salon |Identity politics was conceived and
executed from the beginning as a movement of depoliticization. Feminism
has become severed from class considerations, so that for the most part
it has become a reflection of what liberal identitarians themselves like
to call “white privilege.” Feminism, like the other identity politics
of the moment, is cut off from solidarity with the rest of the world, or
if it deals with the rest of the world can only do so on terms that
must not invalidate the American version of identity politics.
For
example, because all identities are equally sacrosanct, we must not
critique other cultures from an Enlightenment perspective; to each his
own, and race is destiny, etc. (Which certainly validates the
“alt-right,” doesn’t it?) This failure was noted by neoconservatives
some decades ago, a breach into which they stepped with a vigorous
assertion of nationalism that should have had no place in our polity
after the reconsiderations brought about by Vietnam and Watergate. But
it happened, just as a perverted form of white patriotism arose to
fulfill the vacuum left by liberal rationality because of the
constraints of identity politics.
To
conclude, identity politics — in all the forms it has shown up, from
various localized nationalisms to more ambitious fascism — desires its
adherents to present themselves in the most regressive, atavistic,
primitive form possible. The kind of political communication identity
politics thrives on is based on maximizing emotionalism and minimizing
rationality. Therefore, the idea of law that arises when identity
politics engenders a reaction is one that severs the natural bonds of
community across differences (which is the most ironic yet predictable
result of identity politics) and makes of the law an inhuman
abstraction.
This
depoliticization has gone on so long now, about 30 years, that breaking
out of it is inconceivable, since the discourse to do so is no longer
accessible. For anyone trained to think outside the confines of identity
politics, those who operate within its principles — which manifests,
for example, in call-out culture (or at least it did before Trump) —
seem incomprehensible, and vice versa. We are different generations
divided by unfathomable gaps, and there is no way to bridge them. The
situation is like the indoctrination in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, so
that only an economic catastrophe that lays waste to everything,
resulting from imperial misadventures, can possibly break the logjam.
Short of that, we are committed to the dire nihilism of identity
politics for the duration of the imperial game.
collective-evolution | The agency had definite plans to infiltrate academia and change/influence the curriculum, specifically journalism.
As Emma Best from Muckrock reports, recently Tweeted by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden,
memos from the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) office reveal the agencies
perspective on the press and how to handle them. It’s from 1984,
approximately three decades prior to when the Agency declared Wikileaks a
hostile non-state intelligence service. It shows how the CIA viewed the
media the same way.
Are organizations like Wikileaks really a
threat to National Security? Or are they simply a threat to a small
group of powerful people who make millions, billions, or even trillions
of dollars via government secrecy? Are they a threat to the global
national security agenda that is taking place, disguised under the guise
of globalisation? Was president Vladimir Putin right when he said
“imaginary” and “mythical” threats are being used to impose the Deep
State’s way on the entire world? Perhaps truth and transparency are a
threat yes, but not to national security. If we continue to ignore these
questions, the national security state will continue to be heightened,
one in which our rights are constantly violated, with our right to
privacy being one of many great examples.
Several weeks prior, CIA Director Casey had asked the IG to weigh in on officer Eloise Page’s paper
on unauthorized disclosure. The IG passed the task onto someone on his
staff, who produced a four page SECRET memo for IG James Taylor, who
passed it on to Director Casey. The IG specifically endorsed the
proposal for a program where the Agency would intervene with journalism
schools.
See for yourself - you can view the full document here.
In the document, the press are also viewed as “principal villains:”
“To the Inspector General’s
office, the reason that the press were the “principal villains” was
simple: “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “the power of the media
to publish in this country is nearly absolute.” As a result of the
media’s “absolute power,’ argued the Agency that had been involved in mind control attempts, illegal surveillance, tampering in foreign elections and dozens of assassinations, assassination attempts and coups,
they had been corrupted absolutely. The member of the IG’s staff then
suggested that they compare the media to the “opposition,” a reference
to hostile intelligence services. This could be backed up by citing
“precise parallels in methods and results, if not in motivations,
between the media’s attempts to penetrate us and the opposition’s
attempts to do the same.” – Emma Best
The document then goes on to list some
proposed “do’s and don’ts,” as well as expresses the belief that “a
sanitized list of foolish media disclosures that have cost the country
or individuals substantially.” But again, as discussed above, have they
really cost the citizenry, or have they simply cost some powerful
interests?
The document also urges the Director to “remember” that “the
organization has official contacts with influential people outside the
Community – people in leadership posts in this society; academia and
the media concluded; and remember that we undoubtedly have in the
organization many who know such people unofficially and who could help
provide access if needed.”
wolfstreet | Under the US Patriot Act, handling money from marijuana is illegal
and violates measures to control money laundering and terrorist acts.
However, US regulators have made it clear that banks will not be
prosecuted for providing services to businesses that are lawfully
selling cannabis in states where pot has been legalized for recreational
use. Some cannabis businesses have been able to set up accounts at
credit unions, but major banks have shied away from the expanding
industry, deciding that the burdens and risks of doing business with
marijuana sellers are not worth the bother.
But that may not be their only motive. There are also the huge
profits that can be reaped from laundering the proceeds of the global
narcotics trade. According to
Antonio María Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime, over $350 billion of funds from organized
crime were processed by European and US banks in the wake of the global
financial crisis.
“Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs
trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks
were rescued that way,” Costa said.
To date, no European government or bank has publicly denied Costa’s
charges. Meanwhile, numerous big banks on both sides of the Atlantic
have been caught and fined, some repeatedly, for laundering billions of
dollars of illicit drugs money — in direct contravention of the US
anti-drugs legislation.
Whatever the banks’ real motives in denying funds to the Uruguayan pharmacies, the perverse irony, as the NY Times points out, is that applying US regulations intended to crack down on banks laundering the proceeds from the illegal sale of drugs to the current context in Uruguay is likely to encourage, not prevent, illicit drug sales:
Fighting drug trafficking was one of the main reasons the
Uruguayan government gave for legalizing recreational marijuana.
Officials spent years developing a complex regulatory framework that
permits people to grow a limited supply of cannabis themselves or buy it
at pharmacies for less than the black market rate. Lawmakers hoped that
these legal structures would undercut illicit marijuana cultivation and
sales.
“There probably isn’t a trade in Uruguay today that is more
controlled than cannabis sale,” said Pablo Durán (a legal expert at the
Center of Pharmacies in Uruguay, a trade group).
Despite that fact, the pressure continues to be brought to bear on
Uruguay’s legal cannabis businesses. Banco República has already
announced that it will close the accounts of the pharmacies that sell
cannabis in order to safeguard its much more valuable dollar operations.
In other words, a state-owned bank of a sovereign nation just decided
to put draconian US legislation before a law adopted by the Uruguayan
parliament authorizing the sale and production of marijuana. The law’s
prime sponsor, Uruguay’s former president, José Mujica, is furious. During a session of the country’s Senate, he accused the banks of directly attacking democracy.
aljazeera |The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has keenly observed:
"All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want
to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to
their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order
to emphasize their whiteness."
But the question is not fealty to any "native
country". The question is rather the systematic subordination of all
immigrants, regardless of how they have been colour-coded, to the myth
of the "white people" and the violent fantasies of their civilizing
missions. No brown, black, or any other thus coloured person can ever be
completely "white". But their trying to pass as white is a mechanism of
humiliation and denigration they willingly play to presume they are
part of the power structure and a more "normal" human being.
In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in
America (1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to
how since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform
themselves as "white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of
course. Upon their arrivals and one generation into a successful
economic status, other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have
also sought to posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.
Becoming white has always been the most potent way
for racialised "minorities" to overcome their violently alienated
personhood in order to become something they could (and should) never
be.
By replicating and reenacting the racial politics
of their European origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in
general and the Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living
testimonials as to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as
means of political domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by
Zionists for Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of
European racism carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions.
Struggle for racial justice must commence and
continue with the full knowledge of how racial divides were socially
manufactured and politically sustained before we can learn how to
overcome them. The full acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism
in the US and Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No
postmodern or poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the
sustained history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It
must acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.
Counterpunch | Theodore W. Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race,
republished by Verso Books in a New Expanded Edition, presents a
full-scale challenge to what Allen refers to as “The Great White
Assumption” – “the unquestioning, indeed unthinking acceptance of the
‘white’ identity of European-Americans of all classes as a natural
attribute rather than a social construct.” Its thesis on the origin and
nature of the “white race” contains the root of a new and radical
approach to United States history, one that challenges master narratives
taught in the media and in schools, colleges, and universities. With
its equalitarian motif and emphasis on class struggle it speaks to
people today who strive for change worldwide.
Allen’s original 700-pages magnum opus, already recognized as a
“classic” by scholars such as Audrey Smedley, Wilson J. Moses, Nell
Painter, and Gerald Horne, included extensive notes and appendices based
on his twenty-plus years of primary source research.The
November 2012 Verso edition adds new front and back matter, expanded
indexes, and internal study guides for use by individuals, classes, and
study groups. Invention is a major contribution to our historical
understanding, it is meant to stand the test of time, and it can be
expected to grow in importance in the 21st century.
“When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619,
there were no ‘white’ people there; nor, according to the colonial
records, would there be for another sixty years.”
That arresting statement, printed on the back cover of the first
(1994) volume, reflected the fact that, after poring through 885
county-years of Virginia’s colonial records, Allen found “no instance of
the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status” prior
to its appearance in a 1691 law. As he explained, “Others living in the
colony at that time were English; they had been English when they left
England, and naturally they and their Virginia-born children were
English, they were not ‘white.’” “White identity had to be carefully
taught, and it would be only after the passage of some six crucial
decades” that the word “would appear as a synonym for
European-American.”
Allen was not merely speaking of word usage, however. His probing
research led him to conclude – based on the commonality of experience
and demonstrated solidarity between African-American and
European-American laboring people, the lack of a substantial
intermediate buffer social control stratum, and the “indeterminate”
status of African-Americans – that the “white race” was not, and could
not have been, functioning in early Virginia.
It is in the context of such findings that he offers his major thesis
— the “white race” was invented as a ruling class social control
formation in response to labor solidarity as manifested in the later,
civil war stage of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676-77). To this he adds two
important corollaries: 1) the ruling elite, in its own class interest,
deliberately instituted a system of racial privileges to define and
maintain the “white race” and 2) the consequences were not only ruinous
to the interests of African-Americans, they were also “disastrous” for
European-American workers, whose class interests differed fundamentally
from those of the ruling elite. The Invention of the White Race Volume II
npr | The event is often referred to as a "boiling point" of racial and
economic inequality in the city. And at its center was tension between
the police and black Detroiters.
"There was an undeniable sense
that the police were there to protect some, and to contain and
intimidate others," says Scott Kurashige, who teaches American and
ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He notes in his book The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit that in 1967, 95 percent of the Detroit police department was white.
While
many of the facts of that week have long been documented by historians,
one big question remains: What should the chaos of that summer be
called?
"Everybody who saw this, everybody who heard these
stories has a different take on exactly what happened," says Joel Stone,
senior curator at the Detroit Historical Society. "Drawing all these different perspectives together, we realized everybody had a different term for it, too."
Last month, the museum opened an exhibit
titled "Detroit '67: Perspectives," part of a massive community
engagement project that's gathered over 400 oral histories of people who
were there or have been living in the city since 1967.
Part of
the exhibit explores the tension around what to call the July '67
events. Before they walk in, visitors are asked: "What do you call it?"
Responses range from riot to revolution.
"If you use the word
'riot,' you're really putting the onus for whatever bad happened on the
people who were looting, the people who were lighting the fires, the
people doing the vandalism ..." Stone explains. "Whereas, if you turn to
the word 'rebellion,' there's a sense that the people who are doing
that stuff are pushing back against some force. In this case it was a
government force, a police force and that they had a good reason for
pushing back against that."
The most common term to describe what happened is "riot." On July 24, 1967, the lead headline in the Free Press declared: Mobs Burn and Loot 800 Stores; Troops Move In; Emergency Is On.
Counterpunch | Much of this turn toward no authority beyond one’s own opinion, truth
as a narrative, alternative facts, and reality and reason as
self-designed came to fruition cataclysmically with Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign and his election, most stupefying for some and
exhilarating for others. I refer to a cataclysm because regardless of
what Trump narrative you are in, his election is an event both
surprising and momentous. The narrative divide here is not over policy
but personality as those on both the Democrat and Republican side wonder
how such a man can be president and what kind of people would vote for
him as president. Although there have been countless armchair
psychiatric exams of Trump, he yet remains outside an established
political frame of understanding. You have to switch jump into another
story frame to make him real, a jump to the spinscape of Reality TV and
the hyperreal of celebrity and enormous wealth that infects the American
cultural imaginary.
This is a jump every Trump supporter made; into a world narrated in
the same way they narrate the world. It is not a jump that all those who
voted for Hillary were able to make, not by choice but because they
were already living elsewhere. Both narrative realms are variously
plotted and valued but the grounding force separating them seems clearly
to be an enormous wealth divide and the long term consequences of that.
In a simplified and also over generalized way, we have a meritocratic,
professionalized, dividend recipient story/reality frame over here and
over there we have a narrative world we’ve not been inclined to narrate
until Trump won the election.
The disinclination or disinterest has of course been on the side of
those who have been before the advent of The Web in a gatekeeper
position to narrate the world we are all in from their perspective. What
that has meant in terms of the politics of narrative is that a good
deal of frustration was built up in those whose stories of the world
were impeded by not being disseminated. At the same time it meant that
the Impeding Gatekeepers had encased themselves in a bubble of their own
selective narrating, confining themselves to a selective vision of
things which excluded, as we now know, those 78% who live on wages that
have remained flat forever.
The fact that Donald J. Trump is now president of the United States
is astounding and troubling to this rarefied zone faction unacquainted
with the lines of the story he seems to be following. They are, however,
more unacquainted with those who are loyal to Trump and remain so.
These Trumpians live in a life-world that remains opaque and unknown to
those whose own life-world distinguishes itself by excluding such
recognition and such knowledge.
Those who are not drawn to the slogan “Make America Great Again” are
already enjoying the present America. And if they live in gated
communities, one of the reasons they do so is avoid contact with those
unhappy, disgruntled by their present status in America. In a politics
of narrative world, this unacquaintance signals surprise if this unhappy
faction reaches visibility on the national stage. More accurately, they
have reached that visibility via both Trump and The Web of cyberspace.
Trump continues to communicate with his followers on Twitter because he
did not reach the presidency and they did not reach visibility by the
paths of “governing principles” already cordoned off to them.
truthdig | What took place in Charlottesville, like what took place in February when antifa and Black Bloc protesters thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt
to host the crypto-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It
was about giving self-styled radicals a stage. It was about elevating
their self-image. It was about appearing heroic. It was about replacing
personal alienation with comradeship and solidarity. Most important, it
was about the ability to project fear. This newfound power is exciting
and intoxicating. It is also very dangerous. Many of those in
Charlottesville on the left and the right were carrying weapons. A
neo-Nazi fired a round
from a pistol in the direction of a counterprotester. The neo-Nazis
often carried AR-15 rifles and wore quasi-military uniforms and helmets
that made them blend in with police and state security. There could
easily have been a bloodbath. A march held in Sacramento, Calif., in
June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks
at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed. Police accused
counterprotesters of initiating the violence. It is a short series of
steps from bats and ax handles to knives to guns.
The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and
the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we
are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and
this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form
of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment
expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and
support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have
been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect
their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.
The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries
alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it
succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat.
Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels
the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted
and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.
Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in
the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of
identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the
violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard,
for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer
getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if
we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be
anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of
polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but
direct, aggressive confrontation.”
This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It
saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs,
including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It
dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who
speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to
explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society
into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence
to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and
self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death.
And that, I fear, is where we are headed.
theroot | My interest in tackling this all started with this post Jessica Chastain retweeted, which talked about the so-called alt-left “being a problem.”
My annoyance at yet another visible white celebrity acting all fake
deep about a concept she or he clearly doesn’t have the juice or
credentials to discuss (i.e., anti-fascists are in no way the same as
actual Nazis, and to portray them as such is sympathizing with fascists)
aside, I was once again bombarded with the fake word “alt-left.”
I’m
not sure how the word even came to be (but I’m pretty sure the New York
Times had something to do with it, since they’ve been back on their bullshit for the last couple of weeks with these terrible hot takes), but the irony of it popping up right
as anti-fascist groups (antifa) have become more visible recently, and
are putting themselves on the line to defend people from white
supremacists, does not escape me.
Confused? You shouldn’t be. And here’s why:
1. White media branding antifa (and other resistance groups) “the alt left” changes the conversation.
In
the case of “alt-left,” there’s a lot to unpack in it. As it stands,
white media named it such to stand as the opposite of “alt-right.” It’s
supposed to exist as a dichotomy. Two extremes that exist in this world.
One apparently cannot exist without the other. One’s ying and one’s
yang. Destined to fight each other until the end of all time ...
...
except that’s bullshit, insidiously brilliant bullshit. You know why?
Because “alt-right” itself originally emerged as a baby-soft, Johnson
& Johnson-approved synonym for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
Add that to Mother Jones’ and the Los Angeles Times’ humanizing
these assholes by pointing out how “dapper” they are and how they are
just like us, and it obviously gave way to the vast resurgence of white
supremacists ... just by a different name in order to make them more
palatable.
Interestingly enough, however, that actually didn’t
work for long. “Alt-right”—as a term, that is—is something black people
and other people of color were privy to from jump street, which made
anyone using the term “alt-right” seriously look like an insufferable
limp goat.
So.
It wasn’t too long before “alt-right” meant something negative again
(as it should). Which is why calling antifa its antithesis, “alt-left,”
is notable. Without the racially critical lens that white supremacy
tries to avoid, “alt-right” can be reduced to meaning that one is way too conservative,
to the point that it is impolite and problematic. And because white
people have shown historically that they are bad with definitions
(coincidence? unlikely), most would opt to assume that “alt-left” simply
means being way too liberal.
And that’s how antifa goes
from fighting Nazis to having to waste time and precious energy
distinguishing themselves from them. It’s a similar case with Black
Lives Matter and black resistance groups, too. They get lumped in with
the Ku Klux Klan, even though that logically makes no sense. These are
false equivalencies, of course, but that’s the point. These erroneous
comparisons exist for the sole purpose of derailment from taking the
fight to white supremacy. Distraction. And also?
bbvaopenmind | Nature has always
found ways to exploit and adapt to differences in environmental
conditions. Through evolutionary adaptation a myriad of organisms has
developed that operate and thrive in diverse and often extreme
conditions. For example, the tardigrade (Schokraie et al., 2012) is able
to survive pressures greater than those found in the deepest oceans and
in space, can withstand temperatures from 1K (-272 °C) to 420K (150
°C), and can go without food for thirty years. Organisms often operate
in symbiosis with others. The average human, for example, has about 30
trillion cells, but contains about 40 trillion bacteria (Sender et al.,
2016). They cover scales from the smallest free-living bacteria,
pelagibacter ubique, at around 0.5µm long to the blue whale at around
thirty meters long. That is a length range of 7 orders of magnitude and
approximately 15 orders of magnitude in volume! What these astonishing
facts show is that if nature can use the same biological building blocks
(DNA, amino acids, etc.) for such an amazing range of organisms, we too
can use our robotic building blocks to cover a much wider range of
environments and applications than we currently do. In this way we may
be able to match the ubiquity of natural organisms.
To achieve robotic
ubiquity requires us not only to study and replicate the feats of
nature but to go beyond them with faster (certainly faster than
evolutionary timescales!) development and more general and adaptable
technologies. Another way to think of future robots is as artificial
organisms. Instead of a conventional robot which can be decomposed into
mechanical, electrical, and computational domains, we can think of a
robot in terms of its biological counterpart and having three core
components: a body, a brain, and a stomach. In biological organisms,
energy is converted in the stomach and distributed around the body to
feed the muscles and the brain, which in turn controls the organisms.
There is thus a functional equivalence between the robot organism and
the natural organism: the brain is equivalent to the computer or control
system; the body is equivalent to the mechanical structure of the
robot; and the stomach is equivalent to the power source of the robot,
be it battery, solar cell, or any other power source. The benefit of the
artificial organism paradigm is that we are encouraged to exploit, and
go beyond, all the characteristics of biological organisms. These
embrace qualities largely unaddressed by current robotics research,
including operation in varied and harsh conditions, benign environmental
integration, reproduction, death, and decomposition. All of these are
essential to the development of ubiquitous robotic organisms.
The realization of this
goal is only achievable by concerted research in the areas of smart
materials, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and adaptation.
Here we will focus on the development of novel smart materials for
robotics, but we will also see how materials development cannot occur in
isolation of the other much-needed research areas.
bbvaopenmind | In George Orwell’s
1984,(39) it was the totalitarian Big Brother government who put the
surveillance cameras on every television—but in the reality of 2016, it
is consumer electronics companies who build cameras into the common
set-top box and every mobile handheld. Indeed, cameras are becoming
commodity, and as video feature extraction gets to lower power levels
via dedicated hardware, and other micropower sensors determine the
necessity of grabbing an image frame, cameras will become even more
common as generically embedded sensors. The first commercial, fully
integrated CMOS camera chips came from VVL in Edinburgh (now part of ST
Microelectronics) back in the early 1990s.(40) At the time, pixel
density was low (e.g., the VVL “Peach” with 312 x 287 pixels), and the
main commercial application of their devices was the “BarbieCam,” a toy
video camera sold by Mattel. I was an early adopter of these digital
cameras myself, using them in 1994 for a multi-camera precision
alignment system at the Superconducting Supercollider(41) that evolved
into the hardware used to continually align the forty-meter muon system
at micron-level precision for the ATLAS detector at CERN’s Large Hadron
Collider. This technology was poised for rapid growth: now, integrated
cameras peek at us everywhere, from laptops to cellphones, with typical
resolutions of scores of megapixels and bringing computational
photography increasingly to the masses. ASICs for basic image processing
are commonly embedded with or integrated into cameras, giving
increasing video processing capability for ever-decreasing power. The
mobile phone market has been driving this effort, but increasingly
static situated installations (e.g., video-driven motion/context/gesture
sensors in smart homes) and augmented reality will be an important
consumer application, and the requisite on-device image processing will
drop in power and become more agile. We already see this happening at
extreme levels, such as with the recently released Microsoft HoloLens,
which features six cameras, most of which are used for rapid environment
mapping, position tracking, and image registration in a lightweight,
battery-powered, head-mounted, self-contained AR unit. 3D cameras are
also becoming ubiquitous, breaking into the mass market via the original
structured-light-based Microsoft Kinect a half-decade ago.
Time-of-flight 3D cameras (pioneered in CMOS in the early 2000s by
researchers at Canesta(42) have evolved to recently displace structured
light approaches, and developers worldwide race to bring the power and
footprint of these devices down sufficiently to integrate into common
mobile devices (a very small version of such a device is already
embedded in the HoloLens). As pixel timing measurements become more
precise, photon-counting applications in computational photography, as
pursued by my Media Lab colleague Ramesh Raskar, promise to usher in
revolutionary new applications that can do things like reduce diffusion
and see around corners.(43)
My research group began exploring
this penetration of ubiquitous cameras over a decade ago, especially
applications that ground the video information with simultaneous data
from wearable sensors. Our early studies were based around a platform
called the “Portals”:(44) using an embedded camera feeding a TI DaVinci
DSP/ARM hybrid processor, surrounded by a core of basic sensors (motion,
audio, temperature/humidity, IR proximity) and coupled with a Zigbee RF
transceiver, we scattered forty-five of these devices all over the
Media Lab complex, interconnected through the wired building network.
One application that we built atop them was “SPINNER,”(45) which
labelled video from each camera with data from any wearable sensors in
the vicinity. The SPINNER framework was based on the idea of being able
to query the video database with higher-level parameters, lifting sensor
data up into a social/affective space,(46) then trying to effectively
script a sequential query as a simple narrative involving human subjects
adorned with the wearables. Video clips from large databases sporting
hundreds of hours of video would then be automatically selected to best
fit given timeslots in the query, producing edited videos that observers
deemed coherent.(47) Naively pointing to the future of reality
television, this work aims further, looking to enable people to engage
sensor systems via human-relevant query and interaction.
Rather than try to extract stories
from passive ambient activity, a related project from our team devised
an interactive camera with a goal of extracting structured stories from
people.(48) Taking the form factor of a small mobile robot, “Boxie”
featured an HD camera in one of its eyes: it would rove our building and
get stuck, then plea for help when people came nearby. It would then
ask people successive questions and request that they fulfill various
tasks (e.g., bring it to another part of the building, or show it what
they do in the area where it was found), making an indexed video that
can be easily edited to produce something of a documentary about the
people in the robot’s abode.
In the next years,
as large video surfaces cost less (potentially being roll-roll printed)
and are better integrated with responsive networks, we will see the
common deployment of pervasive interactive displays. Information coming
to us will manifest in the most appropriate fashion (e.g., in your smart
eyeglasses or on a nearby display)—the days of pulling your phone out
of your pocket and running an app are severely limited. To explore this,
we ran a project in my team called “Gestures Everywhere”(49) that
exploited the large monitors placed all over the public areas of our
building complex.(50) Already equipped with RFID to identify people
wearing tagged badges, we added a sensor suite and a Kinect 3D camera to
each display site. As an occupant approached a display and were
identified via RFID or video recognition, information most relevant to
them would appear on the display. We developed a recognition framework
for the Kinect that parsed a small set of generic hand gestures (e.g.,
signifying “next,” “more detail,” “go-away,” etc.), allowing users to
interact with their own data at a basic level without touching the
screen or pulling out a mobile device. Indeed, proxemic interactions(51)
around ubiquitous smart displays will be common within the next decade.
The plethora of cameras
that we sprinkled throughout our building during our SPINNER project
produced concerns about privacy (interestingly enough, the Kinects for
Gestures Everywhere did not evoke the same response—occupants either did
not see them as “cameras” or were becoming used to the idea of
ubiquitous vision). Accordingly, we put an obvious power switch on each
portal that enabled them to be easily switched off. This is a very
artificial solution, however—in the near future, there will just be too
many cameras and other invasive sensors in the environment to switch
off. These devices must answer verifiable and secure protocols to
dynamically and appropriately throttle streaming sensor data to answer
user privacy demands. We have designed a small, wireless token that
controlled our portals in order to study solutions to such concerns.(52)
It broadcast a beacon to the vicinity that dynamically deactivates the
transmission of proximate audio, video, and other derived features
according to the user’s stated privacy preferences—this device also
featured a large “panic” button that can be pushed at any time when
immediate privacy is desired, blocking audio and video from emanating
from nearby Portals.
Rather than block
the video stream entirely, we have explored just removing the
privacy-desiring person from the video image. By using information from
wearable sensors, we can more easily identify the appropriate person in
the image,(53) and blend them into the background. We are also looking
at the opposite issue—using wearable sensors to detect environmental
parameters that hint at potentially hazardous conditions for
construction workers and rendering that data in different ways atop
real-time video, highlighting workers in situations of particular
concern.(54)
acq | Recognizing that no machine—and no person—is truly autonomous in the strict sense of the word, we will sometimes speak of autonomous capabilities rather than autonomous systems.2
The primary intellectual foundation for autonomy stems from artificial intelligence (AI), the capability of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence (e.g.,
perception, conversation, decisionmaking).
Advances in AI are making it possible to cede to machines many tasks long regarded as impossible for machines to perform. Intelligent systems aim to apply AI to a particular problem or domain—the
implication being that the system is programmed or trained to operate within the bounds of a defined knowledge base. Autonomous function is at a system level rather than a component level. The study considered two categories of intelligent systems: those employing autonomy at rest and those employing autonomy in motion. In broad terms, systems incorporating autonomy at rest operate virtually, in software, and include planning and expert advisory systems, whereas systems incorporating autonomy in motion have a presence in the physical world and include robotics and autonomous vehicles.
As illustrated in Figure 1, many DoD and commercial systems are already operating with varying kinds of autonomous capability. Robotics typically adds additional kinds of sensors, actuators, and mobility to intelligent systems. While early robots were largely automated, recent advances in AI are enabling increases in autonomous functionality.
One of the less well-known ways that autonomy is changing the world is in applications that include data compilation, data analysis, web search, recommendation engines, and forecasting. Given the limitations of human abilities to rapidly process the vast amounts of data available today, autonomous systems are now required to find trends and analyze patterns. There is no need to solve the long-term AI problem of general intelligence in order to build high-value applications that exploit limited-scope autonomous capabilities dedicated to specific purposes. DoD’s nascent Memex program is one of many examples in this category.3
Rapid global market expansion for robotics and other intelligent systems to address consumer and industrial applications is stimulating increasing commercial investment and delivering a diverse array of products. At the same time, autonomy is being embedded in a growing array of software systems to enhance speed and consistency of decision-making, among other benefits. Likewise, governmental entities, motivated by economic development opportunities in addition to security missions and other public sector applications, are investing in related basic and applied research.
Applications include commercial endeavors, such as IBM’s Watson, the use of robotics in ports and
mines worldwide, autonomous vehicles (from autopilot drones to self-driving cars), automated logistics and supply chain management, and many more. Japanese and U.S. companies invested more than $2 billion in autonomous systems in 2014, led by Apple, Facebook, Google, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, NEC, Yahoo, and Twitter. 4
A vibrant startup ecosystem is spawning advances in response to commercial market opportunities; innovations are occurring globally, as illustrated in Figure 2 (top). Startups are targeting opportunities that drive advances in critical underlying technologies. As illustrated in Figure 2 (bottom), machine learning—both application-specific and general purpose—is of high interest. The market-pull for machine learning stems from a diverse array of applications across an equally diverse spectrum of industries, as illustrated in Figure 3.
RAND | State-sponsored propaganda and disinformation have been in existence for as long as there have been states. The major difference in the 21st century is the ease, efficiency, and low cost of such efforts. Because audiences worldwide rely on the Internet and social media as primary sources of news and information, they have emerged as an ideal vector of information attack.
Most important from the U.S. perspective, Russian IO techniques, tactics and procedures are developing constantly and rapidly, as continually measuring effectiveness and rapidly evolving techniques are very cheap compared to the costs of any kinetic weapon system—and they could potentially be a lot more effective.
At this point, Russian IO operators use relatively unsophisticated techniques systematically and on a large scale. This relative lack of sophistication leaves them open to detection. For example, existing technology can identify paid troll operations, bots, etc. Another key element of Russian IO strategy is to target audiences with multiple, conflicting narratives to sow seeds of distrust of and doubt about the European Union (EU) as well as national governments. These can also be detected. The current apparent lack of technical sophistication of Russian IO techniques could derive from the fact that, so far, Russian IO has met with minimal resistance. However, if and when target forces start to counter these efforts and/or expose them on a large scale, the Russians are likely to accelerate the improvement of their techniques, leading to a cycle of counter-responses. In other words, an information warfare arms race is likely to ensue.
A Strategy to Counter the Russian Threat Because the culture and history of each country is unique and because the success of any IO defense strategy must be tailored to local institutions and populations, the most effective strategies are likely to be those that are developed and managed on a country-by-country basis. An information defense strategy framework for countering Russian IO offensives should be “whole-of-nation” in character. A whole-of-nation approach is a coordinated effort between national government organizations, military, intelligence community, industry, media, research organizations, academia and citizen organized groups. A discreet US Special Operations Force could provide individual country support as well as cross country coordination.
Just as in the physical world, good maps are critical to any IO strategy. In the case of IO, maps show information flows. Information maps must show connectivity in the information environment and help navigate that environment. They exist as computer software and databases. Information cartography for IO is the art of creating, maintaining, and using such maps. An important feature of information maps is that they are constantly changing to reflect the dynamic nature of the information environment. Because they are artificially intelligent computer programs, they can answer questions; provide situation awareness dynamically; and help to plan, monitor, and appropriately modify operations. Information maps are technically possible today and already exist in forms that can be adapted to support the design and execution IO strategy.
As an example, most of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states, as well as several non-NATO partners, are already subject to concentrated Russian IO and they illustrate ongoing Russian IO techniques. Using information cartography, it is possible to map key Russian sources as part of Russian IO operations against a target state. These sources might include:
• Russian and target country think tanks • foundations (e.g., Russkiy Mir) • authorities (e.g., Rossotrudnichestvo) • television stations (e.g. RT) • pseudo-news agencies and multimedia services (e.g., Sputnik) • cross-border social and religious groups • social media and Internet trolls to challenge democratic values, divide Europe, gather domestic support, and create the perception of failed states in the EU’s eastern neighborhood • Russian regime–controlled companies and organizations • Russian regime–funded political parties and other organizations in target country in particular and within the EU in general intended to undermine political cohesion • Russian propaganda directly targeting journalists, politicians, and individuals in target countries in particular and the EU in general.
Similarly, the mapping of target state receivers as part of Russian IO against the target state might include:
• national government organizations • military • intelligence community • industry • media • independent think tanks • academia • citizen-organized groups.
An effective information defensive strategy would be based on coordinated countering of information flows revealed by information maps. An effective strategy would include methods for establishing trust between elements of the defense force and the public. The strategy also will include mechanisms to detect the continuously evolving nature of the Russian IO threat and rapidly adapt in a coordinated fashion across all defense elements.
Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews of the RAND Corporation observe: “Experimental research in psychology suggests that the features of the contemporary Russian propaganda model have the potential to be highly effective.”14 They present a careful and concise analysis of relevant psychological research results that should inform any information defensive strategy. For example, they describe how propaganda can be used to distort perceptions of reality:
• People are poor judges of true versus false information—and they do not necessarily remember that particular information was false. • Information overload leads people to take shortcuts in determining the trustworthiness of messages. • Familiar themes or messages can be appealing even if they are false. • Statements are more likely to be accepted if backed by evidence, even if that evidence is false. • Peripheral cues—such as an appearance of objectivity—can increase the credibility of propaganda.15
Here is what a typical offensive strategy against a target population might look like. It consists of several steps:
1. Take the population and break it down into communities, based on any number of criteria (e.g. hobbies, interests, politics, needs, concerns, etc.). 2. Determine who in each community is most susceptible to given types of messages. 3. Determine the social dynamics of communication and flow of ideas within each community. 4. Determine what narratives of different types dominate the conversation in each community. 5. Use all of the above to design and push a narrative likely to succeed in displacing a narrative unfavorable to you with one that is more favorable. 6. Use continual monitoring and interaction to determine the success of your effort and adjust in real time.
Technologies currently exist that make it possible to perform each of these steps continuously and at a large scale. However, while current technologies support manual application of the type of psychological research results presented by Paul and Matthews, they do not fully automate it. That would be the next stage in technology development.
These same technologies can be used for defensive purposes. For example, you could use the techniques for breaking down communities described above to detect adversary efforts to push a narrative and examine that narrative’s content. The technology can help researchers focus while searching through massive amounts of social media data.
medium |INSURGE INTELLIGENCE,
a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the
exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded,
nurtured and incubated Google as part of a drive to dominate the world
through control of information. Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google
was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups
co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’
The
origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret
Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned
as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business,
industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors. The group has allowed
some of the most powerful special interests in corporate America to
systematically circumvent democratic accountability and the rule of law
to influence government policies, as well as public opinion in the US
and around the world. The results have been catastrophic: NSA mass
surveillance, a permanent state of global war, and a new initiative to
transform the US military into Skynet.
The origins of the Pentagon’s new innovation initiative can thus be
traced back to ideas that were widely circulated inside the Pentagon
decades ago, but which failed to take root fully until now. Between 2006
and 2010, the same period in which such ideas were being developed by
Highlands Forum experts like Lochard, Zalman and Rendon, among many
others, the Office of Net Assessment provided a direct mechanism to
channel these ideas into concrete strategy and policy development
through the Quadrennial Defense Reviews, where Marshall’s input was primarily responsible for the expansion of the “black” world: “special operations,” “electronic warfare” and “information operations.”
Marshall’s pre-9/11 vision of a fully networked and automated military system found its fruition in the Pentagon’s Skynet study
released by the National Defense University in September 2014, which
was co-authored by Marshall’s colleague at the Highlands Forum, Linton
Wells. Many of Wells’ recommendations are now to be executed via the new
Defense Innovation Initiative by veterans and affiliates of the ONA and
Highlands Forum.
Given
that Wells’ white paper highlighted the Pentagon’s keen interest in
monopolizing AI research to monopolize autonomous networked robot
warfare, it is not entirely surprising that the Forum’s sponsoring
partners at SAIC/Leidos display a bizarre sensitivity about public use
of the word ‘Skynet.’
On a Wikipedia entry
titled ‘Skynet (fictional)’, people using SAIC computers deleted
several paragraphs under the ‘Trivia’ section pointing out real-world
‘Skynets’, such as the British military satellite system, and various
information technology projects.
Hagel’s
departure paved the way for Pentagon officials linked to the Highlands
Forum to consolidate government influence. These officials are embedded
in a longstanding shadow network of political, industry, media and
corporate officials that sit invisibly behind the seat of government,
yet literally write its foreign and domestic national security policies
whether the administration is Democrat of Republican, by contributing
‘ideas’ and forging government-industry relationships.
It
is this sort of closed-door networking that has rendered the American
vote pointless. Far from protecting the public interest or helping to
combat terrorism, the comprehensive monitoring of electronic
communications has been systematically abused to empower vested
interests in the energy, defense, and IT industries.
The
state of permanent global warfare that has resulted from the Pentagon’s
alliances with private contractors and unaccountable harnessing of
information expertise, is not making anyone safer, but has spawned a new
generation of terrorists in the form of the so-called ‘Islamic
State’ — itself a Frankenstein by-product
of the putrid combination of Assad’s brutality and longstanding US
covert operations in the region. This Frankenstein’s existence is now
being cynically exploited
by private contractors seeking to profit exponentially from expanding
the national security apparatus, at a time when economic volatility has
pressured governments to slash defense spending.
According
to the Securities and Exchange Commission, from 2008 to 2013, the five
largest US defense contractors lost 14 percent of their employees, as
the winding down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to lack of
business and squeezed revenues. The continuation of the ‘Long War’
triggered by ISIS has, for now, reversed their fortunes. Companies
profiting from the new war include many connected to the Highlands Forum, such as Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Boeing. War is, indeed, a racket.
No more shadows
Yet in the long-run, the information imperialists have already failed.
This investigation is based entirely on open source techniques, made
viable largely in the context of the same information revolution that
enabled Google. The investigation has been funded entirely by members of
the public, through crowd-funding. And the investigation has been
published and distributed outside the circuits of traditional media,
precisely to make the point that in this new digital age, centralized
top-down concentrations of power cannot overcome the power of people,
their love of truth and justice, and their desire to share.
What
are the lessons of this irony? Simple, really: The information
revolution is inherently decentralized, and decentralizing. It cannot be
controlled and co-opted by Big Brother. Efforts to do so will in the
end invariably fail, in a way that is ultimately self-defeating.
The
latest mad-cap Pentagon initiative to dominate the world through
control of information and information technologies, is not a sign of
the all-powerful nature of the shadow network, but rather a symptom of
its deluded desperation as it attempts to ward off the acceleration of
its hegemonic decline.
But
the decline is well on its way. And this story, like so many before it,
is one small sign that the opportunities to mobilize the information
revolution for the benefit of all, despite the efforts of power to hide
in the shadows, are stronger than ever. READ PART ONE
sputniknews | The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan
in 2001 in "self-defense" after 9/11; installed a "democratic"
government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key
node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the
Taliban alike.
Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion
in "counternarcotics programs". Operation Enduring Freedom — along with
the "liberation" of Iraq — have cost an astonishing several trillion
dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?
Have a SIGAR
An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey
details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the
sprawl in production areas; "In 2016, opium production had increased
by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons
in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016."
Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR
(Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints —
discreetly — at the crucial connection; Operation Enduring Freedom
feeding America's heroin epidemic.
Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers
vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike
can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline — in many
cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US
intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the
US Congress.
A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the
Pentagon-designated "arc of instability" tells the story of his
interaction with an Australian intel operative who served
in Afghanistan; "This was about 2011. He said he gave US Army
Intelligence and the CIA
reports on the Afghan heroin trade — that US military convoys from the
ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin out of
Afghanistan — much of it was raw opium — for distribution as their
backhaul.
No one answered.
He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and CIA at a
meeting and asked why no action was taken. The answer was that the goal
of the US was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving
them the poppies to grow won their hearts. He was then warned that if he
brought this issue up again he would be returned to Australia in a body
bag."
The source is adamant, "CIA external operations
are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using
the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a
form of misdirection."
And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump's
going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge; "In the
tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century,
in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these
silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British
Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most
powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade.
It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap.
The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the
officers that surround Trump are worthless."
On our post a month ago about elite ritualistic sex and drug crime magick My Eyes Shut to Your Misdeeds Brother, friend of the blog Rohan dropped a dime on some sordid, degenerate intersectional skullduggery emanating from a prominent homosexual democratic party activist in west Hollywood. We pick up here where he left off...,
SacObserver | The silence from L.A.’s Democratic community on the recent death of a
26-year-old Black gay male sex worker in the West Hollywood apartment
of 63-year-old prominent Democratic political donor Ed Buck has been
astounding.
Gemmel Moore’s July 27 death, was immediately classified as an
accidental methamphetamine overdose by the coroner, but now the
Sheriff’s Department is taking a closer look after his personal journal
was published. Numerous young Black gay men have stepped forward making
allegations against Buck recounting similar stories about a man who they
say has a Tuskegee Experiment like fetish which includes shooting drugs
into young Black men that he picks up off the street or via dating
hookup websites.
In his journal, Gemmel Moore wrote, “I honestly don’t know what to
do. I’ve become addicted to drugs and the worst one at that,” a December
entry reads. “Ed Buck is the one to thank. He gave me my first
injection of crystal meth it was very painful, but after all the
troubles, I became addicted to the pain and fetish/fantasy.”
His last entry, dated Dec. 3, 2016, reads: “If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now.
Buck has given hundreds of thousands of dollars of Democratic causes
and candidates over the years. His Facebook page boasts dozens of photos
of him with everyone from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to
Governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles County Democratic Party and California
Democratic Party chairman Eric Bauman and even Los Angeles Mayor Eric
Garcetti.
In online ads soliciting young Black gay men, Buck has referred to
them as being a “6-foot” n-word. On his Facebook page, he joked with
friends using the n-word.
Typically in politics, we try to distance ourselves from white people
who call Black people the n-word or use the n-word–not protect them
with our silence.
Most of Los Angeles’ Democratic and LGBT community–which are often
one in same–has had nothing to say publicly about Moore’s death.
Politicians who have received thousands of dollars from Buck over the
years have been curiously silent. I can count on one hand the number of
people from the political party of allies, coalition building and we’re
stronger together who have made a public call for a thorough
investigation into Gemmel Moore’s death in light of the numerous
allegations that have been made.
And while there was no shortage of politicians in Los Angeles falling
over themselves to issue statements and be seen in the media condemning
the events of Charlottesville and President Trump’s response to
them–locally they have seemingly looked the other way and conveniently
ignored that one of their top donors might be a serial predator who gets
his kicks by drugging vulnerable young Black gay men.
theintercept |Shortly after the 2016 election, Columbia University historian Mark Lilla published an op-ed
in The New York Times lamenting that “American liberalism has slipped
into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity
that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a
unifying force capable of governing.”
Lilla attacked “identity politics” as atomizing the American public
and losing elections, contrasting it with a holistic variation of
liberalism that powered the New Deal Coalition — Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms,
which focused not so much on who individual Americans were, but what
rights they all needed. The column went viral, sparking countless hot
takes, and he quickly padded out the argument into enough words to call
it a book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” Let the hot takes resume.
The reaction to Lilla’s original piece from left and liberal writers
was harsh. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilla’s Columbia
University colleague Katherine Franke compared
his ideology to that of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s,
arguing that “Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his
statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the more nefarious background work
of making white supremacy respectable.”
But while Lilla may be a white male professor in New York City, his
concerns are hardly uncommon among those in left-liberal politics. For
instance, former Democratic state representative LaDawn Jones — an
African-American woman who chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential
campaign in Georgia — lamented earlier this year
that her party’s Atlanta convention seemed to offer caucuses and
councils for every racial and affinity group except white people. In the
state of Georgia, less than 25 percent
of white voters choose Democrats at the ballot box, meaning that white
Democrats are indeed a minority group. Would the logic of identity
liberalism then dictate that the party design messaging aimed directly
at them? Traditionally, identity liberalism justifies itself by
organizing around groups that have been historically oppressed, but when
traditional majority in-groups become out-groups in certain
organizations and societies, is there a need for special categorization
and organizing for their inclusion as well?
These are the sort of questions Lilla tries to wrestle with in the
short book released this month. “The Once and Future Liberal: After
Identity Politics”is a breezy 165 pages that he uses as a
short overview of contemporary American political history and what he
believes are the shortcomings of modern American liberalism.
The book is at its best when it is reviewing the strengths of modern
conservative thought and liberal shortcomings — when Lilla reviews the
towering political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who reset American
politics, to his laments of over-reaching identity sectarianism on
American campuses — but comes up much weaker when suggesting an
alternative way forward.
TheNewYorker | Now into the arena comes a distinctly more conservative brand of
liberal and Trump opponent, Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at
Columbia, who, on November 18th, published an Op-Ed in the Times
declaring, “One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election
and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must
be
brought to an end.” His article, written while Clinton voters were still
in a kind of disbelieving haze, outraged not a few readers of the paper
with its blasts at “the fixation on diversity in our schools” and the
“moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has
distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying
force.” Lilla is hardly indifferent to injustices against women, the
L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people of color, but he claims that too many
liberals and leftists, indulging in a politics of “narcissism,” are
“indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of
life.”
Lilla, who has expanded that article into his new, brief book, “The Once
and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” insists that his is the pragmatic view: that in
order to secure progress for overlooked and oppressed peoples—in order
to advance a liberal economic, environmental, and social
agenda—political power must be won, which means that elections must be won. At the
moment, the Democratic Party—from elections for the White House to state
legislatures—is failing. The Democrats, he says, were once the party of
the working class; now the Democrats are largely a loose coalition of
educated coastal élites and minorities. Why is it now possible to drive
across the country for thousands of miles without hitting a blue state
or county? How did the Democrats lose a decisive number of Obama voters
to someone like Donald Trump? Lilla believes that identity politics is a
central part of the answer.
When I read Lilla’s book and then talked with him for The New Yorker
Radio Hour, I found much to disagree with, not least his cutting
dismissals of “social-justice warriors” or movements like Black Lives
Matter, which he sees as a “textbook example of how not to build
solidarity.” Lilla was once an editor at The Public Interest and a
neoconservative on domestic issues, though not on foreign policy; Daniel
Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were his elders and
allies. He still writes with marked ambivalence and irritation about the
contemporary left, particularly as he sees it on university campuses. Beverly Gage,
Adam Gopnik, Michelle Goldberg, and others have already delivered
serious critiques of Lilla’s argument about identity politics.
TheSaker | Question: why does the US foreign policies always support various
minorities? Is it out of kindness? Or a sense of fairness? Could it be
out of a deep sense of guilt of having committed the only “pan-genocide”
in human history (the genocide of all the ethnic groups of an entire
continent)? Or maybe a deep sense of guilt over slavery? Are the
beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” really inspiring US
foreign policies?
Hardly.
I submit that the real truth is totally different. My thesis is very simple: the
reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert states
and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population is
because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire. That’s all there is to it.
I think that minorities often, but not always, act and perceive
things in a way very different from the way majority groups do. Here is
what I have observed:
Let’s first look at minorities inside the USA:
They are typically far more aware of their minority identity/status
than the majority. That is to say that if the majority is of skin color
A and the minority of skin color B, the minority will be much more
acutely aware of its skin color.
They are typically much more driven and active then the majority. This is probably due to their more acute perception of being a minority.
They are only concerned with single-issue politics, that single-issue being, of course, their minority status.
Since minorities are often unhappy with their minority-status, they are also often resentful of the majority.
Since minorities are mostly preoccupied by their minority-status
linked issue, they rarely pay attention to the ‘bigger picture’ and
that, in turn, means that the political agenda of the minorities typically does not threaten the powers that be.
Minorities often have a deep-seated inferiority complex towards the putatively more successful majority.
Minorities often seek to identify other minorities with which they can ally themselves against the majority.
To this list of characteristics, I would add one which is unique to
foreign minorities, minorities outside the USA: since they have no/very
little prospects of prevailing against the majority, these minorities
are very willing to ally themselves with the AngloZionist Empire and that, in turn, often makes them depended on the AngloZionist Empire, often even for their physical survival.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
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