#marx is the best of the humans in this book and no one can convince me otherwise

[sharry-arry-odd]

If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx's favorite adjective was "interesting." The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

[johnbierce]

I once knew a guy who got adulthood and growing up confused with Marx's Alienation of the Worker.

The guy I knew was, without a doubt, brilliant in many ways. Brilliant musician, widely read, an in-depth student of Heidegger. (Which should have been a red flag, fuck Heidegger.) But he was persistently convinced that a fundamental part of adulthood was "setting aside the things of childhood, cartoons and Star Wars and all of that." That a grown man simply couldn't have the time for these things, or he wasn't a grown man. (And his assertion was, of course, about manhood, not adulthood.)

This was patently absurd to me. "Lack of free time" and "lack of fun media in your life" as diagnostic criteria for adulthood would have some very silly logical consequences, like an overworked AP high schooler being more "adult" than a retiree. But, even taking his argument in better faith than that, it mistakes chronic overwork, insufficient community support for families, and exhaustion for adulthood.

For me, adulthood has always been about maintaining emotionally mature relationships with your family, friends, and community; being a person others can rely on; and doing your best to positively impact the world around you on whatever scales you have the power to impact (even if that's just your own mental health sometimes). The idea that it's "giving up cartoons" was and is patently absurd to me. As I said above, it's just... mistaking the fundamentally isolating and hostile elements of our society that need changing for the human default; stigmatizing joy and silliness as "childlike" and "immature" instead of simply being HUMAN.

I don't know if I convinced him of this, though he at least listened. (Whatever else I will cast shade on that former friend for, and there is much, I will not accuse him of being close-minded nor unwilling to consider ideas counter to his own. Dude was thoughtful, if nothing else.) I hope it stayed with him, because setting "lack of silliness" as an aspiration is hardly a worthy goal for anyone, and that dude tortured himself more than enough already.

It doesn't matter if you watch cartoons, if you're doing your best to take care of yourself. It doesn't matter if you engage in nostalgia for stuff from your childhood, if you do your best to offer support to your friends, family, and community- and accept support in return. (Only helping while rejecting help is NOT maturity, it's just a way of walling yourself off and hiding vulnerability.) It doesn't matter if you play- games, free play, whatever- so long as you're following a worthy ethical and moral code to the best of your abilities. (What counts as worthy is a WHOLE 'nother conversation.) It doesn't matter if you crab walk around the house trying to pinch your loved ones while claiming that you're being possessed by a crab ghost if you treat yourself and others with respect.

You can be silly and still a proper adult.

As a coda to this- I knew the guy's dad, and he was a goofy, fun dude who loved puns and bad jokes, and is having a blast with life post-retirement. A very silly person who was absolutely a mature adult.

(This line of reminiscence was brought up by reading Ursula Le Guin's essay collection Language of the Night, which was just reissued- I wish I'd read it before now, it's fantastic so far, and I'm just starting. In the first essay in the book, Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons, Le Guin dives into an exploration of why so many Americans- particularly grown men- reject fantasy, even imagination. )

[ghostinthelibrarywrites]

Don't know what's out there

Here's my first fill for the @geraskeferbingo, the start of a new modern with magic series!

Prompt: Sacrifice

Rating: M

Relationships: Geralt/Yennefer (established); Geralt & Jaskier; Jaskier & Yennefer; Geralt/Yennefer/Jaskier (pre-relationship)

Warnings: Canon-typical violence

Summary: After eight centuries together, there’s very little that can surprise Geralt and Yennefer. Then they save a human sacrifice from a murderous mage and end up with a whole new problem— Jaskier, a college student and wannabe author who is immune to magic and won’t stop asking questions.

Read the first few scenes below or find it on AO3!

***

Jaskier has done a lot of questionable things in the name of getting laid. There was the time he had to climb down the trellis from Victoria de Stael’s third-story bedroom when her parents got home unexpectedly. There was the time he took up improv in order to get close to Valdo Marx. There was even the time he tried to grow a beard when he heard the pretty redhead in his Medieval Lit class mention how sexy she found facial hair. But this is a new low.

“So, when you said you wanted to take me camping, you really meant camping,” he says with his most brilliant smile. “No cabin, no cell reception, no wi-fi. Just us and the great outdoors.”

Anders, the unfairly gorgeous grad student Jaskier matched with on one of the half dozen dating apps he uses, looks up from setting up the tent. “Of course. There’s no other way to camp.”

“Yes, good, great.” Jaskier nods.

Anders cocks an eyebrow. “Thought you said you loved to camp.”

“And I do,” Jaskier says quickly.

Jaskier does not love to camp. He likes things like wi-fi and indoor plumbing and mattresses. This weekend will most likely end up with him either eaten alive by mosquitos or plunging to his death off a cliff, but hopefully he’ll have the best sex of his life first. This is his last weekend before the semester is over and he has to head back to Lettenhove for the summer. If he and Anders are going to make the beast with two backs, it needs to be soon.

He’s apparently convincing enough for Anders, because the other man turns back to the tent. “Weather should improve by tomorrow, at least.”

“Let’s hope.” It’s a gray, misty day, with a fog hanging low over the mountains. Their campsite offers a beautiful view of the lake and tree-covered mountains. There’s something poetic about the way the fog blankets the water, with the pine trees dotting the lake’s edge rendered outlines, but Jaskier isn’t here for poetry this weekend. He’s here to finally get into Anders’ pants.

“Ever built a fire?” Anders asks.

“Of course I have,” Jaskier lies cheerfully. Then realizing he’s most likely about to be asked to build one, he hastens to add, “But it’s been a while. I could use a refresher.”

Anders chuckles. “Then come on over. It’s getting dark. We’re going to need a fire. We’ve got a busy night ahead of us.”

And oh, Jaskier likes the sound of that. Grinning, he saunters over to Anders to get the night started.

***

“You didn’t have to come with me, Yenn.”

Yennefer looks up from wiping off… whatever unpleasant substance has gotten on the soles of her boots to glare at the back of her partner’s head. She would dearly love to not be here right now, to be back in her and Geralt’s Novigrad rowhouse with a bottle of wine and a good book. Really, she would rather be doing anything but trudging through the Kestrel Mountain Nature Preserve in the dead of night, getting shit on her shoes and bug bites on her ass.

“I wasn’t going to leave you to fend for yourself,” she reminds him, because Geralt shouldn’t be here either. Just two days ago, the idiot’s leg was nearly ripped off by a wyvern during a trap and release gone wrong, and yet, here he still is, trying badly to cover up his limp as he trudges through the woods to hunt a killer.

“There’s been a dead kid every full moon for the last two years,” he told her that morning when she tried to insist that he sit this one out. “There’s going to be another one tonight if someone doesn’t stop whoever’s killing them.”

Yennefer and Geralt have been lovers for eight hundred years now and she knows when she isn’t going to win an argument, so she really had no choice but to come along. The murderer they’re pursuing is almost certainly a mage; the young men who have been turning up dead every full moon for the past two years have all been turned into withered husks overnight. It’s a youth ritual, Yennefer suspects, though she’s not sure what kind of mage needs human sacrifices to keep themselves young. But magic has changed over the centuries, become something that people do in secret behind closed doors. Aretuza and Ban Ard are long forgotten memories. Perhaps this is a younger, self-taught mage.

“I still think we should have called Ciri,” she says.

“It’s Cerys’ birthday weekend. Wouldn’t want to bother them.”

“Cerys has had enough birthdays.” No one is entirely sure how Cerys, who is entirely human, ended up as immortal as the rest of them, but Yennefer suspects that their daughter just simply didn’t want her lover to die, so she hasn’t. Even after all these years, they still don’t know the extent of Ciri’s powers. “Anyway, Cerys would jump at the chance for a good battle, you know that.”

Geralt just grunts in response.

Yennefer sighs. “How is your leg?”

“Fine.”

“Oh, so you’re just limping for the fun of it?”

He glares at her over his shoulder. “I’ve been hunting this bastard for two years. Not about to give up now, just because of a little cut on my leg.”

“Geralt,” Yennefer says, in what she hopes is a perfectly calm voice. “Your leg was hanging on by a thread.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“Very few mages would have been talented enough to keep it attached.”

Geralt turns to face her. “Good thing I have you then.”

Yennefer does not melt. Well, she doesn’t visibly melt. She lets him pull her into a lingering kiss, only wrinkling her nose slightly at the familiar taste of bitter potions on his lips. “If you reinjure yourself,” she murmurs. “I will be incredibly annoyed.”

She feels the curve of his smile against her jaw. “I promise, after I put a sword through this murderous fucker’s heart, I’ll take it easy.”

“You will, because I’ll tie you down if you don’t.”

He draws back to arch an eyebrow at her. “Is that supposed to be a threat?”

Yennefer rolls her eyes. “Keep your mind out of the gutter.”

“Shouldn’t say things like that to me if you want my mind to stay out of the gutter,” he says.

“I expect someone your age to be able to control himself.”

“You make me sound like an old man, Yenn.”

“If the shoe fits.”

A humming noise fills the air and they both look down at Geralt’s medallion, which is vibrating against his armored chest.

“That you?” Geralt asks in a low voice, all traces of humor gone. He’s pure witcher now, completely focused on his goals.

Yennefer shakes her head, readying a spell at her fingertips. “We’re close.”

***

Jaskier barely remembers trying and failing to build a fire. He barely remembers their dinner of trail mix, jerky, and beer. He doesn’t remember falling asleep at all. But he must have, because when he jerks awake, his head is pounding, his mouth is dry, and he’s lying spread eagle on his back, unable to move his wrists or ankles. Everything is dark and Jaskier looks around wildly, trying to figure out what happened and where Anders is and why he’s tied up.

The campfire bursts to life in a blazing inferno. Jaskier startles, flinching away from the sudden heat and light.

Anders stands on the other side of the fire, his face rendered eerie in the glow. He’s watching Jaskier with an unreadable expression. Jaskier has never been able to tell exactly how old Anders is. His best guess is early-to-mid twenties, based on the fact that he’s a grad student. But right now, something about his pretty brown eyes seems very, very old.

“What’s going on?” Jaskier’s voice comes out hoarse. He looks around frantically and sees that his wrists and ankles are tied to wooden stakes driven into the ground. There’s writing in Elder carved into the dirt in a circle around him. He curses himself for not paying more attention in his high school Elder classes; he has no idea what it says. “Anders, what are you doing?”

“You slept for longer than I expected,” Anders says, ignoring the question. “We’re going to have to hurry.”

“Hurry to do what?” Jaskier swallows, not sure if he wants the answer. “Look, I don’t object to being tied up if it’s something we talk about first, but this is a bit much. Can we just—”

“Shut up.”

Jaskier flinches at the venom in the other man’s voice. And then he sees the knife in Anders’ hand, the curved blade glinting in the firelight, and he goes cold. He looks up to meet Anders’ eyes. “Why?” he asks, voice small.

Anders’ lips twist into a smile. “Because look at you. You’re eighteen years old, go to the best university on the Continent, have the whole world at your fingertips. And you spend your days drinking shitty beer and fucking around on dating apps. So much potential, and it’s all wasted.”

It’s the kind of venom Jaskier’s father would spit at him after one too many glasses of bourbon and he feels something inside himself shrivel up. It’s absurd to have his feelings hurt by a man who just tied him up and is threatening him with a knife, but he liked Anders. And he thought Anders liked him.

“You don’t deserve the life you’ve been given,” Anders spits. “Just like the others. You may as well serve a purpose in your final moments.”

Jaskier’s heart begins to pound in his chest as confusion and hurt give way to terror. Final moments. “Look, if this is about money, my parents will pay a ransom. Just don’t hurt me and I’m sure we can work something out.”

“I don’t want your money.” Anders looks offended by the implication.

“Then what do you want?”

Anders starts towards him slowly, ambling in an unhurried way, but doesn’t answer. It was a stupid question, Jaskier realizes. The knife in Anders’ hand makes it abundantly clear what he wants.

Jaskier struggles harder against the ropes. This can’t be real, he thinks. Things like this only happen in movies. He can’t be tied up on the ground, about to be murdered for some kind of creepy ritual. He can’t be about to die. “My friends knew where I was going. And they knew I was coming here with you. If you kill me, the police will find out it was you.”

“Your friends won’t be able to remember my name or what I looked like,” Anders says, sounding unconcerned.

“Yeah, no, Priscilla is really good with faces. One time—”

Anders scoffs. “You never shut up, do you?”

“You really should have figured that out by the end of our first—” Jaskier breaks off with a gasp when there’s suddenly a knife at his throat. The cold press of metal is a horrible jolt of reality. This is really happening. Anders is really going to kill him.

“Please,” he hears himself say, but it doesn’t sound like his voice. “Please, Anders, don’t do this.”

Anders’ lips twist into an expression of utter disdain. For a horrible moment, Jaskier can only stare into that pitiless face, waiting for the blade to pierce his flesh, for the pain, for the blood. But nothing happens and Anders face screws up in confusion.

“Why the fuck isn’t it working?” he demands.

“What?” Jaskier whispers, grimacing as the knife presses harder. “Anders, please.”

Anders withdraws the knife and shakes it like it’s a malfunctioning video game controller. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Jaskier doesn’t know if Anders is talking to him or the knife. “I don’t…”

“Shut up.” Anders brings the blade to his throat again, the tip pricking the underside of his chin. “This should be working. I’ve never had this problem before. Tell me what you’re doing to stop it.”

“I’m not doing anything.” Jaskier is too scared and confused to even think, let alone strategize.

“Come on, work!” Anders shouts in his face and Jaskier closes his eyes, bracing for the end.

***

Read the rest on AO3!

[duhragonball]

Krillin for the character ask :)

Give me a character and I will answer:

Why I like them: It’d be easy for me to say “he’s just a good dude” and leave it at that.   I think people would agree with that statement, but I think it runs deeper than that.   The thing that stuck with me about Krillin was when I was checking out the bonus features on the Movie 6 DVD I bought in 2002 or whenever, and they had an interview with Sonny Strait where he explained that Krillin only got into martial arts to impress girls, and that was the same reason Sonny got into voice acting.    Maybe I’m misremembering that, but it always stuck with me.   

Krillin wants things out of life, and unlike a lot of the other characters, he’s not looking to get them by wishing on a magic dragon.   He wants to become worthy of the things he wants, and he may not always be sure of how to get there, he knows that he has to become more than he is.  

Recently, I’ve been seeing excerpts from Barack Obama’s book, where he talks about reading up on subjects to try, unsuccessfully, to get girls to like him in college.    I think the idea was that he was trying to be self-effacing, but it hasn’t gone over very well.  I’m not sure if the problem was that he wasn’t being self-effacing enough, or if there’s something more sinister about reading Karl Marx just in case it helps your odds of getting noticed.    I’m not going to wade into that controversy, except to say that it reminded me of Krillin.  

Is it shallow to have self-serving reasons to improve yourself?   Did I just answer my own question?   The point I’m making here is that it’s a useful motivator.    Krillin has self-esteem issues, and he joined the Orin Temple and then Kame House to try to overcome them.   He thought “If I just get really good at this one thing, then people will like me.”   And we can say “Oh, no, it doesn’t work that way, Krillin, people like you because you’re a such a good person, and besides, it doesn’t matter how good you are at martial arts.”  

Okay, fine, let’s assume that’s true, and Krillin deceived himself by training in martial arts.    Oh no!   He put in all that work, and all he got out of it was... being the strongest human on Earth.   Shoot.    He made himself a better person for nothing.

The reality is that I don’t think he would be as well-liked if he hadn’t gone down this road, simply because people wouldn’t have gotten to know him.   That’s really what it’s about.   It’s easy to say that you’re liked for “who you are on the inside”, but what people really want is to be noticed long enough to be liked for who they are.    And sometimes you gotta take a long look at yourself and say “I need to do something to grab people’s attention.”

And sometimes, in order to motivate yourself into that kind of work, you have to play that trick on yourself.    “Just think, if I put in those extra reps in the gym, the ladies’ll be all over me!”   And it never actually happens, but it gets you through that workout, and the next, and the next, and the next.  

I think we can all relate to that.   I’m writing this because three people asked me to, and I’m sort of hoping a few more will see it and like what I wrote.   I try to get better, because I like the rush of validation that comes with it.   And if I don’t get it, well, boo-hoo, I wrote a few hundred words about Krillin, a subject I enjoy writing about.   It’s a no-lose situation, and there’s some non-zero chance that attractive single women might see this and decide to slide into my DMs.    It’s a tiny chance, hardly worth mentioning, but it’s a lot higher than if I just sit in my apartment and stare at the wall.   

Why I don’t: Ocean Dub Krillin really rubbed me the wrong way, because they wrote and voice directed the character to be really nebbishy.   That wouldn’t necessarily make him a bad character, but it definitely conflicted with what you see on the screen, where he’s stepping to Nappa, Vegeta, Dodoria, and everything else he has to deal with.    Once Sonny got the role, everything turned out cool.  Mondo cool, if you will.

I suppose I should point out the flip side of what I wrote above.  Krillin’s so focused on being worthy that he fails to recognize his achievements.   That’s admirable in its way, but it also makes you worry about the guy.    Like, he knows 18 is crazy about him, right?   Wait, does Obama know people like him?   Do I?  Oh I might have made myself sad there for a minute, excuse me.

Favorite episode (scene if movie):

Probably the moment he tries to take on Super Buu all by himself.   One of the cool things about Krillin is that he’s taken on every major villain from Piccolo Junior to Buu, despite being outclassed.    I think the Super Buu thing is the best one, though, because in that situation there’s literally no chance of anyone jumping in to save him.    His entire plan is to hold off Buu for a few seconds and maybe buy a few minutes for the others. He’s doomed and he knows it won’t even work as a diversion, but he still jumps in anyway.    It proves that this is who he is.    When there’s literally no one left to impress, and nothing left to gain, he’ll still play things out the same way.  

Favorite season/movie: The Androids/Cell Saga is probably his best material overall, just because of his conflicted feelings regarding 18, and the difficult choices he makes because of that.   You can make a strong case for the Namek Saga, where it’s literally just Krillin and Bulma and Gohan, so he has to take the lead by default, but I’m just not that into the Namek Saga.

Favorite line:

This is really more from one of the video games.   I think Budokai 3, but I’m not sure.   Piccolo demands custody of Gohan and Krillin’s like “No way, you’re probably gonna eat him or something!” and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in the Ocean Dub, so it completely caught me off-guard, like it was the last thing I expected Krillin to say.   And then Piccolo comes back with “I’m not going to eat him!”  like he’s offended at the very suggestion.   As a runner-up, I dig that part in DBZA 54, where Trunks and Vegeta are both reeling from their losses to Perfect Cell, and Krillin reminds them that they don’t have to posture around him, because it’s just him... “Krillin.    Everyone’s friend.”

Favorite outfit: That’s easy.

Yeah, the Frieza Soldier armor looked mighty good on this dude, and the cop uniform does too, and the classic Turtle Hermit outfit is a signature look, but this, right here, is the Krillin for me.    My man’s got the blue shirt under his orange shirt.    No more of the Yamcha slipppers.   Those look great on Yamcha, don’t get me wrong, but Krillin needs those big chunky Goku boots, because they’re perfect for stomping those pesky girlfriend-exploding remotes.   Fellas, this is the ideal male body.    You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.   

OTP: Maron HAHAHAHAHAHA oh wow.   No. It’s 18, obviously.

Brotp: Clearly Goku is his bro, but it’s not surprising at all how effortlessly he gets along with just about everyone else.   He’s bros with the entire world.

Head Canon: I’m pretty sure the Maron/Marron thing was just a coincidence in real life.   Maron the girlfriend was a filler character, and Marron the daughter was introduced in the manga some time later, and both used the same naming convention to end up in the same place.   However, I choose to believe that Krillin actually named his kid after his ex, and he somehow convinced 18 to go along with that idea.   

By that, I don’t mean he had to sweet talk her into it or promise a bunch of stuff in exchange.    I mean he must have discussed what to name their kid, and 18 was like “Your ex-girlfriend?   Seriously?” and he was like “Yeah, I know she’s a ditz, but you gotta understand I was in a really low place and she helped me through it.”   Or something like that, where once he lays out the whole reason 18′s like “Yeah, you know what?   Okay.” 

Or maybe Maron helped deliver the baby or something.   Or she was the surrogate mother?   Holy shit I might be onto something.

Unpopular opinion: Krillin clanks when he walks, due to the solid brass balls he’s got.

A wish: They should do a movie where Krillin just fights Frieza and wins.   Decisively, undisputably, irrevocably.   Krillin is stronger than Frieza from that point forward.    I don’t care if that means nerfing Frieza or godmodding Krillin, but I just want it made plain that if they use Frieza from here on, it has to be with the understanding that Krillin can whip his ass at any time.  

That might sound silly, and I guess it is, but you see what this accomplishes, right?   It forces Frieza into a new character dynamic, so it’s not just the same old shit with him.    Or Toei collectively admits that they can’t use him anymore, which was what they should have decided in 1995.   I’m fine either way.

An oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen: Don’t grow his hair back, okay? 

5 words to best describe them: Qualified to sell real estate.

My nickname for them: The Kriller.

[one-leaf-grimoire]

JuLisa fluff alphabet <3

I am depressed so this somehow happened when I was supposed to be working on a lab lol.

Nothing spicy under the cut, only wholesome fluff. <3

A ctivities - What do they like to do together? How do they spend their free time?

Incidentally, Julius and Lisa basically spend ALL their time together, since they work and live together in the same place. But when they’re able to take a breather, they enjoy cuddling somewhere, reading a book, or going on a walk somewhere outside the noble realm. It’s nice to get fresh air and it gives Julius a chance to track down any cool magic.

B eauty - What do they admire about each other? What do they think is beautiful about them?

Lisa would say that she admires Julius’s confidence and positivity. He’s a very optimistic person and she needed someone like that to rub off on her. She finds his eyes to be very beautiful, as well as his lips...

Julius would say he admires EVERTHING about Lisa, but more than anything her tenacity and determination. She’s worked harder than anyone else in the kingdom despite being beaten down again and again. He would also say that her entire being is the most beautiful... but above all her eyes. And legs. ;)

C omfort - How would they help each other when they feel down/have a panic attack etc.?

Julius is usually the one who has to comfort Lisa. For a man who’s good with words, he knows that they don’t work in those low moments, and instead makes sure to hold her tight, a silent gesture to tell her that everything is going to be alright. 

But even though he’s strong, the pressure of his job sometimes gets to Julius. Wordlessly, he’ll bury himself in Lisa’s chest, and she strokes his hair and whispers things in his ear to help him calm down. You’re doing your best. You’ve done nothing but wonderful things for everyone. And for me, too. You’re good enough.

D reams - How do they picture their future with each other?

Absolutely, for both of them. Julius has wanted to marry Lisa since almost day one jafkdsl but he took it slow of course. Lisa is always a little scared to dream about the future but it fills her with joy. Marriage might not be at the forefront of her mind, since she would just be happy to be by his side for the rest of their lives. And of course... they both wanted to adopt children eventually and have a big family.

E qual - Which is the dominant one in the relationship?

Funny enough, Lisa is probably the more dominant one in the relationship (outside the bedroom but I won’t get into that lol). From the start, Julius has always been very careful about the power dynamic between them, since he’s the WK and all, and his solution was to let Lisa kind of take the lead in a lot of things, relationship-wise.

F ight - Would they be easy to forgive their each other? How are they fighting?

They really don’t fight all that much? If Lisa gets upset Julius can usually tell right away. If Julius gets upset, he’s quick to say something about it. But if it’s a rare, bad fight, Lisa usually retreats into silence until Julius comes to apologize. But like I said, they are fairly harmonious and even the fallouts of the “worst” fights only last an hour or so.

G ratitude - How grateful are they in general? 

Lisa is beyond grateful. She’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for Julius, and his presence in her life has changed it completely. As for Julius, meeting Lisa brought new meaning into his life that he didn’t before, and he was able to imagine a future for himself that wasn’t lonely and dedicated solely to his work.

H onesty - Do they have secrets they hide from each other? Or do they share everything?

Lol it is VERY hard to hide secrets between them, so they usually tell each other everything. However, there’s a few notable exceptions to this, including when Julius managed to hide the fact that he met a future version of Lisa during the elf arc. He did tell her eventually.

I nspiration - Did they change each other somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helped them overcome personal problems?

Yeah! For Lisa, Julius was the one who finally convinced her to leave her old life behind and become a magic knight. And later, he inspires to her want to become the Wizard King one day, returning long-lost ambition.

For Julius, it’s the other way around. He was ambitious when he was young, and sprinted to the top as fast as he could. He had resigned himself to a life committed solely to his job, but when he met Lisa, all that changed. Not only did she give him a more human reason to protect the kingdom, but she opened up a new future to him that he never thought he would be able to pursue... he finally found something he could love more than the kingdom itself.

J ealousy - Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?

Both of them have many admirers but they’re both comfortable enough to know that nothing unfaithful would ever happen. However, Julius does NOT trust other men around Lisa ajksl and is not afraid to flaunt his status proudly if he feels like someone is trying to get friendly with her. 

K iss - Which one is the better kisser? What was the first kiss like?

At first it was definitely Julius. Lisa’s only kiss before him was quick and drunk, but luckily she was now in the hands of a master ;) Their first kiss was shared after Lisa was badly injured trying to stop an assassination attempt and their feelings were finally spoken. Over time, Lisa definitely grew to match Julius’s kisses :)

L ove Confession - How did they confess to each other?

At the same moment as their first kiss! Lisa realized that the reason she fought so hard was because she couldn’t bear the thought of Julius not being in her life, and Julius realized that Lisa meant more than the world to him. Holding her limp and almost dead in his arms was what hammered that point home for him. In the hospital later, he came to visit and they both ended up all over each other, and never wanted to let go again. :)

M arriage - Do they want to get married? How do they propose? What would the marriage be like?

Like I said before, YES! It wasn’t on Lisa’s mind until Julius brought it up, but she really wanted to. They were talking to each other about having kids, and Julius mentioned that, if they did, he would be expected to be married to the mother of his children. But he promised that he would do a better proposal later! Which he did... When Lisa came back from the Sea Temple mission, Julius took her up on the roof before pulling out a gorgeous ring, and asked her to “be my queen.”

As for a wedding, sadly they never got to have an official one. However, they eloped before the Royal Knights exam and sealed the deal. However, now that Lisa lives in a timeline where Julius is very much alive and well, they are still planning a large ceremonial wedding for sometime in the next year.

N icknames - What do they call their s/o?

Lisa usually sticks to simple things like “darling” or sometimes “Juli~” because it sounds cute. Julius bounces between many pet names, his favorite being “sweetness” <3

O n Cloud Nine - What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?

Before they confessed, both of them kept their card close to their chest. Lisa was slightly worse at this. Images of Julius were constantly dancing in her mind and she would often get distracted lol. When she was around Julius, just a mere touch or an intense look made her blush furiously. It was pretty easy for Julius to tell that something was going on with her.

As for Julius, like I said, at first he was able to stay calm, but rest assured he was freaking out all the time on the inside. But in private, he too got distracted easily and would smile to himself “creepily” (in Marx’s words). It was very hard for him to get any work done.

Once everything was out in the open, Julius was not afraid to show his feelings at the drop of the hat. Lisa still got very flustered about it but was very happy to know that she was loved.

P DA - Are they upfront about their relationship? Do they brag with their s/o in front of others? Or are they rather shy to kiss etc. when others are watching?

Sadly, the two of them could not be upfront about the relationship for a long time. Lisa got into trouble last time someone found out about it, so they keep to themselves. But within the castle, Julius is very loving and doesn’t mind PDA at all. Lisa still is a little worried that someone from the press is going to find out, but is usually very eager to receive whatever he gives her.  

Q uirk - Some random ability they have that’s beneficial in a relationship.

Dyad. I’ll leave it at that ajkfdsl

R omance - How romantic are they? What would they do to make each other happy? Cliché or rather creative?

Oh boy. As soon as Julius got a girlfriend it was clear that he was the epitome of the romantic type. He can be creative AND cliche, and both are just as sweet. Flowers, fancy dinners, romantic escapes to the countryside, he would do all of it at the drop of a hat for Lisa.

Lisa’s approach is less of the grand gesture type and more small things. Small gifts, quality time, that kind of stuff. 

S upport - Are they helping each other achieve their goals? Do they believe in them?

Absolutely. Julius has already kind of reached his goals but Lisa is a great help to him every day as he goes through his WK duties. As for Lisa, she doesn’t really have any future goals for a long time but wants the kingdom to prosper, so she helps Julius as much as she can.

T hrill - Do they need to try out new things to spice out your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?

Their relationship is very spontaneous. Both of them like to run off on a date at the drop of a hat, sometimes in the middle of a work day! But they do value routines too, especially when they’re winding down for the day.

U nderstanding - How good do they know each other? Are they empathetic?

After six years together, they know each other inside and out. Even without the help of a Dyad spell, they complete each other and are always open and understanding with communication.

V alue - How important is the relationship to them? What is it’s worth in comparison to other things in their life?

More than anything.

W ild Card - A random Fluff Headcanon.

Lisa really likes curling up under Julius’s robe. It’s so soft and warm and it smells like him. When Lisa is away, Julius sleeps with it too because it smells like her. In truth... the two of them have the exact same scent but it’s the thought that counts lol

X OXO - Are they very affectionate? Do they love to kiss and cuddle?

Yes. :) Julius is a big softie and Lisa is a human space heater so their cuddle sessions are pretty mindblowing lol.

Y earning - How will they cope when they’re missing each other?

Neither of them are very happy when they’re apart. Lisa deals with it a lot better, since she’s usually out training when she rarely leaves him. Julius is a lot more clingy and can’t focus as well when she’s gone. The nights are long and lonely for him, and he finds it very hard to sleep alone now.

Z eal - Are they willing to go to great lengths for the relationship? If so, what kind of?

Both of them are really secure in their relationship and it is not really in danger. However, both of them would do anything for the other.

[vuify]

Cute & Funny Dog Quotes

If you are looking for a good chuckle about your furry friend, then you have come to the right place. Enjoy these cute and funny dog quotes curated by the Vuify review team.

“No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as much as the dog does.” -Christopher Morley

“Ever consider what our dogs must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul, chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we’re the greatest hunters on earth!” -Anne Tyler

“I once decided not to date a guy because he wasn’t excited to meet my dog. I mean, this was like not wanting to meet my mother.” -Bonnie Schacter

“I don’t think twice about picking up my dog’s poop, but if another dog’s poop is next to it, I think, ‘Eww, dog poop!” -Jonah Goldberg

“What do dogs do on their day off? Can’t lie around – that’s their job!” -George Carlin

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” -Groucho Marx

“Dogs never bite me. Just humans.” -Marilyn Monroe

“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.” –Derek Bruce

“Don’t accept your dog’s admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.” -Ann Landers

“My cats inspire me daily. They inspire me to get a dog!” -Greg Curtis

“You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, ‘Wow, you’re right! I never would’ve thought of that!’” -Dave Barry

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.” –Aldous Huxley

“Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.” -Sue Murphy

“A dog desires affection more than its dinner. Well – almost.” -Charlotte Gray

“Dogs teach us a very important lesson in life: The mail man is not to be trusted” -Sian Ford

“A well trained dog will make no attempt to share your lunch. He will just make you feel so guilty that you cannot enjoy it.” -Helen Thomson

“Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.” -John Grogan

“I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that dogs think humans are nuts.” -John Steinbeck

“It all started when my dog began getting free roll over minutes.” –Jay London

“Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you sever contact with your mothers.” -Jodi Picoult

“A boy can learn a lot from a dog — obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down. ” – Robert Benchley

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” – Harry Truman

“It’s tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won’t drink from my glass.” – Rodney Dangerfield

“If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.” – Fran Lebowitz

“When an 85 pound mammal licks your tears away, and then tries to sit on your lap, it’s hard to feel sad.” – Kristan Higgins

If you enjoyed these funny quotes on canines, you will love all the humour content at Vuify.

[leam1983]

Cyberpunk 2077 Thoughts

Having perused Dark Horse Books’ The World of Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, I’ve gotten a better feel for the various basic hooks that structure V’s inception as a protagonist. The short of it is the Polish wizards are on the right path to nailing Pondsmith’s treatment the same way they nailed Sapkowski’s works.

Consider the following as half a brain dump, half a series of prospective spoilers, and also half projection, so either skip this, find some other entry to read, or come back to this come late November.

I know I mentioned three halves, but it’s late and I don’t give a shit.

I’m serious - DO NOT PRESS ON IF YOU’RE THE TYPE TO BLOW A GASKET IF YOU’RE INADVERTANTLY SPOILED. 

The latest Night City Wire as of August exposed three incipient “life paths”, or starting branches of V’s path. I’ll tackle my personal narrative approaches to them in the order of my choosing.

Nomads: CP2077 is set in a world where much of what we understand to define a family has been blown up, tossed around by climate change and nuclear fire and then stitched back together using grit, resourcefulness and the last dying embers of human decency. Nomads are less a group of people defined by blood relations and more a cadre of individuals that share something more significant than mere genes. It might be a common history, a set of shared hardships, a yen for similar automotive and engineering-related projects - whatever it is, that something pulls people together in ways Corpo rats and street kids will never experience.

This seems to define even the average Nomad’s degree of education. Surprisingly, Nomads are the most well-read group in Coronado Bay’s greater area, some caravans reportedly including entire RVs packed with books. Nomads generationally elect teachers and record-keepers and seem to care for those cultural remnants of the old world, before Pondsmith’s paranoid alternate sixties kicked off more than a century’s worth of technological progression and rampant dehumanization. To a Night City native, a Nomad’s speech patterns appear precious and uselessly florid, while they might appear almost normal to us - maybe slightly touched by the fact that Grandpa Joe or whatever really wanted you to have your Greek classics down before you were old enough to repair your first CH00H2 carburetor on your own.

That new, mega-clustered version of family matters immensely to the Nomads. You identify to yours the same way Orcs in Shadow of War might refer to their clan, or the same way a Scottish clan might design specific visual cues identifying its members. In normal circumstances, Nomads live, thrive and die in service to the clan - and the opening segment for V’s Nomad origins suggests that something happened to his clan. They’re gone, or so the narration says, without going into further detail. Is V responsible? We don’t currently know. As it stands, however, he is a lone Nomad in a clan of one, and soon finds himself pushed out of the Californian wastes and into Night City’s neon-drenched streets.

Seeing this, I considered the narration as an admission of guilt on V’s part. He feels responsible, and hopes that grinding his way to success will in some way atone for what he’s done. Consequently, my Nomad V would be as gruff as could be, but as moral and upstanding as the setting allows. He considers himself as having been invested with an example to set, and would intend to set his sights on more than just filthy lucre. Honest filthy lucre is what matters to him, if that concept even is possible: he might deal in unsavory types and illicit activities, but he always does so with a certain moral rectitude - as a tough and gruff, lean and stringy type you can occasionally catch in his battered Thornton pick-up truck with his feet up on the dashboard and a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in hand. Jackie honestly wonders how he can put up with that Greek pendejo’s endless words and the lack of scrolling animations, while V keeps his Kiroshi optics’ News ticker locked onto grassroots Leftist RSS feeds that stoke a bit of an ignored Rockerboy ethos in him. Quoting Marx in Night City might feel like trying to teach lab rats in the finer points of string theory, but it at least feels genuine to him, compared to the predigested sociopolitical pap Militech, Arasaka and their ilk are more than happy to spew on the airwaves. 

There’s a lot to be pissed off about in Richard Night’s failed utopia, a lot of fat cats to gut and buildings to burn. Still, he leaves the glowering act and the churning rage to Johnny Silverhand’s imprinted ghost. Being more of a down-low, gun-toting choomba than a classic Street Samurai, Vincent “V” Carson thinks first and strikes second.

Vinnie isn’t much for electric guitars and anarchy in the UK, much less in the Free State of Southern California; but he does love the occasional Leonard Cohen ballad or the occasional shot of Johnny Cash’s melancholy. Having picked up something of a Northern Texas drawl while cruising, he might feel like Harry Dresden’s Good Ol’ Boy cousin, magic tricks here pushed aside in favor of a measure of dermal plating and a good ol’ fashioned twelve-gauge and revolver combo. Not being much of a techno-fetishist, he considers his optics and his skull jack as being begrudging concessions to an era that looks down on fully “ganic” types. Having grown up with TV serials and the occasional visor-based Braindance all depicting cyberpsychosis as something vile that utterly dehumanizes its sufferers, he’s naturally wary around anyone who seems a little too giddy with the prospect of taking a few scalpels to perfectly decent muscles and bones.

His Thornton is where most of his Eddies go, and yes, he’s named his truck Suzie. Suzie’s done right by him, and he’ll do right by her - unless someone else with a pretty smile and a working moral compass makes him swoon.

Street Kids: if you weren’t taught on the highways or in corporate arcologies, odds are you became a positive blip in an otherwise grim statistic, one of the myriad fucked-up kids raised by other fucked-up kids with more seniority than you. With no roads and paid-for nannies, you survived off of grifts, grit, violence, deceit, smarts and gumption - and that, in its own screwball way, creates its own blood ties. You’re wise by Heywood’s standards - streetwise, that is - and you speak the back-alleys’ lingua franca of threats, insinuation and casual intimidation like no other.

If only Jackie hadn’t fingered that Rayfield, huh? This beaut could’ve been paydirt! Well, at least for a week or so, judging by the fact that hundreds of car thefts are reported across Night City on a daily basis. At least, Dean - who also goes as “V” - got to make a new friend while out in the pokey, and managed to shake a few proverbial trees... They’ve got a short-lease in with Trauma Team’s frequency and could maybe hook themselves up with a sweet finder’s fee for anyone who’s on the verge of death at the hands of the city’s Scavengers...

Little does V know, that’s selling Trauma Team as well as their clients painfully short. Shows of gratitude don’t mean anything if you’re not packing the right social status. He barely remembers his birth parents as it is, and grew up the fifth grubby prospect of one of the Valentinos’ “school clubs” (hence the nickname) - where the points of study refer to the proper observances to be held in Jesus Malaverde’s presence, intensive Chicano and Spanish immersion, as well as the handling of common types of weaponry.

Vincent and Dean would be likely to shoot one another, if placed in the same room. One clings onto nearly-lost value systems, while the other commodifies what can be discarded like so much flesh - only inasmuch as his efforts to pacify his unofficial five or six abuelas force him to forego extensive modifications. His knives and wrist-mounted data port are his main tools of the trade, although Dean keeps his hacking creds along the bare minimum. Why bother, when melting an ATM’s ICE wall and whacking the cops with a baseball bat is all you need? There’s a type of gun for nearly anything else, if someone knows where to look...

Dean has no last name, and is consequently registered as “Dean Smith” in the city’s Census records. That doesn’t suggest, however, that he wouldn’t want to make one for himself. As he’s less focused on the city’s legends than on its kingmakers and pawn-movers, Dexter DeShawn strikes him as someone to emulate, watch and learn from - all with a decent degree of caution.

Being on top matters a little less to him than eventually pulling Heywood’s stings. With a little fear and a lot of persistence, Dean “V.” Smith knows that one day, he won’t go hungry on a weeknight. To that end, he’s certainly a hearty eater, here paired with extensive free-weight training regimens and the use of anabolic stimulants. Oh, sure, he’ll speak of family and blood like the best soldier festooned in Santa Muerte visual codices, but his friend Jackie’s got a mind like a slow and steady steel trap.

Either Dean blows his new fellow Street Samurai out of the pond, or he does. Unlike Jackie, however, Dean isn’t realistic about it. Friendships are a rare gift in Heywood, if not the rest of Night City, and Dean’s convinced that Jackie could conceivably look past his final betrayal.

Corpo: nowadays, we’re mostly familiar with the idea of one-percenters creating a bubble of affluence for themselves. Boarding schools, private villas, prebooked vacations across the globe’s priciest spots, access to the hottest trends on the minute of their inception - what this tends to forego is the level of social disconnect that’s required in order to stay relevant. We’re only just waking up to the consequences of letting an aging, crusty first-generation Yuppie be crowned the ruler of the free world, and even someone who’s behind on their Bret Easton Ellis could tell you that Donald J. Trump is a sociopath and a narcissist.

Take that mindset, and cultivate it into an ethos that’s taught to children from a very early age - children who live, eat, shit and breathe in accordance with their parent corporation’s tenets. The more placid, mid-tier lifers in the genre are called sararimen, in reference to William Gibson’s use of the term to designate low-level company workers in Chiba City. A bit like Shenzhen’s factory workers and execs, everything in a corpo’s life is in service to the corporation.

In Night City, as of 2077, two major players have installed this culture of total obedience in their roster. Their names are Militech and Arasaka. One is a juggernaut in the field of military-grade personal defence, the other has a wider grasp and reach, but is more fragile. Arasaka owes that fragility to the last fifty years having involved its re-establishment and reconstruction. Fifty years ago, Night City’s Corpo Plaza was blasted open by a thermonuclear discharge that sent the Japanese giant packing. The charges had been set by three Edgerunners: Rogue, Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand - accessorily a well-respected Rockerboy and front-line member of the band SAMURAI. Only Rogue survived that fateful night, or so the street lingo goes, having gone on to start a legitimate consultation business as well as a fruitful career in the hospitality business. Her bar, the Afterlife, is Night City’s hotspot for every techie, script kiddie and accomplished cyber-spelunker.

Our gal Vivian knows this. She knows this, because Vivian “V.” Banks lives two lives.

In one of them, she’s a lean and hungry Junior Executive in Arasaka’s Counter-Intel division. In that line of work, you either fuck someone’s prospects or protect your own, or ensure that no up-and-comer just out of the company’s Law School program manages to push you off the board. She knows full well that in centuries past, corpo-speak was made up of mild euphemisms that at best referred to destroying a rival’s prospects or lifelihood. Taking a life was something that required careful deliberation, especially when tossing a fat severance bonus into an aging CFO’s three-piece pockets and letting your erstwhile rival snort cocaine off of the rolling hips of Tahitian dancers was so much cheaper...

Nowadays, zeroing someone is commonplace.

You’re born for Arasaka, and chances are you’ll die for Arasaka just the same. Viv’s killed, lied, cheated and even stole her way to her position, remorse being this vaguely churning sense of coldness in her gut that keeps one-night stands coming in and out of her bedroom. She only remembers her parents as being credit-chip enablers and personal enhancement drug addicts, cutting ties with them so completely on the day of her official hiring that it felt more like a tacit understanding.

On most days, sex and booze keep the cold at bay. On most days, Vivian Banks is a class-act of a sociopath. The stronger she gets, however, and the more paranoid her targets become - which reinforces her own paranoia. Before long, playing the part of one of Arasaka’s several poisonous flowers won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, she trusts no-one. No Fixer could put her in contact with any hacker she’d trust, no rando fresh off the street with a retro-tinted National Arms plinker would satisfy her. To climb up the ranks and maybe share tea with Old Man Saburo himself, she needs a spotless performance record. She needs skills.

More importantly, she needs a reputation. That means leaving Arasaka Tower and mingling with the experts in their own field - and it means filling out her back book of successful hits. The drinks at the Afterlife are decent enough, but what she’s after is an official in.

If she can get to Rogue, or maybe even hook up with a ripperdoc not bought and paid for by the company, she might be able to score both new skills and increased performance...

If it were as simple as slitting Janet’s throat in HR and diving her way to an orgiastic performance review quite innocently left on the department’s server, she would’ve done that already. Viv is my obvious Pure Stealth build candidate, my main-line hacker and would-be engineer with a thing for black power skirts and designer offensive augments.

With that said, we’re months ahead of schedule, all the good shit’s already come out, so we’re stuck playing the waiting game...

What are your own character or build ideas for Cyberpunk 2077?

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Covid 19 and the New Era

Initially published on the OA blog here.

Part 1: Goodbye to the end of History

31 years ago, US political writer Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The end of history. In it, he summed up what many were feeling at the conclusion of the Cold War: without a grand historical conflict between world superpowers, what further challenges could there be to the system we live under today: capitalist liberal-democracy? In this essay, and his later books, he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, most world governments would shift towards a liberal democracy, with an emphasis on transnational government much like the European Union, and with this new epoch would come a period of unparalleled peace. Events might still occur, he said, but the overall trend of civilisation would be towards endless peace, endless profit, and endless technological advancement that would eventually lead to humans having control over their own evolution.

What Fukuyama might not have predicted is that his simple thesis would become one of the most criticised essays of all time. Barely had the ink dried on his paper when scores of writers poked holes in his analysis – something very easy to do, for Fukuyama wasn’t much of a philosopher, but rather a political hack who summed up the dominant view among liberal thinkers at the time. In this, he was wholly successful, but he also ended up being correct in ways his critics couldn’t have predicted.

The next 31 years of history were some of the most uneventful, in terms of real movement, of any decades that had passed before – sure, not all countries became liberal democracies, and sure, history continued to chew up innocent lives and spit them back out, and sure, a few terrorists showed up here and there – but it seemed that no single event could ever truly change things beyond occupying the evening news for a few weeks. We have just emerged from the one of the most viscerally boring periods in human history, at least for the more sheltered populations in the west, and it’s important to recognise this.

Fukuyama’s end of history was not a new thesis: as the postmodernist Jaques Derrida, was quick to point out, Fukuyama had simply regurgitated some of the most turgid liberal philosophies of the early Cold-War era; the idea that liberal-democracy had emerged victorious, and that socialism had been proved wrong once and for all through the many perceived failures of Soviet societies. All that had changed was that Fukuyama said it at the right time: it truly was the end, capitalism had found its perfect justification in neoliberalism, a set of ideologies based in the idea that capitalism was a perfect, trans-historical goal of humanity, that only needed to be sufficiently untethered from regulation and sufficiently protected by a growing military and police forces in order to function properly. In this proper version of capitalism, untethered from the need to legitimise itself in the face of opposing ideologies, there was no need for capitalist societies to change to face new threats, for what can challenge an ideology that is so totalising it can convince people that it’s the only thing that exists? The only thing that has ever existed. A universal default.

In that sense, Fukuyama was perfectly right. History did grind to a halt for three decades. Not just the history of those decades, but all history, for every society throughout history could be painted as nothing but a stepping stone to this universal conclusion. There was no challenge to neoliberalism in that time, no great ideological foe to defeat, no workers’ movement to crush, and the best that the neoliberal states could offer up as some immense civilisational enemy was a pitiful force of Wahhabi terrorists – a by-product of the previous era, and therefore hardly a new historical agent. All that was left for the world to do was to reckon with the leftovers of the Cold-War period (the Wahhabis, remnant socialist societies, and shrinking unions), products of the last true period of historical movement, and wait for whatever technological innovation that would come next and inject some feeling of forward momentum into an otherwise stagnant society.

In time, even technology failed to deliver a feeling of progress. Each new technology of the period wasn’t truly new: all that capitalism could deliver was slightly faster and more powerful versions of technologies based in the previous era of major public scientific investments. Internet, wi-fi, cell phones, miniaturised processors, satellite communications – every single one of these technologies was a product of Cold-War era military or public scientific investment, albeit with a better marketing team. It is almost as if capitalists could produce no new innovation whatsoever, other than a faster, slimmer version of existing tech, that broke more often.

In this sense, one of the two defining features of the past 30 years that gave life a sense of movement and progress, communications technology, proved to be nothing but a latent product of the previous era, that came up against a wall as soon as the legacy technologies it relied upon reached the limits of exploitability. The same would soon be proven true of the other great symbol of neoliberal progress: economic growth.

Since the beginning of the end of history, economic growth has skyrocketed. Only part of this was due to imperialism – the ability for strong states with financial capital to spare to offload their surpluses onto the global south. That would have been a source of actual value were it the primary cause of this continuous economic boom, since it would have meant greater exploitation of labour. Instead capitalism developed along the much easier route – pure speculation in financial markets and tech companies, both of which are largely phantasmal.

Capital was creating a bubble – not of any one market, such as the late 90s tech bubble or the late 2000s housing bubble, but rather it was making a bubble out of capitalism as a whole. Who could have guessed what would pop it?

Part 2: What the fuck is going on?

Sometime around December 1, 2019, a few people got sick in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Many writers have spent thousands of hours speculating about the potential causes of transmission. Was it from a shopper at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? Did the disease come from the actual produce at this market? Was it a bioweapon? Was it a bat? A Pangolin? Was everyone at the market just too weird and Chinese to not get the disease? What comparatively few news sites have focused on was how on earth a virus could cause an economic crisis so great that we have nothing to truly compare it to.

This is because it could have been anything. It could have been a completely different virus in a completely different country, it could have been a sudden war erupting, it could have been a plane crash, it could have been a Wall Street Executive slipping on a banana peel. The system of global financial markets had been systematically hollowed out and prepared in every possible way to collapse at the drop of a hat sooner or later. To understand how, we need to understand three things: the underlying philosophy of neoliberalism, the way a modern financial market operates, and the general theory of economic crisis put forward by Karl Marx in his unfinished third volume of Capital.

Under neoliberalism, austerity is everything. The existence of everything, often including human life, has to be justified in terms of cost-effectiveness, self-reliance, and interoperability with the rest of the system. This is why social welfare, such as Work & Income New Zealand, operates by giving the absolute bare minimum to beneficiaries, and why all government departments, with the exclusion of Defence, Police, and Corrections, have to operate on paper-thin budgets, constantly needing to justify any expenditure whatsoever in terms of net-benefits to the economy. It is also not a rational ideology, in that in pursuing its goals of profitability and lean government, the means are much more important than the ends. A health system stretched thin (the “ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff model”) might actually be more costly to society than a health system which is budgeted to act preventatively and deal with unexpected crises, but this doesn’t really matter. Likewise, stockpiling, preemptively initiating spending, or even paying for proper maintenance can come to be seen as unnecessary luxuries in a system in which everything must be justified in terms of short-term profitability.

This is why the richest country in the world ended up with a shortage of basic medical supplies. Under ideal circumstances, each hospital should have had just enough masks, gloves and smocks to last a normal week, just in time for a new shipment. The same is true of most systems of logistics and supply under neoliberalism – things enter the warehouse, the shipping container, or the truck, just in time for them to leave. If anything stays in the warehouse, or is stockpiled, then that is an inefficiency in the system. Every minute those hospital gowns spend in the warehouse means a surplus is developing, which means profits lost for the manufacturer and shipping company.

The same logic rings true for financial markets. Each sector of the economy deals in just enough liquid assets (money) to operate under normal circumstances. If too much money circulates in the economy at any one time, then we get inflation – the decline in the value of currency. In a crisis, excess liquidity can be a good thing, which is why the US markets are being flooded with trillions of dollars, but under normal circumstances, these simple laws of financial supply and demand create an incentive for capitalists to invest their cash assets as soon as possible, never leaving anything in reserve in the event of a crisis.

But all of this, supply and demand, surplus and shortage, is somewhat obsolete under late capitalism. Contrary to popular belief, most microeconomic problems are pretty easy to solve using the microeconomic levers most accessible to capitalists such as changing prices, production or wages. Capitalists make them out to be huge, complex issues so that price regulation can be painted as naive meddling in the arcane market, but really, these simple problems like overproduction, underproduction, low demand, and the like, can all be fixed using the tools of the private sector. Larger systemic problems (macroeconomic issues), such as sovereign debt, low competitiveness, trade deficits, and poor consumer buying power, can also be fixed, but through the financial levers available to the state, such as bailouts, stimulus packages, elimination of reserve requirements, and massive liquidity injections. What can’t be fixed, at least not permanently, is the general downward trend in profits relative to investment.

The more serious problems of late capitalist economics – wafer-thin profit margins, constantly slowing rates of growth, and constant fears that consumers are “killing” various industries – are all products of one phenomenon that Karl Marx identified as far back as 1857, the discovery of which he called his “greatest triumph” but which remains a lesser known Marxian theory. This is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a hypothesis which explains why capitalism is doomed to perpetually swing between boom and bust, until it reaches a crisis from which it can’t recover.

Central to Marx’s theory of crisis is a much more famous theory – the labour theory of value. Put simply this is the idea that all the value that capitalist society places on a commodity comes from the workers who harvested the raw materials, worked in the factory that made it, and built the machines that filled the factory. The work being done by living workers is supplemented by the machines that other workers have made to assist them in their work.

The living people involved in this system are the organic component, while the machines, products, and other lifeless objects are the inorganic component. Taken together, the ratio between these components is the organic composition of capital (OOC). When there are few workers but many machines in a factory, the OOC is lower, and so the productivity of these workers is very high because the machines allow them to multiply their efforts. But high productivity creates a problem – if all of this work can be done by fewer workers, then unemployment will surely rise, wages will go down, and fewer people will be able to pay for the products from the factories. Eventually this leads to a crisis of consumption, which is what we are currently experiencing, and unless you’re over 50 or so, you’ve probably been experiencing one your entire life.

In a consumption crisis, wages are far too low for people to buy commodities or easily reproduce their capacity to work. Since the 1970s, wages have stagnated in most Western countries, but until now capitalists had many ways they could “kick the can down the road,” delaying the crisis for another few years and making higher and higher profits in the meantime. For example, to absorb the huge surpluses generated by an economy undergoing a consumption crisis, Capitalist states could offload their surplus values onto colonies and nations in the global south by creating new markets, or waging wars and thereby investing in weapons and reconstruction. A good example of this was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, which ended up costing trillions of dollars, allowed for billions to be invested in weapons manufacturers, and opened up a handful of new markets in the bombed out ruins of Baghdad or Fallujah.

This is one way to offset a major crisis, which we might call the “fuck the rest of the world” method. The other method is a bit harder for the capitalists, which is to massively increase consumer buying power through various measures. The most straightforward of these is the one capitalists are most loath to do, since it undermines neoliberal ideology, which is to simply give people money. This was done in Australia in 2008, when each Australian was given $300 and ordered to spend it immediately. Many other countries, even the US, are now rushing to copy this method of stimulus. Another method, which has been growing since mid last century, is by artificially raising a stratum of consumers through employing people in “bullshit jobs,” a term used by economist David Graeber to refer to people engaged in work that doesn’t seem to do anything. This includes a lot of professionals: secretaries of secretaries, managers of managers, supervisors of supervisors and the like. Finally there is another method which is gaining traction among some of the more far-sighted capitalist technocrats, the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would give people a flat rate of just enough money to fulfil their duty to the economy as consumers. Such a move would represent a last-ditch effort by capital to avoid the looming consumer crisis, which at time of writing appears to be a tsunami whose waters have only reached chest-height.

However, all of these means can only delay the inevitable. A capitalist system undergoing crisis can only offset the real crunch for so long. In 2008, the global capitalist system experienced a major shock when a speculative housing bubble popped in US financial markets. If the crisis continued, the capitalist class would have had to sell off huge amounts of assets, including industrial machinery. This would have solved the underlying productivity crisis for a time by restoring the huge imbalance between the organic and inorganic composition of capital. But this imbalance had been building for decades. Could the capitalist system survive the shock? Mass sell-offs are nothing new – the first response of the US government to the 1929 Wall Street Crash was to encourage these sell-offs, only to find out that doing so would massively increase public unrest from both capital and workers.

In the end, the crisis was instead offset through fiscal policy, as the US federal reserve removed barriers to debt and artificially preserved the value of assets by paying off capitalists with sums that often exceeded the value of their entire business. For this reason, the recovery from the 2008 crisis was slow, but the crisis itself was short-lived. The speculative bubbles weren’t quite popped, but enough air was let out to delay the inevitable, for about 12 years, as it turned out.

Part 3: Infinite new era

It is still entirely possible that the capitalists will be able to kick the can further down the road, and avert the current crisis through arcane fiscal finagling or through truly barbaric methods like forcing US and UK workers back into the workplace well before it is safe to do so.

But it seems equally possible that the world as we know it is over. By this I don’t mean that we’ll soon be living in a Mad Max-style apocalypse, but rather that period of “the end of history” is finally over. Capitalism will probably recover, either through solving the crisis through the above means before it gets worse, or it will allow the crisis to reach its conclusion and engage in massive selloffs of fixed capital, which might extend its rule by several decades by restoring some degree of profitability relative to investments. What that could mean for our people and ecology is anyone’s guess.

But whatever the results of this crisis are, one thing seems very clear. For the first time in our lives, workers have been forced to sit at home and think – not between shifts, or under the endless stress of being a beneficiary expected to look for work that often doesn’t exist, but just thinking, and getting bored. I don’t remember a time when capitalism gave an entire class of people the opportunity to get truly bored, apart from the upper classes, who get to call it ennui.

The politics of idleness are interesting. A few thousand years ago, the backbreaking labour of slaves, poor citizens, and women created the opportunity for the first truly idle class – the Ancient Greek philosophers who are credited with the entire foundation of our moral and political systems. For the next few thousand years, the only people who were allowed to be idle were the sons of rich nobles and merchants, and only with the birth of capitalism did common people find themselves idle – the unemployed newly-displaced rural folk who waited outside the great cities of Europe, waiting for jobs at the new textile factories to open up. Many of these people became the backbone of the first workers’ parties, often millenarian Christian-socialists and underground brotherhoods like the Chartists, Luddites, or League of the Just, which Marx and Engels would later co-opt and rename The Communist League.

Idleness in these times was feared greatly by those in power, and rightly so. Nothing worried them more than huge surplus populations growing restless, organising in their idle time, and realising their position somewhere near the bottom of a great social pyramid. From time to time these surplus populations grew so great that entire nations had to be set up just to get rid of them: the unemployed and wretched masses of the British Isles found themselves criminalised and subject to transportation to the penal colonies of the Caribbean, the Americas, and later New South Wales. Luckier surplus citizens found themselves in the free colonies, such as Perth, or New Zealand.

But are we truly surplus to requirements? Surely after the crash we’ll get our jobs back?

Many economists aren’t so sure. Unemployment modelling already shows rates are going to grow higher than during the great depression, and that’s without a much more pessimistic Marxian analysis of the crisis. To be surplus is a new experience to many of us. Idleness will force us to reckon with our position in the pyramid of society, just as those 19th century oligarchs were afraid of all those years ago.

The ideological backbone of capitalism as it currently exists has been broken. Neoliberalism has shown itself incapable of dealing with Covid-19. But what we make of this realisation is up to us. The ideological backbone might be broken, but the real nuts and bolts of the system: the police and politicians, bosses and workplaces, will still remain. Given enough time, they will use this crisis of legitimacy to forge a new kind of capitalism: maybe a society with a UBI? Or a form of eco-capitalism? Or maybe they’ll go the other direction, and lead us down a road to fascism, or Trumpian nationalistic fervor? If I had to place bets, I’d put it on a mix of all of the above, as usually seems to happen in a crisis of legitimacy. After all, the last great crisis of legitimacy happened during the Great Depression, leading to both the social-democratic compromise of the New Deal and Michael Joseph Savage’s welfare state, as well as the horrors of Nazism.

In truth I don’t think it matters so much what path capitalism chooses to take in order to legitimise itself in this new era, because unless the agency of that choice lies with working people – with beneficiaries, Māori, migrants, the multitude, the proletariat – it will leave us worse off. It might end the crisis, but we’ll live with the knowledge that the next one will be worse, and once again our lives will be utterly beyond our control.

So agency should be our watchword in this new era. So long as we lack agency, we are only a few years from collapse. So long as we lack agency, the response to crises will be arbitrary. New Zealanders got lucky in getting a rational response to the crisis, but next time we might be more like the US or UK – sending thousands more people to die in the name of profits. Taking power, then, is the only way to ensure that this total lack of agency never happens again.

So far in the things I’ve written for this blog, I’ve not actually included a call to join Organise Aotearoa. In a system built on broken promises, who am I to make a promise to readers that things will get better if only we fight for a revolutionary overthrow of the bosses, police and markets that put us in crisis again and again? As an organisation, we are young, and we are emerging from a very beaten-down, hollowed-out, and disparate left-wing movement. Revolution doesn’t seem realistic to many people, but then, neither did capitalism being crushed by a virus a few weeks ago. Socialism will never just happen – it takes work, and a sense of realism. We have a lot of work to do, but only in this period of transition can we see the possible futures laid out before us – apocalyptic misery, or social and economic justice. To fight for this is always worth the effort.

The best summary of the times we’re living in come from this quote I’m quite fond of:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”

[melissalfinch]

My Journey From Theism to Agnosticism

I’m going to explain to you a few reasons why religion no longer works for me with supportive quotes from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Socrates, and Sigmund Freud among other cultural inspirations. This is not going to be about my personal, scandalous, and fabricated experiences in a controversial sex cult because I haven’t had any, but I have witnessed enough to convince myself and others that they do exist. I’m not going to get into the details of the ugly, mentally abusive conversations I’ve been a part of and overheard in various congregations from different faiths. You will not get to gawk in entertainment at my explicit memories of the self-doubt, shame, and brainwashing from what leaders referred to as healthy chastisement, which only led to self-deprecation, depression, and arrogance towards those who did not share my faith. I choose not to get into the heartbreaking details over my loss of friends and pets, and the damage it inflicted on my family relationships, job losses that resulted, and the regretful religion-based decisions that I made. I choose not to get into those details in order to keep my own tear ducts dry. Composing this article the way it’s going to be presented has already required a substantial amount of bravery, causing months of procrastination and even nausea as I type.

With that stated, let’s get down to it. After reading two very informative books on agnosticism and atheism, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, both world-renowned atheists, and watching a some of their debates, I’ve been able to pull out profound quotes that I can relate to from my very core and which support my own theories that question faith and that question the health of adopting a religion.

First off, I’m going to discuss the subject of preaching. I am convinced that people use others to solidify their own faith by bringing them on board and plugging into their heads the conviction they lack. In their passionate preaching efforts, it seems that they are trying to convince themselves more than anyone else. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krsna says to Arjuna that Krsna will carry in other devotees what they lack, but I have found in most preaching efforts that religious followers are attempting to force into others what they themselves lack.

Let’s consider the subject of death for a detailed example. In Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, he points out:

  “Polls suggest 95 percent of the population of the US believe they will survive their own death. I can’t help but wonder how many people who claim such belief really, in their hearts, hold it. If they were truly sincere, shouldn’t they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him: ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.’”

It surely has to make you wonder: are people insincere with their religion or more fearful of the process of death? Dawkins elaborates further on the subject by saying: 

  “It is a striking fact that if you meet someone opposed to mercy killing, or passionately against assisted suicide, you can bet a good sum they’ll turn out to be religious. Why deem it a sin if you sincerely believe you are accelerating a journey to heaven?”  

Hitchens further exemplifies my point in his book by recalling how, when he was thirteen, the headmaster of his grade school in Dartmoor, England, said to him during a no-nonsense conversation: 

  “You may not see the point of all this faith now, but you will one day when you start to lose loved ones.”

Hitchens concludes: 

  “Why that would be as much as saying that religion might not be true, but nevermind that, since it can be relied upon for comfort.” 

Which brings me to a question we should all ask ourselves: what’s more important, truth or comfort? I confess I still do not have a firm answer to that question, but I will say in my own modest attempt at wisdom, if you rely on something that may not necessarily be true but gives you comfort, down the road you will be more likely to question that very thing. Such doubt makes your comfort temporary and can have a reverse effect, often resulting in anger and regret.

To further support this theory, I’ll use what I found as a profound statement according to Hitchens’ take on Freud in The Future Of An Illusion, where he describes the religious impulse as:

  “essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wish- thinking.” 

The idea of practicing a religion out of fear and daydreaming simply no longer sits well with me nor others who tell me they have had similar experiences and have decided to leave religion behind. However, the group of atheists and agnostics I relate to is still in the minority, and many are afraid to admit it in a world still governed by religion.

In addition to specious faiths revealed through preaching and fears of death, we can also see that those pious leaders who chastise their congregations for sins and offenses are often the most guilty and ashamed of committing the same proclaimed abominations.

  “The policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use   her for the very offense for which he plies the leash.”             (Shakespeare, King Lear) 

I do not need to exhaust the hypocritical details of the acts of religious figures and dogmas to prove my point. You can spend hours and hours of your own time researching documents from various Judeo-Christian faiths criminalizing clergymen and other supposed divinely proclaimed leaders who have committed the same unspeakable crimes for which they condemn their flock.

After watching the 2019 film The Two Popes starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, I heard Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (played by Pryce), who wishes to resign as archbishop, sadly admit, “The bigger the sinner, the warmer the welcome,” as if to poorly justify the behavior of imperfect people.

Now the question often arises, do we fight it? Do we fight organized religion the way organized religion has fought among itself in a similar sectarian manner? Nineteenth century German poet, writer, and literary critic Heinrich Heine, whose many works have been banned by German authorities, says in his work Gedanken Und Einfälle (Thoughts And Ideas): 

  “In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides. 

Shouldn’t we use our knowledge of science to advance and not simply rely on fairy tales and fiction for all the answers?”

Marx critiques Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right by saying:

  “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.” 

Surely we can admit the dangers of such an addictive drug.

In perhaps my favorite bold and simple statement on the matter, Hitchens paraphrases Socrates when he says:

  “I do not know for certain about death and the gods but I am certain as I can be that you do not know either.” 

I also reject the arrogance of such people who insist on the validity of their holy scriptures no matter how polite and endearing their character may seem during their attempts to persuade. 

Hitchens concludes in his book God Is Not Great:

  “Know the enemy and prepare to fight it.” 

In conclusion, I refer to Deborah Feldman’s autobiographical memoir, Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection Of My Hasidic Roots, on which the limited Netflix series Unorthodox is based. Ester Shapiro, remarkably played by Shira Haas, explains when asked why she left her Hasidic Jew tradition, “God expected too much of me. Now I need to find my own path.”  

My tears flowed during the viewing of that moment. For me, it has also been a painful process for my faith to change and to leave something I once felt so sure about. I often say that I broke up with God because the interrogation and grief I’ve received from others can easily be compared to a long breakup with a significant other.

In The Two Popes, Pope Benedict XVI, played by Anthony Hopkins, is also considering leaving his faith. He says, “I no longer wish to be a salesman.” The outreach conversion programs in the congregations in which I participated with always made me feel like I needed a shower.

In another conversation, Hopkins’ Pope states, “Change is compromise.”

Later on he admits, “The hardest thing is to listen, to hear God’s voice.” Whoever really hears God’s voice?”

One last quote I’ll share from Hitchens:

  “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.” 

Through my own life experiences, I’ve really seen the faults in humanizing our creator, this God we all talk about. People have let me down, broken my heart, misled me, misinformed me, betrayed me, violated me, and manipulated me. As I progressed in following a religion that egotistically humanizes God, I found their God also disappointing me, breaking my heart and misinforming me.

I find more ease in life simply not having all the answers, but enjoying wonderment in the science of nature simply for the sake of wonderment. As someone close to me once said:

  “Dragonflies are more fascinating than gods.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century is a bestselling economics tome whose combination of deep, careful presentation of centuries' worth of data, along with an equally careful analysis of where capitalism is headed has ignited a global conversation about inequality, tax, and policy. Cory Doctorow summarizes the conversation without making you read 696 pages (though you should).

To sum up: modern growth, which is based on the growth of productivity and the diffusion of knowledge, has made it possible to avoid the apocalypse predicted by Marx and to balance the process of capital accumulation. But it has not altered the deep structures of capital -- or at any rate has not truly reduced the macroeconomic importance of capital relative to labor. I must now examine whether the same is true for inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. How much has the structure of inequality with respect to both labor and capital actually changed since the nineteenth century?

I've been writing about Piketty's work for more than a year, as the first inklings of his French-language publications began to trickle into the Anglosphere. With the explosive publication of the English edition of Capital in the 21st Century last March, the trickle's turned into a flood of Piketty commentary, which I've followed as I made my way through the text, a process that took a lot longer than I expected.

Piketty has come in for a lot of praise for the clarity of his writing, and I think it's deserved. There's very little math in this book, and it assumes very little prior knowledge of economics. In part, this is because Piketty is offering something fresh in the discourse: an unimaginably massive data-set that traces the ebb and flow of wealth and productivity around the globe for three centuries. Piketty's been very transparent about the assumptions he and his team made in pulling together the data, offering more than 100 pages of endnotes that explain the logic behind each assumption (the data itself is online, too).

If there was one word I'd use to sum up the structure of Capital, it's "careful." Piketty is offering up an inflammatory thesis (more on that in a minute), but his presentation is almost plodding. He retraces and reiterates his arguments again and again, which is helpful for those of us who don't trade in economics in our daily lives, and also is set to head off lazy critics who want to dismiss him out of hand. Indeed, one of the most entertaining episodes in the debate so far has been The Financial Times affair, where the FT's Chris Giles pointed out a bunch of "errors" in Piketty's work, only to have the normally even-keeled Piketty come back with a long, detailed rebuttal that boiled down to "Hey, asshole, if you'd bothered to look, you'd see that I documented every one of the decisions you're characterizing as an error, and if you want to disagree with me, then argue with my explicit, detailed assumptions instead of sloppily assuming I didn't even realize I was making them."

Piketty's thesis has been shorthanded as r > g: that the rate of return on capital today -- and through most of history -- has been higher than general economic growth. This means that simply having money is the best way to get more money. Piketty uses examples from English and French literature (Austen, James and Balzac) to illustrate just how unimaginably weird this situation is by modern standards. The literature of the pre-modern era is full of people who understand that the being rich is a hereditary condition, and no matter what you create, or where you work, or how important you are, or how great you are, the only way to get rich is to be rich or marry someone rich.

The most striking fact is that the United States has become noticeably more inegalitarian than France (and Europe as a whole) from the turn of the twentieth century until now, even though the United States was more egalitarian at the beginning of this period. What makes the US case complex is that the end of the process did not simply mark a return to the situation that had existed at the beginning: US inequality in 2010 is quantitatively as extreme as in old Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, but the structure of that inequality is rather clearly different.

In the US (and Canada), this is a more remote memory, because the European colonists who came to the "New World" generally arrived without much capital, and notwithstanding the occasional land-baron or rail tycoon, have not had the opportunity to set up the kind of enduring, centuries-long dynasties that characterized the world they'd left. But for Piketty, this extreme wealth disparity is a central fact of history, and it is supposed to be the thing that modernity -- and capitalism -- conquered, through a "meritocratic" system that rewards people who do amazing things with amazing fortunes, and that recognizes that merely being the kid of someone who did something amazing is not, in itself, amazing, and should not entitle you to the exalted heights that your storied forebears attained.

The estate tax became progressive in France in 1901, but the highest rate on direct-line bequests was no more than 5 percent (and applied to at most a few dozen bequests a year). A rate of this magnitude, assessed once a generation, cannot have much effect on the concentration of wealth, no matter what wealthy individuals thought at the time. Quite different in their effect were the rates of 20–30 percent or higher that were imposed in most wealthy countries in the wake of the military, economic, and political shocks of 1914–1945. The upshot of such taxes was that each successive generation had to reduce its expenditures and save more (or else make particularly profitable investments) if the family fortune was to grow as rapidly as average income. Hence it became more and more difficult to maintain one's rank. Conversely, it became easier for those who started at the bottom to make their way, for instance by buying businesses or shares sold when estates went to probate.

Piketty challenges the idea that modernity somehow led to "merit" asserting itself as the new determinant of wealth. Instead, he makes a very convincing case that the increasing size of the capital class -- which expanded comfortably during the period of colonial expansion -- created a hunger for wealth that turned the aristocracy on itself in a squabble over who got to loot the colonies, which was World War I. This war was incredibly destructive of capital, and left many of the aristocracy holding onto potentially worthless government bonds issued by states that had nearly bankrupted themselves during the Great War. These states were so beholden to the rich that they couldn't contemplate inflating or taxing or defaulting their way out of debt, and so they took heroic and improbable measures to keep bondholders whole, which led to the economic chaos of of which WWII was born.

WWII destroyed so much accumulated wealth that in its aftermath, a raft of previously unimaginable policies became the norm. Trade unionism, progressive taxation, tenants' rights and other rules that spread out access to economic privilege and mobility became the norm, and the growth of fortunes was dramatically slowed all over the world. But by the 1980s, there was a big and important enough class of very rich people that they were able to exert serious political pressure, and the neoliberal era began, with Reagan and Thatcher. From then on, the return on capital has mounted even as growth has slowed, and the gap between the rich and poor has widened to the point where we are teetering on the brink of a society with such entrenched hereditary inequality that it can make no claim to "meritocratic" virtue.

In my view, there is absolutely no doubt that the increase of inequality in the United States contributed to the nation's financial instability. The reason is simple: one consequence of increasing inequality was virtual stagnation of the purchasing power of the lower and middle classes in the United States, which inevitably made it more likely that modest households would take on debt, especially since unscrupulous banks and financial intermediaries, freed from regulation and eager to earn good yields on the enormous savings injected into the system by the well-to-do, offered credit on increasingly generous terms.

This is a crisis. The reason for capitalism is that it is supposed to allocate reward based on "merit" -- it is supposed to move capital into the hands of the people who can do the most with it -- and if all our policy decisions are made in service to a class of supermanagers whose wealth comes from squatting on a fortune managed by some green-eyeshade quants who grow it without its owner ever doing a notable thing apart from being born to dynasty, there is no more reason for capitalism. Piketty darkly hints that the last time this happened, the world tore itself to pieces, twice, in an orgy of destruction that left millions dead and whole nations in ruin.

The main purpose of the health sector is not to provide other sectors with workers in good health. By the same token, the main purpose of the educational sector is not to prepare students to take up an occupation in some other sector of the economy. In all human societies, health and education have an intrinsic value: the ability to enjoy years of good health, like the ability to acquire knowledge and culture, is one of the fundamental purposes of civilization.

Piketty's controversial prescription for this is to impose a global wealth tax. Not a very big one, mind -- he talks at length about how a couple of percentage points per year would be more than enough. But just enough that every squillionaire would have to account for his wealth, disclosing its particulars and its disposition (laying bare the world's tax-havens), and that there would be enough redistributive pressure in the system to keep dynastic fortunes from growing, thus allowing for a middle-class to flourish (Piketty convincingly shows that even at the peak of "meritocratic" redistribution, the poor's share of the world's wealth has not changed appreciably -- rather, that the loosened control of the rich has made room for a middle-class).

A global tax on capital is a utopian idea. It is hard to imagine the nations of the world agreeing on any such thing anytime soon. To achieve this goal, they would have to establish a tax schedule applicable to all wealth around the world and then decide how to apportion the revenues. But if the idea is utopian, it is nevertheless useful, for several reasons. First, even if nothing resembling this ideal is put into practice in the foreseeable future, it can serve as a worthwhile reference point, a standard against which alternative proposals can be measured. Admittedly, a global tax on capital would require a very high and no doubt unrealistic level of international cooperation. But countries wishing to move in this direction could very well do so incrementally, starting at the regional level (in Europe, for instance). Unless something like this happens, a defensive reaction of a nationalist stripe would very likely occur. For example, one might see a return to various forms of protectionism coupled with imposition of capital controls. Because such policies are seldom effective, however, they would very likely lead to frustration and increase international tensions.

There are lots of reasons for this to be controversial. First, as Piketty admits, it's impractical. Getting all the countries of the world to agree to this scheme is implausible. But, he says, we don't need everyone to cooperate to realize some immediate benefit:

To reject the global tax on capital out of hand would be all the more regrettable because it is perfectly possible to move toward this ideal solution step by step, first at the continental or regional level and then by arranging for closer cooperation among regions. One can see a model for this sort of approach in the recent discussions on automatic sharing of bank data between the United States and the European Union. Furthermore, various forms of capital taxation already exist in most countries, especially in North America and Europe, and these could obviously serve as starting points.

There's something ineluctably European and scholarly in Piketty's willingness to treat redistribution as legitimate. "Redistribution" is political poison in the USA, though it wasn't always thus:

In 1919, Irving Fisher, then president of the American Economic Association, went even further. He chose to devote his presidential address to the question of US inequality and in no uncertain terms told his colleagues that the increasing concentration of wealth was the nation's foremost economic problem. Fisher found King's estimates alarming. The fact that "2 percent of the population owns more than 50 percent of the wealth" and that "two-thirds of the population owns almost nothing" struck him as "an undemocratic distribution of wealth," which threatened the very foundations of US society. Rather than restrict the share of profits or the return on capital arbitrarily -- possibilities Fisher mentioned only to reject them -- he argued that the best solution was to impose a heavy tax on the largest estates (he mentioned a tax rate of two-thirds the size of the estate, rising to 100 percent if the estate was more than three generations old).

Indeed, an unwillingness to tax creates all kinds of evils. For starters, if a state can't fund its core programs out of tax, it has to borrow. And when it borrows, it borrows from the rich. So instead of taxation -- which weakens the fortunes and political influence of the wealthy -- we get bonds, through which the wealthy are paid interest out of the funds extracted from those who lack the political clout to escape taxation. The wealthy get more wealthy, and exert more political pressure. Piketty illustrates this beautifully with a couple of well-chosen examples -- for example, take the sky-high CEO salary. Why weren't the CEOs of the post-war period paid tens of millions, while their financialized descendants bring home the makings of a hereditary dynasty? It's all down to an unwillingness to have real progressive taxation:

...Lower top income tax rates, especially in the United States and Britain, where top rates fell dramatically, totally transformed the way executive salaries are determined. It is always difficult for an executive to convince other parties involved in the firm (direct subordinates, workers lower down in the hierarchy, stockholders, and members of the compensation committee) that a large pay raise -- say of a million dollars -- is truly justified. In the 1950s and 1960s, executives in British and US firms had little reason to fight for such raises, and other interested parties were less inclined to accept them, because 80–90 percent of the increase would in any case go directly to the government. After 1980, the game was utterly transformed, however, and the evidence suggests that executives went to considerable lengths to persuade other interested parties to grant them substantial raises. Because it is objectively difficult to measure individual contributions to a firm's output, top managers found it relatively easy to persuade boards and stockholders that they were worth the money, especially since the members of compensation committees were often chosen in a rather incestuous manner.

It's a rare thing to see economists, especially pro-capitalist economists, praising taxation itself, but Piketty -- careful, unemotional Piketty -- dares:

Without taxes, society has no common destiny, and collective action is impossible. This has always been true. At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution. The Ancien Régime was swept away when the revolutionary assemblies voted to abolish the fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy and establish a modern system of universal taxation. The American Revolution was born when subjects of the British colonies decided to take their destiny in hand and set their own taxes. ("No taxation without representation"). Two centuries later the context is different, but the heart of the issue remains the same. How can sovereign citizens democratically decide how much of their resources they wish to devote to common goals such as education, health, retirement, inequality reduction, employment, sustainable development, and so on?

Picketty has little patience for economic doctrine in general, and gets some serious digs in:

Among the members of these upper income groups are US academic economists, many of whom believe that the economy of the United States is working fairly well and, in particular, that it rewards talent and merit accurately and precisely...Some economists have an unfortunate tendency to defend their private interest while implausibly claiming to champion the general interest.

Besides, he says, the thing every red-blooded entrepreneur wants to see is people getting rich by their wits and deeds, not by the birthright of kings. Consider the heiress to the L'oreal fortune and Bill Gates:

All large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates, regardless of whether the owner of the fortune works or not. To be sure, one should be careful not to overestimate the precision of the conclusions one can draw from these data, which are based on a small number of observations and collected in a somewhat careless and piecemeal fashion. The fact is nevertheless interesting.

Take a particularly clear example at the very top of the global wealth hierarchy. Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates -- the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years -- increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt -- the heiress of L'Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau's success with perfume a century earlier -- increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.

In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working. Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own, and it can continue to grow at a rapid pace for decades simply because of its size. Note, in particular, that once a fortune passes a certain threshold, size effects due to economies of scale in the management of the portfolio and opportunities for risk are reinforced by the fact that nearly all the income on this capital can be plowed back into investment. An individual with this level of wealth can easily live magnificently on an amount equivalent to only a few tenths of percent of his capital each year, and he can therefore reinvest nearly all of his income. This is a basic but important economic mechanism, with dramatic consequences for the long-term dynamics of accumulation and distribution of wealth. Money tends to reproduce itself.

(A dry postscript on those who say that feckless descendants correct this problem on their own: "It would in any case be rather imprudent to rely solely on the eternal but arbitrary force of family degeneration to limit the future proliferation of billionaires.")

But how does money increase itself? It turns out that if you have a lot of money to invest, you get a lot more in return, as Piketty demonstrates by picking apart the investment returns of the Ivy League university endowments, which are the only privately invested fortunes whose investment strategies are subject to public scrutiny:

If we look at the investment strategies of different universities, we find highly diversified portfolios at all levels, with a clear preference for US and foreign stocks and private sector bonds (government bonds, especially US Treasuries, which do not pay well, account for less than 10 percent of all these portfolios and are almost totally absent from the largest endowments). The higher we go in the endowment hierarchy, the more often we find "alternative investment strategies," that is, very high yield investments such as shares in private equity funds and unlisted foreign stocks (which require great expertise), hedge funds, derivatives, real estate, and raw materials, including energy, natural resources, and related products (these, too, require specialized expertise and offer very high potential yields). If we consider the importance in these various portfolios of "alternative investments," whose only common feature is that they abandon the usual strategies of investing in stocks and bonds accessible to all, we find that they represent only 10 percent of the portfolios of institutions with endowments of less than 50 million euros, 25 percent of those with endowments between 50 and 100 million euros, 35 percent of those between 100 and 500 million euros, 45 percent of those between 500 million and 1 billion euros, and ultimately more than 60 percent of those above 1 billion euros. The available data, which are both public and extremely detailed, show unambiguously that it is these alternative investment strategies that enable the very largest endowments to obtain real returns of close to 10 percent a year, while smaller endowments must make do with 5 percent.

In other words, if you're a normal person with a 401(k), you'd be lucky to clear inflation with your nest egg. If you're a gazillionaire, you can hire financial talent who'll get you 10 points even in the worst market, and you can pay them hundreds of millions out of chump change.

<1>

The low point was attained in the 1970s: after several decades of small inheritances and accumulation of new wealth, inherited capital accounted for just over 40 percent of total private capital. For the first time in history (except in new countries), wealth accumulated in the lifetime of the living constituted the majority of all wealth: nearly 60 percent. It is important to realize two things: first, the nature of capital effectively changed in the postwar period, and second, we are just emerging from this exceptional period. Nevertheless, we are now clearly out of it: the share of inherited wealth in total wealth has grown steadily since the 1970s. Inherited wealth once again accounted for the majority of wealth in the 1980s, and according to the latest available figures it represents roughly two-thirds of private capital in France in 2010, compared with barely one-third of capital accumulated from savings. In view of today's very high inheritance flows, it is quite likely, if current trends continue, that the share of inherited wealth will continue to grow in the decades to come, surpassing 70 percent by 2020 and approaching 80 percent in the 2030s.

Piketty says that the "normal" state of affairs in which anyone has a crack at fame and fortune is a blip in the long run of human history that has been largely characterized by a self-serving, greedy hereditary aristocracy whose comfort was only possible because of the enmiseration of nearly everyone else. Absent some kind of extraordinary intervention, hereditary wealth will reassert itself as the primary political mover in our world. The people at the top have always convinced themselves that they live in a meritocracy, because hey, they're the best people they know, and they're at the top of the pyramid. QED. But this story is impossible to square with the data:

The fact that income inequality in the United States in 2000–2010 attained a level higher than that observed in the poor and emerging countries at various times in the past -- for example, higher than in India or South Africa in 1920–1930, 1960–1970, and 2000–2010 -- also casts doubt on any explanation based solely on objective inequalities of productivity. Is it really the case that inequality of individual skills and productivities is greater in the United States today than in the half-illiterate India of the recent past (or even today) or in apartheid (or postapartheid) South Africa? If that were the case, it would be bad news for US educational institutions, which surely need to be improved and made more accessible but probably do not deserve such extravagant blame...

...Since it is impossible to give a precise estimate of each manager's contribution to the firm's output, it is inevitable that this process yields decisions that are largely arbitrary and dependent on hierarchical relationships and on the relative bargaining power of the individuals involved. It is only reasonable to assume that people in a position to set their own salaries have a natural incentive to treat themselves generously, or at the very least to be rather optimistic in gauging their marginal productivity. To behave in this way is only human, especially since the necessary information is, in objective terms, highly imperfect. It may be excessive to accuse senior executives of having their "hands in the till," but the metaphor is probably more apt than Adam Smith's metaphor of the market's "invisible hand." In practice, the invisible hand does not exist, any more than "pure and perfect" competition does, and the market is always embodied in specific institutions such as corporate hierarchies and compensation committees.

...Regardless of whether the wealth a person holds at age fifty or sixty is inherited or earned, the fact remains that beyond a certain threshold, capital tends to reproduce itself and accumulates exponentially. The logic of r > g implies that the entrepreneur always tends to turn into a rentier. Even if this happens later in life, the phenomenon becomes important as life expectancy increases. The fact that a person has good ideas at age thirty or forty does not imply that she will still be having them at seventy or eighty, yet her wealth will continue to increase by itself. Or it can be passed on to the next generation and continue to increase there. Nineteenth-century French economic elites were creative and dynamic entrepreneurs, but the crucial fact remains that their efforts ultimately -- and largely unwittingly -- reinforced and perpetuated a society of rentiers owing to the logic of r > g.

This inequality of access also seems to exist at the top of the economic hierarchy, not only because of the high cost of attending the most prestigious private universities (high even in relation to the income of upper-middle-class parents) but also because admissions decisions clearly depend in significant ways on the parents' financial capacity to make donations to the universities. For example, one study has shown that gifts by graduates to their former universities are strangely concentrated in the period when the children are of college age. By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy. Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.

Remember, hereditary wealth isn't just unfair, it's also an invitation to laziness. Just as competition disciplines firms, so to does taxation discipline dynasties:

A classic argument in favor of a capital tax should not be neglected. It relies on a logic of incentives. The basic idea is that a tax on capital is an incentive to seek the best possible return on one's capital stock. Concretely, a tax of 1 or 2 percent on wealth is relatively light for an entrepreneur who manages to earn 10 percent a year on her capital. By contrast, it is quite heavy for a person who is content to park her wealth in investments returning at most 2 or 3 percent a year. According to this logic, the purpose of the tax on capital is thus to force people who use their wealth inefficiently to sell assets in order to pay their taxes, thus ensuring that those assets wind up in the hands of more dynamic investors.

There have been a number of critcisms leveled at Piketty since the English translation of Capital, and, like the Financial Times broadside, most of these have been unserious -- coming from people who clearly haven't read the book carefully enough. But there's one criticism I have a lot of time for: Suresh Naidu's critique of the politics of Piketty's analysis. Piketty treats the rate of return on capital as largely financial, while Naidu argues (convincingly) that it's political. The rules of property and the willingness of the state to support those rules through everything from guard labor to anti-default/anti-inflationary policies are political decisions, not laws of nature, and they are the crux of the rate of return. And since the relative positions of the rate of return versus the rate of growth (r > g) is at the crux of his theory, this is a significant challenge to his analysis.

Piketty, in Naidu's view, is limited by his unwillingness to challenge capitalism itself. As Naidu says:

This is where Piketty’s Walrasian conventions dampen his contribution: he discusses the first, but not the second. It’s like saying slavery is an inequality of assets between slaves and slaveholders without describing the plantation.

Even Adam Smith suggested measuring a person’s income by the “quantity of that labor which he can command.” This has normally been taken to mean income of the rich relative to the wage. But it also means looking at “command”: what privileges and obligations can one demand from the soul purchased (or rented)?

An economy that allows indentured labor means that wealth can purchase more power over people; an economy with robust union contracts means that capital is trammeled in its control over the shop floor. From sexual harassment on the job to the indignities of gentrification and nonprofit funding, a world of massive inequality is a world where rich people get to shape environments that everybody else has to accept.

Piketty repeatedly announces that politics plays a large role in the distribution of income. But he neglects that the distribution of income and wealth also generates inequalities of larger privileges and prerogatives; wealth inequality together with a thoroughly commodified society enables a million mini-dictatorships, wherein the political power of the rich is exercised through the market itself.

Piketty is locked in a curious dance with Marx -- there is a spectre haunting Capital in the 21st Century and it is Kapital -- the Marxist critique of power-dynamics themselves. Piketty wants desperately to salvage capitalism, even if that means proposing something that every capitalist will hate: a global wealth tax.

(Image: Piketty in Cambridge, Sue Gardner, CC-BY-SA)

-Cory Doctorow

https://boingboing.net/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-t.html

[meditationadvise]

7 Powerful Books That Will Unleash The Hidden Potential Of Your Mind

" A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to maintain its side."

There it is: your mind -all leashed-up, bored, bookless and chasing its very own tail in the edge. It's time to unleash it. It's time to throw it back into the surprising waters of wonder and admiration. It's time to sidetrack it from the all as well familiar tail (or story, to wit), as well as give it a juicy carrot to chase around rather. Seven juicy carrots, to be exact.

So, shop that leash, open up your mind, snuggle with your ideal close friend, and dive precisely into the complying with mind-unleashing publications. However keep the light on. As Groucho Marx wittily believed, " Beyond a pet dog, a publication is guy's best buddy. Within a pet dog it's too dark to check out."

1.) "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsche

" We never ever recognize any type of information prior to translating it via concepts. All monitorings are, as Popper put it, theory-laden, and thus imperfect, as all our concepts are."

From epistemology and also quantum fungibility to ecological values and societal advancement, David Deutsche takes us on a provocative trip right into addressing a single inquiry: Is there a restriction to exactly what can be comprehended? He comes at a mind-expending solution of “no” by diving deep into the broadening waters of epistemology and also ontology. He profoundly claims that our understanding of anything is constantly at the “beginning of infinity” and also there will certainly constantly be a boundless amount a lot more left for us to recognize. Basically speculating that, with exact and versatile understanding, anything is feasible unless it is restricted by the laws of physics.

Highly sensible as well as integrating, The beginning of Infinity releases us into greater thinking on the path towards much better and also far better descriptions. He takes us from parochial, obsolete methods of believing to the idea of universality and upgraded ways of thinking of the cosmos as a thing to be gradually evolved right into making use of ever-expanding modern technologies. Therefore bridging the void from guy to overman. As he explained, "There is just one method of believing that is qualified of making progress, or of enduring over time, as well as that is the means of seeking great descriptions with creativity and also objection."

2.) ' Circulation: The Psychology of Optimal Experience' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

" The majority of satisfying activities are not all-natural, they demand an effort that initially one is unwilling to make. Once the communication begins to offer feedback to the person's abilities, it typically begins to be intrinsically rewarding."

Thanks to Csikszentmihalyi, the concept of the “flow state” has come to be an essential aspect of our social awakening. The optimum experience is gained through deep self-control in a particular field/art/sport that gives inherent reward, difficulty, and also comments, therefore integrating self-confidence, focus, control, flexibility, and also connectivity. Time stops or decreases. Instabilities go away. We quit respecting what others consider us. A creative unraveling of something bigger shows up. Every little thing flows easily in interconnected unison with us as its synergistic spearhead. In brief: we stop believing and also simply do.

By just asking the concern, " When are people most pleased?" Csikszentmihalyi, with time checked study, identifies flow states as the response. Professional athletes call it "remaining in the area," mystics have actually defined it as “ecstasy,” and artists term it “rapture.” Releasing ideal experience is concerning doing what we enjoy as a pathway toward better meaning, happiness, and also a self of higher intricacy. By doing just what we love in challenging ways, we take advantage of ideal experience right into our lives. This book powerfully discusses the psychology of this important process.

3.) "Phi: A Trip from the Mind to the Soul' by Giulio Tononi

" Dirty ideas, like dirty waters, can serve 2 objectives only: to hide what lies beneath, which is our ignorance, or to earn the shallow appear deep"

Phi takes the viewers on a mind-altering trip through the nature of consciousness. It interweaves scientific research, art, as well as the imagination with golden proportions, Fibonacci series, as well as fractal cosmology. The visitor has the happiness of viewing the world through such masters as Galileo, Alan Turing, Darwin and Francis Crick, amongst others. From neuroscience to pseudoscience, from deep introspection to mindful meditation, Tononi illuminates on exactly how awareness is a progressing, ever-deepening recognition of ourselves as finite, souls in a limitless universe.

We find out just how awareness is integrated information and just how the power of that combination requires miraculous duty and also credulity. It instructs exactly how the brain is the seat of our understandings, as well as is an innovative force par quality, as well as can also create brand-new forms and also brand-new qualia. It shows just how, by growing awareness, deep space comes increasingly more into being, and synthesizes the one and the many, the ego as well as the eco, the individual and the interdependence of all points into a linked force of Nature.

4.) "The Art of Fear" by Kristen Ulmer

"" Every little thing is great" is really a copout, a stuck area, an obstruction to the exploration of who and just what you are broadening right into higher and even more, as well as the advancement of humankind."

The Art of fear has to do with curiously accepting fear rather compared to conquering or repressing it. It has to do with restoring our understanding of fear from scratch. It has to do with realizing that Anxiety is just one of 10,000 employees at You Integrated, as well as how they all require a voice. Yet Fear many of all, lest all voices become quelched darkness. The key to fear, she discusses, is wondering regarding it, consequently utilizing its power rather compared to overcoming it. In between guts and curiosity is whatever we should be fearless.

Ulmer's individual trip with anxiety at some point led her to examine with Zen masters, where she discovered a mindfulness device called "Shift" which moves our perspective of worry from oblivious repression to aggressive curiosity, thus aligning it authentically with our real nature. The standard tenet being this: As opposed to quelching fear, equip it, by being curious as well as examining instead of judgmental and implicating. Honor it with deep respect so it does not operate secretly in twisted means below the surface.

5.) "Endgame: The Problem of Human being' by Derrick Jensen

" Property One: People is not and could never ever be sustainable. This is specifically real for commercial civilization."

Endgame will certainly take every little thing you think you understand about being a social remaining in an apparently useful society as well as turn it on its head. Absolutely except the regular statist, neither the faithful obedient resident. Endgame has to do with the vital demand to right away take apart the unhealthy human being that surrounds us. Endgame is a scathing, surging review against the harmful, unsustainable, and also ecologically unhealthy man-machine that is our contemporary culture.

Breaking guide down right into a series of easy yet increasingly intriguing facilities, Jensen takes us on a psychedelic as well as convincing flight into the undesirable stubborn belly of the fierce, ecocidal beast that is modern human being. His standard property is straightforward: Industrial people is unsustainable. It's not an inquiry of “if” but a question of “when” it's going to fail.

He suggests that the longer it takes people to fall, the worse the tragedy will be. In that light, there are 2 points we must be doing: Causing the autumn sooner rather than later, and preparing to endure it. His attitude is caustic as well as not so serious, however all the better for the shock worth it offers. This book actually squashes the box we're all so desperately attempting to assume beyond. A free (and maybe less hostile) read is Beyond Human being by Daniel Quinn.

6.) Trickster Makes this Globe: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde

" Better to run with detachment, then, much better to have a method but instill it with a little humor, best, to have no way at all but to have rather the wit constantly making one's method anew from the materials at hand."

Trickster Makes This World is a mythological cornerstone for Spiritual Clowns and also practicing trickster-gods the world over, digging into the intestines of the prehistoric significance of sacred play and also brawler actions. Hyde checks out just how trickster numbers represent the “disruptive imagination” that inverts, reorganizes, and also overturns standard wisdom. From Raven to Coyote, Ape to Crow, Hermes to Loki, Eshu to Legba, Hyde reveals connections in between mythical tricksters that develop a concealed network that links social divides.

The ideal part regarding this publication is its capability to reveal just how mythology ends up being reality. “Trickster consciousness'” is a crucial component of human imagination. It reveals that we are the gods of renewal as well as rebirth, if we decide to be. We are the designers of mischief and also mayhem. We are the trickster gods in training. Charlatan is us, and also we are Charlatan. We are the supreme boundary-crossers. No manmade policies or legislations could have us, unless we let them. Also planetary regulations and also regulations can barely contain us. Charlatan makes this globe by tearing the old world down through high wit, ethical ambiguity, absurdity, and critical transgression and also then dancings in the ashes of its devastation. It is specifically from the dancing, the kicking up of dirt and also ash, where endure new globes emerge.

7.) 'Ethical Tribes: Feeling, Reason, and also the Void Between Us as well as Them' by Joshua Greene

" We need a kind of believing that allows teams with clashing principles to cohabit and flourish. To puts it simply, we require a metamorality. We need a moral system that settles disagreements amongst groups with different moral ideals, equally as common first-order morality solves differences among individuals with various egocentric rate of interests."

Moral Tribes is hands-on moral psychology and a revitalizing brand-new take on utilitarianism. Greene wraps video game theory, evolutionary biology, as well as neuroscience into a wonderful absorbable package to strengthen his concept of cognition, which builds elegantly into a theory of moral psychology. A sweeping synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Ethical People opens up a container of psychosocial worms that takes the principle of principles to the next level, exposing exactly how we are incredibly well-adept at fixing the problem in between “Me” and “Us,” through the concept of the “tribe,” yet how we are ridiculously less-adept at solving the meta-dilemma between “Us” and “Them.”

Greene's principle of metamorlity squares this psychosocial circle by counterintuitively applying utilitarianism to our base, pavlovian response to morality (advanced morality) by coming to be aware of our apathy in order to end up being a lot more understanding. By enhancing humankind as opposed to nationalism, and life patriotism rather of patriotic nationalism, we turn the tables on both prejudice as well as lethargy and we come to be a lot more caring as well as empathetic toward others. When we celebrate variety rather than trying to pack the square secure of manifest destiny right into the round hole of social association, we turn the tables on the monkey-mind's one-dimensional moral tribalism and we introduce Joshua Greene's multi-dimensional metamorality.

[bimboficationblues]

I'm technically new to all this political stuff, so I hope you can help me out! - How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad? Why is the US also bad, and how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a "free country" and that we "at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest", etc. I'm very bad with words, I'm just a dumb kid. Sorry for bothering, and thank you. (:

I will answer these questions, but first off, I would say - read, listen, think. Ultimately it’s better if you can develop your own conclusions through a mutual dialogue and learning process with others rather than getting your talking points entirely from others, especially on a social media platform. But if you want resources or recommendations from others, Tumblr can be useful, and I’m happy to provide if you want.

As for answering your questions, it really depends: who is the person you’re talking to, and what do you want out of the conversation? Not everybody has the same interests or concerns or values, and sometimes they’re intractable for whatever reason. So there are other factors that should be taken into account. If you’re just trying to “win” a discussion, I don’t personally think that’s a worthwhile use of time - but if you are trying to convince someone interpersonally or just get better at clarifying your own perspective for the future, that could be valuable.

So, answering your questions under the cut:

How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad?

A) Capitalism stifles human freedom, and does so in both passive and active forms. This seems counterintuitive because capitalism is peddled as the fulfillment of human freedom (by way of innovation and freedom of choice - Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have claimed that so-called “economic freedom” is a necessary condition for political freedoms), so bear with me.

Passive forms: In order to live under capitalism, most people have to work - and for that matter, they have to tailor skills and interests to be rewarded on the labor-market. Furthermore, since capitalism is predicated on the principle of private property, some kind of state is necessary to enforce that principle through the law, and the state and law are blatantly forms of social control (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism for more info on this). As a Christian myself, this is the essence of idolatry. The capitalist world-system was made by humans, ostensibly to serve human needs, but is both bad at serving those needs in many ways (for reasons to be explained below) and uses us as the fodder for its self-perpetuation! 

And this generates alienation. There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with depending on other people - humans are social creatures and are themselves influenced by the conditions under which they live no matter what those conditions are. But when your labor and the product of your labor benefits others far better than it sustains you, when you are pushed to view all other people as competitors, when you are subjected to various forms of interpersonal and structural domination (detailed below), this produces quite a bit of psychological distress. (Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia touch on these in different ways.)

Active forms: Historically, in order to get people to be wage laborers, they had to be forced to do so - in England, which is generally regarded as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, laws were established to oblige people to work for a certain period and punish them if they didn’t. Similar legislation cropped up in Germany and France. And, of course, there was also the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abuse and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, the confinement of women to the household for free labor. Though not all contemporary evils are the result of capitalism, they have all been shaped by capitalism. Primordial prejudices and mistreatment of “aliens” has been around for a long time, but anti-black racism and “scientific” racism developed out of the economic functions of slavery and capitalist development; though patriarchy predates capitalism considerably, it has been absorbed and reproduced by capitalism’s dynamics. 

One of the common selling points for capitalism is the voluntary character of the contracts, but again, I don’t think it’s a meaningful choice when your other options are “starve” and “beg.” But let’s grant that people enter into voluntary employment contracts to sustain themselves. Within those contracts, bosses behave like dictators, and this is a pattern of both small businesses and large corporations precisely because they want to get as much work and value out of you as they can in order to make a profit. (Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, while not about interpersonal domination by capitalists and employers, has a great chapter on the subject - “Capital’s Universalizing Tendency.”)

Now, although the standard of living and wages for American workers has been rising for a long time (only recently stagnating despite the growth in productivity, again the result of the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s), we have seen the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination displaced to other places - Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America being the most prominent cases. And still, as the article linked above demonstrates, there are lots of forms of interpersonal domination still going on in an American context.

B) Capitalism is anti-democratic. The concentration of wealth into a select few hands, and the associated political and social power that has become attached to greater social wealth, means that wealthier people have greater access to political power and influence. The Koch Brothers are probably the best example of this, though lobbying in general is an expression of this function. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I think it’s the least compelling argument personally even though I agree with it, but it is a popular and common one!

C) Capitalism is also fundamentally irrational. I think this is true in the way that we think about value and the way capitalism generates regular crises, but I’ll just use one example.

The convenient thing about money, as both Locke and Marx point out, is that it is potentially infinite unlike other resources. There is the possibility of limitless growth, of maximum expansion - which is why the capitalist mode of production began in Western Europe and the United States and has since spread around the world. (There is, of course, no such thing as limitless growth for anything, except perhaps cancer.) But capitalism takes this possibility as gospel and as a result, will do anything to maximize growth. 

Sometimes those things are good for working people (farm subsidies enabling cheap food - though without those subsidies there would probably be a famine from capitalists not investing capital in food production). More often they aren’t, whether that’s mistreatment of workers, lowering or stagnating wages, destruction of the environment, or outright warfare. Plus, because there is a limit to natural desires or even luxury desires, capitalists have to constantly concoct new desires for us to latch onto, which is why so much money is sunk into advertising.And this is not merely the result of the ethical whims or personal behaviors of individual capitalists (though those do factor in), but the necessary and logical result of a mode of production that has an internal logic of constant, endless reproduction.

Why is the US also bad? how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a “free country” and that we “at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest”, etc.

This is, paradoxically, an easier argument to make empirically but a harder case to sell because American nationalism and American exceptionalism are pretty ubiquitous, and they’ve only gotten more intractable in the past four or five decades. It really depends on what you mean by “bad,” anyway. On one level, the United States is not that different from any other state historically (since they are usually founded through violence and domination) or contemporarily (since they all act in their own geopolitical interests, and that often means fucking other people over undeservedly).

But, on another level: The United States- were built on indigenous and later African slavery- regularly violated treaties or used duplicitous means to gain access to Native American land for investment and expansion purposes- deployed genocidal tactics and sexual violence against Native Americans throughout the expansion process (especially in California and the Southeast)- fabricated a reason to wage war on Mexico to seize territory from it- botched Reconstruction after the end of formal slavery while still allowing black Americans to be abused and exploited and criminalized en masse- had racial policies that the Nazis found inspirational- engaged in imperialist warfare in the Caribbean at the turn of the century- overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii for economic reasons- nuked a Japanese civilian target (TWICE) when their surrender was already in the cards- used its new hegemony to start launching coups against (mostly democratically elected and socialist-leaning) governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile)- held the rest of the world in a hostage situation alongside the Soviet Union by threatening nuclear annihilation- waged war on Vietnam after violating the agreement to allow democratic elections and unification to take place- illegally bombed Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to gain traction- financed Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union that were the precursors of al-Qaeda- engaged in Iran-Contra, basically the shadiest thing in existence, and failed to deliver any real consequences to the people involved - supported and continues to support dictators (Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc.) as well as death squads (right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America)- has the highest incarceration rate in the world- has massively expanded the surveillance and police apparatuses since 9/11- invaded Iraq under false pretenses and let Islamic State develop out of the chaos

This is just a minor selection. And to top it all off, the Constitution of the United States is designed to make government as dysfunctional and anti-democratic as possible. The powers of the President have been perpetually expanding for a long time, and the Supreme Court is such a shamelessly broken, unaccountable institution that I cannot believe we take it seriously. The Supreme Court’s rulings on free speech have been up-and-down, often determined by war and nationalism, and the social backlash and hostility to political protest every time the United States goes to war suggests that even with the freedom of assembly granted by the Constitution, nationalism takes priority over freedoms.

This post is long enough, but if you (or anyone else) want me to elaborate on anything I’ve said here, feel free to ask.

[eternalloveheart]

Morality: God or man?

I started reading the book “What if the bible never existed” by Dr Kennedy. He explores the importance of the bible by its impact on the world. I am only a few chapters in so far just wanting to bring out my thoughts and the quotes I pulled that made me think. I am pretty much summarizing my take on the points of the first few chapters. I will be making more posts on this book with different points. I know this is a blog so I am not making this into some kind of academic essay just posting the aftermath of my reading.

God or man’s?

There are many reasons we cannot officially have a moral code without God. One main “reason you can’t have morality without religion is not that can’t draw up a common code of ethics. It is that without an external authority, most people will not follow it. Now, I will grant that the humanists have drawn up a code, and they have gotten some people to follow it” (Dr Kennedy, page 435).

Brute force

It seems one of the easiest successful ways to get people to conform to a set of moral rules is by religion. A main problem is being human we know that everyone is capable of just as much evil as us if not more with no true claim to some high ground. I have personally asked some atheists how one might go about ensuring morality with those who do not agree with them such as sociopaths who have no empathetic compass. I explained that religion has helped a sociopath namely David Wood turn from his murderous ways to live a life for God. I wait attentively for a response only to hear the atheist respond with the words “brute force”.

It is difficult to use of brute force as it often leads to tyranny and rebellions. I am taking a policing course where we overview policing history. History shows it only aggravates the people further when more force was involved such as military intervention. It went against the human desire for a decent amount of liberties and rights (which even a sociopath would desire). In the Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, Vol. 55 by J. L Lyman from the Northwest university of Law there is a review of historical mistakes using force against one’s citizens. In the journal it mentions the way the law enforcement was so hated it was inefficient in stopping crime which in turn had crime running more rampant. The journal states that “by 1828 one person in every three hundred and eighty-three was a criminal” in London. The method of “brute force” had worsened the situation as it never got to the core of the problem.

Reasoning

I assume not everyone would have immediately jumped to “brute force”. I think some may have even thought of just reasoning with people. I mean someone has to be able to convince if not through force or empathy that one should dogmatically follow a moral code. I do not just mean sociopaths I include anyone with opposing views of morality. I have to concede everyone has their own views of morality whether right or wrong.

In recent times “the president of the Yale University in a meeting of university professor and educators. He said that we need a new renaissance of education and morality in American colleges. You would think he would have been applauded. But he was booed! They hissed. They asked ‘Whose morality, professor, are you going to impose upon them?” He couldn’t answer the question (Dr. Kennedy, page 482). His ideas might have been the most perfect ideas in the world. It did not matter because no matter how perfect his moral is the human heart is just so full of its own evil. It will not listen to reasoning because it does not care for reasoning based upon their own moral reasoning.

So what if he got a chance to speak would anyone have listened? No one cares what anyone or any group claims is moral. “Charles Darwin knew this. He said it was a horrid thought to realize that all of his speech may have no more significance or meaning than the babbling of a monkey. He said, ‘Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” (Dr. Kennedy, page 506).

It is a hard pill to swallow to admit only God is righteous enough, powerful enough, efficient enough, knowledgeable enough, loving enough and so on to sustain a moral code. God even offers this moral code yet again to those who have broken it with a renewing of his mercies.

Born in sin

So if God is so great why is not everyone just following Him? The heart being born in sin wants to refuse the law for himself and have the laws imposed on others. It is where hypocrisy and double standards arise. I mean having the mental capacity to measure fairness and justice while having fleshly overruling savagery sins.

“Huxley was the most prestigious evolutionary scientist in the world at the time. The interviewer asked him, “Why do you think that evolution caught on so quickly?” Huxley began, “We all jumped at The Origin [The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin] because . . .” Now if you ask a high school science class to finish that sentence, what do you think the students would say? They would say, “The reason we jumped at The Origin of Species was that the evidence amassed by Darwin was so intellectually compelling that scientific integrity required that we accept it as fact.” That is not what Huxley said. Rather, I heard him say, “[ I suppose the reason] we all jumped at The Origin [was] because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” I almost fell out of my chair! What does that have to do with science? (Dr. Kennedy, page 692).

It seems like the same problem all over again with no one caring about absolute morality when they care too much for their own morality. This time it is different when we peak behind the veil. God makes a promise to those who seek Him diligently in Ezekiel. Ezekiel 36:26-28 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

Change

Before we go any further we must consider historical ways people have tried to impose change in the human heart. I know not all have tried “brute” force or “reasoning”. I must admit some have tried changing the environment to help people flourish into their best selves with the hope of fostering perfect peaceful moral.

Many people have been convinced the heart can be changed apart from divine intervention with environmental remodeling. The communists thought they were going to create the “new communist man” without religion. Karl Marx the intellectual founder of communism found his ideas to be the key to solve the mankind’s predicament proclaiming this as the “true solution”. It is no wonder they prohibited ministers from preaching heaven when they had ushered it in prenatally. He thought man was pretty good inside just corrupted by his environmental structures. I have read some books on communism the dream does not pan out.

The communist plan instead of thriving the fruit of good people had made room for a greater evil as “Marxism did produce a new Communist man—a man so cruel that he could commit the most barbaric crimes against his fellow human beings without the slightest qualms of conscience. When we become aware of what took place in the ghastly labor camps, or gulags, we can understand the nature of the new Communist man, perhaps the cruelest man the world has ever seen” (Dr. Kenny, page 811).

“An example of Communist torture occurred just within the last few years. Two Christian women were being punished by the Chinese authorities for the “crime” of being a part of the unregistered house church movement. They were stripped naked, hung up by their thumbs with wires, and beaten unconscious with cattle prods. The system Marx helped create—based on a false paradigm, which was itself based on a false picture of man’s true nature—has probably caused more evil than any system known to man” (Dr. Kennedy, page 821).

In the West “we are told, the new man will be fashioned by psychology and psychiatry. Before you become too excited about that possibility, remember that of all of the professions in America, the highest level of suicide is found in psychiatrists. So if you are contemplating such an act, I don’t recommend that you go see one. He might decide to hold your hand and jump first” (Dr. Kennedy, page 854). I have run into some issues with psychologists lately as I have been told by numerous friends their psychologists think they are beyond help. I almost think that should be illegal to tell a patient because these vulnerable people will remember this every time they reach another low. I can see how a self-fulfilling prophesy could take into effect.

Testimonies

The bible has changed many lives for the better helping people turn a new leaf. It is because being born again is gives a person a new heart and spirit with new desires. God promises to give people a new heart so is there any evidence of this change?

The same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead still has the power to change a person to this day. “No unbeliever could tell me why His words are as charged with power today as they were nineteen hundred years ago. Nor could scoffers explain how those pierced hands pulled human monsters with gnarled souls out of a hell of iniquity and overnight transformed them into steadfast, glorious heroes [of the cross]” (Dr. Kennedy, page 936).

Kwai

There is a movie called “The bridge over the River Kwai” based on the book called “Through the Valley of Kwai”. The author of the book had spoken to the chaplain man of Princeton University who had been part of British forces. He was the very man that had written “The bridge over the River of Kwai”. “He told [him], heartbrokenly, what Hollywood had done to the truth. Here is the real story of the bridge over the River Kwai. The captives had been reduced to savagery. They were starving. They were snapping for every crust of bread like animals. And then the British commander discovered in one of their backpacks a New Testament. He began to read it. As he read it, the wonder of the love of Christ began to fill his soul, and he surrendered his life to the Savior and called on Him for His grace and help. He was transformed. He began to read that New Testament to his men each day. One after another became transformed until virtually the entire camp was transformed by the gospel of Christ. These animal-like men began to save their crusts of bread to give to those who were weaker and sicker than they were” (Dr Kennedy, page 897).

Joad

It is often easy to believe mankind is mostly good when one is living safely in a first world country founded on Christian foundations (which is further elaborated in later chapters). “C. E. M. Joad was one of the great philosophers of England in this century. He was a brilliant intellect and a militant unbeliever. [...] Earlier he had thought that man was basically good and that, given the right conditions, we could create heaven on earth. But two devastating world wars and the threat of another one brought home to him the reality that man is sinful. The only solution to man’s sin, concluded this former skeptic, is the cross of Jesus Christ” (Dr. Kennedy, page 957).

David wood

Note: the pages may not be exact though they are within the range of the found text. It is harder to tell on the kindle app if it is the exact page number.

[dogopower]

Satan, Prince of This World

Satanism revived under the influence of Nietzche’s teachings. The Councils of Cologne 1536 and 1550 reveal that members of the clergy had defected from their belief in God and were teaching and practicing Satanism. Those who comprised the membership of these councils ordered such clergy to be excommunicated.

In 1583 the Council of Rheims excommunicated sorcerers: “who make a pact with the devil; who pervert sexual relations; who practice deviltries, and pretend to heal through the powers of Satan.”

From 1580 to 1620 the disciplinary and dogmatic assemblies of the Protestant religion often discussed the question of Sorcery and Satanism, both as it was being practiced individually and in general.

But to get back to Weishaupt and his writings, and to prove that he had defected from Christianity and embraced Satanism when he revised the “Protocols.” He finished this task in 1776. He announced this to the Illuminati May 1st. This is the real reason why May 1st of every year since has been celebrated by revolutionary organizations, and even labour organizations, without the vast majority of the membership even suspecting the truth. This is why May 1, 1776 is printed on American one dollar bills under the great pyramid. On top of the pyramid is the all-seeing eye of the Illuminati.

Weishaupt established the Lodges of the Grand Orient to be located in the principal cities of Europe, and to be the headquarters of the Illuminati which he reorganized to put the revised and modernized version of the Luciferian conspiracy into effect. The members of the Illuminati were at first restricted to about 2,000. They were men who, because they possessed exceptional mental abilities, had advanced to the top of their particular fields of human endeavour. They were financiers, such as the Rothschilds and their affiliated international financiers; they were scientists, such as Scheel; and educationists and encyclopedists such as Voltaire. Those who comprised the Synagogue of Satan all assumed nicknames to hide their identify. The term “nick-name” was first used to indicate a man who took, assumed, or was given another name to conceal the fact that he had become a worshiper of the Devil who is often referred to as “Old Nick.”

We don’t want to labour this point. It is sufficient to say that the men chosen to become adepts in Satanism were members of the Illuminati, who, by their lives, words, and deeds, proved they had defected from God. Some were avowed atheists. But the majority willingly accepted “Totalitarianism’ (the Luciferian ideology) as presented to them by Weishaupt, as their creed. Only a fool can be a convinced atheist. Only a fool can believe that the Universe, and all it includes, just happened. Even evolutionists with brains admit that evolution could be part of God’s plan of creation under which creatures can develop into a higher plane or deteriorate to a lower plane.

The Illuminati have one thing in common; they agreed that those who use their brains to win success in this world have the “RIGHT” to rule others with less brains on the grounds that the Goyim (the masses or common people) just don’t know what is good (best) for them. As Voltaire stated so clearly in a letter he wrote to a fellow Illuminist, in order to lead the mob out of their present oppression into a new subjection, those who directed the conspiracy must order those they control to lie, “not timidly, or for a while only, but like the very devil, boldly and always..” Voltaire is also on record as having advised those Illuminists, with which he was associated, that they should use high sounding phrases when addressing the Goyim, and make them lavish promises. He added, “the opposite of what is said and promised can be done afterwards ... that is of no consequence.”

The Goyim were encouraged to destroy established government and religions in order to establish democracies. Democracies were defined (deceptively) as being government, and religion, of the people, by the people, for the people.

Thus the vast majority understand the word democracy even today. In actual fact the word “democracy” means demoniacal or mob-rule. Those who direct the Luciferian conspiracy, AT THE TOP, use the “mob” to do the fighting and destroy their governments and religions, then they subjugate the mob.

As far as the High Priests of the Luciferian Creed are concerned, it doesn’t matter if Americans and British destroy the governments of other countries as long as the citizens of other countries ultimately destroy the governments of Britain and the U.S.A. by wars and revolutions. According to the Luciferian principle wars always lead to revolutions. That is why Communist leaders adopted the Luciferian slogan; “Revolution to end all wars.” The Luciferian policy is: Wars to weaken governments; revolutions to complete their destruction.

After every revolution, revolutionary leaders tell their followers it is necessary to establish a “Proletarian dictatorship” in order to restore law and order. Then in due time will come the Socialist Republic. That is another lie. The so-called proletarian dictatorship is ALWAYS turned into an absolute dictatorship. When Lenin was asked “How long will it be before your absolute dictatorship gives way to a Soviet (workers) government?” He replied, “That is a question I cannot answer, Who knows how long it will be before the workers, ‘Goyim learn enough to be able to govern themselves efficiently? Unfortunately the ‘Mob’ don’t know what is best for themselves.” “Mob” is Communist jargon; “Goyim” is Luciferian. There is really no difference. All lesser beings are considered “Human Cattle.”

In order that the Illuminati could obtain control of the Goyim and make them fight wars and revolutions to further the secret plans of those who direct the Luciferian conspiracy, AT THE TOP, Karl Marx was instructed to write the books Das Capital and the Communist Manifesto. He advocated atheism. Weishaupt and Pike and

[1921designs]

A Message to the Twenty-First Century

FROM The New York Review of Books

On November 25, 1994, Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of

Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo,” as he called it in a letter to a friend, for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf. Twenty years later, on October 23, 2014, The New York Review of Books printed Berlin’s remarks for the first time. For more on Isaiah Berlin, please see the Contributors’ Notes.

“IT WAS THE best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.

I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the king of France.

He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German antiEnlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.

Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.

The root conviction which underlies this is that the central questions of human life, individual or social, have one true answer which can be discovered. It can and must be implemented, and those who have found it are the leaders whose word is law. The idea that to all genuine questions there can be only one true answer is a very old philosophical notion. The great Athenian philosophers, Jews and Christians, the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Paris of Louis XIV, the French radical reformers of the eighteenth century, the revolutionaries of the nineteenth—however much they differed about what the answer was or how to discover it (and bloody wars were fought over this)—were all convinced that they knew the answer, and that only human vice and stupidity could obstruct its realization.

This is the idea of which I spoke, and what I wish to tell you is that it is false. Not only because the solutions given by different schools of social thought differ, and none can be demonstrated by rational methods—but for an even deeper reason. The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep. Perfect equality means that human liberties must be restrained so that the ablest and the most gifted are not permitted to advance beyond those who would inevitably lose if there were competition. Security, and indeed freedoms, cannot be preserved if freedom to subvert them is permitted. Indeed, not everyone seeks security or peace, otherwise some would not have sought glory in battle or in dangerous sports.

Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation. Knowledge, the pursuit of truth—the noblest of aims—cannot be fully reconciled with the happiness or the freedom that men desire, for even if I know that I have some incurable disease this will not make me happier or freer. I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on.

So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future?

I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

So we must weigh and measure, bargain, compromise, and prevent the crushing of one form of life by its rivals. I know only too well that this is not a flag under which idealistic and enthusiastic young men and women may wish to march—it seems too tame, too reasonable, too bourgeois, it does not engage the generous emotions. But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity,

a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelet is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelet and just go on breaking eggs.

I am glad to note that toward the end of my long life some realization of this is beginning to dawn. Rationality, tolerance, rare enough in human history, are not despised. Liberal democracy, despite everything, despite the greatest modern scourge of fanatical, fundamentalist nationalism, is spreading. Great tyrannies are in ruins, or will be—even in China the day is not too distant. I am glad that you to whom I speak will see the twenty-first century, which I feel sure can be only a better time for mankind than my terrible century has been. I congratulate you on your good fortune; I regret that I shall not see this brighter future, which I am convinced is coming. With all the gloom that I have been spreading, I am glad to end on an optimistic note. There really are good reasons to think that it is justified.

[eldritchsurveys]

1031.

5k Survey LXXV

3826. Why do most people associate being spiritual or connected to the world as being a hippy? >> Okay, so the first 25 questions in this section were all specifically about LOTR The Two Towers, for some reason? I’m not interested so I just skipped them entirely and am smushing the remaining 25 questions in this part into the other 50. Whatever. Anyway, because that’s the stereotype they’ve internalised, idk. Looking down on non-materialistic worldviews is a common modern pastime in the Western world, just in general. (Not that being a hippie is inherently a negative or stupid thing to be, but that’s definitely the sort of context this stereotype is going for.)

3827. Why is passion and honest emotion equated with hallmark cards? >> I feel like my answer to this would just be similar to my answer to the previous question. These ideas don’t necessarily have the same root, but they’re definitely related. 3828. What words set off alarms in your brain (for me it's anarchy, pagan, etc)? >> *blinks* Certainly not those words. Usually it’s words like, idk, “American values” and “lizard people”... 3829. Are you dancin in the dark? >> No. 3830. Name 2 things you have never done in public: >> I’ve never done the Charleston or the Riverdance in public.

3831. If you had to choose out of what you just named, which one WOULD you do in public? >> I don’t even know how to do those dances, which is part of the reason why I’ve never done them in public. 3832. Challenge yourself. Do whatever it is in public. Why not? What are you so terrified of? >> ... 3832. Is hell REALLY other people? >> The actual context of that quote is so much more interesting than seeing people using it as some kind of antisocial mantra. 3833. Or would it be more hellish to live totally without other people? >> We’re all aware that humans are social creatures, correct? Just making sure. 3834. Leggos or linkin logs? >> I had Lincoln Logs as a kid but not LEGO. 3835. What books have you read more than once? >> I’ve read The Fountainhead three times. 3836. Do you get different things out of reading a book a second time a year or more after reading it the first time? Is it because you are a different person after time passes? >> Yeah, I do, and yes, that’s why -- but first I have to convince myself to read a book more than once. My to-read list is so long all the time and then I learn about yet another interesting-sounding book and jump on that and the cycle never ends... it feels like a waste of time to go back and read books I’ve already read. Even though I know that’s not a logical way to think at all. 3837. The person who goes to ____ is not the same person who comes back. Fill in the blank with anything you think fits. >> Whatever. 3838. Quick! Empty your brain here! >> ... 3839. What's the best movie soundtrack? >> I’m partial to Clint Mansell soundtracks, personally. 3840. Tissues with or without aloe? >> I rarely even use tissues, but when I do, I’m not terribly precious about what kind they are. I just use whatever Sparrow bought. 3841. Are you on any medication? >> No. 3842. Does any part of your own body disgust you? If yes, isn't that odd? What could have caused that feeling of disgust with your own body? >> Having a body disgusts me, overall. Yeah, I’m not fond of the relationship I have with my body either, but it’d be one hell of an uphill battle to reprogram my brain to not think I’m gross. I’m doing my best, all right. 3843. Want some popcorn? >> No. 3844. What if Atlas shrugged? >> I imagine he’d do it in far less time than it takes to read that book. 3845. Who has led the most interesting life? >> ... 3846. What movies are comming out next year that you are looking forward to? >> Ha, what movies are coming out next year... that’s the question, innit. 3847. If someone is half man and half dog is he his own best friend? >> --- 3848. Paper or plastic? >> I usually get plastic bags. 3849. Why did things make sense in childhood, but they don't now? >> What things? 3850. Is it crazy time? >> --- 3851. If there is a lotto with 50 numbers, and a player picks 6 numbers without repeating any, what are their chances of getting all 6 winning numbers? >> I don’t know, dude.

3852. If there were no laws and no rules name 3 things you would do that you don't/wouldn't/can't do now? >> --- 3853. It's a costume party. What will your costume be if the theme is: the 70's? 80's? under the sea? 3854. Have you ever wanted to release the lobsters from those tanks in restraunts and put them back in the sea? >> Nope. 3855. How funky is your chicken? How loose is your goose? >> --- 3856. What's your favorite animal out of these: emu, otter, duck billed platypus, moose, skunk? >> Otter. 3857. priest, rabbi, or other religios leader, a judge, or a sea captain to perform your wedding? >> We had a nondenominational minister for ours. I’m sure we would have rather have gone with someone who wasn’t any flavour of Christian, but going through the French Quarter Wedding Chapel kind of was a path of least resistance. It’s hard to plan a wedding from a completely different part of the country than the place it’s being held, and the Chapel did a lot of the legwork for us. 3858. Do you think that it's okay for people to write their own wedding vows? >> What on earth would possess me to think otherwise? 3859. Rank these as places to be married. 1 = best. Your House or Yard The Beach A Park Disneyland A Forest A Catering Hall Las Vegas A church or temple A Courthouse On a Boat On a Space Station 3860. The Earth is doomed. A giant asteroid is headed our way. It will decimate the planet in 3.2 days. You and your family own a space pod and you have room for 7 people from the list below. Everyone else dies. Who do you pick? Orlando Bloom, Justin Timberlake, Joan Jett, John Denver Baby Eve (the first human clone), Jennifer Lopez, Johnny Depp, George W Bush, David Bowie, Charleton Heston, Ralph Nader, Moby, Jeff Bridges, Kelly Osbourne, Frank Zappa, Bill Clinton, Britney Spears, Osama Bin Laden The Pope, Eminem, Madonna >> *longsuffering sigh* 3861. Rank the following dead people in order of who you would like to spend the day with. 1 = you'd like to hang out with them the most. Joan of Arc Groucho Marx John Lennon Joey Ramone Anton Levay Tupac Jack Kerouac Aaliyah John F Kennedy Lucielle Ball Jim Morrison 3862. If you could grant immortality to one person you know (can't be yourself) who would you give it to? >> I don’t want to grant immortality to anyone. 3863. If you could grant immortality to one person who you do not know personally but know of (writer, politician, etc) who would you give it to? >> --- 3864. Name a person you love: Name a person you admire: Name a friend: Name a relative: If you had to condemn one of them to death to save the lives of the others who would it be and why? >> Just... not even going to touch this one. 3865. Would you rather be one of Santa's elves or a dentist? >> What... 3866. When you first meet people what do you talk to them about? >> There’s no one specific thing that I talk to people about... it’s obviously dependent on many factors (at least one of them having nothing to do with me). 3867. You have been invited to a party with any sports team in the world. Which one? >> No. 3868. Finish the sentances. In a world where: He was: She was: Together, they were: Why do so many movie trailers start off by saying 'In a world..'? >> I had a feeling this was about movie trailers, lol. I’m guessing it’s just convenient or something. (Also, that doesn’t happen much anymore. There’s a new set of trailer tropes now.) 3869. Make up a superhero with really unhelpful powers: >> --- 3870. A couple of days ago this guy won 14 million dollars and tried to donate 1 million to the salvation army. The salvation army turned the money down saying they didn't want dirty gambling money. Did they do the right thing? >> They did what was right from their point of view, which is a dogmatic conservative-Christian POV. 3871. If you had a spare million for charity work who would you donate it to? >> --- 3872. What's the craziest most shocking moment of rock and roll history that you can think of? >> --- 3873. Why is it that if a man kills another man in battle it's called heroic, but if he kills a man in the heat of passion, it's called murder? >> Perspective. 3874. What kind of punishment do you feel the following crimes deserve: premeditated murder? date rape? drug sales? drug use? burglery? 3875. If you could kiss anyone in the world on midnight at new year's eve, who would be the lucky one? >> ... 3876. You have just taken two sexy people prisoner because they found your hide out and you think they are spies. What do youd do: kill them, hump them or have crumpets and tea? >> What the fuck. 3877. What is your new year's resolution? >> --- 3878. Should the U.S. focus more on the threat from N. Korea or Iraq? >> --- 3879. Would you ever have plastic surgery? >> I don’t know, maybe. Mostly I just can’t afford shit like that, so the answer’s “no” by virtue of that alone. 3880. How can George Bush be considered a Christian when he a war-monger and the ten comandments say do not kill? >> Oh, you know. 3881. What is the most interesting premise for a reality tv show that you can think of? >> --- 3882. Who is the Hollywood Star next to die of a drug overdose? >> --- 3883. Do you find yourself caring a lot about online people, even if you haven't met or spoken to them off of the computer? >> Not... like, as a rule... 3884. When you hear the song puff the magic dragon what do you think? >> Weed, I guess. I don’t have any other associations with that song. 3885. Let's give you a tarot reading. Go on, ask any question: first card: the reversed high preistess. you may be expecting things to come too easily. You should be careful not to give up if they dont go your way. You're feeling a desire to escape, to withdraw into yourself. Shrug off your current lack of focus and work diligently to acheive the goals you want. second card: the reversed hanged man. You shouldnt be close-minded with your situation. There are many alternatives and possible solutions to your problems. Try something new. The last card: Justice. what goes around comes around. Seek advice on the matters at hand from elders. Do healthy things, spiritually and physically. 3886. What does 'boo' mean and how did it become a slang word of affection? >> www.dictionary.com 3887. How often do you stretch? >> Whenever I feel like it. I don’t schedule it or anything. 3888. Have you ever wished that you didn't have to be yourself? >> Yep. 3889. Would you rather wear shoes full of earthworms or a hat full of spiders? >> --- 3890. What are some things that for most people go unsaid? >> Bold of me to assume I know what most people are not saying out loud. Pretty sure mind-reading ain’t a thing. 3891. I said, 'Play me the best song in the world.' You put on: >> --- 3892. What happened last year that you would like to forget? >> --- 3893. What are you not able to do alone? >> Operate a seesaw. 3894. Do you feel more connected to earth air fire or water and why? >> Air, because I have a lot of it in my birth chart, I guess. Also, I just like space. (Both in the sense of “having physical space around me” and “outer space where all the stars and shit are”, although the latter isn’t air per se.) 3895. Which two words belong together and why: life, seawater, chocolate, blood, hair piece >> Depends on what you’re trying to reference, I guess. I can go with “life and chocolate” (obvious movie reference) or “blood and chocolate” (less obvious YA book/movie reference). 3896. If con is the opposite of pro, what's the opposite of progress? >> Yeah, we all know this joke. 3897. Have you ever wanted to meet the inspectors with the numbers for names(i.e. inspected by 36)? >> What? 3898. Who is the most thought-provoking person you know, &why? >> Me. I stay thinkin about myself.  3899. If you could change 1 thing you did in the last 24 hours, what would it be & why? >> Meh, nothing. 3900. What is the most bizarre thing you've ever done? >> I’m not sure.