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your-krazy-uncle-bob · 2 years

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Marie Antoinette, the beheaded wife of the beheaded French Bourbon King Charles Louis XVI, did not really say “Let them cake.”

But in the short time that the French Revolution became utterly unhinged, toxic, and nihilistic, she became nonetheless iconic as an out-of-touch elite who had lived in a make-believe world at Versailles, without a clue (or care?) about the ordeal of the masses.

Rather than worry about the drudgery of the French peasant, Marie dressed up as one. And she roamed about in her idyllic faux peasant “farm” at the Hameau de la Reine, near the palace at Versailles.

Apparently, during these brief rustic interludes, Marie felt that the more she might act out a sort of aristocratic peasant life, the more she could find simplicity and escape the drama of court life, but without the real-life, crushing poverty of the poor.

The modern left-wing elite are becoming our version of Antoinettes. Thirty-eight-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is worth over $60 billion. But he enjoys T-shirts, jeans, and apparent simplicity in his many landed estates. He is so worried about the wrong voting tendencies of the clueless middle classes that he poured nearly $420 million of dark money from his vast fortune into the 2020 election—de facto absorbing the work of key precinct registrars—to ensure the “right” result for the unthinking multitudes.

Americans, almost uniquely among modern nations, mostly do not envy, much less despise the rich. But there is a certain sort of privilege that they do not like: the sanctimonious and hypercritical rich whose rhetoric is at odds with their own lifestyles and the methods by which they inherited or made vast sums. And they especially are turned off by those who exude open disdain for the clinger/deplorable/dregs class—to paraphrase the Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden nomenclature.

An especially grating habit of the left-wing wealthy is to lecture the middle class on their supposed illiberality. Often, those struggling are told they need to pay more for what White House economic advisor Brian Deese recently called the “liberal world order.”

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, to take a few examples, are multibillionaires who live lives unlike any in the history of civilization. They also fund various agendas through multibillion-dollar foundations and their own personal riches.

Their causes are all deemed critical to the nation and planet, but unfortunately not fully appreciated as so vital by the peasant classes—whether they be global governance, massive restructuring of the economy to stop carbon releases, radical abortion on demand, or the sponsoring of critical legal theory prosecutors who feel crime is but a rich man’s construct.

Indeed, when various pollsters recently asked the public what their chief worries were, they found the culprits were the prohibitive price of gasoline, the ruinous effects of hyperinflation, supply chain shortages, the nonexistent southern border, or the escalating violent crime wave—all of which concerns are of apparent little interest to left-wing billionaires.

In other words, the worries of the Antoinette liberal elite—climate change, abortion on demand, transgenderism, strict gun-control—are not those that terrify the middle and lower classes. The latter, for some reason, first want to survive one more day with enough affordable food and energy and to be safe from criminals.

Why Democrats are currently unpopular transcends even Joe Biden’s daily, dangerous, and tragic loss of cognition. Their low ratings arise more from the implementation of an array of disastrous policies dreamed up at left-wing university departments and think tanks.

As a result, voters have concluded that the Left “just doesn’t care.”

By that, they conclude that the drivers of modern hard progressivism—the billionaire donor class, the highly compensated professional bicoastal elites, the ideologues who have captured and transformed the old Democratic Party—ignore criticism of their policies. Or they claim that their disasters are unappreciated benefits, or mere PR problems, or shift blame to the Russians, the Emmanuel-Goldstein Trump, the toadish media, or the victims of their disastrous policies.

The border is overrun by illegal aliens. Lethal drugs, cartels, gangs, and child traffickers enter at will without consequences. American towns and cities are being swamped by hundreds of thousands of unlawful border crossers. In response to public outcries, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas either ignores the anguished or falsely claims that the border is “secure.” Translated that means Americans either are racists or should get over the fossilized idea of a border itself.

Gasoline is at all-time highs. Joe Biden tells the public “Putin did it”—although prices soared well before the Ukraine War. Translated, that means the spiral to nearly $5 a gallon in California by February 2022—before Putin invaded Ukraine—was “cheap” compared to the current $6.70 a gallon.

When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was asked whether she might take measures to ease the fuel burden on American commuters, she laughed and thought it “hilarious” that she either could or would consider such action. U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) scoffed that clueless gas-guzzling motorists should buy a Tesla (base price for a low-end Model 3: $46,990) like she drives and so skip the greedy service stations.

Biden will not reconsider pipelines, new federal leases, or his green demonization of fracking. But he will drain the strategic petroleum reserve on four apparent Orwellian principles:

Oil pumped into an underground vault and then pumped back out does not exude the stigma of pristine oil pumped first out of the ground.

Motorists would be encouraged by cheaper prices to drive more and thus consume more of the dirty fuel that Biden wishes to restrict.

The oil pumped out of the reserve to cushion Americans in times of national emergencies can be sent into the global market and thus end up in the hands of our de facto enemies, the communist Chinese.

Biden looks to the reserve, the Russians, the Saudis, the Venezuelans, and the Iranians to pump more of the awful fuel that America has in abundance, needs desperately—and should not dare extract.

Commercial air travel is in near shambles. Shortages of everything from baby formula to tampons are making America seem akin to the old Soviet Union. For Biden’s cabinet, this disaster is called “transitioning” to a better green future.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg presumably oversees our nearly ruined commercial air travel system, ports where cargo ships are backed up to the horizon, and gas and diesel prices that are impoverishing the middle classes. In response, when he is not on paternity leave, Buttigieg brags that he rides a bike, and lectures Americans on the racist origins of their once modern but now ossified freeway system.

Why does the party of caring and good ole Joe Biden from Scranton seem so indifferent? Why is the Left so callous to the consequences of Biden’s self-created high inflationary, unaffordable gas-and-food presidency and what it has done to the middle class?

The answer is not just that the Democratic leadership or the progressive elite are smugly “rich.” Rather, the problem is that they are “Antoinette rich.”

That is, they have lost any empathy for those who endure firsthand the consequences of the elites’ ideological rigidity. So, this is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman or even of Bill Clinton.

Hunter Biden, without any apparent income, is renting a $20,000 a month Malibu mansion, necessitating that the Secret Service rent a nearby $30,000 a month mansion to watch over this 50-something trainwreck of an adult. The elite know that Hunter’s prior income came from quid pro quo shakedowns of foreign governments, that he failed to pay taxes in a manner that would earn any other American a jail sentence, and that he is exempt from investigation.

Americans are not supposed to even mention the truth: the president’s son was enriched, deeply leveraged by the Chinese, and so, too, by association was the president himself. And such “collusion” may explain the Biden Administration’s inexplicable tolerance for Chinese aggression.

Multimillionaire Governor Gavin Newsom lectured Californians on why they must wear masks and avoid social gatherings even as he declined to do so while enjoying a birthday party at the pricey French Laundry restaurant in Napa. He was captured on camera, maskless again, and in the company of the celebrity Magic Johnson while the state mask mandate remained in place.

Now Newsom preens that California won’t pay for its state employees to travel to supposedly backward, homophobic Montana for business trips. But Newsom has no problem dragging his costly state security detail to his in-laws’ tony Montana ranch.

From time to time, Michelle and Barack Obama pontificate to Americans about their racist, sexist, and homophobic pathologies—but always from their Washington, D.C. Kalorama digs or their Martha’s Vineyard chateau, or now from their new, third mansion on Oahu.

How strange that the more millions of dollars the Obamas earn, the more castles they acquire, so all the louder they hector the struggling middle classes. Most apparently illiberal Americans can hardly afford to fill their 250-gallon propane tank; the Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate tanks require 2,500-gallons of dreadful carbon polluting fuel.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi castigates the illiberality of the deplorable classes. During the lockdowns that she championed, however, she got caught maskless violating quarantines—to get her hair done.

Pelosi also released a clueless Antoinette video of herself boasting about her just delivered $13 a pint ice-cream, stocked up in her twin $23,000 sub-zero refrigerators in her Napa estate. Her multimillionaire husband, Paul, recently wrecked his new Porsche (a carbon guzzler) while driving under the influence.

Americans are reaching the point where they either cannot afford vacations at all or are terrified of flying only to be left stranded in the now inert airport archipelago. No matter. The woke Pelosis this week are guests of superstar Andrea Bocelli at his Tuscan beach estate.

No one begrudges the elite Left their riches or their frolics. But they do resent the talk-down and accusatory sermons that come with them and the hypocrisy that fuels them.

This list of Democratic “men and women of the people” who are detached from the people could be endlessly expanded but the size of it explains why they seem tone deaf to the struggles of others they never wish to see or hear. Their exalted status reflects the new globalized wealth of the United States that is found most often in high-tech, media, entertainment, professional sports, finance, investment, law, universities, and insurance—and is mostly left-wing.

The new zillions are quite unlike the old, fossilized money in timber, mining, agriculture, oil, construction, and manufacturing that was grounded in grubbier realities and without the high-altitude sermonizing. Whether one calculates elite blue money by ZIP code, congressional district, or counties, the result is the same: the Democratic Party is run by billionaires and is the sanctimonious party of highly compensated bicoastal professionals.

Both have agendas that transcend the middle class and reflect the reality that they care little for those who cannot match their wealth and tastes. The “crazies” and “clingers” lack the elite’s supposed empathy, superior talent, and wisdom. More bothersome, our left-wing elite has the means to ensure that it is never subject to the disasters that naturally follow from its own ideological bankruptcy.

In other words, the left-wing has a problem. These humanitarian rich feel just terrible about the sins of America, but not terrible enough to sacrifice any element of their privileged lifestyles—the just deserts they feel for being so righteous. To square that circle, of indulgence for their rich selves, and sacrifice for poorer others, they hector and preach—and thereby find medieval penance and indulgence that excuses their own spectacular levels of illiberal consumption.

To the bread-poor masses, the irredeemables, the chumps, and the “right-wing Latinas” they don’t quite say: “Let them eat cake.”

Instead, as they jet about on private planes, free of their own bothersome quarantines, edicts, and masks, while acquiring additional, carbon-gulping, seashore estates, they let their guard down with cries of, “Let them drive Teslas,” “Wear a mask!” and “Transition to a greener future!”

#mid-term elections #Joe Biden #democrats #culture #politics

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duhragonball · 4 years

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shadowjack12345 replied to your photo “Got a commission this week by the awesome FrauleinPflaume, and it...”

Nice to finally see Zatte, I always liked her - she's dangerous in a way we don't often get in DB.

Hey, thanks, that means a lot to me. Also, this is all the prompting I need to try to explain how I came up with the character. Spoilers under the cut.

The thing that held me up early on was that I couldn’t decide if Luffa’s “career” in the past should be long or short. I used the Bardock: Father of Goku TV special as a model of a “short” Luffa arc. You have this character who’s only mentioned in passing (by Raditz), and the TV special fleshes him out and kills him off in the space of an hour. Then he wakes up in the past in the 2011 “Episode of Bardock” Special, if you want to count that. On some level, I imagined it could be possible to give Luffa a really quick run in her native era, and then send her to the future to join the TIme Patrol, like the Bardock specials.

I worked on Chapter 126 and 127 today, so I think it’s clear that I did not go down that route. I knew the alternative would be to really flesh out the character, having her go through multiple adventures like Goku in Dragon Ball. That meant I had to come up with extra stuff for her to do. The simple fact is that I really enjoyed writing the character, and I wanted to take the long road, so that later on, when she refers to her past exploits, there would be some weight to them.

So I worked on coming up with stuff for her to do in between major plot points. I thought about giving her some love interests, since we’d never seen a Saiyan character jump from one relationship to another, like Spider-Man in the 70′s. At some point, I thought it might be interesting to have her run into an old flame, someone who knew her before she went Super.

The problem with that was that when we first meet Luffa, she’s only 19 years old, and she’s been married to Kandai for about a year. And she’s been living on the Dorlun colony for about five years. I say this like someone else foisted this problem on me, but I’m the one who came up with all that stuff, to better amplifly the tragedy she experiences before turning Super Saiyan. This isn’t some seasoned veteran who’s been all over the universe, loving and leaving ‘em from one planet to the next. She’s young and inexperienced and isolated in a very small community.

But I still liked the idea, and I hadn’t published Chapters 1-10 yet, so I still had a lot of room to set things up for later. I realized the only way this would work would be if the “old flame” was a Dorlun who had admired Luffa from afar. And that led me to Captain Mesas, the leader of the Dorlun militia.

Mesas originally served only one purpose, which was to be a sort of proxy who could represent the entire Dorlun colony that Luffa had been hired to defend. I assigned her gender at random, I think. I just know that I didn’t put a ton of thought into it, since I was planning to kill all of the Dorluns off later anyway. Luffa would take this personally, because she came to appreciate these people without really admitting it, and this would be demonstrated by her respect for Mesas, who was their lead warrior, and thus the most Saiyan-like of the bunch. Eventually, I renamed her Captain Zatte, because I had settled on naming all the Dorlun characters after anagrams of metric prefixes, i.e. “zetta”.

So I quickly came to the conclusion that the only way this “reunited with an old flame” idea would work would be if it was a Dorlun, and the only one that would make any sense would have to be Zatte, and the only way that could work would be if there was some sort of romantic tension between them. They couldn’t be lovers in those early chapters because Luffa was married at the time, but later, there would need to be a moment where Zatte would confess her feelings and Luffa would have to feel the same way.

And this is how I ended up making Luffa bisexual. I didn’t want Zatte to be a man, and I couldn’t make Luffa gay, because I needed her to start out in a marriage to a Saiyan man. Too much of the plot depended upon that. I struggled with this decision for a couple of reasons.

First, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, and I didn’t know if I wanted this story to be my first try, because I was already trying to do a lot of other new tricks. I didn’t want real-world wlw’s to see this story and be disappointed by my amateurish attempt to get it right.

Second, I felt disingenuous about making such a major change to the character for my own convenience. I felt like I’d seen that a lot in comic books over the years, where writers would seemingly assign bisexuality to characters arbitrarily, or for “shock” value, or just to be salacious. I didn’t want readers to think I was only doing this for shallow reasons, or to get my jollies writing two girls making out.

But at the same time, I really wanted to do it this way, and I finally decided to just go with it and see where it took me. In hindsight, I realize that I was just being a fraidy cat about the whole thing. Writing wlw romance isn’t so functionally different from mlw romance, and once I got used to the idea, I realized the only thing I needed to do was to treat it with the proper respect. And really, this wasn’t so far off from the original premise. I wanted to make the “Legendary Super Saiyan” a woman to defy convention and to piss off dudebros. Making her queer just continues that same line of reasoning, right? I used to see jackasses on the internet say that women couldn’t turn Super Saiyan because they couldn’t “get angry enough,” which is pretty similar to a lot of biphobic crap I’ve heard on the internet. I mean, I used to listen to Loveline on the radio around 2001, and Dr. Drew was acting like bisexuality was some made-up thing. Apparently Dr. Drew went nuts somewhere along the way, or maybe he always was, but he seemed pretty progressive in 2001, and he accepted gay and lesbian callers just fine, but he told bi callers to “figure out what they want”, and that never sat right with me. People used to say there were no such things as black swans, too. That’s Luffa all over. You can deny her all you want, but she’ll still kick your ass.

I’m this close to going off on a rant about J.K. Rowling, so let me try to force myself to talk about Zatte here. The problem I ran into almost immediately was that I wrote what I had originally planned for her, and I was very pleased with how it turned out. And then I had to move on to the next arc, and yet, she was still there, and I knew I’d have to do something with her. I feel like I’ve been winging it ever since, but my main priority was to set her apart from Keda, the other Dorlun character I kept around. So I ran with the idea that Zatte is more “Saiyan-like” than the rest of her species, and maybe that makes her a little radical at times, maybe not in a way we humans might notice, but a way that other Dorluns would find unsettling. Dorluns are survivalists, and for them “risk” is a four-letter word, but Zatte’s a thrillseeker at heart. She wants to survive in spite of the dangers rather than back away from them. Keda would find somewhere to hide for several months until it’s safe to come out, but Zatte would try to go all Die Hard on a situation. Keda sticks close to Luffa because Luffa is the strongest person in the universe, so by Luffa’s side is arguably the safest place to be. Zatte sticks close to Luffa because she’s a furry being by Luffa’s side is arguably the most dangerous place to be. If she can survive there, she can survive anywhere.

There’s also the whole fanaticism angle. At some point, I came up with the idea that Zatte sees Luffa’s Super Saiyan emergence as a watershed moment in history. I sort of threw that together, mostly to make Luffa uncomfortable and to add some tension to their relationship, but it also distinguishes Zatte from characters like Chi-Chi or Bulma, who see Super Saiyan as a lot of flashy nonsense, signifying nothing. “Punk rocker? Don’t you understand? Your son is a miracle!”

That angle is kind of hard for me to work with, because I also tried to make Zatte very grounded at the same time. I guess it’s like if you had Jerusalem Syndrome but you were very self-aware the entire time. You make a toga out of your hotel linens and just constantly saying “Man, I’m just being really nutty right now, but oh well.”

A lot of her tactics are sort of rooted in stuff I thought made sense with the weaker characters in Dragon Ball. I don’t really know how strong Zatte would be. I envisioned her as being like a “mere mortal”, like Lois Lane, but in Dragon World even guys like Mr. Satan are insanely tough. I’m pretty sure Bulma could kick Brock Lesnar’s ass if she visited our own world. He’d F5 her and she’d just get up and slap him in the face and he’d collapse. I feel like if Zatte entered the 23rd Budokai, she could sweep the entire thing. That’s not what I set out to do, and it sounds really arrogant because I’d be putting her over Goku and Piccolo, but come on, that’s low-tier by DBZ standards. If she couldn’t dominate the 23rd Budokai, then definitely the 22nd, which also sounds unthinkable, but that’s how this crazy show works. Yajirobe could have won the 22nd Budokai if he’d only thought to enter it.

My point is that “weaker” characters can do a lot from the sidelines if they know their limits and pick their spots, like Tien using the Kikoho on Cell and Super Buu, or Yajirobe cutting off Vegeta’s tail, and so forth. Most of those guys hate resorting to that sort of thing, because they prefer to stand and fight in the open, but Zatte specializes in sneaky hit-and-run attacks. She should be able to shoot ki blasts, but she sticks to firearms instead, because they’re more precise and ki senses can’t pick them up. She likes being underestimated, to the point where her ideal battle is one where the enemy doesn’t even know she’s on the field.

I dunno, I’ve always wondered if I was getting her “right” all this time, but now that I summarize it all in one place, it doesn’t seem as disjointed as I feared. I had all these different things I needed her to be and do, and most of them involved finding ways to justify her continued presence in the story, but maybe it’s all worked out after all. Sometimes I feel like Zatte is the Yoko Ono of this fic, but the Beatles suck, so I shouldn’t indulge in their crude analogies. I Zatted my way into this mess, and I’m happy to Zatte my way out.

#shadowjack12345 #luffastuff #zatte #i'm just so glad the visual worked out #i tried to make her look like this alien babe #but i was never sure how it would look if a real person looked like her #but the 'gwen from camp camp' socks and shorts really suit her well #i'm gonna have to write that in to the fic

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lookingfornoonat2pm · 5 years

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On the Zizek-Peterson Debate

The simplest way to explain the Zizek-Peterson debate that I can think of is that their ideas are not mutually unthinkable on any level, yet it is clear that the two men would never come to pose as the other. In some ways, this is characteristic of our moment of aesthetic radical centrism. What is agreed upon is the sanctity of continuing with the basic traditions of modernity, in spite of the looming specters of climatic apocalypse, nuclear war, holocaust, and political re-feudalization. Zizek, the pessimist, assents to continuation of what he undoubtedly considers our folly, that is, modern life, as we have not yet been stimulated by enough horror to change. Peterson, the man who tries to connect his suburban fatherhood to De-Lillo-esque mythical, cosmic forces, believes the primary task of modern life is to live it. Neither of these men communicated a moral mandate that transforms our humanity, or our understanding of the relationship between politics and the biosphere. What distinguishes one from the other is primarily style: lifestyle. Certainly not intellectual or literary style--Zizek dwarfs Peterson as a speaker, a philosopher, a theorist. But if you walked away from that debate thinking that that was what "winning" means, and are therefore overly enthusiastic for Zizek, you haven't learned the same lesson the Democratic Party still hasn't learned since 2016: being smart isn't especially politically important.

Rather, their clothing probably marked the greatest difference in their lifestyles. Zizek prides himself on his time spent contemplating shit, and made sure to include it in his rhetoric. For this delivery he chose a zip-neck long-sleeve blah of a sweater with slacks and loafers, over his usual tee-shirt and jeans. Peterson appeared in a three-piece suit, bars above his usual average white male professor look. While it is easy to dismiss style as utterly irrelevant to the philosophical content pertinent to the reason for the debate itself, it reflects what kind of event each man believed he was headlining. Certainly both dressed "up" from their typical attire. Peterson appeared to be a salesman, an honored deliverer of a message. One could just as easily imagine him at church or at a tech conference about the future of clinical practice and its relationship to automation. Zizek, on the other hand, made sure at a certain point, to address the audience and attempt to discipline their applause away from sporting. "Please don't do this! Because I really think that, and please, Jordan, I hope that you agree, that why we are here engaged in this debate. Don't take it as a cheap competition. It may be that--[laughter]--but we are, as you said in your introduction, desperately trying to confront serious problems." Peterson showed his real commitment to the protestant work ethic by (apparently) trying to type up a response on stage while his opponnent spoke. The way that Zizek prepares himself personally to confront those problems is to dwell upon morose topics.

Dwelling is not an idle word here, as he, as much as Peterson, has many public photos of himself in his bedroom, in his sweatpants. Bedrooms indeed compose a crucial artifact of theorization for both of them. They simultaneously represent two dramatically different faces of the resurgent interest in psychoanalysis, and the entire philosophy of sex, sexuality, perversion, and inversion that hangs on to psychoanalysis as techniques of explication. Furthermore, one of the most memorable moments from the debate came on the subject of tidying one's space. Peterson reiterated his famous point that one should have one's things in order before attempting to criticize others, or remake society. Zizek responded that we very often find that the reason our homes are not in order is that our society is not in order.

As a social worker, this is fundamental to the way I think about psychological and social problems. When working with someone to reflect on the improvement of their life, everywhere you encounter the pernicious effects of an oppressive society. Yet as a soon-to-be clinician, it is absolutely imperative that I care for myself and my own well-being in order to do any of that reflection effectively, and in a way that can create a meaningful relationship between myself and my client. When this tension emerged in the debate last night, both agreed to some vague delineation along the lines of "One improves one's society as one improves oneself." I find this unsatisfying: it does not resolve the primary philosophical difference between the two, which is between Zizek's illiberal democracy and Peterson's "family-friendly" authoritarianism. Agreement certainly feels nice, though.

Make no mistake, the aesthetic dimension is here entirely constitutive of the debate between the two men. Even if Zizek is right, and it is indeed a convening of illiberal minds to create a future beyond the failures of neo-liberal hyperindividualism and neo-conservative chauvinism, then the expressive mode of that convention is rather like a World's Fair: a just-for-fun festival in which attention and investment are given by the audience in exchange for a comforting image of the future. Like in a world's fair, the competition here is in our economy of attention. If one wanted, one could dig deep into the citations--Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Foucault, a slew of clinical literature on the topic of resilience. But the only reason to do this is, again, to try to win politics through correctness, rather than through the processes of empathetic communication, negotiation, and solidarity. Peterson's fumbling through a shallow reading of he Communist Manifesto, and a fairly uninteresting history of the USSR and its catastrophes reflects one important thing he understood about the debate: the point was to demonstrate a sincere emotive connection to collective humanity. We are in a time of desperation and loneliness. Aesthesis matters because attachment matters--no one is going to think through the problems we are facing unless they have somewhere safe and warm to dwell, and people with whom to do it.

I do not mean to say that Zizek did not communicate such a sentiment, because again, these two men share much more than one would hope for in such a famed debate. Instead, I mean to caution anyone reading this from taking it as any kind of epic, mythical, world historical, or any other sort of watershed moment. This was two men who are psychoanalysts discussing a series of psychoanalytic questions related to a certain image of how human power systems work. Zizek reflects no small number of men I know whose approach to politics is a kind of internalization of horror, and a reflexive forbidding of having too much fun while the world burns. Peterson meanwhile appeared in a costume that reflected the huckstering that surrounds the entire occasion. Indeed he began his introductory speech by remarking that tickets to the auditorium were being scalped for enormous costs. I attend here to their clothing, and to the aesthetic dimensions of the debate mainly as a way to say that philosophy, especially political philosophy, is not something that can be won. As the libertarians say, this is simply voting with your feet, buying this recycled product or this other organic one because of something you saw at the World's Fair, or on Amazon. It's all well and good for you to do that. The real efficacy of this kind of public performance is to help agglomerate groups that can safely discuss futures, produce ideas, and so on. Zizek was the only of the two to mention the real political problem of our moment--that is to say, the problem of and by the composition of the political realm itself, the existence of rights or personhood instead of barbarism, and the crass rule of sovereign brutality--the displacement of whole regions of humanity into social precarity through borders, camps, and walls. For them, there is no room from which to philosophize.

#lookingfornoonat2pm #slavoj žižek

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chasholidays · 5 years

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I'm so glad you're doing these again and most importantly found a system to do it so you won't get burned out again! Thanks for doing it and you're awesome as always! So my prompt for bellarke is a history au. Regency or something like that. They get caught in a compromising situation (but nothing was actually going on) and have to marry each as to save clarke's reputation.

“I blame myself,” says Lady Abigail, which isn’t the most encouraging start to this encounter.

“I blame you too,” Clarke snaps, which doesn’t help.

Bellamy is keeping his mouth shut, at least for now. Everyone else is already dedicated to making this worse, he doesn’t need to contribute to that. His job right now is to make Clarke’s life easier however he can.

“You could just believe me that nothing happened,” she adds, softer. It’s no more helpful than anything else, but Bellamy does agree with her.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe, Clarke, it matters–”

“It matters to me. If something was going on with me and Bellamy, I’d tell you. But it’s not.”

Bellamy doesn’t wince, although it takes some effort. It’s the truth, of course; the two of them are friends, good friends. Close enough friends that there are already rumors about them, that Clarke has already been told to be careful about interacting with him, that he’s been told to leave her alone.

If he had, they wouldn’t be in this situation, but he also wouldn’t be able to see her. It’s just not worth it.

“You left the city with him, with no chaperone, and you were seen at an inn, Clarke. You know what that looks like. You know what everyone will think. If you weren’t eloping with him, what were you doing?”

“Traveling!” says Clarke. “Nothing happened, and it shouldn’t have been a big deal. I had no reason to think we’d see anyone we knew, so–”

“So you didn’t think saying he was your husband would be a problem? Really, Clarke?”

Even she can’t argue with that; she opens and closes her mouth and settles on, “It was worth the risk.”

“To get out of town for a few days?” she snaps. “Forgive me for not being more sympathetic to your boredom. You know how important–”

“It was my fault,” says Bellamy.

Lady Abigail’s attention snaps to him, eyes hard and wary, like she had forgotten he was even here. “Excuse me?”

“My sister is–willful,” he says, careful. “She hasn’t been adjusting well to our recent entry into high society, and she wasn’t happy with her tutor.” He sighs, gives up. Clarke shouldn’t have to take the blame for something that was indisputably not her fault. “She ran away, and Clarke agreed to come with me to find her. She was only helping me.”

“Noble.” She doesn’t say it like a good thing. “Unfortunately, noble intentions only go so far. The two of you were seen traveling together, going into the same room. It doesn’t matter what was actually happening, the only thing that matters is what people think.”

“So tell them we eloped,” says Clarke, and Bellamy nearly chokes. “I don’t care.”

“Clarke–”

“What? Everyone already knew we were close and you didn’t like the match. They’d all believe I decided to take it out of your hands.”

Lady Abigail’s jaw works. “You aren’t leaving me with much of a choice.”

“The truth is still an option.” Her eyes cut to Bellamy. “Some of it, anyway. We don’t have to mention Octavia.”

“Whatever you need to do,” he manages. “I’m at your disposal.”

“I’m sure you are,” says Lady Abigail, dry.

All he can do is shrug. Bellamy is a member of upper-class society entirely by accident–a father he’d never met who made a decent fortune at sea named him in his will, and suddenly and without doing anything to deserve it, he had enough money that he’d never have to work again.

Which, honestly, wasn’t a good fit for him. He’d been working too long to settle into idle comfort, so he kept on working, using the money to open a new shop in the city, buy better materials, hire staff, expand. Once he had more than enough money to live on, he found it easy to turn into more and more money, and these days he’s rich enough to buy most things except for a title for himself and manners for his sister, neither of which he wants to care about. But he’d like Octavia to be happy and taken care of, and a good marriage would help with that, and he’d like himself to be happy, and a title might have helped with that.

Mostly what he couldn’t buy was Clarke marrying him, but that was less about the title and more about, well, Clarke. If she’d wanted to marry him, title or no, she would have made it happen.

“What do you want us to do?” Clarke asks. “We were seen in an intimate position by one of your friends. Telling us that it was a horrible mistake doesn’t solve anything. It’s done, so tell us how you think we should fix it.”

There’s a long silence during which Bellamy finds himself holding his breath. He doesn’t want to marry her, or rather he doesn’t want to marry her like this, not with her being forced into it.

“You’re going to have to marry him,” Lady Abigail finally says. “As soon as possible. We’ll say it was done in private and kept quiet because you didn’t want a large ceremony. I’ll find someone in town, it’ll be done by tomorrow.” She looks between them, sighs. “Don’t get pregnant for at least a year. And don’t go anywhere.”

She leaves, slamming the door behind her, and it takes Bellamy a second to recover.

“Fuck,” he says, finally. “I’m so sorry, Clarke.”

“Don’t apologize, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I could have done this alone. Or gotten two rooms. Or–”

“You didn’t do any of that by yourself. I said I’d come with you, I said we should get one room. We agreed on all of this. I’m just sorry she caught us.”

He rubs his hand through his hair. “She’ll really make us go through with the marriage?”

“Honestly? I think she has to. I wish I could say that if she told the truth, people would believe her, but–”

“It does sound like her saving face.”

“Well, it could be worse.”

“How, exactly?”

“I could be marrying someone I don’t like. But I know it’s not–what you were planning for.”

It’s nice that he doesn’t have to lie; he didn’t ever let himself plan for this. “No. But I didn’t have much of a plan.”

“And it’s still a good match for you, at least socially. We’re friends, we can be happy. Right?”

It would be the perfect match for him, if he wasn’t in love with her, but he can’t say that. So he just smiles, shakes his head like he’s amused. “I think we can make it work.”

Bellamy met Clarke when she wandered into his store at sixteen, a lady whose skirt had gotten caught on a tree in an unfamiliar neighborhood and needed some quick repairs. His mother had been out, so he did the work and they chatted, more easily than he expected. He’d assumed it would be the last he saw of her, but she was back the next week, and the week after, his first titled customer. Her patronage didn’t bring more like her, not at first, but once he had his father’s money, she was an invaluable resource, helping him figure out where to open the new shop, what fabrics to buy, what styles were in season.

She’s always been a good friend, but she couldn’t be more than that. It was impossible, unthinkable, no matter how much money he made or how prosperous the circles he ran in were. He could be well off, but he couldn’t be part of her world.

Except that now he is, somehow, married to her.

“At least the ceremony was quick,” she says flopping back onto the bed with deep sigh. It’s the only bed in the room, which isn’t the first time this has happened on their trip. They were pretending to be married before this, after all. But now they’re supposed to be sharing. That’s so much more confusing.

“I was amazed your mother let us get away with something so–small.”

“As few witnesses as possible.” She sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. We both knew the risks.”

“I was sure we wouldn’t see anyone I knew. It seemed so unlikely.”

He sits down on the edge of the bed, starts undoing the cuffs of his shirt. “It’s better for me than it is for you. Marrying you will only benefit me.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been elevated into the peerage.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. But at least we can look for your sister without worrying about anyone catching us.”

He pauses, hesitating before shrugging off his shirt. He’s still wearing his undershirt, but the intimacy throws him nonetheless. He has yet to feel fully comfortable being so stripped down with her. “I know I’ve said this before and you never listen, but you really can go any time.”

“I listen,” says Clarke, amused. “I just don’t want to go. Do you think the marriage will make your sister feel better?”

He glances over his shoulder at her, which is a bad idea. She’s fully dressed, but her eyes are closed and her hair is spread out under her, unbound. She is, as always, beautiful, and the knowledge that she’s his wife is almost too much.

They’re going to have to talk about what that means, sooner or later. But his preference is for later.

“Why would it make her feel better?” he asks.

“Maybe not better. But wasn’t she saying she shouldn’t have to learn to be a lady because society would always see her as nothing but an elevated commoner?”

“I don’t think this changes that. That’s how everyone’s going to see me, isn’t it? An upstart commoner who tricked a lady into marrying him.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“It doesn’t matter what really happened, just what people will think. And they’ll think that I’m the villain. Not for long,” he adds, when she sits up, frowning. “And not–I don’t mind. But I doubt O’s going to think it will radically change her life.”

Clarke sighs. “Oh well. I hope it will anyway.”

“Me too.” He opens his mouth, ready to tell her that they should talk about it, but he can’t force the words out. “Ready for bed?” he asks.

It’s not much of a wedding night, but he’s not going to be the one to say it, and apparently she isn’t either. “Almost. I need to go wash my face. But you should turn in.”

He strips out of the rest of his clothing and changes into his nightshirt, settles into bed. They’ve been managing to avoid going to sleep at the same time for this entire trip, thanks to an unspoken coordinated effort. If Clarke is ready for bed, he’ll stay up reading; if he’s ready for bed, she’ll have “things to do” in the washroom. There’s a polite space of time during which it’s safe to assume that whoever is in the bed has fallen asleep, and then the person who’s awake joins them.

About half the time, they wake up tangled together, which they don’t talk about either. It’s been a trip full of very pointed silences.

Bellamy crawls under the covers, closing his eyes and taking a few deep, measured breaths. The bed is nice, soft and comfortable, and his life isn’t that much weirder or worse than it was yesterday.

“It’s not a big deal,” he says aloud, and the bed dips as Clarke sits next to him.

“It is,” she says. “Getting married. But it doesn’t have to be a big deal until after we find your sister and get her home. One thing at a time, right?”

“One thing at a time,” he agrees, letting out a breath. “Goodnight, Clarke.”

He can feel her settling in, and it’s a little bit nice. He would have missed this, when he lost it. Maybe the marriage means that he won’t. “Goodnight.”

After two days, they find Octavia with her aunt, just as Bellamy suspected she would be. Luna is Octavia’s father’s sister, and she’s never liked Bellamy, making her the perfect candidate for someone to shelter O while she figures out her next move. And, as a woman who never married and made her own fortune, she’ll also be sympathetic to what Octavia wants to do.

“So, give me one good reason I should let you see her,” Luna says, arms crossed over her chest, unimpressed.

“Because I won’t try to make her come back.”

Her eyebrows go up. “No?”

“Not if she doesn’t want to. I knew she wasn’t happy,” he admits. “But I didn’t think she was this unhappy. I thought once she got used to her new position, she’d be fine. But if she doesn’t want to get used to it, we need to figure out something else. I don’t want to lose her.”

Luna turns her attention to Clarke. “And you are?”

“His wife,” she says, smile sweet, and Bellamy doesn’t examine the odd mix of emotions churning in his stomach too closely. She’s telling the truth, plain and simple.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Blake. I didn’t realize you were married,” she adds, with a sharp look in Bellamy’s direction.

He’s still trying to recover from Mrs. Blake, but he’s always been good at speaking without full assistance from his brain. “I wasn’t,” he says. “But I am now.”

“So you’re not worried your sister is going to destroy your romantic prospects.”

He rubs his face. “I was never worried about that. Listen, just let me talk to her. Please.”

After an agonizing pause, she finally nods. “I’ll ask her if she’s willing to see you. That’s all. I didn’t make any promises to you, Bellamy. Just to her.”

“Tell her I won’t bring her back.”

Luna disappears back inside and Bellamy slumps, all the fight going out of him. “She hates me.”

“She hates being expected to be a lady. I don’t blame her. It’s a lot of expectation to get thrown at you.”

“What do you think I should have done differently?”

“Nothing. Just because she wasn’t happy, it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Sometimes things are just hard. You’re doing your best with all of this.”

“Thanks.”

“What are wives for?”

Before he can answer, the door flies open, there’s Octavia. “You got married?” she demands. Her focus shifts. “To Clarke?”

“Did you want me to get married to someone else?”

“I didn’t think you were allowed to get married to Clarke.”

“Is there any way we could talk about this inside?” Clarke asks. “Not on the street?”

“Yeah, you might as well come in.”

They take seats in Luna’s small drawing room, their hostess nowhere to be seen. Octavia is looking between them, shrewd, trying to find the cracks. It shouldn’t be hard; they’re nothing but cracks.

“So, Clarke’s mom caught you two?”

Clarke inclines her head, considering. “Something like that.”

“Congratulations, Bell. I didn’t think that was going to happen.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sighs. “O, we need to talk about this.”

“Yeah, I’m upset you didn’t invite me to your wedding too.”

“If we hadn’t been looking for you, there wouldn’t have been a wedding,” Clarke says, and O grins.

“So you really owe me.”

“You could have just told me how you were feeling,” Bellamy says, trying to pull the conversation back from him and Clarke. “You didn’t have to run away.”

“You weren’t listening! Every time I said I didn’t want to do this, you said I’d get used to it.”

“I thought you would!”

“You never listen to me until I do something like this. You don’t take me seriously.”

He takes a few breaths, not letting himself snap back. It won’t do any good to point out that he thinks she doesn’t listen, to rehash the argument they’ve been having for weeks. He’s tired of talking past her.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead. “That’s how it was for me, so I thought that was how it would be for you. But I get that you–I won’t ask you to come back.”

Her eyes narrow. “You won’t?”

“No. But I need to come up with something you’re doing that won’t drag Clarke’s family through the mud.”

“Living with your aunt in the city might be fine,” Clarke adds. “The nice thing about being rich is that you can have black sheep in your family and everyone lets it go.”

“When you’re poor, no one cares either.”

“Bellamy was just at the worst level of wealth,” she teases, and he smiles back, automatic.

Octavia’s frown deepens. “Really, what happened? When did the two of you–”

“Two days ago,” says Clarke. “One of my mother’s friends saw us going into our inn together, word got back to her–” She shrugs. “No one would have believed we were just traveling together, so–now we’re married.”

“Just like that?” asks Octavia. Even Bellamy will admit, it doesn’t feel real. It certainly hasn’t sunk in yet.

“Just like that,” says Clarke.

“And you’re going to let me do what I want?”

Bellamy leans forward, propping himself up on his knees. “To be honest, I wanted you to get married because I wanted you to be taken care of. I can’t believe this is going to last, this good fortune. If you were properly married then no matter what happened to me, you’d be fine.”

“I’ll be fine, Bell. No matter what.”

It’s not true, and he knows it. All sorts of things could go wrong in his sister’s life, she could end up starving and homeless.

But if he keeps trying to force her into a place she doesn’t want to be, it will only be worse if something does go wrong. She’ll be too stubborn to come to him and ask for help.

“I know,” he says. “So–what do you want to do?”

They spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out Octavia’s plan from here. If he was a real noble, her working would be out of the question, but he’s a merchant himself, so she has a little more freedom, a little less scrutiny.

And he is married now. It’s not as if he has to worry about her ruining his chances at a good match. And Clarke’s family won’t let her starve either.

So she elects to stay with Luna and find an occupation, and Bellamy privately arranges to send an allowance and some rent through Luna.

Octavia probably knows he’s doing that too, but she doesn’t mention it, and she gives him a hug before he leaves.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he says. “You’re welcome any time.”

“Where are you even going to live? Does your wife have a nicer place than you do?”

He glances back at Clarke. “Uh, to be determined.”

“We’ll let you know.”

She shakes her head. “Only you, Bell.” She hugs Clarke too. “Take care of my brother, okay?”

“He doesn’t make it easy.”

“Oh, I don’t make it easy?” he grumbles, and she grins.

Octavia smiles too, hugs him one more time, and then they’re back out on the street, the crisis over.

Well, that crisis. There’s still the marriage to deal with.

Clarke must be thinking the same thing, because she gives him a tight smile. “I guess we should talk.”

He lets out a breath. “Yeah, I guess so.”

They go back to their room, the silence more tense than it has been in a long time, between them. Bellamy’s always been able to talk to Clarke about almost anything, but marrying her is directly in the middle of things he can’t talk about. Being married should have come after he figured out something to say, if it came at all, and having that as the start just makes everything worse.

“So,” she says.

“So.” He clears his throat. “Can you get out of it?”

Her mouth quirks. “Can I get out of it?”

In retrospect, it might have been the wrong place to start. “Sorry, I guess–do you want to get out of it? I figured you would.”

“Do you?”

“It’s good for me,” he says, the safest answer. “You’re the one who’s marrying beneath your station.”

“Bellamy.”

He swallows. “What do you want me to say? I never want to force anyone to–”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I wasn’t willing to marry you, I knew it was a possibility.”

“I know.”

“What do you want? From a wife. You never talked about marrying.”

“Someone I can talk to,” he says. “Someone who knows more about deportment than I do and can help me with–everything. A partner.”

“That sounds a lot like me.”

“It does.” He swallows. “I’d want to be your partner too, though. I don’t have a lot to offer. What do you want?”

“Someone I can talk to,” she says. “Someone I like spending time with. Someone smart and caring and–” Her laugh comes out as a huff. “You’re a great prospect, Bellamy. Anyone would be lucky to marry you.”

“You too.”

“So–we can be married.”

“Yes,” he says, and then, right on its heels, “No. Fuck, I can’t–”

“You can’t?”

“I’m in love with you. You should know that, it’s not just–it wouldn’t be a convenient match for me, Clarke. That’s not why I want to stay married, I–”

Her hands are on his cheeks, pulling his mouth down to hers, their mouths crashing together, the kiss uneven and messy. They did kiss at the church, in the ceremony, one small, quick brush of lips, restrained and perfunctory.

Nothing like this.

Bellamy’s arms wrap around her, tugging her close, and Clarke makes a happy noise, her own arms sliding from his cheeks to his shoulders and then around his neck as they trade warm, wet kisses. Bellamy is smiling, grinning, laughing a little, and Clarke is too, until they can’t keep up the kisses and she buries her face under his chin.

“I was hoping one of us was going to say it,” she says.

“You could have.”

“You asked if I wanted to be married to you!”

“And the answer seems to be yes.”

She laughs again, kisses his shoulder. “I do, yes. I was going to bring it up once we’d found your sister.”

“You were?”

“I know we couldn’t have just–married,” she admits. “My mother told me she wouldn’t approve. But if you–” She snuggles closer, and Bellamy tugs her back to the bed. It seems likely that they’ll consummate the marriage tonight, but that’s not even his primary concern right now. He just wants to be close and comfortable. “I thought if you wanted me, we could manufacture a scandal.”

“I would have preferred the manufactured one.”

“Oh?”

He pulls her back up, kisses her again. She’s not the first person he’s kissed, and she knows he isn’t her first either. In a way, it’s nice. They may not have gotten married in the ordinary way, but it’s nice to know that they’ve both had other people, other choices, and they wanted each other.

She wants him.

“If we’d talked about it sooner, we could have been doing this sooner,” he murmurs, and she grins.

“Well, we are married. We should be able to do it plenty more.”

“We should.” He slides his hands up her back, tangling in her hair as he pulls her back down. “For the rest of our lives.”

“That would be a good start.”

“So, you two got caught?”

They’re back home, at a gathering at Miller’s house with most of their friends and acquaintances. No one seems particularly surprised that they eloped, but Raven is the first to say outright that that’s what happened, to acknowledge that they didn’t marry so much as stumble into a union.

“We weren’t even doing anything wrong!” Clarke says, laughing. “I gave my mother every out, she’s the one who insisted there was nothing to do but let us marry.”

“It was just a matter of time,” Raven says, with a fond roll of her eyes. “You two are a walking compromising position.”

“We were,” Clarke corrects, smiling up at Bellamy, all warm, fond eyes. “Now we’re married, everything is in order.”

He smiles back, all helpless affection. “Yeah. Everything’s great.”

#griffinpuff

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philosophicalconservatism · 6 years

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Response To Post On Conservatism.

https://amateuropinions.tumblr.com

"I’ve seen this take a few place before and I’m always confused by what the point is supposed to be. To a certain extent this reads to me as: A True Conservative has the same ultimate goal as the left, he just disagrees with the strategies the left employs to achieve it. Which makes no sense, because in practice the left has been winning victories on every front except occasionally the ballot box, which is all conservatives ever seem to win. Obviously some of the issues you talk about (abortion) are rooted in actual ideological disagreements. You could have picked a better issue to show that you don’t reject the modern state of things, rather than just dispute what they should ultimately become than one that’s been settled for 40 years and only 30% of people agree with you. But then what’s the point of pretending you want the same thing? As far as I can tell, the left isn’t fooled."

http://philosophicalconservatism.com

According to Gallup, 2015 was the first time there was a significant statistical advantage for the Pro-choice position since 2008.

http://news.gallup.com/poll/183434/americans-choose-pro-choice-first-time-seven-years.aspx

On the other issue, your confusion stems from apparently having an uninformed caricature of the two ideologies rather than a thorough understanding of them. Conservatism from the time of Edmund Burke has never been mere traditionalism (an unthinking embrace of the past). It has always been about contrasting true progress with the illusion of progress advanced by the radical. In Burke's time this illusion was being advanced by the French Revolution.

Some posts from this blog that may be helpful. By the way, the Science analogy used in these posts is actually first used by Burke 300 years ago.

http://philosophicalconservatism.com/post/171577627431/the-meaning-of-conservatism

http://philosophicalconservatism.com/post/139869785231/more-on-the-meaning-of-conservatism

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pyth1a · 6 years

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by Peter Hurford

Chances are that if you're reading this post, you're probably a bit weird in some way.

No offense, of course. In fact, I actually mean it as a compliment. Weirdness is incredibly important. If people weren't willing to deviate from society and hold weird beliefs, we wouldn't have had the important social movements that ended slavery and pushed back against racism, that created democracy, that expanded social roles for women, and that made the world a better place in numerous other ways.

Many things we take for granted now as why our current society as great were once... weird.

Joseph Overton theorized that policy develops through six stages: unthinkable, then radical, then acceptable, then sensible, then popular, then actual policy. We could see this happen with many policies -- currently same-sex marriage is making its way from popular to actual policy, but not to long ago it was merely acceptable, and not too long before that it was pretty radical.

Some good ideas are currently in the radical range. Effective altruism itself is such a collection of beliefs typical people would consider pretty radical. Many people think donating 3% of their income is a lot, let alone the 10% demand that Giving What We Can places, or the 50%+ that some people in the community do.

And that's not all. Others would suggest that everyone become vegetarian, advocating for open borders and/or universal basic income, the abolishment of gendered language, having more resources into mitigating existential risk, focusing on research into Friendly AI, cryonicsand curing death, etc.

While many of these ideas might make the world a better place if made into policy, all of these ideas are pretty weird.

Weirdness, of course, is a drawback. People take weird opinions less seriously.

The absurdity heuristic is a real bias that people -- even you -- have. If an idea sounds weird to you, you're less likely to try and believe it, even if there's overwhelming evidence. And social proof matters -- if less people believe something, people will be less likely to believe it. Lastly, don't forget the halo effect -- if one part of you seems weird, the rest of you will seem weird too!

(Update: apparently this concept is, itself, already known to social psychology as idiosyncrasy credits. Thanks, Mr. Commenter!)

...But we can use this knowledge to our advantage. The halo effect can work in reverse -- if we're normal in many ways, our weird beliefs will seem more normal too. If we have a notion of weirdness as a kind of currency that we have a limited supply of, we can spend it wisely, without looking like a crank.

All of this leads to the following actionable principles:

Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend. Trying to convince all your friends to donate 50% of their income to MIRI, become a vegan, get a cryonics plan, and demand open borders will be met with a lot of resistance. But -- I hypothesize -- that if you pick one of these ideas and push it, you'll have a lot more success.

Spend your weirdness points effectively. Perhaps it's really important that people advocate for open borders. But, perhaps, getting people to donate to developing world health would overall do more good. In that case, I'd focus on moving donations to the developing world and leave open borders alone, even though it is really important. You should triage your weirdness effectively the same way you would triage your donations.

Clean up and look good. Lookism is a problem in society, and I wish people could look "weird" and still be socially acceptable. But if you're a guy wearing a dress in public, or some punk rocker vegan advocate, recognize that you're spending your weirdness points fighting lookism, which means less weirdness points to spend promoting veganism or something else.

Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good. Of course, allocating your "weirdness points" on a few issues doesn't mean you have to stop advocating for other important issues -- just consider being less weird about it. Perhaps universal basic income truly would be a very effective policy to help the poor in the United States. But reforming the earned income tax credit and relaxing zoning laws would also both do a lot to help the poor in the US, and such suggestions aren't weird.

Use the foot-in-door technique and the door-in-face technique. The foot-in-door technique involves starting with a small ask and gradually building up the ask, such as suggesting people donate a little bit effectively, and then gradually get them to take the Giving What We Can Pledge. The door-in-face technique involves making a big ask (e.g., join Giving What We Can) and then substituting it for a smaller ask, like the Life You Can Save pledge or Try Out Giving.

Reconsider effective altruism's clustering of beliefs. Right now, effective altruism is associated strongly with donating a lot of money and donating effectively, less strongly with impact in career choice, veganism, and existential risk. Of course, I'm not saying that we should drop some of these memes completely. But maybe EA should disconnect a bit more and compartmentalize -- for example, leaving AI risk to MIRI, for example, and not talk about it much, say, on 80,000 Hours. And maybe instead of asking people to both give more AND give more effectively, we could focus more exclusively on asking people to donate what they already do more effectively.

Evaluate the above with more research. While I think the evidence base behind this is decent, it's not great and I haven't spent that much time developing it. I think we should look into this more with a review of the relevant literature and some careful, targeted, market research on the individual beliefs within effective altruism (how weird are they?) and how they should be connected or left disconnected. Maybe this has already been done some?

#weirdness #weird

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agirlmeetslife · 3 years

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On Breaking Old Ways

In a recent Mass celebration, I recited the Nicene Creed, as Catholics do weekly in accordance with our traditions. I think one of the effects of attending Mass virtually these days is the newfound awareness on practices that have become rote. "…God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God..." I thought, God from God? Are they saying Christ’s begotten nature is being the heir apparent to the throne? Wasn't challenging Constantine's monarchy almost a guarantee of imminent death?

I have been reciting the Creed my entire life, but I’ve only now started hearing what I’ve been saying. Providence denied me the same command over the language as that of these early Christians, but it gave me the ability to recognize inspiration when I see it. I want to send you an email, because, if I have a small fraction of the enlightened minds and bold convictions as those seated at the first Council of Nicea did when penning those radical words to the creed, if I could access just some of the truths inside merely myself, as the men at Nicea had inside their entire faith, I might feel wild with success.

It occurs to me that I've never said sorry. There are many things, of course, for which I am sorry, so I'll just start with my petulance. I think you were friends with me at a time I felt most entitled to all parts of everyone's internal life, purchased, I believed, by the injustice and pain I experienced in my own early life.

Taking a broad view, pain is observed on a relative basis. But pain is never personally experienced this way, is it? Pain, when it happens to you, is absolute and unredeemed. And in my case, I carry whatever fractured experience I have and heap it onto other fractured experiences and then do things like hurl skewering words at people around me or demand impossible things from them. As uncomfortable and agitating as my explanation to you is, I said terrible, unthinkable things to you, because I was attempting to make pain absent by its very accumulation. It is not an excuse, I know, but I think context might help.

I guess if we are going down this road, I should also say it was during a time that I was figuring it out. This presupposes that whatever it was, has been figured out now, which, as you might suspect, is farthest from th…let me put it this way. Have you ever seen someone with no sense of cardinal direction try to find their way off of the right exit on a freeway at night only to be pitifully escorted off by a police car? Because to anyone who hasn’t seen this happen, I really have no point of reference from which to compare my life of figuring things out. But of course you have.

Over the years, New York became a map of my walks recounting to you the things that unmoored me; the rooftop of my building became a confessional in which, over calls to you, I laid bare my haughtiness. I think I will never really understand you. Who in their right mind would see a girl, with her ungovernable soul, an individualist with a snickering disdain for the weaklings in the world, and think, yeah, I’d like some of that, please? And the way you withheld judgement, your instinct for understanding just about everything, and the incomprehensibly forgiving nature, I found you alien.

I worked with a portfolio manager once who used to be one of the physicists working on the Higgs Boson, which is a very tiny particle...the elementary particle, the “God particle,” named so for its presence at the moment of the creation of the universe. The only way to see this particle is by colliding it with other particles, from many different directions and with other particles. You end up with an outline of the particle, but not with the particle itself. And through this long, meandering way, I finally arrive at my point.

I am sorry for my petulance, for so many of the colliding with you, so to speak. Of course, I never got what I wanted by doing so. Today, I can only see the outline of what happened and why, seeing it happen from all different angles to infer the existence of the masked fear and pain, artifacts from an earlier life.

I have summoned all the discipline I could to keep this email pithy, a laughable exercise now, although my failure to do so can only be softened by my promise that if you saw my first draft, it would make you open the email, cringe, and immediately close it because no sane person wants to read an email whose length rivaled the Magna Carta. So let me just address what your next natural question might be, why this email now? I don’t know. I suppose at some point, I just have to do the things I’ve been meaning to do. And perhaps, the question after that you might ask is, what of this? What does it mean? Probably nothing for you. You may still think I am pathologically ridiculous. And smart money is with you on that. But I suppose if the men at Nicea were onto anything, it is that codifying into words something they believe to be real, even if the response from their audience may not be what they hoped for, was really the only thing worth writing. Everything else is just…what was it that you and I once called things that should not concern us…a rounding error?

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mirceakitsune · 6 years

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Artificial Intelligence: The baddest hoax in modern history

Over the years I've dealt with a good amount of crazy. I've seen more shit in nearly 3 decades than I imagined I could in 10 lifetimes, as far as sheer human madness is concerned. In the last few years it has rapidly gotten worse, and recently it seems to have reached new unprecedented heights.

In this episode, it's my displeasure to present to you the sentient computer... A.K.A. machine learning, A.K.A. artificial intelligence. No folks we aren't talking about a physical electronic brain... which may actually be possible one day, once scientists figure out how to reconstruct all neurons in the human brain and map them to a circuit of quantum bits. We're talking classic binary code running on your average 64 bit processor (C++ / Java / Whatever) which is supposedly capable of sentient processes... most notably recognizing the meanings and circumstances of objects in photos, up to facial recognition within complex images. Said functionality is supposedly achieved, I fucking kid you not, by training your computer like an animal or a human baby. This delusion seems to be embraced not only by ordinary people, but even programmers who are expected to know the matter at hand, and horrifyingly by government officials who believe this bullshit will give them some magical powers like in the movies. A few cases of this fairytale include, but are tragically not limited to:

Facebook supposedly recognizes who you are and automatically tags you whenever you upload a photo. Obviously this isn't because FB has money to throw at an army of moderators who stalk people in realtime to tag their shit, and because that's controversial and stupid they're hiding it behind an AI story, that would be crazy... it's the midget trapped in the body of a computer doing it!

The human-computer chimera may soon be "hired" by the airport, where it would scan the faces of travelers as they walk through the gate. Dozens of them... in a few seconds... in the same image.

British police are teaching an AI what child porn looks like. You can be sure it's not because they're looking for an excuse to play around with that material, hehe... it's just so the little man in the Windows system tray can learn how to "detect abused kids". Unfortunately for them the program is doing a bad job at singling out them kiddo butts, because it's confusing them with photos of sand dunes in the desert. But not to worry: The police is sure that the dead God is on their side, and their program will one day spot those sexy children without error! Hmmm... I wonder if mister computer man can develop a pedophilia fetish...

An old news article suggested an AI which, hold on to your horses everyone, was capable of detecting gay faces. Yep: If it sees any picture of you, it's able to tell whether you are homosexual or not.

Another AI can supposedly analyze the way you walk, determining if you have criminal intent based on how a camera sees you moving down the street. You better not be dancing back there dawg, the computer people will think you're gettin' ready to mug some homeboy!

An elaborate hoax known as Facerig has done an impressive job at convincing people that a program is capable of understanding not just your face, but your facial expressions... without even needing some super high-resolution video, just a shitty blurry webcam. Their hoaxed demos even show animated 3D characters imitating the facial expressions of someone in a camera... which I assume is either edited manually into the video, or the character is controlled in realtime by someone watching your face on camera (horrifying to think it might be without some users even knowing it).

At least a few of those articles managed to convince me that I couldn't possibly be a member of the human race, even if I look human when I see myself in the mirror (otherkin aspects aside). Nope; There's just no way I'm part of the same species as those creatures: My brain wouldn't be capable of coming up with this bullshit even as I'm dreaming at night, I must have been designed by aliens using a properly debugged brain structure! Jesus fucking Christ on a flying carpet... what in the ever loving fuck?

Now there are multiple reasons why this whole thing has become infuriating for me: One is the fact that whenever I try shedding a ray of reasoning on this trainwreck, I'm immediately attacked by virtually everyone who refuses to accept this is realm of fantasy. At the same time I worry about what is actually going on, seeing that a lot of effort and money were put into this hoax so it's obviously happening for a reason (likely a smoke screen for extreme mass surveillance plans). Further more it makes an unique mockery out of both biological life and programming alike, via the demented insinuation that a CPU is capable of emulating sentience which is a requirement for any content recognition of this degree. There was once a time when I was fascinated with the idea of AI and machine learning, and was planning to learn more about it and possibly play around with such code... today I'm disgusted to even hear about the subject, after those fuckers disfigured and diseased it too with their madness and refusal to understand basic logical limitations.

Because common sense doesn't seem to be obvious to everyone, I'm going to clarify why this is impossible, by explaining the impassible obstacles a computer would have to overcome in order to do something as unthinkably complex as facial recognition. For the proposed functionality, a mindless piece of code would have to do the following things, all on its own using only pixels of different colors from an image:

First of all it must determine what in the photo is a face, from numerous objects and complex structures that each represent all sorts of things. This is barely doable itself but okay.

Next it must work around the face being shot from any possible angle. The head may be rotated in any position relative to the camera, resulting in a radically different structure being visible in the image.

The person's face may be partly covered. Perhaps there's an obstacle between the face and the camera, like a structure or another person. Maybe they're wearing a scarf or glasses, which they weren't in other images. Maybe their hair is brushed differently and they have an emo haircut covering half of the face. Maybe they're wearing lipstick and the color of their lips is different.

People have different facial expressions in each photo. In one you may be smiling, in one you may be frowning... in one your mouth might be open, in the other it's closed. Faces are always shaped differently.

The lighting conditions are guaranteed to not be identical, both brightness and colors differ. Maybe it's day maybe it's night, maybe the environmental light is reddish maybe the atmosphere is blue, maybe different cameras that shot you used different color adjustment filters.

The average camera (even good ones) is still much more blurry than anything we see with the naked eye. Motion blur is also involved if either you or the camera are moving, if the environment is dark it gets worse. Noise is further introduced by a bit of jpeg compression, as no sane camera wrecks your drive space by saving in lossless png.

Many people still upload low resolution pictures of themselves on the internet. When your picture is 1024 x 768 and you're standing at a distance, there is nearly no usable detail to even attempt to work with on a PC.

Suppose it miraculously managed to single out a face throughout all those obstacles: It needs to measure something and use it as an identifying trait! What, how, why? The apparent distance between your eyes in pixels? How wide your mouth appears to be? How bulgy is your forehead? It doesn't even know what those things represent, not to mention anything can look like a head or eyes or a mouth!

Even if by total defiance of all logic, there was something that could be mathematically measured and the program did manage to calculate it on its own: The computer would also need to compare the data to what is probably trillions of photos in the database! Not only do people look similar so there would be millions of false positives, but doing so many pixel comparisons would require 100 times more memory and processing power than all computers on the planet combined today have!

Are you fucking kidding me? Someone is actually trying to tell me that in actual real life, a shitty piece of x64 code would be capable of doing ALL THAT? What the fuck are people smoking these days? No, really... just go take a walk in the park or meditate on the top off a cliff, then ask yourself the question: "How could I possibly be led to believe this crap"? It's 1000 times easier to board a space shuttle and go to Mars TOMORROW, compared to achieving something that gets even close to this. Even if Jesus himself was still alive and had his superpowers to heal the blind and spawn fish from a basket, even if Moses could make the waters split with his mighty staff... not even they could create something like this, even if they called God himself for reinforcements. If you open your bedroom window and leap right through it, you can be more confident that you'll fly like Peter Pan compared to this shit happening. THIS - IS - NOT - POSSIBLE!

And before people tell me "but the CIA has had facial recognition for decades": Yes they do and that's a totally different matter. Criminologists use one or two photos per suspect (frontal and side shot) which are taken in carefully controlled conditions: It's always from the same angle and distance, the suspect is told not to smile or open their mouth, the lighting is the same, etc. There are also only a few million photos of criminals in the database, rather than trillions of pictures from billions of people... if you have a 10 GHz processor you may be able to do a pixel-to-pixel comparison of one photo against all others in less than a day.

I'm sorry, but some harsh shit had needed to be said about this: Every time this pops up on EFF or other rights groups, I find myself compelled to speak out against a big fat lie seeing how everyone else refuses to. There is seriously no excuse for allowing fairytales and mass hysteria to spread all over the media, without one voice of reasoning exposing this obvious lunacy for many months! Also fuck humanity hard for ruining what could have been a beautiful domain of research if it was kept rational and serious and not turned into a distorted fantasy... especially since I'm a programmer, do not expect me to forgive this mockery, as they've put yet another cherry on the cake the way only this disgusting species is capable of doing.

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years

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Part 6 On Catholic Social Teaching: Solidarity, Part 1

The great Roman playwright Terence said, “I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me.” It’s significant Terence was known for his comedies, since comedy is the art form that focuses most strongly on our weaknesses and our need for help from both divine and human grace and mercy.

In tragedies, the protagonists die isolated in their grandeur: great men and women left in splendid ruins, while lesser beings look on in awe and say, “Now cracks a noble heart!” But in comedies, the quintessential ending is when everybody comes together at a great wedding banquet, and all’s well that ends well. It’s rather like the heaven Jesus constantly compares to a wedding banquet: the marriage supper of the Lamb in which the poor, deaf, blind and lame have the seats of honor. In comedy, we’re all in this together and — being recipients of the Playwright’s grace — we all get our richly undeserved rewards from the Founder of the Feast.

This idea that we’re all in this together — that nothing human is alien to us, and we’re all debtors to gifts and gift-givers, both divine and human, whom we can only repay by similar acts of generosity to one another — is what undergirds the last pillar of Catholic social teaching known as solidarity.

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church tells us that solidarity: “is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”

As with all Catholic social teaching, solidarity has roots in Scripture — as when Paul tells the pagan Athenians, God “made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:26-27). Solidarity emphasizes the universality of God’s provision for the human race, as well as his call to us to play an active role in that provision.

Christian faith begins, therefore, with a communal and familial understanding of the human race; because the human race springs from “one” — both the one God in whose image we are made, as well as the “one flesh” union of Adam and Eve, from whom the human race inherits its image both glorious and fallen.

The faith insists God begins with his natural creation, and his grace builds on this nature. Therefore, the Church’s social teaching applies naturally to the whole human race, not merely to Christians — since the whole human race participates in the natural law. That is why the pagan Terence knew, like the authors of Scripture, the goods of human love, family and a meal with friends — as well as the evils of murder, or a broken family, or theft.

The Fourth through the Eighth Commandments don’t tell Israel (or anybody else) something they don’t already know through the proper use of reason, but ground these universally known moral facts in God. Contempt for parents, murder, adultery and theft are bad because they harm the creatures made in God’s image. And since we are those creatures, we sooner or later have to acknowledge we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us; we must forgive as we have been forgiven; and we must be good to the alien, the orphan and the widow since we too can easily be strangers in the land of Egypt.

The Church notes that we live in a period in history when the evidence of the constitutive interconnectivity of the human race is more apparent than ever. The Compendium teaches:

“Never before has there been such a widespread awareness of the bond of interdependence between individuals and peoples, which is found at every level. The very rapid expansion in ways and means of communication ‘in real time,’ such as those offered by information technology, the extraordinary advances in computer technology, the increased volume of commerce and information exchange all bear witness to the fact that, for the first time since the beginning of human history, it is now possible — at least technically — to establish relationships between people who are separated by great distances and are unknown to each other.”

The Church hails our increasing interconnectedness as a good thing. In our intensifying global culture, it’s pretty nifty I can and do have friends not only in the U.S., but in the U.K., Australia and Nigeria. Technology has shrunk the world and brought us close to people who were in unthinkably faraway places with strange-sounding names only 20 years ago. We’re much more consciously aware than ever before of the lives, needs and hearts of people all over the globe in ever-expanding circles of friends and family. I can receive a prayer request from my Nigerian friend, post it on Facebook, and within seconds, people from Wichita to Glasgow to Sydney are part of the network of prayer that sustains his life.

But, of course, original sin extends to our global culture as well. So the Compendium continues:

“In the presence of the phenomenon of interdependence and its constant expansion, however, there persist in every part of the world stark inequalities between developed and developing countries, inequalities stoked also by various forms of exploitation, oppression and corruption that have a negative influence on the internal and international life of many states. The acceleration of interdependence between persons and peoples needs to be accompanied by equally intense efforts on the ethical-social plane, in order to avoid the dangerous consequences of perpetrating injustice on a global scale. This would have very negative repercussions even in the very countries that are presently more advantaged.”

In short, our global culture doesn’t just make it easy for me to pray for my Nigerian friend. Because of original sin, it also makes it easy for me to exploit his child and even enslave him for my morning cup of cocoa. Our God-given interdependence and our fallen and increasingly radical inequalities are in a horse race to see which rules us, and the Church calls us to work so everybody in the human family has a just share in the goods of the earth God has given us.

The way to start doing this is to start seeing the relationship between rich and poor as the Gospel does. St. John Chrysostom summarizes that relationship beautifully when he says, “The rich exist for the sake of the poor. The poor exist for the salvation of the rich.” We are emphatically all in this together, insists the Gospel. And the Christian Tradition warns it is the rich, not the poor, who are in far greater danger and in far greater need.

The Gospel repeatedly warns the rich that it is they who are in desperate need of the ministrations of the poor. This is the warning at the heart of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, or in the (to our ears) strange counsel to “make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations” (Luke 16:9). The idea is precisely to turn on its head our traditional notions of patronage — wherein the poor must go hat in hand to the rich for protection, employment and sustenance — by reminding the rich that it is the prayers (or anguished cries and curses) of the poor that will spell the difference between heaven and hell for the rich. For inasmuch as we do for the least of these, we do unto Jesus himself.

The Church tells us that solidarity is both “a social principle and that of a moral virtue.” In other words, it is part of the nature of how humans are supposed to live; but — since we are fallen and often behave at odds with our own best interests — it is also a virtue we have to intentionally cultivate by denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following Jesus.

Obvious case in point: the duty of generosity. Generosity sounds good on paper. All of us together are stronger, happier and healthier than each of us alone and relying only on our meager resources to get by in life. But, in practice, generosity means refusing my natural inclination to clutch my stuff and making the choice to risk sharing it with somebody who might cheat me or do something I disagree with or not share with me when I am in need. The biblical tradition says to this instinct, “Yes, it’s scary. Be generous anyway” — and commends, again and again, the righteous man in these terms: “One man gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. A liberal man will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered” (Proverbs 11:24-25).

And, as the story of the Widow’s Mite (Mark 12:41-44) makes clear, the point, really, is generosity according to one’s means, not according to a dollar amount. The Widow had a couple of measly pennies to offer, but she gave generously nonetheless — as is often the case with the poor. Similarly, the question, “And who is the poor person we should care for?” is much the question, “And who is my neighbor?”: the one who has a need you can fill in the way most appropriate to his or her dignity.

Because solidarity is a social principle, the Church warns there are such things as “structures of sin.” The Compendium describes them this way:

These are rooted in personal sin and, therefore, are always connected to concrete acts of the individuals who commit them, consolidate them and make it difficult to remove them. It is thus that they grow stronger, spread and become sources of other sins, conditioning human conduct. These are obstacles and conditioning that go well beyond the actions and brief life span of the individual and interfere also in the process of the development of peoples, the delay and slow pace of which must be judged in this light. The actions and attitudes opposed to the will of God and the good of neighbor, as well as the structures arising from such behavior, appear to fall into two categories today: “on the one hand, the all-consuming desire for profit, and on the other, the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one’s will upon others. In order to characterize better each of these attitudes, one can add the expression: ‘at any price.’”

In short, sin begins in the heart, but it does not stay there. It gets expressed in everything we do. So the things we make reflect, among other things, the sins that live in our hearts. This isn’t true merely of artists who make pornography or manufacturers who make shoddy products. It’s true of everything we make, including most especially the gigantic and globe-spanning political, social and economic systems we create to dominate the world.

A little sample of how a structure of sin works can be seen in the story found in Acts 19, when Paul went to Ephesus and challenged the cult of Artemis and the rest of pagan idolatry. Paul didn’t merely attract the hostility of her worshippers. He also garnered the wrath of the silversmiths there who manufactured shrines for her worshippers to buy. He threatened, in short, the entire economic “structure of sin” that stood behind the idol and made the Temple of Artemis (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) a thriving commercial as well as religious center. Result: a riot that got within an inch of killing Paul.

Now we are all at one time or another — to the degree we all sin — idolaters just like the Ephesians, since sin is the disordered attempt to get our deepest happiness from something other than God. The “Big Four” in the pantheon of idols are (and always have been): money, pleasure, power and honor. And, just as the Ephesian silversmiths did, we often create political and economic systems to support our idols.

This results in the creation of idolatrous political and economic systems that fight against those trapped within them, even those who are genuinely trying to do the right thing — just as the political and economic structures in Ephesus fought against Paul. So, for instance, we see just such a conflict in the early United States, when the Founding Fathers who fought (sincerely enough) for the proposition “all men are created equal” nonetheless were trapped in the structure of sin known as a “slave economy” and couldn’t find a way to get rid of it. Result: Thomas Jefferson — the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and said of slavery, “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever” — never freed his own slaves. The system of slavery enslaved Jefferson to the sin of keeping slaves.

This is why the Church insists that, in addition to confronting our personal sins, these structures of sin must be battled as well, precisely because they exert pressure on us to not repent from our personal sins. And this means, as it did with ending slavery, the involvement of the state.

This is where the Church bumps up against the libertarian and individualist piety of many Americans, who reject the idea that the state has any role to play in establishing the common good. (Indeed, for some virulent strains of libertarianism, there is a denial there’s even such a thing as the common good.)

To be sure, states have themselves often embodied precisely those structures of sin that must be reformed. But the Church has never thrown the baby out with the bathwater by arguing for the abolition of the state. Rather (and more on this next time), the Church has always affirmed the state is a good given to us by God, and, even in its corrupt form, it exists for our good (see Romans 13, written when Caesar was Nero, who would eventually kill the author of Romans 13). And this is, in no small part, because the notion that structures of sin can be confronted without any involvement of the state whatsoever is like saying a battalion of tanks can be confronted by a determined individual with a BB gun.

The words of the Compendium are clear about what is required to change structures of sin: “They must be purified and transformed into structures of solidarity through the creation or appropriate modification of laws, market regulations and juridical systems [emphasis mine].” In short, individual efforts to effect change (e.g., boycotts of corporations that support abortion or use child slaves) are wonderful, but, very often, it’s necessary to change legal, political, social and economic structures by the force of law as well. Not just the citizen, but the state, has a responsibility here.

Not that this relieves the individual of any responsibility for solidarity or the common good. On the contrary, the bulk of the responsibility falls squarely on our shoulders as disciples of Jesus Christ. Of which, more next time.

BY: MARK SHEA

From: https://www.pamphletstoinspire.com/

#catholic social teaching

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lovehaswonangelnumbers · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/saturn-pluto-retrogradethe-shadow-illuminated/

Saturn & Pluto Retrograde~The Shadow Illuminated

FCGCT Commentary: All Shadows part of ourselves are simply unconsciousness that has not been made conscious. Awareness transforms into consciousness and that is how we dissolve the programming that keeps us on autopilot and allows us to anchor in our higher selves~pure light and love. We are not the programming and part of taking responsibility for our shadow is understanding it is our job to transform it.

Saturn & Pluto Retrograde~The Shadow Illuminated

By Sarah Varcas

What happens in January 2020?

You may already know we have a big moment coming up on 12th/13th January 2020 when a conjunction between Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn heralds the beginning of a new developmental cycle lasting in excess of thirty years. Whilst the actual time of the conjunction and the days around it may well present some interesting challenges (more on that nearer the time!), its real significance lies in its relevance to the evolutionary development of humanity in the coming years. When the Lord of Karma (Saturn) meets the Lord of the Underworld (Pluto) in the ambitious, responsible and pragmatic earth sign Capricorn we know we’ll be held to account in terms of how we impose our will upon the world, take responsibility for our choices and behaviour, exercise and respond to authority and generally manage the material realm.

In the final week of April 2019, first Pluto and then Saturn turned retrograde in Capricorn. Doing so at this point dictates that when they finally form their conjunction in January 2020 it happens only once rather than several times across the course of a few months. A single alignment such as this reflects an intense but relatively short-lived recalibration which sets us on a new path rapidly and with little mercy! We’re not afforded time to adjust, test the water or tip-toe out of our comfort zone. Like a bird pushed out of the nest by a well-meaning parent, we must simply learn to fly on the wing. And learn we will. That said, this conjunction is not the apocalyptic moment some may fear but instead an opportunity for an inner apocalypse of sorts: the deposing of the shadow-self which has imposed its limiting mores and constructs on us for so long we barely even know it’s there.

Deposing the Shadow Self

Both Saturn and Pluto were conjunct the South Node when they turned retrograde in April, alerting us to the risk of reviving old and unhelpful habits in the coming months. But if we use this time to reflect, realign and prepare for a meaningful new beginning in 2020, the past can become fertiliser in the present, for a rich and productive future.

This alliance with the Moon’s South Node illuminates the fears, feelings and desires which form the shadow-self. It may be unsettling at first: a threat from within that we need to keep at bay. Mobilised to keep us small and safe, fear taunts us with all the dreadful things that might happen if we dared to speak our truth, follow our desires or admit to who we truly are beneath a lifetime’s veneer of ‘acceptability’. But Saturn and Pluto have no time for such small-minded thinking. They need us awake to ourselves – warts and all. Ready and willing to embrace the freedom and responsibility that comes with unwavering commitment to truth. Between May and November 2019 they invite us, somewhat insistently, to embrace the complexity of our shadow-self as a core aspect of humanity, not some dreadful aberration best ignored.

The funny thing about the shadow is we all have one, and mostly its contents are the same as everyone else’s. But few people want to own up! The details may vary a bit, but basically it’s the usual morass of anger, lust, envy, crippling vulnerability, fear, worthlessness, hatred, greed, blah, blah, blah…. We’re simply hiding what we all share, but somewhere along the line we’ve decided we’re the only one with these feelings and we really need to make sure no one else finds out otherwise there’ll be hell to pay!! This is how we collectively prevent anyone else owning up and ensure that no-one references what’s really going on beneath the surface of pretty much everyone everywhere!

We allow the shadow to isolate and shame us into silence. We deny those parts of us which don’t fit with who we want to be and hope they’ll keep quiet. The process seems tidy and efficient, but in practice it doesn’t work so well. The energy used to keep everything hidden (including from ourselves!) is energy wasted. It’s like leaving an electrical appliance plugged in, draining power when we don’t need to. It’s costly and unnecessary. All energy is precious and needs to be respected.

But won’t everyone owning up to their shadow be a risky business? What if we can’t control it once it’s all out there?!

Owning and accepting the shadow isn’t the same as acting it out, which tends to happen from a place of unconsciousness and denial rather than conscious intent. Admitting you want to do something isn’t the same as doing it. Acknowledging certain feelings isn’t the same as acting on them. It can, however, release considerable tension and enable us to better manage our inner drives. Normalising the shadow saves us from the tyranny of the repressed. Bringing radical acceptance and fierce compassion to the wounds that create denial in the first place enables conscious intentionality in times of stress. This helps guard against aberrant actions, not encourage them. The shadow controls us as long as it’s hidden. We control it once the tables have turned and we know what’s in there and why. As Carl Jung observed, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’.

Yes, this can be tricky inner work and if we need support to do it there’s absolutely no shame in seeking it out. It’s important we nurture ourselves into deeper inner integrity however we must. Psychotherapy, homoeopathy, acupuncture, bodywork (among many other techniques) can help facilitate the process. But so can a cup of tea with a good friend who can hear us speak our truth and still love us at the end of it. And if that good friend is your cat, dog or other furry companion they can bring their own special wisdom to the table! There’s no one way to do this work, to reclaim our authentic self. We all find our own way in our own time. Saturn and Pluto simply remind us that time may just be now and extend a guiding hand, albeit into some apparently dark and difficult places.

So the rest of this year will be best used normalising what we all share and accepting, without fuss or fanfare, that we all have these troublesome tendencies. It’s simply part of being human, not some dreadful aberration which must be kept hidden on pain of death! Anger, jealousy, depression, hatred, despair, violent impulses, lust – whatever it is you’re not owning up to you can rest assured there are thousands out there not owning up to the same thing!! And whilst this may all sound a bit dramatic, conjuring images of florid breakdowns, it can really be very low-drama ‘this is just the way it is’ if we want it to be. Because that’s actually the whole point: we’re not different because we have this inner darkness. What we believe may isolate us forever, is ironically what makes us all the same! Simply accepting that all this mess comes with being human can neutralise a whole load of pain and stress in the blink of an eye!

As we purge our shadow we purge our life…

In facing our true feelings now, change may become unavoidable once Saturn and Pluto join hands in January. As such, this shared retrograde offers the chance to make inner adjustments – an acknowledgement here, an acceptance there, a turning toward something we still fear to see – before we live our truth no matter what. Come January there may indeed be bridges to burn, but there will also be new paths to walk and fresh terrains on which to plant our flag and call our own.

Of course, truth doesn’t always come in a neat and tidy package. If that’s what we’re seeking we’ve already sown the seeds of denial. Truth encompasses everything and is rarely straightforward in a world of contradiction and paradox. The truth of ourselves is complex and uncomfortable. It’s our contradictory nature which says one thing and does another, both equally heartfelt. It’s us as loving and rejecting in the same moment, as peaceful and angry, as wise and yet impulsive and unthinking. It is us as spiritual and material beings, infused with the divine whilst bound to the physical realm of form and desire.

Through the rest of this year we’re invited to walk a path that bears some pitfalls. We may have to fall down them to discover what’s real and what’s not, who we are and who we’re not. Our discoveries may shake us to the core and challenge who we believe ourselves to be. But within that challenge lies the deepest truth: that when we touch the very ground of our being, all paradoxes are resolved into the simple statement ‘this is me’, without apology, excuse or explanation.

From fear to inspiration

Events in the coming months may illuminate the fear of having our true face judged by another. Saturn and Pluto will poke at our reluctance to simply be who we are and live our beliefs without guile or veneer, revealing where we avoid taking full responsibility for our lives. They present an alternative and more radical choice: a counterpoint to the pressure to conform, stay silent or speak only the ‘right’ things in the ‘acceptable’ way.

The drive to blend-in and be part of something bigger is a defining force in the human psyche. In days gone by it was the only way to ensure survival. Going it alone was a certain path to vulnerability and death. These days many are blessed with the chance to pursue their own truths, but even in doing so still seek others to affirm their worth. The prospect of standing completely alone – naked but for our own wisdom – is profoundly unsettling and though many strive to embody such freedom, it’s a rare individual who fully does so.

But a groundswell is happening and more people each day are standing firm in their own truth, shaking off the projections foisted upon them, the imaginings of those who look on in judgement or condemnation. This aloneness is an act of power. It doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the companionship of others. But if we rely too heavily on acceptance and not enough on the transformative power of authenticity, we risk losing ourselves in the quagmire of social pressure and trending perspectives peddled as unquestionable truths.

Fear controls us in subtle ways: as the voice of reason and responsibility or the whisper of ‘common sense’. It speaks about shame and demands we explain ourselves. It tells us we cannot survive alone in a world where acceptance is the all-access pass to security and power. It points out the pitfalls without acknowledging the joyful freedom of no longer needing to hide. We may have to face this fear in the months to come. We may even slip back into a constellation of emotion we thought we’d conquered. But don’t believe the lie! These very echoes are the doorway to liberation. They show us where we’ve adhered so fast to the opinions of others we no longer recognise our true self. They reveal where our deepest vulnerabilities lay, where our sense of self-worth is threatened. In doing so they invite us to embrace the fear, be engulfed by it, allow it to flood through us like a tidal wave. By holding our nerve in its onslaught we reclaim our power to discern which fears simply diminish us and which speak words we actually need to hear.

By expanding to embrace fear rather than shrinking to accommodate it, a crippling dread can slowly morph into nervous excitement and anxious but enlivening anticipation. This is how we find the courage to say ‘no’ after decades of saying ‘yes’, or to stick with ‘I don’t know’ when pushed to take sides. Gradually and step by step, as we live more fully our own truth, fear becomes inspiration: the augur of greater authenticity and an opportunity to further embody our sovereign self.

Fear has its place, for sure, but not in the diminishment of our autonomy. To the extent that we allow it free reign without question, it will continue to shrink and belittle us. Saturn and Pluto insist it’s time to face it, acknowledge its mighty power and in so doing transform it into courage for the road ahead.

Sarah Varcas

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transhumanitynet · 5 years

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The Unprecedented Decade: A Proposed Solution to Current Global Crises

In response to various reports of ongoing crises throughout the world, this essay has been written with the aim of proposing a radical transition in the way the world currently operates. Through general observation, the case presented below posits that human labour is insuﬃcient to provide the means of modern lifestyles, and that current economic systems are incompatible with a sustainable and decent human lifestyle due to this insuﬃcient productivity. To compensate, mechanised labour has been produced and implemented to oﬀset this insuﬃciency, but at the cost of the environment and a growing human insolvency. To avoid economic and ecological disaster, this essay posits that human labour must be abandoned and replaced by sustainably powered and automated labour worldwide, simultaneously fulﬁlling the various global demands freely and obsoleting emissions-intensive mechanised labour. Doing so would eliminate economic contentions that prevent many from attaining a decent quality of life while also addressing the issue of heavily polluting industries.

Introduction

On the 9th of October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report stating that the world had 12 years to in which to take action to avoid a catastrophic change in global weather systems [1]. The document included a set of proposed “pathways” by which the world could act to combat the adverse eﬀects being caused by man-made emissions. Unsurprisingly, the main suggestion was to lower these emissions by diversifying energy generation, speciﬁcally lowering coal to 0% and oil by a signiﬁcant fraction. In addition to this, the document suggested a range of other changes, such as innovations that can disrupt the energy markets or, in a similar manner, “transform” the aforementioned pathways through technological innovation.

In a similar vein, on the 30th October, the World Wildlife Fund issued a report on the state of natural resources and assets, placing a monetary value on ecological phenomena to the tune of $125 trillion [2]. Additionally, in 2016 Credit Suisse revealed that the richest 1% of the global population owns half of the world’s wealth [3]. These reports are all indicative of issues that put the world in a precarious position. Moreover, the solutions to these problems, as some of the authors point out, are so far-reaching as to have no precedent in any society in history, and will have to be all the more extensive given that government investment into fossil fuels is increasing [4].

Despite this stark deadline and bleak global outlook, there are still options available. The IPCC lay out dozens of actions that can be taken to push back the 2030 climate change deadline, there are a number of organisations worldwide dedicated to preserving wildlife and others to ending poverty. These reports and options present good cases and make commendable suggestions of viable solutions. Moreover, a united, coordinated eﬀort is more likely to provide a decent response. The focus of this essay is not these solutions however, and instead proposes a radical strategy to address the aforementioned problems simultaneously. This proposal can potentially supplement, or be supplemented by, the original solutions, but attempts to solve the issues by considering the underlying contentions that led to the crises in the ﬁrst place.

The Global Crises of the Current Era

In 2017, The Carbon Majors Report detailed how 100 companies were responsible for 71% of carbon emissions [5]. This suggests that inaction and disregard for the environment comes from industrial and/or commercial entities, driven by demand and capital. The current trends of industry, capital and demand have resulted in a range of damaging industrial and commercial practices. To suggest better practices, we must identify the underlying contention behind them and propose an alternative approach that satisﬁes demand while avoiding economic and environmental damage. However, here we will opt for a more heuristic approach, using general observations to establish a cause of the current global crises, after which we can begin to oﬀer such alternative solutions.

To begin, we observe that the global economy is dependent on labour. We also note that in the case of human labour, the energy expended by the human body is not entirely relevant to the work it completes, nor is it always suﬃcient to meet demand. Often the payment received for this work does not reﬂect this expenditure, either underpaying, paying for the work done or overpaying to include other expenses. This payment will hence either not meet the requirements to sustain and/or motivate human labour or will cost the relevant industry more than the completed work physically accomplishes and/or is worth.

The inadequacy of human labour is even more apparent when considering the cost of a modern lifestyle, with access to high quality nutrition, healthcare and commodities. To compensate for ineﬃcient human labour, industrialisation and mechanised labour have been implemented on large scales worldwide. This strategy has improved productivity, but failed to alleviate the original contentions of human inadequacy, as the machines do not directly improve human productivity. Summarily, the use of polluting machinery in supplementing and replacing human labour not only come at the cost of human employability, but also taken a heavy toll on the environment.

Hence it becomes apparent that human labour is incapable of achieving a productivity that can provide a modern quality of life, particularly on an society-wide scale. This fact has not stopped demand for a decent, and in some luxurious, lifestyle, and has resulted in a conﬂicted global economy that emphasises short-term, concentrated proﬁtability via stagnating wages and large-scale industrialisation while sacriﬁcing long-term, widespread stability in both the economy and the environment. These factors have exasperated the global economy and environment to the point of the current crises and require extreme changes, similar in scale to those suggested by the IPCC.

No conventional economic theory provides a suﬃcient answer to these problems either. Capitalism’s focus on proﬁtability devalues any labour not in suﬃcient demand, leading to issues with human error, ineﬃcient labour and disaﬀection. Communism’s philosophy, to provide an equal and sustaining wage to workers regardless of circumstance or productivity, risks economic stagnation and/or collapse from widespread lack of production, whether due to lack of earnings/motivation or caused by widespread ineﬃciency and losses. Likewise, socialism suﬀers similar ﬂaws, though also inherits some of capitalism’s imperfections. As previously mentioned, the introduction of industrialisation to aid human labour runs into the same issues of pollution and human redundancy as before.

An Unthinkable Solution

The current crises and their underlying causes are indicative of prioritising capital and demand above environmental and inequality issues, despite clear warnings against inaction. Various institutions have their predictions on the future, but there are three likely eventualities: Revolution, insurrection or extinction. The latter two possibilities will see current civilisation and its benefactors fall either by violent means fostered through social disaﬀection or by complete civil, economic and ecological collapse respectively. The former is the only solution of the three that can provide the necessary change to preserve the environment and humanity. The world requires an industrial revolution.

To prevent these crises, the supplementation and replacement of human labour with machinery must adopt a sustainable and free approach. Gauging product value by demand or accessibility will encounter the issues of the previous section and result in social upheaval, especially as replacement labour will displace human labourers who will then lack an income, disposable or otherwise. As such, the global economy must abandon unnecessary/trivial human labour and valuations relative to human capability due to its economic incapability, and modify mechanised labour due to its pollution.

To separate it from mechanised labour, this proposed source of production is referred to as automated labour. In this essay, it is deﬁned as self-suﬃcient, subservient mechanised labour that requires minimal to no maintenance from human labourers and powered through sustainable power sources. In being so, it will require no need for human labour, and itself provide productivity in place of human labour. For this reason, its operation must not include the use of capital. Otherwise the insolvency caused by automated labour will prevent a large majority from partaking of its production, leading to large-scale insurrection.

Currently, there is a great deal of research, prototyping and realisation of purpose-built robots, from agriculture [6][7] to healthcare [8][9] to distribution [10][11]. These robots make for good candidates of automated labour in an this approach, and provide plausibility for the strategy’s success. Additionally, the prevalence of automation in modern society suggests that such trends will continue and quicken pace: a survey conducted by Deloitte found that at current rates, industries would be fully and universally automated within the next ﬁve years [12]. Arranging these into a sustainable automated global labour force, as proposed in this essay, will remove both pollution and inequality issues from the global economy, providing products to satisfy demand without heavy emissions or contentious socio-economic systems.

The benefactors of this approach will obviously depend on the intended beneﬁciaries. Regardless of private or public nature, the interest of any group within society will usually be their own interests, though the more conscientious will be concerned for other’s participation and welfare. Given the scale of automating an economy, these benefactors will likely need to interact and possibly combine to reach a mutually agreeable arrangement. To this end, the various demands from across society, and even the world, need to be taken into joint consideration and provide the basis of such an arrangement. The scale of constructing an automated economy is monumental enough without having additional delays due to opposition, disagreements and protests. Hence, implementing this approach must consider all demands and ensure they are all satisﬁed to no one group’s detriment. Avoiding further diﬃculties in implementing an automated economy should suﬃce in enforcing this ideal and ensuring all parties are heard and accommodated.

The reader is encouraged to consider what options would persuade the various demographics worldwide to abandon their labours in favour of an automated workforce. As mentioned, the most obvious approach, particularly for private concerns, would be an automated set-up that replicates their current lifestyles, made even more appealing by being freely available. This amounts to early retirement for those made redundant or insolvent, the stability and sustainability of this retirement being subject to protest from any who are neglected by the implemented automated system. The sheer scale of this venture would likely require a transitional period, where human labourers are phased out over time in favour of automated labour.

Estimated Feasibility of Global Economic Automation

In 2015, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative (MITEI) published a report, the Future of Solar, which examined the use of solar power plants and their use in energy markets, and concluded that solar panels were capable of supplying the world with all the power it demands [13]. There are various concerns in powering the world by solar, ranging from scarcity of materials such as silicon, silver, tellurium, gallium, indium and selenium to balance-of-system (BOS) costs such as installation.

Despite these concerns, the International Energy Agency (IEA) have made estimates on the capacity for solar to provide power in the future, as found in MITEI’s report. These projections have been shown to be outpaced by actual solar power implementation, resulting in more solar power generation than expected. From 2006 to 2014, the IEA World Energy Outlook showed that solar power generation has been fractionally larger than their estimates. Further to this, prices of solar power systems have also been falling sharply in recent years, improving the viability of solar power.

The scope of the aforementioned paper is large and encompasses a range of data sets and conclusions. For our purposes, we consider the proposal of an automated economy and break down costs and requirements in a much simpler fashion. For comparison, we consider a Forbes article published in 2016 detailing how 1% solar panel coverage of the Sahara Desert would fulﬁl worldwide energy demands [14], a calculation undertaken by Mehran Moalem, PhD, formerly of UC Berkeley [15]. While we intend to derive our own answer, we will be following a similar path to Moalem before moving on to calculate solar power requirements of a global automated economy.

To fully automate many of the services and solve many issues of a human driven economy, we ﬁrst need a sustainable power source, for which we have chosen solar power. Even then, we proceed only with averages and very speciﬁc solar conditions. The situation would clearly become more complicated as we examine certain regions more closely and introduce other renewable energy sources, but for now we neglect these factors. To begin, we calculate an estimate for the solar power required to fulﬁl current global energy consumption. For this, we estimate the amount of solar power available worldwide:

Earth’s Surface Area = 501,100,000km2 = 501,100,000,000,000m2,

Average Irradiance at sea level on a clear day = 1000kW/m2.

Here we have assumed an average of 12 hrs of daylight per day, when averaging out winter and summer daylight hours. This 12 hour period represents the average duration of solar irradiance for any one point on the Earth’s surface. Multiplied by the area of the Earth, we ﬁnd the total amount of solar irradiance experienced by each metre squared area to be 6.12×1018kWh. Though Moalem states that solar panels are on average capable of an eﬃciency of 25%, we assume a collection eﬃciency of 16.5%, the average for lower standards of solar panels at time of writing:

Approximate Cumulative Power= 501.1×1012m2×12hr×1000kW/m2 ≈ 6.12×1018kWh.

Average Total Power Collected = 16.5% of 6.12×1018kWh ≈ 1.00×1018kWh.

This assumes we cover the Earth with solar panels however. For our purposes, we need the fraction of the surface coverage required to meet current demands. The global energy consumption over the past two decades are given below, supplied by the International Energy Agency (IEA) [16] in kilo tonne of oil equivalent (ktoe) and used to obtain the equivalent kilowatt hour (kWh) values:

Table 1: The global energy consumption data gathered by the IEA, in 5 year intervals over the past 25 years. c OECD/IEA 2018, World Energy Balances, IEA publishing, modiﬁed by HG Haleswood. Licence: www.iea.org/t&c.

The fraction of surface coverage required can then be found by the ratio of current daily demand (or most recent demand, such as the 2015 data) to solar power incident on the Earth in a 12 hr day. This ratio can be multiplied by the Earth’s surface to obtain the required solar panel coverage:

Coverage Factor=8.71×1010kW/1.00×1018kW ≈ 8.71×10−8

Total Coverage Required=8.71×10−8 ×510.1×1012m2 = 44429710m2 ≈ 44.42km2

This ﬁgure is approximately a magnitude of 10 less than the numbers presented by Moalem. This is likely due to the above solar irradiance of a 1000kW, which is the average on a clear day at sea. Any irradiance below 1000kW yet above 100kW will increase the required area by a multiple of 10, which would come closer to the answer referenced in [14]. Thus, the area ranges from approximately 40km2 to 400km2. Here we consider the worst case scenario, requiring 400km2. The upper cost of solar panels were found to be £3000 for 8m2 (from a commercial source [17]), which is £375 per square meter. At time of writing this is around $480 per square metre, which scales to $480×106 ($480 million) per square kilometre. As these prices were found from a commercial source, the BOS costs are considered to be inclusive of this ﬁnal cost.

Multiplying this by 400km2 gives a total cost of $192×109 ($192 billion) to collect enough solar power to fulﬁl the energy consumption of the world on an average day between 2010 and 2015. Currently, the global GDP amounts to $75 trillion, which is approximately 390 times larger, while the GDP of America is $19 trillion, which is almost 100 times larger. Comparatively, Moalem cites the cost of solar panelling as 55 cents per square metre and, including the additional inverter devices and labour required to set up the solar panels, gives a minimum one-time cost of $5 trillion, which is still only about a quarter of America’s GDP, and one ﬁfteenth of the global GDP.

The world could hence satisfy its current energy demand through solar power at a fraction of its current GDP, though there would be some issues with countries whose personal GDP did not cover their percentage of the cost. This would cover all energy costs of mechanised labour supplemental to human eﬀorts and lives within the current global economy.

However this calculation only covers the global energy consumption from 2010 to 2015 in terms of generation of electricity, which only covers mechanised labour. To observe the feasibility of our proposed transition to an automated economy, we need to consider how much solar power will be needed to automate human labour. Obviously, a transition of this sort and scale will be international in nature and subject to relevant issues, but to estimate an provisional cost we assume full compliance and cooperation. We also assume that the aﬄuent have enough wealth and inﬂuence to automate their lifestyles, removing any cause for them to protest, and that human labour is largely abandoned in favour of sustainably automating the world.

The calculation for energy required to automate human labour is particularly complex, due to the diverse natures of human industry and robotic faculties. Automating human labour varies depending on the work, and the automated labour may require AI, mechanical faculties or both. To that end, the amount of energy required to do that work will clearly also vary. Furthermore, there are a vast range of labour roles, from management to knowledge bases to more trivial, manual labour, as well as interaction of these faculties. This diﬀerence in labour ultimately aﬀects the power needed to perform said labour, making an average power value across all industries diﬃcult to obtain.

Moreover, human labour includes all the faculties of the human body, relevant or not. Acquiring a minimum energy for automating human labour is diﬃcult for that reason, as it requires separating the energy expended by human labour from the likes of basal metabolic rate and other irrelevant bodily energy expenditures. As we are already dealing with estimates, and for argument’s and simplicity’s sake, we will assume that the average energy expended on labour across all human industries is 1Wh per labourer per hour and with an average of 8 work hours in a day, giving 8Wh per human labourer a day.

We will also assume that automated labour, in the form of industrial robots, on average consume 1kWh per hour per robot and with an average of 12 work hours in a day. Though these robots could be kept working indeﬁnitely, their work days are capped in consideration of their solar power supply, which we stated above as being capable of power generation for 12 hours each day. Thus, our robots yield 12kWh per robotic labourer a day. This 4 hour diﬀerence in work day hours, and the diﬀerence in work energy expenditure between 1Wh and 1kWh, will lower the number of robots required to replace human labour. Additionally, unlike human labour, which requires a constant salary, robots will only need a single one-time cost. After that, their labour is limited only by availability of materials, maintenance and power supply.

The current global employment to population ratio is currently 58.5% [18], meaning 4.44 billion of the 7.6 billion people on Earth are currently employed. Using these ﬁgures, our solar power plants must be suﬃcient to supply 35.52 billion Wh, or equivalently 35.52 million kWh. Looking back at the IEA’s global energy demands in Table 1, the daily global energy demands on average from 2010 to 2015 was 87.1 billion kWh. Adding this to our estimated energy expended by human labour gives a total of 87.135 billion kWh. The addition of human labour expenditure is thus considered barely a factor in power expended by the global economy.

More pertinent to this calculation is the cost and power consumption of the replacement automated labour. On average, an industrial robot costs anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000. To obtain a number for the automated “population” required to replace human labour, we take the ratio of work energy expenditure:

Multiplying this by the current employed population will yield the number of robots required to replace human labourers:

Number of Replacement Robots=2/3 ×10−3×4.44 billion=2.96 million

Thus, the replacement robots will require funds between $148 and $238 billion. Our grand upper total to automate the global economy is thus $325.1 billion. However, this ﬁgure represents an overestimate, given that not every job will require an industrial robot to fulﬁl it.

As initially stated, there are many other considerations ignored in this approach, such as international, private and public responses and interactions, as well as the inclusion of other renewable energy sources and the speciﬁcs of implementing an automated economy. Additionally, these estimates have not considered the rising energy demand from developing countries, as well as from potentially increasing population. Finally, while we have considered the power required to replace human labour, we have no factored into this calculation the power requirements for self-sustaining automated labour manufacture and maintenance (robots that build and maintain other robots).

Summarily, the above estimates show that global automation via solar power is hypothetically viable. The current worldwide industrial and human energy expenditures could be supplied by a suﬃciently large enough solar panelled area, at a fraction of the cost of the global GDP. Additionally, as the ﬁnal costs are calculated by considering global population, the cost required for any particular country can be found by calculating said country’s population as a percentage of global population and multiplying by the ﬁnal cost presented above.

Consequences & Considerations of an Automated Economy

The previous sections consider a fully automated global economy, and observe that the scale of such a system would require a transitional period where the automated labour is itself produced and implemented. This would require a provisional labour market to produce the replacement automated labourers, most likely a mix of human, mechanised and potentially automated labourers. Navigating this period could be contentious, aﬀected by industries’ and individuals’ assessments of the risks associated with the proposed automated economy. The conclusion of these risk assessments would give a clearer indication of how to proceed.

We assume these risk assessments will be conservative and cautious. Despite stable early retirement, a salvageable environment and a more cohesive social climate being appealing motivations, they lack the comforting assurance of capital. Additionally, the diﬀering industries are likely to automate at diﬀerent rates, resulting in some sectors requiring human labour for longer, for which capital is likely to considered useful and so remain in demand. As such, we also assume that capital will be retained as a societal mechanism during the transition. While automation is considered preferable and superior to human labour, here we note that currently unautomated industries tend to have no alternative to said human labour. This unfortunately entrenches these industries in the contentions presented in the previous sections, and makes transitioning to an automated economy diﬃcult as a result, particularly with regards to capital.

Despite this, the transition can be stabilized to a degree. With some industries automated, earnings can be proportionally scaled with the decrease in living costs. This should allow industries to employ more labourers, which in turn are dedicated to automating the industry they enter. The approach of “reskilling” labourers has already been considered recently by the Economic World Forum, providing not only precedent for the strategy, but potential guidelines [19]. Generally however, this strategy runs the risk of wealth consolidation within certain demographics. If owners/shareholders appropriate the extra capital from decreased wages instead of using it to expand their labour force, this strategy will obviously fail. Conversely, if excess capital successfully expands the remaining human industries’ labour force, the new recruits will have varying and redundant expertise, lessening their utility. Likely they would most useful as brute labour power, allowing established/experienced workers the freedom to automate their industry.

A more glaring issue in this transition is the problem of sourcing enough production and expertise to facilitate economic automation. While industrialisation and automation has already lead to many industries implementing mechanised labour, much of this labour still requires human oversight to operate properly, and not all of it produces what may be required for economic automation. Replacing human awareness with computational oversight and/or artiﬁcial intelligence will be challenging, especially if specialist expertise is insuﬃcient to automate the majority of industries. There are similar issues of “brain drain” for actually designing automated labour eﬃcient enough to replace human labour. Hence the transition strategy must be carefully considered, with the allocation of capital and specialist expertise evaluated for both potential pitfalls and optimal eﬃciency. Rather than distribute specialists across various industries, it may be more productive to focus them on certain industries at a time, particularly if there is a lack of “brain power” and production available.

To this end, we also note that in MITEI’s Future of Solar report, [13], they consider the production of certain materials required to facilitate building solar power plants. Economic automation is no diﬀerent. The various materials required to construct the automated labour for an automated economy need to be suﬃcient to supply enough labourers to oﬀset current emissions, including production of sustainable power sources. As stated previously, insolvents from these industries require a solution to their redundancy, which will either place them in a new industry or place them in retirement providing automation can suﬃciently provide for them. These constraining factors will shape the necessary strategy to avoid social upheaval, and so determine the priority and speed of automating human industry, subject to availability of specialist expertise.

Assuming an appropriate strategy and suﬃcient production are found, we now consider how an automated economy needs to be servile and satisfy demand in practice. This quality will avoid insurrection motivated by poverty/inequality/insolvency. This requires complete disintegration of capital from the automated industries, to provide freely for the insolvent and/or contribute to human labour forces or obviously risk insurrection. Forgoing the speciﬁcs of social policy for now, we also note that automated industries require a metric to measure demand and how much is required to satisfy it.

In current economic understanding, there are not many well-known or intuitive means of measuring the amount of physical work done to arrive at a product. The closest concept would be embodied energy, which is used in the construction industry. This concept values materials based on the energy required to produce them. This would provide the automated economy with a better yardstick than capital with which to measure the requirements for sourcing and manufacturing products to satisfy demand.

In application, the use of embodied energy can be simpliﬁed to basic physics. The ﬁnal value would be the mass of a product’s components multiplied by their acceleration during transit, then multiplied by the total distance travelled. For the sake of simplicity, we take the acceleration to be from rest to the maximum velocity attained during transit. Dividing this by the time taken to transit in seconds then provides the work done in Watts, providing a measure of power required to transport the materials and a measure of demand on solar power. There are further grounds for considering the entropy of the materials, especially when combining them, though this also increases the computational and power requirements of the automation.

Eventually however, automating the global economy concludes with removal of all human labour and capital from industries that do not essentially require them. Industries requiring sentience and self-awareness, with qualities such as creativity and critical thinking, are likely to remain human industries, especially where we do not/cannot trust artiﬁcial intelligence. However, at that point, automation should be so pervasive that it subsidizes earnings to the point where they are negligible or unnecessary. In such a cases, it is more likely that human labour markets are then entirely driven by personal interest while carrying no real economic consequence/responsibility. Obviously if any industry is found to be impossible to automate, it will have to retain human labour, which can be a serious problem. Drastic changes and/or crises can lead to pressuring human labour under terms it ﬁnds disagreeable, risking further social upheaval, particularly if there is no adequate return for exhaustive and exasperating work.

There also remains the issue of sourcing and eventual recycling of materials. While acquisition of raw materials can be implemented within the transition period, lower demand for or sources of raw material will lower automated labour eﬀorts to source said material. These considerations must also take in account the production and/or transportation limitations of local, national or international automated labour markets, monitoring population distributions and immigration to ensure materials are handled to adequately meet demand.

So far we have assumed full global compliance, but various countries worldwide are privy to supplies of scarce materials and/or commodity supplies. While the devaluation and removal of capital from certain industries and production lines may lower the value on various products, scarce materials and/or commodities will always carry a high value, or at least competing demands. Compliance with global automated economy will be impaired by some countries’ possession of these rare resources, and they are unlikely to supply them without an equal or greater return. This obstacle may be overcome through a mutually beneﬁcial trade agreement of materials scarce in their own countries, but it remains subject to a number of concerns, both geopolitical and cultural in nature.

Additionally, this kind of international cooperation and coordination, and even general interaction, could prove diﬃcult when considering automation of politics, especially if countries opt for AI governance. While this automation will need to be servile, its subservience can show how diﬃcult politics can be, particularly when constituents demand certain actions but expect certain other consequences. Factor into this interaction on an international level, an AI governance becomes even more diﬃcult. These problems can be seen even at the national and local levels, with conduction of military and law enforcement agencies, especially when that conduct is automated. Political and judicial automation are thus the most likely to be contentious and incite social, if not global, upheaval. Their solution will be non-trivial, but a workable strategy is likely to remove much, if not all, contention from these arenas.

Having observed the contentions inherent to transitioning to an automated economy, and even the contentions of said economy, it is clear that there is no full-proof solution to the current global crises. However, given the more stable, sustainable and productive nature of an automated economy, implementing such an approach would be far more conducive to providing and securing the environment and a higher quality of life for much of the world, including avoiding widespread social upheaval capable of universally worsening the quality of life worldwide.

The Transhumanist Appeal

Even if more rigorous calculations were done and show global economic automation to be more beneﬁcial than not, it is likely that more appealing arguments would be needed to justify the risk to current generations. This is especially true of older generations whose concerns only consider the immediate future. Mobilizing maximal global eﬀort clearly requires a future worth saving, particularly futures that oﬀer maximal beneﬁts for large and immediate investment.

To provide this motivation, we look to Transhumanism and the many innovations it intends to provide. The most appealing of these breakthroughs is increased longevity [20], as well as anti-aging and age reversal treatments [21]. It also oﬀers a wide range of more exceptional products such as body modiﬁcations, spanning a range of augmentations from 3D printed replacement organs [22] to bionic eyes [23]. In fact, DARPA has already seen success in memory prosthetics that restore and improve short term memory [24]. Speculatively, these same modiﬁcations would advance even further given a stable, cohesive society, especially over the course of an extended life. Such advancements would lead to restored or improved motor function and bodily autonomy with enhanced prosthetics or via gene therapy and genetic engineering.

Of course, longer, more luxurious lifespans need stability to lower the risks of interruption and even termination. Supplies and resources, and with them social and civil cohesion, are required in order to live comfortably and without the risk of subversion. We have already considered the state of aﬀairs that can lead to these issues and their solution, an automated economy. As such, the motivation for and means of automated economy go comfortably handin-hand, such that an extended lifetime will require an automated economy, or otherwise be reserved for the aﬄuent, which will incite protest and resistance due to both their privileged longevity and the fact that they have sequestered it from others. And as automation can so easily replace human labour, there appears no real justiﬁcation to continue using human labour forces and no reason to prevent them accessing the same longevity either, providing it is sustainably automated.

Returning to the point at hand, Transhumanist principles oﬀer many intriguing technological advances and the promise of further innovations in the future, including such experiences as space exploration and extraterrestrial colonies, breakthroughs in entertainment and recreation, gene therapy, physiological enhancements and so on. Furthermore, the prevalence of cosmetic surgery suggests that Transhumanist sentiments could be fostered within the mainstream. Indeed, there have already been reports of, admittedly unsavoury, methods of age-reversal [25], suggesting that Transhumanist means of increased lifespan would not be dismissed outright.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have summarised the global economy in a axiomatic fashion, condensing the current crises as the result of the following contentions:

Human labour lacks the productivity to sustain a healthy, modern lifestyle without concessions from their industry and/or society.

Mechanised labour is used to supplement and replace human labour, to the detriment of the environment.

These two points are considered foundational causes of the current crises throughout the world. The inadequacy of human labour and the pollution of compensating mechanised labour have resulted in trade, class and military wars throughout the world in attempts to ensure as high a quality of life as possible to the perpetrators. To ﬁx these issues, this essay has suggested a major overhaul of the global labour markets, replacing human labour with sustainably powered robotics in markets that do not require human labour, freeing many necessities and commodities from capital requirements while simultaneously removing the need for fossil fuels. Failure to do so will result in either environmental disaster or violent social upheaval.

Given the amateur nature of this essay, this proposal has not been rigorously researched, trialled or simulated and so lacks proper validation. A number of alternative solutions may be viable, but under conventional economic theory that demands human labour, these solutions will continue to suﬀer the above contentions. Additionally, this essay has avoided overly examining policy and politics, in an attempt to provide a general approach that may be tailored to ﬁt countries according to their need and cultures. Given the dire state of much of the world and its worsening circumstances, the author suggests that current action against global crises make joint eﬀorts to investigate the aspects of this approach related to their causes. If rigorously shown to be successful/beneﬁcial, clearly it would provide crucial counsel to the relevant policy makers and a genuine, eﬀective response to the aforementioned crises.

Regardless of approach, the world has just over 10 years to make widespread and unparalleled changes to address the mounting crises. In conclusion, to survive, we must undertake the most unprecedented decade.

References

[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climte Change. Global Warming of 1.5◦CC. 2018, October 9. Retrieved from http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ [2] World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2018: Aiming Higher. 2018, October 30. Retrieved from https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge hub/all publications/living planet report 2018/ [3] Credit Suisse Research Institute. Global Wealth Report 2016. 2016, November. Retrieved from http://publications.credit-suisse.com/index.cfm/publikationenshop/research-institute/global-wealth-report-2016-en/ [4] International Energy Agency. World Energy Investment Report 2018. Retrieved from https://www.iea.org/wei2018/ [5] Griﬃn, P. The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017. 2018, July. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuelcompanies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change [6] Noguchi N. Agricultural Vehicle Robot Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics. 2018; 30(2): 165-172. (https://doi.org/10.20965/jrm.2018.p0165). [7] Sujon MDI, Nasir R, Habib MMI, Nomaan MI, Baidya J, Islam MR. Agribot: Arduino Controlled Autonomous Multi-Purpose Farm Machinery Robot for Small to Medium Scale Cultivation. 2018 International Conference on IntelligentAutonomous Systems (ICoIAS), Singapore. 2018; 155-159. Retrieved from https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/IR-09-2014-0396 [8] Morales ER. Patent Number: US9358682B2. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US9358682B2/en [9] Lohmeier S. Patent Number: US20160120611A1. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160120611A1/en [10] Gussu TW, Lin CY. Autonomous Flyer Delivery Robot. Information and Communication Technology for Development for Africa. 2018; 203-208. [11] Peterson K et al. Patent Number: US20180300676A1. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180300676A1/en [12] Deloitte LLP. Deloitte Global RPA Survey. 2018. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/bg/en/pages/technology/articles/deloitte-global-rpa-survey2018.html. [13] Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative. The Future of Solar Energy. 2015. Retrieved from http://energy.mit.edu/research/future-solar-energy/ [14] Forbes, Moalem M. We Could Power The Entire World By Harnessing Solar Energy From 1% Of The Sahara. 2016, September 22. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-byharnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/#1b248801d440 [15] Moalem M. Could the world feasibly switch to all-nuclear power generation? If so, would that be a good counter to global warming? 2016, December 19. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/Could-the-world-feasibly-switch-to-all-nuclearpower-generation-If-so-would-that-be-a-good-counter-to-globalwarming/answer/Mehran-Moalem [16] International Energy Agency. Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES) by source. 2018. Retrieved from https://www.iea.org/statistics/?country=WORLD&year=2016&category=Key%20indicators&indicator=TPESbySource&mode=chart&categoryBrowse=false&dataTable=BALANCES&showDataTable=true [17] The Eco Experts. Solar Panel Cost: How Much Do Solar Panels Cost to Install in 2018? Retrieved from https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/cost [18] International Labour Organization, ILOSTAT database. Data retrieved in September 2018. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.EMP.TOTL.SP.ZS [19] World Economic Forum, Boston Consulting Group. Towards a Reskilling Revolution: Industry-Led Action for the Future of Work. 2019, January 22. Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/towards-a-reskilling-revolutionindustry-led-action-for-the-future-of-work [20] Xu M et al. Senolytics improve physical function and increase lifespan in old age. Nature Medicine. 2018; 24: 12461256.(https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0092-9). [21] Latorre E, Torregrossa R, Wood ME, Whiteman M, Harries LW. Mitochondria-targeted hydrogen sulﬁde attenuates endothelial senescence by selective induction of splicing factors HNRNPD and SRSF2. Aging (Albany NY). 2018; 10:1666-[22] Vijayavenkataraman S, Yan WC, Lu WF, Wang CH, Fuh JYH. 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs for regenerative medicine. Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews. 2018; 132:296-332. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addr.2018.07.004). [23] Blanckaert J et al. Patent Number: US10123869B2. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US10123869B2/en [24] Hampson RE et al. Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall. 2018 Journal of Neural Engineering. 2018; 15:036014. (http://stacks.iop.org/1741-2552/15/i=3/a=036014). [25] Irving D. Young bloodmagic or medicine? 2018, March 16. Retrieved from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-young-bloodmagic-medicine.html 1681. (https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101500).

The Unprecedented Decade: A Proposed Solution to Current Global Crises was originally published on transhumanity.net

#ecological #Economics #global #labor #labour #policy #research #solutions #transhuman #transhumanist #crosspost #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #thetranshumanity

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queernuck · 7 years

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Red Jerseys, Red Flags

When discussing notions of third-worldism, many refer to laborers in the first world as the “labor aristocracy” in a manner that prevents any meaningful realization of class consciousness within the first world, that development of the hyperreal globe has in fact been met with a deterioration of the “Real” globe beyond any relationship except antagonism between the first and third world, that the subjugation of workers in the first world is part of structuring them as the “labor aristocracy” or as a sort of petite-bourgeoisie. In order to point out the apparent ridiculousness of inadequate definitions of “working class” or “proletarian” some have joked that the standards applied would make professional athletes into proletarian workers, that in effect the bourgeoisie would even be sublimated into the working class, that there would be such an uneven structuring within class that any consciousness would be a false consciousness.

While the means by which this critique is structured often rely upon a specific concept of the first world that in fact validates the ideology of capitalism over material or structuralist critique, the idea of a proletarian class of athletes is itself rather promising in order to discuss the means by which one perceives the value of work, of the worker, how labor is structured within the relation of its consumption to the production of a space where it may be in turn enacted. That athletic performance is measured in statistics and percentages is familiar to retail workers, often gauged on how often they accomplish certain goals during a work day, such as selling a specific product or a certain amount of product.

The purpose of retail workers is far greater than merely providing a product: the popularity of Amazon shows that there is an enormous profitability to be found in specifically eliminating retail from the chain of consumption, such that the costs of distribution may be eliminated, that warehouses may be in fact turned into the storefront removed. The use of “emotional labor” in order to describe personal relationships has obfuscated the specific use of the term in order to describe women working in retail, and the way in which women are in fact expected to perform a certain sort of labor as a retail worker even if it does not result directly in a sale.

Emotional labor is constituted by an engagement with the customer, the presenting of a face to the customer such that they may create a notion of the self, such that they may affirm their selfhood and moreover may enter into a sort of idealized relationship with this retail worker. The harassment faced by retail workers is structured by the same misogyny found in harassment of sex workers in that it is often only passingly sexual, that the reaction sought by a crude comment is not an actual sexual encounter, but in fact a sort of secondary libidinal investment that inscribes itself as an expression of the same relations upon the body of the worker in question, an assertion of the woman as desired-phallus, who is obtained through the action of harassment. That there is so much idealization of sex work that involves a relation between the sex worker and a man supporting her is not accidental, but in fact is part of remaking the violence at hand, the libidinal investment that makes it intelligible. The man is in fact not only seeking a certain sort of relationship, but seeking it in order to express a certain relation of the phallic, in order to assert himself in a hierarchical dominance over the woman that can then be expressed through the flow of money. Separating this from retail work is frequently done in a fashion that does nothing to meaningfully affirm the violence that surrounds sex work, that specifically separates sex work from other sorts of labor in order to singularize it rather than critique the structures of power that allow such violence to be exerted as part of labor.

That performance in athletes is often sexualized for women, is often racialized, is specifically in assemblages of violence that have colonial origins, are an expression of colonial control. The manner in which collegiate sports specifically operate on a model of control that promises professional employment, that operates as a mirror to the neoliberalism of the Academy as adjuncts take on more and more of the academic load of maintaining a college while tenure is given to professors who spend more time wooing alumni and governments than they do teaching is specifically the transformation of the school as a concept, and that so many critiques of the NCAA in fact focus upon professors within fields that are either not sufficiently neoliberal, or are yet to be specifically structured within a neoliberal articulation is their greatest failing. The means by which the student-athlete is structured relies upon assuming a certain racialized concept of the athletic body, a recourse to aesthetics of the jock and the nerd that are repeated in a racialized context, even frequently sexualized as well such that one can only read them within the sort of denied-Oedipus, the Oedipalization of the academic.

This continues in professional athletics, where one indeed finds a sort of bourgeoisie, but a bourgeoisie structured by precarity: basketball and football are structured by sudden, dramatic artistry in their movements and confrontations that often require the breaking of the body, such that the structure of the sport as a means of creating entertainment out of bloody confrontation is difficult to mistake. Aesthetics of affinity, of conflict, of parties meeting in war are established, such that a petite-bourgeoisie, a labor aristocracy can buy season tickets, wear $350 jerseys, and sip $15 beers while enjoying a game. The creation of the basketball game as an event of meta-sport akin to a fashion show, where sitting front row is part of appearing, of creating one’s appearance as a celebrity, is unmistakable. That fans such as Gucci Mane are genuine is hard to doubt, and this is not meant to be a polemic against them nor against the athletes. Rather, it is discussing how the leagues in question are specifically welcoming of the spectacular.

That the NHL ostentatiously denies this singularization, that it adopts a certain sort of mentality that preserves the same individual structuralism but within a larger arboreality of the team, down into the minor leagues (not nearly as extensive as baseball’s but still rather large) is part of realizing this when faced directly with whiteness. PK Subban, star defenseman of the Nashville Predators, was criticized for “dancing” during warmups by Mike Milbury, who called Subban a “clown” and has been rightfully mocked for doing so. The NHL is not immune to players with character, although it frequently punishes its presence, even more so if the player in question is not white. Subban was standing around during warmups, happened to be in the camera’s focus, was in fact showing a consciousness of the state of affairs that the rink constitutes, a profound awareness that is necessary given the structuralist nature of hockey as a sport contained within the rink-structure. That Milbury, a mediocre player and failed General Manager who once went after a fan with his own shoe during his days as a player for the Bruins, was commenting on Subban is indicative not of a particular racism on Milbury’s part, but its presence in a larger structure of racism in sport.

That Milbury did not directly racialize his comments does not mean that the comments were free from racial weight: Subban has been followed by his own blackness his entire career, from Montreal to playing in rival Boston, to his new home in Nashville. Subban is by all neoliberal standards a model player: while he occasionally lapses into “selfishness” on the ice, this is matched by how this selfishness is specifically part of a consciousness of his value to the team, that the volume with which he calls for the puck is matched only by the roar of the crowd after he slaps a blocker-side top-shelf goal. He is constantly smiling and friendly in media engagements, and has not only endowed a Montreal children’s hospital with $10,000,000 but has followed it up with regular visits. In short, Subban is an athlete so perfect it is all but unthinkable, he presents the perfect figure to project one’s concepts of respectability onto. And even this is not enough, it is not enough to save him from the structural violence of antiblackness.

If he cannot be saved, who can be? The structuring of violence in the first world is not independent of violence in the third; that there are indeed benefits that come from being closer to the bourgeoisie directing neocolonial control is not much different from affinity to the landlords shown by well-to-do peasants described by Mao, in that it specifically relies upon a relationship of rejecting class consciousness, not an impossibility of it. Colin Kaepernick has provided a phenomenal example of what an athlete working from paradigms of class consciousness can do, rather than feeding into a singular neoliberal paradigm of charity, he has specifically used his wealth to engage in a performativity of the radical, a performativity that enters into semiotics of structural Maoism.

In short, if anyone is to be found leading the vanguard, perhaps it will be Colin Kaepernick.

#PK Subban #Nashville Predators #Colin Kaepernick #hockey #football #ESPN #NCAA #Maoism #alain badiou

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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Are you still doing the Animorphs reviews? If so, Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret.

Short opinion: One of my friends was gently poking fun at me for reading trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children*, so I read the scene from the beach on D-Day aloud to the whole room. No one has poked fun at my reading material since then, and two people have since asked to borrow my copies of the series.

Long opinion:

Elfangor’s Secret might have the most social commentary of any book in the entire series—even #9 and #40 pale in comparison—but it delivers that commentary in a way that is subtle, nuanced, and doesn’t resort to black-and-white thinking. The way it accomplishes that goal is through using the opening scene to suggest that even Our Intrepid Heroes have the potential to develop some incredibly toxic ideas if raised in a society that sufficiently encourages them.

Tobias opens the book by wistfully watching some humans slaves (apparently) enjoying themselves, because in this universe he’s an ignorant little jerk who has been taught not to consider the extreme drawbacks of being enslaved and can only see that the slaves get to be on the beach while he does not. Marco is living with two healthy, engaged parents and his very own Pong system… at the expense of referring to people of Latino descent as “jungle rats” (MM3). Cassie is at least kind to her slaves, which doesn’t exactly nullify the fact that SHE OWNS SEVERAL SLAVES. Ax and Rachel end up outside of the Racist Hatefest for different reasons (Rachel, at least, tried to fight back—go Rachel). Jake engages in so much xenophobic, narcissistic, paranoid posturing that he might as well be POTUS wearing his insecurities printed on a t-shirt. Although the book’s narration doesn’t excuse his behavior, it does explain why he’s so desperate to fit in with the status quo: in Nazi America, he has grown up his entire life being told that he is inferior because of his “Jewish blood” (MM4).

This book wastes no time at all in thoroughly condemning everything from Jake’s contempt for other races to Cassie’s and Tobias’s willingness to minimize the horror of slavery. It shows that in a world where the U.S. doesn’t take advantage of the innovative ability of all its residents—regardless of race or religion or nationality—its technology and economy not only don’t advance but actually backslide by several decades. Not only does the book condemn the atrocity of imperially-driven foreign war, but it actually lampoons the concept by showing the idiocy of Jake and Marco being so concerned with whether “decent” people own all the land in Brazil when they have much bigger concerns like, say, the impending annihilation of their entire species by the yeerks. But the opening sequence also shows how easy it is to slide into that kind of counterfactual thinking.

The Animorphs aren’t inherently bad people (well, maybe—but that’s a debate for another time) but they develop a lot of truly atrocious ideas when they’ve grown up their whole lives drinking the poison of their uber-nationalist white-supremacist government. It’s the same poison that the Princeton student who can’t see beyond Cassie’s skin color long enough to treat her as a human being has been drinking all his life. The same poison that makes several hundred English archers believe their only path to glory or meaning in life is through slaughtering hundreds of French knights as a part of some conflict they don’t even understand. The same poison that drives the Nazi soldiers to try and conquer the world so they can wipe out anyone who doesn’t look like them. The same poison that makes the sailors at Trafalgar look at Rachel as an object not a person. The same poison that causes Visser Four to view the humans as livestock to be corralled or slaughtered.

However, as disturbing as this book is in its portrayals of nationalism and racism, it also shows that anyone who is willing to overlook surface differences not only can but must fight back. As horrifying as Nazi America is in the first scene, it is still a world in which Rachel is definitely a “subversive” and Cassie is probably on her way to becoming one as well. When Tobias first pops up in Princeton in the 1930s, he gets a skin-crawly sense of wrongness at the realization that 100% of the students are white males even though he himself has the necessary privilege to “belong” there. Marco describes his own decision to kill Visser Four as a “stain on the conscience,” correctly realizing that just because the yeerk isn’t human doesn’t mean that he isn’t killing a sentient being, much less an unarmed prisoner of war—and even then he only kills Visser Four quickly to spare the yeerk a slow death. Ax spends a lot of this book desperately trying to find some greater meaning in the battles he witnesses, but after Rachel describes the Holocaust to him he comes to the realization that sometimes the only way to stop an unthinkable wrong from happening is through committing a wrong as well.

The ordinary humans themselves also come out of the woodwork to protest the divisions between them. The one Princeton student, Friedman, immediately speaks up on Cassie’s behalf when Davis addresses her with a racial slur. Ax is moved by the devastating kindness of “Doc,” an Allied soldier who dies trying to comfort a fatally injured comrade. Adolph Hitler himself, raised in a world different from the one that let him become a demagogue, is a humble truck driver who hesitates to shoot an alien he doesn’t know anything about. All of these people—and the Animorphs themselves—face a choice. They can do what is easy, through accepting the message that they are somehow superior simply because of their birth status or national identity. Or they can do what is right, through fighting back against those divisions long enough to reach out to their fellow humans and make radical steps toward peace.

*Just to be clear: I am not in any way implying that the Animorphs books aren’t trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children. They were literally commissioned as a marketing tactic to sell AniTV and transformer toys to kids, they use alien species and fictional technologies to ask important questions about the boundary conditions of humanity, they were all (except Visser) published straight to paperback, and they are deliberately written in a way that children as young as six or seven can enjoy but also learn from them. I’m saying that the fact that they are trashy sci fi paperbacks meant for small children does not in any way preclude them from having extreme violence, literary merit, or moral imperatives.

#animorphs reviews #tigriswolf #elfangor's secret #mm3 #asks #answers #animorphs #genocide tw #racial slurs #ultranationalism #we're living in scary times right now #this book feels like it's more important every day #stay safe out there my friends

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englishlistwords · 4 years

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When one sets out to compile a list like the Top Ten Libertarian Rock Bands, one is faced with a few challenges:

Rock purists will object and say, “Hey, they’re not libertarian!” because most rock purists balk at libertarian ideas.

Libertarian purists will object and say, “Hey, they’re not libertarian!” because they refuse to touch with a ten-foot pole anything that could remotely violate the non-aggression principle.

There simply aren’t many outspoken libertarians in mainstream rock today.

My response is that sometimes people are libertarian by accident. Wasn’t rock n’ roll born in an anti-establishment, anti-authority environment? Even many leftist rock bands (i.e., nearly all rock bands) produce a lot of individual songs that could be libertarian-sympathetic, whether they are anti-war or anti-authority.

With that said, these are the top 10 libertarian rock bands, in no particular order.

1. Rush

The classic case of a libertarian band is Rush, whose influence and popularity is hard to overstate. Rush are prog-rock royalty. It’s hard to believe that their immense, progressive sound and musical virtuosity is produced by a mere three men.

Not only has Rush’s 40 year career made them a highly venerated rock band in general, but the main lyricist and octopus drummer, Neil Peart, was often inspired by the great classical liberal novelist, philosopher, and left-wing punching bag Ayn Rand. That fact is apparent on several Rush songs such as The Trees (an allegory of smaller trees complaining about larger trees simply for being larger and hogging all the light), A Farewell to Kings (fairly self-explanatory), 2112 (an epic story of a dystopian future of absolute rule), Anthem (the same title as a Rand novella), and the hit Tom Sawyer (paints a picture of a rugged, Randian individualist).

2. Muse

The British-born Muse is one of the freshest, most popular art rock bands making music today. They share several things with Rush: the same band member count, a mono-syllabic quadruple character name, as well as an affinity for “progressive” song-writing. In addition, Muse adds a healthy dose of piano, synthesizer, pop-style melodies, and Black Sabbath-esque metal/hard rock guitar riffs.

Muse lyrics tend to be highly skeptical and critical of the established powers. Lead singer Matthew Bellamy likes Henry George (a sort of Marxist on land-ownership, but libertarian on everything else) and “left-libertarianism”.

Looking at their music catalog, a non-aggression principle fan could find plenty with which to identify. The 2006 album “Black Holes and Revelations” opens with a not-so-subtle attack on a political figure entitled Take a Bow. Others like Exo-Politics, Assassin, and Knights of Cydonia have subversive/individual liberty themes.

The political rebellion increases on subsequent albums the Resistance and the 2nd Law (see the Uprising, Resistance, and Supremacy).

When we finally come to the album Drones in 2015, the civil disobedience is at fever pitch. The album’s theme “drones” applies not only to the controversial unmanned aircraft used by the US military, but also to the idea that the average citizen or soldier could become an unthinking shell, doing whatever they’re told. See songs like Reapers and Psycho.

3. The Kinks

You may be thinking, The Kinks? The “You Really Got Me” band from the 60s? That’s right, the Kinks. It’s a little known fact that “You Really Got Me” is a subtle ode to overzealous police arrests. While that is actually not true at all, there is a lot more to the Kinks than their biggest hit.

Much of the Kinks’ catalog is in fact dedicated to decrying the initiation of force, the welfare state, clandestine spying, or other big government woes. There is perhaps no better example of this than “20th Century Man” on the 1971 album Muswell Hillbillies. Front-man and songwriter Ray Davies sings:

I was born in a welfare state fueled by bureaucracy

Controlled by civil servants and people dressed in grey

Got no privacy, got no liberty

‘Cause the 20th century people took it all away from me

And this was 1971. Oh Ray, if you could see us now. Actually, he can. He is still living and still making music. Hm, funny. Anyway, there are some other libertarian gems on Muswell Hillbillies such as Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues, where Ray’s paranoia causes him to worry greatly – about things that are kinda true; and Here Come the People In Grey, a tribute to intrusive government workers.

Some other standout tracks from the Kinks on this subject would be:

Brainwashed, sung to a retired World War I vet who has grown dependent on and trusting of the powers that be

Some Mother’s Son, a beautiful, tragic ballad about men dying in war

Live Life, an exhortation to keep cool and do your own thing in spite of political upheaval and media sensationalism

Got To Be Free, an expression of longing to, well, be free

4. BackWordz

Though BackWordz is the newest band on this list, they are probably also the most outspoken and plainly libertarian. Their mission is a sort of libertarian evangelization through the vehicle of Linkin Park-esque metal drenched in hip hop. They are no joke, as their debut album “Veracity” charted at number 2 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. This is remarkable for a couple reasons. The first is the fact they are an independent artist with no major label backing. Another reason is that they are not the typical anger-infused, chest-beating hard rock band – as a sampling of their song titles shows:

Individualism, railing against collectivism and affirming the right of secession

Self-Ownership, criticizing the idea that the State can save us

Praxeology, a term developed by libertarian super-hero Ludwig von Mises, is the study of human action – has any rock band ever had Ludwig von Mises as the subject of a song?

Statism says: “I’m on a life mission to abolish all the government”

Democracy Sucks, the title says it all

One of the most radical bands to come out in a while, I look forward to seeing where BackWordz goes. They have potential to hugely expand their audience with their high-quality production and song-writing. Let the songs get a listener’s blood pumping first and once the lyrics start the sink in, perhaps some minds can be changed.

5. Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper is the father (not mother) of shock rock. As his band was developing in the late 60s, Alice says:

…it was quite obvious that rock was full of idols and heroes, but there were no villains. I couldn’t find a villain in the bunch. I thought, ‘If nobody wants to play Captain Hook, I do!’

Not only did Alice Cooper cause parents with conservative values heartburn about his affinity for rebellion, horror film lore, and a creepy stage show, he might well also cause statists alarm.

He has an anti-political streak and says

I hate politics with a passion…I know people incorporate politics into rock n’ roll – and I think that the antithesis of rock n’ roll is politics. That would be like me singing the Dow Jones report.

He elsewhere says:

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.”

(Note: it’s a separate question whether or not the Washington Journal contains good ideas.) Not only does he want his music free of politics, but he has several gems that outright attack and lampoon politicians and the whole process. His latest album “Paranormal” especially has some politically skeptical tracks, something any libertarian could appreciate. Some standout songs would be:

Elected, about a pompous spotlight-phile running for office

Rats, could be how the elites and rulers see the populace

Lock Me Up, a taunt to those who don’t like what Alice has to say: “You can take my head and cut it off but you ain’t gonna change my mind”

Freedom, an anti-authority anthem for freedom of expression

Private Public Breakdown, about a politician who has lost his grip of reality (soooo, all politicians; Alice possibly has Donald Trump in mind)

6. The Interrupters

Remember the late 90s? The Mighty Mighty Bosstones were skanking all over the radio, welfare reform had been achieved, and the President of the US declared that the era of big government was over. Congress actually passed a “balanced” budget. The correlation between ska/punk and smaller government is undeniable. Now, that connection has reemerged in the form of the female-fronted punk band, the Interrupters.

There is a very real chance that the Interrupters have a Ron Paul sticker somewhere on their gear, because their front woman, Aimee Allen, actually wrote Ron Paul’s presidential campaign song. As you’d expect from someone with such good taste in candidates, many of the Interrupters songs center on the ideas of liberty.

Not only are the lyrics libertarian-friendly, but the songs are just plain good songs. Chuck Berry style guitar leads overlay no-frills punk rock songwriting with rich vocal harmonies. The melodies and progressions are so catchy, the only way your foot won’t be tapping along is if it is tied down by some oppressive police state. Some of my favorites are:

Liberty, a pretty straightforward lament about the rights we are losing

Babylon, uses biblical imagery, encouraging listeners to “rebel against the kings of Babylon” – even mentions money-printing to the delight of Austrians everywhere

Can’t Be Trusted, celebrating the reasons for us not to trust the authorities

Take Back the Power, a pretty transparent message

Outrage, about the tendency of people nowadays to be constantly outraged about something, anything

7. Megadeth

One of the “Big Four” in thrash metal, Megadeth are heavy metal titans who have been head-banging since 1983. Heavy metal is a genre whose imagery is rife with libertarian sympathies: oppressive tyrants, bloody warfare, rebellion against the ruling powers, and on and on. Megadeth takes the prize for anti-state themes in their songs, in spite of frontman and former Rick Santorum endorser Dave Mustaine being politically nonsensical sometimes. (They also take the prize for “Band Name Most Likely Created By A Middle Schooler.”) If we can look past the Santorum misstep, Dave comes sort of close to embracing libertarianism: “I probably [am] a lot more along the lines of what a Libertarian is”.

The title track of “Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying?” is a metal classic, and although it comes short of chucking the whole state apparatus, it raises some pertinent questions:

What do you mean I couldn’t be the president of the United States of America? Tell me something. It’s still “We the people” RIGHT?

Holy Wars decries wars of religion in which “brother kills brother.” Symphony of Destruction chillingly warns of giving a dictator absolute control:

Take a mortal man, put him in control. Watch him become a god, watch peoples’ heads-a-roll.

Dave and co. have really nailed it, though, on their most recent Grammy-winning album, Dystopia. Track after track describe a tyrannical government coupled with a decaying society. In addition, it’s right up there with Megadeth’s best albums. The title track is about what you’d think, and includes the line “What you don’t know, the legend goes, can’t hurt you. If you only want to live and die in a cage.” Perhaps my favorite is The Emperor, a snarling punk outcry against the man in charge, pointing out what should be obvious (no clothes).

8. NOFX

Finding a punk band that appreciates private property is tough. There are many who are great on criticizing the U.S. war machine (Anti-Flag, Bad Religion) or presidents with the last name Bush (Green Day). These are noble things to be sure. Sadly, there just are not any major punk bands that haven’t drunk the socialist Kool Aid (red Kool Aid, presumably). NOFX is not too different in that respect. However, they are right on several key issues: foreign policy (see We March To The Beat Of Indifferent Drum), freedom of expression (see Separation of Church and Skate), and freedom of speech (see Freedumb). What sets NOFX over the top is their tribute to actual real libertarianism, The Plan. In it they sing:

Call us libertarian, cause we do as we please Don’t need fear, or force, or farce to know morality Morals aren’t a substance you can shove in someone’s ear They’re basically a byproduct of, a mind thinking clear

Having come up in the 90s, it’s also refreshing that they don’t appear to buy into today’s identity politics. Their songs are littered with rude, locker room humor, and they poke fun at all sorts of different demographics. While this may cause some to take offense, at least NOFX do not advocate locking people in prison just for speaking. Indeed, if the Social Justice Warriors ever take over (Lord, please no), expect to see NOFX albums at the top of the burn pile.

9. Thrice

Thrice has wandered the back alleys between the “metalcore”, “post-hardcore”, and “indie rock” sub-genres since 1998, and still going strong at the time of this writing. In a Thrice song, you can’t be sure if you might hear screaming, beautiful singing, acoustic guitar, keyboards, or face melting metal licks. Themes of personal brokenness, relational challenges, theology, social evils, and distrust of the status quo fill lyricist/frontman Dustin Kensrue’s lyrics. Kensrue doesn’t seem to embrace a particular political ideology, but admits “I would align with a fair amount of Libertarian stuff at times.”

You may be able to guess this from songs like “Blood on the Sand“, a condemnation of the US wars in the Middle East or “Under a Killing Moon“, a song about totalitarian leadership in search of “witches to burn.” “Doublespeak” examines the tendency of people to not want to know the truth about “who pulls the strings.” “Black Honey” shows the folly and futility of wars in the Middle East, comparing the US government to someone slapping a swarm of bees and wondering why they get stung. “The Earth Will Shake” is an awesome, skull-pounding chain-gang spiritual about prisoners longing for freedom – and if the earthquake doesn’t topple the prison walls, this song will.

10. Bob Dylan

It would probably be folly to label Bob Dylan “libertarian,” as he is generally impossible to label. Dylan has unquestionably shaped popular music since the 60s. A few years after he started playing folk, he exchanged his acoustic guitar for an electric guitar and started accompanying his beautiful, poetic, cryptic lyrics with rock music. Outrage from many of his folk fans followed. However, having heard this new sound, it occurred to the Beatles and every other rock band at the time that their songs didn’t have to all be about puppy love. Dylan has taken so many forked roads in his career that no one (and perhaps not even he) can guess where he will go next.

Maybe it’s that whole “I do what I want” attitude that contributes to the streaks of liberty found in many of his songs. Though his protest songs from the 60s are usually associated with the left, which was doing most of the protesting, libertarians can still latch on to:

Masters of War, a bleak condemnation of war profiteers

With God on Our Side, exposes the inconsistency of how cultures justify war, and who we choose for enemies and allies

Blowin’ in the Wind, his classic, hit song that asks questions like “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” and “How many deaths will it take ’til he knows that too many people have died?”

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, a lament about how people often want to “stone you” for minding your own business and doing your own thing

Man of Peace, a scathing blast at politicians and people in power: “Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.”

I Shall Be Released, a beautiful folk/gospel ballad of a prisoner looking forward in hope to his freedom

Honorable Mentions

It’s a good thing that not all of the contenders would fit in a group of 10 – we need more libertarian artists! So here are some honorable mentions:

LEAH, an independent artist who plays fantasy/celtic influenced metal. She has a few songs that hint at her own personal beliefs, which are libertarian.

Tatiana Moroz is a singer/songwriter with a beautiful voice who worked with the Ron Paul presidential campaigns and is active in the cryptocurrency community.

Jordan Page is a singer/songwriter who campaigned with Ron Paul. A hard rock sound and solid, liberty-themed lyrics.

Anti-Flag is a politically radical punk band – great on anti-war and government oppression themes, but not so great on private property. Check out “Die For Your Government” or “911 For Peace.”

Incubus is a massively popular alternative rock band who rose to fame in the 90s. Song themes include hubris in political leaders and thinking for yourself.

Thrash metal is back, and Havok brings the liberty message along with copious amounts of hair banging around. Give a listen to “Give Me Liberty…Or Give Me Death.”

My ego is not so great that I would dream of being near the top 10, but if you’d like to check out my own libertarian music, my song “Send In The Tanks” could be a good start.

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