writing this piece. Indeed:

He was not or never had been in favor

 Of setting are people free

 If it wasn't for the thirteenth Amendment

 We woulda been born in slavery

 He was not or never had been in favor

 Of letting us vote, so you see...

 Abraham Lincoln was a racist who said

 "You cannot escape from history "Like the snow comin' down the mountain

 That landed on Wounded Knee

 Nobody wants to take the weight 

 The responsibilityHear the joyous sound of freedom

 The Harlem Renaissance

 Hear Duke Ellington and his band

 Kick another jungle jam

 Ooh, do you wanna dance?

 Who's that lurking in the shadows?

 Mr. John Hammond with his pen in hand...

 Sayin' "Sign you're kingdom over to me

 And be known throughout the land!"

 But, you ain't got no money, you ain't got no cash

 So you sign yo name, and he claims innocence

 Just like every snowflake in an avalanche...Like the snow comin' down the mountain

 That landed on Wounded Knee

 Nobody wants to take the weight 

 The responsibility 

This masterpiece begins with a quote taken from the 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate held in Charleston, South Carolina, on September 18, 1858. Lincoln opened his discussion with these words: 

"While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the (slur)  and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me, I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something regarding it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of (slur), nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And since they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man is in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."

This was just the beginning of the speech Lincoln gave, and the words bolded are the exact beginning of the song by Prince (disclaimer: I replaced the racial slurs with this (slur) since I do not want any slurs on my platform). Moreover, as we can see in this song, the Artist was calling out the former President Abraham Lincoln for being racist. As you can see from this speech, HE REALLY WAS A RACIST. Moving on with the speech, Lincoln also said that he was not against slavery, and therefore he did not want to abolish it. Additionally, Prince mentioned the thirteenth Amendment. Before I report the Amendment, I believe it is important to contextualize it. What I am about to write will show one more time that Lincoln was a stone-cold racist, unlike many people were taught in schools. So, during the Civil War, the South USA (which economy was unfortunately still based on slaves working in plantations), wanted to keep a balance of free and slave states to maintain its political power in Congress. Southern slaveholders feared the loss of control for many reasons, including a rational fear that if Northern abolitionists had eventually swayed their representatives to vote to abolish slavery, the South wouldn't have had the votes to stop it. So, on September 22, 1862, President Lincoln warned the Confederate states that if they did not rejoin the Union before January 1, 1863, he would free their slaves. If they had timely surrendered, he would not have issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, on January 1, 1963, Lincoln "proclaimed" the "end of slavery." Bear in mind that this was as much an act of political/military strategy rather than moral courage.

Additionally, the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves held in the eleven Confederate states that had seceded, and only in the portion of those states not already under Union control. Slavery was left untouched in the loyal border states. The Proclamation also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon the Union (United States) military victory.  The actual abolition of slavery was achieved when the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865. The first section of the Amendment declares, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.". In addition to everything mentioned, the second segment of the speech I bolded is about the right to vote. Eventually, the Artist ends these verses accusing Lincoln of being racist, saying that it is not possible to escape from history. I must say that Lincoln really was A RACIST, and we have always been taught history the wrong way. I also must say that despite the abolition of slavery, black people were never really free, for racism was and still is one of the biggest plagues not just in the USA but all over the world and what we have seen until now is the proof.

Moreover, in the next verses, the Artist mentioned the Harlem Renaissance. For those who do not know that was, I will give a quick explanation of it. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural, literary, and intellectual movement that fostered a new black cultural identity. This movement flourished in Harlem, New York, after World War I and ended around 1935 during the Great Depression. The movement raised significant issues affecting the lives of African Americans through various forms of literature, art, music, drama, painting, sculpture, movies, and protests. Voices of demonstration and ideological promotion of civil rights for African Americans inspired and created institutions and leaders who served as mentors to aspiring writers. The Harlem Renaissance arose from a generation that had lived through the gains and losses of Reconstruction after the American Civil War. Sometimes the parents or grandparents of those who lived during that historical period were slaves. Many people who lived in the Harlem Renaissance were part of the Great Migration. They moved out of the South into the black neighborhoods of the North and Midwest of the USA. African Americans sought a better standard of living and relief from the institutionalized racism in the South. Others were people of African descent from racially stratified communities in the Caribbean who came to the United States hoping for a better life. Uniting, most of them were their convergence in Harlem, New York City. Furthermore, Harlem was the center of a musical evolution that uncovered amazing talents and created a unique sound that had yet to be paralleled. Jazz was the newest sound, and it attracted both blacks and whites to go to nightclubs like the Savoy Ballroom to hear artists like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis. Jazz was a result of the Harlem Renaissance, which originated from the musical minds of extraordinarily talented African American people. The genre includes traits that survived from West African American music, black folk music forms developed in the New World. In his song, Prince was indeed referring to jazz music and one of its most relevant and most brilliant artists: Sir. Duke Ellington. In the next lines, we see the Artist mentioning John Hammond. Hammond was a white talent scout, record producer, and music critic. This is another excellent example of how history has been distorted. Indeed, if you look upon the net, you will find that this man fought against segregation and racism. However, if you read Frank Kokofsky's book, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s, you will learn the truth about the political economy of white domination over black music. In particular, Kokofsky focuses on the relationship between John Hammond, Columbia Records, and the Artist Bessie Smith. Indeed, as Kokofsky writes:

"The first and most important point to emphasize is that, as author Chris Albertson reveals in his biography of Bessie Smith, Hammond signed the singer to a series of contracts with Columbia Records that gave her a small, fixed fee for each performance she recorded and no royalties. Such contracts were apparently standard practice with the executive, for Billie Holiday unequivocally stated in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues: 'Later on John Hammond paired me up with Teddy Wilson and his band for another record session. This time I got thirty bucks for making half a dozen sides.' When she protested about this arrangement, it was, according to her, a Columbia executive named Bernie Hanighen – and not John Hammond – 'who really went to bat for me' and 'almost lost his job at Columbia fighting for me.'" 

Hear the joyous sound of freedom

The Harlem Renaissance

Hear Duke Ellington and his band

kick another jungle jam

Ooh, do u wanna dance?

Who's that lurking in the shadows?

Mr. John Hammond with his pen in hand...

sayin' "Sign ur kingdom over 2 me

and b known throughout the land!"

But, u ain't got no money, U ain't got no cash,

So u sign yo name and he claims innocence

just like every snowflake in an avalanche. 

This situation is quite familiar, isn't it? Perhaps Prince had heard or read about this, and therefore he decided to add this fact to this masterpiece.

 Last but not least, another relevant part of this song is the chorus. Indeed, with this brilliantly written chorus, Prince is referring to the massacre of Wounded Knee, where more than 350 Native-American were killed. Indeed, On the morning of December 29, 1890, Chief Spotted Elk (Big Foot), leader of a group of some 350 Minneconjou Sioux, sat in a makeshift camp along the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. The group was surrounded by U.S. troops sent to arrest him and disarm his followers. The atmosphere was tense since an order to arrest Chief Sitting Bull at the Standing Rock Reservation just 14 days earlier had resulted in his murder, prompting Big Foot to lead his people to the Pine Ridge Agency for a safe haven. Alerted to the band's Ghost Dance activities, General Nelson Miles commanded Major Samuel Whiteside and the Seventh Cavalry to apprehend Big Foot and his followers, and the regiment intercepted them on December 28, leading them to the edge of the creek. While confiscating their weapons, a shot pierced the brisk morning air. Within seconds the charged atmosphere erupted as the Indian men rushed to retrieve their seized rifles, and troopers began to fire volley after volley into the Sioux camp. From a hill above, a Hotchkiss machine gun raked the tipis, gun smoke filled the air, and men, women, and children ran for a ravine near the camp, only to be cut down in the crossfire.

More than 200 Lakota laid dead or dying in the aftermath, as well as at least 20 soldiers. Although the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre is well-known, its causes and effects are still an enigma 125 years later. For 19th century Americans, it represented the end of Indian resistance and the conquest of the West. For Native-American, it represented the utter disregard of the U.S. toward its treaty responsibilities, its duplicity, and its cruelty toward Native people. In the 20th century and beyond, Wounded Knee continued to fuel controversy and debate. Notably, what is particularly controversial was and is the impetus and intent of the government that day, the role of the military, and the conflicting ways the tragedy is remembered today. Indeed, from this story, we can see how Prince gave his listener another example of how racism was a persistent plague.

Like the snow comin' down the mountain

that landed on Wounded Knee

Nobody wants 2 take the weight-

The responsibility

Moreover, as I said, the Artist with this MAGISTRALLY written lyrics educates his listener on how racism has always been a persistent, prominent, outraging, and horrifying plague that is still going on today. In addition to that, we can notice Prince's deep and broad historical knowledge, which is something incredibly fascinating and mesmerizing. Moreover, the arrangement of this song, the instrumental and the vocal delivery is among the finest and most poignant he has ever done. Indeed, the Artist with this masterpiece delivers an extraordinarily intimate and intense but yet POWERFUL performance. In my opinion, even though the only instrument played is the piano, its arrangement is outstandingly complex. The blues genre the Artist opted for, also could not have been more following the whole meaning and purpose of the song. Furthermore, the Artist's incredibly broad vocal techniques are perfectly accompanying the meaningful message of the song. Prince, with his ability to shift from a beautiful falsetto to an extremely low chest voice to eventually change to a powerful head voice during the last chorus, is putting into sounds magistrally and vividly a poignant lesson we are still struggling to learn.

Thank you for your attention.💜 Peace. G💜

[miracleanchor]

Things Parents Should NEVER Say If They Want to Raise Empowered Daughers.

Remember that words have the power to wound, irreparably. What parents say matters, so be careful what you say if you want to raise confident daughters. Growing up in Indian households comes with its own issues. Growing up as a girl in Indian households is another matter altogether. Even today, there are some statements that have become so hideously commonplace in Indian families, that our elders either do not, or cannot understand the enormous impact these statements have on the psyche of young girls and children in general. Here are 4 examples of seemingly innocuous statements that are thrown at girls in Indian households, without a thought and understanding, which need to be banned immediately. “Behave like a girl. Don’t talk back!” Behave like a girl. Don’t talk back! (Ladkiyon jaise raho. Ulta jawab mat do / zabaan mat ladao) What does this even mean – to behave like a girl? How do we define what ‘behaving like a girl’ entails? Is it to be submissive? Comformative? Meek? Feminine? This reeks of the same stereotype that is used for the other gender – ‘Be a Man.’ Children who are constantly berated for talking back, or expressing their opinions out loud, are brainwashed into thinking that it is ‘unbecoming’ to argue (in case of women), or cry (in case of men); these children grow up to develop an inferiority complex so strong, that they cannot even raise their voices in opposition to wrong things. These children bear the weight of this nonsensical societal expectations of what a girl is, or what a man is, for the rest of their lives. In the case of women, this conditional suppression of their ability to speak up for themselves and stand for their own well being is one of the primary reasons behind their consistent subjugation. Not knowing any better, young girls adopt meekness, considering it to be a virtue, even at the cost of their lives. Is it inherent and internalized prejudice that leads us to assume girls as being somehow weaker or inferior than boys, even if they are not? Or to assume that expressing emotion, or crying, are somehow specifically feminine traits? If yes, this needs to stop now. Children do not have to bear the burden of their parents’ ideologies and prejudices. Let them discover what ‘behaving like a girl’ or ‘being a man’, means for themselves. “Daughters are someone else’s property, their real home is their husband’s” Daughters are someone else’s property. The home of their biological parents is not their home after all, their REAL homes are the ones they will have after marriage. (Betiyan toh paraya dhan hoti hain. Jab tak ho yahan theek hai, fer toh apne ghar jana hai.) I cannot believe parents still say this to their daughters. Why? It’s like adopting a child and then reminding that child every single day that they are adopted; where they are right now. I envy the girls who did not have to hear this thrown at them in their childhood. Even in jest, this is a statement that cuts to the bones of daughters. If you are a woman, reading this here, imagine for a second how it makes you feel. Does it remind you how much it hurt to hear your own parents say this to you when you were young? Why would any parent allow their own children to suffer from the same fate? Daughters are not things to be owned or possessed; they are individuals, human beings in their own right. Please stop. Never let children feel that they do not belong at their home, with their parents. Their REAL homes are wherever they choose to call their homes. Learn to cook. How will you feed your husband? Learn to cook. How will you feed your husband? In-laws will say your mother has not taught you anything. We are bearing all your tantrums, your in-laws will not suffer them. (Khana banana seekh lo. Pati ko kya khilaoge? Sasuraal wale kahenge maa ne kuch sikhaya nahi. Hum jhel rahe hain tumhare nakhre, sasural me koi nahi jhelega.) Learning to cook for oneself is a skill that everyone must acquire. Women are not born with the guidebook to be a MasterChefs. Having the capability to cook and feed oneself is not a gender specific trait, it is survival. Husbands do not need to be fed by their wives; nor do the in-laws. Threatening your daughters with the supposed repercussions they will face at the hands of their in-laws, is a poor way to handle their tantrums; it is just a way to delegate responsibility for your children to someone else. This not only sows the seed of doubt and fear in the hearts of young girls, regarding the whole institution of marriage, but also paints a poor picture of what they should be expecting from their future relatives. A peace based on fear, is no peace. Cooking and cleaning are not the only maternal legacies that matter. There are a horde of more significant traits that mothers can pass on to their daughters, like courage, determination, self-love and empathy. If you cannot cook and clean for yourself, you need some basic survival skills training asap; not a wife or daughter-in-law. Education is important, irrespective of gender and house-work is important, irrespective of gender.

Don’t wear such clothes. Good girls don’t talk to boys or stay out at night. Don’t wear such clothes. You look like a slut, a prostitute. Why are you wearing make-up? For whom? Good girls don’t talk to boys or stay out at night. They come home early. (Kaise kapde pehne hain? Vaishya lag rahi ho. Kiske liye kar rahe ho ye makeup? Achi ladkiyan ladkon se baatein nahi karti, raat ko bahar nahi ghumti. Jaldi ghar wapis aati hain.) 

Although I admit that this is one of the many ways in which Indian parents warn their daughters of the atrocious crimes being committed against women, and I admit that it is extremely important to prepare our daughters to face a world where the dangers of assault are extremely real; I do not agree that this is how this subject should be approached. Believe it or not, daughters are going to come across pop culture sometime or other. They are going to be exposed to what is cool and what is not, they are going to be influenced by the generalised beauty standards of the world. There is nothing parents can do to stop that. What can be done, is to never aggressively deny or demean their choices of attire or make up. Let daughters wear whatever they want to, let them experiment with make-up however they want to. Remember that words have the power to wound, irreparably. What parents say matters. Never compare or judge daughters as ‘sluts’ or ‘prostitutes’; remember that children invariably end up doing exactly what is forbidden. It is always better to convey positive criticism and use words like – this dress does not suit you, or it does not flatter you like this other one – Be very careful of the words used, when speaking to your children. Parents must be open to uncomfortable conversations; no subject should be off-the-table. If children have questions, answer them in the best way possible; if you do not know, tell them that you do not know and attempt to find the best approach together. There is a veritable goldmine of information out there, FIGURE IT OUT. Because, children will find out about these things, one way or another, in today’s world of information overload, it is impossible to protect children from the ‘bad stuff’. The best way to prepare them for the world is to stay one step ahead of other sources; be approachable, discuss, educate. Create awareness of the potential dangers, so daughters can be willing partners in taking measures to protect themselves. Why this is important? Even in today’s so called progressive society, there is an inordinate amount of pressure being exerted on girls for marriage. We are raising daughters (girls in general) to aspire for marriage, and at the same time, we are not raising our sons to aspire for it. The value that women derive from the institution of marriage is far more than that of their male counterparts. This is the reason why there is a far greater number of women who choose to compromise and stay in abusive and toxic marriages, as compared to men. There is a vast difference in the values which we are instilling in our daughters and in our sons. The weight of expectation that we put on our daughters and women is blatantly unrealistic and unfair; and will eventually break them. We have to bring in change, and we have to bring it now. We need to know that if we want to raise strong, independent, self-respecting women, we must treat them as such; and at the same time, raise our sons to be strong, independent, self-respecting men. We must be willing to put in the effort and we must be wary of the words we use. The fate of the world lies in the hands of our children; and our children are our responsibilities.

[her-culture]

BDSM as a Logical Reaction to Monopoly Capitalistic Society

KATHERINE MEADOWS

Popular culture depicts BDSM (Bondage, Discipline/Domination, Submission/Sadism, Masochism), which utilizes sexual power dynamics as a means of furthering excitement and eroticism, in a way that generally distorts mainstream perception of practitioners. Ironically, by enforcing just one extreme of BDSM play, thereby painting the culture in a biased light, the media is demonstrating exactly what BDSM is confronting. Power is everywhere: present in institution-to-individual interactions as well as individual-to-individual interactions—including sexual relationships. In understanding how inextricably combined power and sex are, we can understand why power dynamics are the linchpin of BDSM play and get a more holistic view of this heavily misunderstood subculture.

Power is Everywhere

On bold-type phrases, interpret “power.”

To understand this concept, we have to examine what gives an entity power or what characterizes something with power. Power lends agency, running everything from machinery to the White House. As an abstract, power allows us to hold some capacity of control. Necessarily, this concept involves an exchange between an empowered entity and an entity lacking empowerment.

Forces in our atmosphere as well as the ground beneath our feet have a capacity to control where populations decide to live due to natural disasters and the motion of tectonic plates can kill.

Police officers also have the license to end a life—if they deem it necessary—and to deprive individuals of their freedom. Elected officials and representatives have abundant influence on the laws that govern our society and can even sway the governing forces of other nations. Power decides the rules and, if those rules are not followed, the repercussions. Those who have power can wage wars; the masses are the pawns of those with power.

Even micro interactions involve power exchange. The professor has the qualifications to grant a grade, and therefore, influence the likelihood that a student’s invested time, money, and hard work will result in a degree. It is within a parent’s hands to decide everything for their child until that child becomes an adult.

The Problem with Power

All of these positions that we identify with power also come with the potential for corruption. The parent, meant to act in the best interest of the child, may abuse that child or use the child in a myriad of inappropriate and dangerous ways. The professor may blackmail the student for something that they want.Those that govern our nation may cater to their own interests rather than those of the citizens they are in place to serve.

The police officer may use an unmonitored prejudice when they rationalize whether or not to use deadly force. The officer is prone to biases like anyone else, but because their position in society holds considerably more power, these biases carry more weight. If you’ve been paying any level of attention to the news or social media trends, you are probably aware that all of these problematic dynamics are both present and in a number of instances, allowed by the Monopoly Capitalist system to persist.

In a Monopoly Capitalist society, citizens serve a few functions. Not only are they the worker bees slaving away their libidos for the benefit of the 1 percent, they are simultaneously the consumers latching that dulled desire & stimulation to empty entertainment and luxury after unnecessary luxury; Lending their meager paychecks to those who make the profits. The Protestant values our society was built on (hard work is necessary for rewards and status) helped construct the path that most Americans are pressured to take. The school system teaches us that we must get a job to earn money so that we can buy the food and shelter that we need to survive, along with the most recent iPhone, clothing fad and other necessities.This system pressures us to go to places of higher education that shackle us to our debt in the name of a more prestigious existence (a specialized job with a higher income—and a more costly certification process). Yet, this upward mobility—a cornerstone of the “American Dream”—has never been easy in America. According to the The Equality of Opportunity Project, a child’s chances of “earning more than their parents have fallen from 90 percent to 50 percent over the past half century,” while the wage gap between the top and bottom percentiles grows broader. The America that is okay with these blatant disparities is the same nation that drives home the values, legislation, and economy that keep it this way.

The Role of Power in Identity

The world that we live in carries many forms of power that consistently determine our environment by limiting options, directing individuals toward one route instead of another, and largely shaping who we are. Foucault argued that power can now be understood as the “boundaries that enable and constrain [an individual’s] possibilities for action, and on people’s relative capacities to know and shape these boundaries.” Power sculpts who we are by being present in the influences on our “possibilities” from birth.

If you are born an American citizen, you were probably born in a hospital current on specific regulatory codes enforced by the dictation of the Department of Health. You were born in a healthy, clean environment, away from toxins and unsafe conditions. If you were born in a developing country, you may have come into the world undernourished, in a war zone, or into a poverty-stricken family. Already, two very separate tracks have been paved. If you went to public school growing up, you were taught logic and the scientific method for determining truth—as well as accepted organizations that presumably follow these methods and present the facts that the masses can invest in. If you went on to higher education, you learned the acceptable and unacceptable ways in which information is integrated into cultural understanding. The process by which we determine what information to let into the canon of accepted ideas is monitored by those with the responsibility to dictate which educational facilities will elevate or condemn. As a contrasting example, religious facilities may use other measures for truth, such as what is outlined in a sacred text. Socially, some use anecdotal (subjective, empirical) evidence, which is generally unaccepted in the scientific community. As Foucault detailed, “scientific discourse and institutions...are reinforced (and redefined) constantly through the education system, the media, and the flux of political and economic ideologies."

In the American school systems, you were taught the rules of this society by parents and peers alike: red means stop, killing people is wrong, the most important goal of life is to make money, etc. We gleaned all of our symbolic recognition, moral understandings, and ideological brainwashing from the culture and society we were socialized in. We were taught everything within the confines of what the overarching systems of control allowed us to learn.

Maybe we learned about these systems: ideology, corruption, etc.—and decided that we want less restriction and more freedom of action. Sometimes, we tested the limits of these systems of control; went over the speed limit one too many times and faced the repercussions. Sometimes, we learned and sometimes, we became more curious. Sometimes, we go farther and find ourselves in the almighty face of power—facing something more than just a $100 fine—facing a life sentence, facing mortality, facing crippling debt and repossession, facing ostracization and isolation—all methods of intense control.

Even if we didn’t encounter this backlash, we certainly grew up hearing about those who did. Part of our societal education is to learn about those who did not play by the rules and how they were made examples of. Now, fear becomes a mechanism of control, wielding power. Institutions, especially “prisons, schools, and mental hospitals” set a clear standard and promoting conformity in society. “Their systems of surveillance and assessment no longer required force or violence, as people learned to discipline themselves and behave in expected ways,”John Gaventa of adds.

Where BDSM Enters the Picture

Power permeates life in the ability to provoke something. Because of this fact, we are constantly surrounded by very subtle, inbred modes of control— constantly subjected to unquantifiable power dynamics, that we largely avoid consciously recognizing, because it would hinder functioning smoothly in this social system.

BDSM brings these power dynamics to the table and forces participants to recognize them and move within them. To understand these dynamics is a kind of power in itself because it is the first step in expanding the capacity for changing the instruments that alter and dictate who we are. Practitioners experience what it feels like to be entirely in control of the situation or to experience complete impotence (and not just if the scene gets weird). By allowing them to fully invest in roles they do and do not play within society, BDSM allows people to confront their staggering lack of power as an individual. Play can be very cathartic, with a potential for both great healing and great shattering.

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

Power permeates the sexual field similarly to the way it permeates institution-to-individual interactions. For example, sex may be used as an exchange for money or advantageous situations. Some individuals may find it empowering to entice others through sexual attraction, just as it is a show of empowerment to deny sexual interactions. Maybe you find the physical show of power (domination) as a turn on.

Generally in sex, a duo can be classified into one of two categories that do not necessarily align themselves with the opposing: Dominant and Submissive. One gives, one receives. One controls the situation, the other allows themself to be operated. This juxtaposition can go as vanilla as one person initiating or guiding the other or as intense as a BDSM scene that is orchestrated to follow an agreed upon script. There may be pairings of two Dominants and two Submissives, but the power play remains the same. How pronounced the power dynamics are determines where on the scale from “Conforming” to “Deviant” the sexual act falls.

Think about the nonverbal conversation that goes on during sex (inside and outside BDSM play), from the point of initiation. Perhaps it starts with a dialogue between the eyes—lingering just too long on the lips or body. When a hand crosses the threshold and is placed on a knee, an arm, or directly onto the other’s genitals, a question has been asked—namely, “is this okay?” If the person being touched is uninterested or has been read wrong, they will [ideally] verbally or nonverbally respond conveying that information. Or they may respond with another question: moving in to kiss the initiator or touching them back. The one acting is the one showing power, as power is the ability to do something specific. A couple may show power equally and at the same time. Or perhaps, one member of the group will take a stronger leading role, directing which positions are utilized. This isn’t to say that the passive member is void of power, as they always have the power to refuse advances (except in cases of harassment, coercion, sexual assault, and rape). Even during a sex act, if the Dominant directs the Submissive in a way that the sub dislikes, they can respond either verbally (“stop”) or physically by assuming a role of power and redirecting the action to something that does please them. Power often operates to benefit the entity with power; and in sex, the goal is generally that all parties involved get off in some way. To directly facilitate one’s own orgasm or excitement is to assume a role of power. To negate another’s eroticism is also a utilization of personal power. In this light, BDSM becomes a “set of tools for sandboxing...mainstream power dynamics,” according to freaksexual.com, “by providing a safe space to experience and confront, in a corporeal way, all levels of power and control.”

Conclusion

In a world where power permeates every interaction, social construct, and institution, human beings are constantly sculpted and directed by subtle forces that surround everything we know. By bringing these power dynamics into a space where they can be physically confronted, negotiated, and controlled in a way that is ultimately pleasurable, BDSM provides a cathartic release for the tensions that a Monopoly Capitalist society presents.

This article was published on the HerCulture blog. If you would like to submit an article, head on over to HerCulture to learn more about our writers and our magzine. Additionally, check out our social media (twitter, instagram, facebook, and tumblr!), our handles are herculture. Give this post a like and make sure you follow us on any of our accounts. By the end of December, we would like to reach our goal of 400 people on this tumblr account!

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x Likhita

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): We’re here to talk about superdelegates!!!!!!

Everyone’s favorite subject, right?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Extremely 2016 up in here.

micah: (This is my least favorite topic.)

clare.malone: I can’t imagine why. It’s so sexy, and the debate is totally based in facts about what happened during 2016.

micah:

OK, so Democrats over the weekend curtailed the power of superdelegates a bit by changing the party’s nominating rules.

Here, from friend-of-the-site Josh Putnam at Frontloading HQ, is a description of the new system:

1. If a candidate wins 50 percent of the pledged delegates plus one during or by the end of primary season, then the superdelegates are barred from the first ballot. 2. If a candidate wins 50 percent of all of the delegates (including superdelegates) plus one, then the superdelegate opt-in is triggered and that faction of delegates can participate in the first (and only) round of voting. 3. If no candidate wins a majority of either pledged or all delegates during or by the end of primary season, then superdelegates are barred from the first round and allowed in to vote in the second round to break the stalemate.

Can someone give us a topline “what this means”?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): It means that superdelegates can’t override the voters if someone gets 50 percent + 1 of pledged delegates.

It also means they could be hugely influential in the case of a multiballot convention, which is probably the more important case.

And it probably makes a multiballot convention more likely by not allowing superdelegates to be used as tiebreakers.

clare.malone: I think what they’re trying to do is mitigate the notion during the primary contest that “elites” have outsized weight.

We should note here that Hillary Clinton won more pledged delegates in 2016 than Bernie Sanders.

micah: Yeah, how much of this is PR vs. actually limiting the influence of superdelegates?

natesilver: Like so many other institutions, they’re catering to their critics and fighting the last war.

Like, I’m not even sure how I feel about superdelegates. I just think this is done for maybe the wrong reasons? And that the more interesting lessons were actually in the GOP primary in 2016?

clare.malone: I don’t know — it seems like a fair reaction in many ways.

I don’t think it’s bad to mitigate concerns that people in your base might have about stifling voter representation.

natesilver: Let’s say the pledged delegate allocation after everyone has voted is: Elizabeth Warren 40 percent, Joe Biden 30 percent, Cory Booker 20 percent, and 10 percent scattered among various other candidates who have since dropped out. Under the previous system, superdelegates would weigh in for Warren — who clearly is the most popular choice — and give her a majority on the first ballot.

Under the new system, the superdelegates don’t get to vote on the first ballot. Instead, they wait until the second ballot, when most of the pledged delegates become unpledged.

And there could be a lot more chaos here: Maybe Booker agrees to run as Biden’s VP, for instance.

clare.malone: Devil’s advocate: Why is it chaos? And even if it is chaos, why is it bad?

Are you arguing that it actually leads to back-room deals negating its supposed goal of democratizing the process?

natesilver: I’m saying that requiring an outright majority on the first ballot — no superdelegates to push a candidate who’s close to a majority over the top — coupled with Democrats’ extremely proportional delegate allocations — is a recipe for chaos

The chances of the nomination not being resolved on the first ballot are about 50 percent, maybe a little higher.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I agree with that. I actually think under the previous system, Warren (or Sanders) was guaranteed to win in a scenario where she (or he) had the most delegates. That is less true now. The previous system gave superdelegates lots of power in theory. But in practice, supers were already bending to the will of the voters. Some superdelegates who originally backed Hillary Clinton flipped to Barack Obama in the latter stages of the 2008 Democratic primary, for example, once it became clear that he would win the most pledged delegates. That ensured that he got the majority of all delegates at the end.

clare.malone: I’ve decided to argue from the angle of the rules-changers. Aren’t you guys infantilizing the voters a bit? Yes, the process might be messier than in previous years, but on a second-round ballot where people are unpledged, you basically get to see a bit of a caucus happen among delegates. Maybe that sort of parliamentary way of doing things is healthy for the party.

Maybe what voters want is to see the process thrashed out, to see a second ballot!

micah: Woo!

natesilver: Maybe! But it goes against the stated aims of the reforms.

perry: And the changes don’t seem like a great advantage for the Sanders people, who pushed for them.

clare.malone: Well, the party is very different than it was in 2016.

So maybe the “center” or the “establishment” candidate will be closer to where Sanders is and it won’t matter … and the voters will be there too.

natesilver: I agree that it’s hard to predict who these changes will benefit. And, of course, there’s a long history of changes that were made with the best of intentions backfiring.

Democrats saw the train wreck that was the Republican nomination process in 2016 and decided to do nothing to prevent something similar happening to them, even though it looks like they could easily also have a 17-candidate field or thereabouts in 2020.

micah: So, using Nate’s hypothetical above — “Warren 40 percent, Biden 30 percent, Booker 20 percent, and 10 percent scattered among various other candidates” — doesn’t this come down to whether you think Warren winning a plurality means she should get the nomination or whether you think Warren not winning a majority means she shouldn’t get the nomination?

natesilver: I think Warren’s probably getting the nomination either way IN THOSE SCENARIOS , but she’s definitely at more risk under the new system.

clare.malone: Maybe it’s a healthier process for a party that has actual divisions.

natesilver: Now, maybe there are some cases where the opposite is true. If you have a case where it’s Kamala Harris 51 percent, Joe Biden 48 percent, Martin O’Malley 1 percent of the pledged delegates — Harris is now guaranteed the nomination, whereas supers could have pushed it to Biden before.

But if it’s Harris 49 percent, Biden 46 percent, O’Malley 5 percent, she’s not.

clare.malone: It’s basically just more of a wild-card system.

(As a side note, as a journalist, I look forward to the potential drama.)

natesilver: What saved the Republicans from a contested convention of their own in 2016 was the fact that a lot of their primaries, especially toward the end stages, were winner-take-all or winner-take-most. That allowed Donald Trump to build up some real momentum in the last one-third or so of the primary calendar.

Without that, the GOP would probably have still gotten Trump anyway — he was clearly the choice of the plurality of voters — but only after an extremely chaotic convention.

perry: I don’t think the big goal (stopping supers from overturning the plurality of the pledged delegates) is necessarily best served by these particular reforms. That said, on the broader question of whether superdelegates SHOULD be able overturn the plurality of pledged delegates, I think there is a case for superdelegates to have that power. I’m not completely sure superdelegates should be disempowered, even though I agree with arguments that the will of the people should be respected and am generally for giving voters more power. The last two years (so Trump) have suggested that maybe party elders should play a bigger role, not necessarily in pushing for a different person ideologically, but maybe a president who abides by general norms. (For example, I think Ted Cruz would be as conservative as Trump, but perhaps less erratic and able to condemn white nationalist rallies.) I’m not sure if, say, Michael Avenatti has a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in 2020, but I bet a lot of Democratic Party elders are not excited at that prospect–and would like to have the power to stop it.

In other words, maybe the elites should have more power?

micah: I’m a secret believer in that.

clare.malone: Why? To prevent chaos?

micah: Because the mob can be dangerous.

clare.malone: Why are you guys harping on that?

I think there’s something to be said about a cathartic political process.

Voters have watched their nominations be manufactured behind the scenes. What’s wrong with radical transparency?

Yes, it might bring a couple of rounds of voting, I concede that. But you haven’t convinced me why that’s bad in the end? As long as there’s civility among the actors, which I think you could engineer, it’s not a terrible scenario.

natesilver: The expectation among voters is that the most popular nominee will get the nomination.

Granted, there are different ways of defining “most popular.”

clare.malone: Which would likely be reflected in the contested convention votes. Right?

Norms have been less broken on the Democratic side of things, so I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation.

natesilver: Maybe? But the more ballots you go, the more divorced you become from the delegates’ original preferences.

We knew on the GOP side, for example, that many delegates personally didn’t back Trump and were big risks to turn on him in the event of multiple ballots even though they were bound to him on the first ballot.

A better-organized campaign will exert more control over the delegate selection process and be better at whipping delegates.

perry: I guess I view these rules as being a diss to the superdelegates. The supers themselves read them that way too.

clare.malone: That’s the point, though. They’re meant to diss. It’s the mood of the party’s hoi polloi.

perry: If Sanders or another candidate who is anti-superdelegates does not win a majority of pledged delegates during the primary, he should be worried. I wonder if the supers, on the second ballot, are even more unbound under this new system, compared to the old one. They could say, “You [Sanders’ supporters] said you wanted a system in which a majority of pledged delegates means you win. You didn’t get a majority. We get to intervene now. These are your rules. We are following them and we will now choose who WE want.”

micah: OK, let’s try it this way: Would these rules, had they been in place, have altered any past Democratic nominations?

Would Clinton have had a better chance in 2008?

perry: This is where I would like to do a more careful analysis.

But, yes, my instinct is that Clinton would have had a better chance to win on a second ballot in this new system. The superdelegates would have no role in the first ballot, but I think their role is enhanced in a second one.

natesilver: There are some primaries, such as in 1984 and 2008, where the nomination process would have been messier, although maybe it would have produced the same nominee.

clare.malone: I smell an assignment …

And then some fan fic about the alternate political universes.

natesilver: Yeah. My thing is that you want a system where someone can win on the first ballot with less than a majority, but with a reasonably clear plurality. Because it’s very common for the top candidate to have something like 35 percent to 45 percent of the overall votes in the primary.

There are two ways to achieve that: either through superdelegates or through winner-take-all/winner-take-most rules.

The Democrats have neither one of those now.

clare.malone: Maybe this is finally a concession to the big tent party that they have. And in the ensuing rounds of ballot negotiation, maybe you have compromises on who gets VP — like, a Warren paired with a more centrist person — we’ll see who comes along over the next couple of years.

micah: IDK, maybe I agree with Clare: Democracy is messy, so maybe it should look messy.

perry: I think those changes might be good (the ones Clare laid out). The idea that the convention picks the vp. But they give the elites more power.

Sanders does not want the party to pick his vp.

clare.malone: Well, that’s the concession he has to pay to be more of a player.

People have sold their souls for much less. A compromise VP when you’re the presidential nominee of a party in semi-shock therapy ain’t bad.

natesilver: One simple reform they could have considered is to give the nomination to whomever wins the plurality of delegates. Except in a few weird states, that’s how our electoral system works: Plurality takes all.

micah: Or: National popular vote. Simple. One day of voting. Highest vote-getter takes all.

perry: Can we jump back to the broader context?

The reason I am open to elites having more power is because Trump is different in terms of democratic norms, etc. I think Sanders would be better than Avenatti in terms of following those norms.

And the voters might blow it.

If we have weak parties and strong partisanship, do we want to weaken the parties further?

I’m not usually an elitist, but are we sure the voters are doing a great job?

clare.malone: This feels like the old argument against direct election of U.S. senators.

It basically comes down to the age-old question: Do we trust the vox populi?

micah: No.

clare.malone: Haha, so now you’ve switched teams!

micah: lol

Just kidding.

Do you?

How much “republic” do you want in your democratic republic?

clare.malone: I’m still arguing team small-d democracy.

natesilver: There’s also the question of whether ranked-choice voting would produce a different result. Like, suppose that Avenatti was the plurality front-runner with 20 percent of the vote. But most of the other 80 percent who didn’t vote for him didn’t like him.

clare.malone: I think you’ve got to have some faith in the voters.

perry: I want to.

natesilver: Although the GOP doesn’t have superdelegates per se, the fact that the party made relatively feeble efforts to stop Trump is also relevant here. It suggests the norm toward letting voters decide is quite strong.

And the stronger that norm is, the less dangerous that superdelegates are.

micah: I think Perry said this earlier, but I do think there’s a chance this empowers supers because it will erode that norm on the second ballot.

perry: Yeah, that is what I was hinting at — particularly if it’s something like Sanders 44 percent and Harris or Booker or Julian Castro (a non-white candidate) at 41.

natesilver: THEY’RE GOING TO STEAL THE NOMINATION FROM AVENATTI

clare.malone: I mean, he’s got his Vogue story in place.

Next comes the chummy Ellen interview.

perry: FiveThirtyEight contributor Seth Masket wrote that there was a big racial divide at the DNC meeting where this change was adopted, namely that some prominent black officials are opposed to the changes.

The Congressional Black Caucus, for example, likes the power of superdelegates in the current system. (Members of Congress are superdelegates, of course.)

clare.malone: Donna Brazile was making the argument that the DNC was trying to disenfranchise them.

micah: Why do you think there’s a racial divide?

perry: Because there is a big racial divide among party elites about Sanders.

Sanders did well among young black voters. But I suspect that he has very little support among black superdelegates.

natesilver: And there’s also the question of: What if in a close race, you had one Democrat with a plurality of votes/delegates but very little support among black or Hispanic Democrats.

You could argue that’s a case where supers should intervene. I’m not sure I like that argument, but you could make it.

Although, again, in any type of plurality scenario, the supers get to intervene anyway.

micah: How about this for a compromise: Have superdelegates but only let elected officials be them.

natesilver: Many/most of them are elected officials anyway?

clare.malone: Yeah.

micah: Not all, though.

perry: Most superdelegates are DNC members, according to the Pew Research Center, not members of Congress. But some of those DNC members might be elected officials at the local level.

micah: BAM!

clare.malone: I love that one of the subcategories of superdelegates is “distinguished party leaders.” Lol.

natesilver: How about: Let the nowcast decide in the event that no one gets the plurality?

perry: Nate Silver picks which candidate is most electable.

natesilver: Hahaha

hahahahaha

perry: If we pitched this idea to Democratic voters, that Nate picks the candidate or the DNC picks, they would probably go with Nate. I’m serious. I don’t think most Democrats trust the party that much.

natesilver: But see the most electable candidate would be the one with the most popular support.

clare.malone: O’Malley’s gonna make a comeback in that case.

micah: If all the supers were elected officials, it would still have a tinge of small-d democracy. It’s a good middle ground!

perry: That seems right to me. They would be accountable.

That’s the problem with the DNC — people don’t necessarily know who those people are.

natesilver: How about if there’s no majority through the delegate system, there’s a national 50-state referendum where everyone votes again?

That would obviously be cost/logistically prohibitive.

In some very real ways, though, polls could become very important under that scenario. For example, it was probably important in 2008 that Obama never fell behind Clinton in national polls, or at least not for sustained periods, when going through all the Jeremiah Wright stuff, etc.

perry: I’m going to play the Micah role here, because I was curious what Nate’s and Clare’s thoughts were about the caucus changes.

micah: Yeah, let’s close on that. Can someone give me a summary of the caucus changes please?

natesilver: My understanding is that caucuses now need to include a means for people to participate off-site — e.g., through absentee ballots.

perry: Right.

clare.malone: I think it’s probably a shift toward the right kind of “small d democracy” change I’ve been talking about. There are lots of good arguments that say caucuses mean that a lot of people who do shift work can’t vote.

natesilver: Caucuses tend to favor candidates whose supporters are (1) more enthusiastic and (2) better organized. I’m not sure that necessarily maps cleanly onto a left-right scale, and it can be fairly idiosyncratic from election to election who does better in caucuses.

clare.malone: Caucuses tend to favor insurgents, it’s fair to say.

natesilver: They didn’t in the GOP, though.

clare.malone: On the Democratic side they have, right?

natesilver: Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz (OK, Cruz is sort of an insurgent) did better in caucuses, and Trump struggled in them.

I think that’s mostly true.

In 1988, Jesse Jackson struggled in caucuses early on but then started to do quite well in them. It can be quirky.

Also, a lot of states have abandoned caucuses of their own volition and switched to primaries.

perry: So is this a big change?

natesilver: It’s not big in the sense that the Democrats didn’t have that many caucuses anyway, and they were mostly in small-population states.

However, there are often big differences between who does well in caucuses and who does well in primaries.

Without caucuses, Clinton might have won in 2008.

Without caucuses, Sanders wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long.

If the GOP had more caucuses, they might not have chosen Trump.

micah: To wrap, does anyone want to say whether all these changes help or hurt any specific potential 2020 candidates?

Or do we really just have no clue?

clare.malone: I think you have to wait and see what their support/activist system is like.

natesilver: Yeah, we’re at the stage where there are 15 billiard balls on the table and it’s hard to know what everything will look like after the break.

Again, my

take is just that it’s a bad idea to have neither superdelegates nor winner-take-all/most rules. Especially in a year without a clear front-runner.

micah: OK, to sum up, it seems like the best take is: These changes could have big unforeseen and unintended consequences — or maybe not. And to cap us off, I asked Julia (who has studied this a lot) to give us her take …

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I’m more ambivalent about the superdelegate change than a lot of political scientists, many of whom are generally opposed to them. This is mainly because I think parties need to think about how they can regain legitimacy, and if supers are left out of the first ballot but can legitimately come in in the case of a deadlocked convention, that’s a good thing.

Acknowledging the possibility that the nomination might not be wrapped up by the convention and that that could be something other than a total crisis is in my view a good thing. The emphasis on party elites unifying around a single candidate early in the nomination — in either party — hampers competition within the party and potentially prevents voters from having real power in the nomination process.. At the same time, my understanding is that none of the rules change anything about how elected officials can make their preferences known during and before the primary season (so people who are superdelegates can still endorse someone ,even if that endorsement is not effectively a delegate vote in this new process), and that will rightly be seen by some in (for lack of a better term) the Bernie camp as attempting to tip the scales in favor of more establishment candidates. If you could actually have a competitive convention without it being seen as a giant disaster, then elites wouldn’t need to head that off by endorsing early.

[xtruss]

Tony Blair, The War Criminal Ghoul: Why We Must Not Abandon the People of Afghanistan – For Their Sakes and Ours

— August 21, 2021

The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours. In the aftermath of the decision to return Afghanistan to the same group from which the carnage of 9/11 arose, and in a manner that seems almost designed to parade our humiliation, the question posed by allies and enemies alike is: has the West lost its strategic will? Meaning: is it able to learn from experience, think strategically, define our interests strategically and on that basis commit strategically? Is long term a concept we are still capable of grasping? Is the nature of our politics now inconsistent with the assertion of our traditional global leadership role? And do we care?

As the leader of our country when we took the decision to join the United States in removing the Taliban from power – and who saw the high hopes we had of what we could achieve for the people and the world subside under the weight of bitter reality – I know better than most how difficult the decisions of leadership are, and how easy it is to be critical and how hard to be constructive.

Almost 20 years ago, following the slaughter of 3,000 people on US soil on 11 September, the world was in turmoil. The attacks were organised out of Afghanistan by al-Qaeda, an Islamist terrorist group given protection and assistance by the Taliban. We forget this now, but the world was spinning on its axis. We feared further attacks, possibly worse. The Taliban were given an ultimatum: yield up the al-Qaeda leadership or be removed from power so that Afghanistan could not be used for further attacks. They refused. We felt there was no safer alternative for our security than keeping our word.

We held out the prospect, backed by substantial commitment, of turning Afghanistan from a failed terror state into a functioning democracy on the mend. It may have been a misplaced ambition, but it was not an ignoble one. There is no doubt that in the years that followed we made mistakes, some serious. But the reaction to our mistakes has been, unfortunately, further mistakes. Today we are in a mood that seems to regard the bringing of democracy as a utopian delusion and intervention, virtually of any sort, as a fool’s errand.

The world is now uncertain of where the West stands because it is so obvious that the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in this way was driven not by grand strategy but by politics.

We didn't need to do it. We chose to do it. We did it in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending “the forever wars”, as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even ten years ago, and in circumstances in which troop numbers had declined to a minimum and no allied soldier had lost their life in combat for 18 months.

We did it in the knowledge that though worse than imperfect, and though immensely fragile, there were real gains over the past 20 years. And for anyone who disputes that, read the heartbreaking laments from every section of Afghan society as to what they fear will now be lost. Gains in living standards, education particularly of girls, gains in freedom. Not nearly what we hoped or wanted. But not nothing. Something worth defending. Worth protecting.

We did it when the sacrifices of our troops had made those fragile gains our duty to preserve.

We did it when the February 2020 agreement, itself replete with concessions to the Taliban, by which the US agreed to withdraw if the Taliban negotiated a broad-based government and protected civilians, had been violated daily and derisively.

We did it with every jihadist group around the world cheering.

Russia, China and Iran will see and take advantage. Anyone given commitments by Western leaders will understandably regard them as unstable currency.

We did it because our politics seemed to demand it. And that’s the worry of our allies and the source of rejoicing in those who wish us ill.

They think Western politics is broken.

Unsurprisingly therefore friends and foes ask: is this a moment when the West is in epoch-changing retreat?

I can't believe we are in such retreat, but we are going to have to give tangible demonstration that we are not.

This demands an immediate response in respect of Afghanistan. And then measured and clear articulation of where we stand for the future.

We must evacuate and give sanctuary to those to whom we have responsibility – those Afghans who helped us, stood by us and have a right to demand we stand by them. There must be no repetition of arbitrary deadlines. We have a moral obligation to keep at it until all those who need to be are evacuated. And we should do so not grudgingly but out of a deep sense of humanity and responsibility.

We need then to work out a means of dealing with the Taliban and exerting maximum pressure on them. This is not as empty as it seems. We have given up much of our leverage, but we retain some. The Taliban will face very difficult decisions and likely divide deeply over them. The country, its finances and public-sector workforce are significantly dependent on aid notably from the US, Japan, the UK and others. The average age of the population is 18. A majority of Afghans have known freedom and not known the Taliban regime. They will not all conform quietly.

The UK, as the current G7 chair, should convene a Contact Group of the G7 and other key nations, and commit to coordinating help to the Afghan people and holding the new regime to account. NATO – which has had 8,000 troops present in Afghanistan alongside the US – and Europe should be brought fully into cooperation under this grouping.

We need to draw up a list of incentives, sanctions and actions we can take, including to protect the civilian population so the Taliban understand their actions will have consequences.

This is urgent. The disarray of the past weeks needs to be replaced by something resembling coherence, and with a plan that is credible and realistic.

But then we must answer that overarching question. What are our strategic interests and are we prepared any longer to commit to upholding them?

Compare the Western position with that of President Putin. When the Arab Spring convulsed the Middle East and North Africa toppling regime after regime, he perceived that Russia’s interests were at stake. In particular, in Syria, he believed that Russia needed Assad to stay in power. While the West hesitated and then finally achieved the worst of all worlds – refusing to negotiate with Assad, but not doing anything to remove him, even when he used chemical weapons against his own people – Putin committed. He has spent ten years in open-ended commitment. And though he was intervening to prop up a dictatorship and we were intervening to suppress one, he, along with the Iranians, secured his goal. Likewise, though we removed the Qaddafi government in Libya, it is Russia, not us, who has influence over the future.

Afghanistan was hard to govern all through the 20 years of our time there. And of course, there were mistakes and miscalculations. But we shouldn’t dupe ourselves into thinking it was ever going to be anything other than tough, when there was an internal insurgency combining with external support – in this case, Pakistan – to destabilise the country and thwart its progress.

The Afghan army didn’t hold up once US support was cancelled, but 60,000 Afghan soldiers gave their lives, and any army would have suffered a collapse in morale when effective air support vital for troops in the field was scuttled by the overnight withdrawal of maintenance.

There was endemic corruption in government, but there were also good people doing good work to the benefit of the people.

Read the excellent summary of what we got right and wrong from General Petraeus in his New Yorker interview.

It often dashed our hopes, but it was never hopeless.

Despite everything, if it mattered strategically, it was worth persevering provided that the cost was not inordinate and here it wasn't.

If it matters, you go through the pain. Even when you are rightly disheartened, you can't lose heart completely. Your friends need to feel it and your foes need to know it.

“If it matters.”

So: does it? Is what is happening in Afghanistan part of a picture that concerns our strategic interests and engages them profoundly?

Some would say no. We have not had another attack on the scale of 9/11, though no-one knows whether that is because of what we did post 9/11 or despite it. You could say that terrorism remains a threat but not one that occupies the thoughts of a lot of our citizens, certainly not to the degree in the years following 9/11.

You could see different elements of jihadism as disconnected, with local causes and containable with modern intelligence.

I would still argue that even if this were right and the action in removing the Taliban in November 2001 was unnecessary, the decision to withdraw was wrong. But it wouldn’t make this a turning point in geopolitics.

But let me make the alternative case – that the Taliban is part of a bigger picture that should concern us strategically.

The 9/11 attack exploded into our consciousness because of its severity and horror. But the motivation for such an atrocity arose from an ideology many years in development. I will call it “Radical Islam” for want of a better term. As a research paper shortly to be published by my Institute shows, this ideology in different forms, and with varying degrees of extremism, has been almost 100 years in gestation.

Its essence is the belief that Muslim people are disrespected and disadvantaged because they are oppressed by outside powers and their own corrupt leadership, and that the answer lies in Islam returning to its roots, creating a state based not on nations but on religion, with society and politics governed by a strict and fundamentalist view of Islam.

It is the turning of the religion of Islam into a political ideology and, of necessity, an exclusionary and extreme one because in a multi-faith and multicultural world, it holds there is only one true faith and we should all conform to it.

Over the past decades and well before 9/11, it was gaining in strength. The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution and its echo in the failed storming of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in late 1979 massively boosted the forces of this radicalism. The Muslim Brotherhood became a substantial movement. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan saw jihadism rise.

In time other groups have sprung up: Boko Haram, al-Shabab, al-Qaeda, ISIS and many others.

Some are violent. Some not. Sometimes they fight each other. But at other times, as with Iran and al-Qaeda, they cooperate. But all subscribe to basic elements of the same ideology.

Today, there is a vast process of destabilisation going on in the Sahel, the group of countries across the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa. This will be the next wave of extremism and immigration that will inevitably hit Europe.

My Institute works in many African countries. Barely a president I know does not think this is a huge problem for them and for some it is becoming THE problem.

Iran uses proxies like Hizbullah to undermine moderate Arab countries in the Middle East. Lebanon is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Turkey has moved increasingly down the Islamist path in recent years.

In the West, we have sections of our own Muslim communities radicalised.

Even more moderate Muslim nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia have, over a period of decades, seen their politics become more Islamic in practice and discourse.

Look no further than Pakistan’s prime minister congratulating the Taliban on their “victory” to see that although, of course, many of those espousing Islamism are opposed to violence, they share ideological characteristics with many of those who use it – and a world view that is constantly presenting Islam as under siege from the West.

Islamism is a long-term structural challenge because it is an ideology utterly inconsistent with modern societies based on tolerance and secular government.

Yet Western policymakers can't even agree to call it “Radical Islam”. We prefer to identify it as a set of disconnected challenges, each to be dealt with separately.

If we did define it as a strategic challenge, and saw it in whole and not as parts, we would never have taken the decision to pull out of Afghanistan.

We are in the wrong rhythm of thinking in relation to Radical Islam. With Revolutionary Communism, we recognised it as a threat of a strategic nature, which required us to confront it both ideologically and with security measures. It lasted more than 70 years. Throughout that time, we would never have dreamt of saying, “well, we have been at this for a long time, we should just give up.”

We knew we had to have the will, the capacity and the staying power to see it through. There were different arenas of conflict and engagement, different dimensions, varying volumes of anxiety as the threat ebbed and flowed.

But we understood it was a real menace and we combined across nations and parties to deal with it.

This is what we need to decide now with Radical Islam. Is it a strategic threat? If so, how do those opposed to it including within Islam, combine to defeat it?

We have learnt the perils of intervention in the way we intervened in Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed Libya. But non-intervention is also policy with consequence.

What is absurd is to believe the choice is between what we did in the first decade after 9/11 and the retreat we are witnessing now: to treat our full-scale military intervention of November 2001 as of the same nature as the secure and support mission in Afghanistan of recent times.

Intervention can take many forms. We need to do it learning the proper lessons of the past 20 years according not to our short-term politics, but our long-term strategic interests.

But intervention requires commitment. Not time limited by political timetables but by obedience to goals.

For Britain and the US, these questions are acute. The absence of across-the-aisle consensus and collaboration and the deep politicisation of foreign policy and security issues is visibly atrophying US power. And for Britain, out of Europe and suffering the end of the Afghanistan mission by our greatest ally with little or no consultation, we have serious reflection to do. We don’t see it yet. But we are at risk of relegation to the second division of global powers. Maybe we don’t mind. But we should at least take the decision deliberatively.

There are of course many other important issues in geopolitics: Covid-19, climate, the rise of China, poverty, disease and development.

But sometimes an issue comes to mean something not only in its own right but as a metaphor, as a clue to the state of things and the state of peoples.

If the West wants to shape the 21st century, it will take commitment. Through thick and thin. When it’s rough as well as easy. Making sure allies have confidence and opponents caution. Accumulating a reputation for constancy and respect for the plan we have and the skill in its implementation.

It will require parts of the right in politics to understand that isolation in an interconnected world is self-defeating, and parts of the left to accept that intervention can sometimes be necessary to uphold our values.

It requires us to learn lessons from the 20 years since 9/11 in a spirit of humility – and the respectful exchange of different points of view – but also with a sense of rediscovery that we in the West represent values and interests worth being proud of and defending.

And that commitment to those values and interests needs to define our politics and not our politics define our commitment.

This is the large strategic question posed by these last days of chaos in Afghanistan. And on the answer will depend the world’s view of us and our view of ourselves.

— War Criminal Ghoul Tony Blair: Former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change

[mccartneynathxzw83]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[bobbynolanios88]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[adrianjenkins952wblr]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[courtneyvbrooks87]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[teiraymondmccoy78]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Featured

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting ���the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Rq4Udo

[cryptswahili]

Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Interview with Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two

Conducted by Wendy McElroy

The multi-faceted Jeffrey Tucker is an American writer who focuses on market freedom, anarcho-capitalism, and cryptotech. He is the author of eight books on economics, politics, and culture, a much-sought after conference speaker, and an Internet entrepreneur. Jeffrey is editorial director and vice president of the venerable American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933. His career has focused on building many of the web’s primary portals for commentary and research on liberty, and is undertaking new adventures in publishing today.

I have incredible good fortune, as Jeff has written the preface to my book “The Satoshi Revolution,” which will be published in early 2019 by bitcoin.com. Meanwhile, a rough draft of the book is available online for free, compliments of bitcoin.com. Be sure to come back for the substantially-rewritten and thoroughly-edited book. I expect there will be a forum established here for me to chat with readers and answer their questions.

To access Part One of this interview, please click here.

Wendy: I was very impressed by an article in which you argued against the idea that Misesian regression theorem invalidated bitcoin as a money. For readers, the Regression theorem claims “Any valid medium of exchange (money) has to have a previous use as something else.” Could you offer an overview of your argument?

Jeff: Mises’s argument was that the root value of money traces to a conjectural history in which the pre-money form was deployed, for example, in barter. By 1949, Mises became hardened in this view: money had to originate in barter; there is no other path. From a historical point of view, this is probably correct. But it is a theoretically misleading formulation.

To understand the theory behind the conjectural history, you have to return to Mises’s original 1912 argument. Here he is more precise. In order for something to become money, it had to have a pre-existing use value. Use value. That’s not the same thing as being used in barter trade. His point was that you can’t take a useless thing and call it money and expect it to take flight.

How can we reconstruct the history of Bitcoin to discern if this applies here? From the January 2009 genesis block until October of that year, Bitcoin’s posted dollar exchange value was exactly $0. And yet we know, because we have a perfect historical record, that there were many thousands of trades being made all these 10 months. What was happening? What was going on? This was a period in which the network was being tested by enthusiasts. What does this network do? It permits the peer-to-peer exchange of immutable information packets on a geographically non-contiguous basis using the Internet so that they can come and go without corruption or compromise.

Is this a valuable service and does it work? This is what was being tested. By October, the use value of this network had proven itself, and so we began to see the emergence of a dollar/Bitcoin exchange ratio. That is to say, Bitcoin was priced as a scarce good. We can see, then, that the conditions of the “Regression Theorem” as theory are met via the services provided by the blockchain. You can also see, however, that if an economist looking at this did not understand the payment system embedded as part of the monetary technology, he or she would be completely befuddled.

To be sure, some very smart people disagree with me. My friend William Luther is blunt about his opinion about his matter. He thinks the Regression Theorem is just wrong, so it doesn’t matter if Bitcoin is theoretically compliant. He once made the argument to me and pretty much backed me into a corner. If he turns out to be correct, I’m fine with that. What matters more, my theory or existing reality? I faced that problem in early 2013 and concluded that I had, as a matter of intellectual integrity, to defer to reality, even if it meant admitting the wrongness of my position or even that of Mises’s. Shocking, I know!

Wendy: The crypto community parallels the libertarian one, in ways both good and bad. An example of the latter is the deep personal schisms with which it is rift. You are a person who stays away from internecine battles. What advice do you have to others who wish to do the same?

Jeff: I try to stay focused on the big picture and imagine that my audience is not my friend network but rather the general public. I try to serve that readership. That means no Twitter wars. No flame wars at all. Plus, I’ve seen vast destruction spread by vicious internecine battles. I’ve seen friendships wrecked, bad theory perpetrated by virtue of ego alone, massive setbacks take place in understanding and marketing. Also, there are some people who are ideologically attached to the friend/enemy distinction. Unless they are smashing someone and hitting “the enemy” they think they are not working. It’s extremely strange how some people thrive off this posture.

To be sure, I have no trouble taking a stand, as I have when libertarians have wrongly drifted left and right. Why? I like to seek greater intellectual clarity and share my thoughts with others, in hopes that I can help others understand too. I’m not seeking saints and not looking to burn witches. I try to choose my battles carefully and stay focused on doing productive work, cooperating with anyone who thinks, writes, and acts in good faith. That’s the main thing to ask yourself, not “Who have you destroyed today?” but rather, “What kind of light have I brought to the world today?”

Wendy: Different explanations of crypto’s recent plunge in price have been advanced. Some people point to increased government regulation, especially in China and in the U.S., where the SEC is taking active steps against the crypto community. Many believe the tumble resulted from a bursting bubble that was created by surging prices earlier in 2018. Still others speak of manipulation by “the whales.” These explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. But do you favor one over the other? Do you have another explanation?

Jeff: It’s impossible to untangle all of this, and many of the factors you name are right, but let me add another issue. The amazing bull market of 2017 was fueled by wild optimism and adoption. People in the space were ready to rock. Then this optimism was massively interrupted by a terrible realization. Bitcoin would not scale. It stopped behaving like Bitcoin and started becoming more expensive and slower than regular credit cards. To use street parlance, it sucked. It was an amazing thing to have happened. It was a true calamity. And to top it off, it was completely the fault of the guardians of the code. When the code would not adapt to broader use, the optimism turned to pessimism and we experienced a huge setback.

By the way, I’ve worked for years with people who are geniuses at code but completely stupid when it comes to the user experience. It was the tragedy of Bitcoin that it fell prey to exactly this same problem. Coders desperately desire cleanliness, zero bloat, no cruft, perfect logic. It’s an old joke in the community that a coder invites you to use his new program but all you see on the black screen is a blinking green cursor. “Of course I still have to write the user interface.”

The OCD-ish mind of coders is a great thing for some purposes but this outlook has never prevailed in the commercial marketplace. In the early 1990s, there was a great battle over word processors. Microsoft kept making Word larger and larger, puffed with cruft, and the code monkeys were screaming that this was a disaster in the making. For my own part, I hated Word in those days and completely agreed that the hard-to-use light-weight programs were better.

But guess what? The market disagreed. Moore’s Law kicked it as it always does and eventually Word destroyed the competition. Why? Because it had more features that users like. Eventually the code got clean again and now Word itself has many elegant competitors. This is the normal progression of any software with a consumer focus.

Incredibly, some people with the keys to the kingdom of Bitcoin actually came to imagine that they could develop a digital money without an efficient, consumer-focussed use case. They drove a wedge between two functions: store of value and medium of exchange. This is not how much work. One function depends on the other. The freeze in the development of Bitcoin, in the name of staying light and elegant, was a fool’s errand. During all the scaling debates of 2014-16, they dug in their heels, shouting slogans, guarding their small blocks, instead of thinking about adoption and scaling when the time came.

When the time did come, Bitcoin did not perform. It fact – and it pains me to say this – it completely flopped.

Old school Bitcoiners like me were horrified to see it all happening. It was like an old friend had become possessed. When the mempools exploded, and the miners were in a position to ration trades based on price, it would cost $20 to send $2. This was in the fall and winter of 2017. It was absolutely disgraceful, and all the more so because the newly emergent “maximalists” defended this preposterous reality, acting if as this was part of the plan all along. They were like PeeWee Herman explaining that when he fell off the bike that he “meant to do that.” They flagrantly ignored even the title of the White Paper. Then the fork came in August of 2017, as it necessarily had to. But then followed a tremendous explosion of tokens of all sorts.

I don’t regret the competition, and I think this is all a good thing. I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Competition Maximalist. But the absurdities of Bitcoin’s performance could have been completely avoided with just a bit of concern for the user. I would love it if we could perform a controlled experiment and see the BTC price today if the thing had properly scaled. We can’t do that. We have the reality we have.

Privately, of course, Bitcoin Core developers will admit that this was a disaster and that scaling will eventually take place on the chain. But at this point, pride and arrogance had gotten the best of them. How long will they continue to promise the Lightning Network while showing no concern for the use case? It’s time for a bit of humility.

To be sure, the Lightning Network is super great. We run a node at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. I look forward to its final stability and adoption. The problem is that this was proposed as an eventual solution to the scaling problem that currently exists. Real-time technological development has to deal with problems in real time according to the time schedule of the market rate of adoption. Markets don’t obey code architects; the reverse has to be the case. Bitcoin Core forgot that at the very point it mattered most.

Wendy: Whatever the probable explanation(s), do you have a sense of when or whether crypto markets are likely to rebound significantly? Do you have a sense of what will cause a rebound or prevent one?

Jeff: Like all enthusiasts, I do expect a turnaround. Remember that I’ve been in these markets since BTC was $14. I’ve seen wild swings and long periods of nothingness. I’m prepared for anything.

Wendy: A debate within crypto parallels one I have heard between gold bugs. That is, should one take physical possession of precious metals, or they can be stored with reputable entities. In crypto, the parallel argument is whether coins should be in private wallets with undisclosed keys, or can they be stored with exchanges that do not demand possession of the keys?

Jeff: That is an interesting parallel! I think it is a valid one. I’m disappointed with the rise of what are effectively Bitcoin Banks that now dominate the market. I’ve reluctantly concluded that there is indeed a demand for financial intermediation, even within crypto. Here is a case where my own preferences are being overridden by market choice. That said, intermediation in crypto is not going to have the problems that it does in a central banking world. We have transparency. We have clear lines of ownership. We know the difference between money and a money substitute. I don’t necessarily think that intermediation is an evil thing in the crypto world.

Wendy: Any other thoughts you’d like to share on this subject?

Jeff: I would council Bitcoiners and anyone who sees the potential of this technology to be patient. Think back to railroads and how they came to be. The headlines were all about land speculation, wildcat banks, stock fraud, bankruptcies, and crashes. The reality, in the end, was a transformed world. It was true with the Internet too. People said for years that no one could make money on the Internet. The dotcom crash of 2000 seemed to prove it. Now Internet commerce leads the world. It will be a long time before crypto becomes competitive with nationalized money, and even longer before the pundit class comes around.

The important point is that we have the knowledge. We have the technology. We know now that it is possible. It can be done. There is no longer any excuse for not turning over the production and management of money itself to the market.

Also let us not forget what matters most. Bitcoin is a technology but the goal is much more grand: a better, more peaceful, more prosperous world. I’ve seen it myself how this works. When you pull down the barriers, when you provide opportunities for people to cooperate, beautiful things happen. I see it constantly at the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy. This is a place where people from all walks of life come together in a spirit of joyful cooperation to build the future. This inspires me more than anything else and points to the kind of future that can be built by a P2P technology. It’s a microcosm of what life in the cryptocon can be like.

Wendy: Thank you, Jeff! This has been fascinating.

[To be continued next week.]

Reprints of this article should credit Bitcoin.com and include a link back to the book

Wendy McElroy has “published” her new book The Satoshi Revolution exclusively with Bitcoin.com. However, things aren’t over yet. Every Saturday you’ll find another installment in a series of interviews about sections of the book with people like Doug Casey, L.Neil Smith, Jeff Tucker, Carl Watner…and so on. Altogether they’ll make up her new book ”The Satoshi Revolution”.

The post Wendy McElroy: Interview With Jeffrey Tucker on All Things Crypto, Part Two appeared first on Bitcoin News.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[everydayanth]

It’s fun sharing these random ideas other people have expressed small pieces of on Medium. This article touches on the idea of whether or not intentionally seeking to be inspirational is counterintuitive.

I would like to add from a conversation had with friends last night about a recent post: how we identify ourselves affects our goals. To what extent do we invite self-sabotage by forgetting to seek an end that can be held as a common goal as the idea has become a part of our perception of ourselves? We are fighting for *idea* and we will keep fighting until it is accomplished.

But what does “accomplished” mean?

What would it mean for us if we are identified so wholly by fighting for an idea?

How much of that fight is determined by our subjective definition of the idea.

We can’t change the world by a single person’s values.That’s called a cult.

If we apply our personal values onto a larger concept, it is not readily digestible for others, so I think what this article is really pointing out is that if we create spaces for everyday people to communicate ideas and values (the ancient symposium vs our modern academic conferences), then those ideas can be agreed upon as a unified force. 

Our popular stories show that we know we need this (MCU, Incredibles 2, Jurassic World, etc.), every highest grossing film and TV show (The Voice, Young Sheldon, NCIS, etc.) involves the theme of teamwork being stronger than the individual. Of our hero taking up the mantle to walk the lonely road, only to find they have friends there, they are not alone in changing the world or protecting the future (literally Infinity War).

But when it comes to our individual culture, we seem to fear the other, and for good reason, it is not misplaced or maladaptive fear. But some of it, in my opinion, comes from the weight of the “change the world” ideology. When we can’t do it, we have failed. And mine is a generation of kids who can’t do it, who are failing daily, and for no other reason than to pick it up together is near impossible to coordinate and far too heavy to do without everyone. 

We are not so entitled that we don’t understand our weaknesses, we are not so coddled or or insufferable that we don’t understand our strengths. We are simply hopeless as we are each told to fight for ourselves, because what else is there? We are so incredibly alone. And from experience, I think we bond over that hopelessness, we encourage it in each other. We see the hopeful among us as naive or ignorant, too conformed to a persuasion or institution to bother seeing the chaos we’re living in. 

Perhaps we’re all trying to be important, successful, happy. I don’t have an answer for this question, I think anyone who does is full of shit because it’s a constant shifting balance and the answer changes faster than we can discuss it sometimes, but it is important and has changed the course of so many politically divided conversations I’ve been a part of. Perhaps the simple question is this: does society serve the individual, or does the individual serve the society?

The answer is both, none, one, and the other, and there are arguments for everything in between. Individual freedom is important, especially to make a system like ours work - it requires expression and tolerance. But when I have asked this question to the most fervent of one-sided followers, there is always and extremely convicted answer, and it it is generally different among any possible grouping of people. Because it is not a puzzle, it is a value, a balance of values, really. And I myself have answered it many different ways, often depending on my own emotional stability at the time, or, if I’m honest, my goals in rhetoric. 

This article started with a simple idea: we need space to connect ideas. And it made me think about having that space, in cafes, libraries, parks, wherever there are people, that space already exists but we’re scared of it, or we are hopeless?  

I really want to know your thoughts on discourse - how we discuss concepts, ideas, and most importantly, values. Do you think we have a tendency to project personal values as and expectation, as a “right” or “wrong” or something inherently true? Do you think our comforts and familiarities stop us from growth and acceptance, or do they give us space to invent new concepts? What are your thoughts on hopelessness and the burden of change, of growing up under the constant threat of change-or else! Do you think it has, inherently, made us fearful of the other? Made us define other as a more narrow reflection of simply not us? Maybe even further, defined ourselves as an aesthetic, a blue-vs-red conversation rather than what-should-we-really-do-about-a-large-influx-of-immigration?

And what do we do about that? Is constant anxiety our new state of fear? How do we just go around and redefine reality as inherent civic freedom and then your personal values as your own decoration? How do we shift away from hopelessness and say it’s okay, we got this to each other when we have no idea how to save the world?

Maybe it starts with unity, and if our stories tell us anything, they reflect our fears and our hopes. Right now our stories tell us that we desperately need to hold on to hope, we need to invite discourse, and we need to unite as a team around a common ideology. We saw it with Harry Potter, and we’re seeing it again with the MCU, these massive cultural phenomenons reflect our desires. And if that is true, we seem to desire the same thing - power, control, discussion, teamwork, unity, and hope. What do you think our stories are telling us? 

I’m trying to keep it brief, I’ll probably write a proper post about this idea, it’s been rattling in my head a lot lately. But I’d love to hear thoughts and discussions before I do. I don’t have any formalized opinions quite yet, though sometimes I sound like I do because forming thesis statements and declarative sentences has been permanently scarred into my brain, but these are just ideas that area a bit chaotic. Perhaps all of the problems start with the distance education has come and the things it has dropped on the way to fit all the details in a neat assembly line format, like logical discourse and building/deconstructing a valid argument? Or perhaps my head has been squashed between philosophy textbooks a bit too long lol. 

Anyway... thoughts? 

[denisalvney]

What Is the Optimal Human Diet?

Eggs are bad for you. Wait, eggs are good for you! Fat is bad. Wait, fat is good and carbs are bad! Skipping breakfast causes weight gain. Wait, skipping breakfast (intermittent fasting) is great for weight loss and metabolic health.

It’s enough to make you crazy, right? These are just a few of the many contradictory nutrition claims that have been made in the media over the past decade, and it’s no wonder people are more confused about what to eat than ever before.

Everyone has an opinion on the optimal human diet—from your personal trainer to your UPS driver, from your nutritionist to your doctor—and they’re all convinced they are right. Even the “experts” disagree. And they can all point to at least some studies that support their view. On the surface, at least, all of these studies seem credible, since they’re published in peer-reviewed journals and come out of respected institutions like Harvard Public Health.

This has led to massive confusion among both the general public and health professionals, a proliferation of diet books and fad approaches, and a (justifiably) growing mistrust in public health recommendations and media reporting on nutrition.

Unfortunately, millions of dollars and decades of scientific research haven’t added clarity—if anything, they have further muddied the waters. Why? Because, as you’ll learn below, we’ve been asking the wrong questions, and we’re using the wrong methods.

If you’re confused about what to eat and frustrated by the contradictory headlines that are constantly popping up in your news feed, you’re not alone. The current state of nutritional research, and how the media reports on it, virtually guarantees confusion.

In this article, my goal is to step back and look at the question of what we should eat through a variety of lenses, including archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, anatomy and physiology, and biochemistry—rather than relying exclusively on observational nutrition research, which, as I’ll explain below, is highly problematic (and that’s saying it nicely).

Armed with this information, you’ll be able to make more informed choices about what you eat and what you feed your family members.

Let’s start with the question that is on everyone’s mind ...

What Is the Optimal Human Diet?

Drumroll, please!

There isn’t one.

Note the emphasis on “one.”

There is no way to answer the question “What is the optimal human diet?” because there is no single, optimal diet for every human.

When I explain this to people I talk to, they immediately understand. It makes sense to them that we shouldn’t all be following the exact same diet.

Yet that is exactly what public health recommendations and dietary guidelines assume, and I would argue that this fallacy is both the greatest source of confusion and the most significant obstacle to answering our key questions about nutrition.

Why? Because although human beings share a lot in common, we’re also different in many ways: we have different genes, gene expression, health status, activity levels, life circumstances, and goals.

Modern dieting advice is often confusing, contradictory, and just plain wrong. And, while there’s no such thing as one optimal human diet, there are some foods humans are designed to eat. Find out what should be on your plate—from a Paleo perspective.

Imagine two different people:

A 55-year-old, sedentary male office worker who is 60 pounds Overweight and has pre-diabetes and hypertension

A 23-year-old, female Olympic athlete who is training for three hours a day, in fantastic health, and is attempting to build muscle for a competition

Should they eat exactly the same diet? Of course not.

Our Differences Matter When It Comes to Diet

Although that may be an extreme example, it’s no less true that what works for a young, single, male, CrossFit enthusiast who is getting plenty of sleep and not under a lot of stress won’t work for a mother of three who also works outside the house and is burning the candle at both ends.

These differences—in our genes, behavior, lifestyle, gut microbiome, etc.—influence how we process both macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fat) and micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and trace minerals), which in turn determine our response to various foods and dietary approaches. For example:

People with lactase persistence—a genetic adaptation that allows them to digest lactose, the sugar in milk, into adulthood—are likely to respond better to dairy products than people that don’t have this adaptation.

Populations with historically high starch intake produce more salivary amylase than populations with low starch intake. (1)

Changes to gut microbiota can help with the assimilation of certain nutrients. Studies of Japanese people have found, for example, that their gut bacteria produce specific enzymes that help them break down seaweed, which can be otherwise difficult for humans to digest. (2)

Organ meats and shellfish are extremely nutrient dense and a great choice for most people—but not for someone with hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that leads to aggressive iron storage, since these foods are so rich in iron.

Large, well-controlled studies (involving up to 350,000 participants) have found that, on average, higher intakes of saturated fat are not associated with a higher risk of heart disease. (3) But is this true for people with certain genes that make them “hyper-absorbers” of saturated fat and lead to a significant increase in LDL particle number (a marker associated with greater risk of cardiovascular disease)?

This is just a partial list, but it’s enough to make the key point: there are important differences that determine what an optimal diet is for each of us, but those differences are rarely explored in nutrition studies. Most research on diet is almost exclusively focused on top-down, population-level recommendations, and since a given dietary approach will yield variable results among different people, this keeps us stuck in confusion and controversy.

It has also kept us stuck in what Gyorgy Scrinis has called “the ideology of nutritionism,” which he defines as follows: (4)

Nutritionism is the reductive approach of understanding food only in terms of nutrients, food components, or biomarkers—like saturated fats, calories, glycemic index—abstracted out of the context of foods, diets, and bodily processes.

In other words, it is a focus on quantity, not quality.

Nutrition research has assumed that a carbohydrate is a carbohydrate, a fat is a fat, and a protein is a protein, no matter what type of food they come packaged in. If one person eats 50 percent of calories from fat in the form of donuts, pizza, candy, and fast food and another person eats 50 percent of calories from fat in the form of whole foods like meat, fish, avocados, nuts, and seeds, they will still be lumped together in the same “50 percent of calories from fat” group in most studies.

Most people are shocked to learn that this is how nutrition research works. It doesn’t take a trained scientist to understand why this would be problematic.

And yet, although there are some signs that the tide is turning (which I’ll discuss more below), the vast majority of epidemiological studies that have served as the basis for public health recommendations and dietary guidelines are plagued by this focus on quantity over quality.

But Aren’t There Some Foods That Are Better for All Humans to Eat (And Not Eat)?

I just finished explaining why there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to diet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t core nutrition principles that apply to everyone.

For example, I think we can all agree that a steady diet of donuts, chips, candy, soda, and other highly processed and refined foods is unhealthy. And most people would agree that a diet based on whole, unprocessed foods is healthy.

It’s the middle ground where we get into trouble. Is meat good or bad? If it’s bad, does that apply to all meats, or just processed meat or red meat? What about saturated fat? Should humans consume dairy products?

A better question than “What is the optimal human diet?” then, might be “What is a natural human diet?” or, more specifically, “What is the range of foods that human beings are biochemically, physiologically, and genetically adapted to eat?”

In theory, there are two ways to answer this question:

We can look at evolutionary biology, archaeology, medical anthropology, and comparative anatomy and physiology to determine what a natural human diet is.

We can look at it from a biochemical perspective: what essential and nonessential nutrients contribute to human health (and where are they found in foods), how various functional components of food influence our body at the cellular and molecular level, and how certain compounds in foods—especially those prevalent in the modern, industrialized diet—damage our health via inflammation, disruption of the gut microbiome, hormone imbalance, and other mechanisms.

Let’s take a closer look through each of these lenses.

The Evolutionary Perspective

Human beings, like all other organisms in nature, evolved in a particular environment, and that evolutionary process dictated our biology and physiology as well as our nutritional needs.

Archaeological Evidence for Meat Consumption

Isotope analysis from archaeological studies suggests that our hominid ancestors have been eating meat for at least 2.5 million years. (5) There is also wide agreement that going even further back in time, our primate ancestors likely ate a diet similar to modern chimps, which we now know eat vertebrates. (6) The fact that chimpanzees and other primates evolved complex behavior like using tools and hunting in packs indicates the importance of animal foods in their diet—and ours.

Anatomical Evidence for Meat Consumption

The structure and function of the digestive tract of all animals can tell us a lot about their diet, and the same is true for humans. The greatest portion (45 percent) of the total gut volume of our primate relatives is the large intestine, which is good for breaking down fiber, seeds, and other hard-to-digest plant foods. In humans, the greatest portion of our gut volume (56 percent) is the small intestine, which suggests we’re adapted to eating more bioavailable and energy-dense foods, like meat and cooked starches, that are easier to digest.

Some advocates of plant-based diets have argued that humans are herbivores because of our blunt nails, small mouth opening, flat incisors and molars, and relatively dull canine teeth—all of which are characteristics of herbivorous animals. But this argument ignores the fact that we evolved complex methods of procuring and processing food, from hunting to cooking to using sharp tools to rip and tear flesh. These methods/tools take the place of anatomical features that serve the same function.

Humans have relatively large brains and small guts compared to our primate relatives. Most researchers believe that consuming meat and fish is what led to our larger brains and smaller guts compared to other primates because animal foods are more energy dense and easier to digest than plant foods. (7)

Genetic Changes Suggestive of Adaptation to Animal Foods

Most mammals stop producing lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, the sugar in milk, after they’re weaned. But in about one-third of humans worldwide, lactase production persists into adulthood. This allows those humans to obtain nutrients and calories from dairy products without becoming ill. If we were truly herbivores that aren’t supposed to eat animal foods at all, we would not have developed this genetic adaptation.

Studies of Contemporary Hunter–Gatherers

Studies of contemporary hunter–gatherer populations like the Maasai, Inuit, Kitavans, Tukisenta, !Kung, Aché, Tsimané, and Hadza have shown that, without exception, they consume both animal and plant foods, and they go to great lengths to obtain plant or animal foods when they’re in short supply.

For example, in one analysis of field studies of 229 hunter–gatherer groups, researchers found that animal food provided the dominant source of calories (68 percent) compared to gathered plant foods (32 percent). (8) Only 14 percent of these societies got more than 50 percent of their calories from plant foods.

Another report on 13 field studies of the last remaining hunter–gatherer tribes carried out in the early and mid-20th century found similar results: animal food comprised 65 percent of total calories on average, compared with 35 percent from plant foods. (9)

The amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, the proportion of animals vs. plants, and the macronutrient ratios consumed vary, but an ancestral population following a completely vegetarian or vegan diet has never been discovered.

The Lifespan of Our Paleolithic Ancestors

Critics of Paleo or ancestral diets often claim that they are irrelevant because our Paleolithic ancestors all died at a young age. This common myth has been debunked by anthropologists. (10) While average lifespan is and was lower among hunter–gatherers than ours is today, this is heavily skewed by high rates of infant mortality (due to a lack of emergency medical care and other factors) in these populations.

The anthropologists Gurven and Kaplan studied lifespan in extant hunter–gatherers and found that, if they survive childhood, their lifespans are roughly equivalent to our own in the industrialized world: 68 to 78 years. (11) This is notable because hunter–gatherers today survive only in isolated and marginal environments like the:

Kalahari Desert

Amazon rainforest

Arctic circle

What’s more, in many cases hunter–gatherers reach these ages without acquiring the chronic diseases that are so common in Western countries. They’re less likely to have heart disease, diabetes, dementia and Alzheimer’s, and many other debilitating, chronic conditions.

For example, one study of the Tsimané people in Bolivia found that they have a prevalence of atherosclerosis 80 percent lower than ours in the United States and that nine in 10 Tsimané adults aged 40 to 94 had completely clean arteries and no risk of heart disease. (12) They also found that the average 80-year-old Tsimané male had the same vascular age as an American in his mid-50s. (Did you notice that this study included adults up to age 94? So much for the idea that hunter–gatherers all die when they’re 30!)

When you put all of this evidence together, it suggests the following themes:

Meat and other animal products have been part of the natural human diet for at least 2.5 million years

All ancestral human populations that have been studied ate both plants and animals

Human beings can survive on a wide variety of foods and macronutrient ratios within the general template of plants and animals they consumed

Additional Reading

For a deeper dive on this topic, I recommend the following articles:

The Diet We’re Meant to Eat, Part 1: Evolution & Hunter–Gatherers

The Diet We’re Meant to Eat, Part 2: Physiological & Biological Evidence

Hunter–gatherers enjoy long, healthy lives

Eating meat led to smaller stomachs, bigger brains

The Biochemical Perspective

Understanding ancestral diets and their relationship to the health of hunter–gatherer populations is a good starting place, but on its own, it doesn’t prove that such diets are the best option for modern humans.

To know that, we need to examine this question from a biochemical perspective. We need to know what nutrients are essential to human health, where they are found in food, and how various components of the diet and compounds in foods affect our physiology—both positively and negatively.

The good news is, there are tens of thousands of studies in this category. Collectively, they bring us to the same conclusion we reached above:

That a whole-foods diet that contains both plants and animals is the best—and in some cases, only—way to meet our nutrient needs from food.

Nutrient Density

Nutrient density is arguably the most important concept to understand when it comes to answering the question, “What should humans eat?”

The human body requires approximately 40 different micronutrients for normal metabolic function.

Maximizing nutrient density should be the primary goal of our diet because deficiencies of any of these essential nutrients can contribute to the development of chronic disease and even shorten our lifespan.

There are two types of nutrients in food: macronutrients and micronutrients. Macronutrients refer to the three food substances required in large amounts in the human diet, namely:

Protein

Carbohydrates

Fats

Micronutrients, on the other hand, are vitamins, minerals, and other compounds required by the body in small amounts for normal physiological function.

The term “nutrient density” refers to the concentration of micronutrients and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, in a given food. While carbohydrates and fats are important, they can be provided by the body for a limited amount of time when dietary intake is insufficient (except for the essential omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids). On the other hand, micronutrients and the essential amino acids found in protein cannot be manufactured by the body and must be consumed in the diet.

With this in mind, what are the most nutrient-dense foods? There are several studies that have attempted to answer this question. In the most comprehensive one, which I’ll call the Maillot study, researchers looked at seven major food groups and 25 subgroups, characterizing the nutrient density of these foods based on the presence of 23 qualifying nutrients. (13)

Maillot and colleagues found that the most nutrient-dense foods were (score in parentheses):

Organ meats (754)

Shellfish (643)

Fatty fish (622)

Lean fish (375)

Vegetables (352)

Eggs (212)

Poultry (168)

Legumes (156)

Red meats (147)

Milk (138)

Fruits (134)

Nuts (120)

As you can see, eight of the 12 most nutrient-dense categories of foods are animal foods. All types of meat and fish, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and dairy were more nutrient-dense than whole grains, which received a score of only 83. Meat and fish, veggies, and fruit were more nutrient dense than legumes, which were slightly more nutrient dense than dairy and nuts.

There are a few caveats to the Maillot analysis:

It penalized foods for being high in saturated fat and calories

It did not consider bioavailability

It only considered essential nutrients

Caloric Density and Saturated Fat

In the conventional perspective, nutrient-dense foods are defined as those that are high in nutrients but relatively low in calories. However, recent evidence (which I’ll review below) has found that saturated fat doesn’t deserve its bad reputation and can be part of a healthy diet. Likewise, some foods that are high in calories (like red meat or full-fat dairy) are rich in key nutrients, and, again, can be beneficial when part of a whole-foods diet. Had saturated fat and calories not been penalized, foods like red meat, eggs, dairy products, and nuts and seeds would have appeared even higher on the list.

Bioavailability

Bioavailability is a crucial factor that is rarely considered in studies on nutrient density. It refers to the portion of a nutrient that is absorbed in the digestive tract. The amount of bioavailable nutrients in a food is almost always lower than the amount of nutrients the food contains. For example, the bioavailability of calcium from spinach is only 5 percent. (14) Of the 115 mg of calcium present in a serving of spinach, only 6 mg is absorbed. This means you’d have to consume 16 cups of spinach to get the same amount of bioavailable calcium in one glass of milk!

The bioavailability of protein is another essential component of nutrient density. Researchers use a measure called the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), which combines the amino acid profile of a protein with a measure of how much of the protein is absorbed during digestion to assess protein bioavailability. The PDCAAS rates proteins on a scale of 0 to 1, with values close to 1 representing more complete and better-absorbed proteins than ones with lower scores.

On the scale, animal proteins have much higher scores than plant proteins; casein, egg, milk, whey, and chicken have scores of 1, indicating excellent amino acid profiles and high absorption, with turkey, fish, and beef close behind. Plant proteins, on the other hand, have much lower scores; legumes, on average, score around 0.70, rolled oats score 0.57, lentils and peanuts are 0.52, tree nuts are 0.42, and whole wheat is 0.42.

Thus, had bioavailability been considered in the Maillot study, animal foods would have scored even higher, and plant foods like legumes would have scored lower. 

Essential vs. Nonessential Nutrients

The Maillot study—and a similar analysis from Harvard University chemist Dr. Mat LaLonde—only considered essential nutrients. In a nutritional context, the term “essential” doesn’t just mean “important,” it means necessary for life. We need to consume essential nutrients from the diet because our bodies can’t make them on their own.

Focusing on essential nutrients makes sense, since we can’t live without them. That said, over the past few decades many nonessential nutrients have been identified that are important to our health, even if they aren’t strictly essential. These include:

Carotenoids

Polyphenols

Flavonoids

Lignans

Fiber

Many of these nonessential nutrients are found in fruits and vegetables. Had these nutrients been included in the nutrient density analyses, fruits and vegetables would likely have scored higher than they did.

What Can We Conclude from the Biochemical Perspective?

When we look at a natural human diet through the lens of biochemistry and physiology, we arrive at the same conclusion: our diet should consist of a combination of organ meat, meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, fresh vegetables and fruits, nuts, seeds, and starchy plants.

But how much of the diet should come from animals, and how much from plants? The answer to this question will vary based on individual needs. If we look at evolutionary history, we see that on average, humans obtained about 65 percent of calories from animal foods and 35 percent of calories from plant foods on average, but the specific ratios varied depending on geography and other factors.

That does not mean that two-thirds of what you put on your plate should be animal foods! Remember, calories are not the same as volume (what you put on your plate). Meat and animal products are much more calorie-dense than plant foods. One cup of broccoli contains just 30 calories, compared to 338 calories for a cup of beef steak.

This means that even if you’re aiming for 50 to 70 percent of calories from animal foods, plant foods will typically take up between two-thirds and three-quarters of the space on your plate.

(Side note: this is why I’ve always rejected the notion of Paleo as an “all-meat” diet; a more accurate descriptor would be a plant-based diet that also contains animal products).

When we consider the importance of both essential and nonessential nutrients, it also becomes clear that both plant and animal foods play an important role because they are rich in different nutrients. Dr. Sarah Ballantyne broke this down in part three of her series “The Diet We’re Meant to Eat: How Much Meat versus Veggies.”

Plant Foods

Vitamin C

Carotenoids (lycopene, beta-carotene, lutein, zeaxanthin)

Diallyl sulfide (from the allium class of vegetables)

Polyphenols

Flavonoids (anthocyanins, flavan-3-ols, flavonols, proanthocyanidins, procyanidins, kaempferol, myricetin, quercetin, flavanones)

Dithiolethiones

Lignans

Plant sterols and stanols

Isothiocyanates and indoles

Prebiotic fibers (soluble and insoluble)

Animal Foods

Vitamin B12

Heme iron

Zinc

Preformed vitamin A (retinol)

High-quality protein

Creatine

Taurine

Carnitine

Selenium

Vitamin K2

Vitamin D

DHA (docosahexaenoic acid)

EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid)

CLA (conjugated linoleic acid)

Additional Reading

For a deeper dive on these subjects, check out the following articles:

What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?

The Diet We’re Meant to Eat, Part 3: How Much Meat versus Veggies

Focus Your Diet on Nutrient Density

Whether we look through the lens of evolutionary biology and history or modern biochemistry, we arrive at the same conclusion:

If you eat only plant foods or only animal foods, your diet will be significantly less nutrient dense than if you ate both. There’s simply no way around it.

Anthropology and archaeology suggest that it’s possible for humans to thrive on a variety of food combinations and macronutrient ratios within the basic template of whole, unprocessed animal and plant foods.

For example, the Tukisenta of Papua New Guinea consumed almost 97 percent of calories in the form of sweet potatoes, and the traditional Okinawans also had a very high intake of carbohydrate and low intake of animal protein and fat. On the other hand, cultures like the Maasai and Inuit consumed a much higher percentage of calories from animal protein and fat, especially at certain times of year.

How much animal vs. plant food you consume should depend on your specific preferences, needs, and goals. For most people, a middle ground is what appears to work best, with between 35 and 50 percent of calories from animal foods and between 50 and 65 percent of calories coming from plant foods. (Remember, we’re talking about calories, not volume.)

Now I’d like to hear from you. What is your “optimal human diet”? Have you experimented with different ratios of animal vs. plant foods? What works for you? Let me know in the comments section. 

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