Remember Americans - Body Count Doesn't Matter Until/Unless It Effects the Economy

China took and is taking massive economic hits in its drastic martial/medieval response to the SARS-CoV2 outbreak. 

China reacted to this like it was a bio-weapons attack. (not saying that it was, but we've established to an acceptable level of confidence that it was at the very least a "gain of function" accident.)

Neither wing of the one party American system is psychologically capable of conceiving the kinds of measures the situation may demand. The U.S. is grossly under prepared on any level to deal with either an objective biological threat, or, the mass hysterical infodemic threat that SARS-CoV2 has already clearly demonstrated itself to be.

Ensuring profit is the one and only goal of any response American governance is capable of mustering. So what it comes down to is this. American political leadership MUST pretend that this outbreak is nothing worse than a bad strain of the cold or flu, period. 

Now, we've already established in Washington state and in Illinois - that community spread with no known travel is underway. So it's here and it's propagating. 

Knowing America as you do, do you expect American infection rates to mirror cruise ship levels ~20% or Korean Tard levels ~80% infection rates?

If you get 50% of the population infected all at once, we're done.

We don't have the means to do bulk testing.

We have limited capacity to treat people who go past flu-like symptoms.

If you try and force everybody to stay at home you may as well just switch off the lights. The real problem - however - will be the number of poor people still well enough to crawl to work.

For tens of millions it is show up for work or sleep in the car. 

Not to mention the ones who show up for work everyday but are still forced to sleep in the car. 

If the most severe aspects of the outbreak run like wildfire through the elderly, poor, and homeless demographics - American elites will consider this an unanticipated windfall and begin proclaiming their exceptionalism. 

It would be too sweet if the rich, elderly attendees of an elite cocktail/dinner party came in contact with servant peasants infected with SARS-CoV2  and they spread it around to all the sleek party attendees.  A fair number of the rich and affluent getting sick and/or dying might shake things up a bit.

So the trick now is to try and draw out the process.

Though it will be a hard slog, if you can keep the infection rate below 5% - you may have the resources to manage care rationing and prevent more massive outbreak and economic disruption.

We shall all soon see. The chickens have surely come home to roost!

Spartans Showed Up in Athens Yesterday and Demonstrated Self-Discipline AHOO! HOO! HOO!

BaltimoreSun | Thousands of mostly white men — many decked out in camouflage and armed with assault-style rifles — packed Richmond’s streets Monday, circling the gun-free Capitol Square, where thousands more waved signs and listened to speeches, all wanting to make one point: They weren’t going anywhere, and their gun rights shouldn’t either.

“I think there’s an assault on the Second Amendment,” said 60-year-old Richmond resident Danny Tumer, who was standing in line to get into the grounds at 6:30 a.m.

Tensions have been building across the state since Democrats gained a majority in the legislature and vowed to enact tighter gun control laws following the May mass shooting in Virginia Beach. As lawmakers filed bills to limit handgun purchases and require universal background checks, gun owners packed local government chambers, demanding localities not enforce any legislation they considered an infringement on their Second Amendment rights.

Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had placed Richmond under a state of emergency prior to the event, saying the annual Virginia Citizens Defense League lobby day and rally Monday — which was also Martin Luther King Jr. Day — had drawn the attention of militia and out-of-state groups who have come to “intimidate” and “cause harm."

He banned weapons from statehouse grounds, and anyone who wanted to be on Capitol Square had to pass through metal detectors and have their bags searched, causing lengthy lines. Many protesters wore orange stickers with the words “Guns SAVE Lives.”

Throughout the morning, the overwhelmingly pro-gun crowd, many from out of state, remained peaceful. There were only small groups of counter-protesters. Officials estimated 6,000 people were inside Capitol square, with another 16,000 outside the gates.

Only one person, a 21-year-old woman, was arrested, according to officials who ran the Twitter page VACapitol2020. She was charged with wearing a mask in public after police asked her multiple times to adjust the bandanna around her face.

Many of the participants left on charter buses by 2 p.m.

Localism in the 2020's

libertyblitzkrieg |  Contrary to popular opinion, I think a loss of faith in Washington D.C. and its institutions is entirely rational and healthy. Maintaining faith in something due to tradition or the fumes of hope won’t lead to anything productive, rather, it’s preferable to honestly assess the reality of whatever situation you’re in and reorient your worldview and priorities accordingly.

Whether the issue relates to above the law criminal bankers, a Federal Reserve which systematically funnels free money to the already wealthy and powerful, the societal dominance of free speech and privacy-despising tech giant monopolies, or the national security state’s undeclared forever wars for empire, there’s no good reason to maintain any faith in the federal government and the oligarchs/special interests who control it.

Philosophically speaking, I’ve come to conclude the only way to truly have self-government where community life reflects the desires and needs of the people who live there is by concentrating decision making at the local level. I’ve become increasingly interested in the general idea of localism not just because I agree with it in theory, but because it seems more and more people will begin to gravitate toward this perspective and life strategy out of necessity and frustration.

Rather than groveling to Washington D.C., grassroots movements should focus more on the local level where community can be built and things can get done to reflect the desires of the people living there. The entire notion of a one-size fits all approach to virtually all aspects of life dictated via laws passed by corrupt egomaniacs in the swamp is certifiably deranged.

AOC Still Cute, But This Plump, Pasty, Gun-Grabbing Ginger Here...., Really?

dcist |  A planned gun rally in Richmond, Va. on Monday has prompted Governor Ralph Northam to declare a state of emergency in the commonwealth’s capital, citing “credible intelligence” that many of the demonstrators “may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection.” Northam instituted a temporary ban on firearms on State Capitol grounds in anticipation of the demonstration.

But he’s not the only Virginia politician fearful that the protests slated for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in Richmond could result in a dangerous clash like the fatal Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017.

Facing a series of death threats, Manassas Delegate Lee Carter says he will spend Monday at a safe house instead of the state house, as first reported by Gen.

The threats against Carter—a Democratic Socialist first elected in 2017—also show how an echo chamber of conspiracy theories that begin as social media posts get laundered into mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal, and can ultimately lead to real-world peril.

Monday’s rally is a tradition for the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a pro-gun group that lobbies each year in Richmond on Martin Luther King Jr. Day while bearing arms. But this year, a large number of armed militia groups have pledged to join the rally. Northam tweeted that “intelligence suggests militia groups and hate groups, some from out of state, plan to come to the Capitol to disrupt our democratic process with acts of violence.”

At least some of the people who say they’re coming have described it as a “boogaloo,” a word used by the far-right to describe a violent civil war, according to the Daily Beast. This morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three suspected members of a neo-Nazi hate group who were considering going to Virginia’s capital for the rally and had more than 1,500 rounds of rifle ammunition, per prosecutors, the New York Times reported.

As these protesters get ready to descend on Richmond, Carter is planning to be at an undisclosed location amid concerns over his safety.

“People were threatening to murder me and murder my family over something I’m not even doing,” Carter tells DCist from Richmond on Wednesday evening. “These threats are more hateful and more numerous than anything I’ve seen before. I mean, I’m the only socialist elected to a legislature in the south, so I do occasionally get waves of death threats—about every two three months it’ll happen—but this one is far larger and far more serious than anything I’ve seen before by orders of magnitude.” Carter has reported the threats to the Virginia Capitol Police.

Pachamama Banished - Catholic Fascists Proclaim "Bolivia Belongs to Christ!!!"

The rich oligarch leader of Bolivia's right-wing coup, Luis Fernando Camacho, was the leader of an explicitly fascist paramilitary group.

Here are some clips from a promotional historical documentary it published:https://t.co/gFMyfjsi2p pic.twitter.com/XXNQfhD7ii

— The Grayzone (@GrayzoneProject) November 12, 2019

thegrayzone |  Bolivian coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho is a far-right multi-millionaire who arose from fascist movements in the Santa Cruz region, where the US has encouraged separatism. He has courted support from Colombia, Brazil, and the Venezuelan opposition.

When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the plurinational spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward. 

 

With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.” 

“Pachamama will never return to the palace,” he said, referring to the Andean Mother Earth spirit. “Bolivia belongs to Christ.”

When You Don't "Do The Work" Or Know How To "Do The Work"...,

nakedcapitalism |  Peggy McIntosh has described how she stumbled upon the reality of her white privilege. She began to brainstorm about what privileges she had that her black colleagues did not, but encountered fierce resistance from her unconscious mind.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

McIntosh was thus reluctant to see herself as having unearned advantages relative to her black colleagues, and this reluctance stemmed from a more fundamental commitment to believing that one’s life is “what one makes it” and that doors open for people due to their “virtues.”

She persevered, however, and understanding finally came. She was unable to keep silent about what she had learned, and her talk in essay form was soon being eagerly read by others; in the words of one facilitator,

[…] “white privilege,” was popularized by the feverish, largely grassroots, pre-World-Wide-Web circulation of a now famous essay by my now-equally-famous friend and colleague, Peggy McIntosh.

Readers followed in McIntosh’s footsteps, coming to grips with previously hidden and painful truths about their own privilege, and the rest is history.

But what actually happened cannot have been this simple.

A problem of chronology

Three years earlier, McIntosh had given a talk about how decent people often perceive “fraudulence” in

the myths of self-realization which go this way: “I came up from nothing, rags to riches, from pink booties to briefcase on Wall Street. I did it all myself. I knew what I wanted and I was self-reliant. You can be, too, if you set your sights high and don’t let anything interfere; you can do anything you want.” Now it seems only honest to acknowledge that that is a myth.

Did she at that time believe racial disparities were a thing of the past?

Women and lower caste or minority men are especially few in the tops of the hierarchies of money, decision making, opinion making, and public authority, in the worlds of praise and press and prizes, the worlds of the so-called geniuses, leaders, media giants, “forces” in the culture.

Let’s summarize.

In 1985, McIntosh proclaimed that meritocracy consisted of clearly “fraudulent” claims, noted how it was in conflict with racial and gender equality, and urged undermining belief in meritocracy as essential for the survival of humanity; in 1988, she said that she had been fiercely reluctant to accept that she was unfairly advantaged by being white because it entailed “giv[ing] up the myth of meritocracy.”

We could try to rescue this chronology by postulating, for example, that McIntosh composed her privilege lists and acknowledged her white privilege before 1985. She then… kept silent about it for years, perhaps because she was still embarrassed about white privilege? But wasn’t embarrassed about her opposition to meritocracy, which she shouted from the rooftops? This seems a bit… strained.

Or we could conclude, with Amber A’Lee Frost, that she is full of shit.

I will propose a more charitable alternative, which I think is also more likely.

Suppose McIntosh did experience a sort of epiphany in 1988, which involved new ideas and the renunciation of important previous commitments. If sufficiently traumatic, this experience could have played havoc with her sense of time, and of her past self – a development which has been amply documented in similar contexts.

To see whether this is at all plausible, we should look at what the pre-1988 McIntosh believed. For this, we do not have to rely on what McIntosh says she believed. There is in fact extant one piece of writing by McIntosh from prior to 1988. Maybe only one, although it is a difficult to be sure; according to Frost, McIntosh is “incredibly protective of her intellectual property.”

It is a talk from 1985, about a dozen pages long in text form, entitled Feeling Like a Fraud. It is, to say the least, fascinating.

Why I Intuitively Adopted Aggressive Black Partisanship Instead of Submissive Intersectionality...,

nakedcapitalism |  If we consider modern privilege discourse as a sort of semi-animate entity, a part of its genius lies in its ability to convince its adherents that questioning it means claiming that no disadvantages distributed unfairly according to collective patterns exist.

Or that questioning it means denying the existence of subtle conventions that make certain people feel unwelcome in certain settings.

Or, closer to home, that critiquing McIntosh’s œuvre means dismissing all of her ideas.

I believe, on the contrary, that there are important questions that should be asked about all of these topics. Privilege discourse doesn’t exactly encourage asking them, but that doesn’t need to stop us.

First, the lateral/vertical world distinction is worth thinking about. The way in which the distinction is partially overlaid on gender in McIntosh isn’t really essential, even to her own treatment of the idea.

Real questions arise at this point. To what extent can things smacking of meritocracy be done away with? To what extent can the vertical world be marginalized? 

To what extent can people, even well-meaning people working towards similar goals, discuss ideas without sometimes tearing the social fabric? 

The lateral world seems less uncomplicatedly good than McIntosh suggests. The secretary praised by her for “keeping everything going” might be working for an elementary school, but might instead be working for an arms dealer. In a case like the latter, the lateral world’s relationship with the vertical world is not conflictual but symbiotic.

One thought I’ve had is that I think people respond better if treated as individuals who are potentially involved in larger group patterns, rather than as exemplars of groups, fighting an uphill battle in any effort to be seen as single people.

One way in which privilege discourse has been “efficient” is by separating the process of classification of something as a privilege from the process of assigning it a moral charge. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with trying to look at advantages as a single large category. But from this starting point, it seems clearly important to make distinctions about where these advantages come from, what they signify, and what can be done about them.

In the spirit of McIntosh’s vertical/lateral distinction, we could make a (not at all hard and fast) distinction between “vertical” and “lateral” advantages. Vertical advantages would include things like money, where people generally feel like having more is preferable. Lateral advantages would include things like speaking French versus speaking English, where either one can be preferable, depending on the milieu.

One problem, in fact, with classifying lateral advantages as “privileges” (and therefore presumptively bad) is that they are more or less coterminous with culture. If the goal is to make it so there are no environments where some people are more confident and others less confident, I don’t see how to do this without leveling all cultural distinctions. After all, one name for a place where a particular group of people feel disproportionately comfortable is home.

Like Kryptonite To Identity Politics

theatlantic |  When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system. When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

In the midst of this death rattle has come a group of thinkers, Peterson foremost among them, offering an alternative means of understanding the world to a very large group of people who have been starved for one. His audience is huge and ever more diverse, but a significant number of his fans are white men. The automatic assumption of the left is that this is therefore a red-pilled army, but the opposite is true. The alt-right venerates identity politics just as fervently as the left, as the title of a recent essay reproduced on the alt-right website Counter-Currents reveals: “Jordan Peterson’s Rejection of Identity Politics Allows White Ethnocide.”

If you think that a backlash to the kind of philosophy that resulted in The Nation’s poetry implosion; the Times’ hire; and Obama’s distress call isn’t at least partly responsible for the election of Donald Trump, you’re dreaming. And if you think the only kind of people who would reject such madness are Republicans, you are similarly deluded. All across the country, there are people as repelled by the current White House as they are by the countless and increasingly baroque expressions of identity politics that dominate so much of the culture. These are people who aren’t looking for an ideology; they are looking for ideas. And many of them are getting much better at discerning the good from the bad. The Democratic Party reviles them at its peril; the Republican Party takes them for granted in folly.

Perhaps, then, the most dangerous piece of “common sense” in Peterson’s new book comes at the very beginning, when he imparts the essential piece of wisdom for anyone interested in fighting a powerful, existing order. “Stand up straight,” begins Rule No. 1, “with your shoulders back.”

"Privacy" Isn't What's Really At Stake...,

NewYorker  |  The question about national security and personal convenience is always: At what price? What do we have to give up? On the criminal-justice side, law enforcement is in an arms race with lawbreakers. Timothy Carpenter was allegedly able to orchestrate an armed-robbery gang in two states because he had a cell phone; the law makes it difficult for police to learn how he used it. Thanks to lobbying by the National Rifle Association, federal law prohibits the National Tracing Center from using a searchable database to identify the owners of guns seized at crime scenes. Whose privacy is being protected there?

Most citizens feel glad for privacy protections like the one in Griswold, but are less invested in protections like the one in Katz. In “Habeas Data,” Farivar analyzes ten Fourth Amendment cases; all ten of the plaintiffs were criminals. We want their rights to be observed, but we also want them locked up.

On the commercial side, are the trade-offs equivalent? The market-theory expectation is that if there is demand for greater privacy then competition will arise to offer it. Services like Signal and WhatsApp already do this. Consumers will, of course, have to balance privacy with convenience. The question is: Can they really? The General Data Protection Regulation went into effect on May 25th, and privacy-advocacy groups in Europe are already filing lawsuits claiming that the policy updates circulated by companies like Facebook and Google are not in compliance. How can you ever be sure who is eating your cookies?

Possibly the discussion is using the wrong vocabulary. “Privacy” is an odd name for the good that is being threatened by commercial exploitation and state surveillance. Privacy implies “It’s nobody’s business,” and that is not really what Roe v. Wade is about, or what the E.U. regulations are about, or even what Katz and Carpenter are about. The real issue is the one that Pollak and Martin, in their suit against the District of Columbia in the Muzak case, said it was: liberty. This means the freedom to choose what to do with your body, or who can see your personal information, or who can monitor your movements and record your calls—who gets to surveil your life and on what grounds.

As we are learning, the danger of data collection by online companies is not that they will use it to try to sell you stuff. The danger is that that information can so easily fall into the hands of parties whose motives are much less benign. A government, for example. A typical reaction to worries about the police listening to your phone conversations is the one Gary Hart had when it was suggested that reporters might tail him to see if he was having affairs: “You’d be bored.” They were not, as it turned out. We all may underestimate our susceptibility to persecution. “We were just talking about hardwood floors!” we say. But authorities who feel emboldened by the promise of a Presidential pardon or by a Justice Department that looks the other way may feel less inhibited about invading the spaces of people who belong to groups that the government has singled out as unpatriotic or undesirable. And we now have a government that does that. 

Starbucks Had A Really Bad Store Manager Problem In Philadelphia - Period

nakedcapitalism |  The results also support our hypothesis about the Starbucks incident, in which a now-fired manager called the cops on two men whose crime appeared to be waiting at a Starbucks while black, and using the restroom. The evidence below indicates this manager was a disaster waiting to happen and had been calling the police at a vastly higher frequency than her predecessor.

We had discussed briefly that one Malcolm Gladwell’s books included a case study of biased policing in the Los Angeles Police Department, which has a a terrible record in that regard. He found was that a very few cops were responsible for virtually all the incidents. Gladwell argued that that meant the conventional approach, of more training for all the police, was all wet. Those rogue policemen needed to be taken off the street. 

Starbuck’s rush to hold a training program may be good optics, but it isn’t likely to be the best approach. The coffee chain should require managers to write an incident report any time they call the police. That would enable them to see if any managers were making a lot of requests and they could then look as to whether the calls were warranted or not. 

News reports have pointed out that part of the problem is that Starbucks never gave its store managers any policy on what to do about people who stay in a Starbucks without buying anything. I’m skeptical that promulgating rules on a national basis is the right answer. As I mentioned when I had nearly a week of having to work in Starbucks thanks to Verizon-induced connectivity woes, there was often one or two homeless people in an area that was a bit removed from the cash registers. 

There were also plenty of customers back there, most working solo like me, but also a few groups of two or three people chatting. No one was bothered by the homeless people sitting nearby. In fact, I thought it was a good thing that some of the money I spent at Starbucks was helping the homeless. However, it isn’t hard to think that in an affluent suburb, the locals would go nuts if a homeless person were to hang out in a Starbucks, and management would almost be forced to run them off because customers were certain to make a stink.

Kanye West Wants Freedom...,

theatlantic |  What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we. In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.

It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

Normotic Illness Culture: Programming the Social Validation Feedback Loop

CounterPunch |  Sitting alone in my room watching videos on Youtube, hearing sounds from across the hall of my roommate watching Netflix, the obvious point occurs to me that a key element of the demonic genius of late capitalism is to enforce a crushing passiveness on the populace. With social atomization comes collective passiveness—and with collective passiveness comes social atomization. The product (and cause) of this vicious circle is the dying society of the present, in which despair can seem to be the prevailing condition. With an opioid epidemic raging and, more generally, mental illness affecting 50 percent of Americans at some point in their lifetime, it’s clear that the late-capitalist evisceration of civil society has also eviscerated, on a broad scale, the individual’s sense of self-worth. We have become atoms, windowless monads buffeted by bureaucracies, desperately seeking entertainment as a tonic for our angst and ennui.

The old formula of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott is as relevant as it always will be: “It is creative apperception more than anything that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” If so many have come to feel alienated from life itself, that is largely because they don’t feel creative, free, or active.......

 

Noam Chomsky, in the tradition of Marx, is fond of saying that technology is “neutral,”neither beneficent nor baleful in itself but only in the context of particular social relations, but I’m inclined to think television is a partial exception to that dictum. I recall the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which, while sitting in front of a TV, Calvin says, “I try to make television-watching a complete forfeiture of experience. Notice how I keep my jaw slack, so my mouth hangs open. I try not to swallow either, so I drool, and I keep my eyes half-focused, so I don’t use any muscles at all. I take a passive entertainment and extend the passivity to my entire being. I wallow in my lack of participation and response. I’m utterly inert.” Where before one might have socialized outside, gone to a play, or discussed grievances with fellow workers and strategized over how to resolve them, now one could stay at home and watch a passively entertaining sitcom that imbued one with the proper values of consumerism, wealth accumulation, status-consciousness, objectification of women, subordination to authority, lack of interest in politics, and other “bourgeois virtues.” The more one cultivated a relationship with the television, the less one cultivated relationships with people—or with one’s creative capacities, which “more than anything else make the individual feel that life is worth living.”

Television is the perfect technology for a mature capitalist society, and has surely been of inestimable value in keeping the population relatively passive and obedient—distracted, idle, incurious, separated yet conformist. Doubtless in a different kind of society it could have a somewhat more elevated potential—programming could be more edifying, devoted to issues of history, philosophy, art, culture, science—but in our own society, in which institutions monomaniacally fixated on accumulating profit and discouraging critical thought (because it’s dangerous) have control of it, the outcome is predictable. The average American watches about five hours of TV a day, while 60 percent of Americans have subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Sixty-five percent of homes have three or more TV sets.

Movie-watching, too, is an inherently passive pastime. Theodor Adorno remarked, “Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before.” To sit in a movie theater (or at home) with the lights out, watching electronic images flit by, hearing blaring noises from huge surround-sound speakers, is to experience a kind of sensory overload while being almost totally inactive. And then the experience is over and you rub your eyes and try to become active and whole again. It’s different from watching a play, where the performers are present in front of you, the art is enacted right there organically and on a proper human scale, there is no sensory overload, no artificial splicing together of fleeting images, no glamorous cinematic alienation from your own mundane life.

Since the 1990s, of course, electronic media have exploded to the point of utterly dominating our lives. For example, 65 percent of U.S. households include someone who plays video games regularly. Over three-quarters of Americans own a smartphone, which, from anecdotal observation, we know tends to occupy an immense portion of their time. The same proportion has broadband internet service at home, and 70 percent of Americans use social media. As an arch-traditionalist, I look askance at all this newfangled electronic technology (even as I use it constantly). It seems to me that electronic mediation of human relationships, and of life itself, is inherently alienating and destructive, insofar as it atomizes or isolates. There’s something anti-humanistic about having one’s life be determined by algorithms (algorithms invented and deployed, in many cases, by private corporations). And the effects on mental functioning are by no means benign: studies have confirmed the obvious, that “the internet may give you an addict’s brain,” “you may feel more lonely and jealous,” and “memory problems may be more likely” (apparently because of information overload). Such problems manifest a passive and isolated mode of experience.

But this is the mode of experience of neoliberalism, i.e., hyper-capitalism. After the upsurge of protest in the 1960s and early ’70s against the corporatist regime of centrist liberalism, the most reactionary sectors of big business launched a massive counterattack to destroy organized labor and the whole New Deal system, which was eating into their profits and encouraging popular unrest. The counterattack continues in 2018, and, as we know, has been wildly successful. The union membership rate in the private sector is a mere 6.5 percent, a little less than it was on the eve of the Great Depression, and the U.S. spends much less on social welfare than comparable OECD countries. Such facts have had predictable effects on the cohesiveness of the social fabric.

Twitter In The Crosshairs: Is We Sick Boss?

Stakes is High with all these global governance challenges....,

WaPo  |  Twitter is sick. And it’s sorry for infecting you. Oh, and — do you have an aspirin?

That was the gist of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s mea culpa this week. In a series of tweets Thursday, Dorsey confessed that the company “didn’t fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences” of the instant, public and global messaging it pioneered. “We aren’t proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough,” he said. “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking.” 

Dorsey is asking the public to help Twitter get better. It is inviting outside experts to submit proposals for ways to define and measure the “health” of conversation on the platform, presumably as a first step toward improving it. As a first attempt, Dorsey has suggested four metrics based on the work of an MIT-affiliated nonprofit: shared attention (is there overlap in what we’re talking about?); shared reality (are we using the same facts?); variety (are we exposed to different opinions grounded in shared reality?); and receptivity (are we open, civil and listening to different opinions?). 

It is good to see that Twitter is finally acknowledging its ill health. It is even better to hear it’s open to intervention. The problem is that the service may be too far gone to recover — and it is unclear whether this initiative is a last gasp or a real attempt to change.

The reasoning behind this proposal is probably not just a noble commitment to public health. Platforms such as Twitter have clearly realized that if they don’t begin to self-correct, the government is going to do it for them through regulations that may not be as gentle as those they would impose on themselves. And in the long run, the flaws in their systems represent an existential threat worth getting ahead of. Being seen as a destroyer of democracy and a net negative to public trust isn’t exactly great branding. A short-term cure, if painful, might offer the inoculation that platforms such as Twitter need for long-term survival.

Could Banks Restrict Gun Sales In The U.S.?

LibertyBlitzKrieg |  What Sorkin is suggesting is more of the same, although perhaps with worse consequences. If banks take action where policymakers do not or cannot, they are essentially putting themselves above the law. And if banks start playing that role, where does it end?

What if, for example, banks and credit card companies decided to stop processing payments for any retail purchase of cigarettes? After all, cigarettes are demonstrably bad for all consumers, and secondhand smoke can harm innocent people. Should banks step in to help protect society at large?

Or what if banks decided to stop processing payments for abortion clinics because they believed the practice was immoral? Is it fair for financial institutions to make abortion effectively illegal? What if President Trump called on financial firms to cut off access to environmental groups he believed were delaying projects that could bring jobs to local economies? Maybe banks should freeze Colin Kaepernick’s checking account until he stops kneeling during the national anthem?

Many of these examples are extreme, but you get my point. Just because banks can be used to have a dramatic impact on our society doesn’t mean they should be.

– From the American Banker piece: Call for Bank Crackdown on Gun Sales Is Deeply Misguided

Even in today’s world replete with plutocrat public relations masquerading as journalism, it’s rare to encounter an article simultaneously pandering, authoritarian, childish and dumb. Nevertheless, I found one, and it was unsurprisingly published in The New York Times.

The title of the piece more or less says it all, How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t, but let’s go ahead and examine some of the author’s suggestions in greater detail.

Record Number of Visitors Attend Florida Gun Show

dailymail |  The Florida Gun Show had never seen a crowd as big as the one it saw this weekend, according to organizers.

Almost 7,000 people showed up to The Florida Gun Show in Tampa this weekend, nearly two weeks after a gunman killed 17 teachers and students at a high school in the state.

'Some of the people attending are afraid that future legislation will impact their gun ownership rights,' manager George Fernandez told WTSP. 

Indeed, the gun business becomes more profitable after mass shootings, as gun owners become afraid of public backlash causing restrictions to their Second Amendment rights.

Who Has Been Steadily Knifing The Soft Underbelly of The Deep State?

theconservativetreehouse |  Yesterday the news broke of Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman, Mark Warner, seeking covert contact with ‘Clinton-Steele Dossier’ originating entity Christopher Steele.

Within the March/April 2017 communication, the back-and-forth centered around Chris Steele wanting a written request signed by both the Vice-Chair (Warner) and the Senate Committee Chairman, Richard Burr.

Vice-Chairman Warner didn’t want a ‘paper trail’ and transparently didn’t want the political opposition (republican members), to know of his political intent.  Therefore Warner never asked Chairman Burr for his signature upon the letter requested by Steele. Ultimately Mr. Steele was correct in his suspicions, and prudent in his risk avoidance.

All of that is true, however, very few have stopped to ask: how did we, the viewing public, discover the Warner messaging and communication story in the first place?

How did the story of the Warner text messaging get into the media bloodstream?   Who was the ‘entity’ who investigated, discovered, and eventually released the Warner messaging?

Hating These Humans Is The Easiest Thing To Do...,

nautil.us |  Considerable evidence suggests that dividing the world into Us and Them is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy. For starters, we detect Us/Them differences with stunning speed. Stick someone in a “functional MRI”—a brain scanner that indicates activity in various brain regions under particular circumstances. Flash up pictures of faces for 50 milliseconds—a 20th of a second—barely at the level of detection. And remarkably, with even such minimal exposure, the brain processes faces of Thems differently than Us-es.

This has been studied extensively with the inflammatory Us/Them of race. Briefly flash up the face of someone of a different race (compared with a same-race face) and, on average, there is preferential activation of the amygdala, a brain region associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression. Moreover, other-race faces cause less activation than do same-race faces in the fusiform cortex, a region specializing in facial recognition; along with that comes less accuracy at remembering other-race faces. Watching a film of a hand being poked with a needle causes an “isomorphic reflex,” where the part of the motor cortex corresponding to your own hand activates, and your hand clenches—unless the hand is of another race, in which case less of this effect is produced.

The brain’s fault lines dividing Us from Them are also shown with the hormone oxytocin. It’s famed for its pro-social effects—oxytocin prompts people to be more trusting, cooperative, and generous. But, crucially, this is how oxytocin influences behavior toward members of your own group. When it comes to outgroup members, it does the opposite.

The automatic, unconscious nature of Us/Them-ing attests to its depth. This can be demonstrated with the fiendishly clever Implicit Association Test. Suppose you’re deeply prejudiced against trolls, consider them inferior to humans. To simplify, this can be revealed with the Implicit Association Test, where subjects look at pictures of humans or trolls, coupled with words with positive or negative connotations. The couplings can support the direction of your biases (e.g., a human face and the word “honest,” a troll face and the word “deceitful”), or can run counter to your biases. And people take slightly longer, a fraction of a second, to process discordant pairings. It’s automatic—you’re not fuming about clannish troll business practices or troll brutality in the Battle of Somewhere in 1523. You’re processing words and pictures, and your anti-troll bias makes you unconsciously pause, stopped by the dissonance linking troll with “lovely,” or human with “malodorous.”

We’re not alone in Us/Them-ing. It’s no news that other primates can make violent Us/Them distinctions; after all, chimps band together and systematically kill the males in a neighboring group. Recent work, adapting the Implicit Association Test to another species, suggests that even other primates have implicit negative associations with Others. Rhesus monkeys would look at pictures either of members of their own group or strangers, coupled with pictures of things with positive or negative connotations. And monkeys would look longer at pairings discordant with their biases (e.g., pictures of members of their own group with pictures of spiders). These monkeys don’t just fight neighbors over resources. They have negative associations about them—“Those guys are like yucky spiders, but us, us, we’re like luscious fruit.”

Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by the: speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and then imbue those differences with supposedly rational power; unconscious automaticity of such processes; and rudiments of it in other primates. As we’ll see now, we tend to think of Us, but not Thems, fairly straightforwardly.

Russiagate Conspiracy Theorists Don't Scrutinize Power, They Protect It!

medium |  Lately I’ve been getting a lot more accusations of being a Kremlin agent and questions about my motives and agendas in response to my writings and far fewer actual arguments against the content of my writing, as well as demands that I stop arguing with this Russiagate thing and move on to writing about other matters. I’ll tell you what: I’ll stop writing about the Russiagate lies when they stop happening, how’s that sound? If you foam-brained pussyhat-wearing cultists are going to keep using lies to inadvertently manufacture support for America’s new cold war escalations, the least I can do is try to throw a monkey wrench in it.

If Russiagate was legit, the people responsible for selling it to us wouldn’t have to come up with new lies about it constantly. There are many very real dangers of the Trump administration that we can focus on without fanning the flames of world-threatening tensions between two nuclear superpowers based on lies, and the longer we spend fighting over this crap the more of those dangers manifest unnoticed.

Russiagaters are the very worst kind of conspiracy theorist, and as long as they’re imperiling my world with their complicity in the manipulations of the US power establishment I’m going to keep fighting them. Get used to it.

Knowledge Engineering: Human "Intelligence" Mirrors That of Eusocial Insects

Cambridge |  The World Wide Web has had a notable impact on a variety of epistemically-relevant activities, many of which lie at the heart of the discipline of knowledge engineering. Systems like Wikipedia, for example, have altered our views regarding the acquisition of knowledge, while citizen science systems such as Galaxy Zoo have arguably transformed our approach to knowledge discovery. Other Web-based systems have highlighted the ways in which the human social environment can be used to support the development of intelligent systems, either by contributing to the provision of epistemic resources or by helping to shape the profile of machine learning. In the present paper, such systems are referred to as ‘knowledge machines’. In addition to providing an overview of the knowledge machine concept, the present paper reviews a number of issues that are associated with the scientific and philosophical study of knowledge machines. These include the potential impact of knowledge machines on the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the role of social participation in the realization of intelligent systems, and the role of standardized, semantically enriched data formats in supporting the ad hoc assembly of special-purpose knowledge systems and knowledge processing pipelines.

Knowledge machines are a specific form of social machine that is concerned with the sociotechnical
realization of a broad range of knowledge processes. These include processes that are thetraditional focus of the discipline of knowledge engineering, for example, knowledge acquisition, knowledge modeling and the development of knowledge-based systems.

In the present paper, I have sought to provide an initial overview of the knowledge machine concept, and I have highlighted some of the ways in which the knowledge machine concept can be applied to existing areas of research. In particular, the present paper has identified a number of examples of knowledge machines (see Section 3), discussed some of the mechanisms that underlie their operation (see Section 5), and highlighted the role of Web technologies in supporting the emergence of ever-larger knowledge processing organizations (see Section 8). The paper has also highlighted a number of opportunities for collaboration between a range of disciplines. These include the disciplines of knowledge engineering, WAIS, sociology, philosophy, cognitive science, data science, and machine learning.

Given that our success as a species is, at least to some extent, predicated on our ability to manufacture, represent, communicate and exploit knowledge (see Gaines 2013), there can be little doubt about the importance and relevance of knowledge machines as a focus area for future scientific and philosophical enquiry. In addition to their ability to harness the cognitive and epistemic capabilities of the human social environment, knowledge machines provide us with a potentially important opportunity to scaffold the development of new forms of machine intelligence. Just as much of our own human intelligence may be rooted in the fact that we are born into a superbly structured and deliberately engineered environment (see Sterelny 2003), so too the next generation of synthetic intelligent systems may benefit from a rich and structured informational environment that houses the sum total of human knowledge. In this sense, knowledge machines are important not just with respect to the potential transformation of our own (human) epistemic capabilities, they are also important with respect to the attempt to create the sort of environments that enable future forms of intelligent system to press maximal benefit from the knowledge that our species has managed to create and codify.

Knowledge Engineering Review 

The American Imperium Losing Control of Its Domestic and Foreign Vassals

unz |  The tumultuous events that dominate international news today cannot be accurately understood outside of their underlying context, which connects them together, into a broader narrative — the actual history of our time. History makes sense, even if news-reports about these events don’t. Propagandistic motivations cause such essential facts to be reported little (if at all) in the news, so that the most important matters for the public to know, get left out of news-accounts about those international events.

The purpose here will be to provide that context, for our time.

First, this essential background will be summarized; then, it will be documented (via the links that will be provided here), up till the present moment — the current news:

America’s aristocracy controls both the U.S. federal government and press, but (as will be documented later here) is facing increasing resistance from its many vassal (subordinate) aristocracies around the world (popularly called “America’s allied nations”); and this growing international resistance presents a new challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC), which is controlled by that same aristocracy and enforces their will worldwide. The MIC is responding to the demands of its aristocratic master. This response largely drives international events today (which countries get invaded, which ones get overthrown by coups, etc.), but the ultimate driving force behind today’s international news is the aristocracy that the MIC represents, the billionaires behind the MIC, because theirs is the collective will that drives the MIC. The MIC is their collective arm, and their collective fist. It is not the American public’s global enforcer; it is the American aristocracy’s fist, around the world.

The MIC (via its military contractors such as Lockheed Martin) also constitutes a core part of the U.S. aristocracy’s wealth (the part that’s extracted from the U.S. taxpaying public via the U.S. government), and also (by means of those privately-owned contractors, plus the taxpayer-funded U.S. armed forces) it protects these aristocrats’ wealth in foreign countries. Though paid by the U.S. government, the MIC does the protection-and-enforcement jobs for the nation’s super-rich. Furthermore, the MIC is crucial to them in other ways, serving not only directly as their “policeman to the world,” but also indirectly (by that means) as a global protection-racket that keeps their many subordinate aristocracies in line, under their control — and that threatens those foreign aristocrats with encroachments against their own territory, whenever a vassal aristocracy resists the master-aristocracy’s will. (International law is never enforced against the U.S., not even after it invaded Iraq in 2003.) So, the MIC is the global bully’s fist, and the global bully is the U.S. aristocracy — America’s billionaires, most especially the controlling stockholders in the U.S.-based international corporations. These are the people the U.S. government actually represents. The links document this, and it’s essential to know, if one is to understand current events.

For the first time ever, a global trend is emerging toward declining control of the world by America’s billionaire-class — into the direction of ultimately replacing the U.S. Empire, by increasingly independent trading-blocs: alliances between aristocracies, replacing this hierarchical control of one aristocracy over another. Ours is becoming a multi-polar world, and America’s aristocracy is struggling mightily against this trend, desperate to continue remaining the one global imperial power — or, as U.S. President Barack Obama often referred to the U.S. government, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” To America’s aristocrats, all other nations than the U.S. are “dispensable.” All American allies have to accept it. This is the imperial mindset, both for the master, and for the vassal. The uni-polar world can’t function otherwise. Vassals must pay (extract from their nation’s public, and then transfer) protection-money, to the master, in order to be safe — to retain their existing power, to exploit their given nation’s public.

The recently growing role of economic sanctions (more accurately called “Weaponization of finance”) by the United States and its vassals, has been central to the operation of this hierarchical imperial system, but is now being increasingly challenged from below, by some of the vassals. Alliances are breaking up over America’s mounting use of sanctions, and new alliances are being formed and cemented to replace the imperial system — replace it by a system without any clear center of global power, in the world that we’re moving into. Economic sanctions have been the U.S. empire’s chief weapon to impose its will against any challengers to U.S. global control, and are thus becoming the chief locus of the old order’s fractures.

This global order cannot be maintained by the MIC alone; the more that the MIC fails (such as in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, …), the more that economic sanctions rise to become the essential tool of the imperial masters. We are increasingly in the era of economic sanctions. And, now, we’re entering the backlash-phase of it.