#corporatized

[politijohn]

Source

[my-midlife-crisis]

[queerism1969]

[lilithism1848]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple to EU: “Go fuck yourself”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro-monopoly – they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather.

This ploy is cousins with Jay Rosen's idea of "savvying," defined as: "dismissing valid questions with the insider's, 'and this surprises you?'"

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369?lang=en

In both cases, an apologist for corruption masquerades as a pragmatist who understands the ways of the world, unlike you, a pathetic dreamer who foolishly hopes for a better world. In both cases, the apologist provides cover for corruption, painting it as an inevitability, not a choice. "Don't hate the player. Hate the game."

The reason this foolish nonsense flies is that we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay.

Take the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. The GDPR establishes strict limitations of data-collection and processing, and provides for brutal penalties for companies that violate its rules. The immediate impact of the GDPR was a mass-extinction event for Europe's data-brokerages and surveillance advertising companies, all of which were in obvious violation of the GDPR's rules.

But there was a curious pattern to GDPR enforcement: while smaller, EU-based companies were swiftly shuttered by its provisions, the US-based giants that conduct the most brazen, wide-ranging, illegal surveillance escaped unscathed for years and years, continuing to spy on Europeans.

One (erroneous) way to look at this is as a "compliance moat" story. In that story, GDPR requires a bunch of expensive systems that only gigantic companies like Facebook and Google can afford. These compliance costs are a "capital moat" – a way to exclude smaller companies from functioning in the market. Thus, the GDPR acted as an anticompetitive wrecking ball, clearing the field for the largest companies, who get to operate without having to contend with smaller companies nipping at their heels:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/06/27/another-report-shows-gdpr-benefited-google-facebook-hurt-everyone-else/

This is wrong.

Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

But just because some regulations can be compliance moats, that doesn't mean that all regulations are compliance moats. And just because some regulations are vigorously applied to small companies while leaving larger firms unscathed, it doesn't follow that the regulation in question is a compliance moat.

A harder look at what happened with the GDPR reveals a completely different dynamic at work. The reason the GDPR vaporized small surveillance companies and left the big companies untouched had nothing to do with compliance costs. The Big Tech companies don't comply with the GDPR – they just get away with violating the GDPR.

How do they get away with it? They fly Irish flags of convenience. Decades ago, Ireland started dabbling with offering tax-havens to the wealthy and mobile – they invented the duty-free store:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty-free_shop#1947%E2%80%931990:_duty_free_establishment

Capturing pennies from the wealthy by helping them avoid fortunes they owed in taxes elsewhere was terribly seductive. In the years that followed, Ireland began aggressively courting the wealthy on an industrial scale, offering corporations the chance to duck their obligations to their host countries by flying an Irish flag of convenience.

There are other countries who've tried this gambit – the "treasure islands" of the Caribbean, the English channel, and elsewhere – but Ireland is part of the EU. In the global competition to help the rich to get richer, Ireland had a killer advantage: access to the EU, the common market, and 500m affluent potential customers. The Caymans can hide your money for you, and there's a few super-luxe stores and art-galleries in George Town where you can spend it, but it's no Champs Elysees or Ku-Damm.

But when you're competing with other countries for the pennies of trillion-dollar tax-dodgers, any wins can be turned into a loss in an instant. After all, any corporation that is footloose enough to establish a Potemkin Headquarters in Dublin and fly the trídhathach can easily up sticks and open another Big Store HQ in some other haven that offers it a sweeter deal.

This has created a global race to the bottom among tax-havens to also serve as regulatory havens – and there's a made-in-the-EU version that sees Ireland, Malta, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands competing to see who can offer the most impunity for the worst crimes to the most awful corporations in the world.

And that's why Google and Facebook haven't been extinguished by the GDPR while their rivals were. It's not compliance moats – it's impunity. Once a corporation attains a certain scale, it has the excess capital to spend on phony relocations that let it hop from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, chasing the loosest slots on the strip. Ireland is a made town, where the cops are all on the take, and two thirds of the data commissioner's rulings are eventually overturned by the federal court:

https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/iccl-2023-gdpr-report/

This is a problem among many federations, not just the EU. The US has its onshore-offshore tax- and regulation-havens (Delaware, South Dakota, Texas, etc), and so does Canada (Alberta), and some Swiss cantons are, frankly, batshit:

https://lenews.ch/2017/11/25/swiss-fact-some-swiss-women-had-to-wait-until-1991-to-vote/

None of this is to condemn federations outright. Federations are (potentially) good! But federalism has a vulnerability: the autonomy of the federated states means that they can be played against each other by national or transnational entities, like corporations. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to regulate powerful entities within a federation – but it means that federal regulation needs to account for the risk of jurisdiction-shopping.

Enter the Digital Markets Act, a new Big Tech specific law that, among other things, bans monopoly app stores and payment processing, through which companies like Apple and Google have levied a 30% tax on the entire app market, while arrogating to themselves the right to decide which software their customers may run on their own devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

Apple has responded to this regulation with a gesture of contempt so naked and broad that it beggars belief. As Proton describes, Apple's DMA plan is the very definition of malicious compliance:

https://proton.me/blog/apple-dma-compliance-plan-trap

Recall that the DMA is intended to curtail monopoly software distribution through app stores and mobile platforms' insistence on using their payment processors, whose fees are sky-high. The law is intended to extinguish developer agreements that ban software creators from informing customers that they can get a better deal by initiating payments elsewhere, or by getting a service through the web instead of via an app.

In response, Apple, has instituted a junk fee it calls the "Core Technology Fee": EUR0.50/install for every installation over 1m. As Proton writes, as apps grow more popular, using third-party payment systems will grow less attractive. Apple has offered discounts on its eye-watering payment processing fees to a mere 20% for the first payment and 13% for renewals. Compare this with the normal – and far, far too high – payment processing fees the rest of the industry charges, which run 2-5%. On top of all this, Apple has lied about these new discounted rates, hiding a 3% "processing" fee in its headline figures.

As Proton explains, paying 17% fees and EUR0.50 for each subscriber's renewal makes most software businesses into money-losers. The only way to keep them afloat is to use Apple's old, default payment system. That choice is made more attractive by Apple's inclusion of a "scare screen" that warns you that demons will rend your soul for all eternity if you try to use an alternative payment scheme.

Apple defends this scare screen by saying that it will protect users from the intrinsic unreliability of third-party processors, but as Proton points out, there are plenty of giant corporations who get to use their own payment processors with their iOS apps, because Apple decided they were too big to fuck with. Somehow, Apple can let its customers spend money Uber, McDonald's, Airbnb, Doordash and Amazon without terrorizing them about existential security risks – but not mom-and-pop software vendors or publishers who don't want to hand 30% of their income over to a three-trillion-dollar company.

Apple has also reserved the right to cancel any alternative app store and nuke it from Apple customers' devices without warning, reason or liability. Those app stores also have to post a one-million euro line of credit in order to be considered for iOS. Given these terms, it's obvious that no one is going to offer a third-party app store for iOS and if they did, no one would list their apps in it.

The fuckery goes on and on. If an app developer opts into third-party payments, they can't use Apple's payment processing too – so any users who are scared off by the scare screen have no way to pay the app's creators. And once an app creator opts into third party payments, they can never go back – the decision is permanent.

Apple also reserves the right to change all of these policies later, for the worse ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further" -D. Vader). They have warned developers that they might change the API for reporting external sales and revoke developers' right to use alternative app stores at its discretion, with no penalties if that screws the developer.

Apple's contempt extends beyond app marketplaces. The DMA also obliges Apple to open its platform to third party browsers and browser engines. Every browser on iOS is actually just Safari wrapped in a cosmetic skin, because Apple bans third-party browser-engines:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

But, as Mozilla puts it, Apple's plan for this is "as painful as possible":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/26/24052067/mozilla-apple-ios-browser-rules-firefox

For one thing, Apple will only allow European customers to run alternative browser engines. That means that Firefox will have to "build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear."

(One wonders how Apple will treat Americans living in the EU, whose Apple accounts still have US billing addresses – these people will still be entitled to the browser choice that Apple is grudgingly extending to Europeans.)

All of this sends a strong signal that Apple is planning to run the same playbook with the DMA that Google and Facebook used on the GDPR: ignore the law, use lawyerly bullshit to chaff regulators, and hope that European federalism has sufficiently deep cracks that it can hide in them when the enforcers come to call.

But Apple is about to get a nasty shock. For one thing, the DMA allows wronged parties to start their search for justice in the European federal court system – bypassing the Irish regulators and courts. For another, there is a global movement to check corporate power, and because the tech companies do the same kinds of fuckery in every territory, regulators are able to collaborate across borders to take them down.

Take Apple's app store monopoly. The best reference on this is the report published by the UK Competition and Markets Authority's Digital Markets Unit:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

The devastating case that the DMU report was key to crafting the DMA – but it also inspired a US law aimed at forcing app markets open:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2710

And a Japanese enforcement action:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And action in South Korea:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/skorea-considers-505-mln-fine-against-google-apple-over-app-market-practices-2023-10-06/

These enforcers gather for annual meetings – I spoke at one in London, convened by the Competition and Markets Authority – where they compare notes, form coalitions, and plan strategy:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cma-data-technology-and-analytics-conference-2022-registration-308678625077

This is where the savvying breaks down. Yes, Apple is big enough to run circles around Japan, or South Korea, or the UK. But when those countries join forces with the EU, the USA and other countries that are fed up to the eyeballs with Apple's bullshit, the company is in serious danger.

It's true that Apple has convinced a bunch of its customers that buying a phone from a multi-trillion-dollar corporation makes you a member of an oppressed religious minority:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Some of those self-avowed members of the "Cult of Mac" are willing to take the company's pronouncements at face value and will dutifully repeat Apple's claims to be "protecting" its customers. But even that credulity has its breaking point – Apple can only poison the well so many times before people stop drinking from it. Remember when the company announced a miraculous reversal to its war on right to repair, later revealed to be a bald-faced lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Or when Apple claimed to be protecting phone users' privacy, which was also a lie?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The savvy will see Apple lying (again) and say, "this surprises you?" No, it doesn't surprise me, but it pisses me off – and I'm not the only one, and Apple's insulting lies are getting less effective by the day.

Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annelid_worm,_Atlantic_forest,_northern_littoral_of_Bahia,_Brazil_%2816107326533%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

--

Hubertl (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2015-03-04_Elstar_%28apple%29_starting_putrefying_IMG_9761_bis_9772.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[thetwistedrope]

about target pulling some pride merch in some southern stores after their employees were threatened... do you think they should have kept all the pride stuff up?

they should have kept everything up. they should have painted the entire store in rainbow. same goes for bud light, they should have doubled down and made all the cans rainbow. if you're gonna be with us, either be with us or gtfo.

you know how when you come out to your parents and they give you tepid acceptance, but the minute a friend or other bigoty family member comes over and suddenly you need to keep your queerness to yourself? it's kinda like that. like. either stand with us like an actual ally or quit pretending to support us.

target pulling merch, hiding merch, removing all of their signage... all that's gonna do is teach fascists that they can get their way if they yell enough. (this also doesn't get into the waste of materials and resources of pulling these items and then just chucking them into the garbage instead of giving them out to be used)

bud light placing marketing employees "on leave" also teaches the same lesson. if you scream enough, if you threaten to bomb places, they will cave.

any company that is going to act like they support queer people should have an inherent understanding that it comes with a risk. the fact that these companies want our money but refuse to stand with us against the fascists just shows that they are only on our side so long as it is profitable. it's taking the mask off of corporate pride and showing the actual truth the lies beneath.

actual allies don't run away the second things get difficult. being an actual ally comes with risks. anyone claiming to be an ally that runs away the second anything remotely sketchy happens is not an actual ally.

and that's doubly so for corporations. i feel bad for all of the queer folks within target, bud light and others that worked so hard to actually make shit happen to only get told "actually, no, fuck you" because of fascists.

[suthecoder]

After re-re-reading the murderbot series so many times I’ve lost count, it hit me that MURDERBOT WAS OWNED BY AN INSURANCE COMPANY. They write BONDS. Everything else is just “vertical integration” — the security, the equipment, the data mining. Insurance has always been data mining adjacent; it’s called actuarial science. And if you don’t think your for-profit insurance company would sell your data for a fast buck …

[progressivemillennial]

[she-is-ovarit]

What's not spoken about nearly enough is how the combination of growing up poor and capitalism/corporate culture for the working class condition people.

I lived below the poverty line my entire life. My mother mostly worked in restaurants, my dad cycled through jobs and nobody really knew where his money went.

I failed my way through high school, got my first job at Olive Garden where I had a manager deal with anxiety by screaming during peak and frequently correcting me and other female workers for not having more "open and welcoming" body language.

I worked at a few other restaurants serving or being a host. Then I worked for Starbucks.

I went through community college, then undergrad, then grad school. I became homeless part way through grad school but pulled it off. I was the first on my mom's side of the family to go to college. It did take $80,000 in student loans.

I am now at a point where I qualify for jobs that make an average of $60,000 to $80,000 or more.

It doesn't feel "right" that I qualify to make that much. It feels like reality itself does not make sense. The universe has made a mistake. There is incredible anxiety around no longer working in working class jobs and being in that culture.

There is a certain type of sociality and culture that comes with being raised in certain income brackets. It feels as though I quite literally do not speak the same language as people who make $30,000 a year, let alone $60,000 - $80,000. Think about a group of people or subculture that exists in society that you don't ever really spend much time around and feel like an outsider to, but suddenly you're in a situation where you're surrounded by only those people and you're trying your hardest to fit inside the "in group" - that is the experience.

Both growing up in poverty and the corporate workplace culture for the working class breeds feelings of inadequacy and a sense of belonging and community with being poor and associating with other poor people. The more someone makes, the less they will find people who grew up poor and have that socialization - the more likely they will surround themselves with people who were raised in wealth and had connections. The more they will feel they don't belong.

[battleangel]

A History of Violence

I wonder if Kris Jenkins who was recently drafted in the second round by the Bengals, same name & same position as his father who was a Pro Bowler who played 10 seasons for the Panthers, Patriots & Jets, ever bothered to read what his father told the New York Times in 2011 about what it was like playing in the trenches in the NFL?

Kris Jenkins - View of Life in the NFL Trenches

Article Excerpt

"N.F.L. fans, people outside, they have no clue what goes on. This isn’t like playing Madden. This isn’t like being the popular kid in high school. When you do those things in the real world, and it don’t work out, you still have your health. The thing about football is you’re directly playing with your life, the quality of it and the longevity of it. The stakes are up there.

You ever been in a car crash? Done bumper cars? You know when that hit catches you off guard and jolts you, and you’re like, what the hell? Football is like that. But 10 times worse. It’s hell."

Nothing is questioned, nothing is learned.

Cycle and history of violence from father to son continues.

The son will just repeat everything his father went through.

Life in the trenches, on the line.

His fathers New York Times article was only written 13 years ago — did his son even bother to read it?

Article:

"The debate about concussions wasn’t there yet. I’ve had more than 10, including college and the pros. Nobody cared. And that’s the thing. We play football."

Are we as an audience, as fans, as a nation of football loving fanatics so blasé about the same violence that was visited upon the father being visited upon his son?

Does that not even get us to collectively pause before checking pre-season match ups in preparation for Week 1 next month?

America's collective Christmas in September — footballs back!!!!!!!

Do actual thoughts ever creep in amongst the unbridled ebullience, enthusiasm and unchecked joy of, "Football!!!!!!!!!!!!".

Or is the unthinking emotion inherent in football fanaticism across all levels, players and non-players alike, the point?

The pure emotion and the short circuiting of logic.

Its probably not a great idea for me to go bash my head against that dudes head 70 to 80 times a game, every game, every season.

But, its football!!!!!!!!!

So, nothing else matters?

Unlike rules now protecting quarterbacks and other positions from helmet to helmet hits, absolutely nothing has changed for offensive & defensive linemen and running backs — you're still smashing yourself head first into a concrete wall — as a running back, 20 to 30 times a game and as a lineman, 70 to 80 times a game.

No matter how much the NFL lies about this and tries to pretend the issue is concussions, its not — the existential issue threatening the sport of football itself is the repetitive SUBconcussive head impacts involved in every blocking and tackling play in football.

They are absolutely unavoidable and occur literally over a thousand times every single season.

It is these repetitive subconcussive head impacts — average 1500 hits to the head per season in high school, football & the pros — that 10 to 15 years after their playing careers are over, can cause neurological disorders and conditions like CTE, Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers disease, ALS and dementia in former players.

We have seen the movie before.

Im pretty sure Will Smith was in it.

And even that movie was nothing but masterful subterfuge from the NFL as they named it as their eternal smokescreen — Concussion — instead of what actually turned Mike Websters brain into CTE mush — Repetitive Subconcussive Head Impacts.

Doesn't have the same Hollywood ring to it, does it?

But it doesn't make it any less true or the NFL any less deceptive.

The NFL's own disability paperwork for former players says players can be compensated as early as 36 for early-onset dementia.

Is a game really worth someone losing their literal mind at 36?

When do we question the every day violence inherent in every tackling and blocking play in football?

Article:

"I remember one game, at Carolina, my second year. We played Arizona, and the double team weighed 780 pounds combined. They just kept double-teaming me, hoping I would fold and cave in. I didn’t. But that was probably the most painful day I had.

From the double teams, over the years, I wore the left side of my body down. I was past hurt.

I was at the point of numb. Like my body was shutting down nervous systems, so I didn’t have to deal with pain.

The numbness started at the very beginning. I couldn’t feel part of both arms. I couldn’t feel part of both legs. It was worse on the left.

I’m just starting to get feeling back in my left side. Look, football is no joke.

But I’m going to say this much: somebody has to be the grunt. That’s why there’s no better position on the field than interior defensive line. Forget quarterbacks or specialists. They’ve got it easy. If we don’t come to play, nobody else on defense can do their job. We’ve got the toughest job on the field. We don’t care about our facial hair. We play a grimy position.

Piles, oh, my God, they’re brutal. I’ve had my ankles twisted. I’ve been bit. I’ve done stuff. I’ve tried to break guys’ elbows, pinching people, twisting ankles, trying to bend up their arms, pop an elbow out. Why? I had to fight back."

Tackle football is cognitive dissonance & constant dissociation.

The inherent violence of football is never seriously questioned nor is it held up under a critical lens.

The most violent, punishing plays are casually dismissed post-game by players waving their hands and saying, "It was just a football play."

Yeah — thats actually the exact problem.

Ah, pile ups. Just a good old fashioned rugby scrum.

Nothing dehumanizing, nothing to worry about.

As long as its not my dick being grabbed at the bottom of a pile as I dig my way through my second bag of Fritos Scoops, safe and secure on my couch, while those dumb fucks kill themselves for an oblong shaped ball for my entertainment.

Exploitative, much?

The spectacle of the pile up.

The brainwashing so clearly evident when grown adult men who would be ashamed to act this way publicly over anything else suddenly leap in unison into the air like feral animals as Troy Aikman shouts with unfettered glee, "The ball is loose!!!!!!".

So is our collective humanity in watching a several ton mass of flesh undulate, eye gouge, scrotum twist, bite, spit and hurt each other for...what?

Us? Them? Football?

Article:

"Mentally, we’re conditioned to be tough. We’re conditioned to feel no pain. The only injury I ever felt while playing was when one of my knees tore. That’s the only time I felt pain and was like, O.K., that hurt.

But Mondays, you wake up, and it’s hard to get out of bed. It hurts wherever you got hit. I remember one time getting hit by Edgerrin James. He put his head in my chest. I woke up, and I couldn’t even move, because it felt like my chest was going to collapse. It was sore for days. All you want to do is get the blood circulating.

Hot tub. Cold tub. Hot tub. Cold tub."

Hot tub. Cold tub. Hot tub. Cold tub.

That's brainwashing.

A dissociative brainwashing ritual to dissociate the self from the pain & violence of the game.

It's like Junior Seau when he referred to himself in third person when he was mic'd up for NFL Films before every single hit for the duration of an entire game.

Very creepy if you can find it on youtube.

It literally sounded like he was programming himself to hit, then he would hit the hole, collect himself on the ground and do it.

Hard. Goddamned hard.

Again. And again. And again. And again.

If thats not brainwashing, what is?

Article:

"The brain fog? It still hasn’t stopped. It feels like you’re punch-drunk, like someone hit you over the head. It’s like you knock yourself stupid. When you have to concentrate on things, then it becomes an issue. My head gets foggy to the point where I really can’t function."

And yet you put a helmet on your son's head and you sent him out to play the same position.

Like father, like son.

Just like fathers in the military who have sons who "follow in their footsteps".

Often, articles will speak of a newly drafted player's heritage and lineage in the sport and if his father had a storied career, the hyperbole of the newly drafted son "being born to play" is routinely trotted out.

Smacks of eugenicism, genetic determinism, militarism, rigid heirarchies, dynasties.

Capitalist masculine toxicity.

Article:

"We know it’s going to hurt. We know because pain in football is consistent over time. You’re still hurting in the off-season. You’re hurting when the next season starts.

I mean, guys play hurt, but it’s a choice. They do a pretty good job now, with all the scrutiny around concussions.

On the line, it’s still painful. By the end of the year, half an offensive line might be getting shots, draining fluid from their knees. Most stay away from cortisone now, because it’s degenerative.

Everything gets off center. Bulging disk. Herniated disk. For linemen, it starts in the lower back. Throws everything off."

What did Jason Kelce recently say on his podcast with his wife?

His back is so fucked up from playing football that he cant bend down to pick up his 1 year old daughter nor can he hold her while standing.

Kelce also played on the line as the center for the Eagles.

Is it worth it?

Should children be playing this game?

Should anyone in its current incarnation?

Has science shown that the risk of repetitive subconcussive head impacts causing neurological conditions & disorders is too high for any child to assume?

What about teenagers in high school who are legally minors and not adults?

Should they be able to assume risks as teenagers that can mentally incapacitate them later in life as soon as their 30s?

Potential suicide due to CTE in their 20s?

1500 hits per season every season starting in high school.

So, that's 6k hits to the head in four years of high school football.

Another 6k more hits to the head in four years of college football.

12k hits to the head before the pros not counting youth football prior to high school which is ages 5 to 14 aka Pop Warner.

Even 5 year olds endure on average 336 hits to the head every season in Pop Warner.

5 year olds!

Kindergartners!

Ask yourself where else you could hit a 5 year old child 336 times in the head over the course of a few months without being arrested and jailed?

Is it really okay just because it's football?

Does that truly justify that amount of head impacts to a 5 year old child?

Wouldn't we call that abuse if it was happening in the Boy Scouts or any organization other than Pop Warner?

Should it be happening at all?

In service of whom and for what?

Football? Glory? Masculinity? Manhood? America? Pride? Militarism?

All of the above?

Article:

"I can’t blame anybody for my death. I made the choice to play football. I made the choice to walk through the concussions. I could have stopped. I could have said, my head hurts. It was my choice, as a man."

But who told you that playing through permanent brain injuries is what makes you a man?

Can't we blame that person?

Your father and your coaches from youth, high school, college all the way to the pros?

Militaristic views of masculinity kills boys and young men for the game of football.

It's a militaristic war game that simulates combat yet kills people in slow motion for real.

The violence suffered by players in football is as celebrated as militaristic ideals of what soldiers suffer through in war: valor, courage under fire, physical courage, endurance, stoically fighting through unimaginable injuries & pain, the quarterback heroically leading his squad as their captain marching his troops down the field to victory just like any military commander complete with a chevron like system that awards stars for each year or season of service very similar to how stripes function in the military.

This militaristic ideal of masculinity is endlessly promoted, encouraged, rewarded and valorized in football just as it is in the military.

Football is Americas killing fields.

High school players — teenaged boys, not adult men — die every year playing football.

Over a million boys play high school football each year and only a handful die or suffer permanent, disabling and/or catastrophic injury.

Would you be so glib about the numbers though if it was your son or your brother or your boyfriend or your best friend who died playing high school football?

What if they were permanently paralyzed from the neck down playing college football?

It's easy to treat the above numbers as a statistic or rounding error when you can close out of the Facebook support page for the now dead or disabled high school or college player and get ready for Chiefs/Ravens next month.

What if you couldn't just X out of the Facebook page because you had to quit your job to take care of your disabled son for the rest of your life?

Or what if your brother killed himself from having CTE from playing college football?

The reality is, we can drop a "sad crying" emoji on a Facebook status and move on — the families of the young boys and men sacrificed to this sport definitely can't.

Go ask Tyler Sash's mom if she's "moved on".

Hasn't science proven at this point that tackle football just doesnt work the way it is currently played?

Why are we okay risking future Junior Seaus, Mike Websters, Justin Strelczyks, Phillip Adams, Tyler Hillinskis with every boy and young man that straps on the pads and helmet and charges on to the field?

Is it 10% of players that get CTE? Is it 20%?

Is it more? Is it half?

More than half?

The truth is we wont know until a CTE test is developed for living players.

Pop Warners Chief Medical Director is working with the FDA to develop the test as I type this.

Why do you think that is?

The NFL's own study funded through a university admits that NFL players are 19 times more likely than non-NFL players to develop neurological conditions and disorders.

19 times!!!!!

As long as its not your brain getting scrambled right?

And you can just sit there and watch the leagues reigning back to back MVP and reigning Super Bowl Champ slowly deteriorate their minds while accumulating permanent brain damage for your entertainment.

Pass the chips.

Article:

"We consider football a gladiator sport because we understand you’re going to get hurt. You’re putting your life on the line.

You might not die now, like in an old Roman arena, but 5, 10 years down the road, you could. You know that.

I wouldn’t change anything.

During my career, I kept my mouth shut. This now, speaking out, it’s about telling you my life. There’s no agenda, no vendetta. This is what football’s really like.

The first warning is the first meeting you have with an agent, when you realize this is real. My choices count at this point. I’m going to be prostituting myself for the next 18 years of my life.

That’s the first warning.

The next one is that good old combine.

That’s when you realize, when you march in that room half naked, I’m a number now."

No, thats when you realize that the NFL is MODERN DAY SLAVERY.

It's a modern day meat market.

6% of the US population is Black male. 75% of the NFL is Black.

0% of the owners are Black. Only 2 out of 32 coaches are Black.

Almost all of the NFL owners are white with very few exceptions and exactly none of them are Black.

The NFL is a modern day plantation.

Article:

"I loved New York. I loved playing there. I loved the spotlight. I was fine in New York, but I also played for Eric Mangini. We started 8-3, Brett Favre, all of that. Everybody told Mangini, stop with the long practices, you’re killing us. You practice too hard. We’re on turf."

36% of all injuries that occur in the NFL are due to turf & 1/4 of all concussions are a result of players heads slamming against turf.

So...

Why won't the NFL replace turf with grass in their stadiums as the NFLPA has been asking for for years?

Because they're cheap as hell and would rather injure their own investments then pay for grass.

The owners & the league have the same exact disregard and disdain for their own players.

The NFL has agreed to switch out turf for grass for the World Cup because the soccer players refused to do what NFL players are forced to — fuck their bodies up on turf.

It proves the NFL and owners could do it and, in fact, they did do it so they could host the World Cup in their football stadium — unless it's actually for the players in their own league.

In that case, you're shit out of luck.

Should have played soccer.

Article:

"What you hear from guys like Ray Lewis, James Harrison, what they’re saying is we’re well aware what we’re signing up for. The violence, we love it. The madness, we love it. We love measuring ourselves in it.

Those guys express themselves with their pads. You soften the game, you’re taking away their freedom of expression. Nobody wants to see flag football, and now, you might as well give guys flags, tell them to hug afterward, all that."

Did he even read the beginning of his own article???

Constant cognitive dissonance is the distillation & essence of tackle football — by the players, the audience, coaches, trainers, medical personnel, announce team, play by play, color, pre-game & post-game hosts, team & network journalists.

I see no repetitive head impacts causing CTE.

I hear no repetitive head impacts causing CTE.

I speak no repetitive head impacts causing CTE.

Article:

"The violence is what I remember. Like against Buffalo in 2009, when I had the game of my career. Or the time I slapped a lineman out of the way in Houston with one arm. Winning, the physical part, the mayhem, finding the line between insanity and sanity, that’s the exact reason why you play. That’s the reason fans like football in the first place.

A guy like James Harrison, he’s possessed, and that’s the guy you love to play with, love to watch. He doesn’t need to be babied."

Protection from permanent brain damage & trauma, fans bloodlust, coaches unreasonable demands, neurological disorders & conditions, neurological symptoms including suicidality, depression, memory loss, confusion, irritability, volatility, aggression, amnesia, mental incapicitation, deteroriation & decline is being "babied"??????????

Article:

"The N.F.L. is too big to fail. If that happened, it would be a slow death. It’s still the ultimate game. For us, it’s like legal prison rules. You have to protect your manhood, your well-being. You’re going to be challenged. You’re going to be tested."

"You have to protect your manhood."

Protect The Shield.

Brainwashed into the cult of American masculinity.

Just like all the other 2.6 million young boys & adolescents playing youth football.

Another million playing in high school.

100k playing in NCAA college football.

1600 play in the NFL.

All brainwashed into the cult of masculinity.

Millions of young boys and teenagers sacrificed on the altar of tackle football, Americas true religion.

Article:

"There aren’t too many places a 400-pound guy with an attitude can go and beat the crap out of somebody and not get locked up for it. I have a violent streak. I have to fight it out of my system. We signed up for it. All of it. We’re not trying to be sane or rational."

What does an 8 year old playing tackle football for Pop Warner sign up for?

Tradition, rigid authoritarianism, toxic masculinity, ideals of manhood worth sacrificing your body, mind, memories, personality, self and literal life for.

A 13 year old football player committed suicide after an egregious hit and post concussion symptoms that lasted for over a year in 2018.

He played through the hit and practiced in pads the very next day — think that might have made his concussion worse?

Prior to the hit, he was a straight A student, a voracious reader, erudite, sociable & well-liked.

After the hit, he became withdrawn.

He lost vision in one eye. He lost his balance frequently.

He was unable to read for more than a few minutes at a time.

He started tackle football at 9.

He played two ways as a linebacker and running back and was known as a ferocious hitter who never complained of pain.

He attempted suicide, was hospitalized, seemed to be improving, then the second suicide attempt was tragically successful.

Dead at 13 for the sport of football.

When is enough enough?

Football is a game, it's a magical talisman, it's a sport, it's a crucible, it's a maker of men, it's the distillation of manhood and masculinity, it's what being a man is.

It's worth bashing and battering your brains repeatedly.

It's worth your mind.

It's worth not knowing who you are at 50.

It's worth you committing suicide.

Just remember to shoot yourself in the chest so your brain can be donated and studied.

[politijohn]

Source

Source

*Taps sign repeatedly*

[wageronancap]

Brothers, is it "brainwashing" to be skeptical of narratives promoted by an openly murderous government

[beardedmrbean]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., "is at long last acknowledging that ObamaCare has increased healthcare prices" and created other unintentional consequences, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote Friday.

Warren, who has long supported the Affordable Care Act, the official name for ObamaCare, has recently come to an "epiphany" about "industry consolidation and price increases caused by the healthcare law," per The Journal.

A letter to the Health and Human Services Department inspector general was aimed at determining if "vertically-integrated health care companies are hiking prescription drug costs" and are "evading federal regulations."

In a bipartisan letter, she and Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., complained "that the nation’s largest health insurers are dodging ObamaCare’s medical loss ratio (MLR)," according to The Journal. 

As Warren describes in the letter, health insurers have exploited the situation, making for "sky-high prescription drug costs and excessive corporate profits."

"In functioning markets, generic drugs cost 80 to 85 percent less than their name-brand equivalents, giving patients much-needed relief from high drug costs and saving taxpayer dollars," Warren wrote. "But patients – including patients in public health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid – who either use or are compelled to use vertically integrated specialty pharmacies are not seeing this relief."

The senators continued: "By owning every link in the chain, a conglomerate like UnitedHealth Group – which includes an insurer, a PBM, a pharmacy, and physician practices – can send inflated medical payments to its pharmacy. Then, by realizing those payments on the pharmacy side – the side that charges for care – rather than the insurance side, the insurance line of business appears to be in compliance with MLR requirements, while keeping more money for itself." 

The Journal explained that despite Democrats arguing that the MLR would help patients, "the rule has spurred insurers to merge with or acquire pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), retail and specialty pharmacies, and healthcare providers." 

"This has made healthcare spending less transparent since insurers can shift profits to their affiliates by increasing reimbursements," the board wrote. 

Warren has voted against ObamaCare repeal efforts over the years but also pushed for a "Medicare for All" proposal when she ran for president in 2020.

Warren's office and HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. 

[decolonize-the-everything]

I GOT IT

They privatized and corporatized community. They corporatized human rights. And people swallowed that like candy.

And combined with individualism saying "you owe nobody, least of all some unaccredited movement, anything"...

No, hear me out because when we say protest or strike or whatever else what's the FIRST thing people ask?

"who organized this?"

Y'all refuse to listen to normal people anymore. And yeah organizations are great and they offer awesome resources and support behind their actions but the more I think about it the more it just sounds like another psyop used to discredit and further marginalize the already marginalized.

Those organizations weren't always there and we were organizing WAY more effectively before them.

And now we're peaking on a fascist wave and where are they calling for strikes and unity and protests? For solidarity?

....but the small grassroots groups that only have a cashapp to raise funds are. The ones actually on the ground or at desks making posters are. The people suffering from poverty and systematic racism are.

But it's them you need to be weary of? Normal people unallied to a corporation & willing to fight the ones ruining our lives?

They might not be trustworthy, huh? Might take advantage of you?

*taps the sign aggressively*

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

Tomorrow (September 6) at 7pm, I'll be hosting Naomi Klein at the LA Public Library for the launch of Doppelganger.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

If the Naomi be Klein you’re doing just fine If the Naomi be Wolf Oh, buddy. Ooooof.

I learned this rhyme in Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's indescribable semi-memoir that is (more or less) about the way that people confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and how that fact has taken on a new urgency as Wolf descended into conspiratorial politics, becoming a far-right darling and frequent Steve Bannon guest:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374610326/doppelganger

This is a very odd book. It is also a very, very good book. The premise – exploring the two Naomis' divergence – is a surprisingly sturdy scaffold for an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of this very frightening moment of polycrisis and systemic failure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCjcwVhFhTA

Wolf once had a cluster of superficial political and personal similarities to Klein: a feminist author of real literary ability, a Jewish woman, and, of course, a Naomi. Klein grew accustomed to being mistaken for Wolf, but never fully comfortable. Wolf's politics were always more Sheryl Sandberg than bell hooks (or Emma Goldman). While Klein talked about capitalism and class and solidarity, Wolf wanted to "empower" individual women to thrive in a market system that would always produce millions of losers for every winner.

Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal. The classic leftist distinction goes: leftists want to abolish a system where 150 white men run the world; liberals want to replace half of those 150 with women, queers and people of color.

The past forty years have seen the rise and rise of a right wing politics that started out extreme (think of Reagan and Thatcher's support for Pinochet's death-squads) and only got worse. Liberals and leftists forged an uneasy alliance, with liberals in the lead (literally, in Canada, where today, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party governs in partnership with the nominally left NDP).

But whenever real leftist transformation was possible, liberals threw in with conservatives: think of the smearing and defenestration of Corbyn by Labour's right, or of the LibDems coalition with David Cameron's Tories, or of the Democrats' dirty tricks to keep Bernie from appearing on the national ballot.

Lacking any kind of transformational agenda, the liberal answer to capitalism's problems always comes down to minor tweaks ("making sure half of our rulers are women, queers and people of color") rather than meaningful, structural shifts. This leaves liberals in the increasingly absurd position of defending the indefensible: insisting that the FDA shouldn't be questioned despite its ghastly failures during the opioid epidemic; claiming that the voting machine companies whose defective products have been the source of increasingly urgent technical criticism are without flaw; embracing the "intelligence community" as the guardians of the best version of America; cheerleading for deindustrialization while telling the workers it harmed with "learn to code"; demanding more intervention in speech by our monopolistic tech companies; and so on.

It's not like leftists ever stopped talking about the importance of transformation and not just reform. But as the junior partners in the progressive coalition, leftists have been drowned out by liberal reformers. In most of the world, if you are worried about falling wages, corporate capture of government, and scientific failures due to weak regulators, the "progressive" answer was to tell you it was all in your head, that you were an unhinged conspiratorialist:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point-3434d7cbfae2

For Klein, it's this failure that the faux-populist right has exploited, redirecting legitimate anger and fear into racist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist and transphobic rage. The deep-pocketed backers of the conservative movement didn't just find a method to get turkeys to vote for Christmas – progressives created the conditions that made that method possible.

If progressives answer pregnant peoples' concerns about vaccine risks – concerns rooted in the absolute failure of prenatal care – with dismissals, while conservatives accept those concerns and funnel them into conspiratorialism, then progressives' message becomes, "We are the movement of keeping things as they are," while conservatives become the movement of "things have to change." Think here of the 2016 liberal slogan, "America was already great," as an answer to the faux-populist rallying cry, "Make America great again."

When liberals get to define what it means to be "progressive," the fundamental, systemic critique is swept away. Conservatives – conservatives! – get to claim the revolutionary mantle, to insist that they alone are interested in root-and-branch transformation of society.

Like the two Naomis, conservatives and progressives become warped mirrors of one another. The progressive campaign for bodily autonomy is co-opted to be the foundation of the anti-vax movement. This is the mirror world, where concerns about real children – in border detention, or living in poverty in America – are reflected back as warped fever-swamp hallucinations about kids in imaginary pizza restaurant basements and Hollywood blood sacrifice rituals. The mirror world replaces RBG with Amy Coney-Barrett and calls it a victory for women. The mirror world defends workers by stoking xenophobic fears about immigrants.

But progressives let it happen. Progressives cede anti-surveillance to conservatives, defending reverse warrants when they're used to enumerate Jan 6 insurrectionists (nevermind that these warrants are mostly used to round up BLM demonstrators). Progressives cede suspicion of large corporations to conservatives, defending giant, exploitative, monopolistic corporations so long as they arouse conservative ire with some performative DEI key-jingling. Progressives defend the CIA and FBI when they're wrongfooting Trump, and voting machine vendors when they're turned into props for the Big Lie.

These issues are transformed in the mirror world: from grave concerns about real things, into unhinged conspiracies about imaginary things. Urgent environmental concerns are turned into a pretense to ban offshore wind turbines ("to protect the birds"). Worry about gender equality is transformed into seminars about women's representation in US drone-killing squads.

For Klein, the transformation of Wolf from liberal icon – Democratic Party consultant and Lean-In-type feminist icon – to rifle-toting Trumpling with a regular spot on the Steve Bannon Power Hour is an entrypoint to understanding the mirror world. How did so many hippie-granola yoga types turn into vicious eugenicists whose answer to "wear a mask to protect the immunocompromised" is "they should die"?

The PastelQ phenomenon – the holistic medicine and "clean eating" to QAnon pipeline – recalls the Nazi obsession with physical fitness, outdoor activities and "natural" living. The neoliberal transformation of health from a collective endeavor – dependent on environmental regulation, sanitation, and public medicine – into a private one, built entirely on "personal choices," leads inexorably to eugenics.

Once you start looking for the mirror world, you see it everywhere. AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs. Brands are the mirror-world version of quality, a symbol that isn't a mark of reliability, but a mark of a mark, a sign pointing at nothing. Your own brand – something we're increasingly expected to have – is the mirror world image of you.

The mirror world's overwhelming motif is "I know you are, but what am I?" As in, "Oh, you're a socialist? Well, you know that 'Nazi' stands for 'National Socialist, right?" (and inevitably, this comes from someone who obsesses over the 'Great Replacement' and considers themself a 'race realist').

This isn't serious politics, but it is seriously important. "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," its obsession with "international bankers" the mirror-world version of the real and present danger from big finance and private equity wreckers. And, as Klein discusses with great nuance and power, the antisemitism discussion is eroded from both sides: both by antisemites, and by doctrinaire Zionists who insist that any criticism of Israel is always and ever antisemetic.

As a Jew in solidarity with Palestinians, I found this section of the book especially good – thoughtful and vigorous, pulling no punches and still capturing the discomfort aroused by this deliberately poisoned debate.

This thoughtful, vigorous prose and argumentation deserves its own special callout here: Klein has produced a first-rate literary work just as much as this is a superb philosophical and political tome. In this moment where the mirror world is exploding and the real world is contracting, this is an essential read.

I'll be Klein's interlocutor tomorrow night (Sept 6) at the LA launch for Doppelganger. We'll be appearing at 7PM at the @LAPublicLibrary:

https://lafl.org/ALOUD

Livestreaming at:

https://youtube.com/live/jIoAh-jxb2k

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

[weather-n-calamity]

“Welcome to late stage capitalism/this is capitalisms fault”

L

O

L

We live in a time where governments around the world are the biggest and most intrusive they’ve ever been. They implement legal tender laws and regulations for every aspect of life, so much so that you need a license for pretty much everything, from cutting hair, to driving to getting married. And you think the market is to blame? You are either a complete idiot or a liar.