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jeanjauthor · 3 years

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In mediveal times how long did a noble family have to exist for to be considered noble and not new money? 10 year, 50 years (son/grandson), 100 years (great, or great-great-grandson), or something so big like 200 years?

I'm going to be bluntly honest.

I have no frikkin' idea.

But we can think it through logically, at least a little bit, as well as draw parallels to modern or recent-era situations that are similar.

(This post ended up rather long, so I’m inserting a Keep Reading cut for the rest of y’all...)

We have a lot more writings on the Georgian/Regency eras (1700s onward) regarding the newly rich versus old money...but that's because there were more opportunities to garner new wealth, through the exploitation and colonization of explorers in the Americas, merchants traveling overseas over much longer distances due to better ship design and navigational charts, etc.

We have complaints about sea captains buying noble titles, giving money to their sovereigns who, for whatever reason, needed more income than they garnered from taxes, etc. People who were ennobled for enslaving foreign regions and extracting local resources for European consumption, so on and so forth.

Part of that was because prior to the boom in exploitative exploration & colonization, there was literally only so much land that could be parceled out to heirs or sold to the newly wealthy merchant classes, and land was still seen as the biggest economic stimulus point (the constant need for herds and crops to feed everyone, etc).

Even mining operations and foundries for smelting iron, etc, were still not advanced enough to be productive enough, because science and technology weren't far enough along for these things to provide enough metal to spark the Industrial Revolution until the turn of the 1800s and later.

We can conclude that the means to amass a lot of wealth was, therefore, difficult to acquire prior to colonization and industrialization. This was not to say that it didn't happen! There were always wars against one's neighbors, there was cross-country trade that could make one rich, someone could stumble across a gold mine (literally, a source of precious metals), so on and so forth. The Crusades were initially about Christian religious fervor...and the acquisition of the wealth of their supposed enemies, the Muslims (who weren't enemies to begin with, btw).

People in the Middle East were literally sitting at a crossroads of trade between Europe, Africa, and Asia, so yes, they had access to a lot more cross-continental commerce than anywhere else. And when the invading crusaders brought back some of that wealth--spices, silks, exotic jewels, dyes, decorative objects, and ideas (yes, those can be a source of wealth! Cross-pollination between different groups sharing ideas almost always leads to new innovations!)--it sparked avarice in the hearts of a lot of people who saw a potential opportunity for acquiring more wealth.

Those who came back with that wealth...possibly bribed their sovereigns, bought lands, became the newly rich...except back then there wasn't quite the same class divide barrier to break. Because those who could afford to go to the Holy Land to conquer & rob it of its wealth had to be able to not only walk themselves there, with enough funds to provision themselves along the way, but needed the equipment to be able to successfully capture rich targets. Horses, armor, weapons, so on and so forth.

They'd also have to attach themselves to some noble's entourage if they weren't noble themselves, and that meant they'd have to share their plunder, etc...or be counted a brigand at best. (Let's be blunt, the difference between sanctioned plundering and brigandry is having the approval of a big group of people regarding your actions.) This meant that most of those that made their wealth off of the Crusades often did so as second and third and fifthborn sons, who weren't going to inherit much anyway--or bastard sons, who by law couldn't inherit without their family jumping through legal and liturgical hoops.

The ones who profited the most off of these plunder campaigns were therefore most likely already a part of the ruling class--or at least the mounted warrior class, which was seen as close enough to being the same thing. Compared to the long-distance merchant classes, who rode or sailed long distances to trade items only produced locally (and thus rare elsewhere) for exotic ones they could bring back and trade at home, the bastards and fourth-born sons had an easier time getting to be acknowledged as "acceptable new money."

Most merchants who did get wealthy tended to do so in free cities, or in city-states that were already mostly democratic (albeit the kind confined to wealthy male citizens) in nature, such as Venice and Genoa, where they did not have kings, or did not have a strong kingly or nobility presence (unlike Paris or London, etc, which were the seats of monarchial power).

But there is one more factor to consider: The Black Death.

Prior to the first major sweep of bubonic plague through Europe in the 1340s, the vast majority of European medieval life was pastorally centered, with the vast majority of people being serfs legally obligated to work the farms for the local lords, a few freemen, the clergy (who were slowly focusing on attaining lots of wealth themselves), and the nobles who were supposed to watch over and protect everyone from outside marauders, etc (to various degrees of belief & efficacy; some were genuinely good leaders who wanted to protect and share the wealth, while others were exploitative SOBs, and most were at some stage in between those two extremes).

When a quarter to a third of everyone died, however...that left crops rotting in the fields, people were weakened and devastated, whole reams of knowledge were lost with the deaths of those who were the masters of their crafts, and...well, the wealthy staggered under the weight. IF they survived themselves, of course.

The vast shift in the availability of workers meant the surviving workers started demanding many of the freedoms they had been previously denied--they literally took their possessions and left their serf-bound homes to go work for anyone who was willing to pay them a lot more and give them more legal freedoms. (Modern folks really need to take notes!) And because all ranks and stations were being hit more or less just as hard as any other caste level, that meant those who could have enforced the peasants staying on their lord's demense-lands were unable to bring enough of them into play to herd the wayward serfs back to their quasi-slavery.

After all, if you had 100 warriors, 50 of which were needed to keep a watch out for brigands and guard the castle, you could afford to send out 20-30 of them to spread out, search for, and round up a stray serf who had run away, while keeping the remainder in reserve. (Remember, serfs who ran away to free cities and stayed there successfully for a year-and-a-day were considered free men and could not be dragged back to their farms...but that left 366 days in which they could be caught and dragged back.)

But if you lost 30 of your warrior-class, you'd still need 50 to guard the castle and its lands--possibly more in such restless times!--and you'd only have 20 to spare, period. Which meant in a practical sense that you'd only have 5-10 at most you could send out (needing to keep a reserve at your home base), which meant searches for runaways were far less efficient--either they'd have to search fewer areas with large enough groups to capture and return, or they'd have to split up, find the serf, run for help, and hope the serf was still in that same area when they got back with enough forces to capture the serf without risking injury to themselves or to the peasant in question.

Prior to the Black Death, upward mobility was a rare thing--you practically had to save the life of the king in battle, etc. This was of course easier to do in the 700s than in the 1200s, but still not an easy thing. And even then, you'd have to prove you were "noble enough" to be accepted by the upper classes. We know this upward mobility of the wealthy-but-not-noble was restricted because we do have increasingly stiff sumptuary laws--aka what non-nobles were allowed to wear.

Literally, wearing winter ermine--the white fur of the ermine mustelid with the black-tip tails--was reserved for royalty and very high ranked clergy and sometimes very high ranked nobility depending on timeperiod and culture. Indeed, a lot of furs became increasingly social-rank-dependent, to the point that only squirrel fur was considered "open for everyone." Yes, only squirrels, because even rabbits were considered to "belong" to the local lord, and poaching them for eating, never mind for wearing, became a punishable crime.

You had to have permission from your social betters to wear luxurious furs and other items....so we can conclude that upward mobility was not much of a thing...up until the devastation of the Black Death upended social order, and the vast majority of people seized back many of their natural rights and forced social status mobility upon those who held all the wealth and the power. (*ahem* Do Take Notes, People. *stares in Covid Pandemic* (Yes, I have no chill on this point, there are TOO MANY PARALLELS to what we're suffering today, socio-economically.))

Anyway! if you're thinking medieval pre-pandemic, there wasn't as much social mobility. Post-pandemic (and there were several waves of the Black Death and other plagues, btw, including a devastaing plague in 1655, not just the most famous one of the late 1340s/early 1350s), there was a lot more elbow room for jostling your way toward the top.

However, the best hope one could have for social mobility was to buy into a noble family. Usually via a marriage contract, wherein the non-noble brought in a great deal of wealth to a potentially impoverished noble family, with their offspring to be considered part of the noble family.

This was often done by someone with an ongoing source of wealth, such as merchant enterprises, or someone who could, say, create exceptional glassware, or whose family line held trade secrets in a lucrative profession, such as the thread-of-gold makers in London, ladies who were taught the secrets from an early age and whose skills were sought far and wide--or the lacemakers of certain regions in France, the Low Countries, southern England... Though to say it was "often" done isn't exactly an indication that it was done often, just that it was more likely a means to acquiring social status than saving the life of a king, etc.

So those are several of the possible ways to become wealthy and high in social status. As for "new rich vs old money"...that's a complex and lesser known subject. Most of the records we have from the medieval era were from legal documents and/or household ledgers, neither of which lend themselves to including personal annotations on things like, "A suckling pig and 2 pounds 16 shillings - Mercantile Atteborough paid this much to be included as an honored guest at the Feast of St. Barnabas in my southern manor keep."

Or maybe, "Goodwife Ashton paid 20 shillings to be able to wear a mantle lined with sable marten fur throughout the winter despite it being above her station, the rude hen" or "My son decided to give a length of silk to the village baker's daughter, even though I told him that she had no right to wear such things until after they were wed and elevated into the family fold..."

We do have a few sources mentioning such things from earlier eras, but writing was such a laborious process, the materials so costly (parchment is literally the inner shaved skin of an animal, often a goat or a sheep, and nowhere near as cheap as paper to produce...but paper breaks down so much faster than parchment over time), that most people tended to not meander about various subjects, but instead saved writing for "truly important" subjects--keeping monetary accounts, tallying things for tax-time, writing about God, and for those few scholars who had the wealth and support system, writing about the natural world, the dawning of science and reason, so on and so forth.

So we don't know how much these things were considered, only that they were considered to at least some small extent.

With all that said, we do know that the longer a family bloodline remains in power, the more determined they are to keep that power, which means concentrating it in the upper classes. (This is dangerous biologically, as inbreeding is...um...yeah. BAD.) In later years, those being allowed to join by marriage would be under heavy expectations to fit in, obey the head of the household/bloodline, and copy the manners and traditions of the class they were joining. But again, not many records of this.

Not all marriages were made for love. We see love as a marital concept among the higher classes only being developed after the rules of Courtly Love had been established for long enough that love as a possibility for high-ranked persons was considered possible. Prior to that, it had been as much or more a business transaction to increase familial power and wealth. But while for the common peasant a marriage was often made based on love and/or compatibility/mutual respect, there were still plenty of families in the in-between ranks who insisted on deliberately matchmaking or at least vetting "prospects" by how much wealth or social power each party or family held.

Again, we don't know how much the consideration of depth of a family's noble or wealthy lineage played into these calculations in the Middle Ages. We do know from the post-colonial era that many noble families back in Europe were scandalized by colonists & other overseas exploiters making loads of money and then not only trying to buy themselves a noble title, but in trying to act like they were the social equals ot the nobility.

"American heiresses" (or anyone from any overseas colony) would come to places like London to enjoy "high civilization." When they did so, their wealth would attract prospective grooms, but their breeding (aka, lack of it) would almost invariably scandalize the prospective groom's social peers and/or family members...until the Industrial Revolution created so many rich "commoners" that the nobles actually lost most of their social status power.

This nobility clout faded especially when America came to economic and cultural prominence on the world stage--a land that prided itself on having zero nobles...but that was not to say America didn't (and doesn't) have a ruling class. We just use different names, and we still have our own Old Money groups, who hoard the reigns of power for themselves and their heirs. Rockefeller is a family name known throughout the nation, as is any politician named Kennedy, for example--and now we have names like Gates and Bezos and Musk...though Gates is technically more old-money than the latter two. (Slightly.)

Unfortunately for the Old Money groups, it is now far too easy for "upstarts" to make billions, diminishing the Old Family names...but make no mistake: Most of these new billionaires still come from money, because they've leveraged their older family ties and associations to wedge themselves into these positions of visible economic power. (Musk bought himself into Tesla; he didn't actually found it. Gates, on the other hand, actually did found MicroSoft and did a lot of the actual programming work in his early days.)

...With all of that said, we only need to look at one more item to determine how long it would take Newly Rich to become Old Money: Time. Depending upon the region and the era...? About 3-4 generations would be my best guess.

Life was short and hard for many people in the Middle Ages, due to the lack of advanced healthcare, with a lot of people dying fairly early on from infections, illnesses, injuries, and the like. While the upper classes would have a lot more access to good food and be less likely to suffer from famines, giving them a better chance at a longer life due to having their nutritional needs met and their bodyfat being a little higher (it's a cushion against ilnesses and injuries, folks; stop being fatphobic!), they would still suffer, and often die much younger than a typical modern-day person might, even one living in modern-day poverty. (Wear your goddamn masks, people!! *ahem*)

When you live in a world where getting to live to be a grandparent or even a great-grandparent is a solid accomplishment, changes will be accepted much more quickly by each successive generation. Mostly because "that's the way it's always been" will have a shorter timeframe needed, due to the lack of grandparents raging on and on about "...that old upstart Timothy bought himself land and the funs to put up a keep on it! He's no more a lord than George the Goose Boy!"

The longer something goes unchallenged in the day-to-day lives of the people experiencing it, the more it seems like it should exist that way. (*STARES HARD AT THE LAST 40 YEARS OF ECONOMIC SUPPRESSIONS.*) And by that metric, given the average shorter lifespans even if you don't count early childhood deaths in mortality statistics across the broad span of medieval times in Europe...it wouldn't take more than 60 or so years for everyone locally to accept that New Money is now Old Money.

...Or that acceptance could happen even faster, if the New Money is clever enough to "share the wealthy" by investing their time, money, and effort in building good relations with their wealthy/high-class "neighbors." This would include publicly deferring to "their betters" and copying the social mannerisms of the upper class without mockery and without overstepping the bounds of what they could reasonably be allowed to do with their newfound status. Truly savy social climbers would be cautious and smart about flaunting their new power, planning for the long term haul rather than reveling too much in the moment.

Note that this statement is building good relations, not spending absurd amounts of money on lavish parties, ostentatious clothing, etc...which brings us to the Old Money side of the equation. Again, this is based in my observations on various peripheral socio-economic factors, and not on direct evidence.

The one thing that would irk the Old Money types pretty much every single time is newcomers being overly flamboyant with their wealth. Especially since the flamboyantly wealthy often end up the stupidly impoverished within a short span of time--to be accepted, the newly rich would have to understand the balance between claiming their wealth and status, and investing it to maintain that power. Wasting it wouldn't be viewed well by those who were raised generation after generation with lessons of how to maintain, expand, and increase their family's wealth and power.

It would be far better for a rising family to absorb and adopt higher-ranking privileges slowly and steadily, rather than greedily grabbing at all of it, all at once. And if they reach out to a neighboring Old Money family "for advice" and show some humility, moderate amounts of flattery (again, not in excess), asking to be treated like a nephew or niece in need of a mentorship, the Old Money family might actually take a proprietary interest in this upcoming family, giving them lessons, helping them get better access to things that were reserved for the upper classes.

Flattery is only good in the long term if there is some genuine sincerety behind it (or the one you are flattering is a narcissist, but they rarely hold onto power for long without serious help from outsiders). Instruction can be obtained with flattery, but also by in being respectfully attentive. And making sure you're not a rival to the Old Money neighbors around you can go a long way toward gaining their acceptance, too. By handling one's rise to power with these things in mind, it could actually allow the Newly Rich to be accepted that much faster, to within a matter of years or decades (with a great deal of luck), if not by one or two generations sooner than usual.

As mentioned above, sometimes Old Money doesn't actually still have the wealth that everyone assumes they have, and they need to accept New Money into their family--aka via an economically advantageous marriage. Sometimes they do have that money, but the sources of reliable wealth and political power are shifting, and the Old Family wishes to diversify its portfolio (so to speak). And sometimes they just want to diversify their power structure. This can include gaining access to up-and-coming industries, being able to have a say in how and where they're used (iron smelting, for example).

Just be aware of the fact that most of the time, if anyone accepted Newly Rich into their Old Money family, it was often an established male accepting a rich but socially-lesser female--aka the "American heiress" syndrome mentioned earlier. While the heiress wives would be...tolerated...if they toed the line, only their children would be considered "much more socially acceptable" because it would be presumed their fathers were raising the children in the Old Money Ways.

(Keep in mind that this is a worldwide trait for patriarchal cultures, not just European in nature. For far too many years, India's caste system allowed women from a lower caste to marry into an upper caste rank, but men were not supposed to marry a woman from a higher caste. This was a method used by the upper casts to deliberately focus familial power higher and higher on the social ladder. And, of course, it allowed high-caste males the social access/right to marry gorgeous low-caste women.)

Most females in a patriarchal society would not get the chance to marry into New Money unless they genuinely had a choice. Most often, they did not, because their families would want to continue concentrating their influence (including matrilineal! revisit this video I posted a while back on just how much influence a matrilineal family line could have on European politics: https://youtu.be/sl4WtajjMks ) into known avenues of power and influence.

...One last caveat: prior to the invasion of the British Isles by the Normans, who treated the local Anglo-Saxons, Celts, etc, as conquered peoples, replacing their nobility with incoming Normans who fight alongside William the Conqueror, many of whom were literally ennobled and given titles and lands etc, practically on the spot just for being a fellow Norman fighter...social mobility into the ranks of the nobility was easier.

If you had the money, the resources, the horses, etc...boom, you were a part of the local power structure. Afterward, there was a stronger incentive to diminish local power & wealth in favor of emphasizing incoming invaders' power and wealth, to be able to subjugate away those who were the original locals. This led to a lot of suppression of social mobility in order to retain power. Not just in the British Isles but elsewhere, as other regions heard of what the Normans were doing, and decided to do it themselves to their own people.

Prior to the 1066 invasion, it was possible for a warrior of commoner birth to go off raiding and looting, bring home a lot of wealth, and be lauded for his (or her!) rise in socio-economic standing. (Whether or not they were Northmen who went a-viking, since plenty of peoples did go raiding for wealth, etc; Scandinavians were just really good at it, far more so than most of the peoples they raided.)

Post-invasion, those in power started to choke down on who could do what, when, how, where, and with whomever else in order to consolidate their socio-economic power. (Seriously, sumptuary laws are mostly a post-1066 thing, along with strict laws of serfdom, up until the Black Death turned everything upside-down.)

So if you're writing a story set prior to the 1000s, there'll be much more opportunity for wealth-based social mobility and its acceptance. But afterwards, much less. But this exists on a continuum/spectrum that varies not only depending on what timeframe the story would exist in, but also where in terms of location, and what kind of social rise-to-power avenue is taken.

After all, someone gaining a lot of money in Genoa or Venice through trade would be heavily lauded by their home society, whereas someone doing the same in, say, Krakow (deep-continent) would be viewed far less companionably by the upper-classes, because trade was not as huge a part of their local culture--trade existed, but it wasn't central to how the locals & their rulers viewed themselves.

Like I said, I don't frikkin know for sure; there isn't enough hands-on documentation in common circulation. But humans have been humaning since before written records began, and we can make some reasonable guesses to help fill in the gaps.

(And if anyone claims you got it wrong, just cry "--IT'S FICTION!! It doesn't HAVE to be that accurate!!")

#answers #medieval moneybags #medieval new rich versus old money

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enjoy-the-small-thingsxx · 3 years

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#Auspol #TonyAbbott

Get this:- (What began as a plague of anonymous fact-checkers attempting to elevate their preferred politics, has metastasised into a truth manufacturing line with the same quality control as a Wuhan mask factory.) NAILED IT.

Probably the best article you will read today and will most likely be ignored because its long it needs to go viral.

(Spectator)

I hope you all have a good memory, because you are going to need it.

Modern political events are being re-written in real-time – dare we say it – ‘whitewashed’ by the unanimous vote of the unelected press. What began as a plague of anonymous fact-checkers attempting to elevate their preferred politics, has metastasised into a truth manufacturing line with the same quality control as a Wuhan mask factory.

There is a danger that the only faithful record of our era will be the one decaying inside our memories. It is a shame that civilisation has fallen back into this bad habit of allowing the powerful to coerce the truth, seizing control on a scaffolding of lies. That said, there is never anything new regarding the squabbles of humanity. The dramatic events of the past few weeks are, in the proper historical context, a tired repeat of the poorly produced saga of our species. These episodes have different authors and a fresh cast, but their underlying story remains the same.

Liberty creates prosperity. Prosperity creates power. Power creates tyranny. Tyranny creates civil upheaval.

After this, the way forward is uncertain. More often than not, the battle for liberty is lost and the citizenry can do little more than lament the freedoms that were so easily and swiftly surrendered to the mob.

If we are to successfully defend our democracy, preserving the historical record is essential. Failure to do so will leave us in the goldfish bowl of fortune, circling the water with Big Brother looking in – distorted and immense on the other side of the glass.

In 2021, our history is guarded by Silicon Valley. We rent space on their cloud servers and entrust companies like Amazon and Google with our private information – usually without reading their terms of service. One accident at a hosting centre or arbitrary censorial act has the potential to erase businesses and memories. Most people place so much faith in these companies that they do not bother backing anything up for safekeeping.

Our civilisation is awash with data hosted by corporate third parties. While most of us are old enough to remember an age before digital streaming, our youngest generations have lived their lives in the palm of Big Tech. They have entwined themselves with these companies in such a way that any attempt made by the wider community to threaten Silicon Valley’s empire will be resisted by devout technological serfs.

When did Social Media’s control of the historical record begin?

Wikipedia was a shiny new thing when I was in high school. Instead of traipsing to the library to locate a reference book that probably wasn’t even filed in the right place, we were gifted this crazy website out of nowhere. Wikipedia was essentially crack for the academic class, providing instant gratification for knowledge-seekers. Type in the question and voila! all the work was done for you. No more waiting in line at the photocopier with an idiot attacking a paper jam with a pair of scissors.

It was like cheating, and that was certainly what our teachers called it. Despite having this glorious database of seemingly infinite knowledge, no one was allowed to use it for anything other than time-wasting ‘wiki-surfing’. (If you haven’t done it, don’t start.)

Our teachers had two objections to the rise of Wikipedia.

The first was a (perfectly reasonable) fear that it would make our inquiring minds lazy. With everyone receiving instant answers, there was no opportunity to stumble over the complexities of a topic. Wikipedia left classrooms in danger of forming monotonous opinions.

Which brings us to the second concern. Wikipedia was given authority over the truth because of its usability, not quality.

Conceived in an open-source environment, it invited thousands of users to post entries about topics which other users then edited – collaborating to create a vast network of information that quickly outstripped the dictionary cabal. With enough people interacting, it was assumed that the truth would win out. Generally speaking, that was the case.

It later became obvious that absolute freedom over information in a publishing environment had a few flaws – namely – humans could be real little shits when they set their minds to it. A common muck-up day activity involved editing the school’s Wikipedia entry with the level of hormone-induced humour that you’d expect.

As usual, politics ruined everything.

The official pages of contentious public figures were the first to be vandalised by bad actors attempting to defame and damage their political opposition. These budding propaganda agents soon learned that subtle changes were the most effective because they went unnoticed for longer. Slight edits to history could be compounded over time, gradually altering the accepted truth until it became the only truth.

As an intellectual product, Wikipedia was simply too good to die from its wounds. It fed off the accumulation and summation of vast quantities of knowledge. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauruses – they all joined this digital abyss, leaving our language vulnerable to shifting definitions. As Wikipedia’s traditional market competition learned, information grows too fast to filter through layers of validation. If you can’t keep up, you die off. This is the exact same dynamic playing out between legacy media and social media.

Wikipedia’s influence over society became so acute that it suffered censorial attacks by the European Union when the commission launched Articles 11 and 13 in 2019. This caused a crisis of intellectual freedom across the world that went largely unreported by the mainstream press. In response, Wikipedia blacked out swathes of the European continent until amendments were made. Extraordinary, considering the inflexibility of the EU.

Things declined rapidly with the rise of Cultural Marxism. Wikipedia became the choking canary, wiggling its legs at the bottom of a mine shaft while a cuckoo took up residence. Its articles have since been heavily edited to bring them in line with the prison cell of social justice. Instead of recording knowledge, Wikipedia’s primary goal is to avoid causing offence, leaving the site rife with contradictions and politically correct fiction. It capitulated to these censorial demands and maintained its position as caretaker of (revised) information.

For all the power Wikipedia has, it pales in comparison to social media – a conglomerate in charge of the real-time recording of history. Forget editing the facts; they aren’t even making it to print.

With the US election over, the next information scandal will revolve around medical tyranny. When China’s Covid-19 became a Catch 22 for the global political class (who are terrified that private citizens will sue them for incompetence), discussion surrounding vaccines became intrinsically linked with the survival of those in power.

Medical advances have always created conflict between healthcare, politics and corporate – especially with the global vaccination market worth almost $US60 billion in 2020.

‘Trust the experts’ simply isn’t a good enough mantra for social media to invoke during its censorial binges when we have hard evidence that experts often make horrific mistakes. Thalidomide was available over the counter for years before it was found to cause birth defects. Despite mounting complaints in the public sphere, it was deemed safe across the medical spectrum. In the end, it killed two thousand children and left ten thousand with serious physical abnormalities. Without public pressure, it would have killed more.

Vaccines carry similar risks. While they save millions of lives, they can be wildly unpredictable in their medical infancy. It is imperative that the government maintains public choice and consumer transparency across social media platforms to ensure that alarm bells ring when something goes wrong.

Silicon Valley has inserted itself into the pandemic, no doubt due to political pressure, by announcing plans to ban users from reporting or discussing side effects related to Covid19 vaccines. They claim that these measures are in the interest of public safety, but Big Tech is not a medical institution, nor should it be allowed to silence the necessary feedback to protect its political and corporate friends.

Under their heading ‘Our Expanded Approach’, Twitter detail their intent:

Twitter has an important role to play as a place for good faith public debate and discussion around these critical public health matters. […] Using a combination of technology and human review, we will begin enforcing this updated policy on December 21, and expanding our actions during the following weeks. We will enforce this policy in close consultation with local, national and global public health authorities around the world, and will strive to be iterative and transparent in our approach. We remain focused on helping people find credible health information, verifying public health experts, and updating our policies in an iterative and transparent approach.

If anything goes wrong with a Covid-19 vaccine, don’t expect to hear about it.

Who are these public health experts allowed to dominate the market of information? Absolute authority demands intense scrutiny. Let us run one example.

The World Health Organisation is one of Twitter’s verified sources. They are a medical bureaucracy that has conducted itself appallingly during the Covid-19 health crisis. When Covid-19 emerged, the WHO helped the Chinese Communist Party suppress reports about the severity of the virus circulating inside Wuhan. It released incorrect information about Covid19’s transmission and deliberately ignored Taiwan’s dissenting medical evidence because of regional politics. The WHO then looked the other way when China bullied nations with accusations of racism if they tried to close their borders. When it became clear that a pandemic was underway, the WHO assisted China in concealing the (previously acknowledged) origin of the virus while allowing the Chinese Communist Party to avoid a mandatory independent investigation into ground zero of the pandemic.

This is the same ‘trusted’ WHO that has been caught editing medical advice to keep up with propaganda circulated on social media. Two prominent examples come to mind. The first is their flip-flopping over mandatory mask-wearing after various world leaders put their careers on the line by interfering with constitutional rights. To justify medical mandates, the ‘science’ behind mask-wearing was altered by the WHO after the political decision to enforce them had been made. Warnings printed on the boxes of these masks still contradict the WHO’s advice.

The second and most concerning manipulation of information by the WHO relates to the long-held definition of herd immunity. Our medical understanding of herd immunity has not changed since the arrival of Covid19. What has changed is the effectiveness of the vaccine in relation to the grand promises made about it by politicians who used its existence to initiate financially devastating lockdowns.

Both of these releases are by the same department at the WHO (the emphasis in red is mine for clarity):

9th June, 2020: Herd Immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven’t been infected or in whom an infection hasn’t triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for Covid19 is not yet clear.’

13th November, 2020: ‘Herd Immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not exposing them to it. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail.

The second statement from the WHO erased the natural phenomena of herd immunity – which remains the dominant method by which human populations overcome disease – and replaced it with an absolute mandate to vaccinate. The true definition of herd immunity survives with people who remember studying it prior to the edit and anyone in possession of medical books that cannot be so easily manipulated.

It doesn’t help that these institutions in charge of reality are headed up by some of the world’s shonkiest people.

When asking questions about why the WHO has acted inconsistently and bizarrely concerning China’s role in the pandemic, it is worth noting that China played an instrumental role in putting its Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, into power. His ascent was vocally opposed due to positions held within the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – an ethnically-based party that has been the dominant force in Ethiopian politics for nearly thirty years. Tedros served as Health Minister despite the regime being recognised as a serial offender against human rights.

In an open letter against Tedros, it was noted that inside an eight-month period, eighty thousand Ethiopians were imprisoned in gulags run by the TPLF where they were tortured for holding a different political opinion. Party officials stole billions from public and state-run projects. Dr. Abiy Ahmed, the current Prime Minister as of 2018, later admitted that the regime Tedros served under was essentially a terrorist state.

Tedros’ own actions were called into question regarding his handling of a Cholera epidemic – which he incorrectly renamed as ‘Acute Watery Diarrhoea’ even after Cholera was confirmed. A letter signed by the Amhara Professionals Union suspected this inaccuracy related to Tedros covering up a public health crisis to protect the tourist industry – an action which prevented aid organisations from intervening. The open letter further accused Tedros of actively marginalising health care treatment based on ethnicity, resulting in a disproportionate mortality rate among the Amhara people.

This is the man Silicon Valley allows to fact-check your opinion. In addition, Big Tech is heavily invested in the pharmaceutical industry and does not disclose its financial interest in the silencing of information regarding side effects that could harm its profits.

The control that these corporations exert over our access to information has gone far enough that it may never be unpicked.

We are now at the point where the facts of history are so distorted that activists can claim, without contest, that the months of Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots were entirely peaceful, then use this false claim to validate their censorious reaction to the ‘unprecedented’ Capitol Hill riots.

Fearing that their despicable actions would be covered up, I kept a sample of the direct incitement to violence propagated on Twitter by activist groups it publicly endorsed. You can view the archive here – including images of burning public buildings and captions that read: ‘this is what justice looks like’, ‘all pigs burn’ and ‘riot 2020 – burn this motherfucker down – eat the rich’.

The manipulation of truth within our civilisation is nearly impossible to believe. We already know that you can convince people of fabricated facts if you bombard them with enough marketing material from certified sources – especially if it supports their preferred world view.

The twenty-four hour news cycle that created a heightened sense of drama to pull ratings, has transformed into a full-time propaganda house. The media are over-feeding the goldfish as they swim around in stagnant water.

Why would anyone, including Silicon Valley, seek to corrupt the story of humanity?

Simply put, it is to install a political party into government who will not punish them for breaking antitrust legislation or the Communications Decency Act – both of which carry serious penalties if convicted. Big Tech corporations are free to continue making money in their lofty oligarchy while a political party has solidified its position in the absence of opposition.

In truth, politics has become the law, with information as its accomplice.

https://spectator.com.au/2021/01/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-goldfish/

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anti-capitalist-book-club · 3 years

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Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy

One-sentence takeaway: Economics is basically the new religion -- a belief system that allows the ruling class to legitimize themselves.

This is the book that I wish I’d read before ever taking an Econ class. It provides a delightfully alternative analysis of today’s economic system, with the key takeaway being that the market forces that fuel inequality today are not as inevitable as traditional economists make it out to be.

My favorite quote from the book:

Unlike physics, in which nature is the impartial judge of all predictions, economics can never be subjected to impartial tests. ... When economists insist that they too are scientists because they use mathematics, they are no different from astrologers protesting that they are just as scientific as astronomers because they also use computers and complicated charts. (p. 196)

His point here is that, economics is, at its core, an ideology. In fact, it is the dominant ideology that rules the world today, in much the same way religion was the dominant ideology a few eras ago: it provides the ruling class with a narrative that legitimizes the unequal distribution of wealth-- in this case, by perpetuating the belief that “market societies were the ultimate natural order, created by an invisible hand.” In other words: “leaving the economy to the experts is the equivalent of those who lived in the Middle Ages entrusting their welfare to the theologians, the cardinals, and the Spanish inquisitors. It is a terrible idea.” (pg. 193)

So, where are the experts wrong-- what are the myths? This is really what this book is about, and the author explains everything extremely intuitively (with some choice references to the Matrix, no less!). I’ve paraphrased a few of the key lessons below.

Myth 1: Poor countries are poor because their economies are weak.

Whether a country is rich or poor is largely determined by geographic conditions, not smartness or culture or capability. In Eurasia, food (from the wild) was scarce, and this gave rise to agriculture, which in turn created a surplus of food. Surplus was what gave society the capacity to allow certain humans to specialize in professions such as the bureaucracy, army, and clergy, and later, the Industrial Revolution. In Australia, food was plentiful, and without a need for agriculture, this transformation of society did not arise in the same way. In Africa, there were agricultural economies, but due to much greater variations in climate (think about the Sahara!) crops did not carry well, and so those economies did not expand as they might have in Eurasia.

Myth 2: Poor people are poor because they have nothing to offer the market.

The accumulation of power and resources is self-perpetuating: “those privileged to have surplus are rewarded with economic, political, and even cultural power, which they can then use to acquire an even larger share of the surplus.” And unequal distribution of wealth can be traced back to the early days of the market society, when landowners began to use their land to produce commodities that would bring them profit on the market, rather than food and other goods for sustaining their communities. For example, in Britain, wool was valuable, so landowners effectively replaced serfs with sheep. When the serfs were left with nothing, they resorted to selling their labor on the market, but they were already at a severe disadvantage in terms of how much wealth they could hope to accumulate.

Side note: backing this is the belief, especially prevalent among the privileged, that "it is right, proper, and necessary for them to have more while others have much less.” The implied flip side of this thinking is that being poor must be a result of some inherent trait, but no, it’s really not.

Myth 3: Government is a brake on development / a parasite on growth

This myth comes from the fear of “successful”people that the state will intervene to curb their wealth through taxation and regulation. But there are at least two things wrong with this argument. First, their businesses rely on government just as much as anyone else (if not more), whether it’s the rule of law, bailouts, or provision of debt-- things that are often sorely needed to get them through economics downturns. They just don’t like the feeling of losing their profit when the economy is doing well. Second, there’s an underlying assumption here that the wealth they have amassed is theirs, and so taxation takes away what’s “rightfully theirs.” But... no. Wealth is produced collectively, and the economy relies on everyone.

Myth 4: Public debt is a bad thing for the economy

The faulty assumption underlying this one is that a government with high public debt is spending beyond its means and can’t balance its books. Kind of true, but too little public debt is also bad. Here’s the best description of public debt I’ve seen to date:

Given that the rich refuse to cough up the kind of taxes that would make government borrowing unnecessary, the state issues bonds and “sells” them to banks and rich people in order to pay for the things that keep the whole show on the road: streets, hospitals, schools, police, and so on. (p. 87)

Public debt also allows bankers to hold their assets in bonds instead of cash, which is kind of the only thing that keeps bank runs from happening on the regular. So public debt is not inherently bad for the economy, far from it. But it would be smaller if the rich paid their fair share!

Myth 5: Unemployment only means that workers refuse to sell their work at a low enough price

This is what Econ 101 taught me, and I never questioned it, but even setting aside the moral aspects of this debate-- it’s really not that simple. First, if workers do not have at least a living wage, they cannot really participate in the economy: they have no disposable income to re-inject into society. This means there is less $$$ in circulation to buy goods and services from producers. If producers can’t sell their stuff, the economy won’t be doing so good. So the ability of workers to unionize and demand higher wages is actually good for companies. Second, the economy is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy: if workers suddenly started accepting lower wages, this would signal that the economy isn’t doing so well, and so business owners would stop hiring and the labor market would contract.

Myth 6: Automation is good for the economy

Only if automation enhances, rather than replaces, the productivity of workers. Right now, “increasing automation reduces the portion of total income that goes to workers, diverting more and more money into the pockets of the rich who own the machines.” But this runs us into the same problem as Myth 5: there is not enough money in circulation to create demand for the goods being supplied. If these profits were distributed into the pockets of the workers instead (i.e. through fair wages or even, daresay, partial ownership of the automating machines!), then automation could be a good thing for the economy.

Myth 7: Control of the money supply should be depoliticized

First of all, money is deeply related to issues of debt management and taxation, so it can’t ever really be depoliticized. A depoliticized money system would mean that decisions such as how the government spends, how much taxes are collected and from whom, who is bailed out in crises and who isn’t, would be determined independently of actual societal needs. The problem is not that control of the money supply is political, but rather, that it is undemocratic. This means that having a central bank that isn’t supervised by Congress might actually be detrimental, because it is more susceptible to the influences of the powerful and rich.

Myth 8: Market failures can be solved by giving everything (such as natural resources) a price

This is a conversation I often hear in the climate change space-- to deal with negative externalities, put a price on the externality. Carbon taxes are a good example of the policies that result from this kind of thinking. But where does the commodification end? Anything that has a price can be owned privately. And the owners will likely be “people whose wealth means they will never be affected by rising sea levels but who will face a reduction in their profits.” If the oceans and atmosphere and every corner of the earth is privately owned, what incentive will the owners have to prioritize the well-being if not survival of people around the globe over their own profits? Not much. Commodification of everything isn’t the answer.

Tl;dr: Democratize everything and make the rich pay taxes!

#yanis varoufakis #anti capitalism #post capitalism #tax the rich #book summaries

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systlin · 4 years

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It seems the overall culture of the SW galaxy has people moving to new and shiny stuff, with crumbling ruins and dying customs in the background. You don't see antique ship restorers or endangered species lists. Maybe bc there's lots of planets in various stages of exploration/colonization/integration. The rich/powerful can just move planets. . I just started the Mandalorian and haven't read any of the EU or anything so I could be way off, but what's your take?

Oh no, you’re spot on

There’s a number of ancient lost cultures, and meanwhile the galaxy moves on to the newest shiniest thing.

It’s mentioned in the EU that some spacefaring civilizations even exploit sentient races who aren’t quite to that level, providing them with enough things like bacta and high offworld tech to get them reliant, but not spacefaring, and then control them like...well, basically like serfs this way, forcing them to produce goods for export and sale to galactic markets.

You see it a bit in all the movies, and in The Mandalorian; people who live a very, very simple existence as, say, scrappers or krill farmers or moisture farmers, with bits of tech that would make our heads swim all around them, but still relying on human labor, wearing homespun cloth, and living hand-to-mouth, worrying about if the next harvest will bring in enough to afford medicine or a droid to help on the farm or enough food to keep from starving.

(TBH this is shown better in the original trilogy and in some of the Disney movies than in the prequel trilogy, which may be why I like the original trilogy, Rogue One, and The Mandalorian best. If the Prequel trilogy had not had Lucas’ incompetent ass writing the dialog and directing and a better editor, I firmly believe that they could have been just as great as the original trilogy.)

It is absolutely canon that there are many civilizations in many stages of development, but the Star Wars universe is a much crueler place than the Star Trek universe; there is no prime directive protecting developing planets, and the galaxy has ten thousand years of history mostly composed of bitter wars back and forth between many groups, some of which destroyed planets, some of which ended whole peoples, and some of which left planets and people shattered and picking up the pieces as best they could. It’s much much more a crapsack world.

That’s why I like it, tbh. That much conflict and chaos gives you a lot of material with which to play. I’d much rather live in the Star Trek future, but to write things and play around in Star Wars is more fun to me.

#star wars

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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Fauci: Young Black Woman Played Key Role In Developing COVID-19 Vaccine by Charles Jay presents Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black woman who is the National Institute of Health’s lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research. Her team developed an mRNA vaccine in collaboration with Moderna that the FDA is expected to authorize. Drs. Fauci and Corbett are using social media and public events to publicize Corbett’s role in developing the vaccine because “to dispel skepticism among Black Americans about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine … it is important that the role of African-American scientists in vaccine development be widely known.” Charles Jay joined in 2018 and has written 90 stories (with three rescued). His profile page says he’s from New York City, noting that “during a 30-plus-year career as a writer and editor for an international news agency, I was barred from openly supporting a political candidate and posting a political opinion on social media. I'm retired and making up for lost time.”

The Daily Bucket: Even a Boring Volcano can surprise you by 6412093 began when the author “found a warm groundwater seep in the park near my house and it made me think. I approach problems by first assuming the most dramatic solutions and then working my way to the plainest explanation; sort of a reverse Occam’s Razor. An Occam’s Hammer, perhaps.” His investigations led to discovering the volcanism near his home. “The scientists found that ‘Boring’ lava flows popped from tubes on the flanks of two 1000-foot volcano cones in the West Hills, and busted up through the Columbia basalt in spots. I set out with the old geology magazine articles … and old topography maps, seeking those lava caves.” Member 6412093 joined in 2006 and has written 443 stories (with 74 rescued). He also is called “Redwoodman” because of his years living in the redwood forest collecting burls. Now living near Portland, Oregon, he often writes about his magical backyard frog ponds.

Dawn Chorus: Birdability—Birding Without Barriers by giddy thing describes the work of Virginia Rose, a retired English teacher from Texas who founded Birdability. Rose’s campaign crowd-sources information about the accessibility of outdoor spaces, and advocates for modifications to allow easier and more enjoyable use of these spaces. “What I admire about Birdability is that it helps us able-bodied people think and act more inclusively. Often it is the environment that is disabling, not the person who is disabled; why should accessibility be a barrier for anyone wishing to experience the great outdoors?” Giddy thing, who joined in 2011 and has written 43 stories (with 23 rescued), is a wildlife biologist living in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. She explains her user name’s origin: “The giddy in my moniker is ironic when applied to me personally. It comes from Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing—’For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.’”

A break from politics. Here's a tale of ecological and environmental connections by Ernest T. Bass is a real-life story of disastrous ecological connections. A series of unintended consequences lead from the dumping of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s to the near extinction of the endemic Channel Island fox who was never directly exposed. "It’s a story about a small animal, but is one of the largest environmental contamination problems in the United States. It’s a story that involves eagles, irresponsible industrial waste disposal, fish, feral pigs, organic chemistry, misguided human intervention, and even a Hollywood film production. It’s got it all.” A section title from the story pulls it all together: “A Tough Situation, But To Really Screw Things Up You Need To Bring In The Humans.” Ernest T. Bass, a geologist, joined in 2004 and has written 16 stories (with three rescued). Previously a resident of Oregon, Bass now lives in Europe.

Unintended consequences blocked Trump's ‘faithless legislature’ efforts in the Electoral College by RWN is a unique look at the concept of faithless legislatures through the eyes of the author, one of the plaintiffs in a 2016 Supreme Court “faithless electors” case. “What I learned firsthand through this four-year journey (through the legal system) is that resistance to tyranny and autocratic political forces works. Maybe not the original intent, but it carries weight forward and pushes back the anti-democracy forces. That is the entire intent, protecting, and instituting democracy.” RWN joined DK in 2007 and has written 126 stories (with eight rescued).

Grokking Trumpists: Undoing the Long Southern Strategy by Mokurai reviews The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics, by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields. "One of the most pernicious myths embraced by many Republicans is that of ‘post-racial’ America, the pretense that systemic racism is over. The Supreme Court embraced it in gutting the Voting Rights Act. The book goes into much more historical detail, starting back in the time of enslavement, the self-proclaimed ‘Southern Aristocracy,’ and the purity of southern womanhood. It then traces the development of Southern religion as a support for all of this, and how all of these threads grew together into a solid cultural structure that was imposed on almost all Southerners, so that those who didn't agree with it all had to keep quiet." Mokurai joined in 2006 and has written 636 stories (with 42 rescued). A nonprofit program manager in Indiana, his profile page lists his many interests, including math, science fiction, languages, and music.

Grief by Concerned Christian observes that among everything that has made their heart heavy during the last several years, the heaviest burden is when fellow Christians don't show the value of compassion for their fellow man. “(I)nstead of stepping in with the Gospel, Christians have at best remained silent while many have condoned, excused, or even embraced these hateful, xenophobic, misogynistic, partisan messages.” Concerned Christian, an Air Force veteran, joined in 2016 and has written five stories.

ACM: On Supporting Reproductive Justice and Women's Bodily Autonomy by NY brit expat tours the history of reproductive rights and gives an overview of where we are today.“(M)any states are vying to be the state whose law is responsible for overturning both Roe and Doe, which would essentially send the decision about the right of women to have abortions back to the states.” The author also reminds readers that abortion is only part of the story. Forced sterilization has a long and terrible history in America and is an ongoing battle, as are the obstacles women still face in accessing sterilization when they want it. “ACM” in the headline refers to the Daily Kos group Anti-Capitalist Meetup. NY brit expat, who joined in 2008 and has written 206 stories (with 36 rescued), is a former senior lecturer in economics with a Ph.D. in Economics.

Nashville Police Department accused of assault and retaliation against their own by silentnolonger begins with the author’s personal story of “sinking deeper and deeper into a hole of depression, with no idea how to climb out ... after being raped in a parking lot in June 2017.” This personal story is one of 36 accusing Nashville Police Department members of widespead sexual assault. The author recounts her own rape and efforts to get women to come forward with their stories. “Despite being a former police officer, I became one of the 64% of sexual assault victims who don’t report their assault. Intellectually, I knew the perpetrator was the only one to blame, but like many victims, I blamed myself.” Silentnolonger is a new member who joined on Dec. 14 and published their first story the same day.

The Language of the Night: More of Nghi Vo's Herstory by DrLori is a mostly spoiler-free review of the new novella When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. “(H)istory is more than facts. Facts and dates are the skeleton of history. We don’t read history for facts and dates; we read to understand what happened, how it happened, and why. Without the stories, we have no interest, no wisdom to glean, nothing to ponder. This is what Vo grapples with. Because history is itself a product of perspective.” DrLori joined in 2010 and has written 211 stories (with 108 rescued). She has a Ph.D. in medieval manuscripts and describes herself as a “novelist and house restorer who is an overeducated liberal in the deep, deep red Shenandoah Valley.”

Will Civics Education Help Students Make Better Decisions? It’s complicated by ed in the apple examines this question: “Can civics education ‘teach’ potential voters to delineate between ‘claims’ and ‘facts?’” The author’s experiences teaching an honors government class provides the background for a look into how teaching students about government does or does not lead to practical use of what they learn. “The principal asked to have the class construct a ‘constitution’ for the school. We read constitutions, beginning with the Magna Carta, the British parliamentary system, a deep dive into our Constitution; the class decided our school was closer to a monarchy, a divine right monarchy. The principal is the king, the assistant principal is the royalty, the teachers are the craftsmen, and the students are the serfs.” Ed in the apple, who joined in 2015 and has written 24 stories (with two rescued), is “president of the Education Alumni Association at a local college.”

US Fish & Wildlife Service Finds ESA Listing for Monarch Butterfly 'Warranted but Precluded' by giddy thing explains the agency’s process and decision on listing monarch butterflies as Endangered. “The ESA provides for a warranted-but-precluded finding when the Service doesn’t have sufficient resources ($$$) to complete the listing process because the agency must first focus on higher-priority listing rules. Warranted but precluded findings require subsequent review each year until the agency undertakes a proposal or makes a not-warranted finding.” This is giddy thing’s second rescued story this week.

COVID-19 positive and underinsured: One kindergarten teacher's story by ringodaisy explains how she and her family did everything right to avoid coronavirus infection and yet she still was infected. “(W)e stopped going to the grocery store and started using a local, volunteer delivery service. We wore masks as soon as health officials recommended it. Our rural village, near Dayton, was the first local jurisdiction in Ohio to implement mask legislation. I’m writing this to say that when people say they caught it even though they always took precautions and they don’t know where—believe them and continue to take all the precautions you can.” Ringodaisy joined in 2020 and this is her first story. Despite being a new member I’ve not encountered before, I can write “her” because she lists her pronouns on her profile page. She lives “in Yellow Springs, Ohio in a straw bale house with my partner, our two dogs, one cat, and four hens … (and teaches) Kindergarten at Antioch School, an independent, democratic, nature-based elementary school.”

Wisconsin: Which Republican gerrymander is worse? (State Senate vs State Assembly) by gboros explores how presidential election voting results have changed over time in the Wisconsin State Senate and Assembly districts. “It’s worth noting that Democrats are already at a geographic disadvantage in WI (with Dems naturally packed into the Milwaukee and Madison areas) and this has gotten worse with urban areas continually becoming bluer and rural areas becoming redder.” Gboros joined in 2019 and has written 20 stories (two were rescued) analyzing state legislatures.

Quarter millennium of Ludwig van Beethoven by Alonso del Arte marks the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. “Beethoven was great because he worked really hard to hone his craft, not because he was some kind of genius. And yet even Beethoven is subject to having the vast majority of his catalog ignored. Who cares about the Late Quartets when you can put ‘Für Elise’ on a loop and add a techno beat … Maybe you won’t like every single thing Beethoven wrote. But I think that if you choose any of his compositions at random, even one you have never heard before, you won’t be bored.” Through descriptions and music videos, Alonso introduces several compositions in the key of E-flat major. The author, who is from Michigan, joined in 2015 and has written 841 stories (with 42 rescued), mostly focused on music, Star Trek, and Michigan politics.

What follows is a feel good story by BayAreaKen lives up to its title. The author guided a long-standing client who had recently retired through the 2008 economic crisis and they all emerged stronger. “On a relative basis, he was beating the market because it was dropping much faster than his accounts, but that was of little comfort when you just started your retirement and much of your savings had evaporated within the first year. Quite frankly, it was terrifying. I’ll never forget the meeting we had in my office in October, 2008. It was the longest and most challenging meeting I had ever had up to that point in time….and ever since. It lasted just over 3 hours. He was crying. He was angry. He was sad.” BayAreaKen joined in 2006 and has written 183 stories (at least three were rescued). A former elected official in Silicon Valley, he is a Wealth Advisor at a financial firm.

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rhetoricandlogic · 4 years

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Descendant of the Crane by Joan He

August 7, 2019

Liz Bourke

Descendant of the Crane, Joan He (Albert Whitman 978-0-80751-551-8, $17.99, 416pp, hc) April 2019.

I more than liked Joan He’s debut fantasy. Descendent of the Crane sets itself in a world deeply influenced by Chinese history and culture. It’s a lush, deeply realised world, full of laws and ministries and red-light districts, scents and textures and presences, histories and legacies. (I’m almost certainly missing references and resonances that would make the reading experience even deeper, simply due to my lack of familiarity with parts of the well from which He’s drawing.)

Yan is a nation of laws. Centuries ago, a band of 11 heroes overthrew the last of the so-called relic emperors. Two of them (known to history as One and Two of the Eleven) were the first rulers of the empire’s new age. They freed slaves and serfs, instituted gender equality, and tried to build a more just and equitable landscape. They also killed thousands of “sooths” – soothsayers whom the previous emperors relied on to tell the future, who can also do magic and whose blood burns blue on exposure to air. (One wonders about nosebleeds, childbirth, and menstruation – it would seem that one’s clothes would go on fire.) In Yan, even now, sooths and anyone consulting them are condemned to death by a thousand cuts, and the populace still hates them virulently, despite how much time has passed.

Seventeen-year-old Princess Hesina is committing treason. Her father, the emperor, is dead. She feels sure he was murdered, and her quest to bring him justice leads her to consult a sooth to find out how she can convince the powerful ministries to open an investigation into his death. Hesina might be first in line to inherit the throne, but her hands are tied by law and custom.

Her adoptive brother and sister, 19-year-old viscount Caiyan and the equally youthful mistress of the wardrobes Lilian, are her allies in opening an investigation, but her 16-year-old brother, Sanjing (a well-respected military general) warns her that investigating the emperor’s death will result in court factions attempting to convict a scapegoat – one connected to the recent border troubles with a neighbouring nation – rather than find out the truth. (This seems like a family of youthful overachievers: they make me feel old and tired.) Hesina finds someone to act as her prosecutor/investigator: a young convict with a dark past called Akira, but it turns out that Sanjing’s right. The trial process only lays bare the fissures in Yan society – and the rotten parts of the system.

Hesina is out of her depth. The more she investigates, the more she finds factions pushing back against her, and the more she learns about her society and her father’s secrets, the less likely it seems that she’ll be able to solve anything. There’s a complicated tangle of injustice and good intentions going all the way back to the Eleven, made even more knotty by functional immortality and an immortal text. Hesina has to grapple with her family’s (her father’s) legacy and her mother’s disregard at the same time that her court is coming apart around her and trying to overthrow her rule, thanks, in part, to her discovered sympathy for sooths. Their treatment is an injustice she wants to correct, but she may not have the chance. Betrayal comes from unexpected directions, and Hesina finds herself forced to flee.

Joan He’s voice and style is a vivid, compelling one. Most of her characters feel solid and alive – Hesina, as the protagonist, is particularly striking in her combination of innocence and knowledge – although a few of the secondary characters, particularly an antagonistic minister, don’t develop into well-rounded, believable people. There’s action here, and intrigue (though I have to say Hesina seems peculiarly unencumbered by servants and rituals, for an empress or even a member of an imperial family). If I quibble with a few small logistics and technicalities of Descendent of the Crane, that’s partly a testament to how compelling and convincing I found it. It makes me want to think about its world and its people.

It ends on a hell of a cliffhanger. I’m seriously looking forward to the next volume in this story, because it’s surely not over yet. Definitely recommended.

#Joan He #Descendant of the Crane #mahreviews #long post

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aramis-dagaz · 4 years

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More thoughts on elves: I’ve seen plenty of blog posts on treating elves as utterly alien and inhuman fey creatures, as well as a few stating that as weird as elves are to humans, those elves are actually low elves. True high elves are so far above low elves and humans that they might as well be eldritch gods.

However, here’s an alternative that splits the difference between eldritch elves and elves that most people are familiar with: elves are descendants of low-ranking fey who ended up in the mortal world and adapting to it. How and why this migration happened could be any number of reasons, such as refugees, colonists, exiles, or some convoluted plan for inscrutable reasons that went horribly wrong or horribly right. Regardless of the original reasons, the elvish ancestors made it to the mortal realm and ended up staying. No doubt it was difficult for them. The mortal realm has weak magic, the food is terrible, and even if elves remain effectively immortal, some part of them became mortal, making the elves, already among the lowest-ranking and weakest of the fey, even weaker. But elves have their pride, and their innate grace and knowledge and natural talents with magic, weakened though as they are in this backwater realm, make them more than capable of dealing with whatever challenges and threats they may face here.

So what we have here is a race of people who are effectively aliens to this world and cannot go back to their ancestral homeland for whatever reason. Even for those who born long after arriving here, they still hear the stories of who they were, where their people came from, the wonders they wrought. They can still feel the ancient magic in their cities, ancestral artifacts, and spells wielded by sorcerers from the fey realms. In their sleep, they dream of the times and places of their ancestors, receiving glimpses of memories that are not their own, yet deeply familiar all the same. They are not of this world and every day painfully demonstrates this, yet they know no other home. If you thought that half-elves are caught in a limbo between two vastly different societies and peoples, it’s only a fraction of the torment elves feel between the mortal and fey realms. In that sense, the human blood dulling their elvish soul might even be a blessing, for they do not truly comprehend the sorrow of the elvish people.

For some, they are still living in agonizing exile, longing to return to the fey realms even if they had never set foot there before. For others, they relive the painful memories of being little better than serfs to their fey lords and realize that even though this world is barely hospitable to them, this adversity gives them immense freedom to choose whatever life they wish. Even being a mere commoner in a fallen elvish empire is preferable to a life of servitude among the greatest of fairy lords. Here, the elves can be their own people. Here, elves can be kings.

How and when the elves became trapped in the mortal realm can have quite an effect on elvish characters. If this happened recently, elves are likely to be even more strange, inscrutable, and alien to humans and other native species, and are likely to be dealing with the trauma of the event that marooned them or still processing the elation of their independence. If the elvish exile happened much, much earlier, then they would be inscrutable for different reasons, as they belong to a culture that is far more ancient than even the earliest human civilizations. Then again, perhaps they broke away with the ancient elven kingdoms, living in small, independent societies or nations that realized that they need to innovate and adapt in order to survive in a world increasingly dominated by the rapidly-changing nations of shorter-lived races. Perhaps their home country adapted by making deals with this world’s deities and other powers. Perhaps the drow entered into a covenant with an evil spider goddess because she promised them a return to the power, glory, and splendor of the fey realms they left, only this time with them in charge, or perhaps out of desperation for protection against the vengeance of their former lieges.

That brings up another question: what do the fey think of their wayward cousins and vassals? Are they seeking to punish the elves for their insolence and failures? Bring them back into the fold, whether they want to or not? Perhaps they didn’t particularly care when they lost contact with their elven servants, but now that they’ve build their own kingdoms, they potentially could be valuable allies or unwitting pawns in the never-ending machinations of the fey courts. There are plenty of elves willing to give anything, even eternal servitude, for just a taste of the power and beauty of the fey realms.

Alternatively, if you still like the idea of eldritch elves, then elves are just Elder Things that adopted humanoid forms to better adapt to this world. Over time and many generations they forgot what they once were, or at least forgot how to change back into their original forms. An elf of a high enough level might even rediscover some of their latent powers and even be able to transform back into their true forms.

#worldbuilding #elves #elder things #eldritch elves

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weptfire · 4 years

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CELENE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING that doesn’t affect Orlais or her. The obvious example is the Mage-Templar War. When it was brewing, her concern wasn’t whether a war was justified but how it would affect Orlais when it inevitably spilled out of the towers. She cared about the harm it would do her people; that’s all. Frankly, she doesn’t think much about what goes on in Circles and whether Circles themselves are justified. Most of the time it doesn’t affect Orlais, and it certainly doesn’t affect her personally. As an empress, her plate is full enough without adding the cares of the entire world to it, and as a person . . . she’s stressed, selfish, and privileged.

This mindset has both pros and cons.

On the pros side, she’s not the type to seek power outside her realm of influence. She’s extremely conscious of how much power she already wields as empress and desires to wield that power wisely. She does not always succeed; no ruler does. Going back to the above example, we see her work with Divine Justinia to deal with the Mage Rebellion. She has many opportunities to wrestle the Chantry for power, yet she does not. She leaves them to manage their own affairs until their affairs overlap with hers. This is where we get into her willingness to share power when necessary. She never cedes power; that should be noted. But, working in tandem with another leader is sacrificing nothing from her perspective. She is very, very willing to work with other people when necessary. Make no mistake: she is lethal. However, her sole goal is to safeguard Orlais’ interests — yes, even at the cost of her life, canonically speaking. So long as you don’t affect Orlais, it’s none of her concern.

Which brings us to the cons. She could use her power to do a lot more good than she does. We speak of Celene as a reformer who holds the plight of the smallfolk close to her heart. A reformer she is, but tell me what reforms she has made that truly benefit them? that benefit the serfs? the peasants? the elves? the impoverished, marginalized, downtrodden? Give me a single, solid example; I dare you. She herself admits she should have dared more. Vehemently as I reject the reunion path in WEWH, that line is solid. She will never be the great reformer, boldly championing the cause of the less fortunate. Yes, she is changing Orlais, just not like that. Her ultimate goal is to keep Orlais together and prosperous. Becoming too revolutionary will cost her the support of the nobles, cause rioting and civil war, result in a coup — the list of consequences rolls on.

Burning the slums of Halamshiral is an example of both sides of this. Her desire to safeguard the welfare of her empire does extend to the elves of Orlais whom she does consider her people. She makes some changes to aid them, but they’re small and of a token nature. If she pushes too hard, the backlash could tear Orlais apart, and that is detrimental to the welfare of the empire as a whole. The rebellion in Halamshiral was a threat not simply to her reign but to the security of the nation, particularly coming at such a delicate time. The decision she made was, in her opinion, for the greater good. They are her people; she does not want to march on them. But if she does not, it could tear her empire apart. She sacrifices a fraction to save the whole. (For the record, I disagree. This is her perspective.)

In a sense, her focus is both broad and narrow. It is narrow in that she is concerned with the welfare of her nation alone, caring only about the rest of the world when it affects Orlais. (It often does, to be fair.) It is broad in that she is concerned with the welfare of her entire nation and will not sacrifice the whole for a part.

Relevant quotes.

“And her reward for perseverance would be Gaspard bellowing that she had let the Chantry have more power, as though power was a sword only one person could hold at a time. It was not. Power was a dance to be navigated with partners, knowing when to lead, when to follow, and when simply stepping on the hem of a rival’s gown could send her to the ground in shame. In careless hands, such power could bring down the greatest empire in Thedas. The culture and history of all of Orlais was Celene’s to protect."

“Sitting on my throne, I see every city in the empire. If I must burn one to save the rest, I will weep, but I will light the torch!”

“’I will not allow you to endanger my empire,’ Celene said, her voice cold. 'If letting you walk free put my people’s lives in such jeopardy, I would throw myself upon Gaspard’s blade.’ Imshael looked at her in surprise. 'You actually would, wouldn’t you? And here I thought you prized nothing more than your throne.’”

Inquisitor: Maybe you kept it because you still care for Briala. Celene: Perhaps I do. But I cannot put her above all the people of my empire.

#⊰ headcanon | primary ⋄ you forget to hide the little tells ⊱#long post cw #formats this like it's a polished meta #it's my thoughts before going to bed #I talk a lot about Celene being selfish and she IS #she genuinely does care about Orlais more than anything else though #she will sacrifice her own health; happiness; and LIFE for the good of the empire #she can be like that and selfish too #but yes worth noting that she doesn't seek more power than she has #she seeks to safeguard what she has yes #but she's quite conscious of how much power she already wields #she neither wants nor needs more #one of the key differences between her and Gaspard is yes they are both imperious and indomitable #but Gaspard never shares power and is always grasping for more #he wants what isn't his. always.#Celene does not. she has plenty. too much even.

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script-a-world · 5 years

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How can I best make clear my world is set in antiquity rather than medieval times without resorting to things like slavery?

Feral: Do you mean actual Earth history antiquity versus medieval period? If so, references to real world contemporaneous politics, celebrities, wars, architecture, fashion, popular art, weapons, farming techniques, religious practices... kind of any "current" event, style, or practice.

If this is for a secondary world, use your research into real world contemporaneous politics, celebrities, wars, architecture, fashion, popular art, weapons, farming techniques, religious practices, etc to create your own in this antiquity-inspired setting.

Tex: We will begin with the definitions!

Medieval, adjective:

1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of the Middle Agesmedieval historymedieval architecture2 : having a quality (such as cruelty) associated with the Middle Ages3 : extremely outmoded or antiquatedhas medieval ideas about the role of women in our society

Antiquity, noun:

1 : ancient timesespecially : those before the Middle Agesa town that dates from antiquity2 : the quality of being ancienta castle of great antiquity3 antiquities plurala : relics or monuments (such as coins, statues, or buildings) of ancient timesa museum of Greek antiquitiesb : matters relating to the life or culture of ancient timesthe study of Germanic antiquities4 : the people of ancient timesrecords left by antiquity

TL;DR of that - "antiquity" refers to "medieval".

Looking at part of antiquity's definition, I wonder if perhaps you mean "ancient"?

Ancient, adjective:

2 : of or relating to a remote period, to a time early in history, or to those living in such a period or timeancient Egyptiansespecially : of or relating to the historical period beginning with the earliest known civilizations and extending to the fall of the western Roman Empire in a.d. 476studied both ancient and modern history

In any case, knowing your time periods (and regions!) will help both of us a lot. The medieval period - more commonly known as the Middle Ages - occurred specifically in the continent of Europe. It coincides with the fall of the Western Roman Empire of circa 500 AD to the beginning of the early modern period of circa 1500 AD. The major bookend events are Flavius Odoacer's ascension to King of Italy to... well, a few major factors, one being the Eastern Church's Schism of 1552, another the Gutenberg's printing press - or arguably the bible produced of it, the end of the Hundred Years' War, and the rise of mercantilism. The beginning of Europe's early modern period was incredibly convoluted (Wikipedia)!

If you peruse the links, you'll find that - slave analogues to serfs aside - very little was about slavery in the Middle Ages, and if you choose to come back to ask over specific topics in the Middle Ages, we'll certainly be happy to help on that.

As for "antiquity", that's... quite a bit of temporal territory to cover. You haven't really narrowed things down by region, or even era, so at best I'm guessing that you mean to pass through the various ages of Europe. Immediately before the Middle Ages was the Western Roman Empire (395–476/480 AD), not to be confused with its predecessor, the Roman Empire (27 BC – 395 AD). The conversion of the Romans from their original, polytheistic religion to Christianity is typically the main difference between the two - you'll need to know the Schism of 1054 for that.

It gets a little... muddied, around that period. It's popular to keep referring to Rome, and while it certainly had a significant impact on European culture, it wasn't the only one on the continent.

The Roman Republic (509 BC–27 BC), which preceded the Roman Empire (lots of "Romans", I know), modeled much of its society after the Magna Graecia of southern Italy. Magna Graecia was itself modeled after Classical Greece. Classical Greece was a middle part of the era known as Ancient Greece, something which lasted almost two thousand years and began after the end of the Greek Dark Ages.

Phew! That's about... three thousand or so years of history. Remember how I said there were more cultures than just the Roman? Well, that applies to most of the Mediterranean cultures of Europe. Iron Age Europe was widely canvassed by the Celts, and exhibited culture unique to the contemporary Greeks and Romans. The Hallstatt culture, which many consider beginning in Hallstatt, Austria, had significant bearing on the later cultures of non-Mediterranean Europe.

Another major player of pre-Classical Europe were the Iberians in Western Europe. Contemporaneously, Eastern Europe had the Koban culture of the Caucasus Mountains. Northern Europe is a grab-bag, much like the Celts and other Germanic tribes of Central Europe, and had both Germanic peoples and a subset of the Corded Ware culture, Battle-Axe. Please note that as these are generalizations, there's a lot of information missing and may seem contrary upon first perusal. Pre-Roman history is both dense and varied, sometimes needing pacing by the decade or even year in order to fully comprehend certain topics.

Before all of that is the Bronze Age, and then the Stone Age. Bronze Age is typified by the use of not only bronze to make things but also the beginning of the written language, whereas the Stone Age is typified by the modification of stone for tools. Of the Stone Age, I recommend most the Neolithic European portion of it.

"Antiquity", from popular and non-academic perceptions, can range anywhere from the Stone Age to pre-Renaissance. This makes things difficult when someone wants to venture into any time period that occupies, usually, Europe before the 1500s. The Middle Ages are often also misunderstood, both for its assumed time period as well as the events within it that shaped medieval culture.

I wish to bring attention to the concept of slavery as a device in literature, especially when using it to "pre-modern" eras: slavery exists as an effect of a stratified, hierarchical society, and such a society must have a certain level of development in many areas of their culture. As this varies by region, era, and religion, we're not able to give a concise answer without more context.

#pylons #time periods #Anonymous

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jeanjauthor · 3 years

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Hello I think thinking more high born ladies, in typically England or even France16th century. Like how could I show the importance with embroidery, needlework, making cheese, and other lady specific things in those times

Well, think of it this way: Certain regions were doing exceptional work in different things. English wool was considered superior, Flemish cloth was considered superior, French lace (in certain regions) was considered superior, England again had an entire guild dedicated to making thread-of-gold that no one else could match, Italian cheese (parmesan) was widely traded because it was preserved so well, Sweden / Finland sold a lot of tall straight trees for ship masts, and so on.

Do a little bit of research, and then you could have your embroidering noblewomen being praised for "being every bit as good as (region)" ...though if it's in an historical setting the noblewomen wouldn't necessarily be expected to make a living at such embroidery, because as people head toward the later centuries. If it's an English woman and she's making lace, "That's even better than what I've seen the merchants bring from the lacemakers of Alsace! With your skills, we could make a gift of such fine lace to the King & Queen! That would surely raise our standing in the royal court..."

As for cheesemaking, the dairy was THE woman's domain, and men were NOT allowed into it. Women might not have known about microbes and germs, but they DID know that cleanliness was an absolute must for the dairy room. There's a wonderful series online, Tudor Monastic Farm, and I'll share a link to where the scenes with the dairy first begins, located here: https://youtu.be/fhZv2iYuWVE?t=1068

The series has a couple of archaeologists (the gents) and a domestic skills researcher (Ruth Goodman) doing historical re-enactment based upon the archaeology, writings, and theories about how things actually happened back then--and the Tudor era is right in your ballpark in the 16th century (1500s CE). You might want to watch the whole series for inspiration.

Even if it is about what farmers went through in a year, not nobles, a lot of what happened on a farm was still very important to the nobility, because that was a part of their livelihoods, too. Nobles didn't always just sit around in the cities looking pretty. (In fact, cities were often a bit...anti-noble...especially prior to the era of the Black plague, because of that whole freed men not land serfs status thing.) The sitting in cities looking pretty thing was much more later period. (1700s, 1800s.)

A competent noblewoman was expected to be able to oversee, hire, and possibly even train various servants on the estate / in the manor house / castle, as well as visit the various tenanted farms (like the Tudor Monastery Farm, taking the place of the monastery's oversight). While the lord of the castle might do more of the visiting, if he was away handling matters of politics, warfare, etc, perhaps taking his adult sons, and he might have a seneschal to oversee properties he didn't live upon, his lady wife was often expected to take up the burdens of the nobility's leadership (such as it was) and see to things herself--in an overseer's capacity, if not necessarily putting her own shoulder to the wheel of the stuck wagon.

If you have a character that tries to disparage women by saying, "What did you do while I was off saving our lands from invasion, literally risking life and limb in battle?" you could have your women reply, "Making sure you still had a home to come back to, and food on your table, and clothes on your back! Money in your coffers, the taxes paid on time and in full so the king didn't take our lands from us in payment instead! Everything you see here that is still here while you were gone, is still here because I made sure it would be! You would have nothing without me, and you know it! Have the grace to admit it, and stop yelling at me."

On the other hand, if the husband/father/brother isn't a douchebag*, then he/they can notice "However did you convince Farmer Attewell to fix that hedgerow? I nagged him for weeks before leaving for the city!"

"It turns out it's very hard to do a full day's labor far from the house if your wife is too ill to mind the children, so I sent the Widow Thrushberry off to the Attewell's farm to tend the house and children, along with Maisy, the hen girl to help as well, since the hens weren't laying until this last week. And since the blacksmith wasn't too busy either, I paid his two strapping sons to make a pair of bill hooks for pleaching, and sent them out to help Attewell with the hedge laying, so they'd know how to wield what they make, and thus give it some thought as to how to make them better, the next time."

"You paid the blacksmiths sons? With what money? Not the seed money for ensuring all the farmers can do their plantings?"

"Not the seed money, no. Since you didn't take me to the city, I didn't need to buy embroidered trim from Mistress Speckleton to cover the worn spots to make my gown look newer...though if you made any profit off your time in the city, I should very much like that trim for a gift some day soon."

"I shall see to it tomorrow. You have done well, my wife--far better than I. The Attewell's bull will no longer be a risk for wandering the roads--I'll see to it the linen weavers make you some fine linen for new clothes as well. I was never so blessed as the day we wed, though I could not know my great fortune for years to come--I should have you solve all the problems around here, my lady wife! You'll have me right-handed to the king some day!"

"You deal better with the merchants than I do, so I'll be pleased, my lord husband, if you'll continue to do so--else we'd be right-hand to the king, but absolute paupers for it."

...As you can see, there are ways to show the value of women's work, either through combatting disrespect or showing (ideally but not necessarily mutual) respect.

If it's an actual historical setting, there's only so much a writer can do to nudge things towards better equity and better equality between the genders, before it starts straining the readers' credulity too much. But if it's a created world, there's quite a lot more flexibility. In a created world, there's more room to include in your culture acceptance of women who are big and strong, women who can fight, women who can do "traditionally male" tasks...and you can also show more gender-equity by having men doing "traditionally female" tasks, too.

For example, if you have a noblewoman trying to teach her daughter how to run the manor's dairy, but the daughter is mad for combat and insists upon training with sword and bow, etc, that's one way...but you can also have a son who is absolutely interested in the complex methods of making cheese, brewing beer, and who absolutely loves doing embroidery. And if both children are in the same family, the parents can have one of those brief eye-contact moments, roll their eyes, sigh, shrug...and the father takes the daughter under his wing, the mother takes the son under hers, and they go on with that arrangement instead of "the more traditional one."

#*douching is actually pretty bad for vaginal microflora so yes this is an acceptable insult #answers #ladies work #respecting what ladies do

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militantinremission · 5 years

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Society's Fraternal Twins: White Privilege & Black Rage

Slave, obey your Master

Turn the other cheek

Your Reward awaits you in Heaven

These were the 3 Pillars of Black Christianity. Regardless of denomination, Slave Masters taught their slaves the 3 Pillars, as part of a bigger plot of Indoctrination. Former Attorney General Jeff Session's use of Bible text to condone separating Immigrant Families rang an old, familiar bell... According to The Catholic Church, the purpose of Chattel Slavery, was to 'Christianize the Heathen'; even though these 'Heathens' practiced a higher form of Culture & Civility, than the 'Enlightened' Europeans putting them in chains.

Centuries of Societal reinforcenent (of Racial Bigotry) has created 2 undercurrents. They are White Privilege & Black Rage. A lot of effort has gone into promoting one, while simultaneously stifiling the other. The imbalance created, has morphed into a Spiritual Unrest that can't be ignored. Those in Power, as usual, are attempting to kick the proverbial can down the Road. Judging from the # of recent natural disasters (i.e. 500 Yr Events), it looks like Mother Nature is intervening

''White Privilege', can be viewed as a Courtesy extended to proponents of White Supremacy. It usually involves some effort to handicap the Black Community: Physically, Mentally, Emotionally, Socially, or Financially. In a general sense, it gives 'Wealthier Classes' freedom to act Above The Law. Ironically, these 'proponents' don't have to be White, or even Caucasian; just like Zionists don't have to be European Jews... Both belief systems are founded in Western Hegemony, & the philosophy of domination. They require 'Classes' or a Caste System. Members of the 'Lowest Class', are most likely defeated adversaries that are singled out- shamed & abused @ the leisure of The Masses.

In Europe, adversaries were identified tribally or nationally; i.e. The French (Gaul, Norman) versus The Italian (Roman), or German (Vandal, Goth). They created 'boogey man' propaganda about each other to preoccupy The Masses w/ thoughts of Nationalism. In truth, they were All servants of some sort... In the Western Hemisphere, the Black People (Copper toned Aborigines) they encountered, possessed skills (Farming, Building, Mining), inferior weapons, & they physically stood out. Unlike Serfs, the 'Indios' couldn't blend in. They also out numbered the Europeans... Making them 'The Adversary', was a No Brainer.

Black People have been globally oppressed for Centuries. The Colonial Powers tell them to 'Get over it, that was a Long Time ago!' [So called] Arabs (Seljuk Turks), don't even acknowledge their role in the East Afrikan Slave Trade- creating the divide between Northern & Sub Saharan Afrika. The advent of the 'Arab Spring', & the recent Splitting of Sudan, is proof that it continues, over 1,000 Yrs later... European Jews either deny, or outright challenge the role their descendants played in Chattel Slavery; the mere insinuation brings calls of antisemitism(?!)

If the 'Black World' saw real, concrete Social Change, moving forward may be possible. Unfortunately, the Oppression has not ended; rather, it has become more refined. In recent years, Racial Bigotry has become more overt. So called 'Honorary Whites', or People of Color are back to taking their [cheap] shots @ Black People. These Groups are now looking for their turn to exploit the Resources of Black Nations. There is a rise of 'monkey business', traditionally associated w/ Classic Populism.

If We express a need for a discussion on Race, White Supremacists & their protagonists are quick to point out Black on Black Crime Stats. The implication, is that Black America needs to 'Clean its Own House', before passing blame. Putting aside my knee jerk urge to report White on White Crime Stats; instead, I ask: Have Conservatives, & alt- right folk looked @ the "Why"? Do they ever delve into what causes the data tabulated in those Stats they are so quick to offer up?

Blackfolk, mostly Christian, have been indoctrinated into believing They are the 'Forgiving Race'(?). They were taught that Vengence, belongs to God. Sounds good in theory, but The Truth is, Black People are Morally Conservative. Regardless of Religious Denomination (Christian, Muslim, Israelite, ect...) We collectively want Retribution. We have been indoctrinated into believing We want 'Justice', but the Subconscious has its Own Agenda. This inner turmoil has led Black People to be patient w/ Oppressors, but combative & disrespectful w/ each other over the smallest infraction; especially Tribally.

The number of Black Men, Women, & Children that are being violated w/o reprisal, is reaching Critical Mass. Nature appears to be taking over. Wo/Man may be the 'Planetery Custodian', but KARMA is the Great Equalizer. It is a Key to Natural (Universal) Law. Even Athiests agree w/ its application in Physics. Retribution, is one of many expressions of Karma under Natural Law. It may even be argued that it is part of the Indemnification process.

Black People in America- ADOS in particular, suffer from PTSD. Some cases are more extreme than others, but most result from some instance where White Privilege was enforced & Black Excellence suppressed. 'Black Pride', is the [Self] acknowledgement & acceptance of 'Black Excellence'. An attack on Black Pride, is a direct attack on Black Excellence. Society goes to great lengths to limit the 'Pride' of Black People Globally; We see it's by Design.

Speaking of 'Design', 'The (American) Ghetto', is an example of a Socially Engineered Environment created to challenge Black Excellence. The Testing Ground for 'Materials & Methods', is called "The Project(s)". Desired outcomes Here (e.g.- broken families, drug abuse, deviant behavior), are expanded into the larger Black Community via Mainstream Media outlets... 'Black Rage', is a cumulative response. In most cases, it results from a 'last straw scenario', where Black Excellence is being stifled to some degree. In the System of Racism/ White Supremacy, Black Excellence is only acknowledged, when it's profitable to those in Power. Otherwise, it is circumvented @ All Costs.

White Guilt, is in fact that 'gut feeling' White Supremacists & their proxies (Honorary Whites) have, that they deserve whatever retribution Black America dishes out. A Realistic discussion about Reparations would go a long way toward ending this dilemma; but instead, The 'Powers that Be' work to stall the inevitable balancing of The Scales. The Tried & True method involves the Wealthy Class getting the (Mainstream) Poor & Middle Classes to rationalize why they deserve what they have. It is also rationalized that Black America has had ample time to get their Act together, why should Everyone Else suffer for their Lot?

White Indignation, is a joke. It is clearly a smokescreen used to justify Barbaric behavior generally, & the System of Racism/ White Supremacy specifically. Recent acts by proponents involve aggressive talk, that escalates to Violent acts in many cases. YouTube is full of these scenarios. What makes these people think it's okay to put their hands on Black People?... LAW ENFORCEMENT. Black Americans are 2nd Class Citizens- 1st to be roused, last to be defended.

The School Admissions Scandal involving 33 Wealthy Families bribing their children's way into Prestigious Universities, is just the latest violation. Lori Loughlin & Felicity Huffman have become The (Current) Faces of White Privilege & 'Above The Law' behavior. Both Women have been arrested, but no mugshot has been televised. While Black Women have served Prison Time for daring to get their children into better Elementary School Districts, these 'Women of Privilege' will probably get reduced Sentences, Probation, & Community Service.

This leads to Affirmative Action Programs that have been decimated over the last 20yrs. Conservatives argued that 'Quotas' weren't fair; even though White Women were the biggest recipient of Affirmative Action Benefits. A Program that was Specifically Designed to grant Black America ACCESS, was circumvented, & transformed into 'Diversity Initiatives'. Front & Center, was The Woman's Initiative. To see White Women accused of cheating a System that they have benefited from- to the perpetual chagrin of Black America, only proves how stacked The Deck really is.

A lot of effort has been devoted to making Black People feel inferior. If an individual or group is 'below the curve', don't we usually offer a helping hand? Don't we try to improve their Lot? What does it say about a Group that:

Excels in Every Endeavor that they are allowed to participate in?

Made contributions in EVERY FIELD from Agriculture to Astrophysics?

Sets the World Standard in Culture, Fashion, Sports & Music?

What do you do, when you see This Group's contributions being appropriated by The World, getting little Credit, & even less Respect? We know there is a contingent looking to instigate an eruption of Black Rage; intent on using it as an excuse for the Wholesale Murder of Black People... What does it say about those who remain silent?

#AntiBlackRacism #WhiteFragility #ReparationsNow #ADOS

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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You will not be surprised to be told that Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, contains a series of attacks on diversity, immigration, feminism, and “identity politics.” You may, however, be surprised to be told that the book contains high praise for Ralph Nader, quotes from Studs Terkel, laments the disappearance of the anti-capitalist left, and presents Jeff Bezos as one of its central villains. Carlson has written a book that is as staunchly nationalist as one would expect. Yet it’s also a little bit socialist.

Carlson’s basic framework would commonly be described as “populism.” There are the people, and then there are the “ruling class” elites. The rich and powerful care only about themselves. They do not care about Middle America, and have presided over the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and exploding inequality. Meanwhile, ordinary workers suffer. At times, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. His analysis is persuasive, well-written, and often funny. It’s also terrifying, because elsewhere in the book, Carlson makes it clear: he wants a white-majority country, thinks immigrants are parasitic and destructive, misses traditional gender hierarchies, and dismisses the significance of climate change. Carlson’s political worldview is destructive and inhumane. Yet because it has a kernel of accuracy, it will easily tempt readers toward accepting an alarmingly xenophobic, white nationalist worldview. Carlson’s book shows us how a next generation fascist politics could co-opt left economic critiques in the service of a fundamentally anti-left agenda. It also shows us what we need to be able to effectively respond to.

First, let’s look at the parts that are most right, and perhaps most unexpected. In an analysis almost identical to that of leftists like Thomas Frank, Carlson says that Republicans and Democrats are now both beholden to corporate power. Sometime in the 1990s, Carlson says, he began wondering “why liberals weren’t complaining about big business anymore,” and had started celebrating “corporate chieftains” like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the Google guys. Ralph Nader should be a hero to all liberals, spending his days “greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims” from a retirement home. Instead, he is “reviled,” even though “every point Nader made was fair” and “some were indisputably true.” Suddenly “both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism… left and right were taking virtually indistinguishable positions on many economic issues, especially on wages.”

The “prolabor” Democrats, Carlson says, were “empathetic and humane” and “suspicious of power.” But today they have disappeared, and the party of the New Deal is now a party of Wall Street. Carlson points out that Hillary Clinton won wealthy enclaves like Aspen, Marin County, and Connecticut’s Fairfield County (the hedge fund capital of the country). “Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1,” and while “Seven financial firms donated 47.6 million to Hillary,” they gave Trump “a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.”

As a result, Carlson says, Democrats are now largely silent on labor issues: “When was the last time you heard a politician decry Apple’s treatment of workers, let alone introduce legislation intended to address it?” Corporations make vaguely “socially liberal” noises, like decrying gun violence and being pro-LGBT, and as a result escape criticism for mistreating their workers or contributing to economic inequality. Carlson cites Uber, which has prominent liberal Arianna Huffington on its board and has had to commit to reforming its “bro culture.” And yet it still treats its drivers like crap:

“[Uber is] running an enormously profitable business on the backs of exploited workers… An obedient business press [has] focused on the ‘flexibility’ Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. … [But] Feudal lords took more responsibility for their serfs than Uber does for its drivers… Uber executives weren’t ashamed… They sold exploitation as opportunity, and virtually nobody called them on it.”

What happens, Carlson says, is that corporations “embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing.” They are, in effect, purchasing “indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.” Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In and Mark Zuckerberg is floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but Facebook is an evil corporation to its core. Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was engineered to be addictive, that its designers thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?… We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once it a while.. To get you to contribute more content.” Carlson notes that the company commits “relentless invasions of the public’s privacy,” and that epidemiologists have linked the product “with declining psychological and even physical health.” Carlson writes:

“Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing customers. Those facts would be enough to tarnish most reputations, if not spark congressional hearings. Yet Zuckerberg remains a celebrated national icon.”

We know Facebook is manipulating people’s emotions to sell advertising, and yet we still get headlines like “How To Raise The Next Mark Zuckerberg.” Or look at Amazon. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary Clinton for president, yet “no textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly than an Amazon warehouse.” Carlson asks: “when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon?… “Liberals and Jeff Bezos [are now] playing for the same team.” Successful businessmen “pose as political activists,” and pitch their products as woke. That way: “affluent consumers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.” He goes on:

“The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.”

Carlson mocks the “socially liberal” Davos elite who hand-wring about inequality while reaping its fruits. He points to the example of Chelsea Clinton, who talked nobly about her values (“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t… That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life”) before buying a $10 million, 5,000 square foot apartment in the Flatiron District that spanned an entire city block. Chelsea Clinton’s career, for Carlson, shows how contemporary believers in “meritocracy” benefit from an unjust and nepotistic system: Clinton was paid $600,000 a year as a “reporter” for NBC despite appearing on the network for a sum total of 58 minutes. The bubble of privilege that many elites inhabit was exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which suggested that “Things in America are Fine.” (The slogan was actually “America Is Already Great.”) Carlson is not wrong here: Hillary Clinton herself was so out of touch that she is still saying things like “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Carlson also says that there has been a troubling tendency for both sides to embrace the military-industrial complex. Key Democratic figures supported the Iraq War (e.g. Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Schumer). It was New York Timesreporters who contributed to scaremongering about Saddam in the leadup to the war, the New York Times op-ed page where you can find contributions like “Bomb Syria, Even If It’s Illegal” or “Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said that Iraq War had been “unquestionably worth doing” because it told Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Barack Obama (who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, Carlson says, for “not being George W. Bush”) killed thousands of people with drones, including American citizens, prosecuted whistleblowers, kept Guantanamo open, and failed to rein in the vast global surveillance apparatus. Hillary Clinton pushed aggressively for military action in Libya, which destabilized the country. There is a D.C. consensus, Carlson says, and it is pro-war. Some of the book’s most amusing passages come when Carlson flays neoconservative hacks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol, who have now become allies of the Democratic Party in paranoia about Russia. Boot’s career, he says, publishing articles like “The Case for American Empire” and advocating invasion after invasion, shows us how “the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, breaking things along the way.” The hawkish consensus is no joke, though, and Carlson says he misses the liberal peaceniks, who “were right” when they warned that “war is not the answer, it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”

To many on the left, everything Carlson says here will be familiar. The phenomenon he’s pointing to, by which Democrats and Republicans both became free market capitalists, has a name: neoliberalism. Larry Summers was quite open about it when he said that “we are now all Friedmanites.” Carlson’s point about how corporations whitewash exploitative practices by appearing socially progressive is one leftists make frequently (see, for example, Yasmin Nair’s essay “Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit” and Nair and Eli Massey’s “Inclusion In The Atrocious“). The foreign policy stuff is a little off: it’s not that Democrats used to be pacifists, since the Vietnam tragedy was initiated by JFK and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. Empire has always been a bipartisan project, antiwar voices in the minority. Aside from the suggestion that this is new, it’s accurate to say that American elites have largely embraced the projection of American military power.

But Carlson is not going to be joining the Sanders 2020 campaign. His book has a dark side: a deep suspicion of cultural progressivism, inclusion, and diversity. Carlson believes that liberal immigration policies have been imposed because they serve elite interests (Democrats get votes and Republicans get cheap labor for Big Business). As a result, the fabric of the country is fraying. He writes:

Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime… If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace… [W]e are told these changes are entirely good… Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

To some people, what Carlson writes here may not seem racist. And like many conservatives, he resents having what he sees as common sense treated as bigotry. I don’t think there’s any way around it, though: Carlson’s problem is that the United States looks different, that it’s not “European” any more and has no “ethnic majority.” He’s explicitly talking the language of ethnicity: it’s destabilizing that we’re not a white-majority country anymore. This isn’t simply about, say, the “Judeo-Christian ethic” or embracing the “American idea.” If that were the case, then it would be hard to make a case for why we shouldn’t let in the Catholic members of the migrant caravan, who love American culture and want to march across the border saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The problem is that they are not European, that they change the look of the place, that they disrupt the “ethnic majority.” Europeans are the real Americans, the ones that hold the fabric of the nation together, and minorities, people who are different, threaten to undo that fabric.

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#politics #the left #current affairs #tucker carlson #white nationalism #neofascism

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