#capitalist knee-jerk decisions

[sybbi]

This is from 2019:

Trump cut off aid after Palestinians got upset that he moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, ostensibly recognizing it as the capital of the Israeli state.

It is so cute that people are acting like the man who refused to condemn white supremacists, who told female poc congresswomen to go back where they came from, who praised the brutal extra-judicial killings of Duterte, who implemented a travel ban on Muslim countries, who called African nations suffering from the effects of global capitalist imperialism shitholes, who wanted to shoot BLM protestors with live bullets, who blew to hell the Iran Nuclear Deal, who didn't condemn the brutal murder of a journalist critical of Saudi Arabia, who tried to get Zelensky to find dirt on his political rival by withholding funding (interesting how a Putin fan boy was trying to keep Putin's future target under his thumb with a quid pro quo), who started a knee-jerk tariff war with China and who has proven to be one of the most unstable, dangerous, patently criminal presidents in history is "just as bad" as Biden. You have to have the memory of a goldfish or logic more twisted than a fucking pretzel to genuinely believe that.

what i don't understand about people who refuse to vote for biden bc of his support of israel is why they would ever think trump won't make things even worse. i know y'all's hearts are in the right place, but you aren't saving palestinians by abstaining; you are actively making their situation worse, in addition to like, everyone else who isn't a rich white man. biden's support of israel is abhorrent, but a second trump term will be catastrophic. it's not "they're both bad, so it doesn't matter." one is EXPONENTIALLY worse than the other, and everyone needs to work together to make sure he doesn't take office

[weepingwitch]

hot take: humans should literally not exist. could birds create a holocaust? no. they cannot enact that kind of cruelty, and so they cannot experience that sort of suffering. if we can wring joy or kindness from this existence, great, but we're creatures wired for evil, taking over the planet and killing everyone else- all the animals capable love and enjoyment but not of our depth of cruelty. voluntary human extinction. really truly.

just imagine. a world full of birds, big cats, elephants, communities of bees- no humans. reincarnation, though, if you want. you can be a bird with pickle and eat fruits from trees.

oh sweet anon, this is the kind of take that the kids these days are calling "ecofascist".

some will argue that it's not humans as a whole that are a destructive invasive species, but {white people/Europeans/capitalists/industrialists/colonialists/etc} are the problem, and that X or Y group actually managed to live Correctly and In Harmony With Nature, but this feels like a moot point now? like that's great but that is no longer the case, the entire planet is suffering the effects of pollution and extraction and climate change. and even if it was the case that human cruelty is ontologically contained to {whatever combination of power and whiteness}, what do you do about that? no matter how you slice it, there's a lot of the {bad} people and they have engineered a system that literally prevents the {good} people from being able to live in a non destructive manner, usually by violently taking control of their land.

some will argue that there's no way you will get people to voluntarily go extinct, which is a fair point lol.

it feels like a lot of people have a knee-jerk defensive reaction to being asked to consider the destruction that they are complicit in, as if we are saying that you personally made the decision to live in a society. we've been fed the lies of individual responsibility for so long that people feel like Harming The Environment is a series of small personal choices that they make each day, and of course they wouldn't personally choose to cut down a rainforest or frack for oil, so of course they couldn't be part of the problem 🙃

there's nowhere left where rainwater is safe to drink.

[dreams-of-valeria]

Could it be F1 and A1 but like maybe the reader and hopper have an age gap so the reader parents are almost (but they are not... or they are ? Idk that’s up to you lol) the same age as hopper therefore there’s this kind of tension??? And hopper being kind of clumsy at the cake ? Sorry if I am asking too much, tbh your prompts got me exited!

@may85 asked:

Sooooooo can I please request A1 and F10 together? F10 being that the readers parents are complete shit and giving reader a hard time about Hop being late. Pllleassee!? 🥰🥰

In the midst of winter

F1: Baking a cake together

F10: Requester's choice

A1: Late for Christmas dinner with Reader's parents

Pairing: Jim Hopper × Younger female reader

A/N: Merry Christmas and thank you so much for your kind words! I’ve clubbed both of your requests together because as you can see, they are essentially the same but I’ve made sure to give them some individuality and I really hope you like it!

Warnings: Ok so this turned out to be a little darker than I expected and includes mentions of abuse and crying but it’s nothing our favourite Chief can’t handle. Age gap.

Word count: 3,067

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

The old clock on the wall taunted you with every plock, demanding your attention between every bite of the bread you were working down just to keep your mouth busy.

The alternative would be to make conversation with the two severely conservative, stuck up and judgy people you knew as your parents. But unlike that moment, your childhood didn’t consist of you swimming in bread, although it had always been your favorite.

Your eyes drifted anywhere but over them sitting across from you at the table, and rather flew over the spread you had spent all day making. Gingerbread, ham, mashed potatoes, roasted green beans and carrots, sugar cookies, cake batter on the counter and a stuffed chicken because the store had run out of turkeys the night of Christmas Eve. The festive season was surely joyous and mesmerizing, but also meant you had to work tirelessly to a goal you had set for yourself, and could barely accomplish when your parents had arrived an hour early; just so they’d have extra time to pick at how untidy your apartment was, how old your simple black dress looked, and how you were wasting your life working as a writer at local newspaper. Which, they had added rather graphically the people of Hawkins only used to wipe their unmentionables. And that was even before they got to the pièce de resistance.

They had always been elitist and looked down upon the humble families just trying to survive and make it in a capitalist country, especially the folks of a small town, which was part of the reason you had moved to Hawkins, Indiana. The lion’s share was because you just had to get away.

The pleasant dream of having a small, homely Christmas dinner with Hopper had been shattered by that one phone call last night, of how your parents had caught wind that you’d found someone for yourself from your sister.

Becky hadn’t told them on purpose, of course. Unlike your parents, she didn’t see anything wrong with you dating a 40-year-old man especially when you were finally, truly happy. In fact, her only folly had been to leave the postcard you had sent her out on the counter, and naturally, your nosy parents had found out. Strangely, it had been Hopper’s idea to dress both of you up in all red for the photograph and send Christmas postcards out to everyone you knew. He wasn’t very generically forthcoming but did have certain ways to show affection.

Including offering to cook dinner with you. You smiled when you remembered, how only last night he had taken you in his arms after the phone call and calmed you down until your panic attack had passed. ‘We can figure it out’, he’d said, brushing your hair lovingly. You missed feeling that sense of warmth and safety in his arms.

You didn’t feel even an iota of that warmth and safety in your own apartment and surrounded by the people you’d known ever since you were born. But knowing and loving were two completely different things, you’d realised, a little too late in your life. The moment you did, you were on a bus heading south.

But now there was nowhere to run. They were there to meet your boyfriend, and like he had said, you just had to get through it. Pull off the bandaid. You wished Hopper wasn’t late, that he was there to defend you from the comments or offer comfort with his hand on the small of your back, but he was late, fighting crime. Typical.

Unlike in your parents’ case, you found that to be endearing. Even if he was forced to let you cook dinner alone.

“It’s been a while,” commented your mother, pulling her blazer’s sleeve back down over her diamond wristwatch. She was studded all over with stones, and they made your eyes hurt from the glare. You swallowed the bread and the lump down your throat and tried to smile.

“Like I said, he’s the Chief of police and must be busy with work.”

“On Christmas Eve? Did someone lose a cow or something?” Your father laughed, a balding bespectacled man who outshone his better half only in contempt.

“We’re not all mindless, farming hillbillies, dad.” You sighed, taking a sip from the wine, but reminding yourself not to drink too much. Drowning your sorrows in alcohol had worked before, but right then, it would only work in your parents’ favor. Just another reason to find a flaw in you.

“Of course not, dear. You’re not one of them.” Rebutted your dad, keeping it civil but his eyes spoke otherwise. Appearances meant everything to them, but you could never forget that look in their eyes that spoke more than those golden words ever did.

“Them are people too you know? Like Jim, my boyfriend.” You smiled, rubbing it in. It was a rarity for you to have the upper hand when it came to irking your parents, and you were not going to let this go. Your father sighed, and you could see that he was taking deep breaths to keep the civility going. Deep down, you wished he would break. You could feel a storm brewing, but it was no reason to let Jim bear witness to it. Provided that he made it in time.

“Of course.” He gritted his teeth but soon eased up. “All we’re saying is, it’s rude to be late to dinner. Especially when you spent all day cooking.”

You opened your mouth in reflex to counter but then listened to his words. Really listened. There were no double entendres or veiled insults. That made you even more suspicious.

”We just want what’s best for you, y/n.” He smiled and your mother mirrored him, and you looked between them like a deer in headlights. What sort of game were they playing? There had to be a game.

“And it’s never too late to make the right decision–” Your mother started off, and you interrupted her with an exasperated sigh.

“I knew it,” you chuckled grimly. “You’re just here to try to talk me out of my relationship.”

“What relationship?” Your father spat suddenly, and the timber of his voice made you shudder. There it was. “You are a child, and that jerk is just forcing you to–”

The door clicked open behind you and heavy footsteps gushed in, along with a gust of frozen air. All eyes went to the hallway and landed on the man of the hour, all bundled up in a parka and boots and huffing heavy breaths, probably from running up the three flights of stairs.

He scanned the room and pursed his lips. “H-hey.”

He was terrible at meeting new people. But that was the least of your concerns. You went up to him with an automatic smile on your face despite the circumstances and helped get his parka off.

“I’m so sorry I’m late, a car had tipped over on Maple street and it took forever for the fire engine to get there and I had to wait, baby, there were kids inside–”

“It’s ok.” You assured him with a smile, holding his face in your hands briefly, knowing you had an audience. An especially judgy one.

On that note, he approached the table with a smile and drew his arm across to the seated guests.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Brown, I’m Jim–”

“Ms. Brown.” You mother corrected, eyeing him sharply. You went up behind him and rest your hand on his back, as a form of apology. You knew already you’d be doing a lot of that later.

“My apologies, Ms. Brown. And also for being late. It’s great to meet you.” You could hear the smile in his voice despite the curt way in which they shook his hand.

“Likewise, Jim.” Your father’s jaw clenched. “Now, shall we eat before you get called into duty again?”

Hopper forced a chuckle and you could hear it. He took his seat by you, not excusing himself to change out of his uniform or splash some water on his face like he usually did before dinner. He knew that no matter how much you mouthed off about them, there was still something there, and he respected that enough not to drag it out longer than it had to be and to take whatever they threw at him. It warmed your heart that he would do that for you, but at the same time, you wished he wouldn’t.

“It smells amazing, y/n.” Jim smiled on your right, squeezing your knee gently. You looked into his tired eyes and smiled back. He meant the world to you. Would they ever see that?

“Do you cook, Jim?” Asked your father as he served himself some vegetables, beating you to it. You sighed and served the potatoes to your mother, yourself and Jim.

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Brown–thank you, sweetheart–unless you count microwave dinners.” He laughed in that deep, rumbling voice as he scooped some potatoes onto his spoon.

“I don’t.” Snapped your father, watching him intently as he chewed. “So this is what your … relationship is like? My daughter cooks for you and you don’t even help out–”

“I like cooking for him.” You interrupted, making louder noises with the cutlery than needed. You used to get reprimanded for that too.

Jim gently rubbed your thigh. “I meant to get here earlier, but my job–”

“So if God forbid something happened to y/n late at night, you’d be on Maple street, correct?”

“I bet you’d love if something happened to me, wouldn’t you, mom?” You hissed, stuffing your mouth with the potatoes. They were overcooked. Damn it.

“Please don’t be a martyr, y/n.” She scoffed.

“How could I be when you steal the show, mom?” You snapped and watched her jaw drop. That had never happened before.

“Y/n! That is not how you speak to your mother. Apologize.” You could see the perspiration on your father’s forehead already, and the next level would be his vein throbbing. Some part of you wanted to push him further.

“No, I’m good. Honey, could you pass the ham?” You asked Hopper, and it took him a second to blink and realize you were talking to him. He did as asked with a slight frown as he watched you closely.

You could feel your father’s eyes burn holes through you a while longer before he wordlessly returned to his dinner. You’d nailed the ham. That Jacques Pepin really knew what he was doing.

“If we knew this was how it was going to be, we’d never had flown up.” Your father said passive-aggressively, attacking the poor ham with his knife. “Thought we could just visit our daughter for Christmas …”

“Don’t pretend like that’s all you’re here for, dad.” You rubbed your fingers over your eyes, feeling moisture come back.

“Well, of course, it’s not! We paired you up with the most perfect man!” He exploded, and you were surprised he could hold it in for as long as he did. Of course, he would bring up the lowest point in your life.

“Oh, Gerald?” You scoffed, watching his vein pop. Hopper shifted uncomfortably, arms ready to interrupt if it came to that. He knew everything about your past.

“Yes, Gerald! He went to Yale! He’s going to be a doctor, y/n.” Your father cried, eyebrows furrowed in a rage. Like you had stabbed him in the back. Your mind imploded with the overwhelming memories and seemed to grip at your chest painfully. You could feel another attack coming.

“He … hurt me.” Your voice cracked, and Jim’s arm came around your shoulders.

“So you say!” Your mother dropped her cutlery, leaning forward in a rage. “He is a good boy but of course you would find faults with him, y/n–”

“He hurt me …” you gasped for breath as your voice quivered, feeling the tears track down your face. “ … every. Day.” Jim’s other arm had come around your front and held you tight, but somehow it made you feel better. The weight on your chest was getting lighter with his touches, as he whispered sweet nothings into your ear.

“Oh, I remember the lies, y/n. And that you ran away. And all for what? Him?” Your father spat, pointing at Hopper. His arms around you froze, and you followed.

“Do you have any idea how much you’ve marred the Brown family name? Dating a damn divorcee who’s twice your age in the middle of Godforsaken nowhere?” He rasped, as his entire face turned red.

“What do you want me to do, dad?” You pleaded, throwing him another lifeline. You were stupid to hope, but that was who you were. “You want me to leave the man who loves me for who I am and finally makes me happy and go back to the one you two approve of? Even if he beats me up?”

You gazed at your parents through tears with a sincere question, still waiting like a fool for them to prove you right.

“Gerald would never do that.” Your father sighed, cleaning his glasses to the end of the table cloth, before looking up at you. There was nothing behind those eyes. “But, yes.”

And there it was.

You knew the moment you’d received that phone call that was the reason they were flying down. Not to check on their younger daughter who couldn’t do anything right with her life, or wouldn’t stay with the abuser her own parents had chosen for her right out of college to marry. But still, you dreamed that they were coming to see how you were doing, to meet Jim and maybe playfully threaten him to take care of you or to tell you that no matter what choices you made or who you were, that they were with you. That they loved and supported you.

You scoffed, realizing that that moment was the final nail in the coffin. You had long abandoned your dream of seeking your parents’ approval, but this was the end. You’d found a new dream already, and Jim would not make you chase him or point out your flaws. And you were completely and gratefully in love with him. And that was enough.

You gazed up at his face, at his still tired eyes and haphazard hair, but also at the overwhelming love in his eyes as he asked you repeatedly if you were alright. He was more than enough.

You smiled at him before turning back to them.

“Well, if I’m such a dishonor to the family name, maybe I shouldn’t have it anymore.” You said, straightening up in your seat as Hopper released you, but still kept his hand on your chair.

They looked up at you slowly, until they said almost at the same time, “What?”

“You heard me. And I think you should get going before the snow comes in.” You pulled your chair back and stood to your feet, watching them expectantly.

They seemed confused, and stared up at you with slack jaws until he said, “You’re kicking us out?”

“Perceptive aren’t you, father?” You mocked, and that seemed to do it. They hastily got to their feet and shuffled around to the hallway, grumbling as they put their coats on.

“You remember this moment when you turned your own family away, y/n. When you come begging back to us.”

“Jim treats me more like family than you two ever did. And if I do come back, it’ll be as Y/N Hopper.” You said, before closing the door after them. Their startled faces were etched into your mind as you walked back into the kitchen, wiping the remnant tears from your face.

“Honey?” Jim called hesitantly from behind you but paused in the kitchen when he saw you at the counter, throwing your apron on.

“You promised you’d help, Chief. Get your apron,” You smiled at him warmly through the tears as you uncovered the half mixed cake batter in the bowl. Hopper cautiously threw the apron on as he watched you, washing your hands before dousing them into the yellow batter.

“I’m sure we have a whisk, sweetheart.” He said, tucking some loose hair behind your ears.

“No, it’s better this way,” you smiled like you didn’t just cut off ties with your parents.

“You wanna talk about it?” Hopper asked in as gentle a voice as he could, eyeing the raisins in a bowl. He didn’t like raisins in his cake.

“I’m good. Could you pass the vanilla, please?” You asked, pointing your eyes to the small vial by the oven. He did as you asked, and you could still feel his eyes on him.

“The raisins, too.” You asked, but Jim didn’t spring into action this time. You entered a staredown, one where you looked at him expectantly, and he pleaded with his eyes. You gave in with a chuckle. He could be so adorable sometimes.

“Alright, but just this once.” You conceded, and he hovered behind you, laying a soft kiss on your shoulder.

“I love you,” he whispered, kissing your hair this time. You paused the mixing and sighed, smiling as his arms wrapped around you again. That one ounce of doubt disappeared when you were in his arms again, and bliss replaced it.

“I love you too,” you declared, turning your face to kiss him. Jim was chaste this time and let you off with a peck, lending that moment more gooey-ness than the batter. And it only increased when he slid his fingers down your arms and into the bowl, kneading along with you.

“What are you doing?” You chuckled, leaning back into him. He was your pillar in more ways than one. You were grateful for him every day, starting with the day you’d met him at the newspaper office when he’d wanted some ���intel’. You’d found out days later that it was all made up and the only reason he was there, was for you.

“Helping.” He hummed, kissing your cheek as his fingers intertwined with yours and straightened out the batter, and Jim Hopper was kind enough to lend the same favor to you.

And that was more than enough.

J.

[mssapphire]

Being emotionally responsible: what the hell does that mean? or answering ‘what have you got to offer?’

This post was intended to be a draft because I had some cohesive thoughts looping around my head and I thought it’d be nice to write them down so I could come back to them when I did decide to write a Serious Post (Serious Post like Serious Steven) about it, but I got carried away and the Serious Post just happened.

When you move around non-monogamous circles there’s a phrase that tends to be repeated (but not thoroughly explained, because that’s not what Insta is for): “it’s not about how many people you’re with (simultaneously), it’s about how many people you can actually care for/take care of”, which is a nice way to phrase what is also called “sexo-affective responsibility”. Let’s unpack that.

To me, that’s nothing but a fancier way of saying that you need to know your own limitations and how much capacity and room you actually have in your life to sustain relationships healthily (re: having the time is not the same as having capacity). It’s also based on a very simple common sense principle: you need to relate consciously to people. You should know yourself enough to be aware of your needs and wants, and invest the time and effort in those people who can actually help you grow and heal - and this is not something that just happens spontaneously, but something you think about, weigh, ponder, consider and decide to do.

Giving yourself that time and space to properly assess your capacity is what is going to allow you to decide what type of relationships you should have. And, if you do your homework right, you’ll understand sooner rather than later that there is a lot of bullshit we don’t need in relationships. That there are relationships not worth having, or that we insist we want one thing when in actuality we need something else. It’s like the person who compulsively has as much sex as possible, without stopping to unpack why they do that and why they want that. Or the person who keeps making romantic connections because they have no idea how to make sustainable, basic friendships. 

And yet time and time again you see people in these circles, particularly but not exclusively cis men, who think they understand this, or at least they agree with everything in theory, but they leave nothing but a wake of broken hearts in their path. It’s what I call “out of control steamrollers” (una aplanadora sin frenos). 

So, what gives? Where is the disconnect? Why do these guys keep doing this, so much so that it’s A Thing, a trope, inside the community? Is it because they’re evil? unlikely. Is it because they’re stupid? also, unlikely. Is it because they have loads of male privilege and are taking advantage of the situation so they can have as much sex as they want, while successfully making the bare minimum emotional investment and at the same time scoring Woke Points because they’re “challenging monogamy”? well, I’d say yes, this is definitely the case. But at the same time, it’s something they’re usually unaware of. And thus it’s a behavior that’s very hard for them to change. Because, even if they’re confronted with it (and if they’re adults, I am sure they have been, plenty of times) - they just don’t see themselves that way.

I have personally dealt with these types. All of them lovely guys in their own way. Guys I loved, and still do. But hot damn, so freaking immature. And I think it’s worth sharing that at some point in our relationships, where I was feeling emotionally neglected and uncared for, I confronted them about it. Of course they insisted they cared about me, and sure, why not, I’m sure they did. But a question I like to throw out there in these discussions, and that always catches them off guard is: what have you got to offer me in this relationship?

And they never know how to answer. And I understand - they have never had to ask themselves this question. And here’s my take on why: I think in society men are raised to believe that just by fact of being themselves that’s enough to be in relationship. In fact, this is the knee jerk reaction I usually get: “I’m a good guy! I’m not a terrible person!” - and I am sure they are, that’s not what I’m asking. But they immediately feel it as very personal criticism. As if you were telling them they’re less than. And that’s not the point

When you are in relationship with other people, the dynamic is supposed to be mutual and reciprocal. You can be a great person, but that doesn’t mean you have the mental space to be in relationship, or even the tools and skills to healthily relate to others. This is what I like to call Emotional Illiteracy - why? because it’s something you can learn. You can learn to be empathetic, to listen and communicate better. You can learn about attachment styles and why people relate the way they do when they’re in a loving relationship (platonic, romantic, familiar). But men don’t think that’s something they’re supposed to learn, because that’s un-manly. Emotions are things for women, not for men!

And the thing is that in society, women are raised to be caretakers and empathetic and to put other people’s needs ahead of their own. Am I saying that all women are sensitive and great in relationship while every guy is emotionally stunted and will never truly love anyone? of course not. What I’m saying is that men who don’t proactively question these structures and who seek out help and actually take the time to learn (and unlearn) are probably going to do a lot of damage... they don’t even want to do, but that they’ll be emotionally responsible for non the less. And yes, we all have things to learn, like what relationships are systematically unequal and should thus be avoided, but I think when it comes to love, men are more in the woods.

Personally, I think Bell Hooks’ definition of love is the most accurate I’ve ever seen: love is not just a feeling you have for someone, it’s a verb - it’s the things you do to grow and nurture the relationship, motivated by that feeling. Feelings alone are no base for a relationship - feelings change. But action based on connection, and a willingness to be vulnerable and heal and connect with someone else, is what is going to give you solid relationships that will stand the test of time. 

But in hetereopatriarchal society, men are taught that their attraction to women, and that alone, is what is going to reward them with a relationship. After all, men do the desiring, and women are the objects of their desire. Time, and time again, I’ve met guys whose only interactions with me boiled down to telling me how attractive they found me. And, sure, that’s nice and all. But that is not actually connecting and setting the grounds for love to grow. And there’s a common misconception where we confuse desire and admiration with love (explained in this post), because we have no idea what love actually is.

Love is being seen, known, heard and understood. And love actions are those actions centered around making the other person feel (say it with me) seen, known, heard and understood. That means making the effort of really getting to know someone. To discover their history, their inner world, to uncover trauma together - and then, by virtue of sharing time and experiences together, provide space for emotional wounds to heal. Love is not fixing someone else’s brokenness, it’s understanding them just enough so they feel safe and less alone, which is something that will nurture them into self-healing.

And this all sounds like extremely hard work - like dangerous work even. We are not taught to be vulnerable, we’re not taught to be in a healthy relationship with ourselves, let alone with others. But understanding just how much of an impact we can have on people around us, for the better or for the worse, is what’s actually going to allow us to make responsible decisions.

When we fail to do all of this work, and engage in relationships impulsively, we’re doing nothing but engaging in capitalistic consumerism of bodies and emotions (another post I intend to write). Where we are using people only to provide us with pleasure or comfort, until things get too difficult and we toss them aside and move on to our next victim (in polyamory circles they call this ‘new relationship energy’ - the rush you get when you start any loving relationship, which can be addictive). Needless to say, but: this is unfair and irresponsible.

And irresponsible, rampant, consumerism not only applies to sex, but to emotions as well (you can be abusive and exploitative in non-sexual relationships too, you know). When we don’t show up emotionally and leave the other person to do all the emotional labor in the relationship - we are using them. Coming to someone just when we need their support and their shoulder to cry on or, worse, when we need someone to give us a solution to our problems, is deeply exploitative and immature.

That’s why it’s so important to have an integral relationship with ourselves. If we are self-destructive, un-self-aware, selfish, prone to instant gratification, and in no place whatsoever to actually care for other people (or, in other words, emotionally immature) - then we really shouldn’t be in relationship. Like the character of Darryl says on the episode of Hunters Without a Home of The Midnight Gospel: according to Tibetan views, love is how happy you can make another person. That is answering the question: what have you got to offer them in relationship? 

The reason why this is such a hard question to answer, I think, it’s because we’re afraid to look inside and find ourselves empty, without anything of real value to offer. And, again, please don’t confuse ‘offering value’ with offering hedonistic pleasure, status, or material things. In the end, as human beings, we all have a necessity to love and be loved - to be interconnected. And I find it appalling and devastating that we live in a society that has made us believe that our actual worth is outside of us, or that ‘we don’t owe each other anything’ or that ‘we shouldn’t have any expectations’ (this relates to a hook up culture that has convinced us that sex is the best and only thing we’ve got to offer, again, another post I intend to write eventually).

No matter what relationship model you choose to practice (monogamy, polyamory, relationship anarchy, open relationships), if you are emotionally illiterate you will only engage in consumerism of bodies and people. And one of the best things you could ever do for your own sake and other’s is to actually make the effort and learn.

Anyway, it’s 2am and my brain has ran out of juice, so forgive me if the conclusion isn’t better articulated. But, there you go!

Edit: here’s a shorter, bullet point version I had already written and which I had forgotten about.

[writr4luvrs]

[:)]

[Platonic] Zer0/Reader

Request: "Zer0 and reader split after borderlands 2 and reunite in 3"

You hated Pandora, you hated the bandits, you hated the animal kingdom, even the plant life was trying to kill you and you hated that just as much. But it didnt compare to how much you hated of having to make the decision of leaving one of the few and only people who was your best friend on this godforsaken planet. Zer0, the silent and mysterious being that roamed the lands for swift and deadly kills and vanish. You partnered with them on missions, went on hunting camps, you both had each others backs. The silent being kept to themself the first few weeks only to easily open up more and more to you and vice versa. Your bond to them made your heart clutch and your throat tighten.

When Wainwright Jakobs sent an echo to your mailbox to off you to be his personal aid in his protection as well conducting business and to jump onto the first spacecraft off Pandora, who the hell would you be to refuse? You wouldn't have to sleep with a literal eye open, you'd have a warm bed, an actual proper long bath, good food, and an astounding pay. "Handsome Jack is dead /-" Zero beings.

"So, must my dream?!" You partially meant that. "I mean- ugh! I can't just leave, leave you, but, shit man..." you squat to the ground, arms resting on your knees, your brain scattered. "This opportunity is the greatest gig I've ever been offered... come with me." you look up to them and they respond with: :'(. "Ugh!" your head falls.

"It's an opportunity / that can't be dismissed."

"I know..." you softly groan.

"Atlas wants me too / If that makes you feel better / It's innetible." You looked up to them, you realized they wanted you to go, to get off this planet cause even they were soon to leave. During the hours you spent on the ship to Eden-6, you couldn't tell if your gut was twisting to your malcontent for missing your best friend or if it was the artificial gravity that you had yet to get use to. After a few weeks of guarding Jakobs and his boyfriend Hammerlock, running jobs around the swamp aesthetic planet, you became adjusted and only occupied your mind with work and hunting. And when the years passed, you understood that leaving Pandora was the best thing for you, every once in a while reminiscing memories of your old friends, glad that Zer0 had told you to leave.

You met good people, ate better food, lied in a warm bed, and a hell of a lot of guns and cash. That was until ships of Children of the Vault (COV) and Maliwan invaded the planet, no doubt, from what you heard from the echonet, they were here for a vault. You trusted every word that Wainright said and so if he said there wasn't a vault, there wasn't a vault. "So, why the hell send me half across the universe to Promethea? The shittiest capitalist planet in the region?!"

"I- first of all: your tone and second of all: that Rhys fellow has specific codes that we need. Despite being observantly obtuse, he knows what he's doing."

"So why not send-"

"No! All he does is soak up bullets and don't even get me started on Miss Gillette..." You recall that he has never liked that man. "We're ending this discussion, bring back them codes before any of them COV bastards catch whiff of you." When you landed on Promethea, you had to fight and dodge through the war zone, turn your head from the refugees that hid from Maliwan and COV, you had to focus but luckily Wainright had contacted Rhys before your departure. Yet, you had run into some trouble. Maliwan soldiers stood guarding their post that was directly in the way of the Atlas office building.

Sneaking in would have been impossible and a Maliwan soldier's: "Move along, poor." just didnt feel great to hear so you decided to give them a few bullets, tragically leading to a battle between you and the soldiers. Fire was becoming more and more heated, you needed back up and called the direct line to Rhys' office, finally having the realization you could've called beforehand instead of outright fighting but then again shooting that Maliwan asshole was worth it. "What?" an agitated voice answered your echo.

"This is Jakobs coming to collect the codes, got a lil situation with Maliwan at your front door."

"I know, those freaking jerks have been trying to barge into my office all-"

"Can you please send backup, like, nowish?"

"Yeah yeah yeah, sure sure sure!" Moments more of shooting and surviving, you notice the number of soldiers were becoming shorter, dividing. Yet you couldn't figure out who was taking them out, you only continued to shoot until there was one soldier left yet before you were able to shoot them, blood began to spill from them. Their chest appeared to have a blade through his chest yet there wasn't- "Oh... okay." The realization coming to you as the soldier fell to their knees, behind them was a dark figure, the assassin and biggest number than majority of people you've come across: "Zer0!" You step over the soldier, kicking away at them as they grasped desperately at you, you tell them "excuse me" and friendly punch the assassin in their shoulder. "My dude! Where you been?"

"Working for Atlas /." Their helmet presenting a ':)' emoticon. "Those Maliwan are real assholes / Thanks for helping out."

"...I called you.."

"... I didn't want to / say it..."

"Well, you're welcome and thanks." You put your arm around their neck, the gesture was automatic. "Let's go get these stupid codes, you nut." The familiarity of their silence, their emoticons, the total dweebness under the cool cold assassin persona. After gathering the codes, you made sure to tell them that the two of you needed to catch up.

"Yes, we can collect / more heads from assholes I've scoped / it'll be great fun." You notice some somewhat gawking from Rhys from afar, did you hint jealousy?

"Yeah, I wouldn't mind....killing or y'know spending time with you... bro..." you lightly punched their shoulder, picking up some blood from it. Yeah, you missed this.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Few of us will ever grasp the level of pain and trauma that the loved ones of Humboldt Broncos players and staff have experienced since Apr. 8, 2018, when a catastrophic collision between a bus and freight truck in rural Saskatchewan killed 16 people and injured another 13.

So many young lives were stolen, far too soon. Those who survived are dealing with lifelong disabilities, injuries and mental trauma. Some are still hospitalized. Such disasters impact small towns like Humboldt — population 5,869 — with disproportionate force. It will likely take decades for the community to heal.

But this calamity is not the fault of truck driver Jaskirat Singh Sidhu alone.

Yes, Sidhu was at the wheel when the semi truck carrying peat moss ran the oversized stop sign, ignoring a series of glaring warnings ahead of the intersection. That’s clearly why the now 30-year-old pled guilty in early January to all 29 counts of dangerous driving, for which Crown prosecutors are seeking a 10-year prison sentence (the judge’s decision is expected to be released on March 22).

But the Humboldt crash was the result of much more than that catastrophic momentary lapse. Far more to blame is a combination of massive regulatory failures, infrastructure neglect, and the all-consuming capitalist imperative to maximize profits with higher speeds, longer shifts, and less training.

The public knee-jerk desire to incarcerate him — which will likely lead to his eventual deportation after he serves his sentence — does absolutely nothing to address that reality or protect youth in the future. Rather, it points to the deeply unhelpful reality of our culture’s obsession with carceral punishment of individual offenders, especially people of colour, leaving the true culprits unscathed.

Continue Reading.

[bitchesgetriches]

Hi Bitches, I have a question that's not really financial, but more about maintaining empathy in this capitalist hellscape. It's long, so I apologize in advance. So. I live in NYC and there are homeless people everywhere. I can remember being a kid and having huge amounts of sympathy for the homeless in my hometown city; I always gave some of my allowance money if I walked by a homeless person, or asked a parent for a dollar to give. Fast forward to now. I'm 27, have lived in 1/4

           NYC for 2+ years, and have lost so much sympathy for the suffering of the homeless. I know logically that I should be much more sympathetic to their situation, but I also can't help but to think that they are such a nuisance. I almost never give them a spare dollar or two now. I mean, I really need every dollar I make right now, at least I think I do. My family & I just can't afford it. I loathe them for inconveniencing me with their shouting and their stench. I think that if they've 2/4   

           reached the point of needing to beg strangers for help, they must have alienated all of their loved ones; I'd never be in that position. If the people who love them won't help them, why should I? But then logically I know that's not true either. I could be in that place with just a few family tragedies. It's this internal battle I deal with every day on my commute: I dehumanize these people, I feel guilty and logically know I'm wrong, I do nothing to help. I want to stop my dehumanization 3/4       

           of the homeless because I know it's wrong, and because I know I can do better for them and society can do better for them. The homelessness problem is clearly related to this capitalist world we live in, but what can be done? How do I stop mentally battling myself and actually get over being annoyed and repulsed every time a homeless person inconveniences me? Thank you bitches for everything, even if this never gets answered        

This is SUCH an interesting question. Thank you for asking it, dearheart! And I applaud you for your self-awareness, pragmatism, and compassion. It’s clear that this is a mental struggle for you, and the very fact that you don’t simply stop the introspection at “Well IIIII would never end up homeless, alone, and stinking up the sidewalk” but instead are working to improve your outlook speaks very highly of you.

So let’s talk about homelessness.

As John Oliver so eloquently explains in this clip, the vast majority of Americans are sooooo much closer to being a homeless beggar on the streets than they are to being on MTV’s Cribs. Our individual financial security is fucking precarious! That’s why we write this blog! Yes, you can build up an emergency fund and save six months of your income, but when you get right down to it, most of us are one major medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

And if you can’t recover from said emergency, if you don’t have a support network to get you out of that mess... that’s it. You’re done. You’re staring down the barrel of homelessness and getting judged by strangers on the street for your inability to stay clean and hygienic while you literally sleep under the overpass and rummage through the dumpster behind Panera for day-old bread.

Now let’s address your knee-jerk reaction that homeless people must’ve really fucked up to lose all support and end up on the street. Surely, someone like YOU could never end up there because you have people who love and support you, right?

Sadly, a lot of homeless people are mentally ill, and slipped through the cracks left by their caretakers and an imperfect system. Others are kids who have aged out of the foster care system with no helping hand and no prospects for an education or career. Others are gay and trans youth who were literally kicked out of their homes and disowned by their families. Others are addicted to substances in this great nation where we treat addiction like a crime rather than the public health crisis it is.

Put even the most normal, patient, chill person in any of these situations, grind them down with bad weather, abuse, lack of nutrition and healthcare for months and years, and I guarantee they’ll get a bit surly. When you meet a loud, annoying, unhygienic homeless person on the street, you’re meeting them at their worst. I defy you to act any better in their situation!

All of which is to say that even a homeless person who you find personally repugnant and unsympathetic is probably not so different from you. Non-homeless people can be massive fucking dicks, so why not the homeless?

I know I keep using “you” in a sort of accusatory fashion in this post, and I promise I’m not condescending to you or picking on you. It’s all meant to reinforce the idea that there is a very thin line separating all of us financially stable people from the homeless. That alone makes them worthy of our compassion and respect. Basic human decency goes a long way to someone who gets alternately ignored and shat upon by most of the human race.

Here’s s’more on why we should all cut the poor and homeless a break:

"Poor People Are Poor Because They Are _____. Rich People Are Rich Because They Are _____." 

It's More Expensive to Be Poor Than to Be Rich

Lastly, here’s what you can do to stop feeling impotent, useless, and heartless when you see a homeless person and you can’t afford to give them money.

Vote.

I personally very rarely give money to the homeless. But I do donate to a number of charitable organizations that help to alleviate the plight of the homeless and impoverished in my country. I also vote for politicians and policies that will improve life for those struggling to make ends meet. I support policies and politicians who aim to get at the root of the homelessness problem--not just systemic poverty, but inadequate mental health programs, lack of support for veterans and the disabled, and lack of protection for children suffering abuse or lacking stability in their home lives.

I pay taxes in the hopes that my money will be used to stab the root problems of homelessness in the heart. When I see a homeless person on the street, I remind myself that I am making informed political decisions to help them. I remind myself that they are the reason I donate to charities and food banks. And yeah, sometimes if I can, I spare a dollar for their plight. But if I can’t in that moment, then I know that I’ve still done something on a broader scale.

You need to start thinking this way to alleviate your guilt. Be the logical, pragmatic person you appear to be from your question. And remind yourself that some day, you could be in the same position whether you expect it or not.

Good luck, honey. It’s going to be ok.

Here’s some further reading:

Ask the Bitches: "How Do I Protect My Own Mental Health While Still Helping Others?"

Raising Awareness About "Raising Awareness"

Raising the Minimum Wage Would Make Our Lives Better 

How to Spot a Charitable Scam

Judging Charities Like Judgey McJudgerson: How Can Your Donation Make the Biggest Impact? 

[tanadrin]

Idk man, in their cynical moods people want to believe that brands are all vibes and bullshit and stuff, but you know what? Sometimes the off-brand peanut butter really does taste significantly worse than the name brand! And I think in their cynical, knee-jerk reactions to capitalism, people want to have it both ways: they want capitalists to be evil ruthless profit-maximizers (which they are sometimes, to be fair!) and also to leave money on the table in cases where it would make no sense to. And yeah, there are some industries where it can be genuinely hard to predict what will sell well and what won't, and this can lead companies to make what are from the outside boneheaded decisions. I think the film industry is a lot like this: risk aversion really can lead to a lot of very samey Marvel movies, because making artistically bold films that people want to see is hard. It's just sometimes hard to predict--even among really well-made films--what will be a breakout hit and what will be a flop!

But consumer goods are not like movies. They're sort of the ideal realm for capitalism to function in, really. You make gadgets, you sell them for more than you paid to make them, you profit. If there really is an unfilled niche that might be profitable, you can survey people to find out what it is (people's preference for stuff like phone size is not nearly as mysterious to market researchers or to the people themselves as their stuff about what makes a film resonate with the human spirit), start selling a new model, and if it sells well, make more of it.

One of the few areas in life in which I actually think capitalism (or at least a robust market economy) is as its best is with physical, consumer goods. There are many fewer of the weird frictions that make markets like housing or healthcare or transit unusual, and it's the domain which conceptually our economics was basically invented to study. For satisfying 99% of people's needs for athletic shoes, or handheld electronics, or small kitchen appliances, it really is a hard system to beat!

Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.

Except.

I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."

And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".

These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.

[random-notes-and-jottings]

How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.

The delete button over a tumbrel

Story by Helen Lewis

JULY 14, 2020

GLOBAL

Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world.

Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture,” is not through a social lens, but an economic one.

Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him.

The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed. The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards? This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful; a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother to three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless.

In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.”

The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic. For Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white-supremacist employee”?

Let’s look at another example of how woke capitalism operates. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’s paperback-nonfiction chart. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was … to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.

This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism.

Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. White Fragility is a staple of formal diversity training, in universities from London to Iowa, and at publications including Britain’s right-wing Telegraph newspaper, as well as The Atlantic. The client list on DiAngelo’s website includes giant corporations such as Amazon and Unilever; nonprofits such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hollywood Writers Guild, and the YMCA; as well as institutions and governmental bodies such as Seattle Public Schools, the City of Oakland, and the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis.

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.” Part of the problem is that although those delivering them are undoubtedly well-meaning, the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications. “Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.” Yet metrics-obsessed companies love these forms of training. When the British Labour leader, Keir Starmer, caused offense by referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment” rather than a movement, he announced that he would undergo implicit-bias training. It is an approach that sees bias as a moral flaw among individuals, rather than a product of systems. It encourages personal repentance, rather than institutional reform. Bohnet suggested other methods to increase diversity, such as removing ages and photographs from job applications, and reviewing the language used for advertisements. (Men are more likely to see themselves as “assertive,” she argued.) Here is another option for big companies: Put your money into paying all junior staff enough for them to live in the big city where the company is based, without needing help from their parents. That would increase the company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay raise.

This, however, would break the iron law of woke capitalism—better to have something you can point to and say “Aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem. Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. These could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

In my book Difficult Women, I wrote that the only question I want to ask big companies who claim to be “empowering the female leaders of the future” is this one: Do you have on-site child care? You can have all the summits and power breakfasts that you want, but unless you address the real problems holding working parents back, then it’s all window dressing.

Along with anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts, LGBTQ politics suffers a similar confusion between economic and social radicalism. The arrival of Pride month brings the annual argument about how it should be a “protest, not a parade.” The violence and victimization of the Stonewall-riot era risk being forgotten in today’s “branded holiday,” where big banks and clothing manufacturers fly the rainbow flag to boost their corporate image. In Britain and the U.S., these corporate sponsors want a depoliticized party—a generic celebration of love and acceptance—without tough questions about their views on particular domestic laws and policies, or their involvement in countries with poor records on LGBTQ rights. Some activists in Britain have tried to get Pride marches to stop allowing the arms company BAE to be a sponsor, given its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, an explicitly homophobic and sexist state. When Amazon sponsored last year’s PinkNews Awards, the former Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T. Davies used his lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech to tell the retailer to “pay your fucking taxes.” That’s economic radicalism.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.” But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back. Companies caught in the scorching light of a social-media outcry are ike politicians caught lying or cheating, who promise a “judge-led inquiry”: They want to do something, anything, to appear as if they are taking the problem seriously—until the spotlight moves on.

Some defenestrations are brilliant, and long overdue. Weinstein’s removal from a position of power was undoubtedly a good thing. But the firing of Emmanuel Cafferty was not. For activists, the danger lies in the cheap sugar rush of tokenistic cancellations. Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.

[spamzineglasgow]

(SPAM Cuts) ‘Circuitous’ by Samantha Walton

In the first SPAM Cut of 2019, Fred Carter explores the Anthropocenic poetics of bodily trauma, personism and scale shift in Samantha Walton’s poem ‘Circuitous’, which you can read for free here.

> ‘The poem was a zippy discourse circus,’ says Rachel Blau DuPlessis, as she recalls buying Frank O’Hara’s Second Avenue at Shakespeare & Co, Paris, 1964. ‘Being inside’ the poem, she writes,

was like living in an alternative mind, inventing elaborated, baroque-ish narrative skits […] a show-offy zeal that took place as language urgency […] “unreadable” and totally syntactic.

Picking up Samantha Walton’s Self Heal in Lighthouse Books, Edinburgh, at the tail end of a less-electric year, the collected work instantly brought to mind DuPlessis’s breathless, effervescent recollection of O’Hara.

> As a collection, Self Heal has a comparable sense of dizzy-carousel, shape-shifting discursive spectacle. Facetiously intimate, formally vernacular, metrically dextrous, and avidly accessible all at once, the poems live in an extended state of language urgency. Walton’s ‘Circuitous’ – which thrums with acute details, astute colloquialisms, and cute lyricisms – knowingly channels O’Hara’s distinctive, ironised chatter:

Sunlight is streaming through the antique glaze

                  & My love for you is galling        you state, over lemon polenta cake        I’m paraphrasing now, but it’s something like,                   I am a bore-hole, & must be plumbed for minerals                  & despised

Yet here the lyric pivots, takes a turn into a world of higher stakes. Personal exchange and relative affluence are plunged into a vaster domain of longer-lasting extractive harm, registering the material consequences ‘deferred for modernity’s sake’. This unsettling volta also marks a scalar shift into planetary and geologic terms:

      Why not just say – the water born from the rock is cool       but you have been raped by industry       & in many ways unnaturally encased?

In a deft rhetorical manoeuvre, the personist register slips into an apostrophic address to mineralogical resources. As Margaret Ronda puts it in her recent Remainders, lyric poetry in the thick of climate collapse often invests ‘apostrophe and prosopopoeia with new proportions’ in knee-jerk response to the emergent scalar derangements of environmental devastation.

> Throughout ‘Circuitous,’ however, this pervasive background of precarity, catastrophe, and epochal change threatens to soak into every fibre and rhetorical device. Colliding bodily trauma with biophysical and technological environments, recursive ‘injuries beep down the blackened feeding tube’; the current digital currency of ‘data’ is never quite cleansed of this material damage, indelibly marked by its ‘clarty’ origins. Rephrasing Marx rephrasing Augier: data, too, comes dripping with blood and dirt.

> Harm, thought of at the scale of the planet and of global capital, appears as a familiar and constant pressure on the terms of personal harm that exemplify the expressivist lyric. In ‘Circuitous,’ ‘nerve-ache’ nestles next to ‘flood’ while another poem in Self Heal complains, plaintively and wryly in equal measure, ‘I can’t love under these conditions’. Personism and introspection constantly threaten to topple over into reflections of environmental damage and exploitation. Still, extracting a handful of demonstrative citations that point to catastrophe scarcely does justice to the persistent sprezzatura and elastic linguistic flourish with which Walton’s poetry handles such terms.

> ‘Circuitous’ forces together disparate discourses with unnerving prosodic ease, far removed from the anxiety, opaque allusion, and syntactic disjuncture that has come to be associated with the contemporary ‘negative’ lyric. Elsewhere in the collection, ‘Poem for You’ yearns to write ‘with a point of reference […] which is you, not the rhetorical you’; frankly ‘tired of problematising’ the lyric self. On balance, Walton’s work seems to levy the complicity of late capitalist catastrophic harm at the feet of personal lyric and ‘innovative’ diffractive tactics alike.

> There’s nothing intrinsically defunct, these poems seem to suggest, about the lyric mode. Indeed, on re-reading, ‘Circuitous’ appears to tap into a lyric tradition that stretches far further back than 1960. The sunlight ‘streaming through the antique glaze’ refracts the ‘unruly sunne’ that once called ‘through windowes, and through curtaines’ to remind Donne’s speaker of a world beyond the private; a reminder that the O’Hara, too, saw himself writing personal poetry in the metaphysical tradition. In this sense, Walton sets out a series of ‘discordia concors’ in 17thcentury manner, yoking together discordant scales and affective registers; ‘the restive galaxy pushing on a string’ is pure Donne, ‘& thick-haunched bee’ pure Marvell.

> While the poem shuttles between the personal and the planetary, the private and the political, Walton appears equally as comfortable raiding the metaphysics for formal flourishes as the ‘linguistic turn’ that succeeded the New American poets. Still, the closing lines of poem return circuitously to O’Hara, echoing the light and economical metrical tread of Lunch Poems:

      We pay up                  & the soles of I touch with my feet which                  correspond to the street       really are responsible for the global tarnishing &       prophetic rumblings of the tectonic plates beneath

Here, the poem comes to a close with an exhilarating scalar expansion, via the contemporary conceit of the ‘carbon footprint,’ from the individual step to the ‘prophetic rumblings’ of the Anthropocene. As the speaker turns to pay the bill for polenta cake, the lyric recognises the geologic agency of human activity. From the ‘solid ground’ of the opening line ‘Circuitous’ completes its circular movement to find only instability in ‘tectonic plates beneath’. Yet the thrill of ‘Circuitous’ – of Self Heal as a whole – is its affirmation of self; of carelessness; of love, despite complicity in acts of ‘global tarnishing’.

> Tired of problematising, ‘Circuitous’ is refreshingly un-hung-up on overworked critiques of lyric, offering instead a ‘baroque-ish’ alternative of versification at its most diverse, its most urgent, and at its fullest stretch. As DuPlessis wrote of reading Second Avenue in 1964:

No crises of judgment in relation to decisions. No angst! Just an insistence on scale that here seemed out of proportion to the casual intensity.

~

Text: Fred Carter

Image: Maria Sledmere

[cielb]

random rant about political spectrum

so based on what i see on the internet, and my experience going through a gamut of different political ideologies throughout my short-ish life, here’s my issue with right wingers, left wingers, and centrists. i speak from an american perspective. i’ll pick on centrists first. these are generalizations and if you don’t do these things it doesn’t apply to you. Centrists: >assume they’re “above,” partisan politics, while embracing a status quo which is really bad, or while unknowingly having a (usually) right wing bias because they don’t critically examine their culture and have taken whatever random point the overton window is now at to determine what is “normal.” >act condescending and as if leftists or conservatives have to “beg,” for their approval >vote third party or not at all, even when the stakes are very high  >take ideological positions without any context of history or their society, resulting in hot takes such as, “If black people can say the n word, so can I, and if I can’t then that’s racist against ME.” >assume they’re automatically more reasonable and logical than their political opponents >assume if their opponents have a more extreme ideology than theirs, it is due to indoctrination/radicalization, and that the status quo is the holy grail Conservatives: >deny homophobia, racism, other problems within their political party >while a conservative may not personally be that, they will not go out of their way dragging the various politicians who hold these views and represent them out of office >meanwhile, liberals always dig dirt on their own politicians and find what’s problematic with them >while SJWs always find anything wrong with anyone, many conservatives do the opposite and may even hype up negative qualities  >the obvious example being the President >are supposed to be the financially responsible party due to opposing expansion of social safety nets >hold moral high ground over some controversial issues, but without trying to make a system that improves conditions that cause such issues to exist in the first place Liberals: >Many liberal politicians are republican lite > left wing politicians have not been able to stop gentrification, poverty, various other problems >This is not entirely every liberal politician’s fault, and there’s ones who do work hard and deserve credit >But it is easy for conservatives to deflect criticism by pointing out poverty ridden places like Baltimore >And blame it on Liberal policies >Liberals will avoid shutting down people who are obviously toxic to their causes because it’s politically incorrect to do so >Try too hard to sound woke and sound fake instead Problems with extremists on both sides: Really self righteous Annoying to be around Refuse to accept any moral ambiguity  Their refusal to accept ambiguity does not make it not exist Thus they come across as unempathetic, stuck up assholes who screw over decent people who made difficult decisions because such people suffered a lot and were unable or unwilling to live up to the strict moral standards the extremists hold.  Because extremists on both sides were annoying as shit, I spent a decent amount of time being centrist/libertarian but socially progressive for a couple years. But I eventually thought through after reading dissenting opinions that conservative policies on immigration, the economy, etc., were opposed to social progressivism. So that put me in a moral dilemma where left wing policy doesn’t sound realistic at all, but conservatism was clearly bereft of solutions and centrism refused to address racism, sexism, etc., or its historical roots, causes, etc.  As of now I would say socialism is not the threat many people are calling it. The level to which capitalism has infiltrated our livelihoods (when was the last time walmart workers held a strike? How many people can’t even criticize the unfair conditions they live in? How can the power that Google and Amazon wield be justified?), our personal lives (Pornography being a capitalist, sexist, racist industry which has become more and more normalized and accepted), and the fact that without forcing companies to care about the environment, we’re literally all fucked, I can say that as of now, what has been dubbed “Late Stage Capitalism,” is the more serious problem. The issue is how can this be addressed in time to save the planet and bring about social and economic justice? How can this realistically be achieved? I honestly don’t know, but I do believe a few things matter: 1) Voting MATTERS. We would not have gerrymandering or disenfranchising going on with people of color if it didn’t. Even if you don’t like who is running, go and vote.  2)Unions and strikes matter. We need to support low income workers because they are an integral part of our corrupt system and the people at the top need to realize that and be afraid. 3)We need to stop being knee-jerk opposed to direct action. When William Spronsen bombed ICE cars, that was direct action. Our reaction to child dying in concentration camps shouldn’t be “uhhh well they didn’t have their papers and we can just write letters to the government that we’re angry.”  4)We have to stop using ourselves as the baseline for what is normal. Many other countries have cheaper secondary education or healthcare. While these countries are different from America and thus their solutions may be simpler than ours, we need to get out of the mentality that we’re the best and see what we can learn from others.

[andersa]

Fully Automated Luxury Communism *IS* Our Future

I have been planning to write on this topic, but a recently featured article in OneZero inspired me to kick it off now. This is my rebuttal.

  In his analysis of the book Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani, Robin Whitlock wrote an article that he felt outlined the reasons why Bastani is incorrect in his belief that one day (perhaps sooner than we may realize), the world will transition to a one-world, communist-style form of government. I haven’t read Bastani’s book, but, I have been an avid supporter of this concept for nearly a decade after watching the movie Zeitgiest: Moving Forward.

Over the years, I have also engaged in conversations about this topic with literally thousands of people, and most of them repeat the same fallacies over and over in their denial that such a thing could ever possibly happen. I have found that many people have several cognitive biases that hinder their ability to look forward into the future and see what it could potentially look like.

Often, they believe it will look and behave very similarly (if not worse) than what we have today, maybe just with a few more gadgets to play with. In fact, most people are completely unaware of their own biases, let alone that there are 175 known biases that influence our rationale.

Of course, the most obvious is the negative connotation that the word “communism" brings to mind. Immediately, the thought of walking skeletons forced into labor camps spurs a knee-jerk reaction to immediately stop listening to any argument that can even remotely be deemed “pro-communist". But, just to touch on some of the other common biases that influence this conversation (and most people’s daily lives) are:

Declinism- when we remember the past as better     than it was, while simultaneously believing the future will be worse than     it likely will be.

Just-World- Many of us who live in developed     nations like to believe the world is a just place. It makes us feel     secure. To think that somewhere in the world someone is dying of hunger,     can overwhelm us with guilt if we think about it while we enjoy an     expensive meal at a nice restaurant. So, we chase away the guilt by     reminding ourselves that we work hard and we’re good people, so we deserve     this nice meal. Anyone who doesn’t have access to such things is just not     trying hard enough, so they get what they deserve. Of course, this bias     can cloud our judgment of other people and their situations. It helps to     cloak the madness of the system we have built. It’s also a bias that     politicians tend to exploit to get you to vote for them, and one that     makes people believe the world in the future will be pretty much the same     place it is today.

Belief & Confirmation Bias: Our beliefs shape     our perception. After all, the human condition requires we believe in     something for it to be real. When one believes in something, they will     find or fabricate as much evidence as necessary to support that belief;     likewise for something one does not believe in. Our brains automatically     default to our belief structures when analyzing nearly any subject. And,     it can sometimes be difficult to examine the evidence with an open mind     that may challenge those beliefs.

Dunning-Kruger: The more you know, the less     confident you are. Fools rush in without understanding. The wise     understand how little they know and pause for consideration.

Framing: It is amazing what a frame can do for a     portrait or painting. The right frame really makes the piece pop and     increase the appreciation of those beholding the piece of art. The same     goes for our brains. Major media, consumer data companies, and marketers     understand how their piece of art is framed MATTERS. A LOT. It is often     seen that they will frame things in different ways for different consumer     tastes and preferences. It is an extremely easy way to manipulate the masses.     And, once one recognizes this bias, one begins to see the frames around     everything.

Familiarity: Our comfort zone. Whether in the     physical sense or the literal, most of us have a pretty small comfort zone     surrounding every aspect of our lives. If something encroaches without     permission, or we are challenged to venture outside of our zones, it can     be stressful and uncomfortable. While the huge world outside of our zones     can be harsh and unforgiving, it can also hold the key to amazing new     discoveries in all areas of life.

Self-Attribution: A common example of this is     when working in a group, you feel like you’re doing more than everyone     else. The interesting thing about this is: if you ask 10 people in a group     if they feel like they’re doing more than others, you’ll likely get 9     responses that support their belief they are working harder than everyone     else.

Sunk-cost: You’ve invested a lot of time, effort,     and money into a project (or your career). But, it’s not going as you had     hoped. It’s difficult to walk away from something that is not serving its     intended purpose.

Anchoring: This is when you’re so focused on one     goal, that you miss out on opportunities to have a better outcome because     you refuse to deviate from the initial goal.

Survival: The celebs (and capitalists) make it     all look so easy. Like anyone can go to Hollywood and become a huge star.     But, what we often don’t hear about are all the failed talent who just     didn’t get the right break into the industry. If one does not succeed, one     is simply failing at trying hard enough (similar to the Just-World bias).

There are many others that fit into this conversation. The ambiguity effect (avoiding options where the outcome is unknown), anthropocentric thinking or anthropomorphism (common in discussions about AI), attentional bias (marketing and constantly being told capitalism is the best way), and so on.

But, even FALC supporters are sometimes clouded by their own biases. In addition to the few of the above, automation bias (excessively relying on automated systems which can give erroneous information that overrides correct decisions) is one. Berkson’s Paradox ( The tendency to misinterpret statistical experiments involving conditional probabilities) is another. And, especially the Bias Blind Spot (the tendency to recognize bias more in others, less in oneself).

So, regardless of these biases on both sides of the conversation, people want to see hard facts and plausible ideas about how this future may come to fruition or why it will not.

The truth is: NONE of us know for sure.

But, there are some things that should be considered before completely shutting the door on the idea of humanity living in a Fully Automated Luxury Communist structure in the future. So, back to the original article I am rebutting by Mr. Whitlock. I seriously doubt he read the book, though that is simply an assumption. But, this assumption stems from the fact that many of his rebuttals to the concept are deeply entrenched in a capitalist mindset, disregarding the very essence of the book.

1                                    Assumption One

For instance, many of the government labor statistics he quotes are based on a flawed system of tracking that the US is notorious for. He also claims that automation is a “long way off and not necessarily replacing jobs”. This is also a flawed analysis due to Moore’s law. But, Moore’s law aside — some even believe Moore’s law is dead or evolving— he goes on to state that according to McKinsey digital who stated two years ago that less than 5% of jobs are able to be automated over the next decade. That is a seemingly naive assumption compared to the breakthroughs we have seen in the past two years from companies like Boston Dynamics and their amazing robots.

And, to counter that McKinsey article showing an example of a lumberjack, or construction and raising outdoor animals:

So, now we get into the cost of all this automation. Sure, it is a prohibitive factor for many, especially small businesses. For now, that is. In accordance with Moore’s law, as things become smaller and more advanced, though, the prices tend to drop. The more assistance provided to small businesses (whether by government supplementation or not), the faster these technologies will drop in price and advance.

Then, by quoting articles that are years old (2014 & 2017), the argument is made that, for instance, self-driving cars are facing major logistical and regulatory issues. Again, without considering the major advancements made recently. In fact, he very conspicuously left out Tesla in this analysis. Or, for that matter, the drone taxis that started in Dubai in 2017, and are now being adopted and accelerated by Uber and Boeing.

So, by assuming that automation is not going to replace most jobs anytime soon, we are really turning a blind-eye on the advancements going on around the world.

2                                    Assumption Two

Moving on to asteroid-mining. Mr. Whitlock used an article from 2012 (nearly a decade old) to prove the point that we were a decade away from identifying suitable asteroids to mine. In 2015, Obama signed a law into effect called “Space Law” allowing private companies to mine asteroids. And, the example used — Planetary Resources — struggling only to be acquired by Consensys, Inc. (a blockchain company) is an extremely poor (on purpose?) example, considering that companies like (to name only a few) Deep Space Industries, Orbital Sciences Corporation, Bigelow Aerospace, and even The Blue Origin aerospace company owned by Jeff Bezos are going all-in on this concept.

In the article, he also tries to point out that these ventures being profitable are the highest concern. That is, again, a false assumption. While it is true that funding needs to happen to make these a reality, one must also realize that funding, in itself, is a fallacy. By this, I mean:

The idea of fiat currency having any sort of value is false. It can be created out of thin air. It is either simply a piece of paper or a number on a computer monitor. Nearly the entire world uses fiat currency.

Nor is the number of materials hidden in the asteroids “speculative, at best”. That is his own assumption, without any real-time understanding of how the above-mentioned companies conduct research to identify lucrative asteroids.

As noted in the original article, Mars One’s for-profit business went bankrupt (though the non-profit side is still running). That is a sign that for-profit in this sector will struggle. Perhaps an even bigger signal that non-profit will eventually win in this sector. As an added point of interest, space is a HUGE business and destined only to grow:

 The point is not profit. The point is to succeed at nearly any cost.

3                                    Assumption Three

Aside from the fact that the vast majority of people are essentially wage-slaves who toil away at mind-numbing tasks to make their bosses a little richer, this entire area completely leaves out the concept of AI and quantum computing. Mr. Whitlock is stuck in his own biases that only a company can do what is being talked about and that companies can only be run by humans. While this is certainly the case today, the advent of AI is not to be scoffed at. In fact, the entire premise of arguments against a system like FALC is akin to the people who 20 years ago scoffed at the idea of having hand-held computers that we know as smartphones. It is an archaic way of thinking… Fearful, even. The truth is: We are on the precipice of technological upheaval never before witnessed by humanity. We better get our heads right to understand the challenges we will face and how to make life better for all humans as a consequence of technology. Otherwise, we will find ourselves in dystopian lives as described by some of the dystopian authors people love to quote.

This concept is not some glorified hippie utopia (utopia is highly subjective, btw) of rainbows and lollipops all day. Stop fooling yourselves and diminishing the world we live in and are about to arrive in. This is the reality we face. When people are displaced from employment and when precious metals & minerals are no longer rare, it will not happen suddenly and it will not be a hundred years away. Try the next 10–30 years, MAXIMUM, for us to really start seeing these effects. Sure, you and I may not be around to see it, but my kids will be.

We need to expand our highly myopic understanding of what is in front of us. If you don’t, others will, and it will be you who is left in the dust.

DISRUPT, OR BE DISRUPTED. That is the motto of the 21st-century.

Finally, yes, the future may be run by corporate empires. That is a scary prospect. In the near future, it may be necessary to eliminate the idea of corporations. All other details aside, the idea of competition is only a hindrance to the advancement of these technologies. Why split the resources (money, labor, etc.) between so many different companies hoping for a profit for a few individuals? In many ways, this is a ridiculous notion. It means fewer resources for each company and wasted time between advancements. This problem is becoming more and more obvious as technology advances.

And, all of this is in addition to the people who are working to cure aging, upload minds into the cloud, and make us into something else to redefine what it means to be human like the Transhumanist movement. If one doesn’t take all of these considerations into account when thinking about the future, they are doing themselves and the future a disservice. Because even though you may stick your head in the sand to avoid seeing it, millions of others are working toward this future whether they realize it or not.

There is so much more I could add to this, but then I would need to write a book… A book explaining Fully Automated Luxury Communism…

[avanneman]

Sebastian Mallaby, shamelessly—nay, nakedly—covering Alan’s ass

(Author’s note: What started as a brief headslap directed at Sebastian Mallaby turned into a 3,000+ word semi-diatribe on the subject of the multiple sins of Sebastian, Alan Greenspan, and a few other big-wigs. Read at your own risk.)

Okay, not my ass, the other Alan’s ass—Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers prompted Sebastian—or at least gave him the hook—to play the ever-popular “exploding the myth” card, this time explaining that “we” were all so wrong to blame the Great Recession on Greenspan, godfather of the notion that markets are never wrong. Said Mallaby

The central error in the popular post-crisis consensus was the idea that naive believers in the self-policing efficiency of markets led us over the precipice. Greenspan was painted as the high priest of this laissez-fairy-tale delusion, and people seized on a moment when he appeared to plead guilty: Under the pressure of congressional questioning, he confessed to a ‘flaw’ in his pro-market ideology. What Greenspan meant was that all belief systems — whether pro-government or pro-market — are imperfect. But that subtlety was lost. Quoted and requoted without proportion or context, Greenspan’s purported mea culpa threatened to define his legacy.

“[L]aissez-fairy-tale”? Funny, Sebastian, funny! You’re a funny man! But, alas, too honest for your own good! You see, Sebastian very sportingly linked us to an article that appeared in the New York Times that described the events of the congressional hearing at which Greenspan made his “purported mea culpa”, which was not “purported” at all. The article, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation”, by Edmund L. Andrews (or “Eddie L”, as his friends call him), ran on Oct. 24, 2008, and, sportingly or unsportingly, quoted Alan a little bit more extensively than Sebastian did, to wit:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

That doesn’t sound like a “purported mea culpa” to me. It sounds more like “guilty as charged.” Greenspan didn’t “mean” that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in human philosophies. He meant that “[t]hose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”

Mallaby goes on in his column to cite instances where the supposedly laissez-faire Greenspan actually labored, over and over again, to increase the regulation of unruly markets, only to be thwarted, over and over again:

The important lesson of the crisis is not that markets are fallible, which every thoughtful person knew already. It is that essential regulations — the sort that the supposedly anti-regulation Greenspan actually favored — are stymied by fractured government machinery and rapacious lobbies. Even today, the financial system has multiple overseers answerable to multiple congressional committees, because all this multiplying produces extra opportunities for lawmakers to extract campaign contributions.

In other words, as Herbert Hoover said, “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damned greedy.” Well, Milton Friedman said the same thing, noting that every businessman wants special favors for no one—except himself, that is, because his business is unique in all the world. But expatiating on the warped wood of humanity doesn’t let Greenspan as easily off the hook as Mallaby would have us believe. The Times article by Andrews carries some pretty damning paragraphs:

Critics, including many economists, now blame the former Fed chairman for the financial crisis that is tipping the economy into a potentially deep recession. Mr. Greenspan’s critics say that he encouraged the bubble in housing prices by keeping interest rates too low for too long and that he failed to rein in the explosive growth of risky and often fraudulent mortgage lending.

“You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others,” said Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the committee [that heard Greenspan’s testimony]. “Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

On a day that brought more bad news about rising home foreclosures and slumping employment, Mr. Greenspan refused to accept blame for the crisis but acknowledged that his belief in deregulation had been shaken.

He noted that the immense and largely unregulated business of spreading financial risk widely, through the use of exotic financial instruments called derivatives, had gotten out of control and had added to the havoc of today’s crisis. As far back as 1994, Mr. Greenspan staunchly and successfully opposed tougher regulation on derivatives.

But on Thursday, he agreed that the multitrillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, instruments originally created to insure bond investors against the risk of default, needed to be restrained.

“This modern risk-management paradigm held sway for decades,” he said. “The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Mr. Waxman noted that the Fed chairman had been one of the nation’s leading voices for deregulation, displaying past statements in which Mr. Greenspan had argued that government regulators were no better than markets at imposing discipline.

“Were you wrong?” Mr. Waxman asked.

“Partially,” the former Fed chairman reluctantly answered, before trying to parse his concession as thinly as possible.

So it sounds very much as though Mr. Greenspan, and the rest of us, were hoist, not merely on the warped wood of humanity but via Mr. Greenspan’s warped ideology as well.

So far, so good. But instead of dispatching Mr. Mallaby’s disingenuous tomfoolery simply on the basis of the Times article—doing so might make a tomfool out of me, which has happened more than once—I decided to do a little digging. I didn’t feel like reading Mr. Mallaby’s biography of Greenspan, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, but fortunately I found a pretty classy shortcut—a long, generally complimentary review1 by none other than Ben Bernanke, former chair of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors and, in 2006, Alan Greenspan’s successor as chair of the federal reserve.

Overall, I would call Benanke’s review “complimentary”���too complimentary, in fact—of both Mallaby and Greenspan. Bernanke follows Mallaby in insisting that Greenspan wasn’t a blinkered ideologue:

However, contrary to the stereotype, Greenspan was not inflexibly opposed to tougher rules and oversight of financial activities. He rarely resisted regulatory initiatives put forth by the Federal Reserve Board staff, for example, and on at least a few occasions he publicly advocated stronger financial regulation—Mallaby cites in particular Greenspan’s concerns about the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his support for enhanced auditing standards after the Enron scandal.

Furthermore, Bernanke “explains” that when Greenspan did oppose regulation that, in retrospect, might have helped prevent or mitigate the 2008 crash, his reasons for doing so were nuanced (my word) rather than knee-jerk:

The multiple influences on Greenspan’s regulatory views are nicely conveyed in Mallaby’s recounting of two famous episodes involving, respectively, Brooksley Born of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Ned Gramlich of Greenspan’s own Board. Born’s advocacy of expanded derivatives regulation and Gramlich’s support for tougher restrictions on subprime mortgage lending were both opposed by Greenspan (and, in Born’s case, also by Robert Rubin and Larry Summers of the Clinton Treasury). In retrospect, of course, Born and Gramlich were (largely) right and Greenspan was wrong. What Mallaby shows, however, is that the debates over their proposals were not the black-and-white ideological clashes they are often made out to be, but rather involved a range of personal, political, and policy considerations, consistent with Mallaby’s less ideological portrait of Greenspan.

So (rather combining Mallaby’s, Andrews’, and Bernanke’s accounts), when Greenspan opposed regulation, or at least failed to achieve it, it wasn’t simply because of ideology; rather, it involved a “range of personal, political, and policy considerations”. Yes, but the end result was, miraculously enough, always the same, reminding me of a verse from Lewis Carroll:

But I was thinking of a plan To dye one’s whiskers green And always use so large a fan That they could not be seen.

However copious the fan, Alan’s whiskers, it seems, always glow greenly in the twilight.

But wait, there's more In fact, I’m just getting started. Bernanke and Mallaby have a lot to say about the $64 question, which Sebastian left out entirely of his column exonerating Greenspan of any blame for failing to avert the events that culminated in the ’08 Crash. Bernanke puts it this way: “much more so than most economists, especially academics, Greenspan was willing to entertain the possibility that financial markets could go seriously off the rails. This leaves the author [Mallaby], though, with a bit of a problem: If Greenspan was not ideologically constrained, and if he was ‘the man who knew’ the dangers posed by financial instability, why didn’t he do more to prevent the building risks that culminated in the 2007 financial crisis?”

Well, says Mallaby, “Despite his extraordinary prestige, Greenspan knew he could survive in Washington only by avoiding fights, or by engaging in them passively and deviously. It was an approach that came naturally to a sensitive, shy man. Haunted by the absence of a pale father, intimidated by the presence of a vivid mother, he often lacked the confidence to confront others personally and directly.”

So it’s mommy issues, plus those rapacious lobbyists once more, who scared poor Alan. That’s why he didn’t push for stronger regulation. But what about “monetary” issues, asks Bernanke? Here, Bernanke says, Mallaby is tougher, and makes criticisms that he didn’t make in his September 9 post: “Mallaby concludes that Greenspan can therefore be held culpable for not using his control of monetary policy to prevent the buildup of financial risks. Most importantly, Mallaby argues, Greenspan should have kept policy tighter than he did during 1998-99 and 2004-2005, to fight the tech bubble and the housing bubble, respectively.”

Was it ideology this time around? Not really, says Mallaby. Again, it was pretty much the vivid mommy thing that kept Alan from mixing it up with the big, bad boys on Wall Street. On the one hand, Bernanke is dubious of this theory. He doesn’t think Greenspan was a fraidy cat. On the other, he doesn’t think Greenspan was too slow off the mark, particularly in addressing the housing bubble, which he claims Greenspan started to do in June 2004, when the bubble wasn’t all that big and unemployment was “still 5.6 percent.” (Apparently, bubbles can be useful when unemployment is “high”). Mallaby and Bernanke wield different fans, but Greenspan’s whiskers still remain discreetly hidden.

There is some “interesting” real-time commentary on this subject via a column by Paul Krugman dated Aug. 29, 2005, “Alan Greenspan and the Bubble”, who unsurprisingly offers a sharper take on the matter, pointing out that in October 2004, Greenspan said, regarding the increases in housing prices, “While local economies may experience significant speculative price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely.” Krugman also notes that by 2005 Greenspan was warning against “the prevalence of interest-only loans and the introduction of more-exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages.” But, says Krugman, in 2004 Greenspan liked adjustable-rate mortgages, quoting him as saying “American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.”

Krugman also notes other shortcomings of Greenspan that remain unmentioned by either Mallaby or Bernanke, both in his Aug. 29 column and in later postings. Krugman rightly toasts Greenspan for the following:

Regular readers know that I have never forgiven the Federal Reserve chairman for his role in creating today's budget deficit. In 2001 Mr. Greenspan, a stern fiscal taskmaster during the Clinton years, gave decisive support to the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts, urging Congress to reduce the federal government's revenue so that it wouldn't pay off its debt too quickly.

Since then, federal debt has soared. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Greenspan has never admitted that he gave Congress bad advice. He has, however, gone back to lecturing us about the evils of deficits.

In fact, Greenspan’s role in greenlighting the Bush tax cuts was disgraceful, and for that a little psychologizing, sans mommy, this time around, is in order. A lot of Republican big-shots blame George H. W. Bush’s 1992 loss to Bill Clinton on Greenspan, who raised rates towards the end of Bush’s first (first and only) term, helping precipitate the recession that certainly helped Clinton, though Bush was really hurt, in my opinion, by being the one who had to clean up the fiscal mess left by Ronnie’s free-spending ways, including the bill for the savings and loans debacle, which cost the taxpayers about $130 billion (unadjusted dollars), circa 1989-1995.

Once Clinton was in, Greenspan fairly made Clinton beg for his approval, which Clinton finally obtained by passing a budget with both tax increases and spending cuts, despite furious Republican opposition. Clinton courted Greenspan obsequiously throughout his two terms, and making Greenspan happy made Wall Street happy as well.

When George W. Bush took office, his package of massive tax cuts for the rich was the last thing the American economy needed, but if Greenspan had given it the review it deserved, his old friends would have cut him, not just socially, but physically as well. I don’t know if Greenspan was “sensitive and shy,” or just a coward, but the result was the same. He abandoned all the “rigor” which Clinton had to endure and fell back on the simple-minded Republican cliché that all tax cuts are good, no matter the circumstances. Naturally, after giving the Bush package the thumb’s up it needed, Greenspan made some vague noises about having to “review” the cuts if economic conditions changed, even though he knew that no one was listening, and even though he knew the only “review” the Republicans would accept would be making the supposedly “ten years only” cuts permanent.2

But wait, there’s still more Yes, indeed. In another column, Krugman links us to a posting by Brad DeLong, circa 2013, recalling remarks Greenspan made out of office in 2010 regarding President Obama’s counter-cyclical deficit spending program. Intoned Greenspan (elisions were made by DeLong):

With huge deficits currently having no evident effect on either inflation or long-term interest rates, the budget constraints of the past are missing. It is little comfort that the dollar is still the least worst of the major fiat currencies. But the inexorable rise in the price of gold indicates a large number of investors are seeking a safe haven beyond fiat currencies. The United States, and most of the rest of the developed world, is in need of a tectonic shift in fiscal policy. Incremental change will not be adequate….

I believe the fears of budget contraction inducing a renewed decline of economic activity are misplaced. The current spending momentum is so pressing that it is highly unlikely that any politically feasible fiscal constraint will unleash new deflationary forces…. Fortunately, the very severity of the pending crisis and growing analogies to Greece set the stage for a serious response. That response needs to recognize that the range of error of long-term U.S. budget forecasts (especially of Medicare) is, in historic perspective, exceptionally wide. Our economy cannot afford a major mistake in underestimating the corrosive momentum of this fiscal crisis. Our policy focus must therefore err significantly on the side of restraint.

Got that? The smart money is going to gold, and we’re going to Greece! Unfortunately for Greenspan, though not for the U.S., his “forecast”/stab in the back proved entirely and completely wrong, and under Obama’s stewardship, despite hysterical and despicable Republican opposition, the U.S. emerged from the Great Recession in better shape than any advanced economy except Germany, which conveniently off-loaded all of its problems on lesser nations, while the U.S. took care of an entire continent largely by itself.3 I guess one can say that Greenspan didn’t follow a knee-jerk “free markets good, governments bad” philosophy. Except when a Democrat was in the White House.

Afterwords There are plenty of “ten years after” takes on Lehman’s and the Great Recession as a whole floating around on the web. Over at Bloomberg, Barry Ritholtz has a column, “Ten Things People Still Get Wrong About the Financial Crisis”, which isn’t bad, though Barry tends to present conclusions rather than arguments, so if you want him to “prove it”, you generally have to follow some links and do some reading, or maybe read his book, Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, which I haven’t done. I like Barry for, among other things, suggesting that a lot of people should have gone to jail who didn’t, thanks to Wall Street “gentlemen” like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner (then head of the New York Federal Reserve and later Obama’s secretary of the treasury) and Henry Paulson, Bush’s secretary of the treasury, who insisted on treating the collapse as an unforeseeable act of God, who after all works in mysterious ways and anyway these are guys I’ve had lunch with at the Four Seasons for past twenty years so shut up already with your goddamn finger-pointing. Barry doesn’t endear himself to me by claiming that you can predict the future, so don’t listen to him when he talks like that.4

Bernanke says his article isn’t a review—“I want instead to comment on Mallaby’s overall assessment of Greenspan—most especially, the Chairman’s responsibility for the 2007 financial crisis.” Well, close enough for me. Anyway, Bernanke says “highly recommended.” ↩︎

To avoid political difficulties, Republicans pretended they would let the cuts would expire after ten years. They just did the same thing under Trump when they passed the latest Republican rich man’s giveaway. ↩︎

I’m not saying that Canada and Mexico got a free ride, but a disastrous U.S. economy would have been a disaster for our two large neighbors as well. ↩︎

Barry’s written a foreword to one of those “How to Make a Fortune” books, which does not impress me. You can make a fortune of Wall Street if you have a (good) college education, work reasonably hard, live a frugal (i.e., boring) life, and invest generously in “index funds” for your 401k for a good 35 years (read A Random Walk on Wall Street for more info). The only hitch is, by the time you’re rich you’ll be too old to enjoy it. Life is a bitch! ↩︎

[ltomr]

Building A Better Internet By Building A Better Government

I had a lot of thoughts about today’s discussion, and I felt the need to jot down my ideas however unorganized:

In class today we discussed potential ways to help fix the internet; primarily focusing on how social media companies, news outlets, or many other internet companies rely solely on marketing and advertising as their source of revenue during a time when their platforms are becoming more intertwined and relevant to our every day social and political lives.  Because the internet and these social media platforms are more intertwined with us than ever before, they wield immense power over information and its distribution, over vast amounts of private user data.  When addressing some of the many problems that the internet faces, who do we hold accountable for change, and how do we take control over the increasingly relevant space that is the internet?

During class discussion, the astute idea of democratizing code itself was brought up by a fellow classmate.  To enable the free flow of ideas, whether coding or otherwise, can help to serve the community of the internet.  When a company can patent code, much like Monsato seeds, it can capitalize on that code and be sure that within a capitalist liberal democracy, it will be capitalized upon.  A hypothetical example could be that YouTube patents proprietary code for video streaming technology, one that it holds hostage and monetizes its usage.  The process does a little to push technology forward, but does plenty for the company looking to own and sell proprietary technology.   This small example is a fantastic one, because our American knee-jerk reaction to this example is that in a capitalist society, the brilliant coder who invented this video streaming technology ought to reap the monetary benefits of his or her creation, a testament to how hard work and brilliance can help one excel in a capitalist society.  This reaction is the product of us having the expectation that realms like the internet must also fall into our framework or understanding of our own liberal democracy, one fundamentally focused on capitalism.  Democratizing code is less an issue about protecting the idea of the brilliant coder, and more about enabling the internet to be an even greater tool for the greater good. Where we press for the internet to behave more like we expect a capitalist democracy ought to is where we limit our thinking as to how we can help change the internet.  Perspectives on "big government", or the defeatist idea that government is run by corporations, not to be trusted, and are too big to be tackled, are also limiting our thinking on how to address this issue because government is potentially the best vessel through which to bring about change on the internet. Ideas about getting government involved in the regulation of the internet in any shape or form are usually met with pretty warranted fears, considering the inner workings of the modern political landscape that's so easily swayed by SuperPAC's, or giant multi-national corporations.  Today we distrust that government could take on such a task, because today our government operates barely on democratic guidance and so heavily on dollars.  Our distrust of "government" isn't really that, but really distrust of our current government that is currently controlled by money. But our task for this discussion is about tomorrow, and technology has always been about the promise of tomorrow. When it comes to all of the roadblocks that appear before us when imagining a better internet, its more than convenient that technological capability is not one of those roadblocks, but rather a means for which to help solve some of its most glaring issues.  Block-chain and torrent technologies show us that de-centralized systems can be viable alternatives to single-server web hosting, democratizing the capability for web presence without the need to sign up for web services under Amazon's host umbrella.  Astra Taylor referenced Wikipedia, a powerful tool that has sustained itself purely on community engagement and so the technological burden of sustaining a viable social network or other platform really isn't there.  However, technological capability has enabled us to do some pretty crazy things these days: the other week I filed my taxes from my iPhone.  Twitter helps bring out awareness to the issue of voter turnout, and subsequently we got Obama elected.  Movements like #metoo, #timesup have had positive social impacts by bringing these issues into the spotlight, all propelled by very capable technologies.  Social media campaigns brought about awareness to the very issue of economic disparity, just look at the Occupy Wall Street movement of a few years ago and how the "1%" has now become a regular part of our political vocabulary. We need to utilize all of these technologies in order to bring us closer to a more direct form of democracy, one that enables the voices of the citizen, one that engages its community in changing the shape of our political landscape.  Technology can bridge the physical gap that voters face, can potentially speed up the political process tenfold, yet the political world chugs along, largely a reactionary entity rather than one responsibly molding new and unexplored places like the internet. The fear of government taking control of the internet is dependent on the perception that government will always be corrupt.  Technology enables us to transmit information and provide transparent lenses on so many current events that the potential for us to change government is greater than ever before.  Utilizing the very technology we're trying to fix will help us bring about a greater discourse, and in turn a more reliable and citizen-centric government if we can get actively involved.  The ideal outcome is people utilizing technology to help shape democracy away from capitalists frameworks that perpetuate an advertising revenue dependence, perhaps through civic engagement enabled by technology. Although there's a lot to unpack in terms of what would be necessary to attain a better internet, it does need to be a process where the government is involved in order for wide spanning change to occur.  For this reason, it's vital that we as citizens sustain our efforts to be engaged with the larger decision making process, and thankfully it is technology itself that can enable us.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Unsurprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn is walking around with a permanent grin on his face. He is rightly delighted with the achievement of the Labour Party in Britain’s recent general election. Given the two years of relentless abuse and ridicule that’s been heaped upon him by the mainstream media, together with the appalling treachery of most of his fellow Labour MPs who tried, but failed miserably, to oust him as leader, the result of the June 8 ballot was a ringing endorsement and validation of his remarkable accomplishment. The victory of the Conservative Party over Labour was so marginal that they are compelled to make a deal with the devil, in the guise of the fanatical Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, in order to have any control at all of the British parliament. It’s a deal that is already looking precarious as it likely contravenes the Good Friday Peace Agreement, and therefore might be illegal. Prime Minister Theresa May, whose pompous hubris provoked the totally unnecessary general election is, to quote one of her own supposed colleagues, George Osborne, “a dead woman walking”. The only thing that might be keeping her in office is that no one in their right mind could possibly want the job. It’s been widely reported that Jeremy Corbyn is already talking about another imminent general election, as a result of the Tories’ fragile condition, and appears to be relishing the chance of forming a Labour government, possibly within a year. But he should be very wary, and think very carefully about whether or not that’s actually a good idea. The Poisoned Chalice Britain is in a wretched condition. Four decades of unrelenting capitalistic economic policies by mainly Tory governments, but also the treacherous Blair/Brown Labour governments, have taken Britain to the brink of permanent destitution. Nearly all of the country’s manufacturing base has been either shut down or off-shored to various Third World sweatshops. All of the once publicly-owned utilities such as gas and electricity, water and communications, have been flogged at fire-sale prices to trans-national corporations. Public transport and postal services are now mostly owned by foreign corporations, and just about any public service than can be asset-stripped and looted already has been. Add to that situation the recent catastrophic decision to split with Europe, Britain’s biggest trading partner. We’re talking about a country that has few natural resources, and almost no heavy industrial capability any more. It has nothing anyone wants, and can’t make anything that can’t be bought cheaper somewhere else, and quite possibly better made. About the only thing that provides some apparent respectability to its economy is a total reliance on its basically criminal financial services – and even these are now leaving the sinking ship, thanks to Brexit. Britain is supposed to be the fifth richest country on the planet, but homelessness is rife and some people are so dependent on charity food banks that they risk starving to death without them. If all that were not enough, we can also add to the mix the fact that for at least two decades Britain has shamefully involved itself as willing stooge to the US’ illegal military adventures throughout the Arab world. This resulted in the unnecessary deaths of at least a million people (most of whom were defenceless civilians), and ruin and destitution for tens of millions more, causing the biggest refugee crisis since World War Two. Unsurprisingly these despicable actions have resulted in terrorist outrages in the streets of Britain, inspiring the government to introduce ever more restrictions on our rapidly disappearing freedom. Secret courts and press censorship have been routine in Britain for some years, and now there are calls from senior police and military officials to open “internment camps” where literally thousands of people could be locked up without charge or trial. This is Britain today. Who in their right mind would want to be Prime Minister of such a place? Corbyn’s Choices The fact of this largely Tory-made catastrophe will not be lost on the very people who created it. Many Tories chose the “Remain” camp in the recent referendum to split from Europe, including the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne. These people knew what a disaster it would be for Britain to quite the EEC. Now the disaster is imminent they must surely be thinking this is a pretty good time not to be in government. Given the current extreme vulnerability of the Tory party, it might, in normal circumstances, be a perfect time for political opponents to strike. But these are not normal circumstances, and Jeremy Corbyn would be far better advised to wait, keep his powder dry, bide his time and concentrate on far more important priorities than prematurely rushing to take charge of a government that is almost beyond salvation. He would be better advised to take the view that because this is a wholly Tory-made catastrophe, let Tories take responsibility for fixing it. The next five years of British government will almost certainly produce one calamity after another – no matter who’s in charge. Much better, surely, to be in opposition where you can throw stones, rather than be responsible for the calamities and have stones thrown at you. The next five years could possibly destroy whichever political party is at the helm, so Labour should be very wary about being that party. So what exactly should Labour’s leadership do? Fixing the PLP The first and most urgent problem that needs fixing is for the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) to unite. It has been terribly divided for the last two years, with a tiny group of Corbyn supporters fighting off the often vitriolic attacks of their own supposed-colleagues who, for the most part, are Blairites – right-wingers scarcely distinguishable from the Tories they’re supposed to be opposing. However, a week can be a long time in politics, and when Jeremy Corbyn entered parliament for the first time since the general election he was greeted with a standing ovation from most of the Labour MPs. So although perhaps the PLP is finally healing its wounds, more work needs to be done to ensure more widespread unity within the Labour Party. The PLP needs to be re-educated to the fact that it is supposed to be a left-wing organisation. Corbyn is not getting any younger, so more youthful Labour MPs with natural left-wing leanings need to be groomed to take over the helm when Corbyn and the equally important Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell decide to take up well-earned retirements. Re-education With immediate effect the Labour Party needs to begin to re-educate the wider population. British people have endured whole lifetimes of right-wing capitalist propaganda. Most are now well and truly indoctrinated capitalists, conditioned to think greed is good, look after number one, and fear and distrust socialism. This vast population of natural conservatives needs to be turned around, to understand how they’ve been tricked to think and act against their own best interests. Alternative news To this end, the Labour Party should create an alternative media platform. This should be designed with the long-term aim of replacing the BBC, which has, since its very beginnings, been a tool of the 1%. Initially the Labour Party obviously couldn’t create such an organisation, but it could make a start, design websites and social media platforms whose purpose is keep the population properly informed about the events that shape their lives; something which one day, when properly resourced, could deliver accurate information – from a humane position rather than the monstrous self-serving capitalist media of today, of whom the BBC is the leading representative. From the very first days of his leadership of the Labour Party Corbyn did a very clever thing. Knowing full well that Britain’s right-wing media cannot be trusted to give him any help, he simply by-passed them and reached out directly to the people. Appealing initially to ordinary Labour Party members – his natural power base – via the party website, he invited questions to be put directly to the Prime Minister during the weekly parliamentary ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). For the first time in history, these sessions were made up of questions composed by ordinary people. And Corbyn never stopped his inspired tactic of sticking like glue directly to his real power base – the British electorate. For two years Jeremy Corbyn has travelled up and down the country talking directly with the people – bypassing the poisonous mainstream media altogether. This direct contact with the public is primarily responsible for Corbyn’s growing rock-star status. But he hasn’t just been making social calls, he’s been re-educating, giving people an alternative narrative to the one that’s been peddled by the Tories and the complicit mainstream media for many decades. This reaching out and re-educating that Corbyn has already been doing to the best of his ability needs to be institutionalised by the Labour Party. The people need to be taught that contrary to Thatcher’s infamous lie that “there is no alternative”, there are, in fact, alternatives, and very good ones at that. Socialism Arguably the single most important new alternative for people to learn about is an alternative economy. As well-conditioned capitalists, most British people automatically reject the alternative world that’s possible with socialist economics. The knee-jerk responses are automatically wheeled out: it failed in Russia; it’s anti-democratic totalitarianism; socialist “sums don’t add up”… and so on. These are all the inevitable results of the misinformation and outright lies churned out by a capitalist-controlled world. Anyone with just a modest understanding of socialism could easily refute them all. The Labour Party could and should begin re-educating the people to the very real benefits of socialist economics. Pacifism During his recent election campaign Jeremy Corbyn was grilled several times over his pacifist leanings. He was often challenged about his position over nuclear disarmament, his opposition to Trident nuclear weapons, claims that he would not “press the button”, and his previous apparent support for the IRA and other supposed “terrorist” organisations. This was clearly a political weak spot for Corbyn, not because there’s anything wrong with his views on these subjects, but because of the public perception that it would be dangerous for a Prime Minister to hold such views. Like the economy, what’s mainly needed here is re-education of the public. Like many other things, Corbyn isn’t wrong in his opinions about British foreign policy, the British public are wrong in theirs. Conversion of public opinion is seldom a very difficult task, as just about every major war has shown in the past, where previously pacifist or at least indifferent public opinion has been quickly transformed into fanatical war-mongering. Of course, this has invariably been achieved through cynical manipulation of the media, but it suggests that if at least some of the media were managed in a pacifist, humane way the necessary change of public perception could be achieved. Corbyn’s belief that nuclear weapons should be banned, and that British foreign policy is primarily responsible for the terrorism that Britain experienced from both the Irish and now the Islamic world, should become mainstream public opinion – not viewed as the deluded ravings of some isolated deranged geriatric. The benefits of opposition Although I’m delighted that Jeremy Corbyn did so well in the general election, and I’m proud of the fact that my vote helped secure his success, I truly hope this is the pinnacle of his success for at least five years. I would not like to see a Labour government for at least that period of time. To understand this position one only needs to think about what would probably happen if another general election was called, within two years say, and a Labour government was returned to power. First and most crucially, the catastrophic fallout of Brexit would have to be dealt with. Given Britain’s extreme economic weakness, with only a corrupt and largely criminal financial services community providing a fig leaf of respectability to economic data – a community that may have mostly disappeared in two years‘ time – Britain would be in the worst economic shape it’s been in since the end of WW2. That’s not necessarily terminal, but for a socialist Labour government it could well be. Because the very last thing the US government wants to see is a successful pacifist, socialist government anywhere at all, but least of all where it’s most reliable capitalist ally used to be. So if we add a hostile US position together with a crippled economy we get the perfect storm, and a disaster that would ruin the Labour Party, and socialist hopes, forever. If Jeremy Corbyn was to become Prime Minister, he could not possibly maintain his pacifist socialist ideals and stay friends with the US. The only real hope Britain has for surviving the calamity of Brexit is to establish even closer trading, military, and diplomatic ties to the US. On the face of it there doesn’t seem much in it for Washington – which is not well known for doing anything that doesn’t produce a profit for its corporations. But Britain does have one thing that’s almost priceless to the US – its geography. Britain is a good sized island that’s only swimming distance from the European mainland. It already provides homes for various US military bases and spy stations. Furthermore, Britain has remained a staunch ally of US imperialism when many other European countries have ranged from barely lukewarm to downright frosty in their attitude towards Washington. A Tory government will almost certainly capitalise on these factors to help survive the aftermath of Brexit. As Japan is the main US proxy to Asia, Britain would likely become the main US proxy to Europe. But how could Corbyn maintain his pacifist socialist credentials, and serve as US lackey to Europe? Jeremy Corbyn has a golden opportunity at his fingertips. The British public are not yet well enough informed to see the huge benefits of the socialist reforms he would like to implement. They have to be deprogrammed and re-educated. They have to learn about and understand the horrors that have been inflicted by centuries of Tory misrule, so that it’s not socialism they fear, but capitalism. Such a reversal in thinking requires a nationwide effort by the Labour Party. Failure to do this would mean that as soon as things got a little bumpy under a new socialist government it would be easy for the mainstream media to steer the people back towards their capitalist programming, and dispose of socialism, possibly once and for all. Corbyn should remain in opposition, and avoid Downing Street for at least five years. The people are not yet educated enough to implement the changes he would love to make. So he should use this time to prepare them, and to prepare individual MPs too for the enormous reforms they will need to make throughout government, reforms that could very well become reality in five years, but not in two. http://clubof.info/

[laurensdy]

What does it mean to lead?

What qualities make someone a leader?

When I was in college, and involved in many groups and the campus paper, we spent a lot of time talking about what is ideal for someone in a position to lead others. I realized then, and acutely so now, that people have vastly different opinions about what is a good for the person in charge.

Being in charge depends somewhat on the organization—a coalition designed to uplift and support black people should be led by a black person; an LGBTQ-action group ought to be led by an LGBTQ person; a group of moms ideally will be led by someone who is also a mother. I understand that sometimes this is impossible or exploitative—but sufficient effort must be made to have the leader ‘match up’ with the values promoted by the group.

When that group is all of us—Americans—it gets a little murkier. How can we select one individual who not only represents all of us, but can embody the ideals that we stand for—especially when those representations and ideals vary so greatly? What skills and strengths must that person have? Has anyone thought about what that list of values might look like?

To some people, sadly, those qualities include being a man; being white; being a Christian, straight, cisgender, upper-middle-class, able-bodied. FDR’s poll numbers would have been dismally lower had the general public known he used a wheelchair for the majority of his mobility needs, despite the fact that he was one of the most influential and celebrated presidents in our nation’s history. Still more would have jumped ship had they known he had been unfaithful to Eleanor—fidelity being a value that, apparently, is not as sacred in today’s society for a president.

To others, those qualities include the cutthroat, tough-as-nails exterior that can reaffirm America’s might (as if it needed that). Often this aligns with capitalistic trappings, shown by the consistent flock of supporters trailing behind those with wealth, which (for so many) is synonymous with powerful—regardless of how this person amassed such wealth, including the potential disregard of morals it took to get there. Although unabashed honesty is an important quality for a president, history teaches us that a successful business model usually involves a degree of deception. Americans desire a strong sense of trustworthiness in their leader, yet turncoats and frenemies are integral parts in thriving white-collar worlds. How do we as individuals, and a country, grapple with that paradox?

While it is necessary for a leader of a nation to be steeled and realistic toward potential displays of force, countless numbers place high regard for experience and ambition in military control. But I would argue this concoction of strength also includes objectivity, patience, decisiveness, and perception—and specifically discourages knee-jerk, emotional (irrational) reactions; operating on a bite-sized, superficial analysis; and premature self-serving aggrandizement.

Those who value the strong often gravitate toward decisive, relentless ambition. Still others uphold a more humble courage balanced with selflessness, compassion, kindness, and understanding. Few individuals are capable of even attempting the balancing act of trying to please all of us. But this discussion about values, and how we align the hierarchy of what we find important, can be a telling exercise indeed.

Perhaps the real reason for all of this is the distorted perception that so many have about what it means to be strong, successful, a leader, or even a ‘good’ person.