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 hasdeclined 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.
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.
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
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 3rd 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
Graduate high school.
Get a full-time job.
Get married before having children.
Wait until at least age 21 to get married.
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:
Graduate high school.
Get a full-time job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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?
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?
I'm an aggressor. I have a knife. Knives are never meant to be seen, only
felt. Not only can I model my desired aggression toward you in pictures,
words, and even movements, I can engage in active deception so that you
never see that knife attack coming. I don't believe there are any
animals capable of that complex mix of behaviors. Sure there's
deception, sure there's aggressive play and practice, but nothing even
remotely approaching the complex systematic, formal and premeditated
instrumental behavior I'm describing above.
Now if I were
blessedly more naive about how such things go, I might model in my
mind's eye displaying the knife like a poor simple creature
instinctively engaging in threat displays in hopes of scaring you off,
which threat displays mask its underlying real instinctual aversion to lethal violence.
Fourteen years ago on the afrofuturism list, I offered the ancient anecdote about Sack's aphasic patients sitting in the common
lounge watching Ronald Reagan deliver a speech. To a person, these language-disordered patients were
amazed by the paradox of the actor's facial expressions and body
language conveying a message totally at odds with what was coming out of
his mouth. They could directly observe both the unspoken intention and
the contrasting spoken deceptions. We all have this capability to varying degrees. My own liminal acuity (perception of facial or body language contradiction) is off the chart.
So it is with longstanding, consistent, and finely-honed trepidation that I spy out the corner of my eye the most recent speech as violence perpetrations emanating from a longtime, consistent, and influential source the NYTimes: When
the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help
account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view
to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as
a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade.
Milo Yiannopoulos is compared and contrasted in the same article as a genuine perpetrator of "speech as violence". That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a
provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your
school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is
nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is
offering.
With regard to Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right - there are few better example of the use of words as "virtue-signal" for collective violence. It's a very good thing that this cohort is demographically composed of untermensch. The alt-right is busily wallowing in the joys of formerly forbidden memetic signification within its demography. Keyboard warriors, one-and-all, these gamma males are living a bronetic Weimar Germany/MS-13 fantasy from the safety of their mothers' basements. Anonymous bad-talk through keyboards is not the same thing as MS-13 face tattoos.
Within MS-13, serial killers openly signify within their community of interest exactly what they're on about. A better example of "speech" as violence with an underlying ethological analog would be pretty hard to find. I would equate that signification to a brightly colored poisonous reptile advertising its venom, with the difference being that the gang-member has agency over its advert while the venomous reptile does not.
Yiannopoulos and Murray are each mentioned in the article, with the former given as an example of an
intentional provocateur and the latter as an example of a public
intellectual. From the perspective of "speech as violence" the now
ruined and discredited Yiannopoulos was never anything more than a
D-list gadfly. Murray, on the other hand, falls somewhere between
professional political propagandist and un-indicted war criminal -
imnsho.
Calling
Charles Murray "merely a political scientist" when in fact he was an
anthropologist studying, developing, and implementing large-scale
counter-insurgency methods in Vietnam, which methods he turned around
- and with substantial political backing - promoted aggressively in the
U.S. - is more than a little disingenuous. Charles Murray has always both intended
and practiced severe rhetorical violence against both real and imagined
enemies. The fact that his pseudo-academic deceptions are even more refined and
subtle than Ronald Reagan's thespian deceptions - (wonder what the aphasics who saw through Reagan's talk/expression contradictions would make of Murray?) doesn't make them any
the less premeditated, systematic, or violent.
Murray has always
known full-well that a knife is never meant to be seen, only felt. So
did President Reagan or at least his speech writers and handlers...,
NYTimes | What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of
simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about
your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain.
That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful
words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A
culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.
That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur
and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of
something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from
debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.
On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that
genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his
view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a
scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference
between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you
strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the
latter is the lifeblood of democracy.
By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about
controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and
torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of
violence.
shameproject | Author of The Bell Curve; Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies learned in rural Thailand on America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.
Florida Vacation
-
Five days in Cape Coral. Ate well, got some sun, got some color, got some
exercise. Alternating nights drinking. Cape Coral has canals, from above it
loo...
Wokeness in November
-
Regardless of one’s personal feelings about wokeness and the culture wars
(I think such things are important for many reasons, but have also spilt
plenty o...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
Silver
-
Noticed this.
Today is the 11th and Silver is from the 11th Group.
Silver is atomic number 47
"The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom, which de...
-
(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
-
With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
