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rotationalsymmetry · 3 years

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At the risk of losing all my (probably pretty limited) anarchist cred, I just gotta go off about what the American ideals are.

(There’s a certain amount of “America is the best” that goes around among Americans (especially conservatives) and I don’t really want to come across like that? An analogy: at some point we got this idea that apple pie is this really classically super American thing but it’s not like other places don’t have apple pie; when I say freedom and equality are American values I don’t mean that other places don’t have those values or for that matter that America is especially good at embodying values of equality and freedom. Just that they are values that we nominally aspire to and that they are good values to aspire to. Anyways.)

(Individual) freedom. Rights. Liberties. To say what you want, believe what you want, hang out with who you want to hang out with, and tell the government off when it’s messing up without being punished (at least by the government) for it. And the US is pretty hard core on free speech: there’s not a lot that the government is allowed to censor, including for instance Nazi stuff. Whether that’s the right call there is an open question. (And…in practice people do get in trouble for specifically their political views, it’s just the government has to break its own rules to do that and it doesn’t really have popular buy-in. For instance, when San Francisco Food Not Bombs was facing mass arrests, the police were pretty open about it being because FNB is an anarchist group, but it did make them look bad and they eventually stopped doing it. (Legally it was “not having a permit”, but uh, that wasn’t the actual reason.)

One place the US both fails to live up to that ideal, specifically on the “believe what you want” front, is that Christmas is a national holiday and US Christians and social Christians (people who aren’t Christian but do celebrate secularized versions of Christian holidays and aren’t strongly tied to a tradition with different holidays and practices) tend to be massively in denial about how that privileges Christianity over other religions. For instance, Jewish people tend to have to specifically ask for Yom Kippur off from work or school and aren’t necessarily able to travel to spend Passover with family. Whereas, apart from people who have jobs that have to be done all the time like nurses, Christians generally don’t have a problem with getting Christmas off, not even having to ask, just automatically. Sure, we don’t have an official religion, technically, but in practice there are things the government (not to mention society as a whole) does to make it easier for Christians than non-Christians.

Still, that’s better than where we started. In the decades around American independence, many states switched from having an official Protestant religion that got government funding, while other denominations had to scramble for funding from congregants who were supporting a religion they didn’t belong to with their taxes, to not having that.

Legal protections against unfair convictions and cruel punishments. Now, if you’ve been following along you know the US has a criminal justice system problem. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I strongly recommend reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Also great as an audiobook.) So, we’re not putting this one into practice well, because racism. But in theory, trial by a jury of one’s peers is a good thing, due process is a good thing, not having to testify against yourself is a good thing, legally not being allowed to torture people is a good thing (again, theory vs practice), and innocent until proven guilty if you have to have a punitive justice system is better than not having an “innocent until proven guilty” approach. All this is super corrupted and we fail to live up to this ideal hard and there should be more about giving people a fresh start after they’ve served their time. But, it’s still good stuff, we just need to live it out better.

Speaking of racism, we value equality. In theory. And some things have gotten better over time. Certainly rules about who can vote have gotten a lot more inclusive.

Maybe if we keep believing that we should treat everyone equally hard enough one day we’ll actually get there. Maybe we get there one piece at a time. One teacher who calls on girls as often as boys, one real estate agent who treats the same sex couples the same as the opposite sex couples, one college admissions person who doesn’t mark down the essays that talk about participation in race based school clubs. Maybe it’s always going to be a process.

(Representative) democracy. It’s possible to overplay this, but yeah, it’s a value we got. That decisions should ultimately be in the hands of people collectively. That legislators etc should be accountable to the people.

Federalism: so, there’s a hierarchy where the national government can overrule state and local decisions. But, this is important, it’s a limited hierarchy in that the people higher up the hierarchy don’t pick and can’t replace people farther down the hierarchy. The state governor gets elected by the people. The city mayor gets elected by the people. So do the legislative branches at all levels. If the President of the US hates the guts of the governor of California, too bad, he’s just gotta deal with it. People higher up in government don’t appoint people at a lower level of government.

Plus, see “freedom” above, there’s limitations on what the national government can actually do. (These limitations are somewhat weakened because the national government can regulate interstate trade and that covers a lot these days, but there’s still lines it’s not allowed to cross.)

Similarly the “checks and balances” concept — the President has a lot of power but he’s not a dictator, and he can’t just do anything. Most things require Congress’s approval. And the Supreme Court can rule on what’s constitutional, this is how we got nation-wide legal same sex marriage and nation-wide abortion protection. Far from a perfect system and one of the big holes is how only Congress can declare war so we just haven’t “declared war” since WWII. So clearly the US hasn’t been in a war since then. Anyways.

Anyways this is why I’m not actually that thrilled about the “but Biden can just executive order everything” approach. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. If you don’t want the President to have dictatorial power, you have to accept limitations on the President’s power even when he’s Team Blue. And the more power the president has, the more wild swings we see on things like immigration policy which is not actually a good thing.

We initially had a “no political parties” concept. That worked out abysmally. Probably if we’d actually allowed for political parties we’d have rules about them that actually made sense and might limit the amount of fuckery that goes on.

Now some ideals that I’m less happy about. These are things I don’t endorse or approve of, but I’m mentioning them because they are common American values. Meritocracy: the idea that sure there’s wealth and power inequality but that’s ok as long as the people with more earned it. Fuck that.

(Well, in theory it’s got some advantages over “powerful people pass that power on to their kids no matter how incompetent,” except in practice meritocracy is often a cover for just that.) (Anyways, in theory we like people to succeed based on merit, which is better than a belief system that some types of people are naturally superior to and more capable than other types of people. So there’s worse ideals. There’s better ones too.)

Capitalism.

Hard work. Grind culture baby. Work all the time. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Puritan bullshit. You don’t need contraception. Just keep your legs closed. If we don’t teach kids about sex they won’t have sex. Also, don’t do drugs. Also, religious people are better than atheists. (Also, specifically Christians are better than everyone else. Real Christians. Not like those (other denomination).)

Melting pot/assimilation: sometime multiculturalism gets into the value stew and I’m all for respecting multiple cultures and recognizing that America is made up of people from a wide variety of different backgrounds, not just people from England/northern and western Europe/Europe. And that we do in fact get our values from a wide variety of cultures (including Native American cultures) and not just Greco-Roman Whatever. (Like seriously: US democracy is as much a child of the Iroquois Confederacy as Athens.) Other times the value is “you’re here now, forget where you’re from and blend in.” And part of that is about not judging people by where they’re from and that’s good! But it shouldn’t be tied to “ew, you’re having that for lunch?”

Manifest Destiny. Yeah. Fuck that.

I’m probably leaving stuff out. Whatever. I’m tired. I’m just going to post. If I want to clean it up later I can make a new post.

#America #united states #political #American values

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things2mustdo · 3 years

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The Ascent Of Money by Niall Ferguson is an introduction to modern finance and the rise of money lending, presenting a favorable view of their effects upon the world.

…financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today.

…poverty is not the result of rapacious financiers exploiting the poor. It has much more to do with the lack of financial institutions, with the absence of banks, not their presence. Only when borrowers have access to efficient credit networks can they escape from the clutches of loan sharks, and only when savers can deposit their money in reliable banks can it be channeled from the idle rich to the industrious poor.

…approximately $1 of every $14 paid to employees in the United States now goes to people working in finance. Finance is even more important in Britain, where it accounted for 9.4% of GDP in 2006.

The book gives an interesting history of some of the world’s most famous bankers and the power they accumulated, particularly the Medicis and Rothchilds, who brought value by facilitating trade and commerce while reducing transaction prices. It also described the role of European bankers during the American Civil War.

Though others had tried before them, the Medici were the first bankers to make the transition from financial success to hereditary status and power They achieved this by learning a crucial lesson: in finance small is seldom beautiful. By making their bank bigger and more diversified than any previous financial institution, they found a way of spreading their risk.

One of the biggest financial innovations was fractional reserve banking, pioneered by the Swedes. Other European countries improved finance while the Spaniards, still obsessed with silver and gold in their American colonies, kept defaulting time and time again, not understanding that the true nature of money lay in debt and not mineral reserves. One of the more interesting parts of the book was its description of the bond market and its powerful stranglehold on world governments.

…the bond market is powerful partly because it passes a daily judgement on the credibility of every government’s fiscal and monetary policies. But its real power lies in its ability to punish a government with higher borrowing costs. Even an upward move of half a percentage point can hurt a government that is running a deficit, adding higher debt service to its already high expenditures.

…countries that defaulted on their debts risk economic sanctions, the imposition of foreign control over their finances and even, in at least five cases, military intervention.

While the book paints a rosy view of finance, it also highlights cases where the abuse of it through hook and crook caused problems for entire economies, particularly through price inflation. A recent example of that was Goldman Sachs’ commodity manipulation that caused the price of common foodstuffs to rise. On the other hand, ignoring finance and having inflexible monetary policy can turn recessions into depressions. He suggests that Helicopter Ben Bernanke actually did the right thing in showering Wall Street with money to prevent a depression. He also thinks Alan Greenspan is a great man for admitting he shouldn’t have kept interest rates so low.

Economies that combined all these institutional innovations—banks, bond markets, stock markets, insurance and property-owning democracy—performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources then, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, and then in the guise of globalization.

You’ll also read about:

The abysmal effects of Britain’s weflare system on their economy

Argentina’s failed destiny to become an economic superpower due to bad economic decisions and poor leadership

How the “risk free” LTCM fund imploded and almost took the world economy with it

My problem with the book is that his explanations were too light. He glossed over tough concepts like sovereign bonds and other financial instruments without providing much in the way of examples, unlike a writer such as Matt Taibbi who explains the most complex concept in a way that laymen can understand. I felt like I had to read this book in front of Google so that I could look up things he mentioned only in passing.

The book also seemed hurried with its historical research, especially towards the end when it become a jumbled mess. Overall it’s an okay book but I don’t recommend it for the neophyte.

…it’s not owning property that gives you security; it just gives your creditors security. Real security comes from having a steady income.

Read More: “The Ascent Of Money” on Amazon

https://www.returnofkings.com/10595/there-is-no-hedge-against-inflation

You’ve seen him: an older man sitting next to a roaring fire or maybe walking the grounds of his ranch or he might be in a suit facing the camera. The messages are all the same: something about “troubling times” and “safety and security” —maybe they mention the federal reserve or money printing. Times are bad and could get worse, but they can help you. They have the answer. What is this company selling? GOLD.

Why would you want a gold coin or bar? It doesn’t earn interest and it doesn’t grow or produce anything. It is vulnerable to theft. The price can move down with astonishing speed as we saw last April (as of the time of this writing it has retraced over 50% of that selloff). But could it go up in value, could it “skyrocket” as the gold shills say?

Keep in mind that gold has already gone up a lot recently, about fivefold in the past ten years. And to simply say that gold is a hedge against inflation is misleading. If you compare the price today, let’s say $1500 per oz, to the average price in 1974, about $150/oz, it actually exceeded inflation. Using CPI over this period gold’s value increased at about double the rate of inflation. However, if you bought gold in 1980, average price that year about $600/oz, you’d have to wait until 2006 for the price to come back to that level and not inflation adjusted dollars either (inflation destroyed about 65% of the purchasing power in that timeframe – and this is using CPI which notoriously understates real world prices). Gold prices and inflation are not as closely correlated as the gold sellers would have you think.

But what about “these troubling times”? It’s different now, right? It might be. This is basically what they’re talking about: the federal government and the federal reserve have been acting in tandem to recapitalize the U.S. economy after the 2008 crisis. The government has been spending like crazy and running huge deficits (and buying lots of votes, funny how that works out for them). These deficits are financed by the issuing of bonds of which the federal reserve bank has been the main buyer under the guise of Quantitative Easing and the Zero Interest Rate Policy. This what they mean by printing money – the fed can buy whatever it wants and it has been buying these bonds that are loans to the government.

The Fed doesn’t need money, rather, it creates it. It is the central bank and it can just put the bonds on its balance sheet. A lot of people, this author included, think the government and the Fed are nuts to think that this course would enable economic growth and it will probably only lead to inflation which could become severe and maybe uncontrollable. Without turning this into a financial doomer article, let’s just say both sides make their case and we won’t know which one is right until this QE and ZIRP experiment is over.

This is what it comes down to: if the price of gold in dollars goes exponential in a hyperinflationary situation everything else priced in dollars is going to do the same. You can’t expect that your gold coin will buy the same goods that it would buy now if this happens. The actual purchasing power of your gold will surely decline as day-to-day essentials become prioritized. Put another way, if 1500 this week buys you one gold coin or 250 basic meals, in a hyperinflationary situation that gold coin might exchange for the equivalent of 100 meals or maybe not even twenty. Of course, 1500 in a bank account or your mattress would be worth much less – maybe not even one meal. The possible hyperinflation scenario is the most compelling reason to hold gold now. It’s not about getting rich. It’s about retaining some savings in the face of a massive financial collapse.

In reality, nothing keeps up with inflation like you will want. Agriculture futures are seasonal and your position has to be rolled over every so often costing you fees and changing your cost basis. Your inflation hedge could get destroyed by a good harvest or weak global demand. Stocks are typically seen as an inflation hedge but in a real collapse your brokerage company or even your local bank might not even exist anymore. You may eventually be made whole on the companies you own but this will take years.

Outside of a financial crisis the case for gold is weak. If you’re holding gold the best case scenario is unclear. Perhaps the price rises faster than inflation but that’s probably a longshot. Consider that if interest rates start to rise, if the Fed sees the light on the harm ZIRP is doing, and if inflation is mild then those holding gold are going to be screwed as many decide to sell, preferring actual cash. Expect gold to lose at least 30% from today’s prices and it could happen in a day or two. Don’t expect your dealer to give you a good price or even answer your call or email if everyone comes in selling.

The risk of gold losing value in the face of an improving economy is something you need to be aware of and in a crisis it won’t provide the kind of financial safety that the gold bugs allege. If you still need a place to park your savings you might consider silver. It’s incrementally cheaper to get into and has more industrial value than gold though it is historically more volatile. Or what about booze? A case of good whiskey or rum is highly barterable, doesn’t spoil, tracks inflation as well as anything, and if times get better (or worse), you can always drink it.

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saintambrose · 4 years

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haha it’s US politics hours

listen, this tumblr has always been a fandom place since its inception and I’ve not really designated it as a space for political discussion because 1) I have several other avenues for that arena of discussion and 2) escapism was the theme here; but I’ve finally watched The Comey Rule and I have some THOUGHTS

and I’m not really sure how active anyone is here anymore anyway, because I’ve not really been around as regularly as I was before the nsfw-ban shitstorm, so. Diving right in.

Probably my favorite thing was how it painted the American right wing as this faux-centrist bastion of impartiality at first, the whole circus with HiLLaRy’S EmAiLs being about how they legitimately believed they could play the angle that the emails were a threat to national security all while they knew damn well it was a huge big nothingburger (with a side of hatred of women) while doing that thing that right wingers have done since the Reagan administration where they malign anything left of fascism as communism (including basic human rights) and then, predictably, you have all these very furrowed-browed old white men sitting around a conference table being VERY CONCERNED that precisely the thing they wanted to happen came true and they are completely unprepared to do damage control on the mess they engineered because WHITE MEN ARE INCAPABLE OF UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS. 🤣😂🤣😂

In all seriousness. I wasn’t crazy about Hillary either. I don’t like dynasties of any kind, royal or political. I don’t like establishment dems who are really just center-right in the real world while masquerading as left in backwards-ass bizarro-world USA. But I’m an old motherfucker now, I’m well into my 30s, I’m boring and watch CSPAN for leisure and shit. I read the reports coming out of the DOJ. One of my degrees is in political science, though admittedly, that’s the least thing that matters, in the scope of everything else these days. But it’s safe to say Hillary was unfairly maligned while republicans committing atrocities exponentially worse have been treated with kid gloves for decades. A very distinct double standard has been applied here for....longer than I’ve been alive, that even the most educated people on the left have refused to acknowledge for far too long. I watched that entire BeNgHaZi hearing (which is easily accessible on youtube, so there’s literally no excuse not to know the facts on this), and everyone knew -- everyone knew it was a bullshit smear campaign.

So, this post isn’t so much a review of the miniseries more than it’s an indictment of the corruption of American politics. The most damning aspect being that, on principle, US politics has always had a problem with embracing progressive policy, and basic civil rights in general. That’s not news; people have known this for some time. But the thing that this miniseries really illustrated in a very cartoonish, yet succinct, way is that there are experienced professionals who hold the highest, most powerful seats of authority in this country who won’t bat an eye at dedicating their entire careers to denigrating common decency, basic human rights, and even constitutional law, while being absolutely incapable of conceiving the long-term consequences of these actions, who will then turn around and concern troll over the ashes of the empire they enthusiastically helped to burn down. It’s nauseating. It’s infuriating. It shows a pathological disregard for personal responsibility.

Everyone was so preoccupied with their massive turgid erection for hating the Clintons (and women) that no one saw they were enthusiastically living in a henhouse built by fucking foxes. No one saw the genuine threat.

And, by extension, no one had the balls to acknowledge that age-old instinct of white men willing to engage in a scorched earth campaign simply to satisfy their worst impulses and entitlement complexes.

Can you fit “Who cares if we’re screwing over several generations with corrupt court-packing and a flagrant disregard for checks-and-balances predicated entirely on the honor system; we just don’t feel like doing domestic labor or respecting women and minorities so we’ll continue expediting reprehensible policies that exploit the most vulnerable people in this country because we can’t compete in an authentic meritocracy" onto a campaign slogan banner?

I sounded the alarms on this trend 20 years ago, meanwhile. My parents and I had just gotten US citizenship, luckily months before 9/11 and the patriot act; and as an outsider looking in, as someone who had risked their life escaping a dangerous regime at an incredibly young age, I saw the warning signs in the republican party even back then. Naturally, I was denigrated as an alarmist and a butthurt liberal.

You know, I’ll acknowledge that as a white person, I’m not the average American’s image of what an “immigrant” looks like. My experiences here over the past couple of decades have thrown into sharp relief how “immigrant” is just a dogwhistle for racist bullshit, because people who concern troll about us don’t seem to have many problems with us white ones. But I came out of a communist country. I’m straight outta the eastern bloc. And I don’t think there are any words in any spoken language that can do justice to how insulting it is when americans try to americasplain communism to me. Bitch. Y’all don’t fucking know. You just don’t.

The point is, even back then, I could see the slippery slope republicans were tumbling down, and I can't say I derive any pleasure from being vindicated in such an extreme fashion. Like. I told y’all motherfuckers. TWO DECADES AGO.

People who aren’t familiar with US politics, and even long-term US citizens who for some reason feel like it’s a waste to pay attention to your own shit, seem to spend a lot of time trying to unpack what precisely went wrong. My observations came up with 1) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools glossing over, and even omitting, the most gruesome aspects of the revolutionary war, the holocaust, and the cold war (and oftentimes, the cold war is NEVER EVEN COVERED, which is especially insulting to me, for obvious reasons); 2) the manipulative aspect of US history in public schools teaching kids that the Declaration of independence and the Constitution are unassailable doctrines of freedom and liberty, and, as such, after independence was won, no further activism to maintain democracy was needed so we can all just smoke a bowl and be complacent because all those authoritarian third world regimes we constantly ridicule and criticize can NeVeR HaPPeN hErE 😒; and 3) how limpdick both-sidesism replaced civil, comprehensive political discussion because the right spent so long abusing, denigrating, and bullying the left that it was just easier to play it safe and take the milquetoast ~centrist~ stance, which always, always, always capitulates to the lowest common denominator, which is always the oppressor.

And generally just this age-old trend of holding the victims of systematic oppression to a higher moral and behavioral standard than the perpetrators of systematic oppression.

Guys, I’m tired. I’m so tired.

I’ve gotten a few questions over the years about why my writing is so angsty, why it always seems to follow the same themes; war crimes, PTSD, gore, torture.

I already escaped one authoritarian regime. The USA promised us one thing, and then once we got here, it started emulating the very tyrants we worked so hard to get away from. A lot of people have no idea what that feels like. How much of a betrayal that is. Especially considering all the financial and legal landmines one has to navigate just to do it, and then we’re punished for that, too.

I write about PTSD because I fucking have it. I write about war crimes because I’ve experienced them firsthand - just as a victim and not the perpetrator. I so often write about soldiers committing them because I want to roleplay what it’s like to not be a victim for once.

tbh writing a fucking Hamilton fanfiction is one of the most cathartic things I’ve ever done, but the extensive research I’ve had to do to be able to write this thing has been low-key traumatic. There’s a lot of historical material I’ve consumed that should have been covered at the most basic level of compulsory education, but conspicuously isn’t. And I know that’s a feature, not a bug. It’s by design.

Democracy - and independence, freedom, liberty, justice, civil rights in general - isn’t just some final xbox achievement that you unlock and then just shelve the game and forget about it for the rest of your life. You have to keep grinding to maintain it, because there will always be selfish, malicious people out there who will dedicate their entire lives playing a long con to ensure you don’t get the same opportunities as them. For the love of god, stop playing the both-sidesism game. From someone coming out of the eastern bloc, I can tell you with great confidence that that was part of the propaganda campaign you were fed to keep you from engaging so they could install a dictatorship under your nose. Do some self-guided historical research, guys. It can be very illuminating.

Anyway. I’ve gone on long enough here, but damn, don’t screw this up again, guys. Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, and I’m going to do my duty. When I first came to this country, after experiencing the rigorous vetting process and labyrinthine legal requirements of US citizenship, I was led to believe that in exchange for that privilege, I was personally responsible for my own civic self-education. It’s so much more important than you've been led to believe.

#uspol #long post #also uhhhh brendan gleeson really needs to win an award #i hope he's ok mentally after playing that role yikes yikes yikes #also 'why do your characters so often have alcohol abuse problems' uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

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troubleintrump · 5 years

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Open Letter:

To my Trump-supporting family,

On the morning of November 9, 2016, the America I knew and loved died. Or rather, I woke that day to discover that it never really existed in the first place.

Let me explain.

I grew up in the Deep South. I was a flag-waving, gun-shooting, red-blooded American boy. I said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, got tingles when I heard the national anthem, and fervently accepted that no other country on the planet could ever come close to the grandeur, freedom, and inspiration that the United States of America offered. We were that City Upon the Hill that was promised to the world – a shining beacon of participatory democracy that everyone else desperately wanted to emulate but could never achieve. We were tough on our allies, but only because we needed to push them to excel and improve. Of course, they’d never quite catch up to us economically, politically, or militarily, but hey, that’s the price of not being the USA. The chants of “USA! USA! USA” weren’t taunts, but merely celebrations of our preeminence. And anyone’s detractions were just signs of their jealousy. Because everybody wanted to be American, right?

I was sold the American dream just like the hundreds of millions of my compatriots. Work hard, pay your dues, and you’ll succeed. No child left behind. All in this together. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I joined the Navy and proudly served my country because that’s just what a Southern boy did. There simply was no higher honor than being part of the vanguard protecting democracy from those who would do us harm.

Even after traveling the world with the Navy and learning that, actually, America didn’t hold a monopoly on freedom, I still wasn’t swayed from my categorical resolution that no country was better. No people could be better. America resulted from the failures and lessons learned from every other country’s trials and errors. Mostly errors. But we corrected them all. Where other countries had endured the restrictions of authoritarianism or the unfettered chaos of direct democracy, America perfected the balance with our Constitution and its representative democracy. Sure, we had our own fits-and-starts, which our schools taught – seizure of land and the treatment of Native Americans, the slave trade and oppression of black people, relegation of women to the home – but the America in which I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s had moved past those missteps. Right? Wasn’t America now that happy melting pot teeming with opportunity for all, if only you tried hard enough?

Of course not. But that was how I viewed it. And I’m sure that’s how you still think of America. What we did to the Native Americans? They just need to accept that we civilized them and they should be thankful. Slavery, Jim Crow, systemic racism? Nah, African Americans need to get over slavery, stop being ghetto thugs, and start accepting responsibility for their own communities. And women certainly have come a long way – just don’t get too uppity or think you’re entitled to too much of a political view, otherwise you risk losing your innate genteelness. (If reading this part makes you feel uncomfortable – and it probably does – stop for a second and think about why. Your discomfort is what’s left of your conscience.)

After I left the Navy and joined the real world, I saw more and more of what this country truly was. The mistreatment of people of color, the judgment and chastisement of the LGBT community, and the everyday sexism. Unlike the America taught in schools, this place had a lot of scars, scratches, and quite a few gaping wounds. But still I thought none of them were terminal. Surely Bill Clinton (for all his flaws) had it right when he said there was nothing wrong with America that couldn’t be cured by what was right in America. Surely.

Up until November 8, 2016, I genuinely believed that, despite its myriad shortcomings, America was still the country that stood up to bullies. It valued intellect and scientific discovery. Americans may have disagreed on specific policies, but still had faith that public servants genuinely had the country’s best interests at heart. Immigration built this country. And we should always, always protect the innocent and welcome those fleeing poverty, war, or famine with open arms.

But America didn’t elect a leader who represents any of those principles. America didn’t elect a leader with any principles. And you did that. You can say you held your nose and voted for the “lesser of two evils,” or that you only voted for Trump because you knew he’d further the policies with which you agreed, even if you found him personally detestable. But when you and all of the other Trump voters pulled that lever, you weren’t just selecting your preferred presidential candidate. You were selecting what America was. And it is nothing like the America I grew up believing in. To say that your choice and the result it brought about triggered an existential crisis would be an understatement. My whole life, I’d been an unquestioning, patriotic servant of America because of what I’d believed it stood for. But in a single night, everything it stood for was revealed as a fraud. Everything I stood for was a fraud.

So now, two and half years into the alternative reality, I’ve come to grips that this isn’t some insane nightmare. This is reality. And seeing how Trump supporters (yourselves included) have behaved since then, I really was a fool for ever believing America stood for anything else.

I won’t bore you with my journey to “wokeness” or why the things you tolerate literally sicken me. Sexual predator? “They’re not hot enough to sexually assault.” Racist bully? “Fake news.” Uncompassionate bigot? “They should stay in their own damn countries.” Even if I had the capacity and patience to expound on every deviation from the America I thought existed, you wouldn’t care. Why? Because you’ve stopped listening. The rise of Fox News means you’ve stopped reading the papers. And even if you did, you wouldn’t be intrigued or inquisitive about what they say because you’ve bought into the idea that the press is the enemy of the people (except for Fox News and the National Review, which get passes because, well, why?).

You’ve stopped paying attention to anyone who doesn’t agree with your crystallized view of the world. You’re the mosquito of the Reagan era, completely unaware the sap has long hardened around you into amber. And frankly, it’s not even particularly pretty amber. It’s dull, opaque, muffled. You can’t see or hear through it and you don’t want to.

But to be honest with you, I’ve lost all interest in trying to break you free. At first, I really wanted to. I wanted you to understand how the promise of America was broken. I wanted you to see so we could find some way to fix it. But every time I tried, you trotted out some line you heard Trump spew (none of which make any sense whatsoever, by the way) or that some Fox News commentator has conned you into thinking reflects reality. So I’m done.

The America I believed in doesn’t exist. Instead, it’s a different country now, irretrievably. I get a bit melancholy about it sometimes, because promise and hope and opportunity are like political endorphins, and I miss them. And I miss you. I miss having conversations about our lives as though you hadn’t abandoned everything we ever believed in. I miss seeing your smiling faces without having to hold back a political tirade. I miss spending time with you without constantly wondering how you sleep at night knowing what this country is doing to the defenseless.

Surely by now you’ve seen the AP’s recent photo of an El Salvadoran man and his two and a half year-old daughter who drowned as they fled the violence in their home country, hoping to seek asylum in America. They drowned because Trump won’t let them claim asylum at the border entry points. He’s denying them the safety and promise that America used to stand for. Many observers who haven’t yet fully recognized their prior delusions are saying, “This isn’t what we stand for.” But it is. It’s exactly what America stands for.

And that is why I’m done with you and your ilk. We’re still family; you raised me; we share the same blood. But we come from and live in two different countries.

Sincerely,

Matthew

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reading-writing-revolution · 5 years

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Open Letter: To my Trump-supporting family from a Navy Veteran:

To my Trump-supporting family,

On the morning of November 9, 2016, the America I knew and loved died. Or rather, I woke that day to discover that it never really existed in the first place.

Let me explain.

And that is why I’m done with you and your ilk. We’re still family; you raised me; we share the same blood. But we come from and live in two different countries.

Sincerely,

Matthew

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miraculousmidnightreviews · 6 years

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War Storm Book Review

By Victoria Aveyard

3.5/5 stars

Spoilers for Red Queen, Glass Sword, and King’s Cage

Summary: Mare has endured the worst of betrayals. But as Maven’s obsession with her grows, Mare, along with Montfort and the Scarlet Guard, must put her tentative trust in Cal and his silvers. It is the only way to win the war. While both sides prepare for an inevitable conclusion, Cal and Mare struggle to establish a world in which reds and silvers can coexist peacefully. In the process, they learn the means by which they accomplish this are just as important as ending years of prejudice and hate.

The Romance (minor spoilers)

I have a feeling this entire review is going to be full of minor spoilers. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to express my feelings.

First of all, Mare and Cal. Love them. Ship them. So. Hard. This book was torture to get through because Mare and Cal are now little stubborn shitheads who both want basically the same thing but believe in majorly different ways of getting there. I was not okay with the King’s Cage ending, alright? It ruined me. I had hope for War Storm but now...well, read it, and you’ll see what I mean.

On the bright side, I am totally here for the banter between Mare and Cal, especially while they’re at odds. It relieves tension among chapters of suspense and the foreboding sense that someone will soon die.

Cal = Mare’s giant teddy bear.

Evangeline, my love

Yes, Evangeline totally deserves her own section in this review.

I think we can all agree that no one really liked Evangeline until she received her own chapters in King’s Cage. If I’m being honest, I didn’t truly jump on the I-love-Evangeline-Samos bandwagon until this book. Maybe, it’s because spilling Mare’s blood isn’t a priority for her anymore. Probably. Definitely.

I truly enjoyed the relationship (friendship?) that developed between Mare and Evangeline during War Storm. It really showed the growth of these two characters nicely. Plus, I’m a real sucker for that enemies to friends trope.

Also, Evangeline and Elane are really cute together.

Point of Views (minor spoilers)

As you know from the previous Red Queen books, Aveyard has written from the point of view of other characters in addition to Mare. I’m always wary of series in which authors switch to or include POVs other than the main character’s. What if I don’t like these characters? In the end, it’s a 50/50 chance as to whether or not I’ll enjoy a new perspective. Sometimes, I grow to admire a character I once despised, and other times, I end up favoring one POV over another. (Let’s face it. The latter happens 100% of the time.)

In War Storm, Aveyard once again switches up the POVs. I won’t spoil the surprise as to who gets their own chapters since this is the non-spoiler section, but I will say that, of course, Mare still remains the main throughout the book. Speaking of POVs, I wasn’t too pleased with one of them. For me, it ruined the pacing of the book. I would get bored with that chapter, and then I would have to put the book down in favor of doing something else. Those chapters just wrecked my reading flow. Right when I got to an exciting part, racing from page to page, I turned to the next chapter and there it was. My reading block. Ugh.

Thanks for reading! We hoped you enjoyed our non-spoilery review! Come back later for the spoilery stuff, or keep reading at your own risk! Check out our other reviews here.

SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

Pacing & POVs but with spoilers

Continuing with the POV thing: Who the fuck is Iris and why should I care? I am not a fan of the different POVs. Just when I was getting used to Cameron in King’s Cage, BAM! She’s gone! And in her place is this girl, Iris. Not a fan, bro. (Yes, I do understand dramatic irony, but I did not think it was necessary for this book.)

But kudos to Victoria Aveyard. After reading, I now know who Iris really is inside, and I do care. A little bit. Not enough for her to get her own chapters, though.

Mare, Cal, and Evangeline keep their POVs in this novel, and I’m cool with that. Actually, I was surprised at how cool I was with that while reading.

Another thing: the pacing. My god, it’s a little bit of torture. First, let me be honest: I really wanted to like this book and give it a better rating than I did. It’s a part of one of my favorite series, and I love the author. Now don’t get me wrong. I still enjoyed it, but not as much as any of the other books in the series. It’s just the pacing. There were really intriguing parts, like Evangeline’s meddling, and Mare secretly planning to take Cal’s throne, but then there would be parts, like anything Iris-related, that bored me a lot.

When War Storm was good it was real good, but when it was bad, it was real boring.

Farley AHHH

I love Farley so freaking much. I’m not one for children, usually, but Clara and Farley are adorable.

Okay, the one thing I really love about this book is the friendship between Farley and Mare. Honestly, it’s more like they’re sisters. Aveyard did such a great job at showing how much they’ve developed as people and how far they’ve come, despite setbacks. Really, Farley stepping into a role as Mare’s big sister is what I live for.

Also, the way she doesn’t judge Mare’s feelings for Cal while simultaneously wanting to flay him alive is just perfection.

Mare & Cal & Maven & Everyone Else

Ever since Maven betrayed Mare, I dropped him hard. I’ve always been a Cal fan (even when he’s a dumbass). I know there are people in the fandom who love Maven for reasons I cannot understand, and I’m not here to judge you or come for you or whatever. But I do think Maven needed to die and he did. The end.

Is it terrible for me to say Ptolemus grew on me? I loved Shade as much as anyone, but I think his death was circumstantial. I’m giving Ptolemus a second chance. I hope he has a short story whenever those come out.

I’m a little disappointed in Evangeline. Yes, it’s in character of her to escape in that way, but I really wanted her to have a badass showdown, helping Mare and Cal. Oh well, I can’t wait for her short story with Elane.

Montfort

Ah, Montfort. Good ole Montfort. I don’t have much to say about this new terrain our characters venture across, but I feel like I should? I liked the way Aveyard described its government. She did a nice job introducing the world to her readers. Yay, democracy!

THAT ENDING WHAT

Alrighty, bitches. Maven Calore is fucking dead like he deserves (by Mare’s hand no less), and it was kind of underwhelming. I liked the way Aveyard wrote it, but no one else died in that battle, really? Like, not even Granny Calore? I just wish she had killed more people, that’s all. It would have been more realistic in a war setting, and also, it would have taken care of some problematic asshats. (Side note: I fucking support Volo’s death. That was good.)

I get it, though. It’s hard to kill off characters. It’s a balancing act; you can’t go all Game of Thrones on this shit, but you can’t let everyone have a happily ever after either. It’s complicated.

Seriously, though, what the fuck? Why are Mare and Cal not together like I dreamt they would be? Come on, Aveyard, why? I’m not cool with this ending. I NEED MORE FROM THEM. WHEN ARE THESE FREAKING SHORT STORIES COMING OUT?!

Thanks for reading! We hoped you enjoyed both our non-spoilery and spoilery reviews! Check out our other reviews here!

—Alexa

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bluewatsons · 6 years

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Brian D. Earp, The unbearable asymmetry of bullshit, HealthWatch Newsletter (February 2016)

Introduction

Science and medicine have done a lot for the world. Diseases have been eradicated, rockets have been sent to the moon, and convincing, causal explanations have been given for a whole range of formerly inscrutable phenomena. Notwithstanding recent concerns about sloppy research, small sample sizes, and challenges in replicating major findings—concerns I share and which I have written about at length — I still believe that the scientific method is the best available tool for getting at empirical truth. Or to put it a slightly different way (if I may paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous remark about democracy): it is perhaps the worst tool, except for all the rest.

Scientists are people too

In other words, science is flawed. And scientists are people too. While it is true that most scientists — at least the ones I know and work with — are hell-bent on getting things right, they are not therefore immune from human foibles. If they want to keep their jobs, at least, they must contend with a perverse “publish or perish” incentive structure that tends to reward flashy findings and high-volume “productivity” over painstaking, reliable research. On top of that, they have reputations to defend, egos to protect, and grants to pursue. They get tired. They get overwhelmed. They don’t always check their references, or even read what they cite. They have cognitive and emotional limitations, not to mention biases, like everyone else.

At the same time, as the psychologist Gary Marcus has recently put it, “it is facile to dismiss science itself. The most careful scientists, and the best science journalists, realize that all science is provisional. There will always be things that we haven’t figured out yet, and even some that we get wrong.” But science is not just about conclusions, he argues, which are occasionally (or even frequently) incorrect. Instead, “It’s about a methodology for investigation, which includes, at its core, a relentless drive towards questioning that which came before.” You can both “love science,” he concludes, “and question it.”

I agree with Marcus. In fact, I agree with him so much that I would like to go a step further: if you love science, you had better question it, and question it well, so it can live up to its potential.

And it is with that in mind that I bring up the subject of bullshit.

Bullshit in science

There is a veritable truckload of bullshit in science.¹ When I say bullshit, I mean arguments, data, publications, or even the official policies of scientific organizations that give every impression of being perfectly reasonable — of being well-supported by the highest quality of evidence, and so forth — but which don’t hold up when you scrutinize the details. Bullshit has the veneer of truth-like plausibility. It looks good. It sounds right. But when you get right down to it, it stinks.

There are many ways to produce scientific bullshit. One way is to assert that something has been “proven,” “shown,” or “found” and then cite, in support of this assertion, a study that has actually been heavily critiqued (fairly and in good faith, let us say, although that is not always the case, as we soon shall see) without acknowledging any of the published criticisms of the study or otherwise grappling with its inherent limitations.

Another way is to refer to evidence as being of “high quality” simply because it comes from an in-principle relatively strong study design, like a randomized control trial, without checking the specific materials that were used in the study to confirm that they were fit for purpose. There is also the problem of taking data that were generated in one environment and applying them to a completely different environment (without showing, or in some cases even attempting to show, that the two environments are analogous in the right way). There are other examples I have explored in other contexts, and many of them are fairly well-known.

An insidious tactic

But there is one example I have only recently come across, and of which I have not yet seen any serious discussion. I am referring to a certain sustained, long-term publication strategy, apparently deliberately carried out (although motivations can be hard to pin down), that results in a stupefying, and in my view dangerous, paper-pile of scientific bullshit. It can be hard to detect, at first, with an untrained eye—you have to know your specific area of research extremely well to begin to see it—but once you do catch on, it becomes impossible to un-see.

I don’t know what to call this insidious tactic (although I will describe it in just a moment). But I can identify its end result, which I suspect researchers of every stripe will be able to recognize from their own sub-disciplines: it is the hyper-partisan and polarized, but by all outward appearances, dispassionate and objective, “systematic review” of a controversial subject.

To explain how this tactic works, I am going make up a hypothetical researcher who engages in it, and walk you through his “process,” step by step. Let’s call this hypothetical researcher Lord Voldemort. While everything I am about to say is based on actual events, and on the real-life behavior of actual researchers, I will not be citing any specific cases (to avoid the drama). Moreover, we should be very careful not to confuse Lord Voldemort for any particular individual. He is an amalgam of researchers who do this; he is fictional.

Lord Voldemort’s “systematic review”

In this story, Lord Voldemort is a prolific proponent of a certain controversial medical procedure, call it X, which many have argued is both risky and unethical. It is unclear whether Lord Voldemort has a financial stake in X, or some other potential conflict of interest. But in any event he is free to press his own opinion. The problem is that Lord Voldemort doesn’t play fair. In fact, he is so intent on defending this hypothetical intervention that he will stop at nothing to flood the literature with arguments and data that appear to weigh decisively in its favor.

As the first step in his long-term strategy, he scans various scholarly databases. If he sees any report of an empirical study that does not put X in an unmitigatedly positive light, he dashes off a letter-to-the-editor attacking the report on whatever imaginable grounds. Sometimes he makes a fair point—after all, most studies do have limitations—but often what he raises is a quibble, couched in the language of an exposé.

These letters are not typically peer-reviewed (which is not to say that peer review is an especially effective quality control mechanism); instead, in most cases, they get a cursory once-over by an editor who is not a specialist in the area. Since journals tend to print the letters they receive unless they are clearly incoherent or in some way obviously out of line (and since Lord Voldemort has mastered the art of using “objective” sounding scientific rhetoric to mask objectively weak arguments and data), they end up becoming a part of the published record with every appearance of being legitimate critiques.

The subterfuge does not end there.

The next step is for our anti-hero to write a “systematic review” at the end of the year (or, really, whenever he gets around to it). In it, He Who Shall Not Be Named predictably rejects all of the studies that do not support his position as being “fatally flawed,” or as having been “refuted by experts”—namely, by himself and his close collaborators, typically citing their own contestable critiques—while at the same time he fails to find any flaws whatsoever in studies that make his pet procedure seem on balance beneficial.

The result of this artful exercise is a heavily skewed benefit-to-risk ratio in favor of X, which can now be cited by unsuspecting third-parties. Unless you know what Lord Voldemort is up to, that is, you won’t notice that the math has been rigged.

So why doesn’t somebody put a stop to all this? As a matter of fact, many have tried. More than once, the Lord Voldemorts of the world have been called out for their underhanded tactics, typically in the “author reply” pieces rebutting their initial attacks. But rarely are these ripostes — constrained as they are by conventionally miniscule word limits, and buried as they are in some corner of the Internet — noticed, much less cited in the wider literature. Certainly, they are far less visible than the “systematic reviews” churned out by Lord Voldemort and his ilk, which constitute a sort of “Gish Gallop” that can be hard to defeat.

Gish Gallop

The term “Gish Gallop” is a useful one to know. It was coined by the science educator Eugenie Scott in the 1990s to describe the debating strategy of one Duane Gish. Gish was an American biochemist turned Young Earth creationist, who often invited mainstream evolutionary scientists to spar with him in public venues. In its original context, it meantto “spew forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.” It also referred to Gish’s apparent tendency to simply ignore objections raised by his opponents.

A similar phenomenon can play out in debates in medicine. In the case of Lord Voldemort, the trick is to unleash so many fallacies, misrepresentations of evidence, and other misleading or erroneous statements — at such a pace, and with such little regard for the norms of careful scholarship and/or charitable academic discourse — that your opponents, who do, perhaps, feel bound by such norms, and who have better things to do with their time than to write rebuttals to each of your papers, face a dilemma. Either they can ignore you, or they can put their own research priorities on hold to try to combat the worst of your offenses.

It’s a lose-lose situation. Ignore you, and you win by default. Engage you, and you win like the pig in the proverb who enjoys hanging out in the mud.

Conclusion

As the programmer Alberto Brandolini is reputed to have said: “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” This is the unbearable asymmetry of bullshit I mentioned in my title, and it poses a serious problem for research integrity. Developing a strategy for overcoming it, I suggest, should be a top priority for publication ethics.

Footnote

There is a lot of non-bullshit in science as well!

References

Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2005;2(8):e124

Button KS et al. Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2013;14(5):365-376

Open Science Collaboration. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science 2015;349(6251):aac4716

Earp BD, Trafimow D. Replication, falsification, and the crisis of confidence in social psychology. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(621):1-11

Earp BD et al. Out, damned spot: can the “Macbeth Effect” be replicated? Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2014;36(1):91-98

Earp BD. Psychology is not in crisis? Depends on what you mean by “crisis.” Huffington Post, 2 Sept 2015 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-earp/psychology-is-not-incrisis_b_8077522.html

Earp BD, Everett JAC. How to fix psychology’s replication crisis. Chronicle of Higher Education, 25 Oct 2015 http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Fix-Psychology-s/233857

Earp BD. Open review of the draft paper, “Replication initiatives will not salvage the trustworthiness of psychology” by James C Coyne. BMC Psychology, 2016 [in press] https://www.academia.edu/21711738/Open_review_of_the_draft_paper _entitled_Replication_initiatives_will_not_salvage_the_trustworthiness_of_psychology_by_James_C._Coyne

Everett JAC, Earp BD. A tragedy of the (academic) commons: interpreting the replication crisis in psychology as a social dilemma for earlycareer researchers. Frontiers in Psychology 2015;6(1152):1-4.

Trafimow D, Earp BD. Badly specified theories are not responsible for the replication crisis in psychology. Theory & Psychology 2016; [in press] https://www.academia.edu/18975122/Badly_specified_theories_are_not _responsible_for_the_replication_crisis_in_social_psychology

Earp BD. Can science tell us what’s objectively true? The New Collection 2011;6(1):1-9

Nosek BA et al. Scientific utopia II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science 2012;7(6):615-631

Rekdal OB. Academic urban legends. Social Studies of Science 2014;44(4):638-654

Peterson D. The baby factory: difficult research objects, disciplinary standards, and the production of statistical significance. Socius 2016 [in press] http://srd.sagepub.com/content/2/2378023115625071.full

Duarte JL et al. Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2015 [in press] http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Political-DiversityWill-Improve-Social-Psychological-Science-1.pdf

Ball P. The trouble with scientists. Nautilus, 14 May 2015 http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-trouble-with-scientists

Marcus G. Science and its skeptics. The New Yorker, 6 Nov 2013 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/science-and-its-skeptics

Earp BD. Mental shortcuts [unabridged version]. The Hastings Center Report 2016 [in press] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/- 292148550_Mental_shortcuts_unabridged

Ioannidis JP. Limitations are not properly acknowledged in the scientific literature. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2007;60(4):324-329

Earp BD. Sex and circumcision. American Journal of Bioethics 2015;15(2):43-45

Bundick S. Promoting infant male circumcision to reduce transmission of HIV: A flawed policy for the US. Health and Human Rights Journal Blog, 31 Aug 2009 http://www.hhrjournal.org/2009/08/promoting-infant-malecircumcision-to-reduce-transmission-of-hiv-a-flawed-policy-for-the-us/

Ploug T, Holm S. Conflict of interest disclosure and the polarisation of scientific communities. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(4):356-358.

Earp BD. Addressing polarisation in science. Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41(9):782-784

Smith R. Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 2006;99(4):178-182

Smith R. Classical peer review: an empty gun. Breast Cancer Research 2010;12(S4):1-4

Roland MC. Publish and perish: hedging and fraud in scientific discourse. EMBO Reports 2007;8(5):424-428

Scott E. Debates and the globetrotters. The Talk Origins Archive. 1994 http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/debating/globetrotters.html

Brandolini A. The bullshit asymmetry principle. Lecture delivered at XP2014 in Rome and at ALE2014 in Krakow. 2014 http://www.slideshare.net/ziobrando/bulshit-asymmetry-principlelightning-talk.

#science #criticism #peer review #bullshit #validity #research

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raymondrroberts · 6 years

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I Robot...

I have before me an article by Alex Williams from The New York Times, “Robot-Proofing Your Child’s Future.” You need to read it. It is at once encouraging, terrifying, and thought provoking.

First the encouraging news. The idea that a lot of jobs may be taken over by robots strikes me as a great thing. When I was in college I took a business management class that talked about soul-killing, repetitious, monotonous factory jobs. The kind we think we miss today because they provided decent paychecks.

Take the car door, bolt it to the frame. Take the car door, bolt it to the frame. Take the car door, bolt it to the frame. Take the car door... well, you get the idea.

Workers sometimes rebelled against the boredom by sabotaging the car, by leaving bottles in the door to rattle and annoy the owner. They rebelled against being treated like a machine.

Well, if you’ve seen recent pictures of a car factory with efficient robots lined upon the line, hanging the doors and welding and all, you know that the boring, good-old days are gone. And they aren’t coming back.

That’s probably a good thing. People have better things to do with their lives than standing mindlessly on an assembly line and being a cog in the machine... though we do miss those nice paychecks.

Second, the terrifying news. According to the article, British Intelligence experts predict that by 2025 robot soldiers will outnumber human soldiers in American forces. That’s seven years from now!

Robotic weapons present all sorts of ethical questions. The concentration of power and the centrality of command, the absence of human decision in firing, the impossibility of conscientious refusal to carry out orders, the overwhelming asymmetrical nature of robotic warfare conjures dystopian visions of the future. If you don’t believe this technology will be put to sinful use, you haven’t studied human nature or history. You need to watch Robocop again.

Military ethics always takes a while to catch up to new technology. We haven’t yet figured out the ethics of weaponized drones. (For a statement on the ethics of drones that I helped draft, click here). I don’t know how we stay ahead of or manage the ethical challenges posed by robotic warfare. Or how we avoid a new arms race that makes robotic warfare the norm for great powers. I do know that robotic police must be rejected by any people who hope to stay free. There are a lot of other things I want to say about this, but don’t have the space here.

Concern is also provoked by the possibility that robotics will contribute to ever greater concentrations of wealth. America’s founders knew that democracy was a fragile thing. They particularly worried that an aristocracy would arise and destroy it. This fear inspired Thomas Jefferson to oppose laws of primogenitor (allowing the eldest to inherit everything) and led him to talk about the need to divide great estates to create a middle class of yeoman farmers who would embody republican virtues. John Adams voiced the similar sentiments,

"The only possible way of preserving the balance of power on the side of liberty and public virtue is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society: to make a division of the land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.” (Click here.)

Noah Webster claimed

“a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom” [and] “the very soul of a republic.”

During American history, an appreciation that democracy depended on a broad middle-class inspired ordinances that opened up the Northwest Territory, lotteries that awarded land in George to the poor, and land-grants like the Homestead Act of 1862. (I realize these expansions have problematic aspects relative to native peoples.) Imagine if land had been sold to the highest bidder: Instead of the patchwork of farms we see when we fly over America’s heartland, we’d see enormous plantations owned by the descendants of railroad barons. What will robots do to democracy? We are going to find out.

Concern is also provoked by predictions of a job-less future. A 2013 University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science study has estimated that robotics threaten 47% of current jobs, including a number of jobs that I’d have sworn would be safe. McKinsey Global Institute recently estimated that robots may force 1/3 of American works to change jobs in the next dozen years.

If history is a guide and these predictions are anything close to reliable, we are going to face a rocky adjustment. The first industrial revolution concentrated wealth in the hands of a few industrialists. It fostered violent backlashes like the Luddites who destroyed factories that had displaced cottage industries. It provoked clashes between labor and management, like the Haymarket Affair, and gave rise to a radical ideology, Marxism.

Luddites smashing a factory

A second industrial revolution brought on by Robotics and A.I. may cause (is it already causing?) similar disruption. Desperate people may be susceptible to wild ideas, scape-goating, and violent action. Powerful people may be just as easily threatened and take oppressive action. As with the first industrial revolution, it will require a renegotiation of the social contract.

Soldiers shooting at striking Pullman workers

Some claim that the death of work is greatly exaggerated and that we’ll find other work. Over the long-term I think this is likely. Over the short-term I’m not sure. Plus, given how robotics and globalization (more the former than the latter) have given rise to the poorly paying “service sector,” we ought to be concerned.

Others make cheerful predictions about a universal basic income (UBI). Maybe. I observe that those who have do not like giving to those who don’t. I also observe that those who work do not like giving to those who “could” but don’t in some traditional sense. For UBI to come about, it would require renegotiating very fundamental aspects of the social contract, the meaning of work, the nature of ownership, and a host of other things. This will not be easy.

I also wonder whether UBI, by itself, can compensate for the psychic benefits of traditional work, such as camaraderie, a sense of purpose, a sense of accomplishment, and a socially defined identity. It is certainly true that much work has that traditionally gone unpaid, such as caring for children and the elderly, provides significant psychic benefit and value to society. A UBI could allow more of this type of work and more volunteerism. I also have some hope that the desire for meaning in life (and extra cash) will drive many to look employment beyond the UBI. Perhaps a UBI will allow people to strike out and take entrepreneurial risks that are currently unthinkable because people have to pay for the kids’ healthcare. That said, my hope is tempered by studies show that many unemployed people waste away their days getting high. My sense is that many people need the structure of traditional work.

Robotics will force a renegotiation of the social contract. Christians have a number of doctrines that can guide us in this public task (public because we’ll have to do this with others), I’ll close by mentioning two. The first is the doctrine of vocation. It teaches that everyone has a particular calling in which they are to employ their gifts in service to God and others (including nature). A world where people don’t have good work is a world that is not structured as the creator intended. This says nothing about remuneration or against technology, per se.

The second doctrine is the doctrine of covenant. It is the idea that God has “bound” our lives together in communities - families, congregations, and political community. These communities make our lives possible and they demand our attention and sacrifice in order to function. They are both a gift and they impose obligations. If those who own the factories do not depend on workers or if the workers are easily replaceable, this will test the ties that bind us together in civil society. In the Bible Cain once asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” According to a covenantal view of society, we are.

#robots #a.i.#a.i. artificial intelligence #robotics #future #jobs #vocation #covenant #robot-proof #robotic warfare #labor #luddites #luddite #mckinsey global #mckinsey global institute

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jobsearchtips02 · 4 years

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Read Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks for US House antitrust hearing

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

This story is available exclusively on Business Insider Prime. Join BI Prime and start reading now.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before Congress about antitrust on Wednesday.

Facebook has released the full text of Zuckerberg’s planned prepared remarks, and you can read it below.

Facing scrutiny over his company’s power and dominance, the technology exec will argue that heavy-handed regulation will only benefit China.

Zuckerberg is to argue that Facebook still faces considerable competition.

The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Google will also testify at the unprecedented hearing.

Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will warn Congress that attempts to regulate his company’s power under antitrust law risks helping China.

On Wednesday, the 36-year-old billionaire chief executive is due to testify before the House Judiciary Committee in an unprecedented hearing that will also feature the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Google. All four American companies are facing intensifying scrutiny over their outsize market power and their impacts on the competition, and face an array of antitrust probes both domestically and abroad.

Ahead of the hearing, Facebook has released a copy of Zuckerberg’s prepared remarks — offering a preview of how the technology executive plans to defend his company against charges of unfair dominance.

The thrust of the argument: That Facebook is a force for good, that it still faces plentiful competition, and that any heavy-handed regulation would hand a victory to authoritarian China and reshape the balance of power online for the worse.

“Although people around the world use our products, Facebook is a proudly American company. We believe in values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression — that the American economy was built on,” Zuckerberg is to say.

“Many other tech companies share these values, but there’s no guarantee our values will win out. For example, China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries. As Congress and other stakeholders consider how antitrust laws support competition in the U.S., I believe it’s important to maintain the core values of openness and fairness that have made America’s digital economy a force for empowerment and opportunity here and around the world.”

Read Mark Zuckerberg’s full prepared remarks below.

I. Introduction

Chairman Cicilline, Ranking Member Sensenbrenner, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I’d also like to thank your staff for their professionalism and courtesy in working with our team over the course of your investigation.

Facebook is part of an industry that has changed the world. We face intense competition globally and we only succeed when we build things people find valuable. I’m proud that we stand for American values like giving every person a voice and expanding access to opportunity. As a platform for ideas we’ll always be at the center of important debates about society and technology, which is why I’ve called for new rules for the internet.

II. Facebook’s value and the role of competition

Every day, millions of Americans use our services to stay in touch with friends and family and talk about issues that matter to them. People use our apps to share videos, photos, livestreams, posts and private messages; to join communities, set up fundraisers for good causes, and even register to give blood. These services create a lot of value in people’s lives, and our business model means we can offer them for free.

We also help millions of businesses connect with customers. Facebook gives small businesses and individual entrepreneurs access to sophisticated tools that previously only the largest players had. Now any business can use our services to establish an online presence, reach potential customers and grow.

We’re constantly building new ways to empower people to connect and share. Since Covid-19 emerged, we’ve seen how important this can be. People use our services to stay in touch with friends and family they can’t be with in person; they use our tools to keep their businesses running since the internet stays open even when physical stores cannot.

Facebook supports its mission of connecting people around the world by selling ads, and we face significant competition. We compete against the companies appearing at this hearing, plus many others that sell advertising and connect people. We also compete globally, including against companies that have access to markets that we aren’t in.

Our story would not have been possible without U.S. laws that encourage competition and innovation. I believe that strong and consistent competition policy is vital because it ensures that the playing field is level for all. At Facebook, we compete hard, because we’re up against other smart and innovative companies that are determined to win. We know that our future success is not guaranteed, especially in a global tech industry defined by rapid innovation. The history of technology is often the history of failure, and even industry leading tech companies fail if they don’t stay competitive. This is why we’re focused on delivering better services for people and businesses, and competing as vigorously as we can within the rules.

Although people around the world use our products, Facebook is a proudly American company. We believe in values — democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression — that the American economy was built on. Many other tech companies share these values, but there’s no guarantee our values will win out. For example, China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries. As Congress and other stakeholders consider how antitrust laws support competition in the U.S., I believe it’s important to maintain the core values of openness and fairness that have made America’s digital economy a force for empowerment and opportunity here and around the world.

III. Facebook’s History of Innovation

In a competitive economy, innovation leads to improvements that benefit consumers. I understand this is one of the key goals of antitrust law, and it is what Facebook has been focused on since day one. We’ve consistently added new products for people that enhance their ability to connect and share what matters most to them.

Our service began as a text-based website. Today on Facebook you can share almost any type of digital content; read news; broadcast or watch live video; play games; connect with businesses; buy or sell products; send and receive payments; organize groups and events; and raise money for important causes. WhatsApp provides secure and reliable communication, including voice and video calls. Instagram offers photo sharing with tools to connect and create. And the Facebook family goes beyond software, with hardware products like Oculus and Portal.

We built these new products and services because the intense competitive pressures we face push us to experiment with new ideas. We are always working to develop technologies that will change how people connect and communicate in the future, and we invest around $10 billion per year in research and development. We know that if we don’t constantly keep improving, we will fall behind.

Many of our products were new concepts when we introduced them, and they have served as models for other companies and apps that have used and iterated on our ideas — including features like News Feed ranking and the Like button that have become foundational to many competitive services. We have also helped advance nascent technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR).

We actively contribute to the open-source community. For example, we developed the PyTorch open- source project, which has become one of the most successful AI development tools and is now used worldwide to create new AI technology and applications. We also released Detectron2, our computer vision technology which we use for integrity work; FAISS, a state-of-the-art search tool for finding similar multimedia documents; and DensePose, for 3D interpretation of 2D images. We offer hundreds of projects like these on Facebook Open Source and GitHub, where our projects have hundreds of thousands of followers. We also share the results of our hardware research: for example, we developed the world’s most efficient servers and published the plans so everyone could use them as part of our Open Compute Project. I believe sharing our intellectual property this way helps the entire ecosystem move forward and develop new products.

We create technology to enable social good. For example, our Crisis Response tools allow people to let family and friends know they are safe, share information during a crisis, and help communities recover. Our Safety Check tool has been activated in more than 1,400 crises. In 2018 alone, our community used Crisis Response tools for over 300 crises in more than 80 countries. We’ve also developed charitable giving tools that make it easy for our community to raise money for causes they care about on Facebook.

People, nonprofits and verified Pages can collect donations from their friends and supporters on Facebook, and so far our community has raised more than $3 billion. To take just one example, the nonprofit No Kid Hungry has raised over $5 million from more than 200,000 donors to help feed children across the United States. We also invest in our communities, and have committed to making over $1 billion in investments in Black and diverse suppliers and communities in the US.

Like many companies, we’ve both built our own products from the ground up, and we’ve moved others forward through mergers and acquisitions. Our acquisitions have helped drive innovation for people who use our own products and services and for the broader startup community. Acquisitions bring together different companies’ complementary strengths. When you acquire a company, you can benefit from their technology and talent, and when you are acquired you get access to resources and people you otherwise might never have been able to tap into.

Facebook has made Instagram and WhatsApp successful as part of our family of apps. Instagram and WhatsApp have been able to grow and operate their services using Facebook’s bespoke, lower-cost infrastructure and tackle spam and harmful content with Facebook’s integrity teams and technology.

Following its acquisition, Instagram was able to get help stabilizing infrastructure and controlling runaway spam. It also benefited from the ability to plug into Facebook’s self-serve ads system, sales team and existing advertiser relationships to drive monetization, and was able to build products including IG Direct and IG Video that used Facebook’s technology and infrastructure. Before it was acquired, WhatsApp was a paid app with a reputation for secure communications; together we built on that by introducing end-to-end encryption and making it free to use. Since its acquisition, WhatsApp has also been able to develop products such as voice and video calling that were built on Facebook’s technology stack.

These benefits came about as a result of our acquisition of those companies, and would not have happened had we not made those acquisitions. We have developed new products for Instagram and WhatsApp, and we have learned from those companies to bring new ideas to Facebook. The end result is better services that provide more value to people and advertisers, which is a core goal of Facebook’s acquisition strategy.

IV. Facebook Platform

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform, a set of tools for developers and businesses to build complementary services on Facebook. Our vision for Platform has always been to foster an ecosystem of apps that build on top of Facebook and create a richer and more interesting experience for people. At the same time, we have developed rules to make Platform work better for everyone and to protect the significant investments we made in capital and talent to develop it. We’ve made changes to those policies over time to deal with issues as they arose, and to protect user privacy and give people more control over their data. We stand by those changes and will continue to evaluate our policies to address any new issues that arise.

V. The Benefits of Scale

I understand that people have concerns about the size and perceived power that tech companies have. Ultimately, I believe companies shouldn’t be making so many judgments about important issues like harmful content, privacy, and election integrity on their own. That’s why I’ve called for a more active role for governments and regulators and updated rules for the internet. If we do this right, we can preserve what’s best about this technology — the freedom for people to connect and express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

In the meantime, Facebook is working to address problems at scale. From election security to building more privacy-protective products, we are bringing significant technical and financial resources to bear on the challenges we face. For example, we now have more than 35,000 people working on safety and security — three times as many as we had just three years ago. We’ve built sophisticated systems to find and remove harmful content. We’re funding new technologies to tackle emerging threats like deepfakes. And we’re building products to connect people to authoritative information, like our recently introduced Covid-19 and voter information centers.

We have a responsibility to work constantly to keep people safe on our platform, and to make sure we’re investing to fix our issues and get ahead of new risks. Facebook’s size is an asset in those efforts.

VI. Supporting Our Community Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Our services have supported people and businesses throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. People turn to Facebook to stay connected with their families and friends and get authoritative and up-to-date health information. For many, our services are critical communications tools: group calls in Italy during the early stages of the pandemic jumped by more than 1,000 percent, and in April 700 million people were making video calls every day on Messenger and WhatsApp. Businesses also use our tools to stay connected to customers, shift sales online, and run fundraisers. For many small businesses, being able to operate online is vital and I’m proud that our tools enable this.

We built new products to respond to the crisis. We launched Community Help, which lets people find and offer help in their local area — everything from volunteering to pick up groceries and assisting with errands to sharing goods and checking in on one another. This is the kind of social infrastructure that companies like Facebook are well positioned to provide.

We connect people to authoritative health information and we’re taking aggressive steps to stop Covid- 19-related misinformation and harmful content from spreading. In January, we started displaying educational pop-ups in Facebook and Instagram connecting people to authoritative Covid-19-related information from organizations including the CDC, regional health authorities, and the WHO. We also launched the Covid-19 information center, which is now featured at the top of News Feed on Facebook and includes real-time updates from national health authorities and global organizations. Through these efforts across Facebook and Instagram, we’ve directed more than 2 billion people to resources from health authorities, and we’re giving millions in ad credits to health authorities so they can reach people.

We’re also using data in new ways to inform the public health response. We partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to launch a Covid-19 Symptom Survey that can help researchers predict the spread of the disease. With millions of responses, researchers are able to get a much more detailed picture of the pandemic. We also contributed aggregated anonymized location data to the Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, a group of 40 health researchers whose work helps governments determine if and where it’s appropriate to roll back social distancing orders. I’m proud that we’ve been able to support people, businesses and the public health effort during this crisis. VII. Our Responsibility to Our Community

This is an incredibly challenging time, and that’s why it’s more important than ever that people can have conversations on our platforms about the issues that matter to them – whether that’s Covid-19, racial and social injustice, family and economic concerns, or the upcoming elections. We recognize that we have a responsibility to stop bad actors from interfering with or undermining these conversations through misinformation, attempted voter suppression, or speech that is hateful or incites violence. I understand the concerns people have in these areas, and we are working to address them. While we are making progress – for example, we have dramatically improved our ability to proactively find and remove harmful content and prevent election interference – I recognize that we have more to do.

I know our primary goal at this hearing is to talk about antitrust and competition issues, but with four major tech CEOs appearing before Congress, we also have an opportunity to talk about how technology can better serve society. Each of our companies is doing important work to meet our current responsibilities to our communities, while also planning and investing for a time where we are likely to see significant economic and social disruption. I hope at least some of today’s hearing will touch on the future, and how our collective scale and resources could be harnessed to help people and businesses.

For instance, many families are worried about schooling and how to balance home and work obligations going forward. How can we leverage our products to lessen this burden for people? What else can we do to support communities if social distancing orders remain in place? How can we better equip our small businesses to compete, including on the world stage? How else can technology companies assist the public health effort? We don’t have all the answers yet, but I hope that our industry continues to look for innovative ways to support our communities through this difficult time.

VIII. Conclusion

Our success rests on our ability to build products that bring value to people’s lives — whether it’s finding a supportive Facebook group, starting a business on Instagram, video calling loved ones on Messenger or staying in touch with a friend on WhatsApp.

Facebook is a successful company now, but we got there the American way: we started with nothing and provided better products that people find valuable. As I understand our laws, companies aren’t bad just because they are big. Many large companies that fail to compete cease to exist. This is why we’re focused on building and updating our products to give people the best possible experiences. Provided we continue investing in new ideas and living up to our broader social responsibilities, I’m hopeful that we’ll keep making progress and deliver better products and services — for the people and businesses that use our products, for the wider tech ecosystem, and for the world.

Several years ago, Facebook moved our headquarters to the campus where Sun Microsystems used to be. We kept their sign out front, on the back of ours, to remind us that things change fast in tech. I’ve long believed that the nature of our industry is that someday a product will replace Facebook. I want us to be the ones that build it, because if we don’t, someone else will. Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.

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from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/read-mark-zuckerbergs-prepared-remarks-for-us-house-antitrust-hearing/

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maryseward666 · 7 years

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METALLICA’s KIRK HAMMETT Slams TRUMP, Urges Americans To ‘Reject The Lies From The People In The New Administraton’

RARE BLACK METAL COLLECTIBLES

METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hamett has issued his strongest condemnation yet of Donald Trump, comparing the new president's inaugural address to the speeches that were made in Germany under Adolf Hitler's rule and urging the American people to "reject the lies from the people in the new administraton." After Trump — one of the most polarizing figures to assume the office — was officially sworn in as the 45th president of the United States on Friday, January 20, a number of celebrities took to social media to share their thoughts, including Hammett, who has previously said that the new leadership lacks "a general sense of what is right and what's wrong." In a series of tweets, the METALLICA guitarist was especially critical of Trump's inaugural address, which painted a bleak picture of life for some in the United States, promised to end what Trump called the "American carnage," and work tirelessly to put "America first." Hammett wrote: "Trump's Inaugural Address and his asking us to put America first sounds, to me, familiar to what was said in speeches going around Germany in the 1930's …and later Russia in the 1940's "Pay attention people Stand up for truth, compassion and togetherness. Don't settle for anything less. "Reject lies, Fear mongering, Misguided Anger "The system wants us divided, so it's easier to control us emotionally. "WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER! "LIKE IT OR NOT, WE NEED EACH OTHER TO OVERCOME THE BIGGER THREAT… "And we all know what the threat is – people in power who are trying to deny us and our children and grandchildren a healthy green future REJECT AMERICAN CARNAGE "We are a better nation right now than ever, better than just 5 years ago! REJECT THE LIES FROM THE PEOPLE IN THE NEW ADMINISTRATON, THEY ARE THERE ONLY TO FEED THEIR OWN THIRST FOR GREED AND POWER "America never stopped being great!! "America is one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. "I'm proud of America!! "To say America is not great, that it lacks greatness, sets up a scenario for manipulation and control from others – pay attention people! "Remember the great America of today. "Then I'll check in with you about America's greatness in 6 months and we'll see what's changed. "The only people who deny CLIMATE CHANGE are the same people who stand to lose from renewable energy "This administration is thinking that it can just ignore CLIMATE CHANGE. "People, it now comes down to us to make up the difference.. "Let's not stand for their preaching lies about our Mother Earth – DENY THE DENIERS !!! "THEY ARE THE EARTH KILLERS "REJECT the term Alt-Right, just another sneaky euphemism for white supremacy, call it what it is! "Don't let them hide behind dishonesty! "One final thing – If we don't put up a fight we risk losing our rights.. "Defend Democracy from those who want to crush it !" Hammett's latest comments echo those he made last month when he told Billboard: "For me, a good leader is someone with integrity, honesty and altruism, and a general sense of what is right and what's wrong. We don't have that in our leadership right now, and that puts me in a state of awareness and attentiveness, and it puts me in a state of wait and see what will happen. But if anything happens that I'm not okay with, I'm going to be super vocal about it for the first time in my life." Hammett added that his decision to speak out on political matters was a departure from METALLICA's long-standing policy of not getting involved in issues that could be considered divisive. "The thing is, METALLICA appeals to such a wide range of people," Hammett explained. "We have people on the left, people on the right, in droves. Part of the reason why we don't consider ourselves a politically oriented band is because when you start talking about politics you draw a line in the sand, and all of a sudden [there's] division, and that's not what we want. We want everyone to be in this together, experiencing the music together. We see politics as a completely different thing. It's like music and NASCAR racing, that's how different politics are to METALLICA." Acknowledging that music has the power to reach people and change their minds, especially young fans that hang on their favorite artists' every word, Hammett said: "That's why I've chosen my words carefully, that I — not METALLICA, but I — will take it upon myself to get involved, if there is something I see that is seriously wrong, and I really feel that it's my job to say something, and to call out people who need to be called out. I believe in fairness. I believe in equal ground for everyone. I believe in equal opportunity and I believe that everyone is equal. That guy doesn't even believe in that! He does not believe that everyone is equal." METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich, who has made no secret of his liberal views, said in a recent interview with Vulture that he has never "willfully had a political conversation with" frontman James Hetfield, who has described himself as being somewhat conservative politically. Ulrich explained: "The thing you've got to understand is that METALLICA is made up of four people from four different places who took four very different paths to where we are now. The one thing that unites us is the love of the music that we're playing and that all four of us felt like outsiders trying to figure out who the hell we were. We didn't come together because we were questioning this in the culture or that about politics. We came together because we were all a little lost and trying to get a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. I'll sit and talk politics with you all night, but I don't necessarily feel the need to do it in an interview. METALLICA is a collective, but we've just never been the kind of band to sit down and say, 'Okay, what's our common view of the world?'" Ulrich made headlines in October when he said that he would consider returning to his native Denmark if Donald Trump won the election. Hetfield told BBC 6 Music that METALLICA stays away from topics like politics or religion in its music because "that just seems to polarize people even more. We all have our own beliefs, but at the end of the day, we're trying to connect with people and it seems like political views don't do that as much as music does." The singer/guitarist continued: "There's a lot of polarization going on in the States, and I see it other places as well. But it just seems like you have to get more extreme to balance out the other extreme. We've got to find some balance in the middle here somewhere."

Trump's Inaugural Address and his asking us to put America first sounds, to me, familiar to...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

...what was said in speeches going around Germany in the 1930's ...and later Russia in the 1940's ...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Pay attention people ! Stand up for truth, compassion and togetherness. Don't settle for anything less.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Reject lies Fear mongering Misguided Anger The system wants us divided, so it's easier to control us emotionally.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER! LIKE IT OR NOT, WE NEED EACH OTHER TO OVERCOME THE BIGGER THREAT...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

And we all know what the threat is - people in power who are trying to deny us and our children and grandchildren a healthy green future

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT AMERICAN CARNAGE We are a better nation right now than ever, better than just 5 years ago!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT THE LIES FROM THE PEOPLE IN THE NEW ADMINISTRATON, THEY ARE THERE ONLY TO FEED THEIR OWN THIRST FOR GREED AND POWER

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

America never stopped being great!! America is one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. I'm proud of America!!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

To say America is not great, that it lacks greatness, sets up a scenario for manipulation and control from others - pay attention people!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Remember the great America of today. Then I'll check in with you about America's greatness in 6 months and we'll see what's changed.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

The only people who deny CLIMATE CHANGE are the same people who stand to lose from renewable energy

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

This administration is thinking that it can just ignore CLIMATE CHANGE. People, it now comes down to us to make up the difference..

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Let's not stand for their preaching lies about our Mother Earth - DENY THE DENIERS !!! THEY ARE THE EARTH KILLERS

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT the term Alt-Right, just another sneaky euphemism for white supremacy, call it what it is! Don't let them hide behind dishonesty!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

One final thing - If we don't put up a fight we risk losing our rights.. Defend Democracy from those who want to crush it !

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

[Read More ...]

MY BLOG: http://www.rockoutwithyourcockout.com/

The post METALLICA’s KIRK HAMMETT Slams TRUMP, Urges Americans To ‘Reject The Lies From The People In The New Administraton’ appeared first on Rock Out With Your Cock Out.

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maryseward666 · 7 years

Text

METALLICA's KIRK HAMMETT Slams TRUMP, Urges Americans To 'Reject The Lies From The People In The New Administraton'

RARE BLACK METAL COLLECTIBLES

Trump's Inaugural Address and his asking us to put America first sounds, to me, familiar to...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

...what was said in speeches going around Germany in the 1930's ...and later Russia in the 1940's ...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Pay attention people ! Stand up for truth, compassion and togetherness. Don't settle for anything less.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Reject lies Fear mongering Misguided Anger The system wants us divided, so it's easier to control us emotionally.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER! LIKE IT OR NOT, WE NEED EACH OTHER TO OVERCOME THE BIGGER THREAT...

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

And we all know what the threat is - people in power who are trying to deny us and our children and grandchildren a healthy green future

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT AMERICAN CARNAGE We are a better nation right now than ever, better than just 5 years ago!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT THE LIES FROM THE PEOPLE IN THE NEW ADMINISTRATON, THEY ARE THERE ONLY TO FEED THEIR OWN THIRST FOR GREED AND POWER

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

America never stopped being great!! America is one of the wealthiest and most prosperous nations on the planet. I'm proud of America!!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

To say America is not great, that it lacks greatness, sets up a scenario for manipulation and control from others - pay attention people!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Remember the great America of today. Then I'll check in with you about America's greatness in 6 months and we'll see what's changed.

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

The only people who deny CLIMATE CHANGE are the same people who stand to lose from renewable energy

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

This administration is thinking that it can just ignore CLIMATE CHANGE. People, it now comes down to us to make up the difference..

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

Let's not stand for their preaching lies about our Mother Earth - DENY THE DENIERS !!! THEY ARE THE EARTH KILLERS

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

REJECT the term Alt-Right, just another sneaky euphemism for white supremacy, call it what it is! Don't let them hide behind dishonesty!

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

One final thing - If we don't put up a fight we risk losing our rights.. Defend Democracy from those who want to crush it !

— Kirk Hammett (@KirkHammett) January 21, 2017

[Read More ...]

MY BLOG: http://www.rockoutwithyourcockout.com/

from Rock Out With Your Cock Out http://www.blabbermouth.net/news/metallica-kirk-hammett-slams-trump-urges-americans-to-reject-the-lies-from-the-people-in-the-new-administraton/ via IFTTT

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