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toshootforthestars · 4 months

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What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid.

The question is not whether intifada, which means “uprising” in Arabic and invokes both civil disobedience and violent resistance, is a threatening term; if it were not threatening, the House would never have convened an entire hearing about it. The only question is whether threatened parties — the Israeli apartheid regime, American foreign-policy hawks, all the board members and lobbyists and donors and hedge-fund managers — deserve to be threatened. They do. For as often as pro-Palestine speech is described as an existential menace to Jews in Israel and across America, our major newspapers are saturated with equally plausible incitements to violence — for that, my friends, is what it means to support a war. The difference is that when the New York Times editorial board defends the bombardment of Gaza or urges lawmakers to send Israel more Hellfire missiles, this may not look like incitement because the violence in question is endorsed by the White House, funded by Congress, and normalized by the media. There is no denying that this is an American war, even if there are no American boots on the ground. The House recently approved a resolution declaring that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This was truly disturbing on First Amendment grounds: It suggested that the government really might try to abridge the freedom of speech on grounds of sedition, as wartime governments have been known to do — including Israel, whose occupying military forces have restricted the free-speech rights of Palestinians in the name of “public order” for decades. Now it so happens that the remarks which the 92nd Street Y originally commissioned me to deliver last week would have concerned the freedom of the press. I would have directed the Y’s patrons to a short essay published in 1784 by the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “What Is Enlightenment?” I believe it is one of the most important things ever written about freedom of speech. In the essay, Kant argues that the citizens of an enlightened society have an obligation to fulfill the duties of their civil posts (soldier, priest, tax man); yet as moral beings, they must also be free to engage in the “public use of reason,” above all by publishing their criticisms of that society. Accordingly, an enlightened despot will understand that “there is no danger to his legislation in allowing his subjects to use reason publicly and to set before the world their thoughts concerning better formulations of his laws.” For the enlightened citizen, Kant provides a curious slogan: “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” There is a very simple, very potent idea here: Freedom of speech, when elevated to the status of a moral good, is just another name for thoughtful obedience. Under such a rule, the right of everyone to disagree is protected as long as the state’s authority to limit action is respected. This way, the state may ensure that conflicts of value never turn into contests of value; it blesses us with the freedom to argue about morality on the condition that we never decide who is right. Kant’s foremost goal, after all, was to minimize the possibility of what he called the “worst, most punishable crime in a community” — namely, revolution. This was his diagnosis of the French Revolution, which in his estimation had proceeded all too quickly from intellectual freedom to bloody action.

I am not advocating violence, though I understand why others on the pro-Palestine left might. What I am advocating is continued hostility. One cannot escape the irony that when the liberal begs us to stop shouting each other down and tolerate a diversity of viewpoints, he is essentially calling for a cease-fire in the culture war. This is as far as free speech gets us: It asks us to have greater moral concern for the sanctity of ideas than for the lives of the Palestinian people. Bomb a hospital, and you are making a calculated strike on a military target; but try to kill an idea, and you are betraying democracy. This is why seeking “higher ground,” as the champions of free speech urge us to do, will only perpetuate the illusion that we are in yet another empty argument that can be safely contained by liberal norms; we will become so preoccupied with the integrity of the forest that we forget about the actual trees. So let the left say that freedom of speech is a public good, like a health-care system: an essential element of a just society that is also regularly subject to abuse, fraud, corruption, and the private interests of the wealthy. When this abuse happens, as it is happening now, we oppose it because we believe that freedom of speech without justice is like a planet without air. We do not protest the war on Gaza because we have an abstract right to do so; we protest it because it is one of the great moral atrocities of our lifetimes and because the widespread refusal to admit this in America is an atrocity in its own right. We are not just speaking; we are fighting with words. And we are fighting to win.

Andrea Long Chu: The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap

NY Magazine / 22 Dec 2023

#food for thought #new york magazine #andrea long chu #the free speech debate is a trap #israel hamas war #freedom of speech #right to disagree #america 2020's #the 2020's

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wilfridcyrus · 6 months

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An Open Letter to Conservative Republicans

Open Letter to Conservative Republicans

I have a lot to say about modern conservative republicanism, let me tell you why, in my opinion, I think it is necessary to take a strong political stance against conservative republicanism.

Conservative republicanism is eroding democracy. Republican ideas are eroding the integrity of the truth of information. Republican rhetoric and actions are becoming increasingly authoritarian, and violent.

Beyond philosophical issues, the political problems with conservative ideology are far-reaching. The democratic actions taken in economics, education, climate change, reproductive rights, and on social issues, are all things that impact the lives of people directly. Republican ideology has for decades put in constant danger things that are necessary for the functioning of a civil society. Democracy is worth standing and fighting for, and conservative republicanism is a direct threat to democracy. Stand and fight.

The sphere of public information has become so clouded with conservative disinformation that the integrity of the truth is being dissolved. In 2023, the rift between the ideas of democrats and republicans is severe. They both claim to have the truth while in direct opposition to one another.

The republicans tout false narratives supported by false information. There may be a kernel of truth, but too often republican talking points are demonstrably false. Take the case of Fox News vs. Dominion for one example. This is a defamation case that has gone through the court system and resulted in conservative cable network Fox News admitting to spreading wide scale false information about the 2020 presidential election.

Republicans manipulate the mechanisms of democracy to unfairly tilt the government in their favor. The principle example of this is the insurrection on January 6th, 2020. The ensuing election denial furthers evidence of false narratives that impact democracy directly. Gerrymandering, dark money, think tanks, lobbyists, corrupt Supreme Court justices – republicans use all of these things to cheat in democracy.

Conservative thought revolves around authority. They push strongman dictators like Donald Trump. Authoritarianism is incompatible with democracy. The founding documents of the United States have protected America against authoritarianism for over 230 years. Republicans claim to stand for freedom, but so much of republican ideology is antithetical to freedom for so many people. Their own freedom is lost to such folly.

The overarching false narrative used by conservatives is that the government is always bad and that republicans are the victims of tyranny. When, in fact, it is republicans who are working against the common good by seizing power and using it unjustly. Rolling back democracy is wrong and should not be tolerated.

The history of conservative culture does have value. Ideas such as hard work ethic, duty to society and family, and individual freedom all have immense value. The fact is, all conservative values are also embodied by other traditions. Conservative ideology is not de facto truth. It's unfortunate, but conservative culture has become irredeemable. Its good ideas have been spoiled by a toxic core that has breached containment.

If you are still calling yourself a conservative republican, or even being sympathetic with that set of ideas, then what you are representing is clear. I am not just talking about the party's extreme, I am talking about the whole party. Those who still remain have plainly revealed a worldview personified in Donald Trump. Even complicit involvement shows acceptance. Don't sit on the fence. Conservative Republicanism should be denounced.

#democracy #politics #philosophy #republicans #conservatives

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bopinion · 7 months

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2023 / 40

Aperçu of the Week:

"It is not enough to win a war. It is more important to organize the peace."

(Aristotle - The Greek from BC is undoubtedly one of history's best-known and most influential philosophers - and my posterboy this year)

Bad News of the Week:

On Sunday, the midterm elections took place in Germany. Actually, the elections for the state parliaments in Bavaria and Hesse, but this time in particular they also had the function of a barometer for federal politics. The current government is approaching his halftime show. Even in the run-up to the elections, a good 60% of voters were of the opinion that a state election was a good opportunity to settle accounts with federal politics. Apart from the fact that this is bullshit - but the lack of qualification of eligible voters is another matter - election observers could hardly be surprised by the results. All of which do not bode well.

The worst aspect first: the right-wing populist and in parts far-right Alternative für Deutschland AfD (Alternative for Germany) gained about 40% in both states and will form the strongest opposition faction in each. Besides the devastating psychological signal, since votes for the AfD are apparently worthwhile as criticism of "the established parties," this also has very practical consequences, such as more influence on the agenda, more speaking time in parliament, vice presidential posts, etc.

Hardly better: the two incumbents of the conservative CSU/CDU were confirmed. Apart from the official bonus, this is probably mainly due to arch-conservative positions, which are anything but progressive or liberal. But the people apparently like a preservationist image ("I'd rather carry on like this than go through unpleasant changes"), a demarcation to the left ("The Greens are a prohibitionist party that wants to patronize you!"), thematic ingratiation with the AfD ("Migration is the mother of all our problems!") and fundamental criticism of the ruling traffic light coalition in the federal government ("They can't do it in Berlin!").

Speaking of the traffic light coalition, all three parties - Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals - were punished. And by a considerable margin. The Liberals were hit particularly hard, losing in the last seven state elections (Germany has 16 states) and even often being kicked out of parliament at less than 5% - like from Bavaria on Sunday. Now it is to be feared that they will seek their salvation in a clearer "profiling". This is unlikely to soften the coalition's discordant impression.

And that is rather unfair. After all, according to an evaluation by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, among others, this coalition has already achieved a full 38% of the goals agreed in the coalition agreement for the four-year legislative period in the first 20 months of its government and has at least substantially addressed a further 26%. That is an extremely respectable result. Although the Ukraine war and all its aftermath have thrown some plans out of kilter. We learn from this that perception is subjective.

Good News of the Week:

There are weeks that are so negative in terms of news that it's hard to find something positive. But I did find something. Even in the area of environmental protection, which is obviously the quickest to get thrown under the bus when business, military and political lobbyists try to shout over each other. Drum Roll please: the European Union is banning microplastics!

Those are those little plastic granules that are in things like cosmetic scrubs, for one thing, so that the Kim Kardashians of this world can shave off their aging dander more effectively. And for another, they're created in washing machines when you clean plastic clothes made of polyester, for example. At least the former is now being put to an end.

A new EU regulation now prohibits the deliberate addition of these microscopically small plastic particles. Not only in cosmetics, but also in artificial turf and pesticides, for example. The gradual implementation will start for things like loose glitter already in October, in other cases the sales ban will only come into force step by step in the coming years. No matter: traces of microplastics can already be found not only in the battered oceans, but even in the high mountains. And in human blood - after all, we are at the top of the food chain. A classic case of "better late than never."

Personal happy moment of the week:

My big daughter is now starting her 3rd semester at university. Since she's involved in the political science student council and was even elected as a representative to the faculty convention, it's almost a bit of "learning by doing in politics." And she and others are touchingly taking care of the new students who are starting now. For example, with an info primer on how studying actually works, a rally to get to know the (often new) city and, of course, partying. And she even bakes muffins for the new generation. I'm very happy that she seems to have found her place. And hope she doesn't forget with all her engagement that she's actually at the university to study.... ;-)

I couldn't care less...

...about U.S. geopolitics in the Middle East. Obama's credo of a "future in the Pacific region" has left a power vacuum. Which - as is usual with vacuums - fills itself. In this case, Iranian and Russian interests. They should have known better.

As I write this...

...a veritable crisis is unfolding in the Middle East. What began with an attack by the radical Hamas could quickly become a regional conflagration. To be clear, there can be no excuse for targeting innocent civilians. Merely because they have the same (Israeli) nationality as the politicians, soldiers and settlers who deny them the right to exist in their own homeland. But neither should the innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank have to suffer under the sanctions that have already begun (Israeli Defense Minister Joav Galant: "There will be no electricity, no food and no fuel (for Gaza) anymore") merely because they belong to the same (Palestinian) people as the terrorists. As a German, I know in every way how vicious and unjust Sippenhaft is.

Post Scriptum

Berlin has promised ten billion euros in subsidies to the US semiconductor manufacturer Intel. For the establishment of a production site in the high-wage country of Germany. This is a new record. The media portal The Pioneer has calculated comparisons: That's as much money as the federal government is providing to all German founders in venture capital through its Future Fund - until 2030. With these 10 billion euros, two hundred thousand social housing units could also be built per year. Or 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity could be created, the equivalent of two nuclear power plants. I have my doubts as to whether Intel pays so much in taxes and creates so many secure jobs that this speculative investment - because that's all it is after all - really pays off.

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ailtrahq · 8 months

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Potential jurors in the upcoming criminal trial of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried could be asked their thoughts on crypto, effective altruism and attention-deficit disorder as his lawyers want to weed out those they consider unsuitable.In court filings on Sep.11, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers and United States prosecutors separately filed their lists of proposed questions they wish to ask prospective jurors in the trial slated for Oct. 3.Bankman-Fried wants to know if prospective jurors have invested in Cryptocurrency, and if so, if they lost money or otherwise have a negative opinion on the industry.In another question, the FTX co-founder is interested to know whether a juror would attribute a crypto firm’s failure to its owners, and if so, why.Cryptocurrency-related questions proposed by Bankman-Fried’s lawyers to prospective jurors. Source: CourtListenerBankman-Fried also wants prospective jurors' thoughts on “effective altruism” — a charitable philosophical movement which Bankman-Fried built his reputation on.Other questions concern if jurors think it’s “wrong” to donate large sums of money to political candidates and lobbyists to further their own interests along with detailing any personal or professional experience with an ADHD-medicated person.As part of standard procedure, Bankman-Fried intends to ask if prospective jurors have read about him, have formed an opinion on his guilt or innocence or if they’ve expressed an opinion about Bankman-Fried, FTX or Alameda Research.U.S. prosecutors wish to ask prospective jurors on their familiarity with FTX and its affiliates, whether they or a friend or family member have invested or worked in the crypto space and what role they believe the U.S. government should play in regulating the industry.Prosecutors also want to ask whether jurors have ever lost money from an Investment due to fraudulent conduct.On Sept. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Bankman-Fried’s request for temporary release ahead of his Oct. 3 trial, ruling that a poor internet connection inside the prison wasn’t a sufficient ground to grant his release.Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to all seven fraud-related charges regarding his involvement in FTX’s collapse in November. He faces a separate criminal trial on additional charges in March next year.

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honeyleesblog · 10 months

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Astrological Outlook and Character Analysis for Individuals with a May 22nd Birthday

Smart, ready for business: they accomplish triumph over their rivals. They show an incredible capacity to focus on their work. Daring and enterprising: they need to be in a place of high standing. Extremely reasonable: they work with greatness. Despite the fact that they might be at risk for incident, they are frequently gifted with surprising capacities or even a specific ability. For instance, they love to find the mysteries of nature, optics or science. They are accomplished in the space of composing and workmanship. His capacities are for absolutely philosophical purposes. Since they can cleverly uncover the insider facts of others, they could become brilliant investigator, exploring judges, or legal counselors. What undermines them: The main thing for these individuals is to accomplish their principal desires. What would it be advisable for them to hope for? They should take a stab at consistency and congruity of character. Something interesting is that they talk uniquely in contrast to they act. This duality is complemented as they age, as well as crabbiness and inner anxiety. They are articulate individuals, equipped for guarding their perspectives with incredible ability. Typically they figure out how to get a decent situation in their calling. They can likewise find lasting success in the military. Astrological Outlook and Character Analysis for Individuals with a May 22nd Birthday

Assuming your birthday is on May 22, your zodiac sign is Gemini May 22 - character and character character: savvy, steadfast, morally sound, miserable, modest, narrow minded; calling: paleontologist, pilot, rancher; colors: dark, blue, blue; stone: alexandrite; animal: shrimp; plant: coconut palm; fortunate numbers: 6,27,35,43,48,54 very fortunate number: 23 Occasions and observances - May 22 Guatemala: Arbor Day college understudy day. Worldwide Day for Natural Variety. May 22 VIP Birthday. Who was conceived that very day as you? 1900: Yvonne de Gaulle, French lady (d. 1979), spouse of Charles de Gaulle. 1900: Juan Arvizu, "The tenor of the silk voice" melodious tenor from Mexico (f. 1985). 1907: Hergდ© (Georges Remდ), French sketch artist of Belgian beginning (d. 1983). 1907: Laurence Olivier, English entertainer and producer (d. 1989). 1910: Julio Salvador and Dდaz-Benjumea, Spanish military and government official (d. 1987). 1912: Herbert C. Brown, American physicist of English beginning, Nobel Prize in science in 1979 (d. 2004). 1913: Rafael Gil, Spanish screenwriter and movie producer (d. 1986). 1914: Sun Ra (Herman Sonny Blount), American jazz performer (d. 1993). 1914: EA Thompson, English history specialist (d. 1994). 1914: Max Kohnstamm, Dutch history specialist and representative (d. 2010). 1920: Thomas Gold, Austrian astrophysicist (d. 2004). 1922: Agustდn Gaდnza, Spanish footballer (d. 1995). 1922: Alicia Jurado, Argentine author (d. 2011). 1924: Charles Aznavour, French vocalist, arranger and entertainer. 1925: Jean Tinguely, Swiss craftsman (d. 1991). 1926: Elek Bacsik, Hungarian jazz guitarist and violin player (d. 1993). 1926: Concha Alდ³s, Spanish author (d. 2011). 1927: Peter Matthiessen, American author and naturalist (d. 2014). 1927: George A. Olah, Hungarian scientist, 1994 Nobel Prize champ for science (d. 2017). 1930: Harvey Milk, American government official and social liberties lobbyist (d. 1978). 1930: Agustდn Tosco, Argentine association pioneer (d. 1975). 1932: Celia Bravo (Lucila Mataix-Olcina), Spanish essayist (f. 2001). 1935: Barry Rogers, American artist (d. 1991). 1937: Facundo Cabral, Argentine artist musician (d. 2011). 1937: Richard Kenneth Brummitt, English botanist (d. 2013). 1938: Susan Strasberg, American entertainer (f. 1999). 1940: Carlos Galvდ¡n, bandoneonist, Argentine tango director and writer (f. 2014). 1941: Paul Winfield, American entertainer (d. 2004). 1942: Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski), American psychological oppressor of Clean beginning. 1943: Betty Williams, Irish conservative, Nobel Harmony Prize champ in 1976. 1943: Edgar Marდn, previous Costa Rican footballer. 1945: Pedro Berruezo, Spanish footballer (d. 1973). 1946: George Best, Northern Irish footballer (d. 2006). 1946: Virginia Lago, Argentine entertainer. 1949: დ?ngel Enrique Tacuarita Brandazza, social lobbyist killed by the Argentine Armed force (d. 1972). 1950: Bernie Taupin, English lyricist, writer and vocalist. 1952: Waldemar Victorino, Uruguayan soccer player. 1953: Tillie Moreno, Filipino artist. 1955: Iva Davies, Australian artist lyricist and instrumentalist, head of the band Icehouse. 1956: Claudio Rissi, Argentine entertainer. 1956: Al Corley, American entertainer and artist. 1957: Javier Castrilli, previous Argentine soccer arbitrator and legislator. 1959: Morrissey, English artist and singer, of the band The Smiths. 1960: Hideaki Anno, Japanese activity chief. 1961: Alfons Arდºs, Spanish columnist. 1961: Antonia San Juan, Spanish entertainer, producer, screenwriter and maker. 1962: Bo Skovhus, Danish baritone 1964: Rita Guerrero, Mexican entertainer and artist, of the St Nick Sabina band (d. 2011). 1966: Wang Xiaoshuai, Chinese producer. 1967: Christophe Gagliano, French judoka. 1967: Paloma Lago, Spanish model and moderator. 1968: Igor Lediakhov, Russian footballer. 1970: Naomi Campbell, English model. 1970: Pedro Diniz, Brazilian Equation 1 driver. 1970: Willy Toledo, Spanish entertainer. 1972: Anna Belknap, American entertainer. 1972: Max Streams, American author. 1973: Emilio Alzamora, Spanish cruiser racer. 1973: Fდ¡tima Baeza, Spanish entertainer. 1975: Salvador Ballesta, Spanish footballer. 1976: Fernando Andina, Spanish entertainer. 1976: Daniel Erlandsson, Swedish artist. 1978: Ginnifer Goodwin, American entertainer. 1978: Katie Cost, English model. 1979: Maggie Q, American entertainer. 1980: Lucy Gordon, English entertainer (d. 2009). 1981: Jდ¼rgen Melzer, Austrian tennis player. 1981: Bryan Danielson, American expert grappler. 1983: Franco Niell, Argentine footballer. 1984: Bismarck du Plessis, South African rugby player. 1984: Paola Sallustro, Argentine entertainer and artist. 1985: CariDee English, American model. 1985: Mauro Boselli, Argentine footballer. 1985: Tranquillo Barnetta, Swiss footballer. 1987: Nდ³vak Diდ³kovich, Serbian tennis player. 1987: Arturo Vidal, Chilean soccer player. 1989: Nდ©stor Girolami, Argentine driver. 1991: Suho, South Korean artist, artist, model and entertainer. 1994: Franco Masini, Argentine entertainer.

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redtechnocrat · 1 year

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Ranked Choice Voting is popular. While not wonderful (approval and range voting is subject to less manipulation and paradoxes), such an option needs to be put in place. First Past the Post voting sucks balls, and allows plurality. I've seen approval with built in ranked run off as a decent medium.

There probably should be proportional voting as well.

Both ways avoid spoilers and still a variety of choice. Our two oligopolistic parties is hardly democratic and on most issues the two parties are Indistinguishable despite the highlight of small differences. Both serve the oligarchy for the most part, since forever, from post war consensus to DLC era and beyond corporatism.

Sortition should be put in to counter faction and manipulation as at least a share of representatives. It's telling that despite being concerned with faction the founders and framers didn't even consider it despite a long history in Ancient and Medieval republics (Athens, Florence, Venice...in Venice the complex mix of sortition and election for Doge produced a very stable republic, the supposed concern of the Framers)...because their explicit goal was to preserve minority rule. Madison is actually explicit on who the minority being protected is -- the wealthy. He didn't mean racial, ethnic or philosophical minorities as his words are twisted today to justify his model. Read the Federalist papers. Confirmed by reference to background (Shays Rebellion).

We use sortition and civic duty to fill juries. A policy jury and or civic service in government would be equivalent..without the means lawyers use to shape juries aside from a basic review of fitness as in Athens.

It'd be nice to have people with a direct experience of material conditions and life of the common folks having input and shaping of policy and not overwhelmingly millionaires who have no idea what it's like to live on the medium income, or SNAP. Also a variety beyond mostly lawyers and a few businessmen's me a smattering of doctors and other rare professionals...and a single bar tender.

Also, finance, lobbying, etc would be utterly ineffective here.

Gerrymandering needs to be outlawed post haste. People should pick their representative, not vice versa. And it's basic factional politics undermining the general good which even by Madisonian logic is acid and pernicious.

And this is without even discussing finance reform, equal time advertising...much less regulation of advertising to reflect facts. We forget that in most languages, advertising is termed propaganda, which it exactly is. Political ads are worthless empty rhetoric at best, demagoguery at worst. Or lobbying. Campaign finance is at best legalized bribery.

The failure to have these sort of reforms to reflect actual population views, distortion form lobbyists and finance is why voting is so ineffectual.

It's the bare minimum and I advocate non-voting alternatives, and building dial power, etc. But being ineffectual means it's also not hurting anything and may do some harm reduction (e.g., Christ isn't going to do radical reforms, but at least he won't make sayz transgenders worse off). It can't be all we do, but it's a start.

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muschiosa2 · 2 years

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“Is There No Time?” A Conversation with Mark Fisher

LEIGH CLAIRE LA BERGE

I met Mark Fisher some years after Alison Shonkwiler and I were lucky enough to have the opportunity to include his work in our edited volume, itself a very Fisher-derived project, Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). I was in Cambridge, England at a conference on aesthetics and politics and Mark had come down for the day from London. This was the spring of 2016. In the United States, the presidential primaries were in full swing and, following the logic of American cultural imperialism, they were the talk of, well, the storied dining halls of the University of Cambridge. Like many progressive and Leftist onlookers, both in the United States and abroad, Mark was particularly excited about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Could it be? He wondered. Was it possible?

I said I thought it was doubtful. Not because, I, the native informant, explained Bernie didn’t have popular support. I was sure then, and remain so now, that many of Bernie’s ideas were quite popular and would be broadly endorsed were they ever to see the light of day. But, of course, voting in the United States is its own labyrinthine procedure. Observers outside the country rarely understand this; indeed, observers inside the country struggle with it, too. Every state, and we have 50, has its own voting rules. Primary elections, as opposed to general, elections have their own rules. Votes don’t count equally. Before the primary election even started, a substantial minority of super delegates—remember those? Mostly lobbyists who buy seats in the upper echelons of the Democratic party—had already pledged their support for Hillary. Then you have to find your polling station. It may have moved without notification, as mine did that year. You may not be registered to vote. Even if you are registered, it still might not work. Technical issues, voting irregularities. And this is only the primary! In the general election, the difficulties expand considerably, as people of color are regularly “scrubbed,” or removed, from voting lists. The more conservative the state, the less likely people of color will be able to vote. Formerly or currently incarcerated people can’t vote. Identification requirements change. With a system like this, the philosopher Dehlia Hannah once said, you don’t need a conspiracy.1

Mark looked amazed. “The thing is,” he said, “there is no time. That’s how they get you.” When he said that, I understood it in response to my explication of American voting impasses. And it’s true: it does take time to vote. It takes energy. It takes frustration. And it still doesn’t work. But that’s not all he meant. He hoped to indicate, too, an attenuation of time as possibility, time as community, time as both a feeling of access to the present—to respond, organize, and critique—as well as access to the past, to understand history. Likewise, time forms our conduit to the future and in it we might plan how things could be different. Of course, one thinks of Marx’s famous line from The Germany Ideology as perhaps the ur-ideal of how “having time” might take a social form:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.2

Mark did function in various capacities: teacher, critic, editor, blogger (back when that was a term), academic, theorist. But perhaps better he occupied a role increasingly needed and uncommon on the Left: that of public intellectual. And I don’t mean, it must be said, liberal intellectual. We do have plenty of those, and their thoughts occupy the pages of The Nation, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among others. Mark’s critical interests were not directed toward carbon credits or public-private partnerships; he was engaged in systemic and structural criticism of our present. There was another distinguishing difference of Mark’s critical production: not only was he a public intellectual of the Left, but his subject area was, of course popular culture, particularly music — a “post-rave John Berger” he was once called by Simon Reynolds.3 We might also call him a pre-Facebook internet critic.

What I mean with that comment is that, in retrospect, Mark’s editorial work and organizational work was at least as important as his theoretical work. To be a public intellectual means not only that one’s work circulates in public; it means now, and probably always has meant, rather, that one creates publics for one’s own work as well as the work of others to circulate in. Publics do not come to us pre-formed; the work of the intellectual is thus not to curate but to cultivate. Mark of course cultivated critique after critique and discursive space after discursive space from the consumerist effluvia in which we, the “consumer-spectator,” to use his term, find ourselves always-already immersed.

Rereading Capitalist Realism some years after its publication is then to be reminded, almost randomly it feels, of some of the more idiosyncratic content that continues to attest to the truth of Deleuze and Guattari’s famous claim that capitalism is a “motley painting of everything that has ever been believed.”4 They meant ideology, but this haunting of the discarded past permeates popular culture as well. As I re-read Mark’s book in preparation for this dossier, I can honestly say that I had not thought of Kurt Cobain or Nirvana once since, well, I last read the book. The re-emergence and stabilization of the very effluvia that destroys history is one of the risks inherent in the kind of methodology that Mark pursued. Now, again, I’m thinking about Nirvana. Object as symptom, symptom as readable, readable object as potentially utopian object.

We know this method, of course; it seems a mix of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, the former provides the site for periodization; the latter offers the introduction of subject “supposed to” do any number of things: know, recycle, consume, experience anxiety and/or depression. Any account of Mark’s legacy, of course, must grapple with this question: does the methodology work? Is its critical apparatus realized? Mark’s gambit inCapitalist Realism was that, as suffocating and penetrating as the real was – presented by Jameson in his 1984 essay, “Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” – things have now gotten worse. That ethical inflection is not presented as such, of course. Rather it is presented as a narrative of an expanding capitalism that, somehow, always manages to be a little more totalizing.

For me, that argument has never been persuasive. It wasn’t when Jameson made it, and it wasn’t when Mark updated it. Jameson had already said, as Alison Shonkwiler and I noted in our own introduction to Reading Capitalist Realism, that “those precapitalist enclaves of nature and the unconscious” have now, too, entered into circuits of production and reproduction. That would seem to be all of it, right? No more time, no more nature, no more unconscious. Mark would then add that the future, too, had been colonized by capital. Thus, citing Jameson and Žižek, he recycles the line that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Mark qualifies the sentiment by noting that “it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative,” to such a state of affairs (2, italics mine.). In the postmodern 1980s, he tells us, “there were still, at least in name, political alternatives to capitalism” (7). Even as Mark does provide more specificity of social texture than Jameson, for example his discussions of higher education in the UK, he too does endorse an over-arching narrative of totalizing decline.

I see in this claim, however, a foreshortening not of the object of criticism, i.e., capitalism, but rather a foreshortening of criticism itself. This kind of argument confuses registers of historical time, narrative time, and argumentative sequence. It all too easily becomes yet another sacrifice on the altar of Leftist melancholia, Walter Benjamin’s well-known worry that an over-attachment to various forms of Leftist impossibility, as well as the pleasure sustained from the critique of them, may assume the place of the political and critical operation itself. Perhaps more to the point is Benjamin’s trenchant if unheeded caution in The Arcades Project that: “There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern’ in the sense of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before the abyss.”5 There is little currency to be found critically in attempting to supersede another epoch’s abyss; all abysses are abysmal. More interesting, I think, remains the catalytic force through which multiple registers of the present are culled together and juxtaposed. And that, in its best moments, is what Capitalist Realism does.

Why has this book endured? Looking back, one thing we can certainly say about Mark’s book is that it’s short. I mean that as a compliment. It’s easy to read, and it has circulated with ease across multiple continents and locations. We might encounter it at a museum, a gallery, an activist space, a community bookstore. And it uses a sonic and felicitous term, capitalist realism, to tell us directly something that many of us already know, or already think we know, even if we’re not sure how or why we know it. Namely, that what is real is always pre-selected, thus it is realism, and that the social forces doing the selecting hope that the selecting itself will be a site of capitalization, that they will engender and re-engender an object and subject of capital. Thus, it is capitalist realism. It hardly matters that the term wasn’t Mark’s originally; it became his.

What kind of book is Capitalist Realism?Perhaps the historian of science Lorraine Daston and the literary critic Sharon Marcus might provide a clue. They have recently introduced the idea of the “undead text,” which they define as a text whose claims resonate beyond its autochthonous discipline — that may even have become outdated in its original disciplinary setting — yet continues to live a transdisciplinary life.6 Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one such example, they suggest. Kuhn’s book is short, essayistic, lacking in long scholarly engagements as often found in cumbersome footnotes; in its first printing, it even lacked an index. An undead text seems in retrospect to be oriented around a single claim, a big claim, one that often resonates in a single phrase. Kuhn offered “the paradigm shift” to explain how scientific knowledge is structured historically. Benedict Anderson, another of their examples, offered the “imagined community.” Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women were “the second sex,” yet noted that “one is not born but becomes a woman.”7

It seems to me now that Capitalist Realism might very well join this august pantheon of undead texts. In what discipline should we place Mark’s book? Cultural Studies? Media Studies? Literature? Film Studies? A cursory glance around the internet shows it appearing on courses in each of these disciplines. In fact, I located it on a political science syllabus as well. Indeed, I actually found a class simply called “Capitalist Realism.” It seems to have many homes. But it could also have no homes. This is the risk and the pleasure of making the big claim, of generalizing, of refusing the genres of so much academic writing and then, of course, of refusing the genres that separate our own habits of thought, otherwise known as academic disciplines. These habits Mark refused, and we are all better for it.

But of course, Mark was not simply struggling against history even though, as Jameson has said, “history puts its worse foot forward.” He was also fighting the feeling that contemporary history generates in so many of us, those who intercept its worse foot. We, or at least I, can’t know the vicissitudes of his depression, but, his work encouraged us to consider the fact that there is certainly something deeply impersonal, un-individual, and deeply uninteresting about depression. And this, I think, relates to time. Depression often generates the feeling of an endless time that is accompanied by an acute enervation. When will this feeling dissipate? Hopefully in the future. But there is no future as depressive time doesn’t seem to advance; it stalls. In the midst of a depression, there is no access to a reparative past nor is there the fantasy of a reparative future. But capitalism has a cure for that. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the real of the capitalist realist than the doctor who shows up to cure the pain, for a price, of course.

One of our most-cited popular (non-medical) studies of depression, namely Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, is deserving of more study in this regard.8 The author relates his own struggles with severe depression and shows us—indeed tells us—again and again, that money saved him. Fittingly, Solomon’s father was the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company that distributed, among other things, anti-depressants. Solomon’s Wikipedia page is instructive:

Solomon is the oldest son of Carolyn Bower Solomon and Howard Solomon, former chairman of Forest Laboratories and founder of Hildred Capital Partners; he is brother to David Solomon, also of Hildred Capital Partners. Solomon’s subsequent depression, eventually managed with psychotherapy and antidepressant medications, inspired his father to secure FDA approval to market citalopram (Celexa) in the United States.9

As a result of his best-selling and prize-winning book, Solomon became and continues to be a kind of progressive public intellectual who claims, among other things, that depression is a real disease, it is not the subject’s “fault,” and that, with the proper medical treatment, it can be managed. More can and should be written about this liberal narrative of depression. I introduce it here to demonstrate a certain possibility and freedom to be found in Mark’s own writings about depression and to show, again, that it is possible to cleave the boundaries of capitalist realism.

Echoing what he had written in Capitalist Realism,Mark noted in The Guardianthat “depression is the shadow side of entrepreneurial culture, what happens when magical voluntarism confronts limited opportunities. We need to reverse the privatization of stress and recognise that mental health is a political issue.”10 He there cited the late David Smail who he called a “radical therapist” and who was part of the anti-psychiatry movement.

Smail talked of friendship and support as the mechanism for managing depression. He himself was an anti-establishment thinker. But we need not be too quick to condemn the master. In fact, Freud himself once said, in a letter to Karl Jung, that “psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.” But love takes time and, as we all know, time is money.

Dehlia Hannah, in conversation with the author, March 19, 2013.

Karl Marx and Friedrich, The German Ideology. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm

Simon Reynolds, “Mark Fisher’s k-punk blogs Were Required Reading for a Generation,” The Guardian,Guardian News and Media(18 Jan. 2017). www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/٢٠١٧/jan/١٨/mark-fisher-k-punk-blogs-did-٤٨-politics

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1994) 34.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) 545.

“Undead Texts: Grand Narratives and the History of the Human Sciences,” Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature (Accessed November 2018).www.english.columbia.edu/events/undead-texts-grand-narratives-and-history-human-sciences

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex(New York: Vintage, 1973) 301.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

“Andrew Solomon,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation (28 Nov. 2019). www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Solomon

Mark Fisher, “Why Mental Health is a Political Issue,” The Guardian,Guardian News and Media (16 July 2012). www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental-health-political-issue

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hlo2environmentalethics · 2 years

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Yes in My Backyard!

Fig. 1. “Smoke Chimney Pollution”; Pixabay, 5 Feb 2014, https://pixabay.com/photos/smoke-chimney-pollution-smoking-258786/; photograph.

Iris Marion Young uses the specific example of the siting of a hazardous waste treatment plant to examine the justice of decision-making procedures and structures. As dominant philosophical conceptions of justice–namely, utilitarianism and Rawlsian justice–focus on weighing the costs and benefits of decisions but do not explicitly examine the structures that are used to make these decisions, Young believes that they are inadequate for dealing with questions of equitable distribution (171). She ultimately argues that the principle of self-determination ought to be applied to collective action as well as individual autonomy and that communities rather than the state should make decisions in the interest of residents.

The state of Massachusetts designated an area in the town of West Warren as the site for a new type of non-radioactive hazardous waste treatment plant (172). Residents were vehemently opposed to the designation out of concern for the environmental risks posed by emitted gases, seepage into groundwater, and potential explosions. Residents wondered why they must unequally suffer the risks of the power plant when the rest of the state only benefits (173). From a utilitarian standpoint, the site in West Warren was justified. Hazardous substances must be treated to minimize contamination, and the rural, sparsely populated site of the proposed plant would cause damage to the least amount of people. Under Rawlsian justice, inequality is acceptable if the least advantaged party can also benefit (174). The communities of West Warren were expected to be compensated through increased community funding as well as the ability to dictate strict monitoring of the plants. Thus, the siting decision would also be justified according to Rawls. However, Young argues that fairness was not achieved in that arrangement because the residents were not in a position to decide for themselves, as receiving compensation is not all that is required for justice.

Young claims that Utilitarianism and Rawlsianism fail to critically reflect on the systems that make allocations and decisions. The underlying myth is that the arbitrator of these decisions, the state, is a neutral party with no interests (178). Yet, that is hardly ever the case. In this example, the presence of a treatment plant benefits the state since it solves the issue of waste disposal and is attracting a business with large revenue streams. Members of the state may also act out of their own interests for promotion or to play to the favor of lobbyists. Since the state cannot be neutral on policy issues, Young argues that the decision-making power ought to fall to those most affected by the policy (180-1). The principle of self-determination can be seen as an extension of autonomy on the individual scale when it is applied to collective action. This thus ensures that any unequal agreement is not forced upon the more disadvantaged party.

I believe that Young’s vision of self-determination is far too naive and contains certain false assumptions. Firstly, she assumes that people can rationally assess the risk of public policies. Young claims that if the waste treatment plant were harmless enough to the community, then surely there will be a community willing to site it (181). On the contrary, I suspect that most communities would be opposed to importing large amounts of hazardous waste to its vicinity, regardless of the safety of the treatment plant. Furthermore, a safe plant that has been rejected several times by communities may raise alarm in the eyes of the next community it attempts to be sited at. I believe that rational assessment of risk and benefit will not be determining factors in the matter of policymaking. The lack of rationality in collective action is also substantiated in the field of behavioral economics.

Secondly, Young assumes that self-determination can yield one coherent set of views on policies regarding the community. Yet, due to diversity in socioeconomic, racial, ethnic, sexual preference, and educational backgrounds, policies are likely to affect people unequally. Consensus would be difficult to achieve. In an ideal world, only the most equitable policies will be passed, but realistically such a policy is difficult to imagine. What would likely end up happening is that the policies created would disproportionately benefit those who have the money and time to devote to these issues. Therefore, even when the decision is made by the masses, the socioeconomically disadvantaged sector of the community would still bear the brunt of the harm.

Finally, Young assumes that policies such as siting of waste treatment plants can be delayed until consensus is achieved. She assumes that the treatment plant can simply come up with a safer approach so that the community will accept it. However, the plant proposal was likely using the safest possible technology for its time, and a better approach would take more time to research. During this time, hazardous waste could accumulate and cause greater harm to more communities. In some situations, any imperfect decision is better than no decision at all, especially when it comes to collective action. While the siting of this waste treatment plant in West Warren was unfair to its residents, it hardly seems more fair to cause greater harm by waiting for better technology to become developed. How would Young propose we deal with waste treatment if no community was willing to welcome a new plant into their neighborhood?

(Word Count: 878)

Works Cited

“Smoke Chimney Pollution.” Pixabay, 5 Feb 2014, https://pixabay.com/photos/smoke-chimney-pollution-smoking-258786/. Accessed 5 May 2022.

Young, Iris Marion. “Justice and Hazardous Waste.” Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy, vol. 5, pp. 171-183.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

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Zuck calls Apple a monopolist

The copyright scholar James Boyle has a transformative way to think about political change. He tells a story about how the word "ecology" welded together a bunch of disparate issues into a movement.

Prior to "ecology," there were people who cared about owls, or air pollution, or acid rain, or whales, and while none of these people thought the others were misguided, they also didn't see them as being as part of the same cause.

Whales aren't anything like owls and acid rain isn't anything like ozone depletion. But the rise of the term "ecology," turned issues into a movement. Instead of being 1,000 causes, it was a single movement with 1,000 on-ramps.

Movements can strike at the root, look to the underlying economic and philosophical problems that underpin all the different causes that brought the movement's adherents together. Movements get shit done.

Which brings me to monopolies. This week, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world's most egregious, flagrant, wicked monopolists, made a bunch of public denunciations of Apple for...monopolistic conduct.

Or, at least, he tried to. Apple stopped him. Because they actually do have a monopoly (and a monoposony) (in legal-economic parlance, these terms don't refer to a single buyer or seller, they refer to a firm with "market power" - the power to dictate pricing).

Facebook is launching a ticket-sales app and the Ios version was rejected because it included a notice to users that included in their price was a 30% vig that Apple was creaming off of Facebook's take.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/28/21405140/apple-rejects-facebook-update-30-percent-cut

Apple blocked the app because this was "irrelevant" information, and their Terms of Service bans "showing irrelevant" information.

This so enraged Zuck that he gave a companywide address - of the sort that routinely leaks - calling Apple a monopolist (they are), accused them of extracting monopoly rents (they do), and of blocking "innovation" and "competition" (also true).

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/zuckerberg-apple-monopoly

Now, there are a bunch of Apple customers who consider themselves members of an oppressed religious minority who'll probably stop here (perhaps after an angry reply), and that's OK. You do you. But I have more to say.

Apple is a monopolist, sure, but more importantly, they are monoposonists - these are firms with "excessive buying power," gatekeepers who control access to purchasers. Monoposony power is MUCH easier to accumulate than monopoly power.

In the econ literature, we see how control over as little as 10% of the market can cement a firm's position, giving it pricing power over suppliers. Monopsony is the source of "chickenization," named for the practices of America's chicken-processing giants.

Chickenized poultry farmers have to buy all their chicks from Big Chicken; the packers tell them what to feed their birds, which vets to use, and spec out their chicken coops. They set the timing on the lights in the coops, and dictate feeding schedules.

The chickens can only be sold to the packer that does all this control-freaky specifying, and the farmer doesn't find out how much they'll get paid until the day they sell their birds.

Big Chicken has data on all the farmers they've entrapped and they tune the payments so that the farmers can just barely scratch out a living, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and dependent on the packer for next year's debt payments.

Farmers who complain in public are cut off and blackballed - like the farmer who lost his contract and switched to maintaining chicken coops, until the packer he'd angered informed all their farmers that if they hired him, they would also get cancelled.

Monopsony chickenizes whose groups of workers, even whole industries. Amazon has chickenized publishers. Uber has chickenized drivers. Facebook and Google have chickenized advertisers. Apple has chickenized app creators.

Apple is a monopsony. So is Facebook.

Market concentration is like the Age of Colonization: at first, the Great Powers could steer clear of one another's claims. If your rival conquered a land you had your eye on, you could pillage the one next door.

Why squander your energies fighting each other when you could focus on extracting wealth from immiserated people no one else had yet ground underfoot?

But eventually, you run out of new lands to conquer, and your growth imperative turns into direct competition.

We called that "World War One." During WWI, there were plenty of people who rooted for their countries and cast the fighting as a just war of good vs evil. But there was also a sizable anti-war movement.

This movement saw the fight as a proxy war between aristocrats, feuding cousins who were so rich that they didn't fight over who got grandma's china hutch - they fought over who got China itself.

The elites who started the Great War had to walk a fine line. If they told their side that Kaiser Bill is only in the fight to enrich undeserving German aristos, they risked their audience making the leap to asking whether their aristos were any more deserving.

GAFAM had divided up cyberspace like the Pope dividing the New World: ads were Goog, social is FB, phones are Apple, enterprise is Msft, ecommerce belongs to Amazon. There was blurriness at the edges, but they mostly steered clear of one another's turf.

But once they'd chickenized all the suppliers and corralled all the customers, they started to challenge one another's territorial claims, and to demand that we all take a side, to fight for Google's right to challege FB's social dominance, or to side with FB over Apple.

And they run a risk when they ask us to take a side, the risk that we'll start to ask ourselves whether ANY of these (tax-dodging, DRM-locking, privacy invading, dictator-abetting, workforce abusing) companies deserve our loyalty.

And that risk is heightened because the energy to reject monopolies (and monoposonies) needn't start with tech - the contagion may incubate in an entirely different sector and make the leap to tech.

Like, maybe you're a wrestling fan, devastated to see your heroes begging on Gofundme to pay their medical bills and die with dignity in their 50s from their work injuries, now there's only one major league whose owner has chickenized his workers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs&list=FLM6hLIAIO-KfsNFn8ENnftw&index=767

Maybe you wear glasses and just realized that a single Italian company, Luxottica, owns every major brand, retailer, lab and insurer and has jacked up prices 1,000%.

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glasses-lenscrafters-luxottica-monopoly-20190305-story.html

Or maybe the market concentration you care about it in healthcare, cable, finance, pharma, ed-tech, publishing, film, music, news, oil, mining, aviation, hotels, automotive, rail, ag-tech, biotech, lumber, telcoms, or a hundred other sectors.

That is, maybe you just figured out that the people who care about owls are on the same side as the people who care about the ozone layer. All our markets have become hourglass shaped, with monop(olists/sonists) sitting at the pinch-point, collecting rents from both sides, and they've run out of peons to shake down, so they're turning on each other.

They won't go gently. Every Big Tech company is convinced that they have the right to be the pinchpoint in the hour-glass, and is absolutely, 100% certain that they don't want to be trapped in the bulbs on either side of the pinch.

They know how miserable life is for people in the bulbs, because they are the beneficiaries of other peoples' misery. Misery is for other people.

But they're in a trap. Monopolies and monopsonies are obviously unjust, and the more they point out the injustices they are EXPERIENCING, the greater the likelihood that we'll start paying attention to the injusticies they are INFLICTING.

Much of the energy to break up Big Tech is undoubtedly coming from the cable and phone industry. This is a darkly hilarious fact that many tech lobbyists have pointed out, squawking in affront: "How can you side with COMCAST and AT&T to fight MONOPOLIES?!"

They have a point. Telcoms is indescribably, horrifically dirty and terrible and every major company in the sector should be shattered, their execs pilloried and their logomarks cast into a pit for 1,000 years.

Their names should be curses upon our lips: "Dude, what are you, some kind of TIME WARNER?"

But this just shows how lazy and stupid and arrogant monopolies are. Telcoms think that if they give us an appetite for trustbusting Big Tech, that breaking up GAFAM will satiate us.

They could not be more wrong. There is no difference in the moral case for trustbusting Big Tech and busting up Big Telco. If Big Tech goes first, it'll be the amuse-bouche. There's a 37-course Vegas buffet of trustbustable industries we'll fill our plates with afterward.

Likewise, if you needed proof that Zuck is no supergenius - that he is merely a mediocre sociopath who has waxed powerful because he was given a license to cheat by regulators who looked the other way while he violated antitrust law - just look at his Apple complaints.

Everything he says about Apple is 100% true.

Everything he says about Apple is also 100% true OF FACEBOOK.

Can Zuck really not understand this? If not, there are plenty of people in the bulbs to either side of his pinch who'd be glad to explain it to him.

The monopolized world is all around us. That's the bad news.

The good news is that means that everyone who lives in the bulbs - everyone except the tiny minority who operate the pinch - is on the same side.

There are 1,000 reasons to hate monopolies, which means that there are 1,000 on-ramps to a movement aimed at destroying them. A movement for pluralism, fairness and solidarity, rather than extraction and oligarchy.

And just like you can express your support for "ecology" by campaigning for the ozone layer while your comrade campaigns for owls, you can fight oligarchy by fighting against Apple, or Facebook, or Google, or Comcast, or Purdue Poultry...or Purdue Pharma.

You are on the same side as the wrestling fan who just gofundemed a beloved wrestler, and the optician who's been chickenized by Luxottica, and the Uber driver whose just had their wages cut by an app.

#pluralistic

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timac-extraversal · 3 years

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Big Dumb Legitimacy, Part I

(TIMAC #004, ~2,300 words, 10 minutes)

Summary: When the mythic basis for a country's government is disputed, the government should consider justifying itself by successfully delivering practical, easy-to-measure projects instead.

Epistemic Status: Political speculation.

-☆☆☆-

In early 2019, I discussed the appeal of Trump's Wall.

Previous government programs were seen as ineffective, it's difficult for voters to tell if a program is working, and congress could always quietly defund or nerf a program when voters aren't paying attention. (Lobbyists for companies that employ unauthorized migrants might also have something to say to the senators about any immigration control program that works.) If you think that illegal immigrants coming over the southern border are driving down wages, and you don't trust the government, the appeal of the wall is obvious:

It's a big dumb object.

You know exactly what it is. You know it can be done. And you can easily tell if the government followed through. Even if you don't trust the newspapers, or the President, you can simply drive down to the Texas border and check if it's physically there.

Many on the left (and among the liberals) abhor the idea of Trump's wall, but with the Trump era coming to an end (for now), some are now starting to admit what was once more of a right-contrarian viewpoint - America's institutions have spent down some of their social capital. People just don't trust them as much.

And that's why the big dumb object may be an echo of things to come.

Latino Voters

In Texas, Trump made big gains in 18 counties where Latinos made up at least 80% of the population. A state Democratic party official said Latinos were worried about threats to the fracking industry, a major local employer, and that Republicans were also helped by 'a network of Border Patrol agents, families and unions.' [1☆] That Latinos are in the Border Patrol shouldn't come as a surprise. Latinos climbed from 7.8 to 12.5% of the country's police forces between 1997 and 2016. Previous efforts at integration were in part driven by policing as well-compensated, blue collar work. [2☆]

Latino voters might be more interested in practical issues than abstract ones. Are they productively employed? Are the places they live safe and secure? Philosophical debate and moral posturing can last all day, and with social media, well into the night. But at some point, someone actually has to get out of a truck and pour asphalt if we want to fix the potholes.

At least one hispanic man was not amused with last year's rioting and, infamously, showed up with a chainsaw and shouted for protesters to go home - and that wasn't the meanest thing he had to say. [3☆]

Spiritual Legitimacy

...and practical issues may be for the best.

To pile up recent heated rhetoric, it would be difficult for a "white supremacist" government of a country "built on stolen land" "by the hands of slaves," founded in slavery 1619 (rather than, more famously, in freedom in 1776), to legitimize itself on intergenerational moral grounds. We would need to repair or replace its legitimizing myth.

Countries are social phenomena, not just physical ones. A country is an idea, not just a place or a people. [4] The narrative of what makes a country legitimate is the story that binds the population together towards a shared project, and convinces the people to accept what, due to the limits of information, must necessarily be the rule of a small number of individuals. A country without a legitimizing myth is vulnerable, and from multiple directions at once.

The state is a shape in the minds of the population, and in a high-energy society its boundaries are maintained by the invisible threat of force. If a police precinct building is set on fire where everyone can see, rival rioters might get the idea that they can just bust open a few windows and pay a visit to the national Capitol building, perhaps smiling as they carry off the speakers' podium or live-blog from the offices of congressional representatives. [5]

There is no such thing as a safe riot. The entire point of a riot is that law enforcement is unable to control the situation. There especially isn't such a thing as a safe riot in the national Capitol building, where rioters might make contact with the nation's lawmakers (who carry much of government's sins), and where, for that reason, security personnel may be even more jumpy than usual. It's the sort of thing that might spark the fires of revolution, either in showing the weakness of the central government, or in retaliation for a massacre.

January 6 was bad, but it could have gone much, much worse.

A spiritual struggle for the soul of the nation is certainly exciting. We might imagine it gets excellent television ratings, social media engagement scores, and clicks. In fact, CNN declined from 2.5 million primetime viewers during what we might call the 'President Trump season finale' to 1.6 million primetime viewers after Biden took office. [6☆] Michael Bloomberg's failed candidacy suggests that you can't buy the kind of entertainment provided by pro-wrestling's now most legendary and infamous heel.

...so it might be better to focus on a form of legitimacy that can be achieved more easily, with something more concrete, like bulldozers.

This does not mean we need to 'abandon' suffering minorities or struggling rural residents 'to their fate.'

Streets Before Trust

On the last day of 2020, Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations posted Streets Before Trust. Alon notes that in a "trust before streets" approach, the focus is on getting community buy-in before starting a project. Often the idea is to avoid disrupting low-income or minority neighborhoods. However, Alon writes that,

The reality of low-trust politics is about the opposite of what educated Americans think it is. It is incredibly concrete. Abstract ideas like social justice, rights, democracy, and free speech do not exist in that reality, to the point that authoritarian populists have exploited low-trust societies like those of Eastern Europe to produce democratic backsliding.

His theory is that the state proves to people that it can provide tangible goods by successfully providing tangible goods. However, he writes,

Such provisions of tangible goods cannot happen in a trust before streets environment. This works when the state takes action, and endless public meetings in which every objection must be taken seriously are the death of the state. ... Low trust is downstream of low state capacity. Build the streets and trust will follow.

On January 6th, Matt Yglesias expanded the concept and provided more examples. [7☆]

The correct way to respond to a low-trust environment is not to double down on proceduralism, but to commit yourself to the “it does exactly what it says on the tin” principle and implement policies that have the following characteristics:

◆ It’s easy for everyone, whether they agree with you or disagree with you, to understand what it is you say you are doing.

◆ It’s easy for everyone to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do.

◆ It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.

That’s not a guarantee of political or policy success. Maybe you will pick terrible ideas and be a huge failure anyway. But this triad for success under conditions of distrust at least creates the possibility of success, where people will look back and decide that what you did worked. Committing yourself to that triad may involve some waste and inefficiency relative to a more theoretically optimal scheme with more means-testing.

There's been a running joke among some parts of right-contrarian twitter that Matt Yglesias is a secret reactionary. After a passage like that, we might joke that he's secretly a Rationalist. (He isn't either, of course.) [8]

Who Do You Trust?

Alon writes,

Low trust in many cases exists because people perceive the state to be hostile to their interests,

Right now, many Americans, both left and right, don't trust the state. Even a writer from Sri Lanka wrote that America is in a collapse - and that collapse isn't a single moment, but a low-level hum punctuated by violence that's in the background unless it happens to you. [9☆]

Many liberals will blame this on Trump. From their perspective, the logical thing to do to restore trust is to criticize Trump. The thinking goes something like this: if Trump is discredited, it follows that all his criticisms of other institutions are discredited - and if those criticisms are discredited, you should trust those institutions as much as you did back in, say, 2013.

This will not work. First, the doubt is not solely caused by Trump. Second, if right-wingers trusted the institutions (such as newspapers) needed to make the criticism of Trump, they would not have voted for Trump a second time. (Trump received about 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. [10☆]) Their trust in these institutions seemed to erode after 2015, [11☆] accelerating in 2020, culminating in the spectacular fireball of the Trump election fraud allegations and the 2021 MAGA Capitol Riot.

For the left and liberal people, a rising 'consciousness of racial injustice' leads them to question (and distrust) every Western institution. "Will this program benefit People of Color?" Historically, there have been some serious questions about that. [12] If the program is complex or difficult to measure, it will allow those suspicions to sneak in, or even dominate: could the criteria, even if they look reasonable, have been chosen by a racist? What if it's subconscious racism ("implicit bias")? Some institution might tell us the program isn't racist, but what if that institution is itself racist, or unwittingly working from racist data? Etc.

Each of these worldviews has layers of memetic defenses - complex procedures to handle opposing arguments. Each also has a network of paid actors that perpetuate them. The New York Times cannot criticize a MAGA into trusting the New York Times. A self-identified progressive is unlikely to be convinced that a MAGA's criticism of 'racial justice' rhetoric isn't motivated by 'a desire to protect white privilege'. [13] And contemporary political constellations [14] can fabricate entire scandals that would take months for a normal person to fully disprove.

You can't go through it. That's too expensive. You have to go around it.

-☆☆☆-

[1☆] How Latino support for Trump grew in Texas borderlands Los Angeles Times, (2020/11)

[2☆] Latino officers are helping diversify police. Can they help reform the ranks? NBC News, (2020/05)

[3☆] McAllen man who waved chainsaw at protesters charged with assault KRQE, (2020/05)

[4] A country is also a people, not just a proposition, as well as a process and a place. But that's an essay for another time.

[5] Perhaps fittingly given the Florida Man genre of news stories, the man carrying off Nancy Pelosi's lecturn was from Florida. But unlike the more whimsical examples of the Florida Man genre, which might see an alligator thrown a drive-through window, people did die during the 2021 MAGA Capitol Riot, including one of the white women who entered the Capitol building. There were even early reports that a police officer was mortally wounded after being hit with a fire extinguisher, though this may not have been accurate.

[6☆] CNN viewership plummeted after Trump left office New York Post, 2021/03

[7☆] Making policy for a low-trust world Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring, (2021/01)

[8] In both cases, he's just integrating information from outside the current consensus and presenting the resulting outputs from adding it to his considerations politely. This creates a sensation of coherent but novel depth under the surface, in the same sense that Japan is an entire culture with its own sets of unspoken cultural assumptions, providing more novelty to manga and anime for Western readers.

[9☆] I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. Indi Samarajiva, (2020/09)

One day, I was at work when someone left a bomb at the NOLIMIT clothing store. It exploded, killing 17 people. When these types of traumatic events take place, no two people experience the same thing. For me, it was seeing the phone lines getting clogged for an hour. For my wife, it was feeling the explosion a half-kilometer from her house. But for the families of the 17 victims, this was the end. And their grief goes on.

As you can see, this is not a uniform experience of chaos. For some people it destroys their bodies, others their hearts, but for most people it’s just a low-level hum at the back of their minds.

[10☆] An Australian news piece from Nov 5 reports Trump had about 63 million votes in 2016. A later USA Today piece reports a final total of about 74 million for 2020.

[11☆] This is my personal judgment, but tracks a Gallup Poll that ends in 2019. Trust in government remains near historic lows (2019).

[12] From a right-wing perspective, if we consider some norms, beliefs, values, or expectations a form of "social technology," there are even more questions.

From a left-wing perspective, during the Obama Administration, I remember one writer suggesting that Black Lives Matter wanted to convince politicians to want to help black folks rather than agreeing to a specific policy, because they didn't trust the details of policy (which could easily hide implementation details that disadvantage black people).

[13] If members of the white working class seem suspicious of this antiracist explanation, however, it might have something to do with white privilege theory lowering white liberals' sympathy for poor white people.

[14] Networks of interrelated organizations and actors acting semi-independently in a way which, due to conditions, gives the appearance of coordination. No one is specifically 'in charge,' and many actions take place in the open.

#timac #politics #racepol

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noctomania · 3 years

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I want you to understand the cause and effect of what has led to what is going on in texas at least re: abortion laws.

First off let me clarify: Roe v Wade was not law...yet. When you see a ___ v ___, that is an opinion. Not in the sense you may think. It's an opinion decided through litigation which means it's a powerful opinion that has been hammered out through the judicial process of a lawsuit being drawn up, and worked out in court. It could be a local, state, or federal court. Typically the ones that are most significant are federal, or ones that have come before the US Supreme Court - either because it is the federal government that is being challenged, the defendant petitions to move it to federal, or that the case has been elevated through appeals.

There are particular circumstances that determine if a case can go federal level:

"Federal court jurisdiction, by contrast, is limited to the types of cases listed in the Constitution and specifically provided for by Congress. For the most part, federal courts only hear:

Cases in which the United States is a party;

Cases involving violations of the U.S. Constitution or federal laws (under federal-question jurisdiction);

Cases between citizens of different states if the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000 (under diversity jurisdiction); and

Bankruptcy, copyright, patent, and maritime law cases.

In some cases, both federal and state courts have jurisdiction. This allows parties to choose whether to go to state court or to federal court."

Federal courts may hear cases concerning state laws if the issue is whether the state law violates the federal Constitution.

In the case of Roe v Wade, the attorney's filed to the Supreme Court since the argument was that the state law was a violation of a federal law - specifically the 14th amendment assertion of right to privacy. That is what determines the jurisdiction in this case.

RvW was decided in 1973 with a 7-2 ruling in favor of Roe's right to privacy and ultimately right to choose how to treated her pregnancy. Why hasn't it been turned into law? Obvious reasons over the years include what party is in power in executive, congressional, or even judicial circles. Right now though we have a D in the executive and congress, but something many are overlooking is the critically important and understates judicial branch - which holds significant changes Trump installed.

Also regarding congressional, though there is a stronger hold on the house (even with 3 vacancies), the senate is just barely D majority with 50 R, 48 D and 2 independent as shown in the charts below. The two Independent Senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, caucus with the Democrats which brings it 50/50 and the US VP - Harris (D) in this case - is the President of the senate and ultimately serves as a tie breaker for votes as well as situations like this even divide of party members. Were the VP a republican than republicans would still have a senate majority.

I will dive more into what's going on with the senate and why even with a D majority it isn't where it needs to be as it's a bit less straight forward.

So how the hell are abortion rights being challenged? Why aren't the all powerful democrats doing anything?!

Well, they are and have been doing a lot - and I urge you in moments when you are frustrated by feeling as though "dems aren't doing anything" to dig deeper to understand how our government operates. It's very clear there is a poor comprehension of our civics system by the general population which is why I'm using this as an opportunity to not only inform but also to learn more myself. I was educated primarily in Texas public education system. I was privileged enough to have decent teachers, but there is still much to learn. I'm doing research as I write this. I've already learned a lot. Come learn with me!

Alright, you're on board with learning more? Great choice! Let's get into it.

So with dem control of executive and congressional branch, all that is left is judicial.

"Trump appointed 54 federal appellate judges in four years, one short of the 55 Obama appointed in twice as much time."

Trump also had a major influence on the nation’s highest court. The three Supreme Court justices he appointed – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are the most by any president since Ronald Reagan (who appointed four) and the most by any one-term president since Herbert Hoover

Donald Trump has appointed and the Senate has confirmed 220 Article III federal judges through November 1, 2020, his fourth year in office.

The average number of federal judges appointed by a president through November 1 of their fourth year in office is 200.

Judges are supposed to be neutral impartial parties who use only what is presented in court and through the judicial process (which involves looking at current standing laws) to determine their decisions in court instead of using their personal opinion or political sway to inform them. However, as we saw all too often, trump was not interested in impartiality. He was interested in control, asserting his own personal opinion, even on occasion insisting he himself as president had more control than the constitution actually allows. So with that conflict and the fact he installed so many judges really makes huge impact on the judicial branch of our government. Since every branch is supposed to be fair and equal this causes a lot of road block when one branch is neither fair nor equal. You can't simply use the other two the gain up on the third - though in this case that would be convenient for dems, it would be much less convenient when the parties were reversed. It's also important to acknowledge the reality that D are not always impartial either - which again we will get to after judicial chat - nor are all R unfair. This can be a hard pill to swallow, even for me. Reality is not always easy to accept.

So of course appointments made by trump, of which there were many, can not be trusted to actually be acting in good faith, but in favor of personal or political interests (which also often come down to personal interest of a financial persuasion). When judges are not impartial, they may make decisions that ultimately contradict what was presented in court or what the law of the land says. Typically if a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee (you can see an example here of the first day of Amy Comey Barrett's hearing day 1/3) determines that there is a conflict of interest or that they are illgitimate, then ideally a judge will be blocked from appointment. This clearly also depends on the makeup and impartiality of the Senate and thus the Committee. The Committee will debate and vote on whether or not to confirm every nomination made by a President. (it used to require 3/5 of the senate or 60 votes but since 2017 only requires a "simple majority" or 51 votes for confirmation)

I want to take a quick aside here and go a little philosophical in understanding judicial impartiality, because I hope it will help you have some perspective on how it's an inherently difficult matter. Ultimately the court's impartiality comes down to checks/balances and faith. Not religious faith, but faith in humanity and honesty. Trusting that there is no hidden motive or lies or manipulation at play. We tend to have to rely heavily on the checks and balances part since faith in humanity can be easily manipulated with lobbying and politicians eagerness to look bipartisan for popularity in elections (appealing as more bipartisan is considered a way of winning over more votes like centrists and those just left and right of it). Checks and balances allows oversight of the 3 branches over one another and attempting to keep the scales balanced in order to prevent any one branch being too powerful and ultimately to avoid the US being something more like a monarchy - which was a primary goal at the time of forming the constitution and government since it is what we had fought to escape in the first place.

"So judges aren't allowed their 1st amendment rights?!"

Humans are merely humans no matter what title they have or role they play and humans are inherently flawed and partial. Nobody is perfect and some make mistakes as well as bad faith decisions for ulterior motives (could be a matter of loyalty to well funded lobbyists or even general unchecked and ultimately supported ignorance or a power grab). After and throughout checks and balances, that is where the faith part comes in that we hope we can trust judges to put their personal opinion aside and go with what the evidence presented in court and the law and super precedents tell them. We trust the Committee to do their due diligence in researching nominees and asking them tough questions. Realistically everyone can and likely will have some kind of opinion on any major issue, so it is not that anyone expects a justice to not have a personal opinion, only that they not use it to determine their decision in court. So, say i was a judge looking at a defendant accused of a civil rights infringement and i personally felt that they were guilty but there was no or not enough "valid" evidence to prove it, I couldn't assert they are guilty just based off my own opinion. I would have to depend on the evidence shown in court proving that it has infringed on precedents or existing law.

(All the appointments made by trump can be viewed more in detail here.)

"BLAHBLAHBLAH WHAT ABOUT THE SUPREME COURT"

It would be too tumultuous for me to dig into each of the 3 Supreme Court judge appointments by trump in regards to current issues around Roe v Wade, so I'm going to focus on one that is likely most relevant in particular: Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett was an appointment made when Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing caused a vacancy in the court. (Why didn't she retire under Obama? The Senate was GOP controlled which made the odds of a pro-choice appointment being confirmed low). RGB was well known for being a strong advocate for the right to choose and for a long time was a stronghold in the court to ensure Roe v Wade was upheld. Since trump wouldn't want to lose too many votes from women and allies to women, he made the clear choice to appoint a woman which is what i would call performative in the case that though Barrett is a woman she does not particularly stand on the side of women's rights.

In day two of Barrett's confirmation hearing, Senator Klobuchar honed in on Barrett's opinions regarding Roe v Wade - especially as to whether it is considered what is called a "super precedent", an important matter when talking about codification. Klobuchar makes it clear that Barrett has said she finds Brown v BoE to be a super precedent despite the Supreme Court never impressing that opinion, but refuses to consider Roe v Wade a super precedent despite that being a Supreme Court opinion. Barrett's argument is that "scholarly literature" she has read has asserted it is not a super precedent because calls for its overrule has never ceased, where as cases such as Brown v Board "nobody questions anymore". Klobuchar digs in again asking if US v Virginia Military is a "super precedent" and Barrett refuses to answer - or as she phrases it "grade" - because it wasn't one of the cases Barrett spoke about in an article she had written.

After Klobuchar asked Barrett if Roe v Wade is a super precedent, Barrett asked Klobuchar how the Senator defines a super precedent. Reasonably so, Klobuchar - who is a senator and not a judge - scoffs and puts that responsibility back on Barrett who was nominated to be a Supreme Court judge. Barrett obliges and asserts a definition that she uses is of (supposedly not conservative) ONE scholarly opinion which depends on a case being "so well settle that no political actors and no people seriously push to overrule"

In a scholarly opinion in 2006 by Michael J Gerhardt at University of North Carolina School of Law defined a super precedent in many ways one being "decisions whose correctness is no longer a viable issue for courts to decide; it is no longer a matter on which courts will expend their limited resources."

However:

in the Roberts hearings, Charles Fried, a prominent conservative legal scholar at Harvard, agreed explicitly that Roe was a superprecedent. As solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, Mr. Fried had asked the court to overturn Roe. But testifying on behalf of Judge Roberts, he said that Roe had become a super-duper precedent that would not and should not be overturned, because it was reaffirmed in 1992 and extended in subsequent decisions protecting gay rights and the right to die.

Here is a good example of what happens in academia and why i take "scholarly research" with a heap of salt since I have experience in doing scholarly research. When you are doing research, your audience is trusting that you have run through all the hard work of researching both sides of a specific matter - not just looking up opinions based on whether they are from a conservative or a liberal as that is not supposed to be what determines their opinion on any particular matter.

You are supposed to be actually looking into all the differing opinions on the specific subject matter. While it does help to have a context of the profile of the one giving the opinion, it is the evidence they present in their argument that is what should be prioritized in research. The audience is also trusting that the sources the researcher uses are valid, researched, and impartial and that any studies they use are peer reviewed and use proper methodology and are also impartial without any sway from funders. Since many academic resources that would elaborate on these details are often gatekept through paywalls or language or other accessibility barriers, it can be difficult for the general population to do their own research - the majority of which do not have access for one reason or another - they are left with nothing but to choose to have faith the researcher they are reading did their job earnestly.

Barrett focusing on opinions from scholars (actually it seems she is more dependent on one particular scholar's opinion - Gerhardt as seen in notes 128-132) based on whether or not they are typically conservative scholars is basing it on an irrelevant matter when she should have been taking on all opinions about super precedents and digging into comparing and contrasting them based on whether or not they hold water. It seems more like she sought a defense for her pre-determined opinion and insulated it from challenge by excluding any other assertions despite their significance. She ultimately failed at her responsibility as a researcher.

On Wednesday 9/2/21, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to not block Texas SB8, a decision that weakens Roe v Wade.

Now this has been a very long form way of spelling out just SOME of the impact that trump has had on the judicial branch. I want to now go back to 2016 when he was elected, and try to extrapolate why what happened in that election was a serious failure in regards to those responsible for casting their votes: The People.

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

"We the people" is every single resident and/or citizen of the nation at any time. The constitution is essentially a contract drawn up between every single one of us including those born and raised here, those who move here, those who's communities were here before the formation of the nation, and those who may be a citizen but living elsewhere. The diversity of The People in every faucet of human life makes this document necessarily complicated and amendable. In consequence the way in which our government is also complicated but also amendable. One matter that has been a point of contention since the dawning of the nation is the right to vote.

Who could vote & When (.):

1776: white men over 21 who owned land

1870 Racial barriers eliminated tho 15th is not enforced by states

1920: white women can vote

1924: Native american's given voting rights

1964: Civil Rights Act - all above 21y/o may vote regardless of identifiers such as race - ensures Black people's right to vote

1971: Voting age lowered to 18

1984: Accessibility extended to disabled americans by setting accessibility standards

In between all of these are other matters that challenged the accessibility to voting for one population or another such as literacy tests, naturalization, and polling taxes. Many of the challenges were directly challenging to People of Color particularly Black Women. To this day there are still many who must fight to assert their right - a right that should never be denied, never be thought of as less than inherent. Access is less a concern for the wealthy and well to do as their needs are never on the line the way it is for people who are poor, Black, disabled, immigrant, or even just have a primary language other than English.

For those of us who have never had to fight to utilize our right to vote in our life have too often shown that we do not respect the power in this right. Or rather know exactly how powerful it is and choose to use that power in a destructive way because we aren't getting our faves. For the first many many years I was eligible to vote, I refused to at all because I do not like how our government and politicians conducts themselves. As soon as I learned about the filibuster I was so pissed I didn't want to partake at all. Have I be impacted by this personally? To an effect, but not in a way that impacts my life significant enough for me to really notice. But in congruence with other privileged decisions not to vote, it has certainly impacted many lives. In a nation where communities are still fighting to have the law meant to protect them properly enforced, it is entirely a privilege abused to choose not to vote.

Though I was 18 in 2007, 2016 I cast my first vote.

Why? Because it was finally looking as though I may face personal consequences if I didn't. Prior to 2016 i wasn't worried bc there was obama, i wasn't old enough to vote when bush was up for relection and seeing him win again embittered me further. by the time I was 18, I saw how unreliable 3rd party was despite my parents being all in that gambit, and otherwise it all felt like nobody was paying attention to the issues only on popularity contests. All i thought of though was my perspective on the matter. It was all me-centric, my choice to withhold from voting in any election. When trump started to look less like a joke and actually got traction, I saw my neighbors trump signs and i looked at where i was in life. I had also began to actually do the work and stop letting apathy guide my decisions, but to rather listen to my humanity and my responsibility as my neighbor's neighbor.

Quite literally. At the time my neighbor was a Black woman. I only spoke to her once and it was when she came by to selflessly make sure I was going to be ok when our landlord was kicking us out to sell the place out from under our feet - something I hadn't even considered doing yet seemed like second nature for her to do (to be fair i was struggling to find a place but i've no idea about her life). I wish i had gotten her name and stayed in touch, it's kind-hearted people like that that are hard to come by. I'm still working on being as selfless.

I was and am proud to have not only voted in 2016, but for my first vote to have been for a woman. I was scared and for someone other than myself for once in 2016. I had high hopes for Clinton based on name recognition and basic common sense.

Humans are not perfect. Nor are they inherently humble.

Trump encouraged arrogance among the most ignorant leaning right. Sanders encouraged arrogance in the most ignorant leaning left. Clinton seemed to always get the most dramatic fire though from both sides, which signaled to me some kind of mess was going on. My own parents tried to sell me on Sanders, but by this point I had a better concept of how to properly research and untangle the mythologies that were parroted by my own parents about Clinton. Even when I proved their parroted lies wrong they were unwilling to concede, only to move the goal post or deflect.

Now, I get to my point.

Which is to really smack upside the head of anyone who chose not to vote in 2016, everyone who is left or liberal but voted for trump, everyone who wrote in someone else. If trump hadnt made it in as POTUS, paired with the republican majority senate, the landscape of the judicial branch would not have faced such a conservative shift, it wouldn't have given mcconnell so much influence, it wouldn't have resulted in the pandemic being so much worse than it needed to be. Many lives would have been spared. You can only blame the government for so long until you realize we are the government, we install the government, and we hold power we must use wisely. We the People.

Many who voted for clinton have been critical of her. As we always should be critical of those we choose in any level of government. We the people hold responsibilities that build this nation from the ground up, and without adherence to those responsibilities it puts other's rights in danger. When we decide that something doesn't matter that much to us or weighing it against the consequences we may personally face - you're failing in your responsibility to your neighbor who is likely doing far more justice to you than you are extending to them.

Yes my white people i look at you.

Yes my white men I look at you.

Yes my white queers I look at you.

Yes my white degree holders I look at you.

Yes white youth I look at you where I once was. When I was younger and arrogant and naive and apathetic and bitter and I let all that guide my choices instead of my concern for the neighbor who was looking out for me.

I still matter in the formation and function of tomorrow's government and I'm going to make sure I let my impact be constructive for all my neighbors who have extended such courtesy to me by not shirking my main duty to make an informed vote in every election i may partake in from local to national.

The differences among us in this nation may seemingly tend to fall along party lines, what the real metric is:

Do you give a fuck outside your own home?

Or is it just about what you want, what you think, what you feel? Nothing in this nation is just involving you or your bestie or your family, we're in this together whether we like it or not. Trust me as someone who struggles daily to find the humanity in others, I know how toxic that can be to your perspective when you give into it. Believe in benefit of the doubt, believe in change, believe in your power to do good for others. Believe and invest in your humanity.

While i can be mad at conservative votes for trump that was to be expected. I'm far more disappointed in the right AND DUTY to vote being given up by so many on the left simply because their fave didn't make it to the finals. That is not how establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, or secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. AOC and Pressley and Porter did not make it where they are by their supportive constituents abdicating their right to vote.

I accept my faults in never having voted before 2016 even in local elections. It was stupid and selfish and 2016 woke me up to that reality. You don't go from 0 to trump overnight. Do you accept your fault in not voting in 2016 when one of the most detrimental candidates was running and won?

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panicinthestudio · 3 years

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youtube

Fact vs. fake - why don’t we trust science any more?, October 22, 2021

Asbestos, climate change, 5G, coronavirus - the public is caught in a battle for the truth. Science is being manipulated and undermined to sway opinion and create doubt. What are the mechanisms behind it all?

Never has scientific knowledge seemed so vast, detailed and widely shared. And yet it appears to be increasingly challenged.

It’s no longer surprising to see private corporations put strategies in place to confuse public debate and paralyze political decision-making. Why did it take decades to classify tobacco as harmful? Why do people still deny human involvement in climate change? Overwhelmed by an excess of information, how can we, as citizens, sort out fact from fiction?

One by one, this film dismantles the machinations that aim to turn science against itself. With the help of declassified archives and testimonies from experts, lobbyists and politicians, this investigation plunges us into the science of doubt. Along with a team of experts, including philosophers, economists, cognitive scientists, politicians, and scholars, we explore concrete examples of how doubt can be sown, and try to understand the process.

Deutsche Welle

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hindisawalblog · 3 years

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BA Full Form And Carrier Opportunity Step By Step !!

Would you like to think about BA full structure? In the event that you don't have a clue, this article will be useful for you. Today, through this article, we will inform you regarding the BA full structure just as exhaustively about the BA course.

In right now, understudies have numerous alternatives. They can browse different courses offered at various foundations. Yet, out of these, BA course is quite possibly the most mainstream courses. Many presumed establishments offer BA courses to the understudies.

What is the full type of BA?

The full type of BA is Bachelor of Arts. It is called Bachelor of Arts in Hindi. BA course is a college class in Arts or Humanities.

In India, it's anything but a three-year course offered by organizations and is a piece of a "senior school".

This course is liked by understudies who have dropped of secondary school and who need to seek after expressions.

You can do this course in practically all nations of the world like India, Japan, Canada, Thailand, Philippines, UK, USA and so on

Relatively few individuals realize that the length of BA course in India is three years, however in certain nations like Canada, Bangladesh and Japan, the term of this course requires four years to finish.

What is the qualification for doing BA course?

For BA Course, you probably passed (HSLC) Higher Secondary test with at any rate 33% score to meet all requirements for affirmation.

Every one of the understudies can show up for the BA course test from a perceived instructive board which likewise offers science and business streams.

A wide assortment of subjects are accessible in this BA program, which permits expressions graduates to tailor their examinations as indicated by their inclinations and interests.

It gives many vocation choices to the understudies. Both private area and public area occupations are accessible and understudies can land positions as per their abilities and information.

In the wake of doing this course, in the event that we talk about government area occupations, Banks, Railways, UPSC, Army can apply for every one of these.

Aside from this, on the off chance that you talk about private area occupations, you can apply for posts like Public relations firms, BPO, Consultancies, Political Scientist, Philosopher, Personnel Manager, Social Worker, Psychologist, Philosopher, Public Relations Executive, Archeologist and Journalism.

What are the work profilers of BA Course?

Discussing position profile in the wake of doing BA course, as a matter of first importance you can do MA to do authority on this course. Something else, assuming you need to enter the school, you can do B.ED. Yet, for B.ED you need to finish the selection test.

You can land different position titles added to your name contingent upon your range of abilities like Analyst, Management Manager, Administrative Officer, Business Administrator, Examiner, Social Worker, Policy Analyst, Finance Managers, Lobbyist/Organizer, Business Consultants, Political Correspondent, Management Accountants Huh.

Additionally Information Systems Manager, Political Commentator, Production Manager, Human Resource Manager, Public Opinion Analyst, Personnel Management Specialist, Research and Development Manager, Labor Relations Specialist, Business Management Researcher, Business Management Professor, Public Affairs Research Analyst, and so on Different Sectors can take part in.

What are the well known BA courses in India?

Lone wolf of Arts(full type of ba) in Economics

Four year education in liberal arts in Philosophy

Four year education in liberal arts in History

Four year education in liberal arts in Geography

Four year education in liberal arts in Sociology

Four year education in liberal arts in Yoga

Four year education in liberal arts in Social Science

Four year education in liberal arts in Political Science

Four year certification in liberal arts in Physical Education

Four year certification in liberal arts in Public Administration

Which are the well known BA schools in India?

Some mainstream BA schools in India are given beneath:

St. Xavier's College, Mumbai

Administration College, Kolkata

Hans Raj College, Delhi

Christ College, Bangalore

Advantageous interaction College, Pune

Loyola College, Chennai

St. Stephen's College, Delhi

St. Xavier's College, Ahmedabad

Sophia College for Women, Mumbai

Woman Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi.

What are the advantages of doing BA course?

A BA course understudy goes through a clear cut investigation program for his general advancement as a person.

For the most part, it is viewed as the least demanding stream when contrasted with Science and Engineering streams. It is by and large thought to be the most un-important.

The purpose for this is that an individual graduating in Arts holds a degree in everyday non-logical subjects.

However, the worth of expressions degree can be checked from the way that it offers a larger number of odds of work openings than some other stream.

What are the courses to do after BA course?

Companions, assuming you have effectively done BA course, you can do numerous different courses with the goal that you can go after any great positions or in any event, for advancement of any work.

Underneath we have discussed some well known courses which you can do as indicated by you:

MBA (Master of Business Application)

L.L.B. (Unhitched male of Laws)

M.C.A (Master of Computer Application)

B.Ed. (Unhitched male of Education)

M.A. (Expert of Arts)

Recognition Courses.

Inn Management.

Style Design