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socialistsephardi · 3 years

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The Political History of Zionism

With everything currently going on, I’ve decided to make this post detailing the different streams of Zionism, in order to deconstruct rhetoric surrounding Zionism. I do this to aid arguments against Hasbara, which often claims that Zionism is unified and simple.

To begin, Political Zionism is generally considered to start with the writings of Theodor Herzl, in the 19th century political climate of Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to this, numerous pre-zionist movements were competing among the Jews of europe following an event called the Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightment”. The French Revolution caused France to become the first european nation to recognize Jews as citizens with rights, which would be followed by Britain and Germany. This allowed for the formation of a new secular Jewish middle class enthrawled by enlightment principles - mainly, rationalism, romanticism, and nationalism. However, this also generated a shift from religious persecution towards ‘racial’ antisemitism. As the Jews of various countries were subjected to either intense expectations of assimilation, or reoccuring waves of pogroms, it became clear that most of europe regarded these emancipated Jews as foreign nationals of alien religion and culturally compatible. The proto-Zionists begin building a consensus pushing for immigration to Ottoman Palestine, some seeking to provide an alternative to the pogroms, some believing themselves witness to the signs of an imment messiah, etc. Moshe Hess, an associate of Karl Marx, calls for Jews to create a socialist state in Palestine (more on Hess later). Waves of European Jews arrive, and organizations aiming to support Jewish farmers and artisans in Palestine and Syria are founded. The local authorities begin to differentiate between the immigrant Jews and the Jews from the local communities. Herzl enters the Jewish public consciousness with his writings calling specifically for the creation of a Jewish majority state. appealing to the British and French empires to aid them. He rejects Hess’s socialist proposal and instead proposes a reconstruction of Jewry altogether, rejecting the diaspora entirely, arguing that only separation could ensure Jewish survival. Herzl proposes establishing this state in Argentina, but concludes that Palestine would likely have more ideological appeal. I feel it crucial to note here that in his early writings, Herzl is hostile to religious Jews, claims that the Jews of the Ghettos and Shtetls hold back the intellectual, and calls the Sephardi Jews living under France in Algeria mixed blood barbarians. These attitudes would carry over into the political zietgiest of early Zionism.

From here, Zionism begins to grow, the call for simple immigration to the land is supplanted by a demand for a Jewish majority state, and competing schools of thought emerge. The World Zionist Organization is created, and the Zionists pivot attempt including the consent of the Ottomans in the project. Herzl here also begins to explicitly call for the colonization of Palestine, in line with his admiration for the french and british empires. The first major split within the Zionist movement comes with the formation of Labor Zionism based on Hess’s writings. Wheras Herzl’s camp depended on gaining support from the empires and from prominent Jewish figures, Labor Zionism argued that only the Jewish working class could create such a nation, and sought to emphasize a progressive Jewish identity. This is also where a re-alignment for the religious backing begins. Originally, orthodox Jews are in an uneasy alliance with the entirely secular Jews in the movement, mostly because despite his early writings, Herzl emphasized a need to manufacture support from orthodox rabbis and communities. With Herzl eventual death, the orthodox separate from the mainstream movement, citing the believe that only the Messiah can reassert Jewish control over the land. Reform Jews at this time also reject Zionism, as it is perceived as a threat to Jewish citizenship in Europe and America. The Reform rejected the notion that Jews were bound by a shared nationality, a position which held true until the holocaust.

Over the next few decades, various zionist groups in palestine compete for power. Many begin attacking the Muslim and Christian Palestinian communities, often forcibly separating the local Jewry in the process. Jewish terrorist groups launch attacks on British centers following WW1. Labor Zionists rejected traditional Jewish practice, arguing that these represented a diaspora mentality. They also set up the early Kibbitzim. Jabotinsky develops a trend known as Revisionist Zionism, with the aim of territorial maximalism. Revisionist Zionism becomes ingrained as the right wing faction, and eventually becoming the ideological foundation of the current Likud party. Jabotinsky admired and borrowed core concepts from Mussolini and fascism, in particular the centrality of the state, social conservative unity, and racial supremacy. Mussolini knew of this and told the founder of the World Jewish Congress “For Zionism to succeed, you need to have a Jewish State with a Jewish flag, and Jewish language. The person who understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky". The revisionists during this time approved of the idea of building a Mediterranean alliance and opposing British influence. In 1939, Stern forms Lehi, and they oppose Britain in WW2, instead arguing that Jews must align with the Axis, eventually going so far as to claim that if they were to take control of the mandate, they would negotiate with Hitler to see the Jews in the camps transfered in as new citizens, and in exchange join the German sphere.

Following WW2, the Nakba occurs, and the Haganah (including groups like Lehi) is reorganized into the IDF. The liberal/general Zionists are now faced with oppozing interal forces such as the labor Zionists and the revisionists. They now turn to emphasis liberalism in the new state, mostly the democratic electoral system and the free market, but largely become a backdrop to the rest of the political movements, which turn themselves into party affiliation, since the basic liberal structure had already been established. The labor Zionists become the dominant trend in Israeli politics until the 70′s. Following the Six Day Way in 67, Israel seizes control of the rest of the land from the mandate. This sets off a new movement. Previously, Religious Zionism was a minor stream mostly simply meaning religious Jews who supported Zionism. From here on, however, it becomes dominated by a right wing religious trend and becomes NeoZionism. NeoZionists combined religious and nationalist elements, specifically advocated settlements beyond the green line, and often advocate the removal of Arab people, citing Arab Israelis as a potential 5th column. Neozionists believe that the secularism of other zionist branches is a significant weak point, and usually incorporate far right orthodox talking points. Groups such as the Hebron settlers are highly influenced by Neozionism. Neozionists are also usually behind the call to establish an entirely orthodox state in the west bank if Israel were to pull out. On the opposite end, there are the post-Zionists, who believe Zionism has fulfilled its goal. Post-Zionists are not really coordiated in the same way others on this list are, but generally they are critical of the direction israel has moved, they typically seek to try to make Jews safer in the diaspora, generally support Arab Israelis and some post-zionists believe in transforming the state into an entirely liberal-democratic one. Right wing Israelis also use “post zionist“ to refer to the Israeli left after the Oslo Accords in the mid 90′s.

Finally, I’d like to take note of Kahanism. Kahanism is an extremist ideology based on the work of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and materialized as the Kach party in Israel, a party which was boycotted by every other faction the single time they were elected to the Knesset, and is now banned and labeled a terrorist organization. Kahanists believe that every single Jew should live in Israel, and that only Jews should live in Israel. They advocate for Israel to enforce traditional Jewish law at the national scale, and together with Neozionists have engaged in actions to provoke fear in diaspora communities. Kahanists believe that all Arab people are the mortal enemy of all Jews and that Israel should seize land from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Kahane himself proposed laws, including banning intermarriage, banning cultural meetings between Jewish and Muslim students, and re-segregating areas that had already undergone desegregation.

So that is a compressed history of the trends within Zionism. I write this not to garner sympathy for Zionism, but in hopes that this helps pick apart hasbarist simplification. At best, Zionism produced a labor movement with a terribly racist history which stole yemenite Jewish children and encouraged discrimination and segregation against sephardi and mizrachi Jews within Israel from a secular ashkenazi ‘core‘. At worst, fundamentalists and militant zealots who are overwhelmingly hostile to anyone else, groups who align with historic and current fascist and nazi movements, and a massive, overwhelming history of abuse and human rights violations against Palestinians, other Arabs, Jews of color, diaspora movements, etc. If you needed any reason beyond the sheer weight of the Palestinian cause to oppose Zionism, here you go. I hope this sways the mind of any lingering ZIonists reading this, and I hope this is used to more effectively call out Zionism for what it is - a racist, imperialist, and fascist ideology hellbent on redefining Judaism for its aims against any act of solidarity between groups, completely fueled by western interests in carving up and controlling West Asia / the middle east/ Al-Mashriq.

#zionism #antizionism #palestine #jumblr #judaism #israel

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architectuul · 4 years

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Let's Build Pyramids: Why to Destroy Cities and Capitalism!

“We must fill our eyes and ears with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must feel that wish. We must stretch the corners of the soul like a sheet.” — from Domenico’s speech, Nostalghia

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For a series of different reasons, Andrej Tarkovski’s Nostalghia seems very actual as it portrays the image of the cities during these days of lockdown. In the most emblematic scene of the film, Domenico, the old madmen who enclosed his family at home for seven years attending the end of the world, gives a public speech from the top of the Equestrian Statues of Marco Aurelio in the Campidoglio square in Rome. Listening to him are a very few groups of mad, foolish and ordinary people standing on the different monumental stairs of Michelangelo’s piazza. In the scene, actors are symmetrically positioned on a precise and identical large-distance from one another echoing, in some rhetorical but also poetical terms, a sort of future scenario on how we’ll have to imagine one of the most crowded spaces in Rome and elsewhere if social distancing becomes a new way of living.

Apart from the poetics of social distancing and its anticipation, what emerges from Tarkovski’s film is also a different perception of space and time opposed to our everyday-life habits: namely when Gorchakov, the protagonist, steps in his large hotel room, where it is shown only the bed and the sink, when he meets Eugenia in the hotel hall and when he visits the thermal bath of Bagno Vignoni. In two hours of film, all these few passages and dialogs are shown very slowly, slow shootings with only a few actors, offering a sort of dilated space, which again recalls how cities and metropolis have been spatially transformed from when silence and emptiness reigns supreme since Covid-19 spread globally. In these days, which seems that will last for a long time, seen from the point of view of domestic segregation (mediatically called quarantine), comes clear on how much we are used to and educated to live in cities and how we suffer it now. We all work in offices, study in schools and universities, consume in supermarkets and shops and do travel for all these reasons abroad, away from home, which we use only as a sleeping-place when we turn back from outside by car, tram or bus.

Assuming all these activities and rituals as fundamental aspects for reproducing life, while thinking also to the urban form of contemporary towns, historical centers, metropolis and megalopolis, it clearly emerges that the very reason behind these common rituals are mobility and circulation. As we all can observe, without working infrastructures, without metros, tram-lines, car roads and highways, cities would have no sense. I thus argue that this is related to a contemporary crisis of space, which is a very tangible condition in actual problematics such as climate change, pandemic crisis, scarcity of land in cities as also in the countryside, as well as the property issue and housing shortage, the problem of minimum dwellings and high rents, conditions that are strongly related to the existence of the city and its urban form.

Wuhan: No One Cares

Who did theorize well the dialectic between circulation and the crisis of space was Karl Marx. In his Grundrisse Notebooks, Marx argues that within the circulation process, which is part of the whole process of production, Capital through the concept of time destroys the concept of space itself: “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus, the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time– becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.” [1] The circulation process, namely the process of exchange of goods, labor force, money and capitals, is the process where products are transformed into goods and this takes place within the so-called global market.

As Marx put it out, in order to surpass any barrier, the production of cheap means of communication and transportation is fundamental to capital, that is why their realization is promoted by capital itself: “The sea route, as the route which moves and is transformed under its own impetus, is that of trading peoples ϰατ᾽ ἐξοχήν [pur excellence]. On the other side, highways originally fall to the community, later for a long period to the governments, as pure deductions from production, deducted from the common surplus product of the country, but do not constitute a source of its wealth, i.e. do not cover their production costs.” [2] To say it in more simplistic words, it is capital alone or through the intervention of the State that needs to build streets and communication routes connecting cities (market centers) through the territory, and doing so as quick as possible.

As we think to the form of the city since its origins, as highlighted by Henry Heller in his book The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective, the urban fabric of the medieval town was a fundamental apparatus in accelerating the passage from feudalism to capitalism. Collecting different arguments of historians and researchers on feudalism, Heller tries to explain the role of the formation of towns in a passage that coincided with the rise of the town both as a marketplace and as a terrain of class struggles.

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From the contemporary point of view of its most sophisticated form that is financial capitalism, David Harvey have always asserted that this aspect of accumulation and exchange is embodied in the ideology of the political agendas of growth. As highlighted by Harvey in one his lecture at Harvard Senior Loeb Scholar, after the 2008 crisis, while the UE promoted austerity policies, on the contrary, countries like Brazil or China pointed towards extreme growth (and urbanization) implementing large investments in order to increase employments and escape from economic depression. Examples like the Chinese project launched in 2013 to merge together Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei into a megalopolis of 130 million people called Jing-Jin-Ji, demonstrates not a mere imperialistic geo-strategic plan, but it also reconfigures the logic of financial capital applied to an archetype which does exists as capitalism does too: the city. In such a context, criticizing the city means contemporarily criticizing capitalism and its logics of production and reproduction. For this reason, through the history of architecture and urbanism the unbearable aura of capitalism and its logics has produced many alternatives by proposing models that served as attempts to escape from, to govern and to destroy it.

University of North Carolina Campus (1860). | Source: Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition

Escape was one of the main reasons behind the invention and ethos of campus planning in the USA in late 1700s. When university and education in the United States became a political project, for many campus planners the only way to make education efficacious was to build them far away from the city, in order to avoid its corruption, distractions, profligacy and chaos. The word campus, coming from Latin campo that literally means an open field, according to Paul Venable Turner was first used at Princeton College in the 1770s referring to the property land of its first college building [3].

From then, putting a group of buildings within the idyllic nature enhanced an alternative to organize life differently. Eliphalet Not, president of Union College during 1804-66, became popular through college pioneers for having invented a way of living and a new governance based on family life principles. During Nott’s governance, each professor was responsible of his class and had to consider it as his enlarged own family. This model of less-control over students structured a new democratic life that corresponded also to the architectural form of the college designed by French architect and landscaper Joseph-Jacques Ramée: a rotunda at the center of the campus and symmetrical wings of dormitories and classes limiting a natural common space where students and professors could live and work together as members of a large family.

Union College, Schenectady (NY), Project and drawings by Joseph-Jacques Ramée (1813). | Source: Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition

Revisiting the same architectural and organizational model, the spread over the American territory of almost identical models such as Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia University, first projects for the Davidson College in North Carolina, plans for a National University near Washington and the Stanford University, echoed in certain ways Robert Owen’s parallelograms for a socialist utopia where mutual-cooperation based on living, working and centralized education could be organized within self-sufficient bodies spread over a farming landscape [8]. Everything but socialism, American university campuses however represented a dilated spatiality inhabited by students moving around in groups, social distanced or close to each other, and with buildings placed here-and-there into an open field full of trees, lakes, forests and idyllic green.

Ville Contemporaine. | Source Der Stadtstreicher

Fascinated by this same depiction of university campuses, yet operating through the same ideals of nature, but more perverse and decisive, Le Corbusier’s plans of Ville Contemporaine for three million inhabitants of 1922 and Plan Voisin of 1925, strongly opposing urbanism as we are all used to know it, can be considered as one of the most radical attempts to destroy the city and its historical aura.

Plan Voisin. | Source Charnel House

While in both the two proposals the Swiss architect insisted on demolishing an entire piece of historical Paris for erecting his prototypical settlement with towers and low-rise buildings into an enormous park, the very response to the logic of capitalism was his Industrial Linear City elaborated together with the CIAM-France group of the ASCORAL in 1942-43 [5]. In the latter, Le Corbusier imagined a series of territorial strips (with highways and railways) connecting European most important historical centers through horizontal and vertical territorial axis containing housing, productive buildings and free-standing agricultural settlements.

Diagram of the Industrial Linear City through Europe and fragment of the linear city connecting two historical centers (1942-43), Le Corbusier + ASCORAL. | Source Le Corbusier - Œuvre complète Volume 4: 1938-1946

In his vision he literally stretched the typical industrial city assuming the highway, that became a greenway, as its structural form: thus, historical centers in Le Corbusier’s vision were reduced into ordinary administrative bodies and exchange hubs—likely in the same way we intend Amazon distribution centers operating today—connected to each other by highways bordered with a green belt and rhythmed through factories and isolated Unité d’Habitations, horizontal garden-cities and facilities. The linear form assumed the infrastructure by explicating it in a new architecture dispositive for a new dilated city, the habitability of which could be imagined by thinking to the point of view of an adventure foreigner-guy traveling and sleeping in highway motels when stopping in filling stations.Though, rather than a real alternative to the capitalistic city, Le Corbusier’s linear city can be considered as a design diagram to control and govern accumulation and to give a specific form to the logic of growth against that neoliberalist laissez faire model that came after Le Corbusier era.

Detail of the Industrial Linear City (1942-43), Le Corbusier + ASCORAL. | Source: Le Corbusier - Œuvre complète Volume 4: 1938-1946

What Le Corbusier presented as a mere opposition, the disurbanization of the world imagined by the Italian collective Superstudio with their Continuous Monument, an enormous infinite white-grid element cannibalizing the city, to quote a very potent expression used by the Italian architectural historian Roberto Gargiani, collects all the frustration of an entire young generation emerging from the political struggles between 1968 and 1977 against industrial capitalism in Europe. While in the first collages of 1969-70 this imposing element cannibalizes the city in the sense that it really penetrates it by destroying emblematic landscapes such as Graz, Madrid, Rome, Florence and New York, in the latest collages of 1970-72 this immense monument could finally run through in full liberty: into world’s nature, canyons, deserts, valleys and rivers [6].

As Gargiani and Beatrice Lampariello have carefully narrated in their book Il Monumento Continuo di Superstudio, tracing its origins, infrastructure highways and viaducts were crucial references on the Superstudio research discourse by images as these infrastructures really addressed them on how to use one of the most emblematic inventions of capitalism for circulation in favor to a new spatial alternative. Inside the Continuous Monument, echoing Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace interior,—there have to be no rooms, no labor-division, no hierarchies, no typology and no program—just a free and pure envelope of nothingness. Rituals and forms of life had to take form in the same way urban communes and hippies did and, perhaps, life inside has to be governed in the same way the Italian autonomists were politically organized: through their same historical effort that helped to understand and made visible the inhabitability of the city.

Fragment of the Continuous Monument entitled Manhattan Empire State Building, Superstudio (1969-70)

It was nevertheless auspicabile that such critics emerged in times of gran abundance, on the apogee—to put it with Adam Smith terms—of the wealth of the nations. Although during modern and post-modern history of architecture there were many other examples going on the same direction, even more radical and polemic (i.e. soviet disurbanism linear aggregation of individual cells with episodic collective buildings is the most emblematic example towards the destruction of the capitalist city) [7], the three strategies analyzed above should tackle not a new projective aura, but, on the opposite, a ferocious critic to what have been done till now. The point is not to advance specific solutions but to raise questions and to address a hysterical reaction to everyday obviousness: Why are we at this point? Why streets and squares are there and we cannot reach them? Why did we all build them if, in a snap of fingers, they become inhabitable? Perhaps, because they have always been inhabitable—inhuman.

Fragment of the Continuous Monument On the River, Superstudio (1969-70)

Going back to Tarkovski’s message, the invitation to build Pyramids should be read not as a mere nostalghia of how we were living before the global lockdown. It should rather serve to think on an historical moment that is yet to come and could give the possibility to share that common anger that lays in our souls and spirits; to finally express it in the form of a common effort for destroying the command of capitalism and building marvelous pyramids for a new form of democracy.

- Marson Korbi

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[1], [2] Marx, K. (1073). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 442, 449.

[3] Venable Turner, P. (1984). Campus: An American Planning Tradition Cambridge, MIT Press, 47.

[4] Benevolo, L. (2005). Le origini dell’urbanistica moderna, Laterza.

[5] Le Corbusier, eds. Willy Boesiger, Oeuvre Complète (1991). Zurich: Les Editions D'Architecture, 72-75.

[6] Gargiani, R., Lampariello,B. (2019). Il Monumento Continuo di Superstudio. Eccesso del razionalismo e strategia del rifiuto, Genova: Sagep Editori.

[7] Aureli, P. A., Martino, T. (2018). The Forest and the Cell: Notes on Mosej Ginzburg's Green City. Harvard Design Magazine, no. 45.

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robert-c · 5 years

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Why Democrats Should Be in Power and Why They’re Not

The simplest answer is this: the Republican agenda represents and serves only a minority of the populace; the very rich and the very extreme religious right. So how do they manage to maintain so much control for so long? Because while a majority of the populace doesn’t agree with them a significant portion are more afraid of the Democrats.

Some of those fears are untrue and unreasonable but have taken hold after decades of lies promoting them that were not successfully countered. Some are fair concerns based on the fact that the Democratic party has always been a much more “open tent”, welcoming many diverse ideas. Those diverse ideas are important, they often challenge us to think ahead to the sorts of changes that we should be moving toward. At the same time they are often too far ahead of their time. Ideas like the 40 hour work week and time and a half for overtime, were considered extreme, called “socialist” or even “communist” when they were first proposed. The key is they weren’t implemented until the time was right.

Another reason people fear the Democratic party is that it is the party for change, for progress. In our individual lives change is upsetting and stressful, even if it is positive change we ourselves have chosen. In a society it is even more fearful. We also need to remember that in every situation, no matter how manifestly unjust or exploitive, some people are rich and powerful because of it. They definitely don’t want things to change and they will never be so honest as to say it is because they fear losing their wealth and power. They can come up with very persuasive tales. For example, the masses of poor, landless whites who fought for the Confederacy thought they were defending “State’s rights and a way of life”, not that they were defending a relatively few rich plantation owner’s “rights” to own slaves.

The mechanics of modern campaigns give entirely too much influence to the extremes. Here’s how and why. The extremists of any position are the people who let that idea consume their life. The vast majority of their time and/or money go to their “cause”. As such, they are terrific tools for a political party to use. In addition to being a source of volunteers they are also a funding source. But as the party relies more and more on their efforts they naturally want more say in the platform and the policy decisions of any administration or Congress that is elected with their help.

That alone would create an ever increasingly vitriolic partisan divide. One might argue that when there is a clear majority for one side or the other it would be resolved. But that ignores two basic truths about this division. The first is that the more extreme the positions, the more they try to paint themselves as morally superior, making compromise or acceptance of defeat more difficult. The second is that fear of change unifies any diversity of conservative opinions, and that fear always makes conservative positions appear the safest, while the forces for change are often fractured and diverse, and in truth the outcome of these changes is not always easy to predict. Thus extremes on the “right” tend to cluster closer together on their issues and agenda than the extremes on the “left”.

Following the “traditional” political advice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries the Democrats have catered to their extreme left flank. Except that it isn’t a unified flank, and incorporating all of its divergent pieces in the party’s main platform has scared away the significant group of “moderate” voters who don’t agree with the Republican’s extreme right wing agenda, but who think it will create less chaos than the combined ideas of the extreme left.

Historically there have mainly been two ways major social changes occur. In the first the forces resisting change remain very strong, creating an ever greater need for change until the forces for change put aside any differences and agree that getting rid of the status quo is the most important next step. Unfortunately this is usually a turbulent if not outright violent transition. The second way is for there to be a strong voice for change that is more peaceful and less extreme, a choice like that between a Dr. King and the Black Panthers. Of course a mix of these methods is what we often end up with, and that complicates our map forward.

This much seems clear – the forces that want to return America to some version of the 1950’s (institutionalized racism, sexism and all) are much better organized than they have ever been. They have been using their own version of the truth so long that now they feel confident in calling actual facts “fake” while continuing to offer no evidence for their outrageous claims. It is a lesson straight out of history. The Nazis were masters at the constant repetition of lies. Heard often enough, from enough apparently different sources, people inevitably believed that there must be at least a grain of truth in it. Given some of the Republicans most outspoken supporters I don’t think the Nazi reference is out of line.

All of this should lead us to a three conclusions: 1) we need to select a platform and candidates which appeal to those voters who oppose the core issues on which the Republicans stand, without incorporating our most extreme elements. 2) The most outspoken extreme elements need to understand that their ideas still have a place and discussion in the party, but moving them front and center risks making any progress toward them at all. 3) We need to find a mechanism for getting out the message and the vote that is less dependent on the resources (time and money) that have typically been provided by the most extreme supporters.

To the argument that our most committed (i.e. extreme) elements will just stay home and not vote I can only say that I fervently hope they are not that stupid. I can understand that they could be so caught up in their causes that they don’t expend extra energy to get out the message and the vote (that’s why there’s item three above). But failing to vote for a side that isn’t everything you want, while the other side is everything you don’t want seems colossally stupid. One must give the Republicans credit, they have kept their extreme elements at the voting booth, even while only going part of the way down their path under most administrations. Our supporters seem to think “likes” on social media, or even demonstrations count for something, even if there is no voting. Let’s be perfectly clear about this: It doesn’t matter how the majority of people feel, the government only responds to the feelings of those who vote.

Some lies get repeated so long that they seem to acquire an element of plausibility. Like Democrats just want to tax and spend. There is far more truth to the saying that Republicans only want to give tax breaks to the rich and leave the middle class and the poor to fend for themselves. But we don’t seem to spend enough effort exposing that. The elephant in the room, that we don’t talk about, is that conservatives (ever since Ronald Reagan) have harbored a pernicious belief that if you aren’t rich, it must be because you are lazy, stupid or in some other way unworthy. We rarely get to hear them enunciate this clearly, but if you look at the things they say, it is there, even if between the lines.

To call this a naïve and “Pollyanna” view of America is way too charitable. What makes this such a powerful lie is that it is something most people want to believe. Everyone likes to feel like they are in control of their life. It is easier to believe, if you also believe that misfortune is the result of things that someone did wrong. It has the additional benefit of relieving you of any moral or ethical obligation to feel compassion or sympathy for the “less fortunate” let alone any sense of charity. In all, it is about as perfect a delusion as could be contrived to allow a rich, ruling class to feel self-righteously, morally secure. At the same time it’s attractive to the wannabe rich with its promise that they can achieve their wildest dreams of avarice through whatever means, without a shred of guilt. It even appeals to a certain element of the poor who would rather believe that the rich are there because they deserve to be, rather than feel that there should be some call to action on their part. All in all it is a “perfect” belief system for those who are lazy or limited of thought and those who like to think highly of themselves regardless of their actions. It is at the heart of every story from the so called “self-made man”. He (or she) started with nothing and built it all, and if they can do it, so can you. You have no excuse for your circumstances.

To make matters worse, there is a germ of truth in it. Most people can do more for themselves than they imagine. At the same time ‘more’ does not equal enough in every situation. Likewise, there is also some truth to the idea that too much charity and support can breed a dependence that is not good for either the individual receiving it or the public budget. The whole truth is that the ‘more’ people could do, is usually not nearly enough. And whether or not the dependency feared is as prevalent as Republicans would have us believe, it is more often the result of a patch work quilt system that works against itself. Requirements to reapply periodically at government offices during “normal business hours” makes keeping a low wage job very difficult. Most Americans not working at the bottom end of the economy imagine that a day off, or a few extra hours off can easily be approved by their supervisor. This is not the case for the majority of people working at jobs even a few dollars above the minimum wage.

Lately some Republicans have found another bogeyman to blame for the poor prospects of some people – ‘cheap foreign labor’. The next best thing to blaming the poor and less advantaged for their own plight is to give them a scapegoat. If you can claim to slay the scapegoat you can temporarily win their support. Of course it won’t work and can’t last; this is really about changing economies and more reliance on automation and high technology. This is more of a replay of the time when we simply didn’t need buggy whip makers in the age of the automobile.

The solution consists of three parts, I think. First we need to educate our extremes that it is more important to unite for victory, even if all of their agenda is not enacted, than it is to be “morally” superior and completely, uncompromisingly devoted to a single cause.

Second, we need to develop a strategy and tactic for getting out the message and the vote that doesn’t depend on so much manual effort being put in by volunteers (who tend to be the most extreme devotees).

Third we need to tell a simpler story about who we are, one that counters the myths and outright lies that have become accepted by the public.

The second most likely involves social media and perhaps using donation money to pay for Lyft or Uber transport to polling places if there are not enough volunteers to provide rides.

The third probably consists of two parts. The first is to tell stories about the personal impact of the injustices the current system creates. People responded to Ronald Reagan’s myth of the “welfare queen” who supposedly drove a late model Cadillac and lived in a plush apartment all on welfare – even though it was later proved to be a complete fabrication. That story appealed to a bias that people had about others getting around the “rules” that everyone else had to follow. We should have been countering that lie with stories of real people who were struggling through no fault of their own, and for whom the so called “social safety net” had failed.

The second part might be as simple as starting the conversation with the idea of looking at the profit motive. So often touted as the key to America’s greatness, it is actually a two edged sword. Where is the profit in providing a cure for a disease compared to a treatment that must go on forever? If I sell you a promise to pay for medical care (medical insurance), do I make more or less money if I manage to keep you from getting medical care? Remembering that time is money, do I make more or less money even if I only delay paying for your care? In the ordinary businesses of the world, is it easier to make money by cutting corners on quality and service or by educating the consumers about the cost and value of quality? Let’s call out the supporters of “free markets”. Most business people talking about free markets really mean free of taxes and the regulations that make their work environments and products safe. They aren’t talking about a system where there is open access to compete on the basis of price and quality of the goods and services offered. On the contrary, most businesses seek to eliminate their competition and to stifle the emergence of new sources of competition.

And let’s not forget about the reasons we have most of these regulations that are so often treated as inherently bad things. It’s because of the abuses of profit seeking people who thought that it didn’t matter if their promises were lies, and their product was worthless or worse, dangerous. “Let the buyer beware” may be a fine piece of cautionary advice, but it is hardly the basis of a code of ethics or responsible governance.

We like to believe that the “free market” brings about innovation and technological improvement. But the sad truth is most of the actual inventors and innovators don’t make money from their discoveries. They are either bought out (usually for a lot less than the idea will ultimately reap) or suppressed so that the current technology can have a longer life. This has been the actual history of business in America for a long time. Certainly there are exceptions where the actual innovator did make good, but not only are those the exceptions, on closer examination you will often find that they succeeded in retaining the profit of their innovations through the same sort of ruthless and questionable practices of other businessmen. In other words, the system itself, doesn’t reward or properly incent innovative behavior exclusively or directly. In fact, it most successfully rewards a short term oriented, exploitative behavior. All of which alone, are enough reason to regulate and monitor the “free market economy” in order to ensure that there is at least a level playing field for those new to the market or with a longer term idea for the betterment of all.

It is most often government “regulation” from visionary leaders that helps us get to the next stage. Without the FAA promoting and supporting airlines the railroad lobby was more than happy to paint air travel as dangerous and to support the sort of regulation that would cripple the emerging industry. Do you imagine that the people supplying natural gas to the gas lights in cities didn’t try to stop the electric lights from being installed? And aren’t those same fossil fuel magnates the ones trying to convince us that we don’t need to convert to clean and sustainable energy sources?

There is certainly a lot more to be said about the economic system and the myths surrounding it, but if we could just get people to realize that it is not always about the betterment of all; that in fact the profit motive actually works against the common good at least as often as it (unintentionally) helps it, that would be a step in the right direction.

It took decades of slowly building these lies into a cohesive mythos, but we don’t have that sort of time to break them down. We need to tell this story more clearly and forcefully. We need to start with health care because I believe most people will understand that their health is not completely within their control.

The opposition likes to appeal to a bias we all want to believe, which is “bad things only happen to bad people”. We want to believe that because it gives us a sense of control over our lives. To be sure, certain life style choices do have a negative influence on our health; smoking, too much drinking, etc. But that is not the whole story. People who never smoked can get lung cancer, and where is the “moral outrage” over choices like eating lots of red meat and a sedentary lifestyle, which are just as injurious to overall health as things like smoking?

This all goes back to picking the right issues at the right time, instead of trying to make a “full court press” on every issue. Take the issue of the rights of transgender people. Personally I’m only interested in the character and talents of individuals. I really couldn’t care less about their sexual identity unless I’m pursuing them as a sexual/romantic partner. I also think that long term, the majority of people will come to the same idea. But in the meantime, the Republican base likes to promote “anti-transgender” laws to provoke a kind of fear that there is a great movement afoot to push this acceptance on everyone, ready or not. Spending lots of resources to counter these idiotic moves only validates their fears, and wastes precious capital that could be spent on battles we can win. A simple condemnation of these ideas and pointing out their ineffectiveness (any passable transgender could move completely unnoticed through any number of public restrooms etc.) should be all the attention we give it. We are talking about an extremely small minority of the population, not that their rights don’t matter because of those numbers, they do. However, we are in a “battle field triage” situation and we simply can’t afford to spend time and money on fights that only help the opposition make their bigoted cases. Transgender rights and acceptance have a much better chance of moving forward with us than they do with Republicans and so we need to tell our TG friends to keep faith with us, but not expect that we are going to mount a Supreme Court fight over every idiotic law some moronic right winger gets passed in some redneck red state haven.

I do truly hope that my fellow Democrats and progressives will take this to heart. We need to win, now more than ever. And I think I can speak to these tactics because I count myself among those who support some of the more ‘extreme’ positions. I just know that the time is not right for all of them. But it will be if we stay in the forefront and continually push, I believe we will be successful.

I believe personal tales of injustice, where everything was done “right” and according to the “rules” and it just didn’t work will win folks over. People want to believe that we have a basically good society that doesn’t let the deserving get a bad deal. But that isn’t really how it is. We need to show people the places where the system fails and people suffer unfairly. Intellectual and philosophical arguments may win over the better educated, but chances are most of them are already on our side. If we want to reach the vast majority of people we need to engage them with the facts that the simple fixes they think should solve these problems don’t work and let them see people who could but for the grace of God be themselves suffering because that system doesn’t work.

I am a member of that generation called the ‘Baby Boomers’. We grew up with the ‘Greatest Generation’ telling us how great America was, and watching super heroes who fought for ‘truth, justice and the American way’. I remember believing it was a place where no matter who you were, or where you started in life, you could achieve anything your talent could deliver. Later we discovered that America wasn’t quite all of the things we were told it was. We demonstrated, we voted, and all because we wanted it to be the America we thought it was. We need that spirit, that commitment again.

#Democrats #politics #election 2020

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thechembow · 5 years

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Why Do We Blame It on the Rain?

Apr. 29, 2019

Rain suppression vs. OR in Frazier Park today

People often think of rain as being depressing weather and attribute their malaise to dark days or seasonal effective disorder. It’s true that darker and gloomier places breed depression, drug abuse, crime, murder and suicide, but these problems also happen in sunny places. So what is it about rain and gloomy weather that makes people feel so bad? Without rain we can’t live and nothing grows. When we don’t get enough rain, people complain about drought. When we get abundant rain, people complain that the weather is “unpleasant,” as if we should base our happiness on an external circumstance that we can’t control anyway. Heavy rain is reported in an apocalyptic manner by the news, but so is a lack of rain. In the world of YouTube junk, conspiracy channels describe every type of weather as warfare being “done to us” by someone, they say the government. Is it not possible that weather is a force that is built into the workings of this Earth, or that not everything weather does is bad?

Today in our part of Southern California, we awoke to a light rain. This is very late in our rainy season, but with the intensive gifting work in 2018 in the US west and a recent complete gridding of Fresno and Clovis, there is a very high orgone energy concentration in Southern and Central California. This is greatly offsetting heavy DOR attacks on this region. We endure heavy DOR assaults daily these days, because there has been so much rain in the forecast. It is the parasitic objective to stop or at least reduce all rainfall everywhere. Wet climates with strong storm systems farther north usually experience abundant rain despite DOR because all they can achieve there is a reduction in rain. In California, it is much easier for the parasites to achieve drought. By gifting throughout the entire state of California in depth, targeting the cell towers which are for weather control, we began to restore the climate here. Then by targeting the Pacific Northwest, a high DOR but still very rainy climate, we opened the floodgates for a more even dispersal of precipitation throughout the west. This brought more rain to California, and more sun between rains, rather than grey gloom, to the northwest.

People tend to focus on physical world explanations for everything they feel and experience. When I lived in Portland, Oregon, which is considered depressing because of rain, I was miserable. But I liked rain so it was confusing. I didn’t know about orgone energy, I didn’t know about DOR, and I didn’t even know what a “chemtrail” was. Here is an example of a lyric I wrote in 2006 about the way it felt on a DOR day, but not knowing why it was that way:

Nothing’s fun today It’s dark and grey without the rain It's overbearing Don't take much to make me cry I sit and stare and wonder why

Everyone's the same Oppressed, oppressive, or insane I'm going nowhere Don't take much to make me sad I wish I knew the love I had

I don’t really know where it came from, but I seemed to know that under all the malaise, I had some kind of love that I couldn’t recognize. This was the love of God, of the cosmic orgone energy, the life force energy. But during my time in Portland, not knowing what was going on energetically, I had no idea why these grey days without rain made everyone act crazy and sucked the life out of me. I was abused, robbed, and almost destroyed by Portland before returning to Los Angeles in 2009. When I returned to Portland for the first time in November 2016, we gifted the towers and I saw just how serious the DOR emergency was there. It was oppressive for a reason. The best, brightest, and most sensitive people in Portland were always abused because the population had such dark and negative energy. DOR adds to that socialist, lowest common denominator mentality of these harsh northern cities. It adds to the crime and the despair that leads to drug abuse and an inability to make a life for oneself. It contributes to poverty, hatred for people who are different or think differently, and mental disease.

The battle ending for the day with OR skies.

What people don’t like about rainy climates has little to do with the rain itself, but the DOR that is used against every rainstorm that comes through. I have been to some terrible places, and by terrible, I mean energetically. For example, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle are all nice looking cities with places to overpay for coffee, food, and alcohol, and are all considered desirable because one can be gouged while on foot or bike. But in every one of these places, I have never felt good. They have too high of a DOR, but this is not something most people can detect. Those who can’t feel DOR don’t understand why I feel ill in these towns. Some other highlights in my travels to horrific grey and gloomy DOR zones include London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, New York, and Pittsburgh. All of these places sucked the life force out of me, but for any that I visited before 2014, I did not know why at the time. Of course there are many sunny places like LA that were once very DORish on a daily basis, and where DOR lead to drought. Now it’s mostly human DOR spewing affecting LA since almost all of the cell towers are neutralized and the drought is over. This is actually easier to contend with than a city with operational cell tower arrays.

Rain is blamed for the effects of rain suppression. We feel exhausted, sickened, and weakened on rainy days, and things seem to go wrong. People are rude, they may even act crazy and violent. This is not because of the life giving rain but because of the deadly radiation that is used against every rain storm. Every rain is a battle. This is true even in the rainy climates. If it’s raining a lot and you don’t feel good, pay attention to what kind of rain it is and what the clouds look like. Is it a grey flat sky? Is the rain splattery? Are you getting rain when you would normally get snow? These are all indicators that something is suppressing your rain. If rain were allowed to happen without interference, it would be a pleasant experience. I have enjoyed those orgone rains as well, once a battle is won.

We have seen in every region we have worked with orgone energy, that it increases healthy clouds and rainfall. We have also seen that when there is not to be rain naturally, the sky clears to a deep blue and all DORized water vapor (what people think of as “chemclouds”) is coalesced and evaporates in lovely spirals and puffy clouds. Rain and snow have increased dramatically in California and beyond with this last record breaking winter, and over the past five years of working with orgonite, rainfall records have been broken again and again in California, even in months that don’t get much rain historically. This is because we have never seen natural weather in our lives until now. This past winter the entire continental USA received the most precipitation on record. This is because of how orgonite has spread around the continent from our gifting and thanks to people learning to make it from us or contributing to our continuing work by buying it from us.

Most of all, your attitude toward the weather will influence how the weather affects you. If you’re a smart phone user, that is the main thing affecting your mood, not the weather. Wifi is similarly destructive. Orgonite is necessary to offset EMF you can’t remove from your life completely, other people’s pollution. As long as you have a device which programs negative thoughts and gives you easy access to YouTube garbage, you’ll continue to feel bad no matter what the weather. We can’t base our happiness on weather. We can influence it for good with orgonite, but we have to accept the fact that this is wartime and we are attacked daily. They attack etherically so only the sensitive know something is up. But still, the most energetically sensitive people I know are smart phone users, and using a smart phone will ultimately be their energetic undoing. How can you try to feel good when you have something in your hand that’s making you sick? Why complain about 5G when you’re participating in it? You’re only harming yourself.

The last thing to remember is that weather is not designed to make you feel good or bad. Weather is woven into the intelligent design of our world. It is a force beyond us, in which our only influence is positivity and restoration or negativity, which contributes to the destructive weather manipulation, all energetic. We are not special on our own, deserving of the weather of our choice like we’re picking it off of a menu. We are part of a greater creation and it’s not our will that we exercise. When we work in geo-restoration, we are providing labor for God here on Earth. We are undoing aeons of damage by parasites to this garden planet and enjoying the process of transmutation. You can’t customize the weather for your wants and you must accept the changing climate. We have been terrorized by the idea of climate change because they knew already that this restoration would take place. By terrifying people about climate change, they use those programmed minds to generate the world they want to see, a hot and energetically polluted desert. When we break out of the fear of climate change and see what orgone energy is doing, we accept with joy the new cool and rainy climate, and cherish the sun of summer, knowing that the winter will come again. Rain is a blessing to all life and never something to take for granted. Take it from someone who has seen drought and found a solution. There is no way to paint a negative picture of rain in my mind, only of DOR, which we must all tackle individually in order to free our minds and then our sky.

A heavy DOR attack neutralized

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suspected-spinozist · 6 years

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My two cents on laziness, work & the robots taking our jobs:

The idea that economically productive labor is a major source of personal fulfillment is extremely historically contingent. In the ancient world, business was something sordid and best avoided, in contrast to civic duty or otium in the positive sense, intellectually and socially productive leisure. Looking east a bit, the rabbis of the Talmud had day jobs, but there’s a reason they’re hardly ever mentioned - labor is praiseworthy only insofar as it allowed them to support themselves while they got on with their real work.

I can’t really speak to acedia and the sin of sloth in the Christian context. I do get the sense that productivity as a moral concern emerges at some point in the middle ages; certainly the positive idea of leisure never lost hold in aristocratic circles. Even then, I don’t think anyone was concerned with the effect of indolence on quality of life rather than a mark of bad character, it’s not like personal fulfillment really existed as a concept. I do know the Renaissance is generally more positive about the concept of leisure. The Reformation happens, early capitalism, I’m sure we’ve all read Max Weber on the Protestant Work ethic.

Certainly the elevation of labor as something honorable rather than shameful has a lot to do with class politics going back to at least the 18th century and probably earlier. In the American context, there’s some really interesting work by Judith Shklar on the role of hard work in formulating a national civic identity, which she reads as a reaction to the perceived thread of aristocratic idleness with a strong racialized component rather than a secularized Protestantism.

The point of all this isn’t to give a comprehensive history of the concept of work. I only want to point out that attitudes towards the value of labor are all over the place, even in the West and even in recent history. Whole societies have gotten by just fine on the assumption that work is terrible and everyone should do as little of it as possible. The claim that idleness is psychologically unhealthy is in particular really new, most historical arguments in that vain focus much much more on idleness as a sign of moral corruption, or as dereliction of duty to provide for one’s family or contribute to society - obviously irrelevant in the post-scarcity society we’re positing.

I think the absence of work is often unhealthy for Americans - and to a lesser extent, everyone in broadly Christian-inflected Western culture - because we live in a society that values economic productivity to an extreme and historically unusual extent. Most people are receptive to their culture and feel like failures when they fail to achieve the things they’re conditioned to believe are important.

Personally, I believe our obsession with work is a form of societal stockholm syndrome. Most jobs exist on a spectrum of soul-crushing to merely frustrating and undignified in ways it’s possible to ignore. I don’t think the problem here is unique to capitalism, either. The historical socialist glorification of work makes sense in context, and people do feel better about performing backbreaking manual labor if they feel they have control over the process and a stake in the cause, but that’s obviously as stopgap measure because - surprise - backbreaking manual labor is terrible. It’s true that most people alive today really do value being able to work and provide for their families, it’s also true that men in honor cultures valued their reputation enough to die for it. Some values are objectively dumb.

Less flippantly, a lot of what goes wrong with the world can be reduced to cultural values failing to track actual sources of human happiness. Attitudes towards work track underlying economic and social conditions. A real post-scarcity society would be a golden opportunity for cultural engineering. Let’s recognize the importance of leisure! Roman culture was incredibly fucked up in almost every possible way, but I do think they got this one right - real intellectual and creative accomplishments are only possible with space to rest and room to breathe. Most people are better and happier moving at their own pace.

This doesn’t mean that we should just make room to be lazy. I’m more optimistic than most people that, given resources and a safety net and a complete lack of stigma, most people would use their leisure positively (even if their activities don’t contribute much to society at large). Even so, I think society as a whole would benefit from structures that reward creative efforts (as well as the fulfillment of unpleasant but necessary duties) with respect and acclaim.

The real challenge - and the real reason not to recreate an aristocratic culture - is to avoid forming social systems that incentivize endless, exhausting, zero-sum status seeking. People are just as capable of working themselves ragged for social position as for money. I’m not sure how to solve this one.

#ruminating

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khalilhumam · 3 years

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Navigating race and injustice in America’s middle class

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/navigating-race-and-injustice-in-americas-middle-class/

Navigating race and injustice in America’s middle class

By Jennifer M. Silva, Tiffany N. Ford The United States of America is a race-plural nation – the American middle class is no different. If we define the middle class as those in the middle 60 percent of the household income distribution, with annual household incomes between $40,000 and $154,000, then 59 percent of the middle class is white, 12 percent of the group is Black, 18 percent is Hispanic, and 6 percent is Asian. Given the racial make-up of this group, this current period of civil unrest, and the looming presidential election, it is more important than ever for those of us concerned with the well-being of the American middle class to understand the attitudes of different racial groups within the middle class. In a Brookings study begun in late 2019, in which we conducted focus groups and personal interviews with a broad range of middle-class Americans, we were able to have real discussions about race, racism, identity, and injustice. To promote comfort and honesty, we stratified our focus groups by race and gender, which allowed different middle-class race-gender groups to talk openly about their experiences in their workplaces, with their families, communities, and in their everyday lives. Below, we present what members of the American middle class had to say about racial injustice, both in the months leading up to the first identified case and in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Navigating Injustice 

Summer 2020 witnessed national uprisings against racism and police brutality, with deeply rooted tensions concerning power, identity, injustice, and belonging that erupted into protests, riots, and lethal violence. These tensions were already brewing in our conversations about identity and respect in our focus groups in the fall of 2019.  For the Black and Hispanic people in the focus groups, experiences of disrespect and discrimination in the workplace were prevalent. Black women described how they had to restrain their emotions and opinions out of fear of retaliation or conflict, while also working harder to be given a fair chance. As Patricia, a Black woman who works in IT, describes: “I got to work harder. I have to work hard. I have to bust my kneecaps and ankles, just for somebody to give me a chance. I have to not respond the way someone would expect for me to respond so that they can respect me. Nobody respects women, and especially a Black woman.”   

Black and Hispanic individuals attested to racism in their everyday lives, whether stereotyping by their co-workers, discrimination in higher education, or racial profiling in the criminal justice system. Justin, a Hispanic man in a Las Vegas, Nevada, focus group, shared his experience, “I’ve never had a positive association or positive experience with a cop pulling me over.  I got to a point where being Hispanic and being behind the wheel at night, it was almost a no-go for me.”  In Prince George’s County, Maryland, Black men described being “trolled for speeding” when they ventured into suburban areas and getting “pulled over because you ‘fit the description’” when they were wearing dreads, driving a nice car, or simply having a laundry bag in their backseat. One man said soberly, “In most of our movies, the person dies. A lot of these movies conditioned us to not prepare for a long life, not prepare for marriage. We figure we get to twenty-one, man, I’m blessed.” 

“I’ve never had a positive association or positive experience with a cop pulling me over.”

In Houston, Texas, Black men referred to the “injustice system,” documenting their fears of their children “getting railroaded for something petty” while wealthy people “get a slap on the wrist, two to three years’ probation for something petty,  while they just violated my child and mess them up for life.” One man tied crime to economic inequality and racism, explaining, “Just because I can’t get a job, the bills don’t stop coming. I can’t get a job. My child’s stomach’s not going to stop rumbling.” Another man chimed in, “It’s more profitable to keep us locked up and to keep this system rolling because you’re rented out as free labor, you’re rented out for for-profit prisons, and there is a quota the police and system has to make to keep those facilities rented.  My biggest thing is to keep my children out of their facilities.”[1]  Men and women in the Black and Hispanic focus groups attempted to acknowledge and fight against injustice,  but also tried to protect themselves from exhaustion and despair.  As a Black woman in Wichita, Kansas, noted, “I can switch it off real quick if I see stuff, like even with the police officers killing a lot of Black men, and women too, I can tune in and tune out.  I don’t want to see that, I don’t want to watch that, because all it does is bring my spirit down. So, I’m an optimist on life in general, and just knowing that the future is going to be as bright as you make it, it’s up to us to make our future bright.”   Brian, a 57-year-old Black man from Detroit, Michigan, moved to Texas when the automobile factories were closing, leaving behind “a post-apocalyptic world.” In Houston, he moved into the technology field, performing computer upgrades and technical assistance on government contracts. Brian has not had steady benefits such as health insurance or retirement contributions as a contract worker, yet has invested substantially in his own career advancement, most recently in a $7,500 online course on data security. Since COVID-19 hit, he has been “trying to get two certifications, maybe three, between now and Labor Day weekend, because right now it’s just very hard to get a job because the work source is gone. The unemployment office, they’re closed. You can’t go online because the website just keeps crashing if you get on there.”  He has been getting some help from SNAP. Brian reflects, “I think that if you want the American Dream, if you’re a minority, you have to work so much harder. I mean, you can get it, but you’ve just got to work a lot harder. There have been times when I’ve been down here where I think that race played a part in me getting the job, because when you’re the only Black person and everybody else is white, you kind of figure you’re probably the token guy that they kind of had to hire, to keep the government off of them. I’ve had a couple of jobs like that. I think there’s just a lot more opportunities, if I were lighter-skinned or white.” He continues: “I mean, plus what’s going on in Detroit right now. I mean, they’ve got the highest COVID cases in the country, and like I said. Detroit is 80% Black, so, like I said. That’s one reason why I’m glad I’m not there.” 

Nostalgia and Resentment 

For some of the white people we spoke with, we heard anger toward perceived “quota-filling” hiring practices or attacks from the “left.” Some white participants resented being put into a racial category at all, while others feared they were on their way to becoming a “minority” in America. Leslie, a white woman from Las Vegas, described her experiences: “The culture has definitely shifted. Because in the [19]80’s, I think being a white working American woman, a lot of people strived for that, and now we are definitely the minority. I feel like we’re the minority and [we’re] discriminated against, especially in the workplace.” Other white people believed that race had become too politicized in recent years, fueling unnecessary conflict between Americans of different racial groups. Jake, a pastor from Pennsylvania, put it, “There’s this bizarre focus on race. And granted there are racists, there’s always been racists, there’s always going to be racists. But it seemed like the country went from this, we’re all in this together mentality, to we’ve literally been carved out. They’ve carved us out into groups now.  I don’t understand why we’re now white people. It just feels like we were people. When I was in New York, we were people. Some of my best friends were the people I worked with who were all different shades of different stuff.”   Promoting a colorblind[2] view of the world, Jake, a Trump supporter, continued, “We elected our first Black president, which was supposed to be this big deal. I didn’t care if he was Black. I cared that he didn’t have any experience and I thought he shouldn’t have got the job.” While Jake insists that racism is wrong, he does not like how quotas – “the numbers” –  seem to have replaced individual merit: “Almost anywhere you go to fill out something now, you’re asked specifically,  are you Latino or Hispanic? Are minorities receiving maybe some additional treatment because we have to get our numbers up to match and we want this to look fair and equal?” In his interview, Jake also worried about a growing “disrespect for our authorities, like police officers. In ministry, there are people who don’t live the way they’re supposed to live.  Everybody makes bad choices and doesn’t, but you can’t throw everybody out because just one or two make bad choices. Any profession, any type of work you do, is going to have some bad apples.”[3]  Overall, Jake seemed perplexed by enduring racial conflict and resentful that we can’t all just be “people.”  Joe, a white man with a high school diploma who works an entry-level factory job, asserts that America has been “going downhill since 1965.”  Joe favors protections for workers such as trade barriers, opposes US involvement in foreign wars, and generally supports “left-wing economic ideas,” labeling himself “kind of a Socialist.”  But Joe is staunchly against immigration, insisting, “End it. All of it. Until every single American has a job and is taken care of, we have no business importing competitive labor.” He is also right-wing on cultural issues – “My issues with the Democrats are cultural progressive issues. I’m all for universal health care, universal basic income. But then they push all the progressive cultural issues. I joke around and say, give me the universal health care but hold the gay marriage.”  While Joe voted for Trump in 2016, now he thinks Trump “has to go” because he has supported Wall Street over American workers.  Joe tentatively tells us about his involvement in white nationalist politics. He has long been involved in Civil War reenactments and has traced his American roots back to the 1660s in New England. He struggles to define what it means to be American today: “if anybody can be an American, then what’s it really mean?” When I ask if it used to mean something, he replies, “Well, when you say he was an American, you knew what they were talking about. That you’re someone of European ancestry. Originally it was white English Protestants and they had different waves of immigration after that. But until the 1960’s, it was pretty straightforward what an American was. Now that’s becoming much more diversified.” Joe has been heavily involved in the Confederate flag and monument controversies and was part of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. He states, “But what irks me is the monuments, particularly those put up by widows and orphans to their fallen kin. I think that’s low. It’s almost a personal attack because history is the foundation of my identity is the way I look at it. It’s an attack on white American history more than anything else.” Joe worries about his children growing up as a “minority,” viewing diverse societies as unsustainable and prone to “culture ruptures” and violence. He feels betrayed by Donald Trump’s treatment of the white nationalists in Charlottesville, telling his supporters to “go out there and fight those people, but then when people do it, he leaves them out to dry, which I think is kind of a cheap move.” He says he is willing to give Joe Biden a chance in November.  

Evidence of racial inequality abounds.

Evidence of racial inequality abounds. Qualitative data from our American Middle Class Hopes and Anxieties Study is yet another contribution to that body of evidence. Black, Hispanic, and white middle class Americans have had vastly different experiences in America – to say the least – and thus hold different views on current inequalities. Armed with their stories, we are better prepared to think more carefully about how to address injustice and inequality, challenge misinformation, and bridge the nation’s longstanding divides.

About the Study

The Future of the Middle Class Initiative has spent the last several years studying the American middle class. We have explored survey data, reviewed the literature, and consulted with experts. But we also wanted to base our conclusions on talking to members of the middle class, listening to their stories, and in the process, deepening our understanding of their lives and their well-being. In fall of 2019, we launched the American Middle Class Hopes and Anxieties Study, a mixed-methods study that brings together in-depth interviews, survey data, focus groups, and quantitative analysis to better understand how the middle class is faring across five core domains: time, money, health, respect, and relationships. For the first phase of our study, we conducted twelve focus groups in five locations across the United States, with a total of 127 white, Black, and Hispanic or Latino middle–class Americans. In April of 2020, we began phase II of the study, conducting one-on-one in-depth interviews with a subset of the focus group participants. As a result of these interviews, we were able to hone in on the new challenges that have arisen as a result of COVID-19, including balancing childcare and work, sharing household tasks, coping with mental and physical health concerns, and dealing with economic uncertainty. This work would not have been possible without the collaboration of Econometrica, Inc. researchers and the generosity of the 127 middle class Americans who shared their stories.

Footnotes

[1] See Rios, Victor. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York, NY: NYU Press, 2011. [2] Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009. [3] Rashawn, Ray. “Bad apples come from rotten trees in policing.” Brookings How We Rise (blog), May 30, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/05/30/bad-apples-come-from-rotten-trees-in-policing/ Jennifer M. Silva did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. The author is not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.

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nobszone · 7 years

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So I was checking my notifications to see which of my posts got the “ @takashi0bump” when I remembered I had this series of asks laying around in my inbox for the past month or so, and I figured now is a good time as any to go over them.

Before we get started, let me apologize to the anon for taking this long to answer. I’ve had a lot going on both on and off the site, and you asked quite a bit here. So I needed a while to get to a point where I felt I was able to properly answer your questions.

So, let’s begin.

First let’s talk about business regulation, and then I’ll give you some of my thoughts on the 2016 election, or at least thoughts that I haven’t had a chance to express yet (anyone who saw my long back-and-forth about a month ago knows I’ve already expressed quite a bit).

I consider myself a Capitalist for two reasons. First and foremost, I believe in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Secondly, as anyone who’s been following this blog will tell you, I’m a huge proponent of individual liberty.

Out of the three economic systems (Capitalism, Socialism, Communism), Capitalism is the one that gives individual people the best chance at achieving wealth and success for themselves. You look at famous American success stories like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Nelson Rockefeller, Howard Hughes and so on. These are all stories that I don’t believe could’ve happened in a Socialist or Communist system.

But I also acknowledge the system isn’t perfect. It has its flaws and failings, some of which have been pointed out in great detail over the course of the last decade. I also am willing to concede that because of the increasing automation of the labor force as well as the development of technology such as AI, Capitalism itself may no longer be viable in as little as 20-30 years.

Because when your workforce is composed of robots, what do you pay them?

Anyway, that’s for another discourse. My point is that while I don’t think Capitalism is the be all end all perfect system for mankind, it’s the best one that we have under the current circumstances as it allows for the most individual freedom as well as gives individual citizens the best chance to achieve wealth and success.

So with that in mind let’s talk about where I stand on regulation.

I’m...mostly against the government interfering with the private sector, but I’m completely open to certain types of regulation.

For example:

Environmental, to ensure that business activities don’t result in serious pollution and/or environmental catastrophe.

Fair labor rules to enforce my above stated belief in an “honest days work for an honest days pay” (though I will freely admit I’m more in favor of right-to-work laws than unions).

Anti-trust regulations to break up monopolies and keep competition alive.

Net Neutrality to ensure the internet remains free and open (Have you all called or emailed your representatives and/or senators, by the way?)

Safeguards to ensure that people buying property or taking out a loan can actually afford to buy said property or pay back said loan (this is mainly to try and prevent a repeat of 2008).

So, some oversight, but not necessarily to the extent that you’d see in a non-Capitalistic system.

I know it’s popular for folks in my generation to rail on about the “evils of Capitalism” (while typing their rants using technology made possible by Capitalism), but there’s certain areas where I think the private sector is much better suited to excel than any government program would ever be.

One example is healthcare.

Let me say up front that I don’t disagree with the idea of a universal high quality healthcare system. Hell I don’t even disagree with the idea of free healthcare for everyone. I think that giving everyone access to high quality healthcare at an affordable price is a goal we should be working towards.

But my issue with acts like the ACA and other systems like the NHS in England is the economics of it.

At the end of the day, a healthcare system that is of high quality, universal and comprehensive while still being affordable is an economic impossibility.

Basically think of the healthcare market as being like a supply and demand curve that you learned about in your Econ class. The “supply” in this case is the number of doctors available, the quality of the care, etc. The “demand” of course is the people needing healthcare. The equilibrium point is where the two meet.

What the ACA and the NHS try to do is set what basically amounts to a price ceiling. They’re saying “okay, health care of <x> quality will not cost any more than <y> dollars.” Which sounds nice for everyone. More people get access to higher quality care, doctors still get paid, everything is peachy.

Problem is, for said price ceiling to be effective, it has to be set below the equilibrium price. So now there’s a gap between the supply and demand lines: a shortage.

In this case a shortage could mean anything from lack of available doctors, a decline in the quality of the care given, waiting times for surgery, things like that.

And if that’s a trade-off you’re willing to make, more power to you. For me? I think it’s counter-productive.

So with that in mind, here’s my radical idea for helping expand healthcare coverage:

Let insurance companies compete across state lines.

Right now, it is illegal to buy health insurance out-of-state. I think lifting this little restriction will do wonders in helping to alleviate the healthcare crisis in America.

While I can’t be certain, I think that private healthcare could indeed become a perfectly competitive market, with all insurers falling towards an equilibrium price. If someone in one state is charging an astronomical amount for coverage, and someone in another state is offering the same coverage for half the cost, people in the first state should be able to buy from the second state.

In a related story, this would also help people in the LGBT+ community. If you live in a state that denies you coverage because you are a non-heteronormative citizen, you should be able to buy from a state that does not discriminate.

Now I don’t know if this would actually work out, the economics of this can be figured out by people much smarter than I am. But I do feel this is an instance where the private sector can do a better job than the government.

Another area I feel the private sector succeeds is in technological development.

Apple and Microsoft come to mind, but the example I like to use the most is SpaceX.

I want you all to repeat this to yourself once a day for the foreseeable future: Elon Musk is taking us to Mars.

SpaceX has only been operating for 15 years, and already they have technology that only made it to the drawing board for NASA. In a year they may be ready to send manned missions into Space, while NASA’s own spacecraft is still at least 2 years, possibly 3, from its first manned flight. And a lot of this is because SpaceX doesn’t have to answer to any bureaucrats in DC. They’re free to use their budget however they wish, while NASA is only given a sliver of the federal budget, and has to justify every dollar they spend.

In a related story, I’m cautiously optimistic about Trump’s plans for NASA. While it seems he has a very basic understanding of how spaceflight actually works, he does seem to have a legitimate interest in manned spaceflight, which is more than I can say for the last administration.

But I digress.

So I hope that clarifies my position on the free market.

Anyway, now I’d like to talk briefly about some trends I’ve noticed on the left and the right in the wake of the election. Since this post has gone on for quite a bit already, I’ll try to keep this part relatively short.

I find myself in a unique position, where for the first time in my life I am legitimately annoyed by both political parties.

The GOP seems to have looked at how the Democrats all but ceased to exist in 1968 and said to themselves “Lets do that.” They’ve made token statements of annoyance at Trump’s antics, but aren’t willing to do what it takes to reign him in. Sadly, I predicted this would happen, as the GOP is mainly trying to tread water until they get through the midterms next year. Sadly this has allowed for some more...fanatical members to make some noise on the federal and state level, people who basically want to say or do anything and they don’t care who they offend in the process.

Meanwhile the Democrats are a total mess right now. As I’ve said before, I cannot believe they actually rejected Socialism before the Republicans got a chance to do so. But that “Feel the Bern” faction that got...well...burned in the 2016 primaries is still angry and vengeful. You have people like Michael Moore calling for all the neoliberal Democrats to be ousted, and to make the Democrats a true Socialist party. At the end of the day, the only thing the Democrats even have to say to the American people right now in regards to why they should vote for them in 2018 is “We’re not the GOP.”

So yeah, you can see why I’m willing to take potshots at both the left and the right at this point in time (much to the imagined horror of high-school age me who was a raging neocon who absolutely would have voted for Donald Trump if he had the chance, but that’s another story).

But here’s something really interesting I’ve noticed.

As the anon in the ask said, there’s a lot of people on the left who feel that they aren’t welcome there anymore, even though the left is the side that, in theory, should be supporting of them. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that there’s this major “our way or the highway” attitude right now with the liberal elite. And you’ve all heard me express my annoyance with the left’s tendency as of late to (as Tom Walker’s Johnathan Pie character so expertly put it) “believe in diversity as long as it’s not diversity of opinion.”

For better or worse, I haven’t seen that on the right.

I mean, there’s been a couple prominent examples of former Republicans saying they can no longer associate with the GOP. Joe Scarborough being the most recent example (though, honestly, who could blame him?), but the fact is that there’s still a lot of differing ideas and philosophies in play right now for the GOP.

Paul Ryan is a big fan of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism, he also supported the auto industry bailouts of 2008 and the Dodd-Frank act.

Rand Paul is a Libertarian (when he feels like calling himself one) who wishes to ban abortion entirely, and while he is not an advocate for decriminalizing marijuana, he is against mandatory minimum sentencing for drug crimes.

John McCain has come out against universal healthcare (also favoring a free-market solution) and Net Neutrality, but he’s also been one of the most vocal proponents of Native American issues as well as one of the most hawkish voices on the right in regards to Russia.

Donald Trump...well...nobody really knows what he supports, as his statements on his political views can range from inconsistent to downright incoherent, but he has consistently supported medical marijuana, term limits for Congress, and manned exploration of space.

Reminder that the Log Cabin Republicans also exist.

The point is there’s a lot of room on the right for differing viewpoints. And I’ve found that even if people can’t completely agree with the GOP on everything, they still don’t have an issue at least relating to them. I personally don’t see eye-to-eye with the Republicans on everything, but I have no problem voting for them, or describing myself as being conservative on certain issues.

And, most importantly, at no point have I ever felt alienated from my more hardcore GOP friends because my beliefs didn’t align with the party.

So, all things considered, it seems that when it comes to diversity of opinion, the Republicans are doing a better job. Why is that? Well I think it’s because both parties, at their core, have a very different philosophical approach to how they wish the United States to be. Though to be clear, this doesn’t just apply to the US of A, this applies to the left vs right debate pretty much everywhere.

The left’s political philosophies (starting at moderate Liberalism and going all the way to Collectivism) put more emphasis on what’s best for the group. The old “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” cliche. The left’s approach to a problem is to basically say “okay we’re going to try one solution and one solution only, but it’s going to be the solution that benefits everyone in some way.”

In a related story, this is why I think a lot of millennials are gravitating towards the left. Thanks to the Internet, we are the first generation in the history of humanity to have actually been part of a truly global community. And it’s not just in politics where this group mentality comes into play. Hell half the time there’s fandom drama, it’s because someone said something stupid and everyone else decided to get together to prove how wrong they were.

It’s important to realize that our parents and grandparents didn’t have this kind of global community. In fact, for about half a century, they were taught to fear the other, the foreigner, the people with the incompatible lifestyle who were out to destroy you.

This is why I think they gravitated towards the right, because the right (starting at moderate Conservatism and going all the way to Objectivism) focuses more on what’s best for the individual. Whether it’s success in the free market, the right to own a firearm, the right to pick your healthcare provider, etc. The right is more focused on individual liberty. Their approach to a problem is to basically say “okay, everyone try the solution that they feel works best for them.” So that’s what I think it comes down to. And both mindsets have their pros and cons.

The left would restrict individual liberty, but they would also aim to make a world where everyone is treated fairly and has the same quality of life.

The right may not care about those social protections and some people would be better off than others, but they would also aim to make a world that had unlimited freedom and choice.

And this is the important part. Do yourself a favor and write it down on your desktop or something so you can see it every single day. Because in times like these, this cannot be stressed enough:

Neither the right nor the left are inherently evil. They BOTH have villains: the extremists who want to do EVERYTHING one way.

Whether it’s the alt-right or the cntrl-left, those camps just want to stick to their way and their way only. The truth of the matter is that just going one way gets us nowhere, and as much as people in both of those camps like to mock centrists, the answer really does lie somewhere in the middle.

I like to think of America as like a car driving down a road. For the most part, we try to stay in the center. But every so often the road turns or shifts, and we have to adjust to the left or the right to stay where we need. But we should never ever make a hard left or hard right, that would end in disaster.

Alright, so that’s the end of this wall of text. If the original anon is reading this, I again apologize for taking so long and I hope I was able to give you satisfactory answers to at least some of your questions. As for the rest of you, I hope you at least learned a little bit more about how I view the world we live in. If you yourself have any questions about my views on all this, feel free to ask!

#Really Quite Frankly #politics #American Politics #ask #Capitalism

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the-syndic4te · 7 years

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The officers around me listened glumly, in silence; only a one-armed Hauptmann laughed loudly at the terms freiwillige Frontverkürzung and planmässig, but stopped when he met my anguished gaze; like him and the others too, I knew enough to interpret these euphemisms: the Jews who had revolted in the ghetto had been resisting our best troops for several weeks now, and Tunisia was lost. I looked around for the waiter to order another Cognac. Thomas came in. He crossed the room with a martial stride, ceremoniously gave me a German salute while clicking his heels, then took me by the arm and drew me toward a booth; there, he slipped into the banquette, negligently throwing his cap on the table, and brandished an envelope that he held delicately between two gloved fingers. “Do you know what’s inside?” he asked, frowning. I made a sign that I didn’t. The envelope, I saw, bore the header of the Persönlicher Stab des Reichsführer-SS. “I know what’s inside,” he went on in the same tone. His face cleared up: “Congratulations, dear friend. You play your cards close to your chest. I always knew you were smarter than you let on.” He was still holding the letter. “Take it, take it.” I took it, broke it open, and pulled out a sheet of paper, an order to present myself at the earliest opportunity to Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt, personal adjutant to the Reichsführer-SS. “It’s a summons,” I said somewhat stupidly.—“Yes, it’s a summons.”—“And what does it mean?”—“It means that your friend Mandelbrod has a very long arm. You’ve been assigned to the Reichsführer’s personal staff, my friend. Shall we celebrate?” I didn’t feel much like celebrating, but I let myself be carried along. Thomas spent the night buying me American whiskies and excitedly holding forth on the stubbornness of the Jews in Warsaw. “Can you imagine? Jews!” As to my new assignment, he seemed to think I had brought off a masterstroke; I had no idea what it was all about. The next morning, I presented myself at the SS-Haus, located on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse right next to the Staatspolizei, in a former grand hotel converted into offices. Obersturmbannführer Brandt, a stooped little man with a wan, timid look, his face hidden behind large, round, black horn-rimmed glasses, received me right away: it seemed to me I had seen him already, in Hohenlychen, when the Reichsführer had decorated me on my hospital bed. In a few terse, precise sentences, he filled me in about what was expected of me. “The transition of concentration camps from a purely corrective finality to a function as a reservoir of labor force, which was begun more than a year ago now, has not been accomplished without conflicts.” The problem involved both relations between the SS and outside participants, and internal relations within the SS itself. The Reichsführer wanted to get a better understanding of the source of the tensions in order to reduce them and also to maximize the productive capacity of this considerable human labor pool. He had consequently decided to appoint an already experienced officer as his personal representative for the Arbeitseinsatz (“labor operation” or “labor organization”). “After examination of the files and receipt of a number of recommendations, you were selected. The Reichsführer has complete confidence in your ability to carry out this task successfully—it will require a strong capacity for analysis, a sense of diplomacy, and an SS spirit of initiative, the kind you’ve already demonstrated in Russia.” The SS offices concerned would receive an order to cooperate with me; but it would be up to me to ensure that this cooperation would be effective. “All your questions, as well as your reports,” Brandt finished, “should be addressed to me. The Reichsführer will see you only when he deems it necessary. He will receive you today to explain what he expects of you.” I had listened without batting an eye; I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but thought it more politic to keep my questions to myself for the moment. Brandt asked me to wait in a lounge on the ground floor; I found some magazines there, along with tea and cakes. I soon tired of leafing through old issues of Schwarzes Korps in the subdued lighting of this room; unfortunately, there was no smoking allowed in the building—the Reichsführer had forbidden it because of the smell—and you couldn’t go out to the street to smoke, either, in case you were summoned. They came looking for me around the end of the afternoon. In the antechamber, Brandt gave me his final recommendations: “Don’t make any comments, don’t ask any questions, only talk if you’re asked to.” Then he led me in. Heinrich Himmler was sitting behind his desk; I came forward with a military stride, followed by Brandt who introduced me; I saluted, and Brandt, after handing the Reichsführer a file, withdrew. Himmler motioned to me to sit down and consulted the file. His face seemed strangely vague, colorless; his little moustache and his pince-nez only emphasized the elusive quality of his features. He looked at me with a small, friendly smile; when he raised his head, the light, reflected in the glass of his pince-nez, made them opaque, hiding his eyes behind two round mirrors: “You look in better form than the last time I saw you, Sturmbannführer.” I was quite surprised that he remembered me; perhaps there was a note in the file. He went on: “You have fully recovered from your wound? That’s good.” He leafed through a few pages. “Your mother is French, I see?” That seemed to be a question and I attempted an answer: “Born in Germany, my Reichsführer. In Alsace.”—“Yes, but French all the same.” He raised his head and this time the pince-nez did not reflect the light, revealing little eyes too close together, with a surprisingly gentle look. “You know, in principle I never accept men with foreign blood into my staff. It’s like Russian roulette: too dangerous. You never know what will manifest, even in very good officers. But Dr. Mandelbrod convinced me to make an exception. He is a very wise man, whose judgment I respect.” He paused. “I had considered another candidate for the position. Sturmbannführer Gerlach. Unfortunately he was killed a month ago. In Hamburg, during an English air raid. He didn’t take shelter in time and a flowerpot fell on his skull. Begonias, I think. Or maybe tulips. He died on the spot. These English are monsters. Bombing civilians like that, without discrimination. After the victory we should organize war crimes trials. The people responsible for these atrocities have to answer for them.” He fell silent and plunged into my file again. “You’ll be thirty soon and you’re not married,” he said, raising his head. “Why?” His tone was severe, professorial. I blushed: “I haven’t had an opportunity yet, my Reichsführer. I finished my studies just before the war.”—“You should seriously consider it, Sturmbannführer. Your blood is valuable. If you are killed during this war, it shouldn’t be lost for Germany.” My words came to my lips of their own accord: “My Reichsführer, please excuse me, but my spiritual approach to my National Socialist commitment and to my service in the SS does not allow me to consider marriage so long as my Volk has not mastered the dangers threatening it. Affection for a woman can only weaken a man. I have to give myself wholly and I couldn’t share my devotion before the ultimate victory.” Himmler listened, scrutinizing my face; his eyes had opened slightly. “Sturmbannführer, despite your foreign blood, your Germanic and National Socialist qualities are impressive. I don’t know if I can accept your reasoning: I continue to think that the duty of every SS-Mann is to continue the race. But I will reflect on your words.”—“Thank you, my Reichsführer.”—“Did Obersturmbannführer Brandt explain your work to you?”—“In broad terms, my Reichsführer.”—“I don’t have much to add. Above all, use delicacy. I don’t want to provoke useless conflicts.”—“Yes, my Reichsführer.”—“Your reports are very good. You have an excellent ability to seize the overall picture based on a proven Weltanschauung. That’s what made up my mind to choose you. But watch out! I want practical solutions, not whining.”—“Yes, my Reichsführer.”—“Dr. Mandelbrod will no doubt ask you to send him copies of your reports. I don’t object. Good luck, Sturmbannführer. You may go.” I got up, saluted, and prepared to leave. Suddenly Himmler called out to me in his dry little voice: “Sturmbannführer!”—“Yes, my Reichsführer?” He hesitated: “No false sentimentality, yes?” I remained rigid, at attention: “Of course not, my Reichsführer.” I saluted again and left. Brandt, in the antechamber, gave me an inquisitive look: “Did it go well?”—“I think so, Obersturmbannführer.”—“The Reichsführer read your report on the nutritional problems of our soldiers in Stalingrad with great interest.”—“I’m surprised that report reached him.”—“The Reichsführer is interested in a lot of things. Gruppenführer Ohlendorf and the other Amtschefs often send him interesting reports.” Brandt gave me a book from the Reichsführer entitled Jewish Ritual Murders, by Helmut Schramm. “The Reichsführer had copies printed for all SS officers with at least the rank of Standartenführer. But he also asked that it be distributed to subaltern officers concerned with the Jewish question. You’ll see, it’s very interesting.” I thanked him: one more book to read, when I hardly read anymore. Brandt advised me to take a few days to get organized: “You won’t achieve anything worthwhile if your personal affairs aren’t in order. Then come see me.”

Jonathan Littell “Les Bienveillantes”

#jonathan littell #les bienveillantes #las benevolas #as benevolentes #himmler #the furies #the kindly ones #books

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ace-trainer-risu · 7 years

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Why do you hate bosie douglas?

Oh man bout to lay down some Oscar Wilde Discourse!

Just kidding. Sort of?

Anyway, the short answer would be that I really, really love Oscar Wilde. He’s definitely one of my favorite authors/artists/historical figures ever. He was an amazing and incredibly influential figure who lived a tragic life and died way too young, and Bosie (aka Lord Alfred Douglas, for those unfamiliar with his nickname) was not the only person responsible for the tragedy of Oscar’s life, but he undeniably played a role in it. And I just, I really can’t forgive him for that.

The long answer is…

Well, okay, so at my university, English majors had to take a senior thesis class, which was basically just a seminar where you studied one topic really in depth. I took mine on Oscar Wilde, and it was an amazing class, so I really know a lot about him and have read a lot of his writings.

I never know what is and isn’t common knowledge about Wilde since I know a lot about him, but for those who don’t really know him, the basic story is that Wilde was a popular and scandalous Victorian author and playwright. He popularized various fashionable movements like aestheticism and dandyism. It was kind of an open secret that he was carrying out affairs with men. He had an affair with a younger man named Lord Alfred Douglas, AKA Bosie, who was a wealthy aristocrat from the Queensbury family. In the late 1890s, at the height of Wilde’s playwriting popularity, Wilde was embroiled in a series of trials that ultimately led to him being jailed for four years hard labor for gross indecency (essentially for having sex with men). Upon getting out, Wilde emigrated to France, where he died shortly after at the age of 46.

This is not the point of this post, but I highly recommend reading him. The Picture of Dorian Gray is obviously his most famous work, and it’s really beautiful and weird and fucked up and super gay. The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, and it’s also so influential of a work that it’s really hard to see how influential it is, because of course lots of things are like Earnest, except they’re like that because of Earnest. But what I would really recommend to first time Wilde readers is “The Happy Prince” which is a beautiful and heartbreaking little fairy tale that he wrote. He was a hugely influential author on modernism, post modernism, comedy, playwriting, etc.

This is tumblr so I feel strangely compelled to defend my love for him, so, yes, Oscar Wilde is #problematic fave. He practically invented being a problematic fave. I can almost guarantee that young Victorian ladies were fanning themselves and sighing over how much they loved his plays but it was too bad he was so scandalous and their mama wouldn’t let them go see him lecture. I am Aware. I could cheerfully list his myriad sins. But for pretty much all of them, I can think of mitigating factors. I will settle for saying that it’s essentially unfair for a modern, Western person to judge the sexual lives of queer* people in the past. They lived in a completely different culture from us, and many of them were simply doing the best they could under difficult, painful circumstances. It’s important to remember that legal, socially accepted same sex relationships are a very recent invention in the west. If Oscar Wilde cheated on his wife and turned to sex workers, well, what the hell else was he going to do? It’s probably worthwhile to note that by all accounts, he always treated his wife and sex workers very decently and generously.

(*Queer is an anachronistic term. I am aware. However, it’s a little tedious to write out “same sex attracted people” every time. In my opinion, queer is the modern term that most closely matches the way that Oscar Wilde wrote about sexuality. So that’s what I’m going to use.)

Despite his flaws, Wilde also did a lot of amazing stuff. He was, by most accounts, incredibly generous and kind. He was funny and witty. He was good to his children. My friends, we probably wouldn’t look at pretty pictures and write #aesthetic if it were not for Oscar Wilde. He modernized play writing. He was a socialist!!! He was a feminist!! He hated corsets!! He wrote out like a fifty page essay that was basically his headcanons about how Shakespeare was bi and hooking up with his one of his actors who was named Willie Hughes. He wrote kinda bad poetry (which I personally like). He lowkey had a feud with Henry James. He was a Fashion Icon who loved having his photo taken. If you or someone you love has ever worn a tux you can thank Wilde for helping popularize them. And, in my opinion most importantly, he was constantly thinking and writing (subtextually) about how to revolutionize cultural thought about sexuality and male identity. To call Oscar Wilde “gay” or “homosexual” is really a simplification of how he thought about sexuality. In fact, he explicitly objected to being called homosexual (altho it’s important to remember that was a much more stigmatizing term at the time than it is now!). Oscar Wilde, instead, was interested in a forming a world in which, basically, everyone could be themselves and could express themselves freely through art and sex. He wanted people to be able to freely love each other without being slapped with some fixed, restrictive label. Like, you guys, do u ever cry b/c Oscar Wilde just wanted the world to be beautiful and queer and free and for everyone to be gay and happy and make art BECAUSE I DO

And, like, okay. Bosie had a hard life too. I get that! His father has gotta be on the list of like Top Ten Biggest Assholes In History. As much as I dislike Bosie, multiply that by like ten hundred and that’s how I feel about fuckboy Marquis of Queenbury. I know I made that post about traveling back in time to punch Bosie; well, the only reason I don’t wanna punch his dad is b/c his dad like literally invented (a form of) boxing and I’m very small. I am Positive I could take Bosie in a fight, and I am positive his black hole of a father could take me. Also it was probably not easy to be a trailblazing twink in the 1890s (altho like John Gray managed it without being a literal piece of shit so……..). To be serious, Bosie clearly had a lot of rough stuff in his life. But, you know, so do lots of people. And I know I was just saying it’s hard to judge historical figures for their sex lives, but I’m judging Bosie for his behavior, not his sex. So, with all the context out of the way, here’s why I hate Bosie:

a) His poetry is like the soppiest shit ever.

b) He was extremely emotionally manipulative and possibly abusive toward Oscar Wilde. I know it seems kind of weird, because our cultural mindset for abusive relationship is big beefy guy beating his small, helpless wife. And Bosie and Oscar are both men, and Oscar was older and physically larger (did you know that he was like six foot? I hadn’t known that.). But there’s a lot of fucked up stories about their relationship. They were very on again off again, with Oscar frequently being the one to end things, and there are reports of Bosie going to extreme ends to get them back together, including threatening to kill himself. One story, which is hilarious with the distance of time but would have surely been dreadful when it happened, is that one time when they broke up, Bosie sent Oscar a nine. page. telegraph. NINE PAGES! For those of you who don’t know, telegraphs back then charged by the word. That’s like sending your boyfriend nine pages worth of texts, except you send each word individually and you know for a fact he’s out of data for the month. Also some poor individual had to type it all out for you. And yes, Wilde was the one to pay, because you could send telegraphs collect. And this despite the fact that Bosie was very well off, whereas Wilde, who was rather extravagant in his pursuit of dat aesthetic lifestyle, was usually tight on money. There’s also a rather horrible story about a time where Bosie fell ill and Wilde tenderly nursed him back to health, and then when Bosie recovered and Wilde caught his illness and fell sick himself, Bosie verbally abused him and left him alone to suffer. What I’m saying is, it was not a healthy relationship and Bosie did not treat Wilde well.

c) It’s basically inarguable that Bosie played a significant role in Wilde’s trial. Again, I’m not saying it’s just his fault, because it wasn’t. But things would have gone down massively differently without Bosie…or they might not have gone down at all. (Do u ever cry b/c maybe Wilde didn’t have to die at 46 and maybe if he hadn’t queer rights would be years, decades ahead of where they are now I mean I’m not saying definitely, I’m just saying m a y b e???)Queensbury family dynamics were a highly complex thing. It’s probably significant that somewhat before the trial, Bosie’s older brother died under controversial circumstances. The official story was it was a hunting accident, but the gossip of the day was that he killed himself because he was having an affair with another man. This was a serious blow to Bosie’s father, so when his youngest son, with whom he’d always had a contentious relationship, started publicly cavorting with a man rumored to be up to some real scandalous shit, the Marquis of Queensbury was not happy. At one point he even physically threatened Wilde’s life. But Wilde, at least at first, genuinely tried to calm things down. He repeatedly advised Bosie to make up with his father; instead, Bosie continued to provoke him. Eventually, Queensbury left a note for Wilde at a club accusing him of being a sodomite (basically the Victorian equivalent of calling someone the f-slur). And this is where things get really messed up. All of Wilde’s friends advised him to just leave things alone, not make things messy. Bosie, in contrast, advised Wilde to sue his father for libel. So, like, quick note about the legal ramifications of this: basically, libel is only illegal if it’s not true. Thus, all Queensbury’s lawyers had to do was prove that Wilde was having sex with men, which they were able to do, because, you know, he was totally having sex with men. I mean, it was wildly foolish of Wilde to sue for libel when he knew it was not libel! Why would Bosie push him into that?And that wasn’t the end of it, because the Labouchere Amendment made it illegal for two men to have sex, even in the privacy of their own homes. So, because Queensbury’s lawyers could prove that Wilde was engaging in gross indecency, he was able to be charged. The libel trial ruined Wilde’s social standing; the second trial ruined him legally. Oh, and the costs of the trial also bankrupted him! Things then get slightly more horrible, because, for a person of Wilde’s fame and status, the police basically gave you a warning period. There was a time frame in which he could have fled the country, and extradition treaties were not really a thing then, so although he would have been ruined and unable to return to England, he wouldn’t have been arrested. All of his friends advised him to flee, but he didn’t. And no one really knows why, although if you ask me, it’s because a) he was basically an extremely self destructive person, and b) I think it’s probably unimaginably heart breaking to have your entire society turn on you and paint you as a monster and pervert, and maybe at a certain point you lose the will to fight, and c) Oscar Wilde wanted everything to be beautiful and like art, like a story, and I wonder if he didn’t feel that this was how the story of his life was “supposed” to go. But that’s really just my theory.And so Oscar Wilde was sent to jail for 4 years hard labor, and by all accounts his heart and his health were broken. He lived in France for a few years, but he never wrote anything again other than the Ballad of Reading Gaol (“Each man kills the thing he loves”… I’m looking at YOU Bosie), and then he died, still quite young, and not of syphilis despite what certain supposedly reputable biographies try and tell you.And none of that had to happen. None of that would have happened if it weren’t for Bosie. He shouldn’t have pushed his father to attack Oscar, and he certainly shouldn’t have pushed Oscar into the libel trial. Oscar Wilde himself wrote that he felt as if Bosie threw him and his father at each other, as if he was trying to destroy both of them. And then after the trial, he basically abandoned Wilde. I believe he only visited him in jail once. Why would you do that? Why would you try and destroy the person you supposedly love, the person that loves you? I just can’t understand or forgive that. I know I joke around a lot in this post but what happened to Wilde honestly makes me so sad. It breaks my heart. He was a beautiful person who wanted to make the world beautiful and full of love and art, and the person he loved tried to destroy him. And really, the inexcusable straw for me is that later in life Bosie wrote some piece of shit biography in which he denied that he and Wilde were ever lovers and painted Wilde as some sort of monster and pervert. No one fucking asked you, Bosie.

So yes, that’s why I fucking hate Bosie, and that’s my Oscar Wilde Discourse™.

#things you didn't care to know about veronica #the asks and the answers #oscar wilde #that oscar wilde discourse #bosie hate #do i need to tag that lol #i hope this is not? a controversial opinion?#but even if it is I STAND BY IT #i hate bosie fight me #but like...be gentle

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preciousmetals0 · 4 years

Text

Congress Gets Bold; Greatness in Gold

Congress Gets Bold; Greatness in Gold:

It Can’t Rain All the Time

Hope for a light at the end of the tunnel — that, dear readers, is why Wall Street rallied today.

Hope that legislators in Washington, D.C., finally set aside their differences to help the American people.

The Federal Reserve has already taken care of Wall Street — “unlimited stimulus” is nothing to laugh at. As Great Stuff reader Larry S. put it yesterday: “This is huge.”

And yet, Main Street USA still waits on pins and needles for Congress to finally reassure the rest of the country.

The latest stimulus bill promises to boost a U.S. economy struggling with massive layoffs, overcrowded hospitals and suffering businesses.

While this bill would be a major step forward to combat the effects of COVID-19, we still have a long way to go in this fight.

We’re reminded of this today as Japan postpones the 2020 Olympics. The only other postponement in Olympic history was the 1972 Munich Games, which were delayed for a day due to terrorist activities.

The Olympics didn’t take place at all in 1916, 1940 and 1944 due to world wars.

How’s that for perspective on COVID-19?

We’ll have another stark reminder later this week, when the Department of Labor releases its weekly jobless claims report. Bank of America expects initial jobless claims to hit 3 million due to mass layoffs following coronavirus shutdowns.

The Takeaway:

Mr. Great Stuff, the market is rallying! There’s hope for a deal! Why are you always so negative?

If I sound negative, it’s because I’m trying to be honest with you! It’s impossible to make sound investing decisions when you’re blasted with extreme market sentiment every day.

Today’s message is that everything will be OK … that Congress and the Fed are riding to the rescue.

Honestly, everything will be OK. Congress and the Fed are riding to the rescue.

However, it’s just as honest to say that there’s no magic wand, no legislation to pass and no amount of stimulus to dump on the American economy to make this all just disappear overnight.

You need to know that.

So, while everything will be OK eventually, you need to keep protecting yourself and your investments for the time being.

I’m here to look out for you (and make you laugh if I can). And if I sound like I’m politically “left of center” or “right wing” while doing that, then so be it. (Seriously, I’ve been called both in the past week … so I must be doing something right.)

Now, if the markets’ mixed messages have you feeling particularly uncertain on days like today, congrats! That means you’re paying attention.

This may ruffle a feather or two out there … but, with the right flavor of diversity in your portfolio, there’s no need for certainty.

Gasp! How can that be, Mr. Great Stuff?

Just ask Ted Bauman, an expert here at Banyan Hill. Ted diversifies like no one’s business. In fact, his readers in The Bauman Letter had diversification at their fingertips long before this mess began…

The Bauman Letter is actually three diversified model portfolios in one: long-term gain opportunities, short-term rallies and opportunities to generate income in the meantime.

(Click here to learn more!)

Not to mention, Ted’s also the man with a plan when it comes to tax season. (I bet you forgot about all that while looking for toilet paper, huh?) Yes, I know the Feds extended this year’s tax deadline … but just think about all the slackers you’ll beat by getting it done now!

And if you click here, you can discover some of Ted’s clever ways that you could pay $0 in federal income taxes — legally, that is.

Good: Stardog Champion

In a sign that risk tolerance may be on its way back into the markets, shares of speculative space syndicate Virgin Galactic Holding Inc. (NYSE: SPCE) blasted off again. (Prepare for trouble, and make it double?)

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) analyst Adam Jonas (My name is Jonas…) upgraded SPCE from equal weight to overweight this morning, prompting a 20%-plus rally in the shares. Jonas cited Virgin’s “healthy cash position” and noted that the company should weather near-term headwinds well.

The “story and the balance sheet remain intact,” Jonas concluded.

Regular readers know that Great Stuff has been critical of investing in Virgin Galactic — and for good reason. The company has no revenue, no earnings and its spacecraft only reach the bare minimum of what’s considered space.

That said, the space tourism market is attractive … or it will be once more Earth-based issues like COVID-19 are addressed. Even after it crashed more than 60% in the past month, SPCE still appears overvalued — especially after today’s upgrade-induced rally.

The main takeaway here is that risk tolerance toward speculative bets like SPCE is making a bit of a comeback. And that’s healthy for the market.

Better: Outshined

With all this market uncertainty, gold is finally coming into its own. What’s more, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) believes that now is the time to buy.

Why? Because the gold market has reached an “inflection point.”

According to Goldman, it goes like this: The Federal Reserve’s recent moves to buy unlimited amounts of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities eased liquidity concerns in the market. With liquidity (i.e., cash flow) now more stable, investors will be more willing to sell gold to raise cash and expand their balance sheets.

However, Goldman notes that we’ve reached “an inflection point where ‘fear’-driven purchases will begin to dominate liquidity-driven selling pressure, as it did in November 2008.”

In layman’s terms, investors will increasingly sell gold to gain liquidity (cash), but safe-haven buying will drive prices higher.

That didn’t make it any simpler, did it? The bottom line is that gold will rise again on safe-haven demand amid market uncertainty, and technical factors in the market should no longer limit its upside.

Case in point: The SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE: GLD) exchange-traded fund (ETF) is up big today, and it remains a Great Stuff suggestion for avoiding the worst that this market has to offer.

Best: Nearly Lost You

In 2018, crashing crypto demand nearly sunk Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq: NVDA). The company was making money hand over fist selling high-powered graphicsprocessing units (GPUs … graphics cards for the computer) to crypto miners looking to score it big in bitcoin’s Wild West.

Now, those teraflop GPUs are finding a different use entirely. According to Needham analyst Rajvindra Gill — who upgraded the stock from hold to buy — Nvidia’s chips are increasingly attractive for analyzing genomes and viruses, speeding up the process “from days to less than one hour.”

After all, if Nvidia’s GPUs can crunch coins on the blockchain, they can analyze viruses just fine.

Gill also touted Nvidia’s balance sheet, noting that “during this uncertain time, superior balance sheets remain supreme.” The company sits on $8.9 billion in cash — more cash on hand than all but one of the 21 chip companies in the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF (Nasdaq: SOXX).

On a final note, Great Stuff would also like to point out that gaming revenue could climb for Nvidia as more people stay at home to avoid the coronavirus. Definitely put this stock on your watch list.

I feel like we need a bit more perspective on COVID-19’s impact on the markets and the U.S. economy. This Chart of the Week comes from this Visual Capitalist article, which shows how we went from a 10-year bull market to a bear market in just 16 days.

That’s unprecedented. It’s faster than the 2008 financial crisis … faster than 1987’s Black Monday … and almost twice as fast as the Great Depression.

So, when people ask me why I sound negative … it’s not that I’m being negative, per se. It’s that I’m trying to keep you grounded in the reality of the situation.

For those looking for a positive spin, we’ve also seen unprecedented steps taken by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to address the situation.

I commend their action, but you still need all the facts. You still need to prepare for this to drag on for a while.

Be patient. Opportunities will arise, and with Great Stuff and Banyan Hill at your side, you’ll be prepared to take advantage of them.

Great Stuff: Set Me Straight

I holler, you holler, we’re all hollering this week.

So far, y’all have had a field day writing in to share your thoughts with Great Stuff … and I love it! Yes, even those emails calling me a socialist, fascist, pacifist, masochist — keep ’em coming.

If you haven’t taken a second to write in to [email protected], well, what’s stopping you?

You have approximately two days to make this week’s edition of Reader Feedback. (That’s one sundown and two sunups for my folks who booked it off the grid … wait, how are you reading this?!)

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Great Stuff on social media. If you can’t get enough meme-y market goodness, follow Great Stuff on Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Editor, Great Stuff

0 notes

goldira01 · 4 years

Link

It Can’t Rain All the Time

Hope for a light at the end of the tunnel — that, dear readers, is why Wall Street rallied today.

Hope that legislators in Washington, D.C., finally set aside their differences to help the American people.

The Federal Reserve has already taken care of Wall Street — “unlimited stimulus” is nothing to laugh at. As Great Stuff reader Larry S. put it yesterday: “This is huge.”

And yet, Main Street USA still waits on pins and needles for Congress to finally reassure the rest of the country.

The latest stimulus bill promises to boost a U.S. economy struggling with massive layoffs, overcrowded hospitals and suffering businesses.

While this bill would be a major step forward to combat the effects of COVID-19, we still have a long way to go in this fight.

The Olympics didn’t take place at all in 1916, 1940 and 1944 due to world wars.

How’s that for perspective on COVID-19?

The Takeaway:

Mr. Great Stuff, the market is rallying! There’s hope for a deal! Why are you always so negative?

If I sound negative, it’s because I’m trying to be honest with you! It’s impossible to make sound investing decisions when you’re blasted with extreme market sentiment every day.

Today’s message is that everything will be OK … that Congress and the Fed are riding to the rescue.

Honestly, everything will be OK. Congress and the Fed are riding to the rescue.

However, it’s just as honest to say that there’s no magic wand, no legislation to pass and no amount of stimulus to dump on the American economy to make this all just disappear overnight.

You need to know that.

So, while everything will be OK eventually, you need to keep protecting yourself and your investments for the time being.

Now, if the markets’ mixed messages have you feeling particularly uncertain on days like today, congrats! That means you’re paying attention.

This may ruffle a feather or two out there … but, with the right flavor of diversity in your portfolio, there’s no need for certainty.

Gasp! How can that be, Mr. Great Stuff?

The Bauman Letter is actually three diversified model portfolios in one: long-term gain opportunities, short-term rallies and opportunities to generate income in the meantime.

(Click here to learn more!)

And if you click here, you can discover some of Ted’s clever ways that you could pay $0 in federal income taxes — legally, that is.

Good: Stardog Champion

The “story and the balance sheet remain intact,” Jonas concluded.

The main takeaway here is that risk tolerance toward speculative bets like SPCE is making a bit of a comeback. And that’s healthy for the market.

Better: Outshined

With all this market uncertainty, gold is finally coming into its own. What’s more, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) believes that now is the time to buy.

Why? Because the gold market has reached an “inflection point.”

However, Goldman notes that we’ve reached “an inflection point where ‘fear’-driven purchases will begin to dominate liquidity-driven selling pressure, as it did in November 2008.”

In layman’s terms, investors will increasingly sell gold to gain liquidity (cash), but safe-haven buying will drive prices higher.

Case in point: The SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE: GLD) exchange-traded fund (ETF) is up big today, and it remains a Great Stuff suggestion for avoiding the worst that this market has to offer.

Best: Nearly Lost You

After all, if Nvidia’s GPUs can crunch coins on the blockchain, they can analyze viruses just fine.

That’s unprecedented. It’s faster than the 2008 financial crisis … faster than 1987’s Black Monday … and almost twice as fast as the Great Depression.

So, when people ask me why I sound negative … it’s not that I’m being negative, per se. It’s that I’m trying to keep you grounded in the reality of the situation.

For those looking for a positive spin, we’ve also seen unprecedented steps taken by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to address the situation.

I commend their action, but you still need all the facts. You still need to prepare for this to drag on for a while.

Be patient. Opportunities will arise, and with Great Stuff and Banyan Hill at your side, you’ll be prepared to take advantage of them.

Great Stuff: Set Me Straight

I holler, you holler, we’re all hollering this week.

If you haven’t taken a second to write in to [email protected], well, what’s stopping you?

You have approximately two days to make this week’s edition of Reader Feedback. (That’s one sundown and two sunups for my folks who booked it off the grid … wait, how are you reading this?!)

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out Great Stuff on social media. If you can’t get enough meme-y market goodness, follow Great Stuff on Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Editor, Great Stuff

#Timor Invest

0 notes

courtneytincher · 5 years

Text

Joe Walsh: The New Never Trump Candidate

With well over twenty candidates vying for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the Republican side appears downright quaint. Joe Walsh wants to change that. The former one-term congressman, radio host, and inveterate Twitter personality is seriously considering a primary challenge to incumbent Donald Trump. Walsh has said he’ll make a final decision by Labor Day, with an announcement as early as this weekend.Walsh, elected to represent Illinois in the Tea Party wave of 2010, would challenge him from the Right, making the case that Trump has too many unfulfilled promises to deserve reelection. But more than that, Walsh wants to smooth out the edges to Trump, which he says are toxic electorally and ethically. “The fact is, Mr. Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. In this, he inspires imitators,” wrote Walsh in a New York Times op-ed last week, testing the waters of his candidacy.Walsh told Politico that he doesn’t think this would be a suicide mission. “There’s a drumbeat from a lot of people out there for somebody who wants to take this on,” he said, confident that he could get financial support from dissatisfied Republicans. Donald Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is currently over eighty percent, and major donors Charles Koch and Robert Mercer, who opposed Trump’s nomination in 2016, have made their peace with the party leader.“A lot of what he’s saying is that Trump doesn’t have support from within the Republican Party, and I think the obvious answer is that he does. And I think criticizing Trump as being a conman, and immoral, and a bad example for children, I think that criticism has already been factored into Trump supporters’ equation,” explained Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center. “A lot of them understand that he’s not the nicest guy out there, but they feel like he’s fighting for their interest and they’re going to support him to the hilt.”However, despite his play for decency, Joe Walsh is far from fitting the “nice guy” mold himself. The potential candidate has years of controversies, insensitive statements, and loose language at his back.Walsh has a history of using the n-word on Twitter, typically complaining about his inability to use it on air or making false equivalencies between its use and the terms “redneck” or “cracker.”After the twin mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Walsh was very critical of Trump’s response. “Today, our biggest domestic terror threat is white American men radicalized by white supremacy. Conservatives must be honest enough to acknowledge this,” tweeted Walsh. But in 2017, regarding the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Walsh said “I’m sick and tired of the Sandy Hook parents. They’re partisan & political. They can be attacked just like anyone else.” When someone took issue with his language, Walsh continued. “Oh grow up. These Sandy Hook parents are anti-gun partisans. We have every right to criticize them. Deal with it.”In his op-ed Walsh accused the president of inciting violence with his language. But Walsh has also tested how far partisan language can go. “On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?” he asked his audience before the 2016 election. Earlier that year, after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, Walsh said, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” The latter tweet was removed by Twitter for violating its terms of service.Interestingly, one thing Walsh does agree with the president on is his response to the violence in Charlottesville in 2017. “Why we’re pissed & what Trump got right: TWO hateful ideologies converged in Charlottesville. The media denounces on, ignores the other,” he said. Walsh even attacked the “DC GOP” he’s now trying to court because “they stabbed Trump after Charlottesville.”There are problems of message consistency as well. In June 2018 Walsh said, “The media is NOT the enemy of the American people. Anyone saying that ought to be ashamed of themselves,” rebuking the president’s preferred turn of phrase as dangerous and un-American. But in October 2016 Walsh told the media, “You are the enemy.”“What if the guy sent to Washington to ‘drain the swamp’ turns out to be the most corrupt person to ever inhabit the White House?” asked Walsh in May. But his own corruption may follow his campaign. In 2011, during his only term in the House, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) named Walsh among the most corrupt members of Congress. Alleging that he was “a deadbeat dad,” the organization pointed to court documents showing that at the time Walsh owed over $100,000 in unpaid child support.Since his announcement in 2015, Donald Trump has been dogged by his promotion of birtherism in 2011 and 2012, the accusation that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But even more recently, Joe Walsh lent credence to the conspiracy that Obama was a secret Muslim. “The truth: as practiced by most Muslims, Islam is not a religion. These Muslims are at war w us. Barack Obama, a Muslim, is on their side,” Walsh said in 2015. As late as summer 2017, Walsh was making the same accusation, including a defense of Trump. “Cracks me up that after 8 yrs of a Muslim, Socialist, community organizer in the White House, people are worried about Trump. Hilarious.” Just last year, Walsh continued to defend the position. “I have a right to call Obama a Muslim . . . That’s America.”A deep-seeded fear of Islam appears to motivate a lot of Walsh’s political positions. Claiming that “Muslims . . . have destroyed Europe,” Walsh wants to explicitly stifle all Muslim immigration to the United States. Walsh has been supportive of President Trump’s travel ban, praised his cuts to the number of refugees admitted, and wants to give preference to Christian refugees over Muslim ones during selection.“There won’t be peace in that part of the world until Muslims want peace, until they recognize Israel’s right to exist, and until they join the modern world,” Walsh said. This is why the former congressman favors a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, Syria, and the region-at-large.A part of the region Walsh doesn’t want to disengage from is Israel. He even used his devotion to Israel as his motivation for hating Obama. “I don’t believe Obama is a Muslim. And I continue to apologize for having ever said that. I constantly let my disgust with his policy toward Israel get the better of me,” he said last week. Walsh supports Trump’s moving of the U.S. embassy towards Jerusalem and has been even more critical of Israel critic Rep. Ilhan Omar than the commander-in-chief.One of the biggest policy differences between Trump and Walsh is on Russian-American relations. Calling Trump “unpatriotic,” after agreeing to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Walsh said “we know whose side he’s on.” Walsh theorized that “Putin must have something on Trump,” engaging in the same rampart conspiracy that has plagued the country for three years.It was Trump’s diplomatic outreach that permanently ostracized the rightwing radio host. “That’s it. That should be the final straw. It is for me.”“While Walsh’s Trump conversion appears to me to be sincere, he is poorly suited to make the argument that Never Trump is about the president's temperament, vulgarity and overall fitness for office,” said James Antle, editor of The American Conservative.Joe Walsh has acknowledged as much. “To be sure, I’ve had my share of controversy. On more than one occasion, I questioned Mr. Obama’s truthfulness about his religion. At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them,” he wrote in his op-ed.“I think he seems to be sincere in his criticisms of Trump. I don’t think it comes across as just being a thing he’s doing for his own self-interest. I think he genuinely does think Trump is dangerous and maybe even a threat to the continued viability of the Republican Party,” Kabaservice said.Joe Walsh isn’t the only candidate seeking to challenge Trump. To his left is William Weld, who announced his campaign for the Republican nomination in February. Weld is the former governor of Massachusetts (1991–1997) and was the vice-presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 2016. Weld broke a pledge with the Libertarian Party by announcing his candidacy as a Republican.“If Walsh runs, he’ll do more harm to William Weld than to Trump. There just aren’t a lot of Never Trump votes to go around. What’s interesting is that Walsh and Weld both originally come from the pro-abortion, anti-second amendment, left of the GOP, but both have tried rebranding: Weld as a libertarian, Walsh as a Tea Party bandwaggoner,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age. McCarthy is referring to Walsh’s original run for Congress in 1996, where he referred to himself as a moderate Republican.Walsh’s past improprieties have not gone unnoticed. “It negates one of the main reasons people dislike Trump in the first place, suggesting some of elite anti-Trump animus is really about his deviations from neoconservatism,” Antle told the National Interest.J. Arthur Bloom, deputy editor of The Daily Caller, believes Walsh’s bad behavior shines a light on the real motivations of the Never Trump movement. “The Joe Walsh thing puts the lie to all the NeverTrumper talk about civility and decency. It was never about that, it was that they didn’t get to be in charge with Trump, so they took their ball and went home,” he tweeted.“I think a lot of the people hoping for a primary challenge to Trump were hoping that the challenger would be more of a national figure. Someone like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, for instance,” said Kabaservice. Hogan had previously considered a 2020 primary challenge, but decided against it. “[N]ot just because he seemed to be carrying the torch for an older and perhaps better Republican Party . . . but also because he was somebody who was one of the most popular governors of the United States right now and actually was governing at the present time. And I don’t think Walsh checks those boxes at this point.”There aren’t many boxes Joe Walsh does check. “True cons are truly cons, just not conservatives,” quipped McCarthy.Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at the National Interest.Image: Wikimedia Commons

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dustedmagazine · 5 years

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Why Brecht Now? Vol. III: Ute Lemper sings “Nanna’s Lied”

“Nanna’s Lied” originally appeared as a song in Brecht’s Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe [The Roundheads and the Pointyheads], a broadly satiric anti-Nazi play first staged in Copenhagen in 1936, directed by Ruth Berlau. Die Rundköpfe… featured music by Hans Eisler, Brecht’s frequent collaborator following the crescendo of the legal fireworks the effectively ended his relationship with Kurt Weill. By 1930 Brecht and Weill were no longer working together; of the dissolution of their partnership, Weill famously quipped, “I couldn’t set the Manifesto of the Communist Party to music.”

Whatever the state of their personal and political differences, Weill loved the lyric to “Nanna’s Lied.” He created an alternate musical arrangement for the song, and legend has it that he gave it to his wife Lotte Lenya, whose interpretations of the Brecht/Weill songbook helped popularize the men’s work outside of northern Europe.

But perhaps the best performance of Weill’s version of the song was recorded by Ute Lemper, on Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, released in the U.S. in 1988. Below find Lemper’s performance, Brecht’s lyrics in German and in an English translation (as performed by Frankie Armstrong), and lastly my thoughts on the song and Lemper’s rendition.

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Nanna’s Lied

Meine Herren, mit siebsehn Jahren Kam ich auf den Liebesmarkt Und ich habe viel gefahren. Böses gab es viel Doch das war das Spiel Aber manches hab’ ich doch verargt. (Schliesslich bin ich ja auch ein Mensch.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Freilich geht man mit den Jahren Leichter auf den Liebesmarkt Und umarmt sie dort in Scharen. Aber das Gefühl Wird erstaunlich kühl Wenn man damit allzuwenig kargt. (Scheisslich geht ja jeder Vorrat zu Ende.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

Und auch wen man gut das Handeln Lernte auf der Liebesmess’: Lust in Kleingeld zu verwandeln Ist doch niemals leicht. Nun, es wird erreicht. Doch man wird auch älter unterdes. (Schleisslich bleibt man ja nicht immer siebzehn.)

Gott sei Dank geht alles schnell vorüber Auch die Liebe und der Kummer sogar. Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

[At 17 I went to market: The market where what’s sold is love They tell me it was good experience Much was bad, god knows That’s the way it goes Sometimes I told them just where to go (After all, I’m only human)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included, the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Yes, you learn to play that market With increased facility! You’re handing out embraces wholesale Though you get the pay Feelings fade away If you hand them out too generously (After all, every supply runs out)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Study as you may that market Haggle as you also may You’re selling kisses, and for peanuts Easy? No they ain’t! Still I’ve no complaint Though we don’t get younger day by day (After all, one can’t stay 17 forever)

God be praised, it all will soon be over Love included: the heartache and fear Where are the tears we shed last evening? Where are the snows of yesteryear?]

By the time Die Rundköpfe… was first staged, Brecht had theorized his theatrical praxis of Verfremdungseffekt, or “defamiliarization effect.” You can hear it at work throughout Eisler’s version of “Nanna’s Lied”: the comically jaunty tone of the verses gives way to the introspective first line of the refrain, then collapses into the abject longing summed in the refrain’s last line, which Brecht cribbed from Villon. It’s an exhaustingly varied performance of affect, culminating in the multiple ironies of the prostitute’s nostalgia for the crystalline purity of snowfall; the thematic upshot, one supposes, is that Nanna has just cooly rehearsed for us the dangers of reified sexuality, in which passion must be studied and kisses must be calculated. A prostitute is in a position to know, and to crack a joke or two about it. We laugh when we should reject her cynicism, our hearts swell when we should recoil. It’s Brecht at his ruthlessly clever best.

Weill’s version of the song smooths away many of those jarring transitions. The tone is more consistent. Lemper’s lissome alto builds slowly through the verses, winding silkily into the first two lines of the refrain, and then finding a more vivid intensity as Nanna’s attention drifts toward vague remembrance: “Wo sind die Tränen von gestern abend? / Wo is die Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?” For some reason, while listening to Lemper, I see Nanna abed after her trick has left. She’s enervated, sweat cooling on skin and sheets. Weill’s arrangement invites such a vision; his is a more deliberate arrangement than Eisler’s acrobatics. The Eisler version for me summons Nanna on the street, under the public eye, still needing to ply her knowing, hyperbolized performance of manufactured desire. That these two scenarios can be evoked by the same song demonstrates the forceful logic of Brecht’s lyrics. Whatever the setting, the song’s defamiliarization inevitably does its work. Nanna’s misery and alienation are its manifest realities.

Of course, none of that solves the riddle of the refrain. Why is Nanna so nostalgic? If she wants to conjure the vivid intensities of love long past, why does she think of tears so recently shed, why the cold of snow? Likely that’s more Brechtian defamiliarization. When we romanticize (as all nostalgia does), we tend to emphasize what’s readily recognizable as warm and lovable. We fall back upon the goods in our culture’s storehouse of stereotyped images. The images that Nanna invokes come from a different inventory—perhaps her own, which has been subject to the dehumanizing effects of her labor. Those of us in the audience, settled in seats and in the theater’s warmth, know nothing of her pain, and Brecht wants to shatter any superficial identification or bourgeois “sympathies” for her plight. Such ideologically constructed psychological reactions can only dampen the force of the Real. They distort.

Accounts of Brecht’s own life have been subject to significant romanticization and distortion. Some claim him a propagandist for Stalinism, citing as evidence that Brecht was one of the few intellectuals to voluntarily live in the G.D.R., which offered him a residence in East Berlin and the resources to establish the Berliner Ensemble. Others claim him a life-long Marxist and indefatigable critic of capital’s evils and excesses. Both generalizations are tin-eared to the complexity of his work, and blind to the even more volatile distinctions between the writing and the man. It’s true that he found a home in East Berlin, after years on the run through Scandinavia, a doomed few years in America and a subpoenaed appearance before the H.U.A.C., which demonstrated that the U.S.A.’s claims to political freedom were (and are) largely hollow sloganeering. But Brecht never joined the East German Communist Party, and the only consistent political element in the plays, poems and essays of the last two decades of his life was a fiery contempt for fascism.

Given our historical vantage, it’s hard not to subject Lemper’s version of “Nanna’s Lied” to similar retrospective distortion. 1988 is tantalizingly close to the collapse of the Soviet Union and, more urgently, the celebratory destruction of the Berlin Wall. By the late 1980s, East Berlin had become a hive of brutally repressive Staasi activity, political paranoia and economic desperation. Portions of East Germany’s populace spilled into Hungary and Poland, as Soviet dominance of the region began to show cracks. Pressure was building. We think of that time and feel the tide of history turning—but that’s a tendentious misremembering. In June 1987, Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech still recognized the Wall as an entrenched symbol and dangerous barrier. On 9 October 1989, barely a month before the Wall’s fall, East German officials granted police and military forces permission to shoot at the demonstrators gathering nightly on the Alexanderplatz. No outcome seemed certain. The world was on fire.

We also occupy a period of intense crisis—the world is on fire. The specifics are different, but the scale is similar to the Cold War’s geopolitical totality, and to the late-1930s global fascist moment. And our language and inventory of historical knowledge is currently subject to tremendous distortion. To say “socialist” today is to summon cartoon phantoms of Stalin, even Hitler. A Vermonter who has continuously served in the U.S. Congress since 1991 is called a “radical.” The Democratic Party is derided as “leftist.” Never mind that the D.N.C. and nearly every Democratic candidate for the presidency are complicit in neoliberal corporate capitalist interests (save, perhaps, that aforementioned guy from Vermont). Never mind that upon achieving power the Nazi Party privatized massive sectors of the German government, especially social services, banking and transport infrastructures. Never mind that the rise of Hitler in Germany sent leftist thinkers and radicals—like Brecht and Adorno and Horkheimer—into exile, to save their very lives.

For some, our contemporary crisis is best answered by the charms of a M.A.G.A. hat, with its implied longing for a past America, some romanticized time of freedom and plenty that, we are told, Trumpism can bring back. When, precisely, that period of greatness existed is less important than the shared conviction that it was. There’s a quality of vagueness to the nostalgia. A vapid blankness. A whiteness. Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Nostalgia doesn’t want to recognize the ugliness upon which America’s putative greatness was constructed—the relations of economic exploitation that opened the way to massive wealth production, and the equally massive cynicism that governed its distribution and investment. Nanna lives in the abject space that sort of cynicism requires, her body among the thousands upon thousands that labor and barely survive by making daily calculations: how much of my humanity can I surrender today to live through to tomorrow? Black bodies, brown bodies, workers’ bodies, women’s bodies—in Brecht’s Weimar Germany and in the 1930s Jim Crow South; in East Berlin and in El Salvador in the 1980s; in concentration camps, behind barbed wire then and now. Right now. Someone is making the calculation, trading in the market for bare life. Listen to Nanna. She’ll tell you.

Jonathan Shaw

#why brecht now #Dusted magazine #feature #ute lemper #jonathan shaw #bertold brecht #kurt weill

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salecheapsneakers-blog · 5 years

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chiseler · 4 years

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Ridicule is Man’s Most Potent Weapon

During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life." He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.” The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.

Out of simple contrariness, when I was about twelve or thirteen I began working my way through the entire political spectrum, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left and beyond. I became an outspoken True Believer at each stop along the way—I was a fascist, a conservative, a revolutionary Marxist—sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. By the time I was in high school, I considered myself a Bakuninist with strong Nihilist leanings. It was around that time I first read Alinsky’s last book, Rules for Radicals, originally published in 1971, less than a year before his death.

After three decades of working tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s urban poor to empower themselves one neighborhood at a time, the book was Alinsky’s attempt to distill the lessons he’d learned from personal experience, adapting them for the new generation of young student radicals emerging from the Sixties.

I found the book insufferable and obnoxious. Not only was I not interested in having some liberal blowhard preach to me about “rules,” I had no interest in organizing anything, let alone “communities.” What’s more, Alinsky’s standard m.o. for achieving social change—namely unifying a disparate group of people by identifying a common enemy for them, then letting their hate do the rest—struck me as not all that different from the tack used by Germany’s National Socialists in the Twenties and Thirties, and by the racist rabble-rousers who worked their way through the American South in the Fifties and Sixties. At the time I took it as more confirmation that at heart there was no discernible difference between the Right and Left, they simply used different vocabularies to achieve their goals via the same methods.

Forty years later, still an unrepentant nihilist, I decided it was time to reassess Alinsky. Considering the present circumstances, it only seemed fair.

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909, and received a degree in archaeology from The University of Chicago in 1930. Quickly recognizing there wasn’t much call for archaeologists during the Great Depression, he went on to grad school (again at the U of C), this time studying criminology. He left grad school after two years, and began working part time as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But having attended college on Chicago’s South Side, all Alinsky had to do was venture a block off campus in any direction to be confronted with the sort of living conditions experienced by the city’s poor blacks. A firm believer in the value and power of participatory democracy, it occurred to him that a large percentage of the American populace had effectively been silenced and forgotten, and had no say in the kind of local policymaking that affected them directly.

Toward the end of the decade he began edging away from labor issues after recognizing the much more widespread and devastating issue of the daily nightmare facing Chicago’s poor black community. With his organizational skills, he took it upon himself to try and show the residents of a blighted neighborhood near the Stockyards how they might unite in an effort to get local officials to pay attention to them at last. It was a ballsy move in 1939 for a young Jewish intellectual, but having encountered pervasive anti-Semitism for much of his life, it was an issue he could relate to, perhaps even more so than the problems facing factory workers.

After organizing several politically active community groups in neighborhoods around the South Side, and after those groups at long last finally started having their voices heard by city and state officials, Alinsky took his methodology on the road in the Fifties, helping organize similar community groups in the slums of other major cities around the country. In the early Sixties, he returned to Chicago to begin mobilizing disenfranchised poor blacks in some of the city’s other ghettoes, which did not place him in the good graces of Mayor Richard Daley.

For all his good intentions, Alinsky was, like most of us, a mass of contradictions. He once famously said, “I’d rather steal than go on welfare.” Although often wildly misinterpreted, the underlying message was that his goal in mobilizing these groups was to help them empower themselves. Help them become more self sufficient instead of being dependent on government entitlement programs. Ironically, had his intentions been understood, it was an idea and a goal that would have been roundly applauded by the same staunch conservatives who were attacking him at every turn, just as he was attacking them.

He insisted he only organized in neighborhoods where he’d been invited, that he never marched into a new place like some kind of evangelist promising to give the people what they needed. At the same time, as laid out in Rules for Radicals, the standard tactic went like this: He’d enter a community and establish friendly contact with a neighborhood church. Then he’d appraise the local situation, identify a major problem, and most important of all, finger a demon, usually a local politician, businessman, slum lord or the like. He’d make contacts and spread the word using the church as a headquarters. The new community activist group would then choose their own board of directors. In the best of all possible worlds, the newly-chosen enemy, after being publicly goaded and ridiculed by protesters, will in turn try to vilify, demonize or somehow discredit the protest’s leaders, and once that happens you’re good to go—it will only strengthen your position and spur other people to join up. Then he would offer a few tactical suggestions and back away, letting the newly-born activist group do what needed to be done to fix the problem. In short, it’s a process of not only pointing out, but often creating a conflict that needs to be solved. Again, it’s a tactic that works just as well for Nazis and racists as it does for the struggling underclass desperate to be heard, and in many cases works much, much better.

He was adamant in his refusal to join any organization (“Even those I’ve set up,” he once said). He despised religious and political groups of all stripes, saying once you join one, you are expected to adhere to their dogma and doctrines, which was something he could not stomach. At the same time, he was not reluctant to cut deals with religious or political groups when it was expedient or somehow served his purpose. It also seems a bit contradictory that a man with such disdain for the doctrinaire would go on to publish a book of rules he hoped people would follow.

That said, unlike most activists, Alinsky at least had a sense of humor, and was a major proponent of the unorthodox protest. The third rule he lays out in his book states, "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Marching around with picket signs and chanting “The people united will never be defeated” simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore. He counseled newly-minted community activists to go beyond the general experience and thinking of the enemy. Give them something they can’t quite fathom. He further counseled them that people always do the right thing for the wrong reason, so they should use that to their advantage whenever possible.

Case in point, when it was learned a slum lord who owned several decaying housing complexes in Chicago lived in a wealthy white suburb, Alinsky arranged to send busloads of black protesters to picket on the clean suburban sidewalks for days on end. In time the slum lord’s neighbors began putting pressure on him to do something about the conditions in his buildings, not out of any solidarity with the protesters, but simply in an effort to make them go away.

He also learned that sometimes merely the threat of an outrageous protest was enough to make local officials agree to hear the activist’s grievances. All progress comes in response to a threat, after all. A threatened Piss-In at O’Hare, in which hundreds of blacks would commandeer every urinal in the airport for as long as it took did the trick, as did a threatened Fart-In at a local philharmonic concert in Rochester, NY.

So I like to think of Alinsky as a radical who was earnest in his intent, but not righteous, which again sets him apart from most social activists.

As an aside, going back to Alinsky now after so many years it occurs to me how much an (utterly subconscious) influence he was on the Dadaist revolutionary group a friend and I formed in college, The Nihilist Workers Party. Particularly that third rule mentioned above, though we referred to it as “Semantic Interference.” Instead of threatening Piss-Ins to further the social good, however, we threatened to immolate (imaginary) puppies in public, marched outside the student union with blank protest signs and smoked large black cigars in fancy sweater shops for no reason at all.

Toward the end of his life, after spending thirty years attempting to empower disenfranchised poor blacks, Alinsky next set his sights on the white middle class, who in the early Seventies were feeling a bit disenfranchised themselves. Following the turmoil of the Sixties, their world had been turned upside down, they were frightened and dismayed and confused. THe comfort and security of the Eisenhower Era was gone. As Alinsky saw it, if he didn’t do something to help spur them to be more politically active and socially conscious, help them feel like they still had a voice in this new world, some Right Wing extremist kook would come along promising to set the clock back to a better day, and they’d follow. What’s more, if middle class whites and poor blacks couldn’t find some kind of unity, didn’t start working together to wrest power back from the wealthy, we would all remain as fucked as ever.

Well, forty-five years on now, it’s clear his warnings were fairly prescient.

What is interesting, however, has been the rise of countless grassroots movements across the country over the past eighteen months. Some are pro-Trump, some are anti-Trump, but most in one way or another arose in direct response to that single unifying figure, most are reacting to a perceived threat from one side or the other, and most, wittingly or not, seem to be employing Alinsky’s tactics.

But one widespread criticism of Alinsky’s tactics over the years holds that too often the activist groups in question lose sight of the real problem, that bit of social justice they were after in the first place. Instead they concentrate their energies on destroying their chosen enemy assuming this is all that needs to be done, or they get sidetracked and focus on some petty issue only tangentially related to the original conflict.

This is certainly what seems to be happening today, with most of the stated goals becoming so petty and wrongheaded as to completely lose sight of the larger picture. Will removing a bunch of statues really do anything to put an end to racism? Will impeaching the president really do anything to turn the clock back and make it all right again? Will burning down a Washington DC pizza parlor prevent a thousand children a day from being shipped to Mars to become sex slaves of the Satanic liberal elite? Of course not, But try telling any of them that. They’re doing something, they’re seeing immediate results, and that’s all that matters.

I do have more respect for Alinsky now than I did when I was in high school. What he told Buckley about the role of conflict, controversy and threat simply seems a given now. But looking at the present situation I have come to understand that his greatest, his ultimate failure—and this is true of most activist and political theorists of any shade—was neglecting to admit that most people are vindictive, bone-stupid sillyasses by nature, and we will always be fucked as a result.

by Jim Knipfel

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