#thus feeding back into the same capitalistic systems

[kittykatinabag]

Hot Labor Strike Summer and all but fuck do I hate the term "right to work"

#how about a right to live without having to work? #i understand thats not the point of striking but i dont like how most of societys systems are predicated on the requirement to work #even if you get favorable terms the language will always be putting people underneath capital #thus feeding back into the same capitalistic systems #but im somehow an idealist when it comes to this stuff even though usually im a cynic to realist #afternoon ramblings #hot strike summer #labor discourse

[mrfengi]

Tumblr Archive Frustration and The Sketchy Town Crier Is The Future Of The Internet

This likely happened months or years ago, but noticed that Tumblr now requires a login to archives. Missed this change, having used an RSS reader to follow my favorite Tumblr Blogs for years. In my understanding, the point and appeal of Tumblr was a blog platform with social media on the backend. A defining part of a blog is people don't have to sign in to read it. To me, the archives are key to that open aspect. In the blog era, the archive was an unquestioned feature, the more functional the better. If someone liked a post, they'd want to go back and read more and making that as easy as possible was key. And if one had a popular topic or ongoing series, one wanted to make it as easy as possible for new readers to start at the beginning which they'd obviously want to do. Even if the endless scroll had existed, expecting people to roll back months or years manually would be absurd.

Social media not only profits from maximizing engagement from logged in users, but the business increasingly rests on monetizing usability. Thus platforms are at best indifferent to archives and searches as accessible and functional tools and usually actively hostile towards them. It's particularly bad in the web browser format, which I suspect most companies would love to abandon. Consider the rise of the asynchronous feed and search results. The Tumblr web archives are a mixed bag. Deficits: One must log in. One can filter by month, but it's a drop down menu that shows one year at a time. One must hover over entry squares to see the dates. Benefits: one can use the month and tag filter at the same time, which is handy for tracking an ongoing series of posts, which not all Web 1.0 blogs had. For example, Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin had a feature called The End of Civilization in which he mocked offerings from the Diamond Previews catalog. Good comics industry humor and now possibly history of a bygone era as Diamond may have ended the print version. However, the only way to get to the beginning is clicking "Older Entries" at the bottom of the page. A better archive can be seen with Slacktivist's epic analysis of the Left Behind series that ran from 2003 to 2016. It's relatively compact and simple, though one does have to click several times to reach the earliest of 18 pages. But no log in is required - this lengthy and now prescient contemplation on the pop culture of right wing theocrats is quite accessible.

For some time, it seemed like the internet's path was constantly improving search and archives with user control. I expected more tools for viewing content from oldest to newest. At the moment I can't pinpoint when and how things broke - as it's the tools for doing so that degraded - but traces of it still exist. Google still has a search tool for news archives with date filtering going back to 1900. At one point this was part of the main Google News service page, combining free and paid sources, maybe even Lexus Nexus, to providing a possible century of results of varying accuracy. Google News search now has five options - hour, 24 hours, week, year - with results in no coherent order.

Now the capitalist internet offers a barely coherent stream of recent information manipulated by a feedback loop of perceived reactions, things like larger context, longer chronology and verification increasingly require power user skill and workarounds. And entertainment sites are openly adopting the model of a not particularly well stocked video store in which anything besides recent releases is a random selection of whatever tapes still work. Now the various AI schemes they are layering on top of this already janky system kind of seem like they decided a user driven internet was a mistake and instead all content will be controlled by a personalized but deeply untrustworthy town crier who must be constantly cajoled into providing anything besides what it assumes you want. And some people may be into that, but I think it sucks.

[thoughts-on-bangtan]

I m sorry if this post makes u upset but honestly this is something i have been wondering a lot about. So i m sure the admis are aware of a theory that has existed for long time in t/k spaces that BH was holding t/k back. So wrt that we also know the boys recently became partners of BH by buying shares sometime in 2020. They also renewed their contracts in 2020. We also know tae has become happier and the famous t/k conversation took place in 2020. We can also see that t/k have more on (1/2)

screen interactions and are more frequently paired together since after the ITS convo and also appear to interact more with each other in various cobtent. Also there is a fall in j/k content no? I wonder if that theory was indeed true and that tae being happier could be bcoz of him getting to be more open with jk now and not hiding their relationship infront of the cameras and if that has anything to do with them being shareholders and the new contract. Bcoz this kinda makes sense to me (2/2)

Admin 1: The only thing with which you’ve upset me is by ignoring what I’ve said just a few posts ago about how the only ships I feel have actual potential of being ‘real’ are vmin and, to a certain degree, namjin, and how I’m more than open to talking about other duos etc as long as we talk about them as their real life friendships. Just yesterday I said that I don’t really care or pay attention to what other shippers do because it’s simply none of my concern. Why is that? Because no JK+ML ship has ever given me reason to go “huh?” or given me the impression there could be more than just friendship. Also, I’m not here to try and disprove other ships, or somehow try to convince anyone that my views are the only correct ones, I simply want to have a good time talking about vmin, namjin, and Bangtan, and that’s it, which I’ve said it yesterday as well.

I’ve been ARMY for many years now and yes, I’m more than aware of this theory because, in a way, it’s inescapable even if you try to stay clear of what T/K (and J/K) shippers are up to. And yet, despite that, for years my opinion on the topic has not changed in the slightest. I’ve written a whole post about ships and BH and how they are used for marketing purposes in rather obvious ways at times, how more screen time doesn’t immediately equal them being romantic (and the whole no screen time = no bond paradox), or BH “allowing” them to show off their relationship more, because that frankly, to me, sounds ridiculous.

Even if we’d entertain the idea for a moment, while also remembering that apparently T/K is still the biggest BTS ship, wouldn’t it make more sense for BH to show them? Because that would bring in more money? So, in that sense, hiding them wouldn’t make such sense business wise? Someone could argue that scarcity creates more demand, which once they do supply that demand, the money basically rains down on BH like crazy. And yet even that, to me, doesn’t really make all that much sense, given that they could just put T/K content behind a paywall, as in keep their interactions as paid content exclusives, but even that isn’t the case since apparently there hasn’t been much T/K shipper satisfying content even there. So, what exactly, would be the business point for BH to “hide” them? Remember, they are a company after all, not a matchmaking service.

Anyway, going back to my thoughts. We have 4 O’Clock followed by the knowledge that not that long after Tae started working on Happy Christmas, a duet for himself and Jimin which supposedly was too much for two members to sing it together (the implications here are rather clear), which was followed by Scenery (which has clear connections to the same event as in 4 O’clock and to Jimin), and add to all of that what Tae replied to that ARMY on weverse (this I also have a whole post about which I thought might’ve made my thoughts clear in a way, but I guess it did not). That does paint quite the obvious picture, does it not?

Just yesterday I said that the biggest rule in shipping is respect and being respectful, yes? Do you think it is respectful to still hold on to this made up T/K theory despite being faced with Tae’s own words? Despite how ridiculous it sounds? I don’t think so.

Therefore, for me, with everything Tae has done to express his feelings in connection to Jimin, as well as clearly stating that 95z is love (just a few months after telling off that shipper) and the fact that (despite surely having to jump through many hoops along the way) Jimin answered Tae in kind by making Friends happen which solidified them as soulmates to us but also made their wish and promise of remaining together even when the cheers are gone known (here’s my analysis of that song). That’s no small thing. And if that T/K theory held any merit, I highly doubt either Tae or Jimin would do all this, which I’ve also already once discussed in a previous post. Add to that Tae’s Weverse reply, their conversation during ITS, and Tae wanting Jimin to come sleep next to him on JKs birthday (that being something the company has no control over and is their own free time and their free will of telling us about it), the only “relationship” that Tae has with JK, in my opinion, is that of close friends, band mates, and colleagues.

As for their contract and them being shareholders and that having some kind of connection to them being able to show their relationships more freely—while yes, they did say that they’ll sign the contract and thus give BH seven more of their years so long as the contract reflects their hard work and achievements, it’s rather ludicrous to think that there might’ve been some kind of clause in there as well about how BH won’t “hide” a ship anymore or allow them to just run free and show off their relationships. Frankly that would be stupid and way more risky than worth it both for BH and the members themselves. Besides their personal relationships, especially romantic ones, are not for public consumption, so to speak. Even more so in the world of idols and with the prospect of having to do their military service in the future (this being doubly important and risky when considering their relationships being between two members and therefore LGBT).

We have no way of knowing what is exactly in those contracts, and what kind of effect them having BH shares has on their work-relation with BH, all we do know is that whatever was in those contracts was satisfying enough for all seven of them to sign it and be happy with that choice. Everything else is pure speculation.

This is the final time I’m answering such an ask since now I think I’ve truly made my stance on JK+ML ships known sufficiently, and this time I mean it.

Also, for future reference, can we please talk about JK not in romantic connection to a member for once? I have a whole post expressing my grievances with the treatment he gets from shippers and how there is so much more to him.

Admin 2: We live in a materialistic capitalist world where money is the leading power. Many people get up in the morning and work their a*s off to bring in enough income to live and to feed themselves and their possible family. But there are also people who find ways to make money without having to work their a*ses off. Such possibilities in todays day and age gives you, among other things, making videos on Youtube. If you’re sneaky enough and have an eye for what sells best at any given time and what brings in the biggest viewership, you might come to find that a great way to earn well is by making videos about BTS, and more specifically, about popular BTS ships, or even the most popular one at that.

Maybe you noticed how at some point there was a boom on youtube when it came to people making reaction videos, especially to anything BTS related, as well as hundreds of channels about shipping doing analysis videos, especially for T/K and J/K.

More below the cut:

In that moment when Tae basically said no to T/K being romantic, those T/K channels faced potentially “losing their jobs” and thus losing a very lucrative source of income. When I say lucrative, I mean up to $90k a year, which is a sum of money the average person can only dream of. Therefore, to save their existence and income, they decided to push on with their agenda and disregard any signs pointing against their ship. That’s why I think theories such as the one anon presented us with are ones that are created during conversations between people with such channels as wonderful solutions to explain away signs and behaviors that simply didn’t fit them and their agenda. There is a whole own eco system between those channels and their views, and shippers at large, to keep their shipper fantasies alive at all cost.

We know that T/K is one of the oldest, and the most popular one, among BTS ships, which relies on how fun and nice interactions between JK and Tae are to look at, how silly they used to be in the past together, and how some of their on stage behavior worked well in terms of “awakening” crazy fantasies among shippers. The most important in all of it though has always been that this ship contained the maknae and the next member closest to him in age, and thus also to many of those who ship them. But that of course isn’t all there is to it.

Since 2016 we’ve had 4 O’Clock and Scenery, both inspired by the same event, as well as vmin defining each other as their soulmate. These facts alone are, for me, a glaring contradiction for this whole T/K theory and any kind of romance existing within either T/K and J/K. For me, it’s a rather absurd thought to have a soulmate and also be in a romantic relationship (or harbor romantic feelings) for another person. Just like it’s absurd for me how supposedly two big JK and maknae ships are supposed to be real at the very same time and the band also exists at the same time as some form of background noise.

We also later on have Tae who wrote Sweet Night in which Tae sings about falling in love with his best friend, who has always been Jimin. Taking into account what Tae told that shipper on Weverse yet months later announced that 95z is love, that he sang Friends with Jimin, which was also co-written by Jimin, I very much doubt that there have ever been any romantic feelings from Tae toward JK (and vice versa).

I’d also like to note that Tae and JK didn’t spend any time together during their vacation in 2019 (according to them in the first episode of BV4), as well as JK having shown a kind of distaste toward the idea of one of Tae’s friends already having gotten married (or at least that’s what his facial expression looked like) which to me indicates the same thing they said in the ITS conversations: they’ve matured and their personalities have simply grown in different directions making parts of their friendship a bit awkward.

On the FESTA 2020 Rolling Paper Tae called JK his comedian while JK called Tae is safe place, which for me makes it sound that their bond is simply that of an older brother and his younger brother. I feel like during their ITS conversation they tried to communicate to us that they had some issues with each other but at the same time also try to somewhat negate all that obsessive romantic shipping that's been going on involving those two for so long. But that obviously hasn’t worked out.

Tae did say that he had to take certain steps and now he’s happier, but personally I believe that had far more of a connection to their work, or specifically Tae’s mixtape and the work and negotiations around it, since we know some of it might’ve been pushing the lines a little too much if BangPD felt the need to call him and ask him to tone it down a little. If I put on my delulu hat, looking at how happy Tae seems in recent months, I’d be inclined to believe this also had something to do with Jimin, who also seems to be in quite the happy mood as well.

Even if I’d step into a whole delulu tent, I see absolutely no connection to JK when thinking of all the things that could’ve been a factor that led to Tae’s happy state.

It’s easy to see that we’ve been getting more T/K interactions recently, which can be due to marketing strategies (since Tae’s mixtape is coming soon, and potentially also JKs since it’s been mentioned here and there last year) but also due to them getting closer again friendship wise after working through whatever was causing them to be awkward with each other (or at least slowly doing so). We all know that Tae is a very honest (as much as that’s possible in their line of work) and the only thing all of this shows us that Tae is simply showing us with JK that they’re doing better again, but none of their behavior in any way diverges or exceeds anything that’s normal for all of BTS and how touchy and full of affection they are with each other to various degrees. We have a whole post on the bias of body language as well.

Personally, I see no indication whatsoever for there being anything romantic about T/K, since that’s what you’re essentially asking about. After all Tae was the only one who had no idea about JKs drawing for Hobi, so if they were romantically involved, don’t you think JK would’ve showed it to him or at least told him about it?

I’d recommend listening to what Tae told us, remember that especially when we see him put his arm around JKs shoulder or touches his arm, that that isn’t a show of his romantic love for him, but just their normal level of BTS affection. Don’t let people convince you into buying into their agendas because at the end of the day, they have a lucrative business in doing so while, should it all one day come to an end, you will be the one that gets hurt due to their words and theories.

The sole fact that T/K relies on many of the same arguments as J/K, and both have JK as the part of them, is, for me, an indication that those ships aren’t real and instead that Tae and Jimin treat JK as their younger brother whom they love, just like all of BTS does. This is simply how BTS are. Everyone touches everyone’s arm, thigh, back, and hugs each other, it’s simply them being them. In order for a ship to be romantic and “real”, it takes a little more than just a touch of a thigh. There needs to be something more, like we’re able to find/see that something more with vmin, for example.

Tae is my bias and it always upsets me when people don’t respect him and the things he’s said.

#answered ask #BTS #Taehyung #Jungkook

[blackwoolncrown]

That makes sense. I suppose I'm just worried because I don't know what life would look like without it, and in the meantime I feel guilt for enjoying/benefiting from aspects of industrialization. If you could point me to any resources I would appreciate it.

Also I'd like to give you some money but anonymously, is there a way to do that?

Human minds have, IMO, only one considerable flaw.

You should know of this flaw because if you are not conscious of it, it stands to ruin your life.

The flaw is this: We prefer the familiar over the unknown.

On the face of it, this is simply a tendency, and a logical one for a social animal with a survival instinct to have.

However- this is what makes it a flaw: You will prefer the familiar over the unknown even when the familiar is killing you.

Anyway, just something to keep in mind. I can relate to the feeling of 'okay, I get that this is bad, but how would life without it be good or enjoyable? Are the things I enjoy bad? And if so, am I bad?"

First off, you are not bad for enjoying things.

The issue is simply that we are used to what is familiar to us and take our joys where we can find them and for the most part we have been raised within a life-depleting system and thus its features are familiar, good, understandable and even pleasurable. Given that this system attacks and hides any possibilities outside of it in order to maintain dominance, many of us have no idea, no faith, no reassurance that escaping the system is possible or even desirable. It helps to know that the very concept of a world outside of this system as being inherently boring, dull, harsh etc is actually an illusion created by the system itself. It serves industrial colonialism to make you believe that the trinkets it has made us out of the death it causes are better than life without it. Like an abuser, it wants you to believe you need and want it, and that life without it is death-- but it is killing us.

Consider, also, that many of the things we enjoy are simply dulled substitutes for what it has taken from us. Not knocking electronic entertainment as a whole, but as an example; we have shows and movies and games about people exploring, adventuring, (or worse), but precious few places left to roam. If you wanted to get up and go trekking across some highlands for a day or two, ride across lowlands on horseback with some friends, go on pilgrimage to some sacred site and look at paintings our ancestors left... could you? What's the likelihood that option is available to you? Accessible?

Media feeds us back fantasies of freedom and agency while we live in a prison-like capitalist reality. Screens are screens, electric or not. They block your sight of something.

Millions of snack foods available to us but most of us aren't allowed to have gardens nor are gardens even accessible. Land is turned to cement and golf courses. We did not do this. We were raised inside of it. We are not bad for finding pleasure and familiarity in it. When we know better, we do better.

I had the same fear and unease as you. But as I pared my life back and spent more time in spaces outside of colonial mindsets (or at the very least less of it) I began to realize that a lot of what I ‘liked’ about the mainstream lifestyle was the way it self-soothed the stress it caused. Outside of that stress there is less and less craving for stimuli. Idk about resources anon, sorry, but I would see if you can find any info about how precolonial ppl passed the time.

Guilt is absolutely pointless. Not Gxd, Earth, Creator, whomever, not a single entity- not even your comrades, feels that it is good or useful for you to feel guilt. Enjoy what you can when you can.

But know the difference between temporary relief and actual joy.

Anyway, about money, I appreciate the offering. I get this question sometimes and I have to say this: I am absolutely uninterested in your name especially if you do not want me to know it. I have no way of knowing if the names provided to me through electronic transactions are even real, or aliases, usernames or deadnames. Recieving funds that relieve the stressful conditions of my marginalized experience under slavery-built capitalism is more interesting to me than names, and while you may see my name on the services by which I accept reparations, I can neither confirm nor deny that any of them are accurate.

The choice is yours.

p*ypal.me/ellipsislux c*sh*pp: $moonseye v*nm*: awingedserpent onlyfans (subscribers go by username and can leave tips): @shesthatwhich

[jackwanchor]

Can America Spearhead a New Global Political Method?

Communism doesn't work. They had a saying in Cuba when I was there a few years ago, and it was 'We pretend to work, and Fidel pretends to pay us'

There's no incentive to advance personally if you don't obtain greater benefits. In the case of Cuba, I don't think that it's as simple as the leaders being greedy, because a major factor has been the blocking of trade with the USA. Having said that, the benefit of having trade with the USA is possibly only existing because of the wealth and therefore spending power of the USA, due to it being a capitalist system.

The Russian version of communism has also been proven to be a failure, because of simply human greed. Those who have power are able to use their power in making money. Such power is often due to the ability to create immoral deals that are often illegal in nature and are diverting funds into the private ownership of the Oligarchs, thus enabling the continuance of the corruption.

Likewise the capitalist system is also a failure in the longer term, for the same reason as the Russian communist system, namely the greed of the people who hold the power, which in the case of a capitalist system, are the rich. Money is power.

Greed is seemingly a natural trait of the human species, as the rich are dedicated to increasing their own personal wealth, whether it be as a capitalist, or a communist.

It seems that in any successful society, there has to be at least some capitalism, because it feeds progress, but it seems that major amounts of capitalism is a path to long term failure of the system itself. The greed of the rich, perpetuating ever increasing cash flow into their personal bank accounts is no different in effect than the illegal activities of the Oligarchs that achieve the same result.

Standing back and comparing both systems they both appear to have the same structure, the only difference being that the capitalist system has the greed less exposed, due to any illegality being either absent, or hidden, using the inherent wealth to finance the hiding, or often to use loopholes that in themselves are created by using wealth, to maintain a legal position, even if such a position is considered immoral to the mainstream of the people of the country as a whole.

If we look at the development of the excessive incomes of the wealthy of the democratic capitalist countries, it has accelerated in the last 50 years or more, with the yearly incomes of the wealthy multiplying at a far higher level than in the years prior to the more recent years.

This has the effect of creating a new class of people, the Working Poor. In extreme cases, people have become so underpaid that they are effectively paid slaves, trapped in the poverty that is statistically impossible to break out of unless there are changes made to the political systems.

For the rich, the system is also unsustainable, whether it is capitalist or communist. Suppression of the masses is a sure path to some equivalent of a peasants revolt.

We are probably right on the edge of such a revolt.

Added to the social trend of defunding the lower class levels of the global societies of the so-called free world, is the current insecurity caused by the Covid19 pandemic.

In the USA, there's the uprising of the people that has been sparked by the exposure of the police brutality issue.

And of course, there's the climate change issue.

America has an opportunity in the coming years to not only maintain the global leadership, or more accurately to regain it, but to create a new political system. This might need the abandonment of the so-called 'American Dream', which is actually a propaganda tool of the rich, that is used to create an illusion that everyone has the opportunity to join the rich people, when the reality is that the rich themselves are a clique who will block as much as possible the entry of others into that clique, because the value of wealth is only maintained when those who lack the wealth are existing to actually do the work that is essential for the wealth creation itself.

The next ten years or so should be interesting as far as American politics goes.

Donald Trump might have done America an unintended favour, by being such a loser, mismanaged, with almost zero negotiation skills, and etc etc etc., that he has pissed off the masses and the next administration will have a great opportunity to make radical changes to the American political system, and ultimately to that of the world.

#politicians #republican #destructive donald #incompetence #Capitalism

[pastichejournal]

Burnout Syndrome: Mark Fisher From the Future

In the wake of Burnout Syndrome (work caused stress/alienation) becoming mainstream, it’s worth reflecting on Mark Fisher's writings connecting mental health to the post-Fordist workplace.

For history to become what it always was, symbolism must be established in the future. The effects of neoliberalism and the post-Fordist workplace have only recently started to gain a kind of general consensus. Although symbolism can be initiated prior to an event (fiction, cyberpunk, etc.), for thinkers and media to reflect in the face of an overabundance of events is to start the first step of glancing back at the ‘vanishing’¹ moment whose symbolism will only emerge concretely in the future as what ‘will have been’². While it’s unclear where the late Mark Fisher is on this spectrum of concrete reflection on the symbolism and historicity of our time (he quotes many who have speculated before him), his thoughts on the neoliberal induced mental health crisis is a good spot to jump into as The World Health Organization’s updated definition of Burnout Syndrome (linking cynicism and distance from work to the workplace) in the International Classification of Diseases — ICD-11 — is making its way around the major news outlets. Although this is only a small step towards connecting mental health to the post-Fordist workplace, to understand the case being made by Fisher and how it relates to the real (burnout syndrome becoming mainstream as being connected to the workplace), it’d be beneficial to first walk through the differences between Fordism and post-Fordism.

    For Fisher, a good example highlighting the differences between fordism and post-fordism is the differences between the gangster movies of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (between 1971-1990) compared to more contemporary gangster movies (Fisher uses Heat as an example). The ideology evolves from the ‘families with links to the Old Country’ to the ‘rootless crews’ prepared to abandon everything at a moments notice. The ‘old fashioned’ ideology prioritizes certain characteristics like family relations, respect, and religion, while the ‘newer’ ones cut through all of this to survive most efficiently. Fisher highlights the new ideology by quoting Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.” The ‘traditional’ gangster’s way of life is challenged in the new field where “Family ties are unsustainable in these conditions…” Fisher goes on:

Like any group of share-holders, McCauley's crew is held together by the prospect of future revenue; any other bonds are optional extras, almost certainly dangerous. Their arrangement is temporary, pragmatic and lateral - they know that they are interchangeable machine parts, that there are no guarantees, that nothing lasts. Compared to this, the goodfellas seem like sedentary sentimentalists, rooted in dying communities, doomed territories. 

This ‘no long term’ is echoed in the post-fordist career models in which jobs are increasingly more and more temporary. The long term hierarchical fordist model “obligation, trustworthiness, commitment - are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism…” Jobs no longer promise a hierarchical ladder to climb over decades, but a day to day struggle to maintain income. If the gangs held on to permanence, they’d be quickly confronted with the wave of individuals whose only permanence is the lack thereof. The connection to family is then challenged: “The situation of the family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory, in precisely the way that traditional Marxism expected: capitalism requires the family (as an essential means of reproducing and caring for labor power; as a salve for the psychic wounds inflicted by anarchic social-economic conditions), even as it undermines it (denying parents time with children, putting intolerable stress on couples on couples as they become the exclusive source of affective consolation for each other).” Those who have surrendered their ideology and lifestyle to reflect the conditions in which they hope to interact with and succeed in are then at a great advantage. 

This post-Fordist ideology is also projected into the visuals of everyday life. Fisher observes the places in which the Scorsese and Coppola scenes are set compared to Heat. The organic and flamboyant social spaces (“All the local color, the cuisine aromas, the cultural idiolects…”), as opposed to the non-places in post-fordist movies; “... polished chrome and interchangeable designer kitchens, of featureless freeways and late-night diners… a world without landmarks, a branded Sprawl, where the marketable territory has been replaced by endlessly repeating vistas of replicating franchises.” It’s natural that the movie Heat starts at a train station and ends at an airport. Both the family and physical landscape have shifted significantly in the transition from the fordist to post-fordist workplace. “The ghosts of Old Europe that stalked Scorsese and Coppola’s streets have been exorcised, buried with the ancient beefs, bad blood and burning vendettas somewhere beneath the multinational coffee shops.” 

The act of comparing gang depictions in film highlights the process and responses to critiquing capitalism, as many argue that we prefer the post-fordist workplace to the fordist workplace. In using the gang as a reference point, we see that there is no angle to create a wholly preferential state. Regardless of the ideology of gangs in social relations, the medium is inherently flawed. Even if we can sympathize with the individuals, ‘ethical’ gangs would hardly be seen as any kind of objective solution to alternative social relations. Although Fisher is highlighting the differences and in some cases the benefits of fordism in Capitalist Realism, his book is nonetheless arguing that ‘the medium is the message’³. Movies (Fisher mentions Wall-E) can be no more explicitly critical of what capitalism holds in store for us, yet we act as though everything will work out (what Slavoj Zizek calls cynical fetishism). The liberals will fight for ethical capitalism, the conservatives will fight for neoliberal capitalism, but the medium will nonetheless remain. Thus capitalism, the call to reform and change capitalism, and cultural attempts to ‘expose’ capitalism, are all mediums that are now ingrained within the ideology of capitalism and support this phenomena of capitalist realism (“there’s no alternative”). 

To examine these different aspects of how capitalism and neoliberalism have ingrained themselves so foundationally in our culture and social relations is to offer a brief introduction into how our mental health is in jeopardy. The machine like act of working 9-5 in a factory of machines is now subtly submerged in daily life, labeled as ‘flexibility’.    

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively as a component of just-in-time production you must develop a capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live in conditions of total instability, or 'precarity', as the ugly neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.

Although there was a desire to escape the lifelong factory job, the results of post-Fordism birthed a new wave of issues. Fisher brings up the connection between the ‘boom and bust cycles’ of Capitalism and bi-polar disorder arguing that “Capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence,  capital could not function.” 

This link between context and mental health is essential. To contain mental health to exclusively biological ends, excluding any possibility of politicized causation, would largely benefit a system that is potentially causing these issues. Especially when the system would profit off of selling medication to cope as Fisher points out. This also supports the individualized culture, “it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry).” It’s interesting seeing the connection between a sort of Sartrean individualized free will and neoliberal Capitalists. As Existentialism starts from an atheistic foundation to create the bridge to free will, Neoliberalism starts from a market morality foundation that labels an individual’s conditions as a product of their own lack of ‘working hard’. 

By attaching the systems at play behind a mental illness, Fisher is following the same steps as Marx did with commodity fetishism. As Marx attached the labor and laborers involved in producing and distributing a commodity, Fisher attaches post-Fordist working conditions to mental illness. Fisher is recognizing that mental health may be a symptom of these systems (or an element of a system, as Zizek would say). 

If one were to make of this an oversimplified debate between two opposing sides, it would appear that we are in a battle between individualized free will and determinism. However, as Fisher brings to light the data that appears to link the increase of psychiatric and affective disorders in countries that display what Oliver James calls 'selfish' capitalism and as this Burnout Syndrome becomes more mainstream, it appears that this link is now becoming too strong to dismiss and not a simplified matter at all. If the present seems too complex to make sense of, perhaps peace can be found in the idea that symbolism will be attached in the future. It’s only now that we can look back at the past 40 years of research on Burnout Syndrome⁴ and use the very recent mainstream implementation as a support of the real to the writings of someone like Mark Fisher. 

1-2. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 159

3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill, 1964

4. Linda V. Heinemann1 and Torsten Heinemann, Burnout Research: Emergence and Scientific Investigation of a Contested Diagnosis, Sage Open journals.sagepub.com/home/sgo, 2017

Note: All Fisher quotes are from Capitalist Realism

#mark fisher #capitalism #capitalist realism #philosophy #pastiche #pastiche journal

[continuations]

Universal Basic Income: An Introduction

Here is the text of a speech I gave at the 72nd Annual NYU Labor Conference, which this year was on AI and Automation.  Unfortunately there is no recording - I stuck relatively closely to this, but didn’t read it.

----------

Universal Basic Income: An Introduction

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this audience about Universal Basic Income. I am approaching this topic from the perspective of a venture investor who backs companies that automate tasks ranging from image recognition to medical diagnosis, as well as someone who has thought and written about automation for nearly three decades going back to my undergraduate thesis on automated trading in 1990.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term Universal Basic Income or UBI, it refers to a payment to every citizen that is unconditional, i.e. paid independent of employment status or income. A commonly used number is a monthly payment of $1,000 per adult and less per child. The idea for such a scheme in the United States is quite old and an early mention can be traced all the way back to Thomas Paine’s 1795 pamphlet on “Agrarian Justice.” Proponents over the years have come from all over the political and ideological spectrum, ranging from Milton Friedman to Martin Luther King Jr.

If I have done my math correctly, the first Annual NYU Labor Conference took place in 1947 at what we can now recognize as the beginning of the golden era of the Industrial Age. A period that lasted for 40 some years during which market based economies produced exceptional growth with the benefits shared between capital and labor. For the last twenty plus years, however, the benefits of growth have accrued primarily to the owners of capital in what has become known as the great decoupling, which is attributable to the twin effects of automation and globalization.

Given this impact of automation on labor it is not surprising that this section of the conference has the word “Mitigation” in its title. UBI is often positioned defensively: “Automation will take away your job, but here is some money.” This framing is deeply problematic. At best it makes UBI appear like another welfare policy and at worst it carries a ring of “opium for the people” -- a way of keeping the working population docile while capitalists get richer.

How then should people think about UBI? In my book World After Capital, I refer to it as “Economic Freedom.” Why? Because UBI massively increases individual freedom. It provides a walk away option from a bad job, a bad spouse or relationship, even from a bad city. As such it also provides new found bargaining power in the labor market for the roughly 40% of Americans who are part of the precariat. At its most fundamental, UBI makes people free in how they allocate their time. They can choose to work and make more money or they can choose not to and instead spend their time on friends and family, or art, or science, or politics, or the environment, or any of the millions of things humans do outside of the labor market.

There is another crucial distinction between the defensive, mitigation framing and the offensive, freedom framing of UBI. The former implies that we are stuck in the Industrial Age, whereas the latter carries the possibility of a new age, which I call the “Knowledge Age” in my book. The defining characteristic of the Industrial Age isn’t “industry” -- as in manufacturing -- rather it is the job loop: people sell their labor and use their income to buy “stuff” (goods and services), which in turn is made by people selling their labor.

Employment in agriculture declined from 90% of all jobs in 1780 to below 3% today. This change is often taken to show that we successfully replaced agricultural jobs with other jobs and that we can and should do so again now: automate existing jobs only to replace them with new and different jobs and thus stay in the job loop of Industrial Age. But that reading shows a lack of imagination. A different interpretation is that something that once occupied the bulk of human attention, producing enough food to feed the population, has been reduced to an afterthought.

Well, what occupies the bulk of our attention today? The job loop. Paid labor. If we succeed in enabling automation to its fullest extent, if we succeed in transitioning into the Knowledge Age, then 100 years from now we will have done to paid labor what we did to agriculture. A reduction from something that occupies 80 percent or more of human attention today, to something that’s barely noticeable.

It is crucial that we free up human attention now because too many important problems are going unsolved. The market based system has been so successful that it has solved the problems it can solve, leaving us with the ones it cannot. Prices do not and cannot exist for events that are rare or extreme. There is no price for a human finding their purpose. There is no price for preventing an asteroid impact. There is no price for averting a climate catastrophe. Because we are relying on the market to allocate attention, we are paying far too little attention to these crucial issues and far too much attention to making money and spending it on stuff.

UBI then is a central pillar of a new social contract that enables a transition to the Knowledge Aga, a transition that is as profound as the one from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age. What replaces the job loop? In World After Capital, I suggest that the answer is the Knowledge Loop, in which we learn, create and share knowledge -- broadly defined to include not just science but also art and music.

Now of course there are many objections to UBI. Most of these, such as people spending money on drugs, or an immediate collapse in the supply of labor, are easily dismissed by the evidence from UBI trials around the world going back to the famous 1970s Mincome experiment in Canada, all the way to the currently ongoing Kenya study by Give Directly. There is also indirect evidence that contradicts these objections, such as the by now well documented benefits to the Native American population from casino licenses.

I will therefore focus on two objections, one practical and one philosophical, that are not so readily addressed by the available evidence.

The practical objection that looms largest is that UBI is simply not affordable. Almost every analysis that comes to this conclusion makes two mistakes. First, looking at a gross instead of net expenses. Second, examining payments from a fiscal perspective only.

The gross expenses in the United States would amount to something like $3.3 trillion or roughly the same as all Federal revenues. Net expenses, however, would be quite a bit smaller. In conjunction with introducing a UBI, it is crucial to modify the tax code so that income tax is paid starting with the first dollar earned. A large fraction of the population that is currently not paying federal income tax, Mitt Romney’s infamous 47% remark, would instantly owe some amount of income tax. And of course for people already paying taxes the net transfer is also smaller. At a 35% flat tax rate on all income, whether from labor or capital gains, as well as eliminating various deductions, the net expense required for a UBI is on the order of $1.5 trillion. And this is a completely static calculation which does not assume any GDP growth benefits of UBI, which have been estimated as high as $2 trillion dollars.

$1.5 trillion in new expenses still sounds like an impossibly large amount. But with a UBI in place it becomes possible to eliminate some programs such as food stamps and TANF entirely and modify other programs, such as Social Security, for savings on the order of $500 billion. Now to cover the remaining $1 trillion there are various proposals worth considering including a carbon tax, a financial transactions tax and a VAT -- the latter being favored by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Some combination of these could cover the entire remaining $1 trillion.

But we should also consider a fundamentally different approach to implementing a UBI. I am talking about moving from fractional to full reserve banking, something that has historically been favored by economists from the Austrian school, as well as by Milton Friedman, whom I previously mentioned as a UBI advocate. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we have created annually on the order of $500 billion in M2 money supply. This money creation in a full reserve banking system would be possible as direct payments into citizens’ UBI accounts. Instead of letting commercial banks decide where newly created money enters the economy, it would enter equally for everyone. That would make it harder for someone like myself to get a mortgage for a second or third home, but would make it possible for many people to afford a first one.

At the $500 billion annual level we are simply matching the current money supply growth, which has not been inflationary. It is, however, possible to fund more and potentially all of UBI that way instead of via taxation. Wouldn’t that result in inflation? Won’t prices simply go up to offset the new money created? If we wanted to fund more of UBI that way we would have to also institute some form of demurrage, for instance through negative interest rates. Doing so will become much more readily possible with “programmable money,” a better term for what is often referred to as crypto currencies.

All in all though the key takeaway here should be that through some combination of changes in the tax code, elimination and modification of existing welfare and social programs, and some new taxes and/or changes to the banking system, it is entirely possible to finance a UBI. The fact that this is possible shouldn’t be surprising, seeing how even at the gross expense level of $3.3 trillion, a UBI represents only 15% of GDP.

Now on to the philosophical objection. This is the claim that removing the need to work in order to earn a living robs people of their purpose. While strongly held today, this view of human purpose would strike people from other time periods such as the middle ages or antiquity as absurd. They would have answered that human purpose is to follow the commandments of religion, to be an upstanding community member or to be a philosopher.

Why is it so difficult for us today to disentangle our job from our purpose? Well we have spent the last two hundred years or so telling people from practically the day they are born that finding and succeeding at a job is their purpose. It is deeply woven into our culture as part of the protestant work ethic. And it has become the singular goal of education. The current obsession with STEM education is not because of the need to solve difficult problems, such as climate change, but rather because of a belief that people with a STEM degree will find a better job. This of course should not come as a surprise as the modern education system was designed for the Industrial Age. So education too is something we will have to change.

By now you might say that clearly I must be crazy. I want to introduce a UBI, revise the tax code substantially, even alter how money is created in the economy and change the education system to boot? Any one of these seems impossible, let alone all of them together.

We can’t change this much. And yet we have done so twice already. After living as foragers for millions of years — 250,000 of those as Homo sapiens — we changed everything when we transitioned into the Agrarian Age roughly 10,000 years ago. We went from migratory to sedentary, from flat tribes to highly hierarchical societies, from promiscuous to monogamous-ish, from animist religions to theist ones. Then again only a couple hundred years ago we changed everything when we transitioned from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age. We moved from the country to the city, we switched from  living in large extended families to living in nuclear families or no family at all, we went from lots of commons to private property (including private intellectual property), we even changed religion again going from great chain of being theologies to the protestant work ethic.

Each of these massive changes in how humanity exists were in response to a huge shift in our technological capabilities. Agriculture allowed us to create artificial food supply. Industrial technology allowed us to create artificial power. And digital technology now allows us to create artificial intelligence. Digital technology is as big a change in our capabilities as those two prior ones, it is not simply a continuation of the Industrial Age. We should expect to have to change everything rather than getting away with a few incremental patches here and there.

In conclusion: UBI is not a mitigation measure, keeping us trapped in the Industrial Age. UBI is a necessary, but not a sufficient, enabler of the Knowledge Age. We need to change pretty much everything else about how we live as well, including education, healthcare, the intellectual property regime, and much much more.

#universal basic income #world after capital

[swordoforion]

Orion Digest №27 - Hybrid Planned Economy: Microeconomics

We have covered how a Hybrid Planned Economy (HPE) could function on a macroeconomic scale - National Market Bureaus (NMB's) would create and oversee Regional Market Bureaus (RMB), which allow for registration of citizen-managed businesses that compete in an RMB-regulated market. The operation of the market will be reported back to the NMB, which will analyze trends and consumer demand for goods and services and will implement changes in funding and individual direction accordingly. However, how would these businesses be organized, and how would a civilian interact with the government system of HPE?

In our typical member nation within the eco-socialist federation, the average citizen is registered with their national and regional government, and until the time at which they are able to find employment on their own, they are put on track for employment with a government registered business, or are provided welfare and at least food and housing. If a citizen wants to create their own business, they will draft a business proposal to send to their RMB, which acts as an application for usage of public production resources and funding. Once their application is approved, they will be given capital to begin building their idea, which includes securement of machinery, housing, and hiring of staff.

One of the first regulations that our entrepreneur will be accountable to is the concept of the democratic workplace. They will not own the business, or have sole management - every member of their company will have partial ownership in the company they work for, and business decisions will be made by democratic assembly, which can have higher management through election. This is not a new concept - worker co-operatives already exist in capitalist economies, and are widely successful, though rather obscure among business practices. This democratic structure of management allows workers to have a say in what they produce and how they operate, while also creating a management staff to ensure that progress of the company moves forward.

In a democratic workplace, decisions that would disadvantage the workers will be naturally discouraged; to make such a decision would require the workers themselves to intentionally vote to disadvantage themselves, so as long as they act in their own self interest, the operation of the business will put people first. If the protection of staff is a priority, then fewer risky decisions in the interest of profit will be made, and thus, the tendency of businesses to enlarge themselves could be minimized, keeping us at lower levels of growth that would assist environmental de-escalation programs.

The exact specifics of profit distribution would have to be decided by the nation and their respective Market Bureaus, but the profits of a registered business would be used both to provide livable wages to the workers, but would also be partially sent back in the form of taxes to the government, to help provide for the funding and capital for start-ups and businesses of interest. The rest could be used for reasons of expansion, though to what level this excess profit allows for expansion would affect the annual capital provisions from the RMB. Taxation of the profit of government registered businesses would enable lower taxes upon citizens (the goal of such a society would be to prevent mass discrepancy in wealth, so while wealth would be proportionate to taxes, ideally the difference would be negligible as we move towards equal wealth).

A balance would need to be struck between prices set by businesses (another factor that NMB's could control through their annual review) and the wages afforded to workers in order to ensure that the wages were livable, as if the government has to provide welfare and housing to those in poverty regardless, it would do them little good to send people into poverty with unaffordable prices. Taxation would also have to be taken into account, and so, much of the difficulty in creating an HPE system would revolve around the delicate balance of business taxation, salary taxation (one option available is to have no salary taxation, and simply have heavier taxes upon business profits), prices, and wages. The flipside of having the economy feed directly into the government is having the average quality of life become something the government must maintain, and at every level, this government will be democratic and accountable to the very same people who rely on it, so there is no choice but to find an equitable balance.

The complex job of managing so many businesses would require a vastly expanded bureaucracy, but this problem could open up a solution to others - a larger bureaucracy means additional job opportunities created for citizens displaced from dissolved companies, or simply unemployed citizens unable to find work elsewhere. The world federation could establish funding to national bureaucracies to support the hiring of workers to keep the market running, supplied by government (public) ownership of production resources, which would consist of pre-federation wealth and general capital owned by the government and given to citizens in exchange for a portion of the profit.

Any citizen within a eco-socialist federation would then be presented with multiple options for career work, and would have a degree of control and input over the world around them - they would be able to vote and run for government at any level, and either create or work in a democratic business or for the bureaucracy that supplies and manages the market. It's also important to remember that as much effort as it would take to create a HPE structure, the output would only be need-based while we focus on de-escalating to ZPG, so when we speak of work, we do not mean 12 hour shifts and long, backbreaking work weeks. The goal of any moral system of economy is to have people do skilled work of their choice, and have as much time for personal development and recreation outside of that environment as possible. The purpose of life is not to work, but with an HPE, we can make an economy that works for the people.

- DKTC FL

#HPE #hybrid planned economy #microeconomics #economics #economic theory #orion #orion digest #sword of orion #eco-socialist federalism #eco-socialist federation #taxation #zpg #business #command economy #planned economy #worker co-op #worker cooperative #NMB #RMB #economy

[attached-detachment]

“whosever delights in solitude must either be a wild [lower] beast, or a god”

FB feed hitting me with too realness  .  politics by aristotle, of friendship by francis bacon  web search hitting me with perspectives https://aphelis.net/whosoever-delighted-solitude-bacon/ “A final remark about the following sentence, also from the excerpt of Francis Bacon’s essay quoted above: /For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”/ The last part is a clear reference to Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

/If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. (1 Corinthians 13:1, NIV)./“ 

DDR guy coweye playing ariana grande’s rain on me. yeah pop music can have heart.  yeah i wish i grew up not depressed and part of the girlhood youth i wasnt.  yeah in many respects its too late for that because i dont want to try and because the physical realities that reflect dysphoria back constantly are overwhelming and i succumb to depression instead of blissful neglectful happiness.  rant rant capitalist system still corrupt take it out on the rest of the world while i continue to participate in it. but because i do so begrudgingly, im better than you /sarcast ick  more quotes below ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ aristotle  “Thus also the city-state is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually. For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part; since when the whole body is destroyed, foot or hand will not exist except in an equivocal sense, like the sense in which one speaks of a hand sculptured in stone as a hand; because a hand in those circumstances will be a hand spoiled, and all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer such as to perform their function they must not be said to be the same things, but to bear their names in an equivocal sense. It is clear therefore that the state is also prior by nature to the individual; for if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.” bacon XXVII–Of Friendship. “It has been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words than in that speech, “Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god:” for it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred and aversion towards society in any man hath somewhat of the savage beast; but it is most untrue that it should have any character at all of the divine nature, except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in solitude, but out of love and desire to sequester a man’s self for higher conversation: such as is found to have been falsely and feignedly in some of the heathen; as Epimenides the Candian, Numa the Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really, in divers of the ancient hermits and holy fathers of the church. But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: Magna civitas, magna solitudo; because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity. (The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon: Including His Essays, pp. 73-74)” XXVII eh, well that’s fitting, im going to be 27 soon, fear and dread ensues

[perkwunos]

At this point on can return to the question of value versus values; that is, economic price-mechanisms versus the kind of “conceptions of the desirable” described by Kluckhohn: honor, purity, beauty, and the like. I’ve already noted that the latter tend to take on importance either in societies without a commercial market (e.g., the Kayapo) or, as in ours, in those contexts (church, home, museum, etc.) relatively insulated from it. According to Turner, both really are refractions of the same thing; to understand the differences, one has first of all to consider what they are being refracted through. That is, one has to consider the nature of the media through which social value is realized. The key question is the degree to which value can, as it were, be “stored.” Here money represents one logical extreme. Money is a durable physical object that can be stored, moved about, kept on reserve, taken from one context to another. At the other extreme, one has performances like chiefly chanting, the deferential behavior of subordinates, and so on. A performance is obviously not something that can be stored and “consumed” later on. Hence, as he puts it, there can be no distinction here between the spheres of circulation, and realization. Both have to happen in the same place.

Here it might help to go back to Marx, who invented these particular terms. In a capitalist system, the typical product is made in a factory and passes from wholesaler to retailer, before finally being bought by a consumer and taken home to be consumed. In Marx’s terms it passes from the sphere of production, to that of circulation, to that of realization: the latter by providing the consumer some pleasure, fulfilling some purpose, or adding to his or her prestige. In a society like the Kayapo, however, the spheres of circulation and realization coincide. Social value may be mainly produced in the domestic sphere, but it is realized by becoming absorbed into personal identities in the public, communal sphere, accessible to everyone.

Marx, of course, was writing mainly about political economy and was not especially concerned with what went on in the domestic sphere. But I think if one expands his ideas just a little, to include the issue of social production (the production of people, and of social relations outside the workplace), one might come up with the formulation seen in Figure 3.2.

In a capitalist system, then, there are two sets of minimal units—factories (or more realistically, workplaces), and households—with the market mediating relations between the two. One primarily concerns itself with the creation of commodities; the other, with the creation (care and feeding, socialization, personal development, etc.) of human beings. Neither could exist without the other. But the market that connects them also acts as a vast force of social amnesia: the anonymity of economic transactions ensures that with regard to specific products, each sphere remains effectively invisible to the other. The result is a double process of fetishization. From the perspective of those going about their business in the domestic sphere, using commodities, the history of how these commodities were produced is effectively invisible. Therefore, objects—as Marx so famously observed—appear to take on subjective qualities. Perhaps in part, too, because they are also turned there to the fashioning of people. Most commodities—as critics of Marx so often point out end up marking different sorts of identity, and this is the ultimate social “realization” of their value in the terms outlined above. All of this could simply be considered part of the overall process of “social production”: forming people both in their capacities, and, more publicly, in terms of their identities, of what sorts of person they are taken to be. But I would add: from the perspective of the workplace, everything is reversed. Here, it is the creative energies that went into producing labor power (actual human beings capable of doing whatever it is the boss wants them to do) that becomes invisible. Hence, instead of things taking on human qualities, real human beings end up taking on the qualities of things. Thus we have the “reification” that Gregory talks about, human beings or human powers reduced to commodities that can be bought and sold, and hence put to use in creating new commodities.

David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

#david graeber

[larrykrakow]

Jesus Christ And Socialism

New Post has been published on https://theprogressivemind.org/jesus-christ-and-socialism/

Jesus Christ And Socialism

Jesus Christ was a great man in my eyes. He still lives on in the eyes of the faithful, but he carries significance for me, an atheist as well. Jesus Christ believed in many things that Karl Marx believed in. He believed these things long before labels on this ideology came to be. Jesus was a healer according to the Bible. He was a man who stood up for the poor, the sick, and the hungry. He stood against the early capitalists that looked to exploit an economic system.

As we approach his birthday, we have to acknowledge his positive influence on society. In a way, he made it good to be charitable, caring, and kind while standing up to the oppressive forces ruling society. We are in a place where another individual like him is needed. With people facing eviction during a deadly pandemic and record levels of job loss, our society needs restructuring. Capitalism will never completely fall in the wake of some utopian revolution, but it can be put in check. Jesus Christ was a man willing to stand up to the system of exploitation and that ultimately cost him his life.

So why does the right-wing use the name of Jesus Christ to oppress?

That is a good question. Why does someone like Steve Mnuchin get to spend time as Treasury Secretary after illegally foreclosing on people? Our government is full of the so-called money changers that Jesus Christ would have cast out of the temple in Jerusalem. So why do people like fraudulent people like Donald Trump? People do not like Donald Trump for his policies. There is really nothing there. The only thing that was there for people to latch onto was the appointment of anti-abortion judges. In fact, Jesus never said anything about abortion and he never was against immigration. The right-wing has abortion and identity as things that they believe that Jesus professed. They have completely twisted his ideology to suit their own.

The first truly great socialist was Jesus Christ. From his message of feeding the hungry and healing the sick to his actions against the money changers in the temple in Jerusalem, his life has been all about justice. Sadly, people misrepresent his message for their own ends.

As we all know, Jesus was a man of charity and healing, not of hate. In fact, Jesus was a man of color from the Middle East, probably of Arabic descent. White Evangelical Christians and some of the other denominations hold a view that America is a white Christian nation. How “Christian” is it to believe that people of color should not have the same opportunities as everyone else? Christianity has gone through several evolutions as has many other religions. One thing is certain, in America, people twist the message of Christ in ways to meet their own narrative. That makes it difficult to fight a twisted ideology when the twisted is fanatical.

We often have to look throughout our history in America to see how the white Christian faith has been used by powerful people from slave owners to big business in the modern-day to manipulate society. The message of Christ has been manipulated by wealthy televangelists for personal gain. The Pat Robertsons and Jerry Fallwells of the world have turned religion into a capitalist venture.

So where does socialism fit into the narrative?

If you truly believe in Jesus Christ, then you have to acknowledge his message. For me, it was easy. After all, I am an atheist who was born into a Jewish family. I approach things with more logic and less emotion. This is not to toot my own horn or to say that I am better than anyone. It is to make people understand that you have to approach things in a way that allows you to think for yourself and not be swayed by others. Do you think healthcare is a human right? Do you believe that everyone deserves a living wage so they can afford housing, food, clothing, and the ability to raise their children?

Sure, people can preach to me all day and tell me that if you want to do something about it then you have to donate to charity yourself. I hear that lecture all the time, but when we see the balance of wealth and power consolidated into a cabal of elites, we have to demand of THEM to do the right thing. THEY are the money changers that were cast out of the temple in Jerusalem.

The most powerful are not the ones feeding the hungry in food deserts in our inner cities. They are not using their wealth and power to make sure that there is enough affordable housing for everyone. Also, we have to acknowledge, they are not paying living wages, thus denying people who work to give them that wealth the right to basic needs. Let us take the Walton family as a great example. By not paying a living wage, much of their workforce was on some form of public assistance to make ends meet such as food stamps.

It is time for us to question the wrong message.

Things are not working. People are waiting in long lines for food during the pandemic due to massive job losses. Food pantries are stressed to the max and our medical system is being overrun by Covid19 patients. The wrong message of “Make America Great Again” has been toxic. It cut into the energy needed by progressives. This fear of another term of Trump forced us into another term of an establishment Democrat who will carry on the status quo. The left has not been able to get enough airtime to advocate for what we need. What we need is universal healthcare in a single-payer system. We also need many more things in our society, but we cannot begin to discuss them, because of the modern-day money changers that Christ would have cast away.

So as an atheist, I will tell you that I love Jesus Christ. I don’t love him in the religious sense, but I do love his message of charity. Here is a list of quotes from the Bible aligned with his philosophy. When you allow someone to talk badly about socialism, you allow them to get away with twisting the message of Christ. So does that mean that the vast majority of Trump supporters are fake people? In fact, that makes them Christian heretics in the eyes of Chris Hedges, an American preacher, and philosopher. The right-wing will hate me for this, but I will call them out as fake. They are fake because their racism allows them to twist the message of a great socialist and a man of color to suit their own narrative. In fact, let us also note, Jesus was a Palestinian Jewish man of color. Put that narrative in your back pocket for keeps.

[ohsoethical]

LET’S TALK ABOUT ETHICAL FASHION PLS

Ethical fashion: ‘an approach to the design, sourcing and manufacture of clothing which maximises benefits to people and communities while minimising impact on the environment.’ Ethical Fashion Forum

(Source: https://airrclothingblog.com/2015/03/06/brand-profile-beaumont-organic-available-at-airr-clothing/)

Wow. Where do I begin?

Actually let me begin with this disclaimer: ANY CRITICISM I MAY MAKE ABOUT CERTAIN SITUATIONS/ORGANISATIONS/GROUPS OF PEOPLE IS NOT AN ATTACK ON THESE PEOPLE AS INDIVIDUALS BUT THE SYSTEM FROM WHICH THEY HAVE DERIVED FROM. 

K lets begin.

 So I guess you could say I’ve been in/observing the ethical fashion scene for about 4/5 years now. During my first year of uni I realised I needed to go beyond complaining about the oppression of garment workers and start acting, and decided to create a blog called Oh So Ethical. My first thought was to create an ethical fashion blog where I styled outfits I’d made out of secondhand clothes, and raved about the latest ethical brands I loved (I cringely called this ‘Fridays Five Ethical Faves’ ffssssssss). After a while I stopped, but went back into it when my cousins and I realised we needed somewhere to share our opinions, ideas,and hopefully inspire others to think and act ethically- and so we rebranded Oh So Ethical and made it what it is today. 

At the beginning I tended to place a large emphasis on ethical brands that we liked and bought from. ‘Ethical is the new black’ was my favourite slogan. However, as the years have gone on, and with more interaction with activists, friends, random people I’ve met, and having witnessed the ongoing exploitation of garment workers continue year after year, I have become extremely cynical of the effectiveness of ethical brands, particularly ‘ethical fashion’.

Indeed, through learning from others and seriously thinking about ethical fashion, questioning whether it is an actual means of empowerment for workers,and if it will ACTUALLY dismantle the system of oppression, I have come to a conclusion:

It’s a resounding NO.

Here’s y.

(Source: https://fashionindustrybroadcast.com/2017/06/12/sustainable-ethical-fashion-faux-has-never-looked-so-real-or-this-stylish/)

I recently read an amazing article in The Guardian by Martin Lukacs, which really helped me understand the underlying processes behind ethical fashion. To sum it up, we live in a neoliberal society, where we are taught to act and thrive individually. When it comes to activism, we are taught to focus on how we, as individuals, can change the situation, and are made to feel personally responsible and guilty for the world’s problems. Due to the guilt created by this individualism,we feel the need to relieve our guilt by acting in a way that makes us feel better, and as we are seen as consumers (as opposed to citizens) within neoliberal ideology, our means of creating change is through buying and consumption e.g. buying ethical clothing. 

While these individual actions are undoubtedly important, by placing such a great emphasis on individualistic activism, we are intentionally being steered away from focusing on the real perpetrators at large: CORPORATIONS- who are out here exploiting workers and the environment, and continue to get away with it. In turn, we are made to neglect the fact that we need to be targeting the root causes of exploitation, including the deregulation of state power that allows corporations to get away with murder, and the capitalist system that puts profits over people, encouraging exploitation and greed. By steering our attention away from such issues, corporations can continue making profits and getting away with their bullshit, while we discuss the pros and cons of bamboo leggings. (see more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2017/jul/17/neoliberalism-has-conned-us-into-fighting-climate-change-as-individuals)  

Author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion’ Tansy Hoskins provides a similar discourse, adding that we are encouraged to trust in capitalism to make change and better the world; that companies can be made ethical through our consumer actions. However, the contradiction is that corporations have only become stronger and continue to exploit workers/resources, despite their greenwashing and attempts to come across as ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’. More shopping is not going to free workers from this system. By using consumerism as a sole means of empowering workers, we are utilising the very system that has led to the exploitation of workers in the Global South, namely capitalism, without even acknowledging or striving to challenge or dismantle it. (see more: https://oxfordleftreview.com/olr-issue-14/tansy-hoskins-neoliberalism-and-fashion/)

In an insightful article on White Saviour Complex and Fair Trade, Bani Amor delves into the colonial connotations of attempts to ‘save’ the world via ethical companies, which are argued to share parallels with the colonial activities of the West going into the Global South and attempting to civilise the ‘Other’ with its saviour tactics, thus ensuring domination over the GS and its resources, validating supremacy. I’m not saying ethical companies are going to these countries on colonial conquests, but we really do need to understand the historic relevance of colonialism in interactions between the Global North and South such as these. If you go to these countries, get products made, sell them in the name of ‘liberating workers’ while not giving them a say or listening to them, and continue to stay silent on the structural system that has resulted in your existence as an ethical brand, you are falling into dangerous territory.

The article also reviews research on cause-related marketing, which is basically when corporations and nonprofit charities combine to promote sales and causes simultaneously. By tying serious social causes such as poverty and exploitation to making profits, this results in the depoliticising and downplaying of such causes, and provides an undignified, extremely simplified solution to a complex, very dire situation. 

Finally, one pivotal point made is the fact that coloured women, through this process of ‘saviourism’ are made both “hypervisible, but also invisible- ‘seen but not known’”. Their existence is highlighted, but they are simultaneously being silenced, as workers are spoken over, dehumanised and patronised by brands and movements that are supposed to be ‘empowering’ them. (read more: https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/spend-save)

In general, the ethical fashion movement tends to solely focus on how we can individually change the industry and ‘save’ workers in a way that utilises and continues to prop up the very system that is screwing workers over in the first place, conflicting with its ‘empowering’ rhetoric.

 GREAT SO WTF DO I DO NOW THEN MAYISHA.

(Source: http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2014/04/ghosts-rana-plaza)

Okay so I know I’ve painted a very dull image of ethical fashion, and I know not all ethical brands are the same, etc etc. However, when the  industry constantly paints ethical fashion as a positive means to an end, neglecting the issues surrounding ethical fashion, alternative viewpoints are needed.

I get a lot of people asking me for advice e.g. about ethical brands, how to be more ethical etc. Ultimately we want our goods to be made by workers who were treated fairly. Personally, I stick to secondhand- it’s cheaper for me and helps reduce waste in landfill. I do like ethical clothing, and knowing where my clothes/jewellery has come from, but if I do buy ethically I will from now on be seeing what that brand is doing to support garment workers and in calling out corporations, so if you’re an ethical brand prepare for a QnA sesh with ur girl.

One thing I would advise is to not simply boycott the high street- this comes from trade unionists and garment worker activists in Bangladesh. They want to produce garments and a source of income, they just don’t want to be tortured in the process (obviously). At the same time, we cannot deny that our excessive consumption is part of the problem, so if you need a new jacket- please just buy your jacket and not a jacket, 5 tops and 6 dresses because they were half price- really think about your purchases. Being a ‘shopoholic’ is a cute insta aesthetic but its seriously impacting the environment and feeding the system of worker exloitation.

Also acknowledge that a lot of people simply cannot afford to buy ethically, and should not be made to feel guilty for going to primark to buy jeans. 

One thing I also really want to highlight, as you would have probably guessed from the blog, is that our activism is not limited to our purchasing. We need to be vocal, we need to be out there demanding change from corporations, calling them out, exposing them etc. Something as little as a tweet, an email, and insta post can go a long way guys. I know its not in fashion to support such movements (pardon the pun) but we really have to keep pushing- we cannot afford to wait for another Rana Plaza for us to take action.

This might piss people off. I’m sorry. But understand that a few years ago I was the same as the very organisations and brands I’m talking about, and it took criticism like this to understand that I needed to rethink my activism if I were to truly create change. Plus, you feel pretty helpless after hearing of a factory fire every other week, another worker protest because factory owners didn’t pay their workers that month, stories of sexual abuse of young females from management, refugees being exploited, masses of workers fainting simultaneously, and NO ONE CARING. Not even the very people who by default should be sharing and raising concerns about these issues. It’s surreal.

We have groups and regular discussions on twitter that enable ethical brands to get together, support each other and discuss how we can promote ethical brands and use them etc. It’s nice how such elaborate forms of unity can be created surrounding ethical branding but little is done to address the very problems that has led to the reason these ethical brands exist, and how to put an end to worker exploitation. Again, we are steering towards ‘solutions’ that aren’t actually solutions, but are utilising capitalism and perpetuating the neoliberal stance that we need to individually create the change.

BUN THAT SHIT.

Things are going to start changing.

We are not only going to change the world with our individual practices, we are going to change the garment industry in a way that emphasises our solidarity and support for garment workers, creating a mass solidarity movement. We are going to call out corporates when we clock their messy moves and let them know as consumers we don’t f*ck with them unless they treat their workers with dignity. We are not going to buy our way to change, we are going to collectively DEMAND it.

 We have no choice but to.

(Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca/world/1126316-bangladeshi-garment-workers-protest-on-may-day)

#fashion #ethicalfashion #ethical fashion #ethical #ohsoethical #ootd #garment industry #garment workers #garmentworkers #garmentindustry #workers rights #workersrights #rana plaza #ranaplaza #bangladesh #capitalism #neoliberalism

[hegemonicpolitics-blog]

An Introductory Rant

Part 1

"All I know is that I am not a Marxist." So allegedly said Marx on the topic of a particular French self-proclaimed Marxist party. My own self-application of this idea has come at a mild sense of disappointment, but I think is fundamentally reasonable.

I've attempted to move by thought towards the neo-communism of writers like Alain Baidou and Slavoj Žižek. In understanding Marx I still wish to hold to the idea of the historical dialectic, at this current stage with its worker/capitalist antitheses, is only resolved in communism, that is, the complete abolition of wage labour and private property. However, the 'human nature' argument that I've desired so long to ignore has continued to resurface.

In a situation where the wealth of society is held in common, we understand from game theory and the 'tragedy of the commons' concept, that self-interest threatens a collective-interest when it comes to the commons. As soon as self-interest triumphs, all self-interest becomes necessary because the collective-interest is diminished in its returns.

The necessity then is to impose collective-interest, which fundamentally is what we do in democratic societies a lot of the time. While neoliberalism and the right has continually said that unbridled capitalism shall eventually, through the 'invisible hand' or 'trickle down economics', distribute wealth in a fair fashion, this is simply not the case, and we have observed the impacts of decreasing regulation and control on people and the environment.

Social democracy naturally mediates between pure liberalism and pure communism; we place regulation, restriction, taxation and the other thing upon society in order to reign in the worst excesses. Naturally this is not perfect; if democratic it exists in conflict with power interests, and thus cannot survive indefinitely unlike communism, and on the other hand it keeps intact capitalism as a system, only emulating or simulating a more egalitarian approach artificially. Wage labour relations and the relations of production still exist, they are simply softened.

However communism, in the forms we have witnesses develop in the world, has the same problems. Fundamentally capitalism still exists, simply in another form: state capitalism. The state exploits surplus value and converts workers' output into exchange-value, continuing the same alienation as under capitalism.

The key differences are two-fold: it removes the progressive tendencies of wealth distribution of capitalism (in creating new wealth through investment), thus rendering it considerably less prosperous, and it requires significant energies to enforce. In this way it is less efficient, less free and continues the same fundamental capitalist functions.

In order to de-commodify the labour of humans, it abolishes market mechanism and gives birth to economic planning. In this sense, it becomes even worse, because it replaces liberal democracy with bureaucracy.

It has its advantages. The exploited surplus value can be redistributed or put into building the commons for the collective-interest. But once again this relies on the new bureaucracy to hold as its class-interests the interests of the proletariat.

So this is my opposition to neocommunism. It is utopian in a sense, in that it fits in with an old fashioned Hegelian concept; that of the ideal, which is somehow achieved through the resolution of the dialectic. It is fundamentally unscientific, and also seems to rely too heavily on the Hegelian concept of the Geist.

Even in Marxism's anti-humanist materialism, there is fundamentally some sort of Geist at conflict with itself who discovers its alienated parts are in fact part of its whole. It is obfuscated by cries of 'materialism!' and 'science!', but the former doesn't resolve the inherent idealism in Marxism Hegelian roots, and the latter only works in the context of the 19th century German notion of 'science', which is thoroughly rejected by scientists today who adhere to genuine rigour and genuine physical phenomena.

Neo-communism understands the Soviet experience, but it shrinks back into its shell and proclaims the vaguest of all possible concepts of communism in order to justify its righteousness. It proclaims that we cannot allow ourselves to throw in the towel to capitalism and accept wage labour as necessary. But it provides absolutely nothing except a fetishisation of the word that indicates not political, economic and philosophic thoroughness, but the sad musings of ex-communists pining for the Soviet era with their own petty devolved Leninism.

Žižek is a sad old curmudgeon who can't quite accept being called a social democrat, and so gives into to old fashioned Leninism hidden behind a 21st century democratic mask. Communism is dead, wake up.

PS: Communism can survive, so long as it asserts itself as fundamentally utopian, rather than making claims to scientific truth.

Part 2

Hegemony is the perfect launchpad for those departing Marxism for social democracy, or, as Laclau and Mouffe refer to it, radical democracy. While the two terms are not the same, they are similar in philosophy if not in modern application. I would attach myself to the socialist strains of social democracy, not those deliberative and technocratic ones that have developed since the 1990s.

But why hegemony? For this we must return to Marx. Many aspects of Marx have been rejected by an array of thinkers. His economics requires serious refinement and tries to distill it down the fundamental scientific laws that do not necessarily materialise. Aspects of his critique are certainly useful; his explanation of the labour theory of value and how that gives way to surplus-value are innovative concepts that need to be integrated into any critique of capitalism. But the tendency for profits to fall, for wages to fall, and crises of overproduction have not surfaced to the degree that he believed they would.

His dialectics have been problematic as well, due to the issue of the collective-interest that is supposedly completed by the synthesis of the capitalist/workers antitheses. I discuss this in my rant on neo-communism in more detail.

But his conception of capitalism in the sense of the base-superstructural relationship, integral to the creation of sociology, is important. While the crude economic determinist explanation of this phenomena has been discounted, that of the Second International, we can nonetheless understand it as a great model for interpreting society.

We cannot, as will be demonstrated by putting even the slightest amount of thought to it, assert the 'primacy of the base'. The base-superstructural relationship is the totality of human experience; neither part spontaneously generates new conditions or relations, they solely feed into each other. Thus, the only distinction between the two is perhaps which exists first. There can be no primary role that is anything but a human distinction.

Alternatively a distinction can be made; the base is the only 'real' element, while the superstructure is fundamentally unreal. But this ten effectively becomes a reductionist philosophy, which undermines sexual, gender, racial and environmental struggles down to anti-capitalism. This we cannot do once again, as the economic determinism of old fashioned Marxism does not provide any ability to make scientific predictions, and is thus we cannot assert this reductionism as truth. If we could determine in which ways scientifically that capitalism enshrines the gendered, sexual, racial and environmental issues that we come up against, certainly those could be integrated, but understanding them as coming solely from the base is disingenuous and beyond what we can prove, and in the end undermines many aspects of these struggles.

But a nuanced, reciprocal base-superstructural relationship does help us understand one thing: hegemony.

To be continued...

#neocommunism #marxism #post-marxism #hegemony

[10oclockdot]

10 More Times I Spun the Ol' Wheels of Thought

1. Gaming is puppetry.

2a. Donald Trump was the biggest liar in the room (Politifact confirmed, we recall), so he called Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted" so that no one could call him Lyin' Trump. Donald Trump was the crookedest person in the room, so he called Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary" so that no one could call him Crooked Donnie. Has there always been this much projection in our politics? Has each side always impugned the other side with their own worst fault? Maybe all this time that Democrats have been telling white working-class Republican voters that they were voting against their interests, we were disavowing the fact that increasingly the Democratic party was also ignoring white working-class interests.

2b. Throughout the entire election cycle, popular wisdom held that Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican party signaled that the GOP was in ruinous disarray. This was the thing liberals got most wrong, because really, it was the Left that was in disarray. The Republican party successfully rebranded itself without losing very many of its constituents. Meanwhile, it was the Left that lost all its key elections. It was the Left that nominated a pro-war pro-Wall-Street neo-liberal. It was the Left that, over the course of a couple decades, completely abandoned its once-time blue-collar base. It was the Left that ended up alienating its rural voters by stereotyping them as backward, sexist, racist, homophobic gun nuts, rather than working collaboratively with them to get them on board with the intersectional causes of social justice. And it's the Left that doesn't really have a coherent agenda going forward to reclaim the voters it lost. After all, fighting poverty ought to be the central tentpole of any social justice agenda, and yet Democrats never seem to talk about white poverty. To be sure, rural America bears some of the responsibility to educate itself about structural prejudice and microaggressions and purge itself of xenophobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, and such, BUT I think it's reasonable to say that the Left must stand in solidarity with rural America before we can expect rural America to stand in solidarity with other Leftist causes.

3. I used to think that I could measure the rectitude of a given ideological framework by examining its limits or margins. I believed that if there were sexist Christians (and there are, to be sure), that invalidated the whole of Christianity. I believed that, at its heart, there were no good Christians, because churches bred or maintained or at least turned a blind eye toward patriarchy. But now I'm beginning to think that no ideology, no matter how radical, centrist, or conservative, is very good at policing its own margins. It appears that there are plenty of terrible people under the big tent of the left. There are plenty of people who call themselves feminists who are nevertheless racist or pro-capitalist or cultural appropriators or trans-exclusionary or anti-science or anti-logic or what-have-you. Not to mention that human beings are, en masse, liars, hypocrites, manipulative, self-serving, and prone to mental laziness. How, then, do we honestly judge a social movement? By what statistical method can we control for the ignoble outliers in every movement, so that we hold ourselves to the same fair standards to which we hold others?

4. In the age of the internet, we model the distribution of knowledge in terms of the network or the viral outbreak. Through these models and metaphors, we track trends on twitter, shares of videos, and reblogs of posts. We can map the spread of an idea. What would happen if we applied this kind of model retroactively to earlier times in history? Could we map the network of papal proclaimation spreading from Rome to local Catholic parishes? What was the rate at which scientific discoveries traveled from the Arab world back to Europe in the middle ages? What was the "bandwidth" of the silk road? Did the know-how of the bronze age or the iron age spread quickly or slowly? What carried this knowledge and why?

5. As the resources on the planet dwindle, the markets for stamp collecting, wine collecting, art collecting, antique collecting, et al continue to prosper, and the value of the rarest and most prized objects within these markets continues to increase. Why so? I argue that it's because as there's less land and gold and other natural resources for each wealthy person to own, the market must imbue other objects with value. Consider the raw material value of the paper, glue, and ink in an album of very valuable stamps. It's minimal. But what majestic alchemy that market forces in the modern and post-modern era have imbued such worthless scraps with such enormous social value! Never has it been possible to own so much social value in so little matter.

6. Don't tell me that El Chapo's cartel functions like a corporation unless you're also willing to say that corporations function like El Chapo's cartel. Capitalism functions the same whether the market is legal or illegal.

7a. I would be much more interested in moral philosophy if its sole aim were to determine WHY we make the intuitive moral judgments that we make, rather than to propose some code of moral behavior. I'm not interested in any moral philosopher who comes up with a set of reasons for pulling or not pulling the lever in the trolley problem. I'm interested in whoever could tell me WHY I'm more likely to pull the lever than to push the large man. What calculations is my brain doing? What's it weighing? Where did this moral architecture come from? What was its adaptive advantage? What ancient ancestral dilemmas gave it its strongest leanings? If our brains' snap moral judgments don't have much to do with utilitarian mathematics, what DO they rely on? Are our intuitions outmoded for our present way of life? If so, which ones? Do some which don't comport perfectly with cold logic nevertheless retain an adaptive advantage?

7b. Because if we could figure this out, we'd be able to understand our politics VASTLY better than we do now. Some time ago, I wrote a post on the justice or injustice of the way Henrietta Lacks and her descendants were treated (here). I came to the conclusion that ultimately our moral judgments all come back to one thing: poverty is wrong. Full stop. I don't think that anyone feels, deep down, that poverty is a good thing. People might think it's natural or to be expected or necessary or deserved or whatever, but no one, deep down, considers it good. BUT, poverty is everywhere. SO: if poverty is wrong, BUT it's everywhere, the brain has to do some complex gymnastics to account for that. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is usually the result of sin or some bad choice, and thus poverty is merited and deserved. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is the result of greed, and thus that greed must be combatted so that resources may be distributed more equitably. Perhaps the individual decides that poverty is structurally necessary for the economy to function (since it provides an incentive to work?), and therefore any attempt to eliminate it would be disastrous. Maybe we say they're lazy. Maybe we say that they live in a "backwards" culture that doesn't know any better. Maybe we tell ourselves it doesn't matter because they live far away. Maybe we point out that even if we gave all of our income away, poverty would continue, so we're powerless to stop it. Maybe we blame poverty on a desert (they should move!). Maybe we blame the number of kids they have (too many mouths to feed!). And so on. By giving poverty a cover story (a myth), we give it a reason for being. And thus we make poverty reason-able to ourselves.

7c. I suggest that because our inborn aversion to poverty so powerfully and diametrically conflicts with the realities of poverty, that we have built up a whole superstructure of religions, philosophers, storytellers, and pundits and grown them over millennia to justify poverty to us. We do not spend so much time rationalizing or explaining away poverty because we believe, deep down, that poverty is acceptable. We do it because deep down we know that we know that we know for certain that poverty is terrible, and thus our justifications for it must be powerful and constantly repeated. "Everybody's giving a reason why all these people are in poverty, therefore poverty seems reasonable, therefore I guess it isn't that big of a moral ill." (By the way, what other areas of the status quo have we constructed vast industries to rationalize? Rather than spend the same energy to change them?)

7d. Perhaps, deep down, all of our complex moral judgments boil down to very basic innate brain chemistry. Poverty = bad, death = bad, hurt = bad. Stuff like that. But now, thrust into the emergent complexity of the world around us, grappling with our vast knowledge of this world, of having regular and precise news of stuff happening at every point on the planet (historically amazing and pretty new for our species), we have to come up with a constant stream of justifications and rationalizations to keep the bad-alarms from going off in our brains constantly, all the time. And because these ideological prostheses of justification are so numerous and so elaborate, we think that THOSE are moral philosophy. But I think moral philosophy should concern itself instead with the question of why do we feel the NEED to come up with these incredibly complex systems of "that's ok, that's not ok, that's sometimes ok but only if...".

8. The harder we are to impress, the easier we are to oppress.

9. Dear Trump cabinet: It's becoming clear that he chose nearly all of you to function as his useful idiots. He selected you precisely for your lack of education, your dearth of relevant qualifications, and your almost-certain incompetence to fix complex 21st-century problems. He chose you because he wants to be able to think he's the smartest guy in the room. And the 1% always profits when the government is weak and inattentive to the needs of the 99%. Trump isn't your teammate. He forces you to embarrass yourself to prove your loyalty to him, but he has no loyalty to you. He's setting you up for failure and he's ready to blame you for everything. He probably laughs at you behind his back. He hopes you'll never realize what contempt he has for you. But there's hope. Because one day you'll figure it out. And when you do, America's best scientific and political minds will be waiting, secretly, in the wings, to help you take him down.

10. Dear Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Just because Nixon won the presidency doesn't mean you have to give Best Picture to Oliver!.

#10 new

[dist-the-rose]

Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this “free” proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufactures as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed. In England this legislation began under Henry VII. Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to “put themselves to labour.” What grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII. the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal. Edward VI.: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast and be set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labour. If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th. If they run away, they are to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck, 369 Chapter XXVIII arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him. 1 The last part of this statute provides, that certain poor people may be employed by a place or by persons, who are willing to give them food and drink and to find them work. This kind of parish slaves was kept up in England until far into the 19th century under the name of “roundsmen.” Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons. Similar statutes: 18 Elizabeth, c. 13, and another of 1597.2 James 1: Any one wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of the peace in petty sessions are authorised to have them publicly whipped and for the first offence to imprison them for 6 months, for the second for 2 years. Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often as the justices of the peace think fit... Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be branded with an R on the left shoulder and set to hard labour, and if they are caught begging again, to be executed without mercy. These statutes, legally binding until the beginning of the 18th century, were only repealed by 12 Anne, c. 23. Similar laws in France, where by the middle of the 17th century a kingdom of vagabonds (truands) was established in Paris. Even at the beginning of Louis XVI.’s reign (Ordinance of July 13th, 1777) every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, is to be sent to the galleys. Of the same nature are the statute of Charles V. for the Netherlands (October, 1537), the first edict of the States and Towns of Holland (March 10, 1614), the “Plakaat” of the United Provinces (June 26, 1649), &c. Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system. It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus value making, to lengthen the working day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation. The class of wage labourers, which arose in the latter half of the 14th century, formed then and in the following century only a very small part of the population, well protected in its position by the independent peasant proprietary in the country and the guild-organisation in the town. In country and town master and workmen stood close together socially. The subordination of labour to capital was only formal – i.e., the mode of production itself had as yet no specific capitalistic character. Variable capital preponderated greatly over constant. The demand for wage labour grew, therefore, rapidly with every accumulation of capital, whilst the supply of wage labour 370 Chapter XXVIII followed but slowly. A large part of the national product, changed later into a fund of capitalist accumulation, then still entered into the consumption-fund of the labourer. Legislation on wage labour (from the first, aimed at the exploitation of the labourer and, as it advanced, always equally hostile to him),3 is started in England by the Statute of Labourers, of Edward III., 1349. The ordinance of 1350 in France, issued in the name of King John, corresponds with it. English and French legislation run parallel and are identical in purport. So far as the labour-statutes aim at compulsory extension of the working day, I do not return to them, as this point was treated earlier (Chap. X., Section 5). The Statute of Labourers was passed at the urgent instance of the House of Commons. A Tory says naively: “Formerly the poor demanded such high wages as to threaten industry and wealth. Next, their wages are so low as to threaten industry and wealth equally and perhaps more, but in another way.”4 A tariff of wages was fixed by law for town and country, for piece work and day work. The agricultural labourers were to hire themselves out by the year, the town ones “in open market.” It was forbidden, under pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those fixed by the statute, but the taking of higher wages was more severely punished than the giving them. [So also in Sections 18 and 19 of the Statute of Apprentices of Elizabeth, ten days’ imprisonment is decreed for him that pays the higher wages, but twenty-one days for him that receives them.] A statute of 1360 increased the penalties and authorised the masters to extort labour at the legal rate of wages by corporal punishment. All combinations, contracts, oaths, &c., by which masons and carpenters reciprocally bound themselves, were declared null and void. Coalition of the labourers is treated as a heinous crime from the 14th century to 1825, the year of the repeal of the laws against Trades’ Unions. The spirit of the Statute of Labourers of 1349 and of its offshoots comes out clearly in the fact, that indeed a maximum of wages is dictated by the State, but on no account a minimum. In the 16th century, the condition of the labourers had, as we know, become much worse. The money wage rose, but not in proportion to the depreciation of money and the corresponding rise in the prices of commodities. Wages, therefore, in reality fell. Nevertheless, the laws for keeping them down remained in force, together with the ear-clipping and branding of those “whom no one was willing to take into service.” By the Statute of Apprentices 5 Elizabeth, c. 3, the justices of the peace were empowered to fix certain wages and to modify them according to the time of the year and the price of commodities. James I. extended these regulations of labour also to weavers, spinners, and all possible categories of workers.5 George II. extended the laws against coalitions of labourers to manufactures. In the manufacturing period par excellence, the capitalist mode of production had become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of wages as impracticable as it was unnecessary; but the ruling classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without the weapons of the old arsenal. Still, 8 George II. forbade a higher day’s wage than 2s. 7½d. for journeymen tailors in and around London, except in cases of general mourning; still, 13 George III., c. 68, gave the regulation of the wages of silk-weavers to the justices of the peace; still, in 1706, it required two judgments of the higher courts to decide, whether the mandates of justices of the peace as to wages held good also for non-agricultural labourers; still, in 1799, an act of Parliament ordered that the wages of the Scotch miners should continue to be regulated by a statute of Elizabeth and two Scotch acts of 1661 and 1671. How completely in the meantime circumstances had changed, is proved by an occurrence unheard-of before in the English Lower House. In that place, where for more than 400 years laws had been made for the maximum, beyond which wages absolutely must not rise, Whitbread in 1796 proposed a legal minimum wage for agricultural labourers. Pitt opposed this, but confessed that the “condition of the poor was cruel.” Finally, in 1813, the laws for the regulation of wages were repealed. They were an 371 Chapter XXVIII absurd anomaly, since the capitalist regulated his factory by his private legislation, and could by the poor-rates make up the wage of the agricultural labourer to the indispensable minimum. The provisions of the labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman, as to giving notice and the like, which only allow of a civil action against the contract-breaking master, but on the contrary permit a criminal action against the contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873) in full force. The barbarous laws against Trades’ Unions fell in 1825 before the threatening bearing of the proletariat. Despite this, they fell only in part. Certain beautiful fragments of the old statute vanished only in 1859. Finally, the act of Parliament of June 29, 1871, made a pretence of removing the last traces of this class of legislation by legal recognition of Trades’ Unions. But an act of Parliament of the same date (an act to amend the criminal law relating to violence, threats, and molestation), re-established, in point of fact, the former state of things in a new shape. By this Parliamentary escamotage the means which the labourers could use in a strike or lock-out were withdrawn from the laws common to all citizens, and placed under exceptional penal legislation, the interpretation of which fell to the masters themselves in their capacity as justices of the peace. Two years earlier, the same House of Commons and the same Mr. Gladstone in the well-known straightforward fashion brought in a bill for the abolition of all exceptional penal legislation against the working class. But this was never allowed to go beyond the second reading, and the matter was thus protracted until at last the “great Liberal party,” by an alliance with the Tories, found courage to turn against the very proletariat that had carried it into power. Not content with this treachery, the “great Liberal party” allowed the English judges, ever complaisant in the service of the ruling classes, to dig up again the earlier laws against “conspiracy,” and to apply them to coalitions of labourers. We see that only against its will and under the pressure of the masses did the English Parliament give up the laws against Strikes and Trades’ Unions, after it had itself, for 500 years, held, with shameless egoism, the position of a permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists against the labourers. During the very first storms of the revolution, the French bourgeoisie dared to take away from the workers the right of association but just acquired. By a decree of June 14, 1791, they declared all coalition of the workers as “an attempt against liberty and the declaration of the rights of man,” punishable by a fine of 500 livres, together with deprivation of the rights of an active citizen for one year.6 This law which, by means of State compulsion, confined the struggle between capital and labour within limits comfortable for capital, has outlived revolutions and changes of dynasties. Even the Reign of Terror left it untouched. It was but quite recently struck out of the Penal Code. Nothing is more characteristic than the pretext for this bourgeois coup d’état. “Granting,” says Chapelier, the reporter of the Select Committee on this law, “that wages ought to be a little higher than they are, ... that they ought to be high enough for him that receives them, to be free from that state of absolute dependence due to the want of the necessaries of life, and which is almost that of slavery,” yet the workers must not be allowed to come to any understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common and thereby lessen their “absolute dependence, which is almost that of slavery;” because, forsooth, in doing this they injure “the freedom of their cidevant masters, the present entrepreneurs,” and because a coalition against the despotism of the quondam masters of the corporations is – guess what! – is a restoration of the corporations abolished by the French constitution.7

[commentaryonhowwelive]

October 2017. Age 25. Journal Entry.

Tuesday, October 10th, 2017

“The fact that I'm having a hard time sitting down to write about what makes me happy is itself indicative of what makes me happy. I have this desire to extend my inner happiness into the physical world in an attempt to create an unchanging and unlimited source of happiness. This is impossible, but I incessantly try anyways.

As I make more money, try to stay into excellent shape, constantly move from place to place and change jobs, sleep with random girls, it's all an attempt to create a source of happiness from outside of myself.

I don't like the idea of finding happiness only from within, because the human brain simply doesn't work that way. If we’re living in miserable conditions, our bodies are hardwired to want to be in a different state. If we’re too cold or too hot, we strive to reach a temperature that is comfortable. Our biology simply doesn’t allow such fine tuned machines to work under too extreme of conditions. If we’re hungry, our stomachs will hurt and we will become irritable. As the phrase goes, “society is only three square meals away from anarchy”. This states that we are human animals whether we like it or not, and we must conform in some way to society in order to create livable conditions for ourselves. 

The capitalist society that we live in creates desire; which I find inherently dangerous. However, we as humans will always have a strong sense of desire for things that can advance our genes because it’s necessary for our survival. When our primate ancestors saw a fertile mate, or a companion with a piece of fruit in their hand, you can bet that they had a strong desire for what they saw, or else they didn’t survive. 

In our modern age, we still have a desire for what we see, that’s why capitalism is still works. Except we don’t beat our friends over the head for their apple, we just think about wanting it then probably go buy our own later. Even though we don’t act immediately on our desires as much any more, the desires remain as we are still human animals. We are imperfect beings, in realizing this, we have learned about our biology and instincts and have exploited them via capitalism through incessant consumerism and gearing our marketing toward our biological needs that sometimes we don’t even realize are there. Commercials play our emotions, we use bright colored signs, we give free samples in stores to stimulate our appetite to make us want to buy more food.

So instead of turning away completely from capitalism and shaking your fist at the CEO’s of the world, I say we embrace it with a healthy dose of skepticism. Emphasis on the term healthy. Allowing ourselves to feel our feelings and act on our needs and desires is not only healthy, it's necessary. Our goal should be to find a way to release our urges and act as our bodies want to act while at the same time, living in line with capitalism to the point that we have financial freedom.

People aren’t evil, excessive capitalism is evil.

Capitalism facilitates hyperbolized human tendencies which quickly turn into what we consider the 7 Deadly Sins. When you have the opportunity to make $500,000 a year, it’s really hard to say no to that, even if you’re cognizant that the wage could feed 15 less fortunate families but you’re going to use it to go on exotic vacations. Greed happens not because humans are evil, but because capitalism allows it.

Those less fortunate families would more likely than not fall victim to the same faults and hoard money if given the opportunity.

Again, capitalism as a system isn’t inherently evil. It is an imperfect means of societal progression which leads to the exploitation the primal urges of us imperfect humans.

Once we get to the point that we can make enough money to live the life we want to live within capitalism (since cash is king and a near sure fire way to create the objective life we want), we can then attempt to feel true freedom and feel the feelings we have, acting as true and authentic beings. As Maslow’s hierarchy of needs dictates, we must take care of our basic needs that we as humans need, then our goals above that are subjective, i.e. self actualization and who we want to associate with.

You need food water shelter to make yourself happy. This is because you’re a biological organism, therein requiring certain objective fuel sources. But once this has been settled, we can achieve happiness in any way our cerebral cortices deem fit. You need a certain level of happiness within before externalities can make you happy. You need an edifice to build on top of. If you’re starving in a giant beautiful house, you can’t appreciate the house. If you have a million dollars but you’re homeless, that money is good for nothing. If you didn’t sleep last night, it doesn’t matter how many people are around you that you love; all you want to do is sleep. Thus, we must care for our human needs and urges before we can approach the next level of validation. The top level of validation is human actualization.

Everyone is somewhere along the capitalism acceptance scale. Some are fully within the throes of a capitalist lifestyle of earning and spending, creating unneeded waste in order to fulfill their shallow desires. Others do only what they need to do to care for themselves, then they choose to ignore the chasing of money for the rest of their available time for it does not appeal to them; they have different metrics for satisfaction. Say John makes $100,000 a year but really only needs $30,000 to live the lifestyle that makes him happy, so he does so. However, Don also makes $100,000 but digs himself into crippling debt by living a life of opulence outside of his means. They make the same amount of money, yet John is likely to be much happier because he lives within his means. His lifestyle doesn’t require the spending of more money than he has, putting himself in debt to others, yet he’s happier.

I can see the hierarchy at play in the moment to moment in myself as I can allow my mind to wonder pleasantly insofar as I'm with others, waiting for something, or getting something done. I'd much rather sit in a coffee shop and allow my mind to wander and write if I'm with someone I know, satisfying the social need immediately before allowing myself to self actualize. Writing for me is an act that leads to self actualization, yet I have a fear of writing if writing is all I’m doing. I feel like I’m missing something, like I should be doing something else, like I don’t deserve to be sitting here and just writing. I know that I deserve the capability to write whenever and however much I want, yet my fear of being alone outweighs my desire to write. Thus, I tend to write only when something else is happening that validates myself in the present.

If I am teaching a class and I have 20 minutes of down time, I feel comfortable writing.

If I’m waiting for a friend to show up somewhere, I feel comfortable writing.

If I’m on a plane and have no where to go, I feel comfortable writing.

If I’m sitting in the living room with my significant other, her working, I feel comfortable writing.

It’s a belief that writing should be on the back burner, something to fill time, no matter how meaningful it may be or how much it leads to satisfaction when I have a finished a piece. 

I thrive on chaos. Insofar as the chaos isn’t stress inducing, so I guess I could say that I thrive on having a lot of things going on all at once, because the more going on, the less I’m thinking about myself and more about the world around me.

When I’m by myself, I start over thinking. A thought goes into a spider web of this then this and maybe that, but also that and if this and this makes that then it also creates this and that and maybe these too! Thoughts don’t stop when alone, but quickly and consistently reacting to a chaotic environment is the antidote. Having to respond to my environment puts the thoughts on the back burner. I’m not worried about whether I could be doing better, whether that guy is making more money than me, whether I could be doing something better with my life. I think this applies to an extreme many of facets of life, in that the less you think about things, the happier you are. Ignorance in bliss, and if I’m busy with something all day and allocating all of my mental resources towards that, I don’t have time to worry. A busy person is usually a happy person.

Occupying your mind with anything that isn't negative is ideal. It's better to piss away your time with simple happiness than to have worry over take you. I’m better off delivering pizzas, a seemingly simple task, rather than worrying about myself.

General sadness isn't necessarily what we’re trying to avoid. Because when we think of being sad, at least I tend to have a grossly oversimplified idea of what it is, without really objectifying it. What we’re trying to actually avoid is bad decisions, which are predated typically by worry, fear, anxiety, or melancholy. When we’re in fear, anxious, or upset, we make poor decisions. We regress, or overeat, or drink too much, or don’t aim for anything positive. Thus, having simple yet positive tasks to occupy our time is better than engaging in negative activities like watching TV, over eating, playing video games, or doing drugs.

Looking back at our ancestors; their primitive lifestyle and what they needed to do to survive, it makes sense to somewhat mimic that in our own lives. Create our own quests and whatnot. They didn’t have time to be worried or anxious about the unknown, because they were preoccupied with the task at hand, which in essence was always working towards something. 

In addition to the actions that we take, we must always take into consideration the inaction that is just as important. This is manifested in the act of selective ignorance. We can experience a lack of motivation due to the sheer amount of pain in the world, or all of the things that we know we’ll never be able to overcome or accomplish or change. We must ignore it, selectively of course, so as to not pass that threshold of ignorance to a fault. I could spend all day ruminating on the lack of food in 3rd world countries, or the evil disproportion of wealth in capitalist countries, or that fact that I’m crummy at understanding computer code, but what’s the point? How will that assist the human? It won’t, unless it is acted upon in a positive way to solve the problem.

I once read about a man who made a lot of money at a very young age. It was a combination of luck and skill. I was jealous of him. What did he have that I didn’t? Why him? Why me? Then I found out he died. That's all of our ends. I immediately felt more fortunate than him, because I live in this moment. I have what he doesn’t. It’s a manifestation of my primal urges to have what others don’t, to be the leader, to be the alpha. I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do.

Anger is often manifested as putting too much emotional stock in others. Any time I’m angry, I can almost always relate it to someone else’s actions, or the fact that I’m upset that I’m not as good as someone else. Thus I’m putting to much emotional stock in others.

That’s all for now.