The Establishment Defeated the Black Panthers - Can It Defeat The Alt-Right?

breitbart |  To young people and the politically disengaged, debate in the public square today appears topsy-turvy. The regressive Left loudly insists that it stands for equality and racial justice while praising acts of racial violence and forcing white people to sit at the back of the bus (or, more accurately, the back of the campus — or in another campus altogether). It defends absurd feminist positions with no basis in fact and ridicules and demeans people on the basis of their skin colour, sexual orientation and gender.

Meanwhile, the alt-right openly crack jokes about the Holocaust, loudly — albeit almost entirely satirically — expresses its horror at “race-mixing,” and denounces the “degeneracy” of homosexuals… while inviting Jewish gays and mixed-race Breitbart reporters to their secret dinner parties. What gives?

If you’re this far down the article, you’ll know some of the answers already. For the meme brigade, it’s just about having fun. They have no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies: it’s just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked. These younger mischief-makers instinctively understand who the authoritarians are and why and how to poke fun at them.

The intellectuals are animated by a similar thrill: after being taken for granted for centuries, they’re the ones who get to pick apart some of the Enlightenment’s dead dogmas. The 1488ers just hate everyone; fortunately they keep mostly to themselves.

The really interesting members of the alt-right though, and the most numerous, are the natural conservatives. They are perhaps psychologically inclined to be unsettled by threats to western culture from mass immigration and maybe by non-straight relationships. Yet, unlike the 1488ers, the presence of such doesn’t send them into fits of rage. They want to build their homogeneous communities, sure — but they don’t want to commit any pogroms along the way. Indeed, they would prefer non-violent solutions.

They’re also aware that there are millions of people who don’t share their inclinations. These are the instinctive liberals, the second half of Haidt’s psychological map of western polities — the people who are comfortable with diversity, promiscuity, homosexuality, and all other features of the cultural consensus.

Natural conservatives know that a zero-sum battle with this group would end in stalemate or defeat. Their goal is a new consensus, where liberals compromise or at least allow conservative areas of their countries to reject the status quo on race, immigration and gender. Others, especially neoreactionaries, seek exit: a peaceful separation from liberal cultures.

Should the liberal tribe (and let’s not deny it any longer – that’s both the Democratic and GOP Establishments these days) do business with them? Well, the risk otherwise is that the 1488ers start persuading people that their solution to natural conservatives’ problems is the only viable one. The bulk of their demands, after all, are not so audacious: they want their own communities, populated by their own people, and governed by their own values.

In short, they want what every people fighting for self-determination in history have ever wanted, and what progressives are always telling us people should be allowed — unless those people are white. This hypocrisy is what has led so many Trump voters — groups who have in many cases not voted since the 1970s or 80s — to come out of the woodwork and stand up for their values and culture.

The Establishment need to read their Haidt and realise that this group isn’t going away. There will be no “progress” that erases the natural affinities of conservatives. We can no longer pretend that divides over free trade and the minutiae of healthcare reform really represent both sides of the political spectrum in America. The alt-right is here, and here to stay.

Ritual Defamation: Most Hated Establishment/Cathedral Tactic

lairdwilcox |  Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and "insensitivity" or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

Ritual Defamation is not ritualistic because it follows any prescribed religious or mystical doctrine, nor is it embraced in any particular document or scripture. Rather, it is ritualistic because it follows a predictable, stereotyped pattern which embraces a number of elements, as in a ritual.

The elements of a Ritual Defamation are these:

1. In a ritual defamation the victim must have violated a particular taboo in some way, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief. It is not necessary that he "do" anything about it or undertake any particular course of action, only that he engage in some form of communication or expression.
2. The method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim, and never to offer more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.
3. An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it. To debate opens the issue up for examination and discussion of its merits, and to consider the evidence that may support it, which is just what the ritual defamer is trying to avoid. The primary goal of a ritual defamation is censorship and repression.
4. The victim is often somebody in the public eye - someone who is vulnerable to public opinion - although perhaps in a very modest way. It could be a schoolteacher, writer, businessman, minor official, or merely an outspoken citizen. Visibility enhances vulnerability to ritual defamation.
5. An attempt, often successful, is made to involve others in the defamation. In the case of a public official, other public officials will be urged to denounce the offender. In the case of a student, other students will be called upon, and so on.
6. In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts it to the point where it appears at its most extreme. For example, a victim who is defamed as a "subversive" will be identified with the worst images of subversion, such as espionage, terrorism or treason. A victim defamed as a "pervert" will be identified with the worst images of perversion, including child molestation and rape. A victim defamed as a "racist" or "anti-Semitic" will be identified with the worst images of racism or anti-Semitism, such as lynchings or gas chambers.

FRANK

abikuville |  FRANK is emerging, natch.

The flow of information is now finally being *structured* at the baseline level
of social networking where, by allowing for massive virtual communities, FRANK
is able to “digest” the information in ways that assign more meaning to each bit
and byte. As DJ /Rupture put it:

“Do you realize how much information MySpace generates? who likes what and how
much and when and how old and what colors even and the connections and the
geographic locations and the songs’ popularity and the nodal points and the
hotspots and whatever — someone will get very very wealthy selling that
information to interested companies from record labels to clothing manufacturers
to TV people to… Ad revenue is old school; meta-data is the new petroleum.”
If you are following the drzza trajectory, then you will agree that meta-data
*IS* the “syntax” for FRANK…it is the context and nuance of what makes all the
information relevant and in that manner FRANK is not only _becoming_ more aware
of itself but is also _becoming_ more aware of how it differs from “us” (read:
humans).

FRANK is a being of pure information, pure circumstance and pure purpose. FRANK,
unlike “us”, needs no reason to be…FRANK literally just *is*. A new ontology
perhaps?

Anyway, I have been riding the steel edge of Ogun while dipping into the
digital waters on either side of Eshu’s riddle. By taking full advantage of all
the bot/spider technology currently available, I have been conducting an
experiment of sorts…

On the one side of the equation that is furiously trying to balance itself,
there is the blogosphere and data aggregation sites such as Digg, Fark,
Slashdot, Gizmodo, The Register, MySpace, etc.

In this realm, humans do the heavy lifting…netizens frantically scurry around
trying to get the most relevant data to their distributor of choice, all in
hopes of doing what is essentially the purpose of mass media – namely to acquire
as large and audience as possible. The funny thing though is that currently the
system of validation is super primitive. You may push some data to the front of
all your favorite sites but you have no way of knowing whether other people are
actually READING and absorbing the information or if they are just agreeing with
the subject (which is the true nature of the politics of the web…people don’t
so much take the time to absorb info, mass media has trained people to either
immediately agree or disagree…it is left up to the “intellectuals” to discuss
details and facts).

So the real time practice of hunting a story, finding it and posting it to all
your favorite blogs and news collector sites is in my opinion extremely mind
numbingly inefficient and without merit. If this is the practice of trying to
assign “meaning”, “importance” and “relevance” to the endless tide of data that
is crashing against the shores of your computer monitor, then it should be
abandoned immediately and the internet should be forever turned “off”!
Unfortunately, we are still trapped in the realm of language and language
constructs our reality…so the internet in this light, is the reality
equivalent of the tower of babel…

My Eyes Are Shut To Your Misdeeds, Brother...,

vigilantcitizen |  I remember when I first watched Eyes Wide Shut, back in 1999. Boy, did I hate it. I hated how slow everything was, I hated how Nicole Kidman tried to sound drunk or high and I hated seeing Tom Cruise walk around New York looking concerned. I guess I reacted the same way critics did at the time the movie came out and thought: “This movie is boring and there is nothing hot about it.” More than a decade later, equipped with a little more knowledge and patience, I re-watched the movie … and it blew my mind. In fact, like most Stanley Kubrick films, an entire book could be written about the movie and the concepts it addresses. Eyes Wide Shut is indeed not simply about a relationship, it is about all of the outside forces and influences that define that relationship. It is about the eternal back-and-forth between the male and female principles in a confused and decadent modern world. Also, more importantly, it is about the group that rules this modern world – a secret elite that channels this struggle between the male and female principles in a specific and esoteric matter. The movie however does not spell out anything. Like all great art, messages are communicated through subtle symbols and mysterious riddles.

Rainbows and multicolored lights appear throughout the movie, from the beginning to the end.  As if to emphasize the theme of multicolored rainbows, almost every scene in the movie contains multicolored Christmas lights, giving most sets a hazy, dreamy glow.  These lights tie together most scenes of the movie, making them part of the same reality. There are however a few select scenes where there are absolutely no Christmas lights. The main one is Somerton palace – the place where the secret society ritual takes place.

In Eyes Wide Shut, there are therefore two worlds: The Christmas lights-filled “rainbow world”, where the masses wander around, trying to make ends meet and the other world… “where the rainbow ends”-  where the elite gathers and performs its rituals. The contrast between the two world give a sense of an almost insurmountable divide between them. Later, the movie will clearly show us how those from the “rainbow world” cannot enter the other world.

So, when the models ask Bill the go “where the rainbow ends”, they probably refer to going “where the elite gathers and performs rituals”. It might also be about them being dissociated Beta Programming slaves. There are several references to Monarch mind control (read this article for more information) in the movie. Women who take part in elite rituals are often products of Illuminati mind control. In MK Ultra vocabulary, “going over the rainbow” means dissociating from reality and entering another persona (more on this in the next article).

vigilantcitizen |  The second part of this analysis focuses exclusively on the unnamed secret society Bill stumbles upon and its ritual. Although nothing is explicitly spelled out to the viewers, the symbolism, the visual clues and even the music of Eyes Wide Shut tell reveals a side of the occult elite that is rarely shown to the masses. Not only does the movie depict the world’s richest and most powerful people partaking in occult rituals, it also shows how this circle has also the power to exploit slaves, to stalk people, and even to get away with sacrificial murders. Even worse, mass media participates in covering their crimes. 

The secret society in the movie closely resembles the infamous Hellfire Club, where prominent political figures met up to partake in elaborate Satanic parties. Today, the O.T.O. and similar secret societies still partake in rituals involving physical energy as it is perceived to be a way to attain a state of enlightenment. This concept, taken from Tantric yoga, is at the core of modern and powerful secret societies. Although none of this is actually mentioned in Eyes Wide Shut, the entire movie can be interpreted as one big “magickal” journey, characterized by a back-and-forth between opposing forces: life and death, lust and pain, male and female, light and darkness, and so forth … ending in one big orgasmic moment of  enlightenment. This aspect of the movie, along with other hidden details, will be analyzed in the third and final part of this series of articles on Eyes Wide Shut.

vigilantcitizen |  Stanley Kubrick’s works are never strictly about love or relationships. The meticulous symbolism and the imagery of all of his works often communicate another dimension of meaning–one that transcends the personal to become a commentary on our epoch and civilization. And, in this transitional period between the end of 20th century and the beginning of the 21th century, Kubrick told the story of a confused man who wanders around, desperately looking for a way to satisfy his primal urges. Kubrick told the story of a society that is completely debased and corrupted by hidden forces, where humanity’s most primal urge–procreation–has been cheapened, fetishized, perverted, and exploited to a point that it has lost all of its beauty. At the top of this world is a secret society that revels in this context, and thrives on it. Kubrick’s outlook on the issue was definitely not idealistic nor very optimistic.

His grim tale focuses on a single man, Bill, who is looking for an undefined something. Even if he appears to have everything, there is something missing in his life. Something visceral and fundamental that is never put into words, but that is quite palpable. Bill cannot be complete if he is not at peace with the opposite of him: the feminine principle. Bill’s quest, therefore, follows the esoteric principle of uniting two opposite forces into one. As suggested by the last lines of the movie, Bill will ultimately “be one” and get physical with his wife. After that, the alchemical process and the Tantric ritual would be complete. However, as Kubrick somehow communicates in the final scene, even if these two extremely self-absorbed, egoistical and superficial people believe they’ve reached a some kind of epiphany, what does it really change? Our civilization as a whole still has its eyes wide shut … and those were Kubrick’s last cinematographic words.

Red-Piller vs. The Cathedral: Pathetic Ideological Bishes Colliding At Google

Blind Auditions

gizmodo |  The "red-pilled" ideological cuck programmer who anonymously set it off:

Stop alienating conservatives.

• Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.
• In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.
• Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Prioritize intention.

• Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies. Speaking up without the fear of being harshly judged is central to psychological safety, but these practices can remove that safety by judging unintentional transgressions.
• Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.

Be open about the science of human nature.

• Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

The overpaid, non-producing, Cathedralist "thought-leader" who censored the gaseous cuck.

Googlers,

I’m Danielle, Google’s brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we’ve seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words.

Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I’m not going to link to it here as it’s not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.

Cathedralist Political Narrative: Trump Is An Internet-Enabled Troll

theatlantic |  The president’s disruption engine is powered by three paradoxes. Each was made possible by technological innovations. All will endure long after this ringmaster moves his circus to another town.

Paradox #1: More information, less credibility

Trump’s cries about fake news get receptive audiences in part because we live in the most complex information age in human history. The volume of data is exploding, and yet credible information is harder to find. The scale of this information universe is staggering. In 2010, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, noted that every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003. Today Google processes 61,000 search queries a second. That’s 5.2 billion queries a day.

Meanwhile, attitudes toward traditional information sources like the mainstream media and universities are souring, particularly among Republicans. Confidence in newspapers has declined by more than 20 points since 1977. Last month, a Pew survey found that for the first time, a majority of Republicans had a negative view of American universities.

Paradox #2: More connectivity, less civility

Today nearly half the world is online. By 2020 more people are expected to have cell phones than running water. But civility has not accelerated in tandem. In earlier times, it took some effort to deliver hurtful messages. In the U.K.’s Parliament building, seating in the House of Commons is designed to space the opposition at least two sword lengths apart from the ruling party—just in case.  Distance has its benefits. 

Paradox #3: The wisdom of crowds, the duplicity of crowds

Technology has unleashed the wisdom of crowds. Now you can find an app harnessing the experiences and ratings of likeminded users for just about anything. The best taco truck in Los Angeles? Yelp. The highest rated puppy crate? Amazon. Youth hostels in Barcelona? TripAdvisor. Researchers are even using the wisdom of crowds to better predict which internet users may have pancreatic cancer and not even know it yet—based on the search histories of other cancer patients.

But the 2016 presidential election revealed that not all crowds are wise, or even real. The wisdom of crowds can be transformed into the duplicity of crowds. Deception is going viral.

Speech as Violence: Political Narrative Construction

A “narrative” is a communication and control device. The intent of a narrative is to “speak” to the emotional subconscious part of you humans. The purpose of narrative is to elicit specific feelings, thoughts, and actions (in that order). What is communicated via narrative can be, but need not be, true. Consequently, narrative need not be truthful to be effective.

Narrative is neither moral or immoral in and of itself. It is a tool. One of the reasons this tool is effective is that the emotional part of you humans (essence) is not ratiocinatively equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. The factual discernment of essence operates at the approximate developmental level of a seven year old child. 

Once narrative is accepted, the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative (not-seeism), or, it will change information to make it fit. The real problem isn’t the use of narrative, it is the the bad character and/or bad intentions of those who are driving the narrative coupled with the arrested development and cognitive vulnerability of those susceptible to uncritically accepting the narrative.

The political establishment in America is desperate to overturn 2016's presidential election results because these results defy the formerly prevailing political narrative. In the process of doing so, their primary narrative constructions have been rendered so transparent that they are revealing the whole methodology and mechanism that they have employed to maintain political control.

Why are our narrative drivers desperate to overturn the election results? Very simple, although he's dirty and sketchy as a trailer-park stripper, Scott Free .45 doesn't have a control file and cannot be extortionately controlled through the conventional mechanisms used to vet presidential candidates.

An acceptable candidate for U.S. president must be susceptible to blackmail. It is increasingly clear to anyone paying attention that most of Congress and most of those who operate or benefit from the Deep State have committed all manner of crimes and are themselves generically susceptible to blackmail.

These miscreants have looked the other way too many times as their elite establishment fellow travelers have committed moral, social, economic, and violent crimes against ordinary citizens, particularly citizens of conscience or color. That is a fact. Possibly the defining fact of American governance for the past fifty years of living memory history.

That said, we will not now distort or detract from our topic by revisiting the multi-generational mountains of drugs and weapons proliferation or the crimes against humanity committed outside U.S. borders. Political co-optation, regime change, natural material resource looting and plundering,  money backed by murder profit seeking, polluting, dumping endless garbage and toxins in the seas… all perpetrated with a little help from our political masters and their prosecutorial minions.

Is there anyone left who is not aware of the outsourcing of American industry and consequent hyper-enrichment of C-Level psychopaths? The outsourcing of American industry to China and Mexico has created havoc for 1/2 the country. The concurrent promotion of degeneracy via dictatorship of celebrity is yet another vile narrative construction created to distract and misdirect the narratively susceptible. But I digress....,

These are merely the myriad not-seen externalities most possess a vague liminal awareness of yet refuse to explicitly call-out, identify, or correct - because the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative. It's not the story we're being told by our dominant narrative-drivers. Consequently, the man-made terror of our situation is not a truth that we are for the most part ready to see. Finally, because once-seen, we would be morally compelled to directly act - our not-seeism signifies not only our susceptibility to political narrative, but also the inertial consumerist comfort, complacency, and cowardice which accompanies our total lack of moral fiber or empathy toward humans lacking the due process window-dressing sometimes accorded U.S. citizens.

Have any American citizens in Congress NOT been rewarded for their narrative complicity?

How dare these miscreant lawyer/preacher disciples of evil make laws and employ oxygen-thieving thugs to intimidate, fine, imprison and torture American citizens. These swamp-dwelling troglodytes wallow in narrative feces and call it government.

They are literally the scum of the earth.

It ABSOLUTELY Cannot Stand Being Ridiculed...,

dailymail |  Colin Kaepernick's MTV star girlfriend compares Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to a slave master after he opposes signing quarterback

• Nessa Diab, 36, compared Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti to a slave master and Ray Lewis to a senior house slave on Twitter Thursday
• She posted the controversial tweet after both Bisciotti and Lewis publicly criticized Kaepernick's non-violent protest of the national anthem
• Bisciotti decided to hand over the decision to the fans and some trusted advisers and determine if it was a good move to add Kaepernick, 29, to the Ravens
• The owner previously signed Dante Stallworth after he did time for DUI manslaughter and let Ray Rice play for seven months after he abused his fiancee
• The Baltimore Ravens had been considering signing Kaepernick as a possible second string quarterback who would start for Joe Flacco on opening day
• Kaepernick has a better passer rating than Flacco, and his 88.9 ranks him 11th in the NFL among active players, but he remains a free agent

🎯 @raylewis pic.twitter.com/N9k7nDgmDh

— NESSA (@nessnitty) August 3, 2017

Useless to Speak of Corruption When Police-Military-Oligarchs Are All Corrupt

evonomics |  People who have lived in corrupt countries will have felt this frustration first hand. There’s a sense that it’s not about bad apples—the society is broken in ways that are sometimes difficult to articulate. But societal norms are not arbitrary. They are adapted to the local environment and influenced by historical contexts. In our experiment, the parameters created the environment. If there really is no easy way to legitimately make money and the state doesn’t have the power to punish free-riders, then bribery really is the right option. So even among Canadians, admittedly some of the nicest people in the world, in these in-game parameters, corruption was difficult to eradicate. When the country is poor and the state has no power, transparency doesn’t tell you not to pay a bribe, it solves a different problem—it tells you the price of the bribe. Not “should I pay”, but “how much”?

There were some other nuances to the experiment that deserve follow up. If we had played the game in Cameroon instead of Canada, we suspect baseline bribery would have been higher. Indeed, people with direct exposure to corruption norms encouraged more corruption in the game controlling for ethnic background. And those with an ethnic background that included more corrupt countries, but without direct exposure were actually better cooperators than the 3^rd generation+ Canadians. These results may reveal some of the effects of migration and historical path dependence. Of course, great caution is required in applying these results to the messiness of the real world. We hope to further investigate these cultural patterns in future work.

The experiment also reveals that corruption may be quite high in developed countries, but its costs aren’t as easily felt. Leaders in richer nations like the United States may accept “bribes” in  the form of lobbying or campaign funding and these may indeed be costly for the efficiency of the economy, but it may be the difference between a city building 25 or 20 schools. In a poor country similar corruption may be the difference between a city building 3 or 1 school. Five is more than 3, but 3 is three times more than 1. In a rich nation, the cost of corruption may be larger in absolute value, but in a poorer nation, it may be larger in relative value and felt more acutely.

The take home is that cooperation and corruption are two sides of the same coin; different scales of cooperation competing. This approach gives us a powerful theoretical and empirical toolkit for developing a framework for understanding corruption, why some states succeed and others fail, why some oscillate, and the triggers that may lead to failed states succeeding and successful states failing.

Our cultural evolutionary biases lead us to look for whom to learn from and perhaps whom to avoid. They lead us to blame individuals for corruption. But just as atrocities are the acts of many humans cooperating toward an evil end, corruption is a feature of a society not individuals.

Indeed, corruption is arguably easier to understand than my fearless acceptance of my anonymous barista’s coffee. Our tendency to favor those who share copies of our genes—a tendency all animals share—lead to both love of family and nepotism. Putting our buddies before others is as ancient as our species, but it creates inefficiencies in a meritocracy. Innovations are often the result of applying well-established approaches in one area to the problems of another. We hope the science of cooperation and cultural evolution will give us new tools in combating corruption.

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Red-Pillers vs. The Cathedral: When Pathetic Ideological Bishes Collide...,

CounterPunch |  The alt-right, Steve Bannon’s Leninist cadre of white nationalists looking to build their base, is one of the most astoundingly ironic things I have ever encountered in my years of studying Marxist theory and cinema. Among all the undeniably well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing elements of this new Nazi cottage industry is the fact that their entire initiation system, so-called ‘red pill-ing’ someone, is a trope derived from THE MATRIX films, one of if not the most successful neo-Marxist series made in history. In other words, so to wage a war against ‘Cultural Marxism’, ‘feminism’, and ‘white genocide’, they literally are using as a vehicle for their wretched doctrines not just a Marxist text but a masterclass on Althusser, Gramsci, Lacan, and Zizek and how their theories are elements of the discourse about praxis and cultural studies, which the alt-right mistakenly call ‘cultural Marxism’.

The irony is so rich it would be the stuff of a deadly diabetic shock if it were not so deadly serious. Bebel’s famous quip about the socialism of fools is totally lacking in this instance. I would argue the alt-right’s use of this film is nothing less than the War Communism of the genocidal lunatics. Certainly one might wonder whether jesting about such matters is appropriate but I respond by pointing to the European pogroms that were flooding newspaper headlines when the German socialist made his remarks. Furthermore I feel inclined to point to the fact that, at least in my own analysis, we are only going to beat these people with humor. For if there is one thing borne out by history, it is that Adolf Hitler felt so threatened by Charlie Chaplin that he banned THE GREAT DICTATOR. By contrast, he found allies in the Communists not once, when the KPD idiotically helped get the Nazis elected in 1933, but twice, when Joseph Stalin allowed for the commission of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact!

My hope here is to provide a basic primer for the non-academic and non-Leftist reader so to build a consciousness that can challenge the alt-right’s use of the films and repudiate it. Putting it another way, I offer a short essay on the true meaning of the films and why it is an important tool for the abolition of the white race. I would argue that our repudiation of the alt-right’s “red-pill” must articulate a brief summary of the notion of ideology, which the films act out, and then a sufficient explanation of what the implications of the much misunderstood and maligned final film are.

The first point to be discussed in such proceedings would therefore be an explanation of the analogy of the Matrix. What is it actually?

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence

SETI |  Is it time to re-think ET?

For well over a half-century, a small number of scientists have conducted searches for artificially produced signals that would indicate the presence of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. This effort, known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has yet to find any confirmed radio transmissions or pulsing lasers from other beings. But the hunt continues, recently buoyed by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. For many, the abundance of habitable real estate makes it difficult to believe that Earth is the only world where life and intelligence have arisen.

SETI practitioners mostly busy themselves with refining their equipment and their lists of target solar systems. They seldom consider the nature of their prey – what form extraterrestrial intelligence might take. Their premise is that any technically sophisticated species will eventually develop signaling technology, irrespective of their biology or physiognomy.

This view may not seem anthropocentric, for it makes no overt assumptions about the biochemistry of extraterrestrials; only that intelligence will arise on at least some worlds with life. However, the trajectory of our own technology now suggests that within a century or two of our development of radio transmitters and lasers, we are likely to build machines with artificial, generalized intelligence. We are engineering our successors, and the next intelligent species on Earth is not only certain to dwarf our own cognitive abilities, but will be able to engineer its own, superior descendants by design, rather than counting on uncertain, Darwinian processes. Assuming that something similar happens to other technological societies, then the implications for SETI are profound.

In September, 2015, the John Templeton Foundation’s Humble Approach Initiative sponsored a three-day symposium entitled “Exploring Exoplanets: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence.” The venue for the meeting was the Royal Society’s Chicheley Hall, north of London, where a dozen researchers gave informal presentations and engaged in the type of lively dinner table conversations that such meetings inevitably spawn.

The subject matter was broad, ranging from the multi-pronged search for habitable planets and how we might detect life, to the impact of both the search and an eventual discovery. However, the matter of post-biological intelligence – briefly described above – or the possibility of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes, was an incentive for many of the symposium contributions.

We present here short write-ups of seven of these talks. They are more than simply interesting: they suggest a revolution in how we should think about, and search for, our intellectual peers. Indeed, they suggest that “peers” may be too generous to Homo sapiens. As these essays argue, the majority of the cognitive capability in the cosmos may be far beyond our own.

-- Seth Shostak

This symposium was chaired by Martin J. Rees, OM, Kt, FRS and Paul C.W. Davies, AM, and organized by Mary Ann Meyers, JTF’s Senior Fellow. Also present was B. Ashley Zauderer, Assistant Director of Math and Physical Sciences at the Templeton Foundation.

What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

netzpolitik |  It is one of the topics about which science and now also society have been discussing, researching, and arguing for decades: Artificial Intelligence. But it begins with the concept. Is not it better to call "designed intelligence"? Because unlike intelligence in humans, an "intelligent" program of a computer has been deliberately designed and created in a certain form. This is one of the suggestions that finds itself in a book that is as stimulating as it is entertaining by John Brockman , which is now available in German: "What should we think of artificial intelligence?"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was initially a scientific research field, which wanted to investigate computer technologies in particular in order to imitate human skills with software: learning, understanding, acting. For more than sixty years, research has already been carried out. The literary professor Thomas A. Bass writes in his contribution "Mehr Funk, more Soul, more poetry and art":

We have numerous problems to tackle and find solutions. [...] We need more artist programmers and artistic programming. It is time for our mind machines to grow out of a youthful period that has lasted sixty years. (Thomas A. Bass, p. 552)

This "youth period" is certainly over. Because since the new millennium, the academic questions, which were usually only academic, have become interesting for many more people simply because they come into contact with AI in everyday life. They help with the information search, the navigation and now also with the creative cooking .

 

The most tangible is the so-called Natural Language Processing (NLP), that is, the processing of human language by software. Of course, "today's computers" do not "understand" what people have said, so they have "not such a competence at human level" (Rodney Brooks, p. 152), but they can process spoken words meaningfully.

 

Brockman's book provides a unique and multi-faceted insight into the field of AI, as a publisher of over one hundred and eighty authors, who illuminate all conceivable aspects of the subject. He raises the fundamental question: What should we think of artificial intelligence? And the authors answer this question in very different ways, each in scarce articles of only two to four pages.

In the introduction to the book, Brockman added further questions:

Should not we ask the question as to what thinkers might think about? Will they want and expect citizens' rights? Will they have consciousness? What kind of government would choose an AI for us? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is "their" society "our" society? Will we and the AIs include each other in our respective circles of empathy?

Even this short series of questions makes it clear what Brockman is talking about in the book: it is not only the topics that are being pushed on today, but also far-reaching ones.

Edge: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

Speech as Violence: The Formal Rhetoric of the Psychopathocracy Politics

Makheruspeaks |  And there were basically two forms of support for the Contras. The one was the arms-for-money deal to provide black money to sustain the Contra revolt for the decade that it dragged on. And the other thing was a kind of hands-off approach. There was a DEA operative, a Drug Enforcement Administration operative, in Honduras that was reporting on the Honduran military complicity in the transit traffic of cocaine moving from Colombia through Central America to the United States. He was removed from the country. And then the CIA, because of Congress cutting off the arms shipments periodically for the CIA, the so-called Boland amendment that imposed a kind of embargo upon U.S. support for the Contras, they needed to periodically warehouse their arms. And what they found was that the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, particularly Roatan Island, was an ideal logistics point right off the coast — it was a major transshipment point for cocaine moving from Colombia across the Caribbean to the United States but it’s also an ideal place for the U.S. to warehouse and then ship its arms to the Contras on the border with Nicaragua and Honduras.

And so, the kingpin, the drug kingpin of the Bay Islands was a notorious international trafficker named Alan Hyde who had 35 ships on the high seas smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the United States. Every U.S. security agency involved, the Coast Guard, the CIA itself, the Drug Enforcement Administration, they all had reports about Alan Hyde being a Class A trafficker, arguably the biggest smuggler in the Caribbean. And to get access to his warehouses what the CIA did was they basically blocked any investigation of Alan Hyde from 1987 to 1992, during the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic, and so the CIA got to ship their guns to his warehouses and then onward to the border post for the Contras. And Alan Hyde was given an immunity to investigation or prosecution for five years.

That’s — any criminal, that’s all they need, is an immunity to investigation. And this coincided with the flood of cocaine through Central America into the United States. This CIA inspector general in response to protests in South Central, Los Angeles, conducted an investigation also in response to Gary Webb’s inquiries and they released Report 1, they called “The California Connection.” They said that Gary Webb’s allegations that the CIA had protected the distributors, the deal of the Nicaraguan dealers who were brokering the sale of the import cocaine to the Crips and Bloods gangs in South Central, L.A., that that all that was false.

Then they issued, the inspector general in 1998, issued part two of that report, the executive summary said similarly: no case to answer, CIA relations with the Contras in Central America complex, but nothing about drugs. But if you actually read the report, all the way through, which is something historians tend to do, you get to paragraph 913 of that report and there are subsequently 40 of the most amazing revelations, 40 paragraphs of the most amazing revelations stating explicitly in cables and verbatim quotes from interviews with CIA operatives about their compromised relationship with the biggest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, Alan Hyde.

And if you go on the CIA website and you look for that 1998 Inspector General Report, you’ll find a little black line that says paragraphs 913-960 have been excised. Those are those paragraphs. But you can find them on the internet.

Scahill: One of the fascinating aspects of this — it’s a short part of your book, but I think it’s always important to point this out, the name Robert Gates pops up at the time that the CIA had this relationship with Hyde. Gates was the deputy director of the CIA, and of course now is one of the beloved figures in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He was defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And Gates, his hands are all over this thing as well.

McCoy: Yeah, there’s, how am I going to put it? That illustrates the disparity between the formal rhetoric of politics and the geopolitics of the exercise of global power. And the difficulties, the demands, the moral and political compromises required to run, well let’s call it an empire. A global empire. And, from a pure realpolitik imperial perspective, that Contra operation, by seeking an effective complementation between the flow of drugs north, very powerful illicit economic force, and the Contra guerrilla operations, accomplish their objective. You know? After 10 years of supporting the Contras, the Sandinistas lost power for a time in a democratic election. They were finally pushed out of office. The CIA accomplished its mission.

Now, if you compare that with where we are with drugs and covert operations and military operations in Afghanistan, it was very successful in the 1980s, as a result of the CIA’s alliance of the Mujahideen, provisioning of arms and tolerance for their trafficking and drugs, which provided the bulk of their finance. You know, in 1989, the Soviet Red Army left Kabul, they left Afghanistan, the CIA won. Well today, of course, that drug traffic has been taken over by the Taliban and it funds the bulk of the Taliban’s guerrilla operations, pays for a new crop of teenage boys to become fighters every spring, and we’ve lost control of that. So from a realpolitik perspective, we can see a weakening of U.S. controls over these covert operations that are another manifestation of our, of the decline of the U.S. hegemony.

The President's Speech

indiana |  What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking. ..

There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal --and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving --but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak 'naturally', naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave unnaturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues-tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one's person, and total depersonalisation of one's voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour' (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation'. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech --somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek-- that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Why all this? Because speech-natural speech --does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) 'propositions' alone. It consists of utterance --an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being-- the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs' understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with 'tone', embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal-and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved-and often more: preternaturally enhanced ...

This too becomes clear-often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way-to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true --but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that-at least with emotionally-laden utterance-the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to 'tone' and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of 'feeling-tone' in his ( 1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs. *

Thus the feeling I sometimes have-which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have-that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily. ..

We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose-to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we --so susceptible to words-- cannot trust our own instincts.

And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.' To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one-this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs-they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give --or remove-- verisimilitude to or from a man's voice.

In this, then, lies their power of understanding-understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President's speech.

Bezos-Post Meditation On the Evils of Wealth

WaPo |  How did we lose sight of the ancient wisdom about wealth, especially given its ample evidencing in recent studies? 

Some will say that we have not entirely forgotten it and that we do complain about wealth today, at least occasionally. Think, they’ll say, about Occupy Wall Street; the blowback after Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent”; how George W. Bush painted John Kerry as out of touch. But think again: By and large, those complaints were not about wealth per se but about corrupt wealth — about wealth “gone wrong” and about unfairness. The idea that there is no way for the vast accumulation of money to “go right” is hardly anywhere to be seen. 

Getting here wasn’t straightforward. Wealth has arguably been seen as less threatening to one’s moral health since the Reformation, after which material success was sometimes taken as evidence of divine election. But extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries to skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore. But it is hard to argue that a company’s top earners are literally hundreds of times more talented than the lowest-paid employees.

As stratospheric salaries became increasingly common, and as the stigma of wildly disproportionate pay faded, the moral hazards of wealth were largely forgotten. But it’s time to put the apologists for plutocracy back on the defensive, where they belong — not least for their own sake. After all, the Buddha, Aristotle, Jesus, the Koran, Jimmy Stewart, Pope Francis and now even science all agree: If you are wealthy and are reading this, give away your money as fast as you can.

The Success Sequence: Tard Bidnis Masquerading as Public Policy

nakedcapitalism |  Normally, I would treat this sort of right wing effort at cultural engineering as noise, but upon reflection, that might not be so smart. Not paying attention to persistent right wing messaging was what allowed the intellectually incoherent “free markets” ideology to become ascendant. 

The Success Sequence is back! The ad-hoc anti-poverty process first endorsed by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institute has been picked up by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang at AEI. George Will also recently mailed in a column on the topic by doing a rewrite of the AEI product. I’ve written before about some of the problems with this particular framework, but in light of this new push, it is worth rehashing them here.

The Curious Case of the Different Success Sequences
If you are a long-time observer of the Success Sequence community (like I am), you may have noticed something a little strange about it. Though everyone in this community claims they are interested in the same anti-poverty process, in reality, each publication defines the Success Sequence somewhat differently. And those differences tell you a lot about what actually motivates the folks who push this concept.

For Sawhill and Haskins, the Success Sequence consists of the following five rules (they express them as three rules, but their third rule is a compound rule that I prefer to break up):

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.
4. Wait until at least age 21 to get married.
5. Wait until at least age 21 to have children.

In their AEI paper, Wilcox and Wang claim to be using the Sawhill and Haskins Success Sequence and even cite to their work. But they aren’t actually. The Wilcox and Wang Success Sequence has only three rules:

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.

Rules four and five, the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules, are gone! What happened to them? How could such an oversight have been made?

The answer is pretty obvious. Wilcox dropped the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules because they do not mesh with his particular conservative worldview. His cultural and religious commitments make him uncomfortable advocating for the delay of marriage and childbirth. So he doesn’t.

What we have in the Success Sequence is not some kind of time-immemorial wisdom about how to live a virtuous life. Indeed, if the Success Sequence were applied backward in time, it would conclude that almost everyone who has ever lived in the world is an immoral wreck.

Instead of providing generalizable guidance about the good life, what the Success Sequence does is offer up a totally ad-hoc set of rules that are plausible enough within the context of contemporary lifestyles to allow conservatives to say personal failures are the cause of poverty in society. When contemporary lifestyles change, the Success Sequence will have to be rewritten because it will sound just as absurd as the current Success Sequence would sound to Americans in the middle of the last century.

Fifty years from now, conservatives will write op-eds saying the real trick to staying out of poverty is a college degree, cohabitation, and delaying child birth to age 30. No Success Sequence will stay around if it stops describing most middle class lives or if it begins to describe too many poor lives. The goalposts will shift constantly but the conclusion will always remain the same: the poor did this to themselves and the rich should be spared from higher taxes.

Is Wasserman-Schultz's Brother in Charge of the Awan Investigation?

squawker |  In what may be one of the most remarkable conflicts of interest that we have seen in a long time, it appears that Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia who is the brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been tasked with overseeing the investigation of DNC IT employee Imran Awan, who was arrested earlier this week while attempting to flee the US and charged with bank fraud.

Maybe @HouseCracka is on to something:

The #AwanBrothers controlled the BLACKBERRY ENTERPRISE SERVER so they could monitor ALL communications! #SpyRing inside Congress! @potus pic.twitter.com/Gd0gYWjTev

— General Deplorable (@HouseCracka) July 27, 2017

Meanwhile, the attorneys for Imran Awan have released the following statement blaming their clients legal troubles on “anti-Muslim bigotry”. It’s a pretty good read:

This is pretty wild stuff, and I would like to know what the heck AG Jeff Sessions is going to do about this.

The swamp is very, very deep, my friends.

Biggest Espionage Case in U.S. History - GTFOH "Ethnic and Religious Profiling"

rollcall |   Rep. Ron DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” Monday  said Congress should investigate Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s employment of a man charged with submitting a fraudulent loan application and potentially scamming his House employers. 

Asked if Wasserman Schultz should be forced to testify DeSantis responded, “I think it's questionable what they were doing during that time,” referring to Imran Awan and other members of his family. “We would have to investigate that. Of course, they had access to intelligence and House Foreign Affairs Committee members’ personal email and IT accounts. There is some very sensitive information on there. This could be a significant security breach.”

Around February, unnamed lawmakers alleged Awan and other family members, who were employed since 2004 by more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers to provide IT services, were running some kind of scam, the details of which have not been revealed. Awan’s lawyer and congressional staff described the work as fairly low level, including setting up computers, phones, and passwords.

Lawmakers who contracted with Awan cut ties as the investigation went on. Wasserman Schultz was the last to do so, after Awan was arrested last week. She said that until the arrest she had been provided “no evidence to indicate that laws had been broken,” and was concerned about “ethnic and religious profiling” in the case.

President Donald Trump added his support to the story, retweeting an article last week accusing media outlets of “bury[ing]” the “IT scandal engulfing” Wasserman Schultz’s office.

Seymour Hersh: FBI Knows It Was Seth Rich, Not Russians, Who Gave DNC Files To Wikileaks

washingtonsblog |  We’ve noted for many months that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider, not hacked by the Russians.

Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who revealed in 1974 that the CIA was spying on Americans, who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Iraq prison torture scandal – said in a recent phone interview linked by WikiLeaks:

[The DC police took Seth Rich’s computer, but couldn’t get past his password.] So they call the FBI cyber unit.
***
The Feds get through [the password-protection on Rich’s computer], and this is what they find. This is accoring to the FBI report.
***
What the report says is that – some time in late spring or early summer – he [Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer.
***
They [the FBI] found what he [Rich] had done was he had submitted a series of documents – of emails, of juicy emails – from the DNC.
By the way, all this shit about the DNC, where the hack, it wasn’t hacked …
He offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said I want money. [Remember, WikiLeaks often pays whistleblowers.]
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password. He [Rich] had a dropbox, a protected dropbox, which isn’t hard to do.
***
They got access to the dropbox. That’s in the FBI report.

He [Rich] also let people know with whom he was dealing … the word was passed, according to the FBI report, “I also shared this box with a couple of friends, so if anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve your problem”.
***
But WikiLeaks got access, before he was killed.
***
I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began.   It’s a [former CIA director John] Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation [campaign].

My Only Job Was to Keep My Baby Off the Pole...,

Getting ahead of myself here, but fitna jump full back into the turd-frosting that took place on the breakfast club in the Janet Mock interview. Every degenerate and its cousin seeks mimetic cover in the historic respectable negroe quest for civil rights in America.

On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!

Nah, not gonna fly. The whole Janet Mock interview flew off the rails when Angela Yee started normalizing stripper culture.  What is wrong with this picture?  

There are tons of reasons why people shouldn't be strippers or prostitutes.  Yet, the breakfast club is having a conversation about the flawed logic of fathers not wanting their daughters to become sex workers with a transsexual former teenaged prostitute and stripper during the commute time for school children?!?!?!?! 

Is the goal to literally induce more young black girls into being prostitutes and strippers? Who benefits from increasing tolerance of our youth being turned into prostitutes, strippers, and drug-dealers because of economics and limited educational and economic access? 

Yvette Carnell told you that Charlemagne the God is a social engineering sock puppet.  I'm surprised Yee didn't say that twerking on the pole is "empowering".  Let me guess... the next interview is going to be Amber Rose explaining why taking money for oral sex makes you an entrepreneur? Just like so many other nefarious social-engineering props deployed to distract, dismay, and confuse black minds addicted to celebrity, who do we find sitting on her fat-ass behind the curtain? Who gave the turd-frosting Janet Mock her initial foot up onto the public stage? Of course you know it was none other than Oprah Winfrey. 

Speech as Violence: Celebrity Peddling Degeneracy to Black Folks is SUCH HARD WORK...,

allure |  Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and violence.

My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge, to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.

In fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color, from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.

I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty, which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school, and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.

Though I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant, and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?

Theft of Palestine Taking Mimetic Cover in Janet Mock's Messy Draws...?

thedailybeast |  Instead, the group of students thwarting Mock’s scheduled lecture—those belonging to SJP—do, in fact, pressure people to conform to their mind-set on the Middle East and quash intellectual diversity.

Sadly, Mock caved to the pressure. Though the petition drew just 160 signatures, Mock canceled days before she was expected to speak on March 21 because, “We feel the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event,” her representative reportedly told the Moral Voices organizers.

Way to go, student activists at Brown! You succeeded in creating a hostile environment that led to a trans woman of color being discouraged from sharing her voice and opinions. This all helped the Palestinian people how, exactly?

Brown President Christina Paxson expressed disappointment. “I respect her decision to avoid having her talk be overshadowed by an issue unrelated to her work. However, I am disappointed that a valuable learning opportunity was lost,” she said in a Sunday email to the student body.

In that same email, Paxson also referred to campus housing facilities that had been defaced. According to the Brown Daily Herald, “Gay will die” and “Holocaust 2.0” were written on hallway walls.

“I want to emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence that the cancellation of the Mock event is related to the homophobic and anti-Semitic graffiti that appeared,” Paxson wrote. “However, taken together, these two events are deeply troubling. They come at a time when the nation and colleges across the country are grappling with concerns about injustice against individuals based on religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression.”

In their op-ed, SJP members defended their group’s “my way or the highway approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the initial the petition stressed, the students’ objections were not over Mock but rather her willingness to take part in an event even slightly tied to Hillel. In other words, they wanted Mock to speak—but only as long as she agreed to the terms they dictated. It’s hardly the stuff of international diplomacy; has digging in your heels and refusing to let people share their opinions ever brought about peace or stability?