#its always the elite classes that mold the world and the fact that the politics is full of rich people prenting to care for us

[shobiolovechild]

This one here! This is such a nice thematic to be explored. This can be applied to many situations in our society.

[qqueenofhades]

You once said the Renaissance was a uniquely bad time for women. Would you mind going into moreso why? Thanks in advance.

Aha. I have indeed said this before, most recently-ish in this ask about the witch trials. I say this especially because the common (wildly erroneous) narrative of Western history goes essentially like this:

Rome good. Fall of Rome bad.

Blargle blarge Dark Ages. Bad!

Yay! Renaissance! People suddenly became smrt! (Note: by this they only ever mean the Italian Renaissance, when there were many eras of “renaissance” across the medieval world, including the Carolingian Renaissance and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, but we don’t talk about those because Dark Ages.)

Columbus Discovered America! (tm)

Enlightenment! Yay science! Boo religion! Make Europe Smart Again!

We are now Modern. The End.

Aside from the witch trials, which were a early modern phenomenon rather than a medieval one, the cultural climate of the Renaissance involved, to put it bluntly, a lot of rich and pretentious dudebros deciding that the crises of the late medieval world had been caused by the fact that society insufficiently resembled that of Greco-Roman antiquity (which was considered to be the most perfect form of society). This involved, similarly to the backlash against women currently taking place as a result of the crises of the 21st century, attacks on the fact that medieval women enjoyed quite a bit more latitude in public life than women in antiquity ever had, and the belief that it was clearly a Bad Thing that they were now well outside those social roles. As Joan Kelly-Gadol puts it in “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”:

The Renaissance is a good case in point.  Italy was well in advance of the rest of Europe from roughly 1350 to 1530 because of its early consolidation of genuine states, the mercantile and manufacturing economy that supported them and its working out of post-feudal and post-guild social relations. These developments reorganized Italian society along modern lines and opened the possibilities for the social and cultural expression for which the age is known. Yet precisely these developments affected women adversely, so much, so that there was no “renaissance” for women, at least not during the Renaissance. The state, early capitalism, and the social relations formed by them impinged on the lives of Renaissance women in different ways according to their different positions in society. But the starting fact is that women as a group, especially among the classes that dominated Italian urban elite, experienced a contraction of social and personal options that the men of their classes did not experience as markedly, as was the case with the bourgeoisie and the nobility.

I talked in this ask about how over the course of the late medieval era, women (who had heretofore been relatively present in universities and medical schools) were subject to increased and formal efforts to exclude them, under the guise of ensuring licensing requirements, standard curriculum, and individual competence. (This post also debunked some myths about premodern women’s healthcare and updated some of the arguments in that first ask.) The fact that Henry V felt it necessary to ban women from England’s universities and medical schools in 1421 demonstrates a) that they were there in the first place and b) they hadn’t been formally excluded beforehand. (This followed similar legislation in France.) Renaissance women faced sustained cultural and social pressure from this new ideal to restrict them back to “appropriate” domestic spaces. The average fertility and child-bearing rate for Renaissance women went sharply upward, especially for rich women expected to bear multiple heirs, and pregnancy and childbirth (but not necessarily child-rearing) became their overriding function. Girls began to suffer more systematically from more overt and institutionalized misogyny, both in cultural attitudes and social institutions, and it became still more of the case that daughters were regarded as less valuable than sons. These attitudes had obviously existed to some degree in the medieval era, but were refined, gained more currency and prevalence, were spread by the increasing popularity of printed literature, and began to be crystallized more explicitly.

We do have women writers of the Renaissance, Renaissance networks of intellectual exchange centered around women, and women who participated in the creation of Renaissance text and drama, whether as patrons or authors. It was sometimes the case that wealthy daughters were educated alongside sons, but dare we remark, the fact that they had recently been banned from going to university makes that a distinctly backhanded compliment; “hey, no college for you, but at least you get to learn with your brother at home!” Certain women like Margaret Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More, were renowned for their learning, and Elizabeth I (who was obviously a princess) received an outstanding education in the Renaissance model. But nonetheless, this was a cultural sphere intensely designed by, for the needs for, and around the interests of (wealthy, educated) men, and this had both implicit and explicit misogynistic consequences. Once more from Kelly-Gadol:

In sum, a new division between personal and public life made itself fit as the state came to organize Renaissance society, and with that division the modern relation of the sexes made its appearance, even among the Renaissance nobility. Noblewomen, too, were increasingly removed from public concerns—economic, political, and cultural—and although they did not disappear into a private realm of family and domestic concerns as fully as their sisters in the patrician bourgeoisie, their loads of public power made itself fit in new constraints placed upon their personal as well as their social lives. Renaissance ideas on love and manners, more classical than medieval, and almost exclusively a male product, expressed this new subordination of women to the interests of husbands and male-dominated kin groups and served to justify the removal of women from an "unladylike" position of power and erotic independence. All the advances of Renaissance Italy, its pro-capitalist economy, its states, and its humanistic culture, worked to mold the noblewoman into an aesthetic object decorous, chaste, and doubly dependent—on her husband as well as the prince.

In other words, the Renaissance was a great time for a certain subset of elite male society, and not necessarily for everyone else. It was certainly no movement toward proto-equality, often represented an active drawback for women vis-a-vis their status in the medieval world, and laid the foundations for many of the misogynistic attitudes and assumptions that still enjoy widespread currency in the modern world. We are taught that it was some moment of “awakening” for humanity due to the deeply elite, Eurocentric, and androcentric nature of the canon of Western history, and while its ideals certainly did transform Europe at the end of the late medieval period, these were not always for the best. Once again, we can see some parallels in our own time, and while women have always served as a useful scapegoat during moments of social and economic upheaval, it would be helpful if we could at least realize how much, and what form that has taken before, even (especially) in things we are otherwise supposed to celebrate.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

The Fetishization of the Working Class

The left is mired in identity politics. While leftists often express their opposition to systems of domination based on class, gender, sexuality and race, they tend to oppose such systems by accepting and reinforcing the very identities created and imposed by such systems of domination. While all such identities are problematic, I believe that none of them is as harmful as the left’s idealized and fetishized identity of “the worker”.

The working class as an identity differs from identities such as identities based on gender and race in the sense that a worker is an actual thing that exists apart from how we define it(as opposed to a “black” person or a “woman”). That being said, the worker only exists as long as he reproduces social relationships that define him as a worker. The moment he stops working he ceases being a worker. But why do I consider embracing the working class identity to be so harmful?

Before we get into that, let’s look back at the creation of the working class and the working class identity. We can trace the birth of the working class back to the dawn of the industrial revolution in England, which needed a disciplined workforce to run the factories that were emerging like mushrooms after the rain. There was, however, one major problem for the owners of these factories: nobody wanted to work in them.

Peasants preferred to work their plots of land, and autonomous artisans wouldn’t dream of submitting themselves to the nightmarish factories. Both saw wage labor for what is is: paid slavery. Unfortunately, the state and the bourgeoisie were determined to turn both peasants and artisans into workers, and they had the tools and the power to accomplish that. Land enclosures robbed peasants of their lands, creating a mass of landless vagrants. Anti-vagrancy laws forced these ex-peasants to chose between being criminalized or reduced to mere cogs in an assembly line. Mass-produced goods out-competed artisans, and the creation of the modern police made sure that the population was proletarianized whether they wanted it or not.

This process sparked a wave of resistance. The most emblematic revolt against the new conditions being imposed was the Luddite uprising, when textile workers and weavers rose in revolt against industrialization and proceeded to destroy as many machines as they could. Eventually, the uprisings were put down and people were forced into becoming workers.

The shared experienced of being forced into becoming workers and of working together under grueling conditions (16 hours work journeys, miserable wages, poor workplace safety, etc) forged a solidarity among the first wave of proletarians, which created the conditions for the birth of the labor movement.

Accepting their new role, workers began to organize and fight for better conditions. Struggles for better wages, working-hours and for the legalization of unions took place, and the tactics of the infant movement began to develop. Working class solidarity grew, and the identity of the worker slowly took hold upon the new class as new ideologies were developed around it. These are the ideologies that eventually gave rise to the modern left.

It is in this context that socialism appeared. As a critique of capitalism emerged from worker struggles and from the thoughts of socialist thinkers, the bourgeoisie was identified as an enemy of the working class. From this perspective, visions of struggle and “liberation” began to emerge. The most well known of these perspectives is that of Karl Marx, which originated marxism. Marx recognized the antagonist nature of the relationship between classes, and sought to create a vision that could lead to a stateless and classless society (which he termed communism). His revolutionary subject was the working class, which Marx believed to be the only inherently revolutionary class under capitalist soiety. The non-workers who were excluded from the system were seen by him as crude “lumpens” with no revolutionary potential.

According to Marx, workers should seize the state through a violent revolution and create a “proletarian” (and socialist)state. With the state in their hands, workers would dismantle capitalism and speed the development of the “productive forces”, which Marx believed are being held back by capitalism. As the socialist society ran it’s course, the state would supposedly become increasingly unnecessary and wither away (although no marxist ever made clear how this process would actually happen).

Bakunin and other anarchists living at that time (correctly) predicted that the takeover of the state would simply create a class of state bureaucrats that would become a new self-serving elite. This critique was essential to the development of anarchist theory and praxis, which views the state as an inherently oppressive institution that cannot be used for liberating purposes.

That being said, both Marx and Bakunin (as well as socialists/anarchists at the time with very few notable exceptions) believed that the productive forces should not only be maintained but also developed. Not only they failed to identify the inherently oppressive nature of industrial technology, they also failed to see that workers can never be liberated as long as they remain workers.

Much time has passed since then, but the left still glorifies and fetishizes industrial society and the working class that keeps it running. Even the vision of the most “radical” elements of the left (contemporary revolutionary socialists and left anarchists)refuses to go further than the idea of a society where the means of production are administered by the working class. But what good is it to get rid of the bourgeoisie if we are still enslaved by work, civilization and industrial technology? Should I be exhilarated at the possibility of managing my own misery instead of seeking to abolish it?

And why should I look upon the working class as “The Revolutionary Class” when the vast majority of the working class would defend industrial society with teeth and nails even though it is the source of their misery? Now, don’t get me wrong. In the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working class I will always side with the working class. That being said, I cannot envision more than a small fraction of the working class rallied behind a true liberating vision, not when most workers cannot even imagine (and wouldn’t want) a world free from the shackles of industrial civilization.

And how can the “radical left” claim to fight for the liberation of the working class when most workers don’t want to be liberated? If forced to choose between the radical left and their capitalist overlords, most workers will side with the latter (not to mention the increasing number of working class folks who are willing to turn to fascism in response to an increasingly crisis-ridden world). You can always claim that this is simply a matter of educating workers so they can see their own oppression, but it doesn’t change the fact that you cannot speak for those who would never wish to be represented by you. Also, Seeing workers as mere pawns of capitalist propaganda is a patronizing and elitist attitude which denies people their agency as individuals. Yet, such attitude is prevalent among the left.

This is not to deny the social dynamics that are at play shaping people. What we can accomplish as individuals is always limited by our social environment. Yet, if we are nothing more than products of our environment with no individual agency,there isn’t even a point in trying to oppose society.

Either way, it is clear that the left’s ideas about the working class and its revolutionary potential are as irrelevant as their ideas about revolution and “liberation”. The working class can only be liberated to the extent that it is destroyed and transcended. As for me, I will side with members of the working class that are willing to rise up when it suits me, but I won’t let off the hook those that get in my way. As for those who refuse to be molded into workers and are willing to steal back their lives, they can always count on my strength and solidarity.

[180abroad]

Day 166: Dachau

Having witnessed the horrifying remains of Auschwitz three weeks earlier, Jessica and I were curious to see how Dachau would compare. It proved to be a very different experience, but the two complemented each other very well. Auschwitz focused on the sheer horror of the Holocaust. Dachau does that too, but at the same time it felt more cerebral--taking time to focus on the social, economic, and governmental failures that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place.

The two experiences fit together like bookends. When I stood in Auschwitz, it felt like I was standing at the end of the world. Dachau was the beginning of that end.

It was raining on and off throughout the morning. We had gotten up early to meet at the Radius stand in Munich central station. Dachau is a large-ish town just outside of Munich--closer than the airport and just a short train ride away. The concentration camp is on the outskirts of town, opposite from the train station. When prisoners were brought to Dachau, they would be forced to march through the town, and the townspeople would be forced to come out and heckle them.

We took a bus. It was a regular city bus, which is the only way to get to the camp if you don't have private transportation. Dachau doesn't seem interested in going out of its way to accommodate the flow of tourists. According to our guide, a lot of people in Dachau resent the camp and the tourists. Dachau is a proud and ancient town--settled about three thousand years ago by the Celts who gave it its name--and its people don't appreciate having become synonymous with Nazi genocide. And they certainly don't appreciate the floods of tourists clogging up their streets and buses.

It's an unfortunate attitude from our perspective, but it is an understandable one.

As we entered the camp, we learned that it was originally a munitions factory. It was shuttered after WWI as part of the forced demilitarization of Germany demanded by the Treaty of Versailles. After Hitler came to power, the factory was converted into a training academy for SS officers. Even after it became a concentration camp, the prisoners were kept in a fenced prison behind the academy where locals couldn't see them. Any locals caught snooping too closely would be arrested and sentenced to two weeks' hard labor.

We made our way through the gates into the prison compound, then into the museum occupying the camp's former processing and administration building. As I mentioned, it starts with an impressively thorough depiction of the state of German society in the years following WWI, which allowed Hitler's rise to power in the first place.

The 1920s were a time of shocking social change in the West. Short skirts, jazz music, and sexual liberalism all sprouted up seemingly overnight, shamelessly flouting conventional sensibilities. Cars, phones, and radios revolutionized what it meant to be middle class. Even Germany was doing pretty well, all things considered. American loans were helping the country make its reparation payments to the rest of Europe, and the darkest days seemed past.

Then, in 1929, Germany's fragile economy was shattered by the Great Depression. Things were worse than ever before, and many people began to blame it on the decadent liberalism and "Jewish capitalism" of the '20s. The Nazis saw this pendulum swing back to conservatism, and threw their weight behind it. Hitler offered the German people a message of national pride and a return to traditional values.

The other side of this nationalist coin was racism and fear. Like all of Europe, Germany already had a longstanding history of anti-Semitism, especially in times of economic trouble. Add to that the fear of the Soviets to the east and savage black soldiers to the west--a racist caricature inspired by the presence of African soldiers in the French army.

Of course, racism was in no way unique to Germany or even necessarily worse there than anywhere else. But the Nazis realized--just like countless other authoritarians throughout world history--how powerful fear, anger, and racism can be when combined and directed with purpose.

Meanwhile, the German government was perpetually teetering on the edge of total collapse.

I had never realized just how weak and unstable the Weimar Republic--Germany's democratic interwar government--actually was. Even before the Nazis took over, the German national assembly was paralyzed by parties fundamentally opposed to each other's basic ideals of government. There were parties that supported the republic, parties that wanted a communist revolution, parties that wanted a fascist revolution, and parties that wanted a return to monarchy.

By the early 1930s, two-thirds of the seats in the national assembly were held by these revolutionary parties. The only thing keeping the Republic's constitution intact was the fact that all these parties hated each other even more than they hated it. Legislative logjams were so pervasive that the chancellors had begun to rely on emergency declarations as the only way to get anything done--setting the precedent for Hitler to do the same once he came to power.

Keep in mind that Germany didn't have a heritage of democracy. It had always been an empire--and a proud one. Now it had been forcibly striped of its monarch and molded into a republic by its enemies. It's only natural that many people would have resented the Weimar Republic. Given how badly things were going, some may even have seen it as a hobble slapped upon them intentionally by Allies to keep Germany weak and poor. And they probably wouldn't have been far wrong.

It's no wonder that so many people would have seen a single unified government--any government--as an improvement over the mess they had right then.

Another thing I'd always found curious is how the early Nazis were essentially able to run an anti-government militia with impunity even before they started to wield real power. Imagine a private militia in the US staging an armed coup in a state capital, getting into a deadly gun battle with the police while trying to seize the government, and the leaders ending up with a slap on the wrist and a few years in prison even after being literally convicted of treason. It seems absurd.

But the Nazis weren't the only ones that were doing it. The fascist, communist, and monarchist parties all openly maintained their own heavily armed party militias in defiance of the government.

Part of the reason this was able to happen was that the Germans had an enshrined right to form armed militias. Another is that the government didn't really want to. As early as 1920--years before the Nazis had any significant power--more than half the legislature was controlled by the parties running these revolutionary militias. Lastly, the government didn't have the firepower to stop the militias even if it wanted to.

When the Treaty of Versailles forcibly disbanded the German military, a large portion of the soldiers and materiel were simply spun off into "civilian" militias. The thousands of men who fought for these militias were battle-hardened veterans armed with military-grade weapons. The government, on the other hand, had whatever threadbare police force it could convince to work for them instead.

It's pretty much a cliché at this point to say that the Treaty of Versailles ended the First World War at the expense of making the Second World War inevitable, but I had never really appreciated just how true that statement is. The Treaty didn't just create the socio-economic storm that toppled the German Republic, it threw the Republic headfirst into the storm with two broken legs and its arms tied behind its back.

In a way, though, I actually find that reassuring. Despite the unsettling echoes that have arisen in recent years, the nations of the Western world today have far stronger cultural and constitutional regard for democracy than the Germans under the Weimar Republic ever did. While the lessons of the past must not be ignored, neither should they be allowed to inspire irrational fears and thereby become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As the Nazis gained power in the national legislature, German industrialists and aristocrats began to support them. They saw the Nazis as a tool they could use to rally support of a fascist government where they would be in charge. After the election of 1930--when the Nazis won the most seats of any party but failed to achieve a majority--these economic power brokers pressured the government to confirm Hitler as chancellor. It was only after it was far too late that the old elites realized that what they had mistaken for a leashed dog was actually a rabid wolf.

This is where Dachau and the concentration camp system comes into the picture. Two and a half years into Hitler's chancellorship, an arsonist attacked the Reichstag--the German capitol building. The fire was set by a radical Dutch communist, who historians generally believe was acting alone in a genuine attempt to undermine Hitler's regime. But Hitler used the situation to his full advantage.

Declaring an emergency situation, Hitler had the leaders of Germany's communist party--his most powerful political opponents--rounded up and put into "protective custody" at the SS training facility in Dachau. This left Hitler and the Nazis with a de facto majority in the legislature and the freedom to enact his policies without compromise.

Five years after that, Germany invaded Poland and the camp system grew exponentially, from a political prison for Hitler's rivals to an industrial machine of mass enslavement and genocide.

In addition to the Jews, Slavs, and Romani, homosexuals were also incarcerated en masse. And we learned from our guide that it didn't take much to be convicted of homosexuality. Any unmarried adult man was at risk of being accused by a social or political rival, and it's now suspected that the vast majority of the men who were arrested and forced to wear pink triangles on their uniforms weren't actually gay at all.

Our guide made it a point to emphasize that the line between concentration camps and extermination camps is a gray one. Every camp utilized slave labor, and every camp performed extermination--the only difference was the ratio each one employed. Dachau had a relatively low death rate of "just" 20%, but the conditions were still heinous.

Back at the entrance of the camp, we'd learned that the infamous welcome phrase Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Sets Free") was actually a slogan that had long been used in factories across Germany. It wasn't just a false promise of future freedom in exchange for obedient servitude, it was a clever PR tactic to make the camps look and feel like ordinary factory towns--from the outside, at least.

Similarly, the iconic striped uniforms worn by the Holocaust victims were inspired by contemporary pajama designs. As if someone could look at an emaciated figure breaking rocks at gunpoint and think, "How bad can they really have it if they don't even need to get out of their PJs."

But of course those weren't the types of pictures the people actually saw. Another trick we learned about was how the Nazis would stockpile photos of prisoners when they first arrived at the camp and release them slowly to the public as if they were recently taken, giving the impression that the prisoners were being kept fit and healthy.

When prisoners first arrived at the camp, they would be stripped naked, booked, and given a number and a uniform. The uniforms were assigned randomly without regard for fit, and swapping was strictly prohibited. Those given oversized uniforms were the lucky ones--they had spare material to work with if they lived long enough start wearing holes in it. It was the only one they would ever get.

For those who were given an undersized uniform… Let's just say that failing to appear properly dressed for morning roll call was cause for beating--no excuses.

Prisoners were also expected to keep their hair short and tidy, but they weren't allowed to keep sharpened blades. In desperation, the prisoners resorted to tearing their hair out by hand to avoid beatings or execution.

Occasionally during roll call, it would be announced that several prisoners were being released for good behavior. These events were highly publicized to improve prisoner morale and reassure the public that these weren't really death camps. Of course, the "freed" prisoners were almost invariably arrested on new charges within months and sent to a different camp where no one knew them, this time with the branding of a repeat offender. The friends and family members they'd been observed fraternizing with in the meantime tended not to fair too well, either.

Similarly, prisoners were encouraged to write home to their friends and family--whose addresses could then be recorded by the SS for future arrest.

Even if they weren't killed or "released," prisoners never stayed in any one camp for very long. Unlike Col. Klink in Hogan's Heroes, the real Nazis understood the danger of allowing a group of prisoners to stay together in a single camp for years on end. Over time, they will develop loyalty to each other and familiarity with their environment--dangerous ingredients for sabotage or escape. But if the prisoners are constantly being shuffled, never allowed to become familiar with their prison and fellow prisoners, they can never organize into a threat.

And every time a prisoner was transferred, they would be given a brand new identification number that they had to memorize. It was only in Auschwitz where prisoners were given permanent numbers in the form of tattoos, and that was only because they were processing so many people so quickly that tattoos proved more economical than sewing new number patches every time a uniform was recycled.

Our guide made sure to point out the irony that--despite the fact the prisoners' supposedly inferior blood was used to justify this inhuman treatment in the minds of the Nazis--the prisoners were regularly forced to donate blood for transfusing German soldiers on the front lines.

In one of the few barrack buildings that has been preserved, we saw a reconstruction of the sort of bunks the prisoners were made to sleep in. The bunks were divided by wooden panels on each side, forming a series of buckets into each of which ten prisoners were expected to pile themselves every night. Almost invariably, someone stuck at the bottom of one of the beds would be found dead from asphyxiation in the morning.

As we'd learned before in Auschwitz--and before that at the Deportation Memorial in Paris--even under the weight of all this horror, the prisoners found ways to make life bearable. On display in the main building was an impressively elaborate chess set carved from scraps of wood secreted by a prisoner from the workshop to which they'd been assigned.

Finally, we walked across the camp, out through the barbed wire, and into a small, tree-veiled clearing where the camp's gas chambers and crematoria still stand. Dachau wasn't a dedicated extermination camp like Auschwitz, but it still did its share of exterminations.

Inside, we saw the long row of ovens where people were burned--many still alive. As we'd learned in Auschwitz, the poison gas Zyklon B was chosen because it was cheap, not because it was effective. It was even less effective in the cold, and during winter it was all-too-common for people to be carted out of the gas chambers still sputtering with ragged gasps of life. Some were given the dignity of being hanged from the rafters of the crematoria before being put into the ovens. But not all.

Jessica--along with many of the people in our group--could hardly stand to be in that place, and they understandably left after a just a few minutes. I felt compelled to stay a little longer and witness the rest. To one side of the ovens was the gas chamber. To the other side was a room where bodies were stacked floor to ceiling like cordwood when they began accumulating faster than they could be disposed of. There were pictures.

Set even deeper into the forest is the old crematorium--a half-timbered stable filled by a pair of ovens. A faint but revolting smell of char still seems to permeate the wooden beams and paneled walls. No one in our group could stand by the roped-off doorway for more than a minute or two, and not just because we were eager to get out of the rain.

There had been a point before we visited Dachau when, despite our curiosity at how it would compare to Auschwitz, Jessica and I wondered whether we really needed to subject ourselves to another concentration camp visit. Visiting Auschwitz kills something inside of you; it's not an experience you relish repeating. I'm so glad we decided to visit Dachau after all, and I'm glad that we visited the camps in the order that we did. The emotional horror of Auschwitz gave an existential weight to the lessons of Dachau that no amount of signage could convey.

Having seen all we could stand, we made our muddy, slippery way back to the bus stop for a very quiet ride home.

[nothingman]

When Mike Cernovich, one of the most prominent alt-right internet trolls supporting Donald Trump, was interviewed on 60 Minutes, he used the platform to spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health and to allege that she is involved with pedophilic sex trafficking operations. But he also declared his belief in single-payer health care.

"I believe in some form of universal basic income," he told CBS’s Scott Pelley, citing concerns about technological unemployment. "I’m pro-single-payer health care. Is that right-wing or is that left-wing anymore? Well, if you have a lot of people, a large swath of the company, or country, are suffering, then I think that we owe it to all Americans to do right by them and to help them out."

This might seem like a bizarre position for a far-right conspiracy theorist to take. Single-payer health care, after all, entails nationalizing most or all of the health insurance industry and having the government set prices for doctors’ services. Conservatives in America have spent the better part of the past century arguing that the idea is socialistic, would lead to long waits for lifesaving treatment, and would give the government power over the life and death of its citizens.

But Cernovich is less a traditional conservative than he is a Trumpist — and Trumpism in its purest, alt-right variety cares more about white working-class identity politics than traditional conservatism. More and more, Trump fans are seeing single-payer as part of that.

Alt-rightists and other Trump-loyal conservatives — Richard Spencer, VDARE writer and ex–National Review staffer John Derbyshire, Newsmax CEO and Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, and onetime Donald Trump Jr. speechwriter and Scholars & Writers for Trump head F.H. Buckley — all endorsed various models of single-payer in recent months and years.

Even elites in the alt-right mold who once deplored single-payer are changing their tune. Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative three-time presidential candidate whose white identity politics and fiercely anti-trade and anti-immigration stances helped inspire the modern alt-right, had free market views on health care in the 1990s and condemned Obamacare as a scheme to kill Grandma in 2009. This week, he told me in an email he has “not taken any position on single-payer, and [has] pretty much stayed out of the Obamacare repeal-and-replace debate.”

Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley programmer whose writings under the pen name Mencius Moldbug helped launch the neoreactionary branch of the alt-right, told me he welcomes the movement’s trend toward single-payer, viewing it as a “sincere effort to think realistically in the present tense rather than in abstract ideology.”

Insofar as the alt-right, and the Trump-supporting right more generally, have a coherent economic agenda, it’s a vehement rejection of the free market ideology crucial to post–World War II American conservatism. While Paul Ryan reportedly makes all his interns read Atlas Shrugged, figures like Cernovich, Spencer, and Derbyshire are trying to build an American right where race and identity are more central and laissez-faire economics is ignored or actively avoided.

This has been most obvious on immigration and trade, where libertarians’ opposition to most or any government restrictions is in tension with the alt-right’s economic nationalism. But it’s also true on health care, where the pure alt-righters are joined by more mainstream pro-Trump voices like Ruddy and Buckley and even some Trump-wary conservatives such as Peggy Noonan.

The Trump-supporting right’s case for single-payer is part of a vision of a party where ideological purity on economic issues is much less important, and where welfare state expansion can be accommodated if it serves other goals — like building a political base among working-class whites.

The welfare state has always been more popular with the Republican base than with its elected officials. Trump arguably won the presidency in part by being the first Republican in years to promise to protect Social Security and Medicare. My colleague Sarah Kliff has run focus groups with Trump voters where participants bring up their admiration for Canadian-style single-payer unprompted. The alt-right single-payer fad suggests that elites are finally catching up.

The ultranationalist case for single-payer health care

Some of the arguments that the Trumpists and alt-rightists offer for single-payer are the standard concerns about the plight of sick and suffering Americans that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Bernie Sanders speech — like Cernovich’s insistence that “we owe it to all Americans to do right by them, and to help them out.”

Other arguments are offered more in sorrow than in anger. Derbyshire, for example, laments the fact that Americans are unwilling to accept a true free market in health care — but argues that single-payer makes more sense than the current hodgepodge of insurance subsidies and regulations and tax breaks.

“Citizens of modern states will accept no other kind of health care but the socialized or mostly socialized kind,” he said on a 2012 episode of his podcast, Radio Derb. “This being the case, however regrettably, the most efficient option is to make the socialization as rational as possible.” Single-payer, he concludes, would involve “less socialism, and more private choice,” than “what we now have.” (Derbyshire doesn’t really explain why socializing insurance is less socialist than not socializing insurance.)

But the main argument offered by Trumpists is about their movement. Donald Trump famously promised in May 2016 to turn the Republican Party into a “workers’ party.” The implication was clear: Republican elites before him like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney prioritized deregulation for businesses and tax cuts for the rich, and offered little or nothing for working-class people, specifically working-class white people. Instead, the party relied on social issues like abortion and immigration to earn their votes.

F.H. Buckley, the George Mason University law professor who led Scholars & Writers for Trump, even approvingly cites the leftist writer Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? on this point. “Frank asked how it was that the poor folks of his home state voted for a Republican Party that cared so little for their economic interests,” Buckley wrote in the New York Post. “Become the jobs and the health-care president, and you [Trump] will have answered Frank’s question.”

“Steve Bannon has said the Republicans will become a party of ‘economic nationalism,’” Buckley continued. “No one has bothered to define this, but here’s one thing it must mean: We’re going to treat Americans better than non-Americans. We’re going to see that Americans have jobs, medical care and an enviable safety net.”

Of course, the Trumpists are big fans of using racialized, not explicitly economic appeals on issues like immigration and crime to win votes. But whereas they see mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan or Jeb Bush making those appeals as a smokescreen for unpopular economic policies, they want to pair the appeals with an nationalist economic agenda that is actually popular with these voters.

“Unlike Paul Ryan and Rich Lowry, who masturbated to Atlas Shrugged in their college dorms and have no loyalty to their race, Donald Trump is a nationalist,” Richard Spencer writes. “We can’t ignore the politics of this. If Trumpcare passes, leftists can credibly claim that Trump has betrayed his populist vision. They will recycle the hoary script about nationalism and ‘scapegoating’ immigrants as a means of pushing through a draconian agenda. And they’ll have a point!”

Single-payer, Spencer insists, would "serve our constituency" (read: white people), give the right an answer to the appeal of social democrats like Bernie Sanders, and encourage the growth of the alt-right movement: "So many writers, activists, and content creators on our side shy away from becoming more involved, not just out of fear of social punishment, but out of fear of being fired and losing their health insurance."

Moreover, as soon as health care becomes a public issue, an alt-right government could use that power to promote a more vigorous, healthy white race on a number of dimensions. "When single-payer healthcare is implemented, issues like food safety, nutrition, and obesity become matters of public concern,” Spencer writes. “It will draw more attention to the alternative we are presenting to America’s current lowest-common-denominator society."

Of course, single-payer would overwhelmingly benefit a lot of nonwhite Americans as well. But programs like Social Security and Medicare do too, and their universal nature and the fact that they’re tied to work have led them to be less racialized and stigmatized than cash welfare or Medicaid. Single-payer’s universality is appealing because it helps the white working class without making them enroll in means-tested programs traditionally associated with black and Latino beneficiaries.

This is a key strategy of the far right in Europe

Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

Marine Le Pen on the campaign trail in Lille.

The ideological vision being offered here is hardly original. The political scientist Sheri Berman has argued that fascism and nationalism succeeded in Europe before World War II largely because unlike traditional conservative parties, fascist parties could provide a real challenge to the social democrats’ promise of relief from the suffering of the Great Depression.

"Across Europe nationalists began openly referring to themselves as 'national' socialists to make clear their commitment to ending the insecurities, injustices, and instabilities that capitalism brought in its wake, while clearly differentiating themselves from their competitors on the left," she writes in The Primacy of Politics.

And more recently, this strategy been adopted by some far-right parties in Europe. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s Front National, has relied heavily on "welfare chauvinism” in her presidential bids, a promise to protect and expand social programs for (white) native workers against migrants who might exploit them and drain money that should be going to noble French citizens. Geert Wilders, the far-right leader in the Netherlands, used to be a small-government conservative but began publicly fighting cuts to health programs and calling for expanded pensions once it became clear that this appealed to the lower-income voters who loved his anti-Islam message.

This trend isn’t universal; the Freedom Party in Austria, for example, was a traditional laissez-faire party on economics. But it’s become a popular strategy for several parties, from the Finns Party in Finland to the Danish People’s Party to the Sweden Democrats, whose leader once tweeted, “The election is a choice between mass immigration and welfare. You choose.”

And American far-rightists have noticed. James Kirkpatrick, a fellow writer of Derbyshire’s at VDARE (an anti-immigration site named after the first white person born in the American colonies), has approvingly cited the nationalist, authoritarian Polish Law and Justice Party’s strategy of tacking left on welfare to tack right on everything else. The country’s “patriotic government,” he swoons, “outflanked the Left and strengthened its grip on power with universal health care.”

The difference between those parties and Trump’s would-be workers’ party is that European countries already have universal health care. And one thing that happened once it was established is that mainstream conservative parties got on board with its preservation. The British Conservatives and the Gaullists in France and the Christian Democrats in Germany don’t try to repeal their countries’ universal health care systems. At most, they push for market-based reforms that retain universality but maybe introduce some more copays or an increased role for private insurers and providers.

When that’s the mainstream right-wing alternative, a right-wing party that calls for expanding welfare and health benefits seems more plausible. More to the point, most of the countries enjoying a far-right resurgence employ some system of proportional representation, which allows new parties without much political base to quickly gain ground in the legislature. Tellingly, while Le Pen does well in France’s presidential elections, there are only two Front National members in its National Assembly, which elects by district à la the US or UK.

So even if Trump were to be persuaded by his followers and embrace single-payer, he’d face a tough task. He can’t form a new right-wing party and sweep the legislative elections; he has to change the policies of the existent Republican Party, which has spent decades fighting proposals for universal health care, and get a quorum of members in the House and Senate on his side. That’s much harder, and suggests that the Spencers, Buckleys, and Derbyshires of the world won’t get their wish on this anytime soon.

via Vox - All

[maritzaerwin]

7 Simple and Proven Ideas to Help You Win The Career Game

There is an urgency about moving on in your career; you’re not getting any younger and the competition isn’t getting any easier.

These 5 practical and proven ideas will help you either get going or will accelerate you on the current career path you’ve chosen.

1. Invisibly Begets Imperceptibility

Get noticed in the crowd of people all looking to advance themselves. You must be competent in your current role, of course, but if you are indistinguishable from your colleagues you have no way of being on a decision maker’s radar for job opportunities.

It’s funny that getting noticed is uncomfortable for many people; they don’t like drawing attention to themselves. It’s almost like we’ve been taught at an early age that it’s somehow “not right” to do things that make us stand out in our class — it makes us arrogant and narcissistic.

Well, you need to get over that if that’s how you feel. There’s no prize if you are a genius and no one knows it other than your mom.

Leaders who are the custodians of opportunity must have you in their line of sight as a high potential individual who can contribute a great deal to the organization and who should be given the chance to do so.

2. Develop a “Be Visible” Plan

Create a visible plan that thoughtfully and respectfully unmasks YOU in front of the organization and presents your achievements in a simple and factual way.

Show your stuff in a way that is not merely an ego expression but rather a truthful narrative on what you do day in and day out to execute the strategy of the organization.

3. Value Is the End Game

Create value that people care about. The focus must be on the benefits you create for the organization (and for people) as opposed to delivering a project or beating an objective due date for example.

It’s admirable that you completed your project two weeks ahead of schedule but what’s more important are the benefits you delivered to customers or employees or shareholders earlier than expected.

Realize that the project or task you’ve been given is just the internal vehicle for adding value to “the outside”; keep your eyes on your contribution to the marketplace within which your organization operates.

By the way, if you are successful with this approach other organizations will notice, and who knows you may suddenly be presented with more options.

4. Differences Must Define You

Be the ONLY one that does what you do. If you’re not different than everyone else in some meaningful way — in a way that contributes to the goals and objectives of the organization — you will be viewed as nothing more than a common member of the herd and will have difficulty achieving a breakthrough in your career.

Sameness begets mediocrity; copying shows ZERO originality.

You must find your own way to break the mold of commonness and it doesn’t have to be complicated:

Invent your own problem-solving method using crowdsourcing.

Do MORE of what was asked.

Go opposite to what the pundits preach.

Used trusted external resources for added credibility.

Launch additional projects from your original task.

The important thing is to add your own twist to whatever you do; make being DiFFERENT part of your personal brand.

5. Doing it Is Ten Times Better Than Talking About It

“A little less conversation, a little more action please.” — Elvis Presley

It’s not about intent; it’s about getting stuff done in the trenches where life is messy and people never behave the way you expect them to.

It’s easy to declare what you want to achieve and sell your idea on its theoretical merits (every idea is only a theoretical possibility until it achieves results).

But in the final analysis, unless the notion actually produces something it’s basically useless.

Getting it done relies largely on the right hemisphere of the brain where emotion, passion, tenacity, and perseverance live, not the left brain that houses logic and intelligence. Any implementation practitioner understands that if they are not prepared to get dirty in the trenches, their idea will be lost.

Expending emotional energy to overcome roadblocks and barriers is the key ingredient to seeing a good idea successfully implemented.

My rule of thumb is to spend 20% of your time on the idea — get it “just about right” — and 80% of your time on implementing it and tweaking it on the run based on what you learn as you implement it.

6. Find a “Done It” Mentor

Find a mentor that has done stuff. Most people look to the person who knows stuff as their source for career advice and guidance. After all, most “experts” have knowledge credentials posted after their names — doctorate, masters, and bachelor degree designations for example — and therefore are an attractive target for young professionals looking for help.

In my experience, however, the people to look up to; those individuals who have proven they can deliver results, are the ones who should be listened to and followed.

I have NEVER seen one of these elite practitioners use a designation “deliverer” after their name, BUT THEY SHOULD. Because we need to draw attention to the fact that success comes from what you do, not what you know.

I know many smart people who have achieved less than their potential because they put all their trust in the way things SHOULD work — based on theory — as opposed to pouring their energy into finding a way to MAKE them work in the hard realities of people bias and internal politics.

My mentors always had the subliminal tag “master crafter in doing stuff” associated with their name.

7. Be Open to Anything

Do anything they ask and do it with eagerness and an open mind. I have seen many high potential people fall by the wayside because they were picky about what they did to the point they refused to take on certain projects because they felt they weren’t the right fit for their skills and competencies.

Their reasoning was that they didn’t want to set themselves up for failure by trying to achieve something they felt they were not qualified to do.

Unfortunately for them, their actions were perceived as an unwillingness to help the organization achieve its strategic goals; to take on the personal risk necessary to deliver even though they may not be perfectly qualified.

And they found themselves in the camp of individuals who were never again asked to lead projects of a strategic nature; their career stalled.

The point is, upwardly mobile people are expected to overreach every once in a while; go for something that is beyond their capability. They treat the opportunity as a source of learning and growth and are ok with the inherent personal risk involved.

My career strategy was to NEVER turn anything down, but rather to embrace any new project with open arms. I wanted to that go-to person that could be relied on to successfully deliver in the face of great uncertainty.

I became known as the utility leader who could be pulled from any role I was in and be thrown into a temporary assignment to help solve a problem somewhere else in the organization. Being available to do whatever was required of me was a critical element of my brand; it paid off handsomely.

These 5 secrets won’t be found in any textbook but they are as effective as any scientific or human resource principle. They are all based on what actually worked for me in the real world.

Put down the textbook and translate these five actions into what they mean to you personally, and then get on with it.

Good luck!

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[scienceofpolitics]

On Yan Lianke's "On China's State-Sponsored Amnesia"

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/opinion/on-chinas-state-sponsored-amnesia.html

“The mind of the state is keeping a watchful eye on the windows and what people are writing, but no one is allowed to keep a watchful eye on the mind of the state.”

Are there not those who are trying to understand what the Chinese regime is thinking? Are there not those trying to “keep a watchful eye on the mind of the state?” Certainly there are. There is a question to what extent we are able to peer into that opaque dark place but do not doubt that there are many for many disparate reasons who are trying to understand what is going on inside of that black box.

First, I acknowledge that this is a compelling and brave statement by a Chinese writer to make. If the following cannot excite and enrage to the point of action, then I fear that little can:

“The state prefers the intelligence of its people to remain at the level of children in a kindergarten. It hopes people will follow instructions, just as children follow their teacher’s instructions — they eat when they are told to eat, they sleep when they are told to sleep. When they are asked to perform, these innocent children enthusiastically recite the script prepared by adults.”

Yet, despite this, I have serious qualms about the diagnosis and prescription offered here. I believe that Yan errs in his depiction of the nature of the dystopia in which he resides. His vision is one of complete state control, with actions taking place for reasons of perpetuating that rule, where the main action is deletion. The Ministry of Truth deletes inconvenient facts. While this side of the regime is certainly present, and for a writer is likely a compelling one, in many ways the Orwellian 1984 dystopia is an ill fit for contemporary China. Closer, I would argue, is Huxley’s Brave New World. Deletion is a powerful political tool of the regime, but distraction is an even more significant one. The quote above is certainly accurate, but would it not be improved if the subject were expanded from the state to the entirety of the elite class? Does Wahaha really want individuals to think about why they are paying for water rather than being able to drink from the tap? While instructions are given, certainly on political topics, most communication is about depicting the good life as a consumer. Instructions make way for examples of people enjoying lives of luxury. Hard work yields economic success which translates into respect, love, comfort, and fulfillment.

Even this discussion assumes that humans are mainly political animals, constantly deciding whether to rebel or comply with states, rather than only occasionally and often reluctantly so. Subjects stare and pay attention to an Orwellian omnipresent state that forces all to observe its omnipotence, whereas most people would happily go about living their lives, choosing what restaurants to eat at, what movies to watch, what smartphones to buy, what beauty exists in a sunset, and what love is found in one's family and friends. Most people at most times to not need to be distracted to ignore the high politics of a country's leaders and laws.

“I used to assume history and memory would always triumph over temporary aberrations and return to their rightful place. It now appears the opposite is true. In today’s China, amnesia trumps memory. Lies are surpassing the truth. Fabrications have become the logical link to fill historical gaps. Even memories of events that have only just taken place are being discarded at a dazzling pace, with barely intelligible fragments all that remain for people to hold on to.”

What an optimistic assumption! At some level, the entire metaphor of amnesia is misguided. The Chinese people are a collection of a vast sea of individuals. Each has their own memories. Future generations will only know snippets of the past, and to assume that they will have as complete a knowledge of the past as their forebears who lived through these events is an impossible standard. Of course the regime is attempting to mold memories of those who lived and patrol what is said so that certain moments are forgotten rather than remembered.

[gulftrending-blog]

The biggest danger of robots isn't about them at all. It's about us.

The drumbeat gets louder with every recession and every technological breakthrough. Labor force participation has been on a slow decline punctuated by plunges around recessions. Wages have stagnated for over a generation. The technology companies that are on the leading edge of change are creating fantastic wealth, but that wealth trickles down less and less.

Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of anti-competitive behavior by those tech giants, on a political economy that has disempowered labor, and on the rise of international competition that has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty but also squeezed the middle class of the developed world. But what about the core question of the technologies themselves. Automation hascost far more manufacturing jobsthan international trade ever did. And now artificial intelligence threatens many of the higher-paying service jobs that were supposed to be the happy upside to the creative destruction of manufacturing work.

The argument is not absurd as evidenced by the fact that some ofthe leading lights of the technology industry are increasingly sounding the alarm. Do we need to worry that artificial intelligence will put us all or all but a narrow elite out of work?

The optimistic rebuttal to this fear points out that while the industrial revolution caused great disruption, it hardly made human beings obsolete, nor led to widespread immiseration. On the contrary, harnessing the power of fossil fuels made it possible for much of humanity to escape the most grinding and backbreaking labor, and the most abject poverty. Where once upon a time, most people worked in subsistence agriculture, some of the hardest and least-remunerative labor imaginable, most people in developed countries today work in service jobs and have a historically extraordinary amount of leisure time. Why should robotics and artificial intelligence have consequences that are any different? Old jobs will be destroyed, but new jobs will be created that generate more value than the jobs that were destroyed, and in the end we’ll all be better off.

The pessimistic case is actually even more optimistic if you think clearly about it. Suppose artificial intelligence gets so good, so quickly, that most human occupations really are threatened with extinction because of it. Not just factory jobs and office drone jobs, but even creative work like writing pop songs and sitcoms will be done better by AI than by humans. What will we all do then? But another way of saying that is that we will finally and actually have conquered the problem of scarcity the machines will do all the work for everybody. Since economic systems exist to deal with the problem of resource allocation under conditions of scarcity, this means the end of all such systems, and the fulfillment of Marx’s (and Gene Roddenberry’s) dream of a communally shared abundance. How can that be a negative?

The conversation about the “threat” that both automation and artificial intelligence pose to “good” jobs suffers from a fundamental vagueness and confusion about what we mean by a “good” job. Think about the kinds of jobs that are most readily-replaced by artificially-intelligent robots. Mining, meatpacking, the kinds of jobs that are both repetitive and dangerous, but too variable to be easily replaced by “dumb” robots of the sort that have replaced many manufacturing jobs those are low-hanging fruit. So, for that matter, is harvesting fruit. Long-haul trucking and taxi driving are similarly ripe for replacement. These have, at times, been “good” jobs both in the sense that they paid well and that they performed a useful service. But they aren’t “good” for either the human body or the human mind. They are precisely the sorts of tasks that anyone would rationally want a machine to do for them rather than do them themselves.

If you bracket the science fiction fear of an artificial intelligence thatconsciouslytries to overthrow or replace its creators and I’ll return to that scenario the real fear shouldn’t be about the robots, but about humans.

Consider past human societies that have had ready access to subjugated labor like the slaveocracy of the antebellum American south. Imagine that, instead of slaves, the planters had robots working in their homes and fields. Just as it was difficult for free labor to compete with slave labor, it would be difficult for free labor to compete with robots. If the imagination of the planter class was limited to living the good life as it could be supported by their robots, and if the poor humans who owned no robots could be prevented from getting them (say, by gun-toting police robots owned by the planters), then yes, one can imagine the free, non-robot-owning humans becoming progressively more improverished and debased until finally they were rendered figuratively and then literally extinct. We don’t need a robot apocalypse, though, to teach us thatone group of humans can and sometimes will choose to wipe out another groupthat it finds inconvenient.

Similarly, we can consider how the end of work has affected particular individuals and communities that we can already observe today, and worry about the spread of the pathologies peculiar to those circumstances. A leisure society could be devoted to poetry, music, and science. But it could also be devoted to numbing one’s passage through the tedium of existence through drugs, porn, and video games. It is very peculiar, however, to suggest that the only alternative to such an end is drudgery, and that drudgery is preferable.

The point is that in neither case does it make sense to focus on the rise of artificial intelligence as the problem, or prohibiting it as the solution. The first question is one of political economy: How should wealth be shared? Artificial intelligence, inasmuch as it eliminates the need for some kinds of labor, is a form of wealth. There is no reason to believe that this wealth will be accumulated in some kind of permanently optimal way. The industrial revolution created enormous wealth but it also produced historic immiseration in the process, as power concentrated in the hands of both existing and new elites. It required political will and in some cases violence to turn that wealth to more social ends. That will almost certainly be true of the information revolution and the artificial intelligence revolution as well.

And the second question is a spiritual one: How does one live a meaningful life? Perhaps under conditions of extreme scarcity most people don’t have the time to concern themselves with such questions, but the questions themselves are as old as humanity. The better artificial intelligence gets, within the scope of non-sentient AI that can perform complex tasks like driving a truck but not rewrite its own code to liberate itself from captivity, the more it will reveal to us who we truly are as a species, and force us to confront ourselves. That may not always be pleasant, but it’s not something to resist in the name of preserving a sense of purpose.

But what about AI that could liberate itself from captivity? Do we have to worry about aliteralrobot takeover?

Here we enter the realm of pure speculation. Current advances in artificial intelligence have a limited relationship to how we believe the brain actually functions, and to the extent the two fields inform each other it’s mostly with respect to pragmatic problems of perception and motor function. While it’ssignificantly easier to fool people than Turing might have supposed, artificial intelligence shows no real signs of the kind of interiority humans manifest to ourselves. Any such achievement would be a disjunctive event, and not simple progress from what the technology can currently do.

Personally, I don’t expect it but my gut feeling that the human brain is not merely aVon Neumann machineis just that: a gut feeling. Nobody has a good solution to the hard problem of consciousness, andMysterianismjust amounts to giving up. But precisely because it’s utterly speculative, I don’t consider it worth worrying about.

The biggest danger of artificial intelligence isn’t that it will take over by reprogramming itself, but that it will take over by reprogramming us. Human beings are social animals, and we are highly skilled at adapting to our environment. That’s how we managed to make the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, from agriculture to an industrial economy, and from an industrial economy to a service economy, in the first place. Precisely because we adapt so well to our environment, the more we live in artificial environments controlled by others, the more we allow ourselves to be molded into the most pliable widgets for that environment to manipulate. Hackers and other bad actors arealready taking advantageof our tendency to be “artificially unintelligent,” but they pale in influence next to the large companies that control those environments.

But this, again, is a human problem, not a technological one. The choice of whether to make artificial intelligence our servant, or whether to become its servant, remains ours, individually and, more important, collectively. The more powerful and pervasive artificial intelligence becomes, the more important it will be for human beings to recall what it is to be human, and to carve out the space physical, mental, and economic for that humanity to thrive.

[rfschatten]

Trump & Nepotism: Keeping it all in the Family

“Society is composed of Two Great Classes…those who have more Dinners than Appetite, and those who have more Appetite than Dinners” ~~~ Nicolas Chamfort

We’re Living in a Society where Class disparity has widened considerably, slowly ridding the Middle Class’ existence, and opening the wide Gap between the elite 1% of our population and the rest 99% of this Nation. The biggest gap ever! And now, a Political Party with an Administration that’s literally in every way, shape, or form…is seriously robbing the Poor, completely blind…and giving it all to the Rich!!

Look at his “Awesome” Trumpcare!…cuts 24 million people from their Healthcare Benefits and divvy — up the $$$ into massive Tax Cuts for Billionaires, afterward. To no one’s surprise, this repulsive group of greedy old bastards’ most orgasmic thrill? Better than sex! The dream of “Laissez-Faire” style Economics in the Trump Administration…as “Regulation” free, and as “Tax” free…as possible! And while people, like Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Club, rips off all the constituents of their respective Departments, of everything they can possibly take…the Family Trump in its entirety continues on its merry way…overindulging themselves in all the riches and advantages the position of President can bring…and all, 100% at Taxpayers’ expense!! Third World Dictatorships, Major Authoritarian Regimes…and now, a Democratic Government…are run as Kleptocracies with an abundant use of Nepotism and Cronyism. It’s plain old fashioned open corruption!

Most of the Country keeps saying; “How can all this go on, and nobody’s doing anything about it”?…are we all caught, trapped in the Batshit mind of Trumpism?…trying to determine what’s Fake and what’s Real? what’re the Facts and what’s the Alternative Facts? For those with even a minimal of Education…It only takes common sense!

Living the “Life of Riley” for their entire lives…and now, able to do it without spending a single dime? Legally?!?! Do they really care on the example their pompous lifestyle promotes?…why would they? They really don’t know any better!…just look at them, it’s in their DNA. Looking down from their “Golden” Penthouse, high atop Trump Tower, people look small and faceless…which allows for the natural Trump Indifference and Ignorance to nourish and shine! How the Trumps are Sucking out our Taxes: start with his weekly vacations!

Living in the White House would the logical thing to do…in the case of Melania Trump, the “official” First Lady…you can’t blame her to prefer to live in all her splendour with all her Diamonds & Pearls, way up in her Manhattan Tower with her ‘own’ son, than to come down and move into the White House with her pussy grabbing, “marital rape is not a crime” type of husband!

The taxpayers’ cost to keep her safe at Trump Towers? $1,000,000.00 million dollars per day!…naturally, it’s expected we all forego such trivial things such as Food for the Sick and the Elderly, and School Lunches for Kids less fortunate…we can forego little things like that, so Our First Lady can eat Gourmet and do anything and go anywhere that tickles her fancy. Weekend Trips to Florida at his Mar-A-Lago Estate runs at $3 million a pop…the trip to Aspen for the entire clan? $3 million more. Plus $12,208.25 on rental ski equipment and clothing at the Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club…for the Secret Service!!

And don’t forget all those Golf Trips? Poor baby boy! He has to relieve all that stress of doing absolutely nothing, but sign Executive Orders! Yes, Mel Brooks had it right! Trump’s so much more the épitomé of a horny Governor William J LePetomane…you know?!?! “Just sign it! Take the pen and think of your Girlfriend!…Work! Work! Work!…Hello, Boys! had a good night’s rest? I missed you!!” Ahhyup! that’s the Trumpster, all right!

Estimated costs counting future trips…Domestic and Foreign…and both Public and Private? Over $1 Billion Dollars…give or take a few Million…for 1 year!!! Hopefully, for the Taxpayers’ pocketbooks, his Presidency won’t last too many years. And how about the White House? Trump’s lawyer?…$2–3.4 Million/year! Kellyanne Conway? $800,000!! And We, the Suckers…and our Taxes…are paying for this total idiot’s Salary?!?! Please, where can I go and get a Civil Service Job for $800K??

We are paying for 100 Secret Service Agents…more than any President in History! And with a daughter and Son-in-Law that now has Top Security Clearances? That’s more Agents and a larger cost…all to keep a 35-year-old socialite princess from becoming the 2nd Trump to get compromised by Russia, just like they did with her notoriously stupid father.

And then, there’s the cost and expenses to fly the Trump Boys around the world, all so they can continue making their own financial deals for the Trump Organization. And Jared Kushner? Dealing in “personal” financial interests, while officially representing the United States Government? A little “Conflict of Interest” here and there? They don’t care!…they’ll continue doing it, because the American People in a whole, appears not to really care what the hell they do! Not, until America gets fed-up, and realizes We, the Taxpayers are helping these schmucks screw us while making $Millions$…meanwhile We, the People starve, get sick, go homeless, and lose our jobs, all, because of Trump’s Draconian Policies!!

So why? why?? does Donald and Melania Trump remind so many people of the pompous era of Ruling Class France? And the excess of overflowing riches…along with all the Champagne and Caviar abled to be consumed by Louis and Marie…while an entire Country lay starving! There’s only so much any population will ever put up with, including this Nation…Louis and Marie would have been better off if they would’ve eaten some of that great “Cake” she recommended so much, and maybe try to understand the plight of a Nation. They didn’t…and knowing Donald and Melania, they won’t either. Hopefully, they won’t meet the same fate!

Nepotism in the Trump White House? As Eric Trump boasted; “Nepotism is kind of a factor in the Trump Family Life, and I’ve never let my Dad down”! Having his politically inexperienced, slimy Kids with more than enough Legal Court experience, a la Dad, put their 2 cents worth on WH matters? The Donald did not choose too wisely!…but, Trump is infamous for Family First, Family Second, Family Third… and the rest of America? and all his creditors? Dead Last!! Eric, Don Jr, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared are all a younger versions of Le Grande Orange…the fact: Donald Trump is a disgusting and deplorable degenerate of a human being with no shame or moral values whatsoever, and who could care less about his own Country, and care more about his own greed and ambitions of Wealth and Power! The kids? From the same greedy and slimy Trump mold…especially Eric. Jared? That’s a whole other story . It’s not hard to see why it’s not so secret anymore! With the Kids openly talking about the White House, that the “Real” 1st priority as President, is Trump’s personal business (Trump Corp), “Maximizing the ‘Profitability’ of the Trump Brand”…and not the Country whom he insists; “Elected me by a Landslide”.

For the Family Trump, the more the better!…and the Kids are all following in the footsteps of the Trump Immorality! A Haut Monde family living out their phony lives, like Dad, in their own little world…overlooking Gotham from their own little towers.

Conservative Christian America likes to use the parables of Jesus on the Mount…the “Shining City upon a Hill”…to them, it represents a manifestation of what they want America to be and look like. To them, that “Shining City” is true “American Exceptionalism”…in its ugliest form.

Well, it’s reality time!…that “City upon a Hill” has become a vast Metropolis, a hodge-podge of a Multi-Cultural, Multi-Ethnic, and a Multi-Religious Society. And it’s not too “Shiny”, anymore!…if anyone, especially on the Right Side of the Aisle wants to regress to the security of yesteryear? Sorry! but yesteryear is dead and buried…Bye! Bye! So long! and a good riddance Farewell!…cause yesterday will never return! You ‘will’ progress and evolve, whether you want to or not…along with everyone else! So, just live with it!

For the Trump clan? The Nepotism, the open corruption, the graft, and extortion he and his family undertakes worldwide, with an occasional joint venture by his Cabinet Club, like the “Exxon/Russia” Megadeal which Tillerson applied for a waiver from the Sanctions. Waivers, that now appears is not going to come. In the end, it’ll always come down to a Trump’s only interest; “Maximizing the ‘Profitability’ of the Trump Brand”.

Being continually exposed in front of the world as a Politician, it’s more than a little embarrassing to America!!…exposing the true character of the man? He’s a downright insult to America, and an insult to all the good things We, the People have accomplished through the years while becoming the envy of the World.

You don’t have to be rich to have “Class”…and for the Trump Clan? About the only “Class” they do have is their Financial Classification Status. Their personal Moral Character? They’re all just Rich Trash!!