Cobb

Black Film: A Thumbnail Review

So a week ago, Amazon Prime started their "Black Lives Matter" advertising and put up a couple dozen black oriented films, offering a title called "Just Mercy" for free. (Discounted from 2.99). I cast it as a simple-minded commercial ploy but also defended it to a knucklehead who said that anyone or any institution that says "Black Lives Matter" is racist.

Last night we finally got around to watching Harriet, with my favorite young black pop star Janelle Monae, but not after running through the offerings of Prime, Netflix and Apple TV. Prior to going to Apple TV, the only standout films I noticed were Glory and A Soldier's Story.

During this time, my eldest daughter the most conservative and blackified of us, raised up something of a continuing issue for her as not having been raised in the same cultural milieu as some her other black friends. So she began checking off a list of films one of these friends explicitly gave her as representative. The included:

• The Wood
• Higher Learning
• Boyz n the Hood
• Set It Off
• Waiting to Exhale
• Rosewood
• Love & Basketball
• Juice
• Poetic Justice
• Friday
• New Jack City

With the exception of New Jack, I didn't see any of these films as worth the time and started to grumble about her friend's taste in film. But I didn't say anything. You see, the second context of this reading off of film titles was that I was trying to explain to them what a big deal Tyrese Gibson (who? they said) had been back in his day. He recently squared off against Jamie Foxx in some controversy or other on Instagram. I remember taking Gibson's side. But I was trying to explain that he was all the hotness back in the day along with Morris Chestnut, Taye Diggs and the older Denzel Washington. But I couldn't remember what the popular movie was with Chestnut. (It was The Best Man)

With that concession, I recalled a few more that I started to see on a YouTube search. That was a short list of films which is something of a unique category of black film: rom-dram. Romantic Drama, which is what I think best describes Jason's Lyric and Eve's Bayou which were two smoking hot romances I recall.

Finally we got around to checking out the collection on Apple TV. Damn, it was impressive. They had about 10 different categories of black film and there had to be at least a dozen in each category. So now just this moment I'm going to give 50, 4 and 5 star films that I think are worth anybody's time and a couple others worth seeing as canonical pop, like Coming to America and Sprung.

Fine	Black	Films
Glory	Daughters of the Dust	To Sleep With Anger
She's Gotta Have It	Malcolm X	A Soldier's Story
Killer of Sheep	Carmen Jones	Bird
Training Day	Man on Fire	Cry Freedom
Sankofa	Hustle & Flow	Akeelah & the Bee
Hoop Dreams	The Color Purple	Paris is Burning
Do The Right Thing	The Green Book	Amistad
Us	Get Out	Thelonius Monk

 

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Fun	Black	Films
Friday	Strictly Business	Drumline
Boomerang	Coming to America	A Rage in Harlem
Django Unchained	Purple Rain	Stand By Me
School Daze	Set It Off	Tales from the Hood
New Jack City	Sorry to Bother You	Crooklyn
Just Another Girl on the IRT	The Defiant Ones	Jackie Brown

While I'm at it, here are some ripe old stinkers.

• Three Brothers
• Dead Presidents
• Rosewood

I have no opinion on the following, either because I haven't seen them or I basically have no judgment

• Love & Basketball
• Love Jones
• Precious
• 12 Years a Slave
• Claudine
• Hidden Figures
• The Best Man
• The Wood
• 1 Angry Black Man
• Moonlight
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Mahogany

It also goes without saying that there are a lot of standout films starring Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Sam Jackson and Sidney Poitier that ought to be considered, but you already know that. Also I would also say that my favorite younger contemporary black film dudes are Harold Perrineau & Jeffrey Wright. Either of them could do my biopic. 

Fame Inversion Theory

A while back, after some controversy involving the rap artist 50Cent, ideas of accountability shot through my head. His album was 'Get Rich or Die Trying' and somehow, despite his huge success with that album, he had somehow disappointed millions of fans with his next album. Well, he already got rich. It reminded me about my own preferences. The theory started like this. I would rather make 1million dollars each from 17 people, than make 1 dollar each from 17 million people. At the time, a CD cost about $17 and an artist could be fairly sure to get at least a buck from every one sold. 

So if you piss off a million people, you've got to be some colossal-sized arse, but in the end you can ignore them. They're only out $17 bucks most of which you didn't even collect. But if you piss off a million dollar investor, you're in trouble. These are relative extremes of responsibility. When you're chilling in you mansion, and some sobbing waif shows up at the gates begging for an autograph, you don't interrupt your Cheerios breakfast. When Mr. Shadow calls, you sweat blood. Having watched Julie Taymor's film 'Titus', I reckoned that making a deal with a king is a very, very dangerous thing to do. One should hope never to owe their life to anyone, the cost of abandoning those responsibilities might very well be fatal. 

So maybe I don't want 17 million dollar investors in me after all, and certainly not one 17 million dollar investor. Which is better? The irresponsibility of having cadged the masses, or the enormous debt incurred by the sponsorship of a few powerful benefactors? In the former case, you are famous forever. You are ultimately accountable to the masses who must ultimately be disappointed in you by the millions. When you owe allegiance to a cabal, your fame is inverted. They will say as did the man in the Godfather: "A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous!" It's a deadly game when at some point you are made an offer you cannot refuse, but everybody saves face and the accountability is brutal.

This morning I was stunned by what I'm calling the Secular Northstar. More about that later, but part of its brilliance, this manifesto of world historic dimensions, is that it seems to understand perfectly how it is that the web of obligations can corrupt our most important institutions. And those corruptions are manifest in their inability to be responsible to the public. It is because of Mr. Shadow. He has dirt on you. You have dirt on him. You must be sharks. 

It suddenly occurs to me why motivational speakers and con artists prey on the public. "I'm a successful real-estate developer who has made millions. I can show you how, just buy my book!" Maybe he's the guy who just realized that to make tens of millions, he gets in over his head with people he never wants to piss off. Better to just stay in the 7 digit category trying to sell books, than in the 8 digit category looking over your shoulder.

Integrity dies in the confidential, accountable service of masters you cannot escape. Of course you were just following orders. You were protected. Only make sure that when you die, the secret letter gets published. Then you may smile at gunpoint, like Aaron the Moor. Then you may be a martyr. 

The Second Set: Music That Remade Me

I seem to have lived more lives than I expected. These days I tell myself that in life there are two kinds of people, trees and monkeys. I'm a tree for my family, but out in the world I'm a monkey. A flying monkey. So when I looked back at the top 15 albums in my mind that I wrote 10 years ago, I was thinking back. Now a new set of music has ripened and matured in my monkey mind and I need to account for that.

I remember Puck in the first episodes of MTV's Real World. For some reason I associate it with a gig I had down in Jacksonville's Baymeadows district. I stayed at Homewood Suites and ran down to the package store past the gatorholes for a fifth of Jim Beam Rye. The riff from Interstate Love Song was in my head the whole time. Then one day I heard Vaseline and discovered that it was the same band. I had to know more. The album was a revelation, and it seemed that every song was an anthem for dark parts of me. It went in and inverted all of my rock sensibilities. As time went on, STP was for me everything that was right with the new rock, a soundtrack for sections of empty highways on my desolate consulting missions around the country. Lady Picture Show was Cobb Parkway in Atlanta. Meatplow was a two lane strip of black ice in the dead winter cold of Columbus, Ohio. Down was me sitting in a rental car in an alley in Boston. None of it mattered to be timely. I went back and forth in time with it. When I read the release dates of the albums it all seems wrong, like they've existed long before in my mind. They're that deep.

 

The second best apartment I ever had was on the top floor of a walkup brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Seventh Avenue & Flatbush. I bought my NAD amp and my Infinity Speakers for that place. That place with the hardwood floors. With the eat-in-kitchen where I never cooked. With the french doors on the two bedrooms. With the exposed brick. Where the first fat fly of summer buzzed against the windowpanes with the clear view of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. It took me weeks to finally make the D Train go away. It rumbled by spooking me into thinking another earthquake was happening. Especially at night. I went to the brand new Virgin Superstore in Times Square and the pleasant young man told me that he knew everything about classical music. He was so happy that I asked him. "Hum anything", he challenged me. "I'll tell you what song it is." I was embarrassed. All I could think about were the clips in the old montage from 'Hooked on Classics'. I declined. But I did know one thing. I wanted the Appassionata. For years after I first discovered Bach, Liszt, and Debussy there seemed to be no solo pianists I could find to match their purity. Of course I didn't know where or how to look and the first person that asked to be a guide was declined. I thought too much of the encounter. I believed he was flirting with me and saw me too deeply because this was music I truly wanted to experience and I was only on the very edges of it. I was me. I wanted to do it myself. I bought Barenboim. His rendition of the Moonlight Sonata, which I didn't know at the time, has been the reference in my mind ever since. Every night in Brooklyn, I went to sleep with that album in the Sony CD player. It is peace.

 

I was bored on the plane and I had an aisle seat. I don't like the aisle because I have broad shoulders and enough bad experience with food carts and my funny bone to think there might be a conspiracy against me in the flight attendants union. At least it wasn't a bulkhead seat. So I actually plugged my headphones into the inflight station and browsed through the printed program guide in the seat back pocket in front of my knees. Hmm, what's this? A new album, a featured album no less, by Bobby McFerrin. Say what? If you know me, you know that I think there are two great injustices in the music world and they cycle around Fishbone and Bobby McFerrin. I know Bobby McFerrin to be a musical genius. I knew it back from his Spontaneous Inventions album back when people were just discovering Whoopi Goldberg's surfer girl routine. Of course the world has been fixated on that one song that paid for his mansion, but I knew better, primarily because of Medicine Music. I was entranced by Bang! Zoom, and in many ways it had been thematic for my early married life in Atlanta. Kids' Toys is still the ringtone for my youngest daughter, and Friends is to me one of the most perfect songs ever made. But nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on that flight. Beyond Words. This is one of the most inventive and transcendent albums ever recorded. As I listen even in this moment, the phrasing is sublime and the melodies seem crafted to soothe. It is a daddy album. It is a jazz album. It is both subtle and magnificent with the perfect interplay of Chick Corea's piano, Bobby's voice, excellent percussion and the most righteously mellow fretless bass playing I have ever heard. All with no lyrics. It is the landmark in McFerrin's career - he has invented something new in jazz vocals as it perhaps was inevitable that he would. OK. So I'm a fan. And yes he went even further several years later with Vocabularies.

 

There's a piano interlude between each of the cuts on this album that immediately takes me back to the days when my fiancee and I lived up near Grant's Tomb in the City. We had the tiniest of apartments sublet by one of the Urban Bush Women (thanks Christine) and it was a miserably hot summer. I had picked up the album back when I lived in Boston picking through the ruins of hiphop in the days of Jurassic Park. And there it was one complete with the Francophone edge of the Native Tongues, Lucien. And it got better from there. It was refreshing to hear the French approach to rap and I especially liked Democrat D's fricatives as well as the sad mellow of Moda et Dan. Of course MC Solaar was the standout. Some years later I found some comfort in Raggasonic, but this was the collection that kicked off my flirtation with Gallic hiphop. It lasted through a few singles later by Solaar, but Menelik and Lucien disappointed in the long run. This was the bright spot, and unforgettable.

 

 

There once was a videogame called Fez. It was a miracle of multiple dimensions. The game was highly anticipated and starred in a movie about indie game developers, unsurprisingly named Indie Game. The game was a smashing, although delayed success. I seem to recall it drove the lead programmer crazy. That was only the beginning. Its soundtrack was a simple marvel and introduced me to Disasterpeace who has gone on to relative fame. But there was a followup album named FZ: Side F that featured a collection of artists that rebirthed my love with electronic music. That included Solar Fields, Morusque, Monomer and my favorite Aaron Cherof. When I finally got around to Cherof, I was blown away, and so his album Anagnorisis has been in heavy rotation ever since 2013. It remains a standout among all of my new favorite electronic composers and DJs.

 

I got bored of jazz, you know. But I was overly into it for a long time. Obviously I loved the stuff that Miles was doing at the end of his life, and I have been a big fan of the Return to Forever crew, especially Stanley and Chick. Herbie has been a lifelong favorite and of course everybody lights a candle at the shrines of Coltrane, Monk, Basie & Mingus. There are several other dozens to choose from but everything new seemed to be a bit derivative of the best fusion and straight ahead. Truth be told I can put up with a lot of Bony James and contemporary smooth. But very little had gotten under my skin since the early 90s. Out of nowhere, really, came The Bad Plus. I was transfigured by the trio's coordination, by the drummer's prodigious fills and polyphony. It was frenetic and captivating. Their rock covers introduced me to songs I never knew - it had to be at least 5 years before I knew their rendition of Tom Sawyer was not original. (I have since put Rush in its appropriate place, I think). Flim, Velouria, too. All of their music had the energy and sophistication I forgot I was hungry for, and it was truly satisfying. I decided that Dirty Blonde would be my theme song - and I even wrote lyrics for it. The album that kicked it off still holds magic for me.

 

Jacques Loussier is one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. He did that French thing, take something old and make it new. They have said that Wynton Marsalis is one of those rare musical geniuses who is both a jazz and classical prodigy. It's true. But I think it is an even greater achievement to rearrange classical pieces that have been interpreted hundreds of ways for hundreds of years and make them jazzy in unpredictably clever ways that retain respect for the original. These are deeply inventive compositions he has put together with his trio, and it seems magical every time he performs. At least I am very convinced. It is almost impossible for me to decide which of his albums impresses me most, but I'm going to choose his interpretations of Satie. Because. I doubt even Satie could have envisioned his pieces so variantly played and I love the way he redoes them several times on this album. Taking nothing away from his performances of Bach and Debussy, this album is special because he renders them mulitple times, each with its own special flavor. For a long time, this has been my bedtime album.

Hiromi has saved jazz for me. Once again this is an amazing fusion of inventive style, prodigious skill, energy and sophistication that had me wondering why the Stanley Clarke Band's first album in 2010 was so extraordinary. I listened and listened but never read any liner notes. So I didn't really know it was her that made the difference. So I watched this video and knew that jazz was alive. What an outstanding trio. I can't say enough about this one, other than that the music is so excellent that talking about it is almost useless. You just want to listen to it over and over, and so I have. By far, I'd have to say my favorite song of hers is Labyrinth, although her play with Beethoven and Gershwin is fantastic. Watching her performances with Simon Phllips and Anthony Jackson is also a miracle to behold. I think only the Bad Plus synchronize in such fabulous ways, differently of course but spectacular. She's as much fun to watch as to listen - real passion on those keys.

 

I think one of the best things about being such a flathead as I am, so subject to the enjoyment of just about everything, is that you don't know what you don't know. That is to say, if there's a lot of things you can enjoy without getting bored, you will always have another opportunity to discover something wonderful you just haven't gotten around to yet. For me musically, that has meant Glenn Gould. As many times as I have ignored the award winning documentary about him, I should have guessed that he was phenomenal. And I have been in a lifelong quest for the perfect solo piano artist. I can remember first hearing in my college apartment bedroom Andre Watts playing live Listz Transendental Etude #10 so ballistically he popped two strings on the piano. I can still hear the KUSC announcer saying '..and survive it did.' Yes it stands as probably the greatest piano performance ever in my mind and experience. But actually the recorded album, which I eventually purchased, did not meet a very high standard of production. But this is about Glenn Gould. I can remember literally spending an afternoon holed up in a San Francisco hotel room watching the documentary of his second recording of the Goldberg Variations with commentary describing the difference between the newer 1981 recording and the original 1955 version. Astounding. As wondrous as all that is, it has been the French Suites that has captured my imagination. Am I heading down that corridor towards chamber music, after all that Prokofiev? It may be so. The French Suites stands out. It may be that his Scriabin gets me in the end, but for now it is the French Suites.

 

Steve Coleman and I have a very troublesome relationship. He represents the oversophistication of jazz that has made it fun for musicians and theoreticians, but not for listeners like me. A funny story is that my brother, who used to be a sound engineer, was a friend of Steve Coleman's original pianist Andy Milne. I knew about Milne because he ran clinics in Leimert Park at the World Stage, but I didn't know he had played for Steve Coleman. So I went to see him play at the Mondrian for the debut of his new album Forward to Get Back. My brother couldn't make the gig, but I spoke with Andy after the show. I said, I really like your music. I told him that it reminded me of Steve Coleman without the pretense. He cracked up. Ha ha very funny. Anyway, Steve Coleman did release what I say is one of the greatest rap albums of all time. Steve Coleman & Metric Tale of 3 Cities. Dude. I still don't know who the rappers are because I don't care. I expect that the golden age is over and my expectations and tastes have moved on, but damn when I was holding on the the last breaths there are two albums that stand head and shoulders above the rest. This is the first. Well I may as well mention the other which is Aphrocubist Improvisations from the Broun Fellinis, but that's going a little bit too far back dealing with a hiphop thread that is mostly dead. Nevertheless, more than even Buckshot LeFonque, A Tale of 3 Cities is the stand out, last stand standard of the most righteous genre of hiphop, serious lyrical force backed up with funky jazz. This is the last and greatest, right here. Get it if you can find it.

 

There is one last thing to say here and I'm not exactly sure how to say it because on one hand it is very conventional wisdom to say that Radiohead is one of the greatest rock bands ever. And it is also quite conventional to say that OK Computer & Kid A represent them at their most mindblowing and transformative. On the other hand, I like the reggae dub versions of these great songs, for the most part, better than the originals. This album, in addition to being a straight out genius arrangement, holds the distinction as one of the very last CDs I ever went out of my house to shop for. I recall the hybrid store out on the Santa Monica Promenade that let you pick and choose a dozen mp3s and they burned you a disc. But I had to have this entire record. It also bears mentioning that Vitamin String Quartet also Vitamin Dub has done a strikingly awesome cover of Just which is a favorite song of mine to play loud challenging the powers of my subwoofers. Radiodread's version of Airbag had been my daughter's favorite song ever, so it also has to be one of mine.

Nathaniel Rateleiff is, outside of Nancy Wilson, my favorite vocalist ever. I discovered him about 6 years ago. I looked around, bored, for critically acclaimed independent new music. The last time I did that, I found Coldplay. So I was batting 1000. The album cover caught my attention so I gave it a shot. OMG. To this day, I still haven't puzzled out the actual lyrics to half of his songs, but every time I have, it has been rewarding. His music is like nobody else's. It's like bluegrass, but not. Like country but more like western. But that voice. I've never thought I'd seriously consider the genre of 'singer songwriter', but his stuff gets to me. Like an abstract cryptogram of the heart, of suffering and of persistence. Like the souls of Modest Mouse with no need or desire to be stars, but the love of the music just comes through, haunting, vivid, like a bright red rash on the face of a hobo who just fell out of a moving boxcar. This is soul music. Soul music I say. Like Bill Frisell on a lonely day.

 

That's about it. To include more is to go beyond writing about the personal and into more generic music criticism, which I think I've indulged for the last time right here. So let's see. Here are the honorable mentions. Love Stories by Frank McComb, Treat Me Right by Eric Sardinas, Chant Down Babylon the Bob Marley covers by hiphop artists, Dub Chamber 3 by Bill Laswell. Real Enemies by D'Arcy James Argue. All kinds of stuff by Squarepusher, Tycho, Boards of Canada and Big Giant Circles, Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse, Crystal Planet by Joe Satriani and various musics by Gorecki and Elgar.

LA Riots: Myths & Stereotypes

l.a. riots myths and stereotypes
(from deep in the boohabian archives - spring 1997)
boohab - organic hiphop metaphysician

boohab - 07:42am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#6 of 185)
jesus christ. never have i seen such blatant revisionism. horowitz, you are seriously tripping! but you
know what? i forgive you because you are white and you didn't grow up in south central, so the only
access you have to the whole truth is through black folks like me who, on the whole don't care what you
think. you are so wrong it doesn't matter any longer if you ever get it right.

so despite all which has been said and truthful, people close to the facts understand that perhaps the
context will never stick. certainly after the fact of john woo's political descent, and riordan's ascent, the
political truth doesn't matter any more, so it is appropriate that your piece starts and ends with myths,
stereotypes and perceptions.

but just to give you the slightest clue, perhaps you should research back to those fateful days and ask
why people outside of los angeles rioted too.

further, as a matter of fact and record, kjlh 102.3 fm headquartered on crenshaw boulevard, right next
door to the angeles funeral home (an institution as distinctive as its name), played NO MUSIC. it was all
talk and call in for days. rap music indeed.

the only journalist closest to mainstream credibility i can give any credit for having any amount of context
on the subjects would be warren olney in his radio show 'which way la' in the aftermath.

boohab - 07:49am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#7 of 185)

the more i read that article the more i am amazed at how absolutely clueless the author is. i find it hard to
conceive what prompts him to flap around in the shallows of hearsay... i can't even find words which
describe how retarded his 'analysis' is. thank god he's on the web.

cause and effect. let us assume that this principle is universal, that it holds sway over all human beings
and begin from there...

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boohab - 09:28pm May 1, 1997 PST (#41 of 185)

nobody is giving money to inner city schools. public high school education is being defunded, by what i
suspect are reactionary reasons. in california, the longstanding compromise has been to leave high schools
separate and unequal and attempt to take up the slack at the jr. college and state university level, where at
least there are state and federal funds available. that means, of course, affirmative action. now that
commitment is being dumped at the level it really matters because of all the rediculous hype over
berkeley. anyway...

horowitz, at least on charlie rose, doesn't appear to be a raving lunatic. at least now i understand what
stick he's shaking. and considering his enormous disenchantment with the black panthers, it is
understandable why his revulsion to the logic of violent insurgency infuses his rhetoric with such alarm.
still, i find his analysis flawed, and wonder who exactly he is talking to as regards the orientation of
african americans to the events of 5 years ago.

for example, as i talk about in the 'racial extermination' thread, there's no mention of the black church in
southern california, nor that of maldef, and left asian and black organizations in their response to the hype
about the uprising. what was clearly an outburst of rage has now been transformed into some grand
conspiracy in horowitz' description. i don't buy it.

i'm not entirely sure what anyone is supposed to learn about the events of 5 years ago. southern california
and the nation has failed to implement any serious policy related to the basic problem which was and
remains police abuse. there is no national watchdog and despite some efforts to implement community
policing, the public is not well prepared to act intelligently when such situations repeat, witness st.
petersberg.

if indeed the country is disintegrating into anti-government hysteria, there is no greater threat to civility
than distrust of police. anyone who recalls (or recalls reading about) events involving clashes of federal,
state and local authority regarding local police actions, should know what kind of mess this can lead to.
yet it is clear, in the wake of willie williams' dismissal that public confidence in the los angeles police
department is far from restored.

so what now?
---
boohab - 08:33pm May 3, 1997 PST (#44 of 185)

I was staring at that book just the other night in charlotte. well, that one and a dozen others. what i was
looking for specifically was something by john mcphee, but what section? over in the hype section was
cochran's book, radical son, the race card, fuhrman's book, and gates' book '13 ways to look at a black
man'. i read gates' dust cover and put it back. completely disgusted with everything surrounding oj, i can't
imagine what's left to say worth hearing besides chris rock's joke about if it were jerry seinfeld and the
only person who found the bloody glove just happened to be in the nation of islam... i ended up buying a
copy of the new yorker (with gates on black london - since i'll be over there this month) and gorbachev's
memoirs. i had picked up reginald lewis' 'why should white guys have all the fun' because it was
autographed by his widow and jett is in the news, but i decided to put it back.

at any rate, it would be interesting to hear angela davis dissected. as well it would be interesting to see
david horowitz deconstructed. now that i'm reviewing some history of actual marxism, it would be
interesting to see where these fellow travellers get off. as far as i've seen, all they do in black
communities is show up for king day parades and say "we're all the same". hmmm. let's try a thread shall
we?

---

boohab - 09:06am May 5, 1997 PST (#53 of 185)

whoa, slow down there pardner. my rage is my rage. i own it and i am responsible for it, it is not some
negotiable social anger to be farmed and framed.

what gives bell hooks, of all people, a special credibility is her unique ability to make clear the
distinctions. as soon as you got up to 'the killing rage of black women and men', bell steps in and lays
bare the differences in her critiques of 'she's gotta have it', for example. in that movie, men didn't see the
rape.

i'm going to crosspost some of my observations on black rage specifically, and i think that will illuminate
a bit more about the l.a. thing and the type of analysis bell hooks performs. overall, it is my belief that
'black rage' has become a commodity which too often substitutes for political action. that has a great deal
to do with the way non-blacks dismiss it (in the case of dh) and co-opt it (in the case of sa).

boohab - 09:51am May 5, 1997 PST (#54 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 27 Jul 1996 13:49:31

black rage is not a theory.

i'm not sure that it makes so much sense to explain it in any other terms than malcolm x's. 'whatever you
will do to me, just know that i will do the same to you'. considering what happens to black americans
ever day *not it theory* but in reality, it's a mutha to face. most white folks who have looked closely at
the situations many blacks find themselves often recoiled in shock. to a person, in my experience, it
comes out like 'man if they did shit like that to me...'. in the end, there is a profound respect for the many
black strategies used to displace or redirect that rage.

coming from that perspective, i respect that many folks are likely to respect the words and deeds of mlk.
but that is rarely the case. there is often a sense of resignation americans feel in confronting the facts that
justice is so often an impossibility - that oj will be virtually barbecued forever, yet the korean shopkeeper
videotaped shooting a black teenaged girl in cold blood received a suspended sentence and is forgotten by
the nation. white folks and blacks alike come to agree that black rage, given american society, is
inevitable. that is why white people live in white neighborhoods, stay away from downtown at night,
understand the fear of bernard goetz, get the message of willie horton and respond in all sorts of ways in
every aspect of american society in a predictable fashion to the images of danger associated with black
rage.

black rage becomes not only a self-fullfiling prophesy but a necessary component of american politics.
white folks accept their guilt and fear, as they realize their collective historical incompetence as the
political majority in addressing the injustices faced by blacks. they bow out. they accept the destruction
of cities and the perpetuation of tragedy. black folks do the same thing in their relationships to each other.
we abandon our brothers at the first sign of trouble despite what we know, better than anyone, about the
content of their individual characters, and we use our own successes and absence of (external) rage, as a
justification of our own evasions of responsibility. thus the enraged black man or woman has become a
staple symbol in everyone's rhetoric. but few of us are serious or busy addressing the fundamental
injustice.

---

boohab - 09:52am May 5, 1997 PST (#55 of 185)

rage is not hate.

rage is visceral reaction to a severe victimization when all else seems hopeless. rage is the explosive last
lashing out of a man facing death with his back to the wall. it is not sustained or calculated like hate. one
speaks of acts of rage, not strategies of rage or ideologies of rage. you rage to get shit out of your system
and scare folks into not pushing you any more. it's a natural thang.

what's unnatural is that there is black rage. that a society is so predisposed to pushing black folks to the
limit that their rage is almost predictable.

although i never do, well - i haven't in memory - i know very well what this rage looks like and how to
use it. the expression of black rage as a dramatic device is (over)used by black and white artists alike. it's
part of the american lexicon. but that is very distinct from the real thing, as different as individual rap
artists are in rhyme character in a recording studio are from real killers behind bars. the expression is
romanticized in typical american fashion (i can think of no better example than the western movie, and in
particular the role of the writer in clint eastwood's 'unforgiven').

also, black folks front. that's not rage, that's frontin'. and i know one of you stupid punk ass white boys is
going to want me to please explain frontin'. don't even try it. you know what i'm sayin? just be glad i
didn't straight wax your sorry ass from the jump. cause you wouldn't be standing there with that stupid
look on your face gettin all huffy. you'd be pickin your ass up off the floor. oh oh oh now you know
what i'm saying. damn skippy. if your shit was correct i wouldn't have to go there. lame ass mu'fukas.

(i need to invent a new smiley to cap off that last paragraph. it is the following expression: i am tilting my
head to the side, rolling my eyes up and smacking my teeth and straight walking away - kind of like what
dennis johnson did to chris collingsworth last night)

boohab - 09:56am May 5, 1997 PST (#56 of 185)

articulation of rage is a valuable skill.

so often black folks feel it, but don't know exactly where it is coming from or what to do about it. they
equate that existential anger, confusion and the resulting frustration as an essential characteristic of being
black. but it is not. while it is certainly part of the black experience, the permanancy of which white
supremacy replicates generation after generation, it is not the defining core of who we are.

every generation (and ethnicity) of african americans finds different ways to articulate and diffuse or
redirect this rage.

boohab - 10:02am May 5, 1997 PST (#57 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 03 Aug 1996

the articulation of black rage or any other black sentiment or thought serves as a critical discourse on
american society.

however, as many exemplify in their admittedly undernourished comprehension of articulate black voices,
most of america does not pay attention. there are certainly *reasons* behind white fear, defensiveness
and reactions to perceived threats posed by blacks. but they are not good reasons, and they must be
challenged. 'consistent patterns of thought' within black communities are either well articulated or they
are not. those which are well articulated have names as do those who represent them. if there are issues
to be discussed and contention about the validity of claims, then there are real ways to deal with them
which are not grounded in fear, defensiveness and reactionary rhetoric. to direct such discussions are the
reasons black thinkers of all types write histories, teach classes, create novels, compose music, sculpt,
rhyme, dance, preach, witness and otherwise work to expose their thoughts.

yet despite this fact, americans continue to beleive in or be unduly influenced by the racist hype, often
beleiving themselves to be as well-informed as anyone. because of this there is practically an industry
dedicated to knocking ignorant people upside the head. i take up the cudgel of the race man from time to
time, but this time i'll defer to farai: http://www.popandpolitics.com

certainly ms. chideya is not the first, nor will she be the last to bring clarity to issues of racial prejudice,
oppression and injustice. there are today and have been so many who have directly transformed rage into
productive lessons without pandering themselves as victims. they don't expect nor ask for pity; these are
teachers. and their lessons stand in defiance of fear. too often we extract soundbites out of these lessons
believing there are golden platitudes that stand for all time in any varitey of circumstances. but how many
times have americans consoled themselves with the pathetic plea of a brain damaged man beaten into
submission by brutal police officers? (if there was ever any question of whether or not rodney g. king
was willing to surrender, consider those words). there is no excuse for americans to pretend to
understand the lessons of the past without any consistent discipline and evaluation. racism invariably
leads to injustice.

like disease, racism needs to be fought with thoroughness and vigor every generation. yet unlike disease,
if you harbor racist ideas wittingly or not, it *is* your fault and your responsibility whether or not we live
in a democracy, everyone's attitude should bear scrutiny on the issues.

---

boohab - 10:07am May 5, 1997 PST (#58 of 185)

black rage is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

there is a vested interest in american politics to use black rage. white political majorities are particularly
attuned to black rage, whether that is constructive or raw rage. in short, black rage is a legitimated form
of political protest. a lot of blacks recognize this and make use of it. if i sit here in this forum and
complain that black folks get harrassed unnecesarily by the same police that should be protecting them,
that does not carry the same weight in american society as the artist ice cube writing the rap 'fuck the
police' and having 17 year olds pump the beat in the car next to you with an evil stare on their face.

when black representation on the city council of los angeles is resisted for decades, and there is no forum
given for the tyrrany of the darryl gates administration, that doesn't get the same attention as video of
blacks burning police cars. often enough, there are no acceptable political compromises offered by a
polity which ignores the facts of black life. consider how it is that 'law and order' has become a 'white
man's burden' in our society.

such political intransigence is often enough reasonable provocation for black folks to take rage to the
streets. the spirit of compromise - cant we all just get along - is not proactive. it comes after the violent
fact. clinton has demonstrated this in his dismissal of sista souljah, for example.

boohab - 10:09am May 5, 1997 PST (#59 of 185)

(end of blasts from the past)
---

boohab - 05:54am May 6, 1997 PST (#70 of 185)

my rage is what i say it is. but that doesn't stop the patronizing bullshit. but i don't need to go there. like i
said before, you can be so wrong for so long as to be irrelevent.

america can survive the burning of its cities and not change its mind. that is the one lesson i have learned
above all. myths and stereotypes are what count.

the inevitable destination of dh and iv's condescention can be found here, as they demonstrate the snide,
callous, intransigent politics which creates police brutality in the first place and defends the misapplication
of justice as applied to black folks in particular. it is clear, that after an exhaustive and patient explanation
of the human element of rage in the context of los angeles 1992, both were content to reduce complexity
to the snappy reiterations of the most ignorant and prejudiced comments about the tragedy.

no doubt, they will recount to me 'the facts'.

"The tones of lies are vulgar facts but they are not noble sounds. But there is another truth and that
truth passes through time in the very same way that an irresistible force passes through an immovable
object. That's what I said: this truth is so irresistible that it passes through immovable objects. It is the
truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the
possibilities of the human spirit."

-- Stanley Crouch

---

boohab - 10:27am May 6, 1997 PST (#75 of 185)

you are being silly ilya. maxine waters *is* a duly elected leader of south central los angeles. is this her
call, or does it matter to you what she thinks?

take a look at these photos, (the essay is a bit obscure but it's what i was thinking at the time). who was
out for revenge?
---

boohab - 10:52am May 6, 1997 PST (#76 of 185)

I don't think it's beneficial to think about the accuracy of the aim of the looting, torching, shooting ragers.
those who riot best, riot. those who lobby best, lobby.

what is important is to recognize the disposition of political forces in the aftermath. to consign this matter
to the police as merely a crime wave is to foreclose the possibility of a transformative politics of the
ragers. yet this was the status quo of the racist stereotypes against south central and east los angeles, and
this is precisely what horowitz has done. such is the justification for the lapd being one of the most
advanced paramilitary police forces in the world. is there any reason to believe horowitz' dismissive
majoritarian position might be moderated by intelligent or (heaven forbid) compassionate consideration?
well, not if you are preoccupied with maoist history and the love affairs of opera singers.

so instead of engaging (which would probably have been very easy, considering salon's recent article on
maxine) on a level of political negotiation, we witness crude and egregious examples as par for the course.

this does not bode well for the future expansion of democratic politics in the united states. there are
generations and geographies for which adequate political representation has never been achieved. where
the practice of voting and speaking out is the experience of defeat after defeat. where human rights issues
become 'special interest' issues. where people don't expect suspects to be brought to trial - merely shot in
the street. where people are suspects for just being alive.

my experience tells me that the fire next time will be put out by next wednesday. american society and
politics absolutely crushes such political dissent even before it gets the opportunity to become political.
and as long as americans can distance themselves, with haughty indifference from the truths of these
matters, hiding behind the thin blue line of police force rather than engaging in constructive political
engagement, then as malcolm x said "as long as those ingredients, explosive ingredients exist, you are
going to have the potential for explosion on your hands".
---
boohab - 08:35pm May 6, 1997 PST (#84 of 185)

speaking of salvadorans, i forgot to mention that there was an improper degree of cooperation between
the lapd and the ins in the aftermath. having arrested a large number of latinos and holding them under
emergency rules, ins records were searched and individual suspects turned over to that agency for
deportation.

korean liquor stores were a particular target primarily because of the murder of latasha harlins. her killer,
the owner was caught on tape shooting harlins point blank for allegedly stealing a quart of orange juice.
she was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. as i recall, no homes burned except one
apartment building adjacent to a strip mall. lots of pawn shops were burned.

I wrote "How will theory transform the monsters created in our nightmares by our abusive white
fathers?". i was thinking of several things, primarily the dualism gerald early calls the 'lure and loathing' of
american society. white cops protect white folks in white neighborhoods like beverly hills and like
hawthorne, meaning they keep you out, by any means necessary, but you are supposed to respect the
law - you hate the powerful society that you wish to be a part of because it is so eager to use violence
against you. so when you are successful, do you replicate that abuse? does the son kill the father and set
himself up to be killed, or does the son live forever in his father's shadow?
---

boohab - 07:23am May 9, 1997 PST (#125 of 185)

120 posts until slavery and the founding fathers. actually i thought nazis would be first. before we start
talking about the caucasian wars, the long march and the battle of hastings why don't we look a bit closer
at our own politics today?

the mike davis analysis is a very good piece. it clarifies for me some things that i knew but never looked
at very closely. (i studiously avoided all of the books coming out on the subject back then - the level of
ignorance was so astounding that i couldn't stomach it.) davis' ability to talk with gangbangers and his
understanding about their longstanding war with the lapd is unrivaled. although i didn't read leon bing's
bio on kody scott, i did read his own book, which i take to be more accurate.

I have some 30 or so photographs of the destruction which i'll scan in and add as a special addendum to
boohab's factotum.

Donna Dear - 07:47am May 9, 1997 PST (#126 of 185)
"A modest woman; with much to be modest about"

Boo....ya got a link to the Davis stuff?

boohab - 08:03am May 9, 1997 PST (#127 of 185)

http://www.exuberance.com/rut/miked/burning.html

david horowitz - 08:44am May 9, 1997 PST (#128 of 185)
Author, Radical Son

Sherman: Yes, the movie.

boohab: How come lefties like Davis always line up on the side of the criminals?

boohab - 09:19am May 9, 1997 PST (#129 of 185)

that depends on your definition of 'senseless death'.

if one is capable of compassion for the murdered, then one can measure ones tolerance for all murders
on the same scale. so justice denied to crips and bloods hurts just as much as justice denied anyone else.
davis lays bare the symbiotic relationships between local politicians, fear of crime, lapd funding and gang
warefare. what emerges is a picture of gang violence which is allowed to fester because it serves police
interests in obtaining paramilitary equipment, political interests in demonizing 'south central' as one big
sinkhole (which actually is one of america's largest and most ethnically diverse urban areas), and gang
interests in bloody revenge. despite the large number of gangs and gang members in los angeles, only a
small minority are involved in drug dealing and the murderous crime associated with that - but that
understanding is impossible to come by through conventional means. so there is essentially an ongoing
war between the lapd and gangs and it's the gangbangers who get shot on the street, not the cops.

the net result is that criminal suspects are systematically denied due process because of the agressive
tactics of the lapd. the courts try to compensate for the cops zealousness, then the cops try to
compensate for the courts.

on the other hand, davis illustrates clearly how operation hammer and gang sweeps affected everyone in
that geographic area. you recruit cops from all around the country, send them to the academy and then to
work an internship at the county lockup, then out into south central with orders to sweep, and you spend
millions of tax dollars with overtime for mass arrests with 2% criminal booking rates. nevertheless you
add thousands of names to a computerized arrest record system, available online to every patrol car -
which effects police thinking. they don't know, or care to know, the difference between criminals and
ordinary teenagers. to them, all youth of color in south central los angeles are potential gangbangers, thus
potential enemies.

also remember that the great myth of los angeles policing is that the area covered by the lapd is far too
great for community policing. the reason los angeles has helicopter patrols is an outgrowth of that old
idea. los angeles does not have community precincts - they have these large bunker buildings which spit
out squad cars. all the busses in the rtd have numbers painted on their tops, as do squad cars, and certain
public buildings so that la can be monitored from the air. cops don't get out of their cars unless they
*must*. they don't fight crime on the ground, they cruise around 'hostile territory'.

when pcp was (for a short time) the new hot drug on the streets, the lapd testified about its ability to give
superhuman strength to suspects. that's when they started with their more agressive baton techniques and
chokeholds. it was assumed that anyone resisting arrest was a potential pcp addict, and a great deal of
force was used. that whole technique we saw used on rodney king came from that period. the chokehold
got the lapd in more trouble than they could handle. so they got stun guns, then they got 9mm pistols,
shotguns and they even got tanks. well, they always had shotguns.

anyway, the lapd has been very successful in publicizing certain gang activity, bringing up the racial
spectre and in cooperation with local polticians, securing for themselves more and more paramilitary role.
the lapd's anti-terrorist and intelligence divisions are probably the most advanced in the world, and that's
no exaggeration.

the great irony is that citizens in los angeles, especially in south central, do not feel protected or served by
the police. everyone (these days) buys weapons for self-protection.
---
boohab - 03:13pm May 9, 1997 PST (#140 of 185)

So defending police officers somehow means that you are protecting
"the owning class"? Whatever that means. So many people seem to wish
to excuse criminal behavior due to the us vs. the cops mentality.
Does it suprise you that the cops will start to have the same
attitude? Americans today view our police as corrupt and violent
when the truth is that the vast majority are neither. You want to
see violent cops go to Germany. See what the Polizei constitute as
police brutality.

the vast majority of police departments in america don't have a credibility problem, and the vast majority
of police chiefs in california said darryl gates should have stepped down a long time before he did.

the vast majority of police officers in the foothill division which was that of koon, powell, wind and
brisneo also failed to cooperate with the fbi investigation of systemwide corruption. nor was there any
legal recourse for non-cooperation.

the vast majority of african-americans are unconcerned with police abuse and bruality in germany
because they know what it is like firsthand.

you seem to forget that african-americans specifically haved lived through an era when police exclusively
protected white people. so as much mouthing off as people do about 'defending criminal behaviour', this
country still writes off huge sections of its population as criminals, and not long ago that included any
black folks who asserted themselves in any dispute with whites. someday there will come a point in
american society when blacks, clearly and still america's most despised (except perhaps for gay blacks),
will be able to assert themselves in any situation without having to explain and carry their constitutional
and civil rights on their sleeves. but while we still do and are smarting from abuses, you'll hear a lot
whose rights are being stepped on, and that includes criminal suspects - because that's who we are.

---

johnny cochran is wealthy. why? because he has been successful in winning civil judgements against the
los angeles police department. the taxpayers as a political class, changed the law in order to limit the
liability of the lapd on several occasions.

the first example was after the successful prosecution of wrongful death and criminal negligence in the
case of (whatshisname) who was hung in the signal hill jail by police -(they claimed it was a suicide, and
were busted by a coroner's inquest). it limited the liability of police officers and jailers in civil and criminal
matters as regards the safety of suspects in custody. the second came on the heels of the successful jury
award of about 6 million dollars to activist michael zinzun, who lost an eye during his arrest and lockup. it
put a cieling on the amount juries could award.

it is perhaps not widely known that the legal defense fund for officer stacey koon amounted to about 13
million dollars. i beleive rodney king's award was about 4 million. these figures may be wrong, i am surer
about koon's defense fund, and i am certain he got more than rodney king.

so these are concrete examples of defenses of the police, specifically when they are at their worst. why?
because people like johnny cochran would bankrupt the city..

--

boohab - 09:17am May 10, 1997 PST (#146 of 185)

and even the abolition of slavery did not reject the presumed inferiority of africans... anyway.

neither the aclu or any other 'liberal' watchdog group has the political knowhow to work gang
intervention. the fact of the matter is that the few people IN the system which are successful at
reconstructing gang members get no respect or funds from either liberals or conservatives.

I think it is reasonable that juveniles of high school age convicted in the 'big four' violent crimes should be
tried as adults, but i don't think it is reasonable that special abridgements of due process are called for in
any case. just keep the police in their place.

but the fact is that before we can deal with violent crime, we have to undo the huge mistakes made in the
war on drugs and mandatory sentencing. i challenge anyone to convince me that prisons are not tough
enough, but they are wasted on the wrong people. the burden of prison overpopulation lies almost
exclusively with conservative neo puritanical prohibitions. violent criminals get out because crackheads go
in.

and yes it is a shame that the united states jails more people per capita than any other nation. the aclu is
right to fight against that. then again, the political majority seems to desire a police state.
--

 

The Trump Diversion

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. 

That is because I don't believe nearly as much as opponents of Trump that he is running the country. It was 12 years ago that I concluded that populist politics ran the political establishment of the US and therefore deserved my scorn and abandonment. But perhaps it's fair to say that until Jonathan Haidt and the IDW correctly put all of the Culture Wars into fine relief that I may have been playing politics by other names. My hopes (and therefore my writing efforts) are for society to work, but I am convinced that the entire problem with politics and social media are that society has been dumbed down and escalated into conflict through very narrow channels. We have been turned from chimps to T-Rexs and have lost the ability to play piano. We are no longer dextrous. 

My association thus with the IDW and with Stoicism have resulted in me appearing not to give a rats about society. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a staunch civil libertarian. It is completely consistent. But I think (as one example) the passage of the legalization of gay marriage has given its supporters the false confidence that political activism is the engine of positive social change. It is not. Politics is about government policy, not about social engineering. And yet that is what we've decided as a nation that politics is supposed to be, and for those of good intent on the Left it is the greatest failing of our age, because Trump doesn't give a shit. No, he doesn't. He is not a role model for the kind of decency we Americans want. He is a profound asshole, and a thin skinned bastard. He is caustic and inept. Transparently so. 

I have never thought that Trump's manipulations of those agencies he rules could be so clever and subtle that they couldn't be undone by a reasonable successor. So I have never panicked. And yet the merciless mercenaries that the Democrats have become has left wide open a stable rational response to Trump's haphazard governance, some of which is actually rational, if not diplomatic. At this moment, I can see two things he has done right. He has played hardball with Chinese trade and he has kept the immigration debate alive. Trump's nationalism has given nationalism a ridiculously purple paint job. But nationalism is what America needs. The leader of a national government should make that government work, but that is not the objective of the Progressive Left, which is to make Americans love Americans through political activism. To them, the personal is political. That is wrong. 

If you listen to Eric Weinstein's podcast 'The Portal' and if you listen to Sam Harris as I do, then you will quickly realize that there are very smart Americans who can see that there is a lot left to be desired in America. In the IDW, which both men belong, we are engaged in combatting a crisis of rationality. It is this crisis of rationality and its undermining of confidence in Western civilization that is our greatest problem. It is a problem that is not well defined or described in either the mainstream media, in academic publication, or in political messaging. Some people might call it income inequality. They are vaguely right. Some people might call it the patriarchy. They are vaguely right. Some people might call it godless degeneracy. They are vaguely right. As they politic in the diffuse miasma of social media only those select phrases come through. The simple common denominator is that America is being led poorly. 

Since I am a civil libertarian and champion of a better society, I often say it thusly. The ruling class has failed to fulfill its obligation to society. And to be more concrete about it I find it apt to point out that Donald Trump produced a reality TV show. I pointed this out before.

There was a great moment I saw from the Hoover Institution's You Tube channel when the host asked a reporter who has spent a lot of time with Trump and his team "I don't understand. How did millions of blue collar and poor working class people vote for this billionaire?" The first thing the reporter replied is "Have you watched 'The Apprentice'?" The host says, no I don't watch reality TV. To which the reporter replied, with a polite 'Duh'.

Trump is the billionaire that blue collar workers with no filter want to be. They communicate on the same level, and he has proven it. Everybody who looks down a these working class people and their reality shows is at a complete loss. But the answers are as plain as day. So really, how long are these clueless people going to keep the same media diet, if they truly want to understand the media language and political ambitions of that working class that stood up and elected this president?

So the problem I have with my Facebook friends is that they only know me as this ex-conservative who is not contributing enough to the dogfight whose job it is to shovel enough his own shit on Trump's head to bury him. But I know that's just partisan ammunition for political gain. That is because the Democrats who have failed miserably to produce grownup candidates, resurrect the Clinton gods or beat Bernie Sanders fair and square have been reduced to cataloging 'atrocities' of the President. What they haven't done is Labor. What they haven't done is Anti-Trust. What they have done is outsourced their brains to a mythical Scandinavia. Since I have to say this, because I'm often explaining to binary thinkers, the Republicans have done fuck all for America. They deflated the Tea Party who had every common cause with Occupy Wall Street and have defaulted spectacularly leading to the support of corporate welfare. There is no longer a such thing as a fiscal conservative in America, at least not one in a responsible position of power. They have completely crawled up the ass of big money, especially where political fundraising is concerned, and we are stuck with pretty much everyone who understands money and fiscal responsibility at the economic equivalent of a dog track run by gangsters and underwritten by the Fed. I pay over 17% on my best credit cards. Chase gets their money for 0.1% by the billion and has never paid more than 1% since 2008.

I know that nuclear power generation of electricity will not prevent global warming. But I also know it's at least 50 times better than wind, solar and all other renewables. Yet it is an article of faith that nuclear power is not politically acceptable in America. It's scientifically green but it's not Green. This is thus my situation. I have no patience with that which doesn't present honestly. I cannot afford to waste my breath contributing to a political dogfight that is not building ammunition to fight anyone but the opposition party and its constituents. So I'm out here stuck with the nuclear power engineers without a job. I'm stuck out here with the data engineers who traffic in flight schedules and aircraft maintenance, unlike Facebook who has all of the billions trafficking in the stolen personal data of consumers. I refuse to jump up and down and say with arrogant moral certitude that it's Trump's fault. It's the fault of American populist politics and its attendant media totems who refuse to surface the problems Americans are positioned, but not funded to solve. If one party cannot take sole credit at the expense of the other party, it will not be raised as a matter of concern to the Federal government. 

How foolish do we have to be to expect that a President elected from this environment can and will solve every other kind of problem Americans need solved? Perhaps we are being saved by the pandemic. Perhaps we will realize that there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt in our political philosophy.  

Yet I don't believe in political solutions to people's problems. When I explain this, people don't get it or don't believe me. Perhaps I should say that in the way that people who are atheist might understand. I have no faith in the god of Democrats. I have no faith in the god of Republicans. I can get to whatever people need without attending either church. Trump is, by all rights, the devil incarnate to those who believe in the god of Democrats. Indeed he may even be the devil incarnate to those who believe in the god of democracy itself. I have my doubts about democracy, and I certainly don't worship it. I didn't major in political science but computer science. I'm on the side of the engineers, and I don't believe in social engineering. In fact, I despise it.

So let me close with a couple other complaints around the matters of social engineering. As all Californians know, we are done with the drought. It has been around for a decade or more since El Nino drenched us and sent mudslides down our fancy slopes. And in those many years there have been no new reservoirs built. California political leaders have socially engineered a solution by jawboning us to conserve water. Don't care for your lawn, they said. Don't have a real shower, they said. Today, during the SARS-nCOV-2 aka COVID-19 pandemic, there was no strategic investment by either party in government policy involving our supply chain for medical equipment or funding for handling epidemics by pathogens that attack time and time again. No strategic investment, therefore no strategic reserve and obviously no strategy. Now that there is a crisis, the government is telling us to trust them and once again jawboning 'solutions'. They are socially engineering at the very limit of their capacity. And the people who know better, Americans who are actual experts are essentially left out in the cold. There are massive failures that are obvious to people who give it a day's thought can see. With everything that was debated and legislated about healthcare in the past 30 years, we simply find that we don't have enough hospital beds per capita. 

I don't sufficiently hate Trump. I don't see how doing so will get water or hospital beds to the people who need them. 

The Misery Gap, Kantian Good Intent and Non-Zero Sum Activism

Consider the misery gap.

Imagine that you are an American who feels out of touch with harsh reality. You can go watch superhero movies because they are violent and exciting but just really fantasy violence. You're safe. You're comfortable. You watch TV shows where young stupid awkward people are cute and have nice apartments and don't get into car wrecks that jacks up their insurance premiums. You're young and healthy enough to get totally wasted whenever you feel like partying and you don't even think about health consequences. I mean you'd eat cheeseburgers every day if you could live with the gut and hip consequences. I mean meat is more dangerous than alcohol, right? OK let's not get to serious here.

The bottom line is that you're a happy American and you've got it pretty good. You are, dare we say it, privileged. I mean not compared to your friends and co-workers but compared to all kinds of other miserable people. You think to yourself, I'm happy to talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable. And I'm all for being supportive of that. I'm a good person and I will speak up, because that just makes sense to me. You think, I wouldn't want to live in a harsh reality like so many other people, and I want people to live like I do. More friends for everybody, right? In your world, there is practically limitless freedom. The only limits on freedom are the zero-sum kind. When I take advantage of you, directly that's wrong. Otherwise I can swing my fist anywhere, so long as it doesn't hit anybody's nose.  

OK That's the setup. 

What then is the zero-sum nature of activism? When you talk about all kinds of ways that people could be less miserable, is there a cost? Is positivity not always only positive? When everybody is working to make the world a better place so long as our intentions are good, then we are all good right?

Cobb doesn't think so. This is the theoretical context that occurred to me as I was thinking about a 'misery gap' in the following scenario. If Trump makes you miserable, if the very fact of Trump is making America miserable again, then why do people risk death to come here? Most certainly they know that they will face violence and dangers of the action movie type where commandos with black camo and automatic weapons will shout at them. Certainly they must know that they won't be able to get car insurance.

---

Anyway. That train of thought had a hard time climbing a hill to see the promised land. Meanwhile Fareed Z sees some facts and makes some speculations. The facts are the most interesting part.

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN: Given President Trump's mean spirited and often bigoted attitudes on immigration, it pains me to say this, but he is right, that the United States faces a crisis with its asylum system. Democrats might hope that the out-of-control situation at the southern border undermines Trump's image among his base as a tough guy who can tackle immigration. But they should be careful. It could actually work to the president's advantage.

Since 2014, the flow of asylum seekers into the United States has skyrocketed. Last year, immigration courts received 162,000 asylum claims. A 240 percent increase from 2014. The result is a staggering backlog with more than 300,000 asylum cases pending and the average immigration case has been pending for more than 700 days. It's also clear that the rules surrounding asylum are vague, lax and being gamed.

The initial step for many asylum seekers is to convince officers that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries. And about 75 percent meet that criteria. Some applicants for asylum have suspiciously similar stories using identical phrases. Many simply use the system to enter the U.S. and then melt into the shadows or gain a work permit while their application is pending.

Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself. Yet, the two have gotten mixed up. As the Atlantic's David Frum has pointed out, the idea of a right to asylum is a relatively recent one dating to the early years of the Cold War. Guilt ridden over the rejection of many Jewish refugees during World War II the U.N. created a right of asylum to protect those who are fleeing regimes where they would be killed our imprisoned because of their identity or beliefs. This standard has gotten broader and broader over the years.

And now includes threats of gang warfare and domestic violence. These looser criteria coupled with the reality that this is a safe way to enter the U.S. have made the asylum system easy to abuse. Applications from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have surged even though the murder rate in their countries has been cut in half.

More broadly, hundreds of millions of people around the world who live in poor, unstable regions where threats of violence abound could easily apply for asylum. Do they all have the legal right to enter the U.S. through a backdoor, bypassing the normal immigration process? The Trump administration's approach has been mostly to toughen up the criteria. Hire more judges, push Mexico to keep applicants from entering the U.S.

But a much larger fix is needed. The criteria for asylum need to be rewritten and substantially tightened. The number of courts and officials dealing with asylum must be massively expanded. People should not be able to use asylum claims as a way to work in America. There needs to be a much greater cooperation with the home countries of these applicants rather than insults, threats and aid freezes.

No one fix will do it, but we need the kind of sensible bipartisan legislation that has resolved past immigration crises. Democrats have spent most of their efforts on this topic, assailing the Trump administration for its heartlessness. Fine. But that does not address the roots of this genuine crisis. If things continue to spiral downward and America's southern border seems out of control, Trump's tough rhetoric and hard line stance will become increasingly attractive to the public.

Keep in mind, that the rise of populism in the Western world is almost everywhere tied to fears of growing out of control immigration.

(published now without further comment)

 

 

Richard Kadrey and the Morality of Dark Degenerates

I have been enjoying the Sandman Slim series of novels by Richard Kadrey for years. This week I just finished his latest novel, The Grand Dark. It is a revelation. I will place it, in my ultimate library right next to Gene Wolfe's 'The Land Across'. The new book, The Grand Dark, takes place in what could be described as an alternate Mitteleurope postwar near future. It's at once both futuristic and retro, a brilliant creation in which serves as a kind of gothic background for a tale of youth and innocence lost, repression, rebellion and decadence. In describing it thus, having read it, I find myself getting excited about something I'm sure I wouldn't have been excited about had I read an overview. It's Kadrey, a writer of wondrously dark imagination. There's not much of any other way to describe him now as the caretaker of the morality of dark degenerates. 

So start with the phrase 'entartete kunst', and imagine an American 1980s romantic punk sensibility in a Reagan era where the CIA was not turned against Soviet Russia, but against Americans whose common folks had turned to a minimally employed louche cokeheads and heroin addicts. Imagine thin wastelings like the Pet Shop Boys, East end punks in tattered jackets looking after scores with West End girls, dragging on Shermans all black lipsticked in sheer gauzy blouses. Imagine a precisely speaking man in small hornrimmed glasses dressed formally with a preternatural intelligence lording over a bicycle delivery service with a ratpack of couriers looking just out of the workhouses of Oliver Twist. Imagine a grimy industrial city barely hanging on to civility patrolled by automatons, robot taxi drivers, spiderlike police bots. Imagine disfigured war veterans who wear steel masks covering their deformities grumbling to themselves on public transit everywhere you go. 

The Grand Dark is the pseudonym of the theatre of the absurd in which the most crumbly of human dramas are shot through with sexual drama and political innuendo that caters to the most ribald and degenerate sensibilities of a bounding youth and a slumming aristocracy - where poets and students and grand dames & dukes meet at opioid cocktail parties signifying about the potential of transgressive creativity, each production aiming to rise the level of shock and awe to that of civilizational neutron bombs. And around every corner are the brutal police and the even more vicious secret police. 

The novel is the story of a naif and his lover, an actress, two against the whole demonic world. Like Forrest Gump stranded in Milan Kundera's Prague, Kadrey's protagonist Largo struggles against the news of the world as he manages to escape its crushing jaws by inches every day. He is animated by his passionate love for Remy whose love and life are romantically reckless in the way only an energetic and beautiful youth animates to the stunned jealousies of the jaded who surround her at work. Their love is true and it surpasses all until things with gravity and grit get their grubby ways. Remy disappears. Largo struggles to find Remy. Has she abandoned him? Is she lost? Kidnapped? Dying of the miasmic vapors of this cruel industrial wasteland?

In all ways subtle and clever, Kadrey's world pulls you into its twisted orbit, drowning you in gothic mystery and the horror of war, the heat and hate of the beat down humans and the intrigues of revolution and counter-revolution. It is a world of creeping cold claustrophobia, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil set in Eastern Europe. Kadrey's writing simply and occasionally brings you directly into the head-pounding despair of a sweet young man fighting for his very survival in a world intent on destroying all that gives him hope. 

In all this, Kadrey has brought me face to face with something I would not have known how to approach - which is how one who is weak and powerless with no cause to hope and no ethos beyond survival lives at the mercy of sophisticates who see in him only a means to crafty ends. Largo's degeneracy is genuine. He is a son of the underbelly of society, and no he doesn't know how to tie a tie. He doesn't jog for his health, he grabs on to the parcel of peace that can be purchase by a couple of drops of opioid under the tongue, by the hot breath of his lady love, by the thrill of outrunning the gangsters out to bash his brains. And so we are left breathless trailing a youth with none of the degraded common sense of a degraded time, yet whose honesty is the only sort that can reflect the humanity of those who struggle on the daily. He is dirty and unsubtle. He is weak and frightened. He is used by inches in ways he cannot comprehend and all he can do is try to stand up straight and stand up for his friends. He who suspected no one finds himself pinioned, as was my heart. 

A Thought about Critical Theory

I think most critical theory generates praxis that cannot be organic, by definition. It can only work in an upscale bourgeios context, because it's essentially shopping research for ethical lifestyle choices. And still people don't know if red wine is good for you, waiting for the next round of PhD theses.

This is rather astounding given the (fake?) admiration for 'authentic' indigenous cultures who are operating on ancient wisdom and traditions of the sort rarely subjected to critical theory.

I think critical theory is an intellectual neutron bomb aimed at the modern metropolis. Then again, I'm sure some critical theorist might tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.

Some References by Allan Bloom

The civil rights movement provides a good example of this change in thought. In its early days almost all the significant leaders, in spite of tactical and temperamental differences, relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They could charge whites not only with the most monstrous injustices but also with contradicting their own most sacred principles. The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right. This stance implied a firm conviction of the truth of the principles of natural right and of their fundamental efficacy within the Constitutional tradition, which, although tarnished, tends in the long run toward fulfilling those principles. They therefore worked through Congress, the Presidency, and, above all, the Judiciary. By contrast, the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement—leaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptance—had at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.

Yet the Constitution does not promise respect for blacks, whites, yellows, Catholics, Protestants, or Jews. It guarantees the protection of the rights of individual human beings. This has not proved to be enough, however, to what is perhaps by now a majority of Americans.

The upshot of all this for the education of young Americans is that they know much less about American history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one of the few things that they used to come to college with that had something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. None of this means much, partly because little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions. It is the rarest of occurrences to find a youngster who has been infused by this education with a longing to know all about China or the Romans or the Jews.

All to the contrary. There is an indifference to such things, for relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.

Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind (pp. 33-34). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Actually openness results in American conformism—out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life—except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the real historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.”

None of this concerns those who promote the new curriculum. The point is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any. It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls. Practically all that young Americans have today is an insubstantial awareness that there are many cultures, accompanied by a saccharine moral drawn from that awareness: We should all get along. Why fight? In 1980, during the crisis with Iran, the mother of one of the hostages expressed our current educational principles very well. She went to Iran to beg for her son’s release, against the express wishes of the government of her country, the very week a rescue of the hostages was attempted. She justified her conduct by explaining that a mother has a right to try to save her son and also to learn a new culture. These are two basic rights, and her trip enabled her to kill two birds with one stone.

Actually the problem of cultural difference could have been faced more easily here in America forty years ago. When I was in college, a young Mississippian was lodged in my dormitory room for a few days during a visit of the University of Virginia debating team, of which he was a member. It was my first meeting with an intelligent, educated Southerner. He explained the inferiority of blacks to me, the reasons for Jim Crow, and how all that was a part of a unique way of life. He was an attractive, lively, amiable, healthy youngster. I, however, was horrified by him because I was still ethnocentric. I took my Northern beliefs to be universal. The “different strokes for different folks” philosophy had not yet taken full hold. Fortunately the homogenization of American culture that has occurred since that enables us to avoid such nasty confrontations. Only obviously pathological lower-class types now hold the racist views of my young visitor. Southerners helped to fashion our theoretical view of culture, but the Southern culture they intended to defend disappeared.

Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind (pp. 34-35). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Potential Politicization of Black Panther

Politics has overstepped its bounds into the realms of society and culture, and Americans are caught up in social debates that they think can be politicized. Politicians, recognizing the opportunity and not being sufficiently qualified to actually write good policy, take advantage of this moment and attempt to ride herd on such social and cultural issues. This has gone on long enough to be mistaken for ordinary politics. It is not, and sooner or later people will tire of it.

In the meantime we are stuck with identity politics and errors of judgment, ie current affairs and personalities taking place of principled ideology. Somehow people believe that the person of Donald Trump actually represents Conservatism. Somehow people believe that the person of Hillary Clinton actually represents Liberalism. So while people march against a person believing they are attacking a wayward ideology and the idiots who support it, only a few people negotiate the difference. And so with the same masses of people who believed that the person of Barack Obama represented a particular ideology the noise will continue.

Apart from that on the purely social and cultural side, I have much to say about the role of superheros and such movies in American culture. In short, we’ve gotten cartoony. I think it says more than a little when our cinema is most predictably popular around Disney animations and Marvel comics. We can’t hope for Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, nor should we, but we should notice how much our role models in film have become two dimensional.

And so it stands to reason that many black Americans, although they might know better, want everything the mainstream gets. Therefore we have dark ‘skinned’ emojis and browsers that remember which ones we choose. Similarly, we have superheros painted into ‘inner-city’ tropes, like Luke Cage. I happened to think Luke Cage was not so super at all, nor were his contemporaries ‘The Defenders’. For me, Daredevil had potential, but in the end failed miserably. Only Gotham held my attention for more than one binge. To the extent Gotham had rich plots and characters, it was much more satisfying to watch Jada Pinkett Smith’s deliciously evil and devilishly charismatic portrayal of Fish Mooney. But her’s was the year of ‘Oscars Too White’ or some such hashtag noise and people want to racially represent. Some political mouthing off from certain quarters are inevitable.

Without having seen much more than an exciting trailer complete with stereotypical rap beats, and knowing Marvel Studios’ ability to deliver, I expect just what has been promised, an excellent action film that goes a bit deeper than the norm. That deeper bit, as demonstrated with Wonder Woman, is certainly enough to get the multiculturalists among us standing on their hind legs and yelping. Yes you too can learn from the example of someone who can bend steel with their bare hands! Heaven forbid Marvel has any superhero who eats laundry detergent like candy as well. And so it will be predictable that if Black Panther is as least as good as Wonder Woman then perhaps in the minds of such people who really really care, it might make up for the failure of Idris Elba’s Dark Tower. Then again, I don’t think even most political black Americans really cared. They wanted Elba to be James Bond, or so I’ve been told. Wasn’t he good enough in Pacific Rim?

Black Panther however, raises the whole black nationalist and pan-africanist notions above the level of academic debate. And though I don’t know how much the original comic dealt with some concept of Malcolm X with vibranium claws, its got an appeal that is at least as relevant as the Jewish origins of Superman and the reasons we Americans have superheroes in the first place. Which again, I must emphasize, is not inherently political as it is explicitly social and cultural as is any serious literature. Can superheroes be serious literature? It depends on the filmmaker. Western films can certainly include cowboys and indians and not be experssly about cowboys and indians. So too superhero action films can transcend the simplistic genre formulas. Witness this year’s extraordinary Hostiles and Tarantino’s Hateful Eight. Maybe Black Panther can do a better than average job, which won’t be so hard given what Marvel has (not) done before.

There is a contingent of political black Americans who play the race game which sometimes tries to be more politically significant than it can possibly be. We don’t know who BLM is, it has no one the caliber of even the second and third tiers of the Civil Rights Movement. But we live in a social mediasphere where that’s not important. And from that corner that represents itself as representing the stereotypical downtrodden oppressed black American, there will issue a call and expectation that Black Panther be an important lesson for all Americans, and as a bracing role-modeling experience. I daresay it cannot be taken so seriously as much of Spike Lee’s work. But that’s another generation. I can only tell you that my son and daughter, millenials who do cosplay, are hyped to the max. But they have no need for role modeling any more than I did. It was really something for me to have Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali in the 1970s when I was in high school and in my early 20s it was a comfort and an honor to meet Guy Bluford. But those were real heroes not superheroes.

So I cannot possibly take seriously the idea, even if perfectly executed, that the politics of identity and all that could have Black Panther as its platform. It’s not a race film. Do The Right Thing was a race film. It’s a black cast film, and that’s plenty. As such, Black Panther may stand a chance to compete with Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time video as a showcase for beautiful people. God knows these baldheaded women in the preview are stunning. Black Panther may stand a chance to even approach Hall & Murphy’s Coming to America, although that’s a very high bar. I expect it to be at least as fun as Mo' Betta Blues and maybe as good as Boomerang which is saying a lot. And I am quite frankly relieved to see a new generation of actors and filmmakers take the stage. They didn't need Denzel. (and his Equalizer's nail gun (cringe)) Good on them.

If it comes to pass that some fragment of America wants to go there and make Black Panther into a vehicle for their political agenda, I won't be surprised or impressed. Such a move will indicate yet another example of post-modern symbolism eclipsing reality-based politics. So what. At this moment there are so many other more significant films dealing with reality. I could throw Remember The Titans at them and see if they can do that well. Antwone Fisher. Fences. Sometimes the hardest thing to explain is how nobody represents black Americans’ social, cultural and political diversity but themselves, but it’s just that simple.

 

Diversity & Multiculturalism: The Semiotic Swamp Realized

They are basically good ideas that have been taken to extremes by well-meaning, foolish people. The result is a contingent of essentially nihilist non-conformists that undermine national unity, which is our best understood method of civilization.

A quick and dirty analogy is clothing. Diversity and multiculturalism are like different styles and colors of clothing. They can indicate interesting and important things about people but underneath people are all the same, and therefore the laws governing people should not take the clothes they are wearing into consideration. Society would be stifling and oppressive if everyone were forced to wear the same color and style of clothing. On the other hand if everybody wore completely different color and style combinations, fashion would be meaningless. Furthermore, how could you tell a policeman from a doctor?

Diversity and multiculturalism, like any political philosophy or cultural development in society must serve a higher purpose. I think proponents of these ideas have forgotten the purpose and become rigid defenders of their methods. I also think there is very little agreement or discipline within the ranks of those proponents about how as much as why. So in that regard ‘diversity and multiculturalism’ has become a minor, very young religion complete with its sacraments, holy writs, prophets and Philistines.

This development began in the late 80s, as I recall, with an answer book to E.D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” and Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind”. It was the Fifth Graywolf Annual entitled “Multicultural Literacy: Opening the American Mind”. Also notable in my education about this matter are Nathan Glazer’s “We Are All Multiculturalists Now” and Marshall Blonsky’s “American Mythologies”.

At this point, it is clear that the transformation of the American universities is rather complete, and I find myself in agreement with Blonsky and Bloom. The new ways of teaching have produced a generation of thinkers that don’t quite understand the origins of their values, and yet take their rote understanding of things very seriously. This applies to those in the subjective liberal arts, whereas those in the sciences are more immune. These days I am rather convinced that my interpretation of this recent history is correct by examining the relationship between people and information technology, including the shape and content of social media and its effect on cultural content production and political idea formation. The technology people won, and there is no art outside of electronic media that holds the attention of the masses of Americans. I find this tragic for the Humanities, but if you read the trajectories of those five books, you can see that the Humanities did it to itself by decoupling itself from the traditions of Western thought & history. And now finds itself adrift in what I call the Semiotic Swamp.

Immediately to my right on the bookshelf next to my desk is the Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature. I open to a random page. 518. The entry is ‘Feuilleton’. I was a computer science major, and I know what that word means. That makes me rather unusual in a nation whose blockbuster movies center around superheroes, childish animations and evil clowns and the most significant aspects of one’s importance as a citizen are considered to be their race and sexual preference.

I think a great deal of disappointment and suffering will ensue from the foolish ways in which diversity and multiculturalism have run off the rails of probity. We will be transformed, and we will survive, because those who possess the courage to deal with history honestly will reveal the folly. Those of us who defy wishful thinking will remain. And so it goes.

Obligatory Seriousness on Coates v West

Via Loury & McWhorter. (h/t Bill Benzon)

A couple points written in realtime.

1. Neoliberal doesn't mean conservative, it means pro-corporate in order to raise tax revenues to fund the welfare state. I expect very much that applies to Coates. So what.
2. I'll take West over Coates any day.
3. Yes Coates is more culturally impactful, but I'm not part of that conversation. I don't think much is being said.
4. "There's no politics in Coates, West". Yeah, I think academics over analyze politics.
5. McWhorter: Yes Coates fetishizes White Supremacy. I agree with West's criticism, but again, so what. If Coates is an 'artist' and yeah I generally think he's a creative, not a political figure. He's not refining a politics. West is an agent-provocateur but he's not leading a political party any longer. Coates, is a neo-liberal, just like Obama was.
6. [14:55] Racial essentialism: Loury stretches the size of the scope of the set of problems that can be legitimately synthesized by black intellectuals. Yes, if Coates is a bubble, then West is a bubble. Good comments on capitalism.
7. [19:40] What is the prescription? Biased narrative and development narrative. The issue is performance. Right. Uncontroversial simple facts. Interesting that he has to be so passionate about speaking the obvious. He must be speaking to a world of clueless newbs and willful fools. Afro-studies hustle. Heh. It's a shell game. It's a lie.
8. [25:30] Blackademia. Different planet. Yeah. I know that. I knew that.

 

So by minute 30 I am finding this tiresome. The satirical novel... blah blah. I would probably write it if it made me rich, but I have a better chance by doing something else. So at [31:14] I turned it off, because now they're getting hopeful. But thinking about the satirical novel reminds me that if Coates can be made a star, anybody can, and somebody will next. And then we'll have a new coterie of HNICs to maybe snipe at each other for nickels of publicity. It's all theatre, but it's not a black owned theatre. So what else is new? I feel like the Nigerian physicist program manager at JPL in all this. Who cares about African Americans? Africans don't. Perhaps it's time to close the door on the black intellectual promise. It's like Toqueville. Everybody goes back to Toqueville and everybody goes back to DuBois. There will never be another and there's really not much else to say, than a kind of black weather report in a warming economic climate. In that regard, if West is right, then Coates believes in White Supremacy's global cooling of race relations, and he's playing his role to try to keep that idea alive against all reality. Here's the black weather report for today. Coates can be the weatherman with a bow tie. It's all shtick.

The weird thing is that I'm not hungry for any of that participation. Occasionally it attracts my curiosity, and sometimes I hold out hope for a new take. But the most interesting thing I've heard about race in the past few years is that 'douchebag' is the perfect way to describe that kind of bad actor we all know and hate. It's not the Nazi. It's the douchebag, and everybody has the ethics to punish him. But I suppose this black intellectual is supposed to change the way we behave so no douchebag can ever make it past the first trimester? Again I say, black Americans are doing, every day, exactly what they want to and nobody is stopping them. Not even the other black Americans who try so desperately. Not my monkey. Not my circus.

Obligatory Seriousness on Hiphop & Black Culture

Hiphop has been a net positive. There’s no way I could say that any of our lives would be richer if hiphop never existed. There has been too much brilliant innovation. But also hiphop is folk music, and folk are not always enlightened. I would not venture to say that any kind of folk music is a cause so much as an effect. Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you just because you listen to Ghetto Boys. That’s their confession, their life, their reality.

I take a much broader view of black culture in America. Hiphop may have all the attention of somebody, but somebody ain’t everybody. Jazz, Gospel, R&B, Blues and Hiphop are all creations in this broad culture, and anybody that knows that kind of music (IE can create it) knows that there are many different styles in all that. So I object to the idea that Hiphop owns ‘black culture’. Because most everything I know about hiphop is the hiphop of another time.

As for what is negative and positive in ‘black culture’, I can only presume that one means what are good and bad results of the choices black individuals make, and how do they explain themselves. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I leaned on Marvin Gaye and Al Greene to get the attention of the woman I married, and I love renting convertible sports cars and blasting Bruno Mars. But my intent was there before those songs ever existed. So a lot of people get into a kind of chicken and egg loop here, but I try not to. I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for movies and restaurants, they would never know what to do on a date. If it weren’t for Prince, 1 million babies wouldn’t be born. And yet that’s not a machine. You can’t just play Nelly on a hot night and guarantee that women will take off all their clothes. And if you listen to DMX, he’s telling you straight up that you aint strong enough. That’s a self-conscious distance between even the studio gangsta and his audience. Hiphop, especially gangsta is always reminding its audience who is real and who is not. Hiphop is smart enough to recognize it’s not causality. So anybody who takes it that seriously is either fooling themselves or actually stupid.

So of course there are fools and idiots everywhere. And yes we live in a society that has industries that capitalize on the weaknesses of fools and idiots. I’m just not so sure we can actually call that culture. There is not so much one should expect from folk music, folk dress, folk dialect, folk cooking anywhere in the world, especially when it’s in a consumer society aimed at its fools and idiots.

Individuals will always find a need to express themselves. In the English speaking world, most all poetry has gone into remission except for the 4/4 time rhymed couplets of most hiphop. I think if you give American culture and the English language the respect it deserves, it will be easy to find hiphop and poetry capable of expressing virtue, elegance and intelligence. If hiphop never did that, we could all write it off. But it did. For the world, and it probably will again.

 

Obligatory Seriousness on White Nationalists, Antifa & Charlottesville

So I figure that when we end the last term of Donald we will enter the seventh inning stretch of the Culture Wars. The game is not nearly over, shit hasn't gotten real enough yet. It will only come when there are enough burned buildings and dead bodies to stop the blathering in its tracks. 

I've been thinking about the hug. Men in Los Angeles, particularly straight black men (since such things have to be said) essentially starting grasping each other after the Riots. It was an evolution in dap that was created by the fact of the Riots over the beating of Rodney King, and the failure of a jury to crucify the four officers complicit in that beating. It was only after the buildings were burned to the ground, after Korean storekeepers hardened up their defenses to the level of lethality, after 64 people were dead, after similar riots in cities all over the country were over and people were picking up fragments of their lives from the ashes. It was only after all that when people responded with tenderness and a new kind of civility arose. It was only after the election of Riordan as mayor of Los Angeles that calmer heads prevailed. It was only after people lost fingers that they stopped pointing fingers and demanded healing. It was only then that these black men in Los Angeles started acknowledging their own humanity in a new and purposeful way. It was the peace that war demanded. And now American men hug that way on the regular. 

Our identity politics have been ratcheting up the stakes of the continuing Culture Wars but they haven't reached a crescendo. The failures of the multiple intersectional third wave theoretical tentacles on the appropriate pronouns for pet groups, while crumbling to its foundations, have not yet lost their grip on the popular imaginations of the Chatting Class. So 'racism', 'sexism', 'homophobia' and various other accusations have not lost their cachet despite actual progress against these very real sins. That a lone wackjob like Dylan Roof can kill nine in Charleston and not set off so much acrimony as the gang of neo-confederates in Charlottesville tells us something very important. We have political groups of Americans who wish to see the destruction of other politcal groups of Americans. As I say, there hasn't been enough violence to satiate that bloodlust.

In a way, we are fortunate to have Antifa and Alt-Right to enact these fantasies. Call it the boneheads vs the skinheads. So far we, we meaning Left and Right, remain willing to send them into ritual combat as non-official proxies for the never ending stream of invective that is our contemporary political dialog. We are in that same perverse way, fortunate to have a President whose oratorial vacuity allows all sides to interpret whatever they wish to project as emanating from his bully pulpit. Americans are not actually having to deal with leadership in anyway resembling a responsible republic. So the wars between ourselves against ourselves continues. And it shall continue as the Congress, the Executive and the Press continue to fail to lead and America stumbles into a triple witching hour when all three fail simultaneously. Charlottesville is just a test. Our good fortune will soon run out and real riots will begin, but we now benefit by watching all the ingredients. Time will provide us another OJ Simpson or another Timothy McVeigh or another James Damore or another Matthew Shepard. Somebody whose fate will align the political opposition like Alt-Right and Antifa into a perfect storm. America will rage. Then America will hug. But first we must suffer the fire next time.

What strikes me as particularly notable about this latest non-event in Charlottesville all due respect to mere three deaths in Virginia, a number that MS-13 would consider a weak showing, is the actual symbol at the heart of the matter; the fate of a statue. You see there's still a lawsuit. And while lawsuits are generally the respectable and civilized way to resolve disputes, nobody is really talking about that lawsuit. The focus of our finger-pointing is the animus of the non-official proxies and what pronouncements we in the Chatting Class are demanding of their putative leaders. The legal process and the legal solutions for violence and rioting and municipal statuary are not what we really care about. We demand that the right people make the right sounds. We demand rhetorical satisfaction, ultimately a pledge of fealty. We are demanding satisfaction for something with great historical import and mythological power to validate our claims of sovereignty.

The King used to be called democracy, due process and rule of law. But we don't really want that right now. We want the so-called King to bend the knee.

For myself, I didn't pay attention to the Taliban in Afghanistan until they started blowing up statues. When you decide to blow up statues, when you are offended by symbols, when you burn flags, books and buildings, you are expressing a desire to exterminate. That's what's going on here. A desire to rewrite history and to undo any claims that Others might make that stand in the way of your full dignity. It used to be that Americans, all of us, aspired to one national identity. But we've gone radically and multiculturally autonomous and self-serving. We've abused pluralism into a perversion of itself. The warm fires of the melting pot have gone damp and we have been served cold kale salad and told that's as integrated as we're going to get. Pick out the fruits and nuts you don't like. It's your salad, we are told. Common purpose is epistemologically impossible. Or at least faith in it has declined abysmally. That's what it means when you are compelled to rename, reclaim, resist, reinterpret. It's only one step from remove. 

What I hear in the back and forth is a call for others to imagine their ox being butchered. The interwebz are full of madlib scenarios of offense. "What if it were a statue of (insert inviolable icon here)?" We only offer sympathetic imagination of the Others when they are incited to rage beyond reason. Isn't what the screening of movies like 'Detroit' are all about? Of course it is. All of our dramas are about pushing people to the limits of tolerance. We are encouraged to all be inglourious bastards. Today is national punch a Nazi day. One step closer to the edge and we're about to break. 

American institutions of the humanities and mainstream mass communications are broken, but we people are not. The longer we pay attention to those broken institutions, the more we fail to see our own humanity both in ourselves and in the so-called  'Others'. I have lost my faith in the ability of these old mainstays of society to be repaired or reformed, although I am confident about our basic humanity and the evolution and growth of new institutions. A new kind of hug is coming, but it will take a while. It will come after the fire. We have already created our Alts and armed these outcasts with the imprimatur to fight for 'our' version of America. I'm telling you now that they have been dignified by our callous disregard for our common purpose and they will clash and that clash will not be contained. 

The Best Racial Joke Ever

I've been thinking about what kind of people know enough about America to be worth listening to if you're just an average American. I'm saying it's Louis CK. He's our best comedian. He travels the road all year, and he speaks to every audience in America face to face. He knows how much he can assume about what Americans know, and where their moral limits are. You can't be funny if you don't know where the line is or how to push it. So right now, I'm saying that our sharpest comedians are truly the poets of American society. I think musicians and other recording artists are too isolated in their craft from their audiences and that the interaction of laughter is much more useful feedback than flashes of cigarette lighters or people saying 'ho'.

Louis CK is also wise to the ways of the interwebz and has captured many of his routines on YouTube. Here is one I've recently found very interesting. 

Louis CK's Connecticut friend is having a very tough time explaining his discomfort with the use of the term 'nigger' to describe anyone, and as we laugh our way through the story we get to the end. It's not about the name calling, it's about falling asleep at a forklift. But if we used the term 'bastard', the whole joke would not be funny because Americans don't really care about who is a literal bastard or not. It's not about John Snow or the King in the North. The fact that Game of Throne's John Snow is a bastard is a very big deal - it is a fundamental essentialism that cannot be ignored in the mythical kingdom of Westeros. In the mythical kingdom of America, primogenitor and other birthrights are not at issue, but we are colorstruck.

Then again who do we mean 'we'? 

The more I think about this routine, the more I appreciate Louis CK's powers of perception. It is perhaps the smartest way anyone could identify the discomfort of whitefolks around whitefolks in dealing with race. I say 'dealing with race' rather than 'dealing with racism' because while most folks would easily agree that it is racist to call someone a nigger, it's hardly actually racist. It would be more clearly racist to fire the sleeping forklift driver if white sleepers were not, but the black sleeper was not fired as the story is told. It's about the aggravation of the white Connecticut friend not being able to convey his sense of outrage at this act of 'racism', yet time after time, everybody else in the story only reacts to the act of sleeping, not the epithet. 

This is instructional to the degree that it illustrates where we are. I say so because I also understand how Louis CK deals with other taboos. In another bit, he talks about how he is annoyed by people literally saying 'N-word' as it makes him think 'nigger' because the person saying 'N-word' is actually too much of a 'faggot' to say 'nigger'. That's brilliant too. 

I came across thinking about Louis CK this morning as I was reading some autogenerated blurbs from a Twitter account I newly followed. The blurb started off.."Thanks for following me! Having witnessed the downward spiral of the USA for too many years, it is my hope that.." Then he goes on to talk about a 50 word solution. Such are the pains of trying to grow your Twitter following. But then I asked myself what exactly is spiraling downward in America and what kind of person has the proper perspective on all that? The answer that came forefront in  my mind was the matter of self-regard that shortcuts the ambition of Americans from believing that they can participate in any noble aspect of society. It's a kind of navel-gazing that accepts the self as shit and the world as shit and the danger of giving a shit. In that, Louis CK's comedy, the stuff that really launched his popularity, embraces that shitty self-regard. Doing so with the contrast of what he must do to be a good father is what gives his comedy the biting tension. He's got something excellent there, an extraordinary balance of semi-porn mixed with a kind of brutal self-deprecation that informs his observations. He's a sinner. He makes no bones about the fact that he's a sinner and it allows him to tell stories that remind us of our own sins. And much of that is the whole slavish self-regard. In this routine's beginning he mocks with blistering accuracy the person who gives the non-apology for being in trouble. "Whoops", he says. Lies are perfectly magical. How can we liars tell children not to lie? 

Bullseye. 

I have something of a theory about how America has changed for the better as a society relatively free of repression while at the same time embracing universally low expectations with heedless ferocity. We are the nation that has capitulated to the culture of weed smokers. That's why niggers are falling asleep on the forklifts. We're all niggers now. Who among us sleepers needs to be any better than that? Damn good question. 

 

The New Distributed World

When my daughter returned from Thailand, she reminded me of how much people elsewhere in the world listen to American music. I don't think I realized how true that is until I saw these two videos.

Somedays I wonder what can and cannot be crowdsourced. Talent can. But there is going to have to be a revolution in marketing. Digital marketing is probably still in '1.0'. As we perfect security and get a lot better at opting in and opting out, it will be interesting to see how people deal with the mainstream, or if anything like 'the mainstream' will survive as we know it.

Perhaps we will not need brokers, or perhaps those brokers will be indicated to us as well. Fascinating times. Long live the broadcast.

Joots

"So come. Take me by the hand. We'll leave this troubled land. I know we can."
-- Maurice White, 1976

Somewhere around 1982 I encountered this geek word. I think it was coined by D.R. Hofstadter. It rhymes with puts. It's a verb used like "joots the system".  It basically is the action taken when one begins to 'think outside of the box'. Now looking towards Google, which I tend to do less in order to be close to my own thoughts on any matter, I see that it actually was Hofstadter and it is an acronym for 'jumping out of the system'. 

From those days it became second nature for me to investigate the inconsistencies at the border conditions of all systems. I have since then been automatically drawn to what I called 'the social implications of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorum'. No organization or system of organization of human beings can be complete and consistent. That means all organizational policy will either use lies to accomplish all of their goals or will be truthful but be unable to meet all of their goals, or they will be truthful and meet all of their goals but only by using external resources not bound by the policy of the organization (which would have to be deniable). In retrospect, perhaps it was inevitable that I became a consultant, that unbounded external resource. 

These days I am a bit restless to have more power, and on some days I think about why I wasn't more persistent in being an asshole in my 30s pursuing BMW perfection and riches. The answer is simple. As soon as I became a father, I knew I had to be a father. I am not sure, having not entertained these thoughts very often, if I am more desirous of autonomy or power. In some ways they seem to be one in the same, given that there are not many things I am so insistent my orders provide for society. I might get power and take its benefits for the freedom it gives me not to be bound by work rules. Or I might take autonomy for the same reason. Karma chameleon. I come and go. I guess that's the point. I want freedom to come and go as I please. I think of liberation geographically because my mind is already free.

Yesterday I drove around in circles looking for a parking space for Venice Beach. I'm sure I found the most convenient and expensive in anticipation of an upcoming meeting of the Obscura Society. I bought a t-shrt and CD from the rollerblading guitarist Harry Perry. He has been there since the 70s. We talked for a minute and than he sang me a song. He's not as good as he used to be. I walked out past the ruins of the Venice Pavillion to the Breakwater Station where I was Junior Guard in the summer of 1975. I talked to the lifeguards about the good old days. They tell me that hazing has been banned from all of the JG programs. Venice' chaos is orderly these days. It's not dangerous, it's market driven. The skaters have a skate park. The henna tattoo artists are all licensed. But the junk food is still as bad. I stayed away from it. Somebody left their iPhone on the benches near the paddle tennis courts. I gave it to the man who ran the t-shirt shop next door. In 150 minutes I saw maybe two women whom I might consider actually attractive. This was my place when I was a confused teen, when I used to perform in public as a tumbler - not for the coins like the shirtless athletes now at the boardwalk with their barker's megaphone and script, but like a skateboard kid. I get it. I understand the dynamic of going to Venice Beach to make a spectacle of yourself. I used to wonder why nobody who actually knew how the world worked didn't set up a booth with encyclopedias next to the fortune tellers and other cranks. This place would be far too lonely for truth and reason. You don't teach at a circus.

Every day I watch videos about fast cars. I am currently in the middle of overthinking my immanent purchase of a Porsche. I still haven't decided between a 911 with its classic lines and pedigree, or the Cayman with its mid-engine and sleek profile. What's not in question is my desire to be apart from the crowd, to be moving even while standing still. To imply my impermanence here in this moment in this position in this stance is to show my belonging to a higher echelon. In this material world there are complexities that deliver without question. Mash on the gas and the Porsche goes, not just straight but around the curves and dips in life. Then again, so does my truck. It doesn't need pavement. It doesn't need smoothness. It doesn't need pampering. I am very hesitant to trade one for the other. I want both. Some days I want the speed more. Other days I want the tough more. I always want to drive. The very first record I bought as a teen was a 45 by Earth Wind and Fire. Getaway. 

Everyone has their promised land. In urban dreams, they try to leap tall buildings in a single bound. This is fantasy. People have forgotten how to dream about freedom. They don't see economies. They don't understand the powers they seek. They wish to trade places, every pauper has his imagined prince. The man on Virginia Avenue wants to be on Park Place, completely ignoring the third dimension where god like hands grab green houses and orange bills from the bank. Put on your hoodie, turn up the bass, walk in step to the beat on the sidewalk mean mug but are your shoes made for hiking?

All systems fail. All systems are incomplete or inconsistent. Freedom = (adaptability + vision at the edge cases)^mobility. 

The Crypto Future

The advance and spread of cryptocurrencies requires ‘perfected’ security. It will do for identity what GPS did for location. People in the cryptocurrency economy will always be on the grid, so to speak. They will be absolutely, positively identifiable in a global, distributed web.

A public distributed blockchain is a perfect history. It will answer the question at the top of mind of every investigation. Who did what and when.

I have no doubt that a new class of individuals will arise who understand these things and will consequently make every effort to safeguard their anonymity. These will be the people who have the ability and/or connections to read and understand computer code. The rest of us will take our chances. Just as today there are people who have been able to take advantage of PGP, the overwhelming majority of people are plagued by spam.

The spam of the future will be much more insidious, and seductive.

I see the great opportunity for cryptocurrencies to be able to monetize attention in new ways. It’s rather the keystone of a post-modern economic order. Those of us who grew up with Walter Cronkite and three network TV stations have seen, dare I say, the devolution of authority inherent in there now being >2000 channels of television. Social media has expanded that to the very ends of cognition.

However all of these have been limited by the fairly narrow regimes of capitalization. Imagine, therefore a world in which social capital becomes actually fungible. I like to give the example of the rise of video games. I started out with pinball in the 70s, listening to the Eagles. Then through the age of Pac Man, then Mortal Combat in arcades. Next Counterstrike and now World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, et al in the living room. My kids grew up watching me play. They didn’t touch the controllers, they watched my gaming as if it were TV programming. Popular gamers developed a network called Twitch, it grew to 55 million gamers and Amazon bought it for a billion dollars. A network of people watching other people play videogames. The Book of the Month Club never had it so good.

Thousands of new sources of capital will create many new currencies, which will fund business models that will seem outrageous by today’s standards.

We will enter the era of populist attention capitalism and banking.

Both of these developments will have profound implications for the social order. I cannot seem to manage my speculations but they seem to all land around this conclusion.

I expect that the rise of crypto in all of our lives will lead us to be hyper-tribal. They will change our systems of trust radically. I think nationalism is under attack, and I think cities will become the new centers of power as national currencies weaken. Multicultural ethics will entrench. Who writes books will be more important than ever (if people still read and write, rather than watch and listen) Who funds armies will be more important than ever. As a stoic, I must be dour. Sorry.

Social Justice, Hope and the Welfare State

Q. Do you feel that welfare has made an overall positive or negative impact on poor people in the United States?

A. Absolutely negative economically, absolutely positive in terms of hope.

I’ll focus on the negative because I think people will ultimately decide for themselves if it is appropriate in the long term to get hope from government cheese.

The strength and consequent weakness of our consumer economy is that somebody somewhere is always always always thinking of something new and exciting. They sell this idea to capitalists, who decide, Shark Tank style, whether or not the masses should get a taste. The thing to understand is that the business community in the US is coming up with new business models faster than any other entity in society. I don’t think even music.. well I guess the perfect example IS music. New musicians make money all the time. There is no way anybody can predict what kind of musician it is most profitable to be. By the time you learn to sing, somebody has come up with autotune and singing is so 2010…

The net effect is that you can only hope to educate yourself quick enough to be employed by the newest industries and business models if you go to the hottest schools. People who go to ordinary schools pick a major where they figure they will be able to get a job at a good company that has been doing X for a longer time. If you can’t get a college education you have to pick a business that’s been around for maybe 50–100 years. If you get no education and pick welfare, well then you’re in the same category as peasants from 400 years ago. Even illiterates can pick grapes for a living, and there’s competition of those jobs too.

So income inequality continues as long as new ideas and new markets emerge, and the lower you are on the educational chain, the lower standard of living you have to accept.

But at least there’s hope.

You don’t get thrown in jail just for defaulting on a loan. We don’t have debtors prisons in America. There’s disability insurance which is part of the welfare state. So if you mess up your back, you can collect on that. But I’m thinking you’re asking more about stuff like WIC and EBT cards. I know very little about that, personally.

I believe that it’s fundamentally wrong to let people fail, but it is also fundamentally necessary. You cannot force people to succeed. If I believe you are going to get a worthless job, I have an obligation to tell you about a better one. If I believe you are going to be on welfare, I have an obligation to try to persuade you away from that dependence. If I believe your weed smoking is a crutch, then I have an obligation to sober you up. But but BUT BUT all of these are just *social* obligations, not *moral* obligations.

Being poor is not a crime. I have no moral obligation to prevent you from being poor, like I have a moral obligation to stop a violent attack in progress.

If you learn anything from this, understand that this is the difference between justice and ‘social justice’. ‘Social justice’ is not actually a moral obligation, it’s just something you do to improve your social status. Justice itself is a moral obligation. That is why we craft laws and establish institutions to execute those laws. That’s why certain offenses are merely socially unacceptable and other offenses are crimes.

Since it is not a crime to be poor, you can even help people stay poor. That’s what dependence does, and in some ways that’s what the welfare state does. It creates dependence on a set of exchanges that are some of the slowest moving business models ever. Milk money for babies. That’s as basic as it gets, and rather sad because after all, a well-fed woman could nurse her child for free.

I cannot tell you the value of hope in the various forms of the welfare state, but I’m pretty sure that’s the best thing that comes out of it. It would never be enough for me.

 

On Intellectual Courage

And if you think it's easy that's only 'cause
You ain't me. And I ain't you.
-- Earnie Isley

I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm learning things that I should have learned a while ago. Surely it would have taken more faith and courage for me to have taken another road. So I hope that I am wise enough at this point to admit my failure of ambition. And still I'm a bit confused.

This weekend I have been thinking about how difficult it has been for me to be myself. It has gotten easier over the years, but when I was young it was very difficult. Something reminded me about how I used to look for friends when I was a child and find that all of the children I was introduced to had none of my intellectual interests. I've always had a problem because of my own natural curiosity and my intellectual powers, such as they were. I never quite believed that I was a nerd or a geek or anything anti-social but I was made to suffer because of those terms. I understand that people simply didn't understand me, but I didn't understand myself. I didn't feel like a weirdo. I simply felt like there were a lot of social things I didn't understand the value of. 

I often recall a summer vacation after my sophomore year in high school. I was bored at home and turned on daytime television. Regis Philbin was on his own talk show talking about a thousand things I had never heard of here in my own hometown of Los Angeles. I recognized that there were certain things I might not experience because of my not being rich, but I was shocked to find that I wasn't even aware of such things. So I endeavored to find out. 

So when I think about how I might be different from other 'nerds' in my profession, I know that I made a conscious decision to discover and understand the world of fashionable Los Angeles beginning in the mid 1970s. Several years later, when the term 'yuppie' was coming into fashion (I read it in the LA Weekly, while sitting on a bus stop at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Purdue Avenue after paying for a traffic ticket), I knew that's what I wanted to be. A young urban professional. 

Much of the life of the world was a mystery to me, and I did have a certain amount of arrogant ambition. I believed then, as now, that anything I wanted to know, I could learn. But I also understood, then as now, that I had no particular sponsors who were invested in my success. While I was at my private prep school, I was informed about every standardized test I should take that would help the school look good but I had no particular confidence in the advice of my guidance counselor. This is a very typical story I've heard from others and from things I've read and I don't mean to suggest my predicament was highly unusual. However I am particularly drawn to the subject of intellectual courage and courage in general.

What are we supposed to know, and how should we broker that knowledge? What kind of time should we give ourselves to pursue ultimate aims, and what confidence can we have in the edification of the journey? It is an especially difficult dilemma to consider for those like myself who were not only unsponsored, but who felt they had nothing to lose from falling short. And yet we must socialize. We have to sing the songs that everybody knows along the way, so we take time away from the pursuit to consume and understand the common understandings that get us through a day.

I always preferred to have my appearance, specifically my clothing, speak for me. I always felt and still do feel flummoxed in estimating what it is someone who might care to know me, might care to know about me. Self-introductions are very difficult. I probably overshare. I've heard one intimate friend tell me that I seemed insecure by telling so much. Perhaps she was right. But how else can one do it, especially if one is actually unafraid? What sort of personal information should one be proprietary about? One eventually learns, but in one's fragile youth it is very hard to say.  I like this band. I go to this church. I believe this about politics. If one seeks to think one's way into the future, many conversations are wagers. For me, it took a long time to break through. That was because, as I suspect it is for most young people, I was looking for someone to complete me. I ended up painting myself into a corner and that forced me to dismiss so many individuals for whom I made rash presumptions. Moving to NYC made it clear that my Los Angeles shoes were not communicating properly. 

It wasn't until my last grandmother died that I abandoned my race, class, political and religious conversations that, along with my career credentials and marital status, communicated what I thought were the proper clues which bore up my identity. I had been on my way to allow identity to flow like the loose robes of the desert through which ones nakedness might be shared. This was a difficult journey, especially as I moved and worked across the country. So I always had a contingent part of me, and now it was more evident. I was not that Ivy League graduate, or that Wall Street hustler. I was nowhere near the apex of the most reasonable peaks of ambition that I could imagine for myself, and nobody cared. 

It is now a great deal easier for me to say that I am an asshole. That is because I have found enough people to tell me that I am their kind of asshole. The inner beast that has been my ego, suffering under the clothing and skin and conversations that I have had to learn to be sociable is now able to express itself. What I find unusual is that it often expresses itself as a kind of resigned indifference. I have learned that the world of human beings stumbles along without ever clearly knowing how much weight to give to the wit and humor of Regis Philbin, the testimony of Robert Conquest or the intricacies of analytic geometry. We don't know what we are supposed to know, we just hope that we can manage our way through the gates for which we have no passports of confidence. 

Resigned indifference is not a comfortable position, and I am not particularly proud of this attitude. But I honestly have no idea how I should fit into a society that has failed to uphold, for me and others I presume to be like me, a reasonable set of values and expectations. What are they? Let us merely say that although Truth may not serve man, it should be prosperous for enough men to serve Truth.  The pursuit is not its own reward, and we must fight off the competition in any case. I don't actually pursue Truth but I believe the employment of reason and moral ethics to be enough. These too, are likely only to provide a sort of smug self-satisfaction of our own estimation of our energies. And then one gets old.

I suspect that there's someone who has already read the book or found the friend who let him in on this secret when he was 23 years old sitting on a bus stop in West Los Angeles. Instead, I was figuring out how to comport myself as a young urban professional. I've been there and done that to my own satisfaction, and that may be the only satisfaction there is to have. But I also have also taken very seriously those race, class, political and religious ethics I have grown in and out of. Some of that work has helped me to this point, which while not particularly high, does feel elevated. 

--

A friend posted a list of late 19th century occupations taken during the London census. One of them struck me as both poignant and hilarious. "Fatuous Pauper". It would be quite presumptuous to rename this blog or split it from now going forward, but that is how I feel. I feel on the one hand I might have dealt with my social dissonance in a more cold-hearted manner and isolated myself further into the narrow set of social constraints of a more disciplined and demanding profession. On the other hand, I actually do like myself, even if I should descend into penury. I think I'd be a very good wanderer, although I'd need to work on my harmonica skills. 

I'm going to beat myself up a little more about this for a week or so. I'll let you know how it turns out. 

Bogota and the Mystery of the Middle Class

I spent a week in Bogota, Colombia. It was easy. It was easy for me because I had friends, translation and money. I had places to go and things to do. As I could, I spent time in upscale and downscale locations very much in proportion to the way I do in my home town of Los Angeles. I conducted business with my colleagues. I ate in restaurants. I hired cars to get around. I slept in a comfortable queen sized bed with multiple pillows. I charged my phone. I connected to wifi. I put on short pants and brown shoes and walked through the neighborhood. I familiarized myself with the place, and in pursuing a somewhat ordinary set of routines, I was able to compare that place with other such foreign places I have visited. I have visited several dozen American cities and a few overseas including Zurich, Sydney, Milan, London and Paris. 

Bogota is different because it's middle class is nowhere near as affluent as the middle class of Los Angeles and those other cities. And with my understanding of my own position relative to the American middle class, (which is at the 'frequent flyer' level) I make certain observations and judgments about the others. I would call this perspective the 'walking economy', and from that point of view I can make a few reasonable determinations. 

The Mystery of the Middle Class is pervasive in my thoughts. I have concluded that what is most different about today's world is the number of people who live away from wealth and destitution. My uneducated guess is about 4-5 billion out of 7 billion, but that's because I am thinking about literacy. When it comes to actual income, I trust the numbers of Pew. Pew tells us that 13% of the world is middle income and that about 29% of the world is middle income or better. So the immediate thing about this mystery is that so many people can read and this affects how they can be governed. How do you lead billions of people who can read for themselves? You have to have ways of dazzling them or of compelling them. The interwebz provide the dazzle and compulsion is the same as it ever was. That means a lot more propaganda and story-telling, political narratives and bodewash are required for the peaceful transition of power. I sense this acutely in the US. We imbue far too many narratives with social and political significance. And within the context that more than half of us are high income on the global scale, more of us believe our narratives are economically justifiable and right. This is why we hate each other. We cannot stand when the other guys get to hold the flag and clap the erasers. 

What if there were only 20 million expertly skilled people who were actually capable of running the world? Would you be on that team? How much of the information that they used would you be capable of accurately understanding and interpreting? When the bankers banked, when the soldiers soldiered, when the engineers engineered, when the surgeons did surgery, how could you actually remain informed? What would be your responsibility to them? This interface is being renegotiated through computer mediated communications and it's generally pretty sloppy and subject to abuse. And so the faith of the general public, the common man, is being undermined, and that generates discontent which is self-fueling. So the mystery of the middle class is compounded by the natural forces of dissonance and the generated forces of disinformation as well as sloppiness.

What people need to know is different from what they feel they need to know in a situation of distrust and counter-narratives. This dynamic is accelerated to the point of 'eclexia', in which people become so broadminded as to become uselessly judgmental and broadly critical of that broad set of inputs they consume with vigor. At some point they fall to a level of studied cynicism. I think American citizens have fallen to that point after a period of snarky eclexia. This cynicism is useful to the point of independence, and I fall heavily on the side of that. For me, the fundamental value of individual liberty requires some of that studied cynicism. But hand in hand with that is the necessity for circles of trust. This is what I pursue and observe others similar pursuits. I watch how we at once pay lots of attention to information we must receive, process and somewhat distrust, while openly sharing that information with those people we very much trust. This is the new organization. This is the new neighborhood. These are the people we must trust to have our best interests at heart by sharing common values and purpose so that we can make communal sense of information in a world we distrust to organize and protect us from the top down. What therefore we need to know comes from our networked peers. We need to know trusted people. What we feel we need to know is everything that the ruling class says we need to know, which we must take small bites of until we have our own experts in our own networks. Why? Because we cannot trust the old order to provide enough security and knowledge in a world of billions of networked, literate actors like ourselves. They don't know us, and they don't trust us. They just tell us what they think is good for us, without actually sharing. When the message is "Please don't try this at home", we know they are forbidding our education, and ultimately our self-determination. We need to be able to experiment, take our own chances among ourselves with people we trust.

The entire first world is rather like a second world in this regard. Everybody understands cities, traffic signals, internal combustion engines, planes, trains, automobiles, electricity, clocks and maps. We understand shopping, money, budgets, costs and profits. We understand hospitals, courts, schools, police, food stands, fire departments, churches and parks. All of us have all of these things with more or less luxury signaling attached. The first class passengers get to the destination city at the same time as those in steerage. But what about the ruling class, the 1%? Are they even playing the same game? 

I think they are. But I also think that there are a new set of transgressors who through technique or technology are breaking the old guard's safeguards. Asymmetric war is forcing change. Digital currency is forcing change. GMO is forcing change. Soldiers have to soldier differently. Bankers have to bank differently. Politicians have to politick differently. Preachers have to preach differently. Scholars must re-evaluate their schools. So we watch to see what old comforts can survive.

This is the new middle class dilemma. Our children are not in such a hurry to learn how to drive. Maybe that's a job for a computer monkey. Our children are not in such a hurry to own a house. Maybe that's a job for a renting startup so they can live with their friends and trusted circles. We in the US have 20 flavors of motorcycle and 100 flavors of car. Maybe that's an over-investment whose significance is not as much as we think it is. Our banking relationship with that one giant mega-bank may not be what we really need.  

When I think about my retirement, I think about simple second world locations where I can easily understand the paradigms of the 20th Century because they are still clearly in place. Places where there are only 2 flavors of motorcycle. Where the entertainment takes place on stage in a theatre with live performers.  Where the food is grown locally and everybody knows how to cook it. Where gold jewelry works at the pawn shop. Where even if I can't literally read the language of the writing on the wall, I understand it because of its context. 

 

 

The Unsustainability of Dainty Sensibilities & Strong Arms

"We're just bugs on God's windshield." -- Richard Kadrey

I have this notion that I call the Logarithmic Shadow. It's one of those aspects of human nature I should probably consult Adam Smith on. In my version, this shadow is what keeps the common man alive. Why? Because we have a low profile, and since we do, the Powers that Be aren't particularly out to get us. It's why billionaires don't buy on eBay. It's why Michael Jordan doesn't play basketball against high schoolers. It's why you'll never get to speak to, or be margin called by a group vice president at Citibank. We're not worth the effort. We provide no challenge. 

Lots of people think I'm something of a spokesmouth for the American Right. I'm not, but I also am not into the hopey changey. But what my evolving sense of things is telling me is that the overwhelming majority of people, including intelligent people, are not really qualified to say what's best for the commons. I suspect that the law, bearing a high resemblance to the world of code, is far too contradictory and convoluted to be understood by any but the finest minds. Rather like the best algorithms for TLS, people only believe they understand how it works, but not having authored at that level, have no idea how it might be subverted. 

So I'm puzzling in public with my buddy, whose codename is Ladera. He understands appellate law. And within 30 minutes of spirited grumbling I hear something quite nuanced that makes a significant dent in my argument, and I realize that I am completely out of metaphors. Like many other of my arguments, I am getting very close to actually needing an understanding of the law and its evolution. My gripe is and has been that Americans have voted themselves into comforts and luxurious standards of living that are as unsustainable as an underwater blowtorch. My overextended metaphor is that we have voted in such a way that all cars must be expensive because they must all have airbags. And I'm trying to get Americans, who consider themselves to be anything but rich despite the fact that most of them will own several automobiles in their lives, to see how risk averse that pile of laws has made us. We have grown out of the virtue of physical courage because our entire paved, plastic, medicated and insulated environment shields us from the rigors of... childbirth, street fights... you know all of that stuff that we find so fascinating in the 'culture' of the Third World. American women and men do not have large families. That is the vector of the West. We don't face the life and death decisions of having six children who might have to face life and death decision. We have engineered an economy and lifestyle that we know is unsustainable, and yet...

It seems to me that the whole birdsnest is held together with bubblegum and spit, but also the titanium chickenwire of let's say 2,000 attorneys, judges, legislators and law professors who genuinely want us to be pampered pets.They will fight to make the law that says it is insufficiently civil for people to die of cancer before their 80th birthday. They will therefore unleash the beasts of healthcare and healthcare insurance to make it so we have every legal avenue to live forever. In other words, they take the daintiest of sensibilities and work a bulwark of rights from that. It's rather like Little Red Riding Hood's mother has actually contracted 50 woodsmen to follow her journey to grandmother's house. 

The implication is, that there is no actual logarithmic shadow. Sure our instincts remain. We naturally protect children and innocents. But we're actually not playing fair with the bad guys. We are reserving the nuclear option. 

This puts us in bed, all of us common Joes, with the most dangerous abstracted corporate powers that ever were. So when United Airlines tells us to fly their friendly skies, we had better believe their marketing. When we look at the smile of that Gerber baby, we had better trust the Nestle Corporation because all of those 2,000 legal eagles and their regulatory capture of the baby food industry are our only salvation. You know because none of us know how to actually grow food we trust to feed infants, and American breasts are not for suckling. 

We have a culture that absolutely demands that of us. We have internalized it. The likes of Trump scare us to death because he doesn't talk like the Nestle corporation. He tells us that the skies may not be friendly. This is not about Trump of course, it's about physical courage and danger. You know I'm talking to you because of your squeamish reaction to the video here. 

I have a difficulty in maintaining optimism for the First World. I'm not certain that I approve of the Shadow. Are all men actually created equal? There are a lot of scary implications. I need to see decentralized power, and I'm not certain we can get there. Worrisome. Very Worrisome. 

The American Bog Standard Welfare State

I perceive that the US has a welfare state mentality without actually having a welfare state. So whenever parts of the non-existing welfare state is threatened, the usual suspects rebel as if they have actually lost something.   So I predict that the top income tax, within 20 years, will top out around 40-45% and we will become an appropriately two-tiered society. Free market mechanisms will collapse for the working class. There will emerge a minimally effective bog standard welfare state, and it will suck balls. Like whatever byzantine health insurance schemes survive Obama-Trumpcare, public education in Texas and civil infrastructure in Michigan.

When I say two-tiered society, I actually mean three, but we already understand that the wealthy exist in a world unto themselves, and nobody ever expects that to change absent violent revolution. So this is actually about what compromises can beset the affluent such that they are blunted into submissive acceptance of those curtailments of liberty necessary for the maintenance of an actual welfare state.  

This requires three tricks to be pulled off.  

The first trick is for all of the affluent to get enough money to say to hell with those lower than them, kind of the way NPR listeners never drink Budweiser, so long as there is enough craft beer around. Once this is established through a understood set of cultural signifiers, they can stare each other down from a distance. The difficulty with this trick is that affluent Americans also feel entitled to possess that which they can conceive. The affluent believe in upward mobility because of the readily observable examples of the rich in our heretofore open society. The solution is to eliminate all prosumer quality goods and services which might convince the affluent that they are as welcome as the rich and wealthy. IE no (affordable) Corvette will exist to actually compete with (unaffordable) Porsches. No affordable iPhones will exist to compete with unaffordable 4K movie cameras. And of course, Shock Top will have to taste good and Bud like piss.  

The second trick is for the usual rebellious suspects to realize that their fetish clients (minorities) and their fetish sponsors (celebrities) both don't give two effective turds about their political solidarity. This will take some work because as alienated as Trump haters feel, the current president actually sympathizes with the common working class patriotic American. Therefore he might consequently stumble into an improvement in government that appeals to a broad majority. You cannot have a welfare-state that does this; the gap between the universally publicly funded and the private must appear as clear as the difference between inner-city public school and Hogwarts. This therefore must mean the establishment of a soul-crushing meritocracy where the affluent actually cannot predictably succeed. They will therefore resent and scorn those with affirmative action tickets to ride, as well as those who don't need it. Imagine Meryl Streep not bothering to make public speeches, but instead immediately donating her Oscar to the homeless shelter. Middle class solidarity goes to shit. This needs to happen in order for the affluent to take their own class interests more seriously, even Leftist affluents.   

The third trick is for capitalists to create a sufficiently diverse marketsphere that is inclusive of every interest group that can support a cognizable political force. That is to say that if your constituency consists of the obscure demographic of Irish Catholic men of middle age, that you produce enough movies like Boondock Saints so that they feel like they are part of the American heroic mosaic, no matter how much the rest of America hates their guts. Since there will never again be an authentic working class Irish Catholic President, this and a host of other cultural smoke must be blown up their collective asses in order to sedate their violent human tendencies. In this way, people who realize they are being ignored politically will feel adequately attended to by those large and powerful entities who don't actually respond to their democratic needs, just to their material and psychic desires. This can be done through the miracle of marketing which in the US is already sufficiently advanced and verges on completion.

With the establishment of these three tricks, the permanent welfare state in America will be established in fact. Americans will tend to their class sensibilities and remain satisfied within their own ranks. It would help if we decommission the military and religion because these are two institutions that inspire people to become selfless and purpose-driven. This is incompatible with the aims of the welfare state, which requires no sacrifice other than the actual practice of the defense of liberty and justice for all. The political-correct language of multiculturalism and historical revisionism has been very effective in establishing an expectation of class-appropriate 'liberty' and 'justice' for each group. This simply needs to be actualized through the application of insurmountable economic class stratification.

This lies within the realm of possibility. We're on the right track.

Sociology's Red Pill

This will be the first time I am trying to articulate something I find to be deeply profound. Thus, future selves, try to understand the spirit in which it is given. 

The provocation is probably first with the Moldbug Reactionaries, which is to consider the scope of which all of the American dialectic is false and incomplete. The second is something I have engaged upon through Niall Ferguson, Robert Conquest and George Orwell. That is to determine the depth of which the moral case for Marxism & Socialism and their materialism can and should be taken. Prodded and poked along by the New Oxonian and John C. Wright, I have been considering why atheists fail, and if they should. As always, I keep tabs on Nassim Taleb, Dan Ariely and to a lesser extent Robin Hanson to see how it is people are generally deceived. And of course I have Steven Pinker to thank for his marital naïveté. The grand provocateur that more people than me have been watching is, of course, Donald J. Trump whose effect on so many people is thunderous. I am a little bit frightened that people are so easily frightened. 

But I must continue my vigilance against wishful thinking, as crabby as it makes me. And I must keep my eyes aware of the massive powers of institutions and their leaders, no matter how small, insignificant and contrite it makes me feel for having not been adopted (brilliant soldier of intellect that I am) by significant powers that be. 

So in the past week I have been struck by the notion that all of the soft sciences are wrong and that we don't actually know about human behavior what we think we know. Because if we actually knew, we would be better at controlling and predicting it. Which is to imply that there is more coercion going on in those enticements that make up our consumer society than we ever thought probable. In other words 1984 is here and we think our tolerance for Big Brother is voluntary. I'm sure I could write other provocative statements of that sort, but let's leave that to the future, shall we? 

Start next HERE: The Amoral Society:

It is sometimes asked why the social sciences don’t make progress the way the physical sciences do. The answer is invariably that it’s because the social sciences deal with much more complexity. I disagree. There’s plenty of complexity in the physical sciences as well. The answer, I believe, is that progress in the social sciences is being blocked by moral beliefs. More precisely, the social sciences are pervaded by moral beliefs to an extent that not only disincentivises research into areas that potentially challenge them, but to an extent that prevents social scientists from even asking questions.

One thing I have always done is to question the relevance of / accuracy of studies that tend to help Americans understand themselves. These studies are almost never done in a global context. And furthermore our studies of things people do or think in other countries are almost always predicated on a domestic controversy. We never hear anything about Sweden unless it's to compare their healthcare system to our own. We never hear how people in Spain view single parent families. 

As my scope widens to the aspects of the fate of Western Civilization, I am reminded of this quote and conversation. To Act Against Reason. So that's what I'm bringing into the mix. Some sense that the history of sociology in America is more a form of social control and political exegesis than a form of actually learning and understanding how people live in society. 

 

The New Materialist

The American middle class has front row seats to antics of a disconnected elite who rule over their society in irreplaceable ways. Social media is overrun with that which is genuinely better and genuinely reactionary trash, but the format of the mainstream and most importantly it's producers, have not changed.

I want to put words in your mouth. Words like Viacom and Disney and Fox and ESPN, and I want you to tell me if they are serving the proper role of the fourth estate. And then I want you to talk about Penguin and Basic and Hachette and Springer Verlag and tell me where the gap is. The way Americans talk to each other is through a set of media that up until the accident of the Internet, may as well have been a highly controlled propaganda machine. And I think the result is that we have a dysfunctional journalistic elite that are wholly unsatisfactory to America's professional class. IE, the academy is fighting, talk radio is fighting, churches are fighting, political organizations are fighting. Everybody is fighting to get the long form of the truth out there because there is an elite of 2000 blonde anchorpersons who refuse to use big words or be honest about history. So everybody is fighting to get themselves in the picture. Everybody is publishing selfies because nobody feels honestly represented.

AND. Because we have been told that we're all precious snowflakes, we cannot conform to any sensible set of coherent values and stop fighting for self-representation. So the fights continue.

This is why people fall for the identity politics of total triumph. They have not been showed how to live a life without spectacular dynamism. We don't need spectacular dynamism and revolutionary movement. We need something simple and reliable that we can verify for ourselves. We need something we can try at home. We need the confidence that we don't have to have 4K television lest we miss the next big thing. We need to be OK.

Today's cosmopolite flies from pillar to post. Not even something as simple as wheat can be reliable in their hands. The entire food supply chain of America has been traumatized by glutin. Like MSG and red dye #2 before it, these perfectly harmless things have been used to usurp common sense. But how can we trust elites who sell us Nexium one year and then sell us lawsuits against Nexium in the next? Life in America sounds like a drug commercial, idealized family living over a soundtrack of 25 debilitating side-effects. How about we just accept that we die? How about we just accept that all of this new-fangling trendiness is superfluous? How about we just eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, rice and beans, meat and potatoes?

I say the enemy is the New Materialist. He has shaken the foundations of common sense and delivered the masses into the hands of charlatans. It is not that the charlatans are any different or better than before, its that Americans have failed to respect their own native instincts and have been made almost permanently insecure. They fall for anything, in a world where tweeting is making a stand.

Obligatory Seriousness on Election 2016

I've been abusing history lately because I don't have the luxury of spending time with people who think like me. So I've been hunting among authors and books for stories that give me some feeling of what it's like to be a Russian. The reason is the same as the reason I read Dickens a few years back. I'm expecting the death of public optimism and a separation of classes, so I want to know how people keep their heads in such circumstances. I think I've learned something, and now I'd like to share it.

One of my life quotes is from Rabbi Hillel. "Where there is no hero, you be the hero." It means taking responsibility for keeping a level perspective when hope dies. Along with Hillel, I have over the past few years been reading Lovecraftian stories. I have this compelling need to understand what it means to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. In Japanese, there is a strange irony in the term 'domo arigato' which can be interpreted not only to mean 'thank you very much', but also 'thank you very much for the obligation to return the favor that you have now placed on me'. We may have lost some of that here when we reply to 'Thank you' with 'No, thank *you*.' The old response was 'You're welcome', which implies, feel free to ask again and I will respond again in kind. But that's a bit too much responsibility. Saying 'you're welcome' is tough. Civility is tough. The social contract is tough. In America, the social contract is under stress.

If you ask me what I feel about the election of Donald Trump, then I have to say this. Most clearly this is a rejection of what became the new normal under Obama, but also a reiteration with exclamation points of the same kind of reckless populism that elected Barack Obama the first time. The expression 'Yes we can' never escapes my mind without the implication 'because we are the majority and we have the votes'. Having the votes, is of course what democratic rule requires, and in the US, it requires money too. Whose votes and whose money are things we think we know but probably don't. But money and votes are aggregated by the infernal machines of party politics in America and dreams and wishes are pasted on top of that machine. The optimist in me looks forward only to a sort of glorious sacrifice. It's an unusual attitude for an American, but it gives me a great deal of comfort to know that I am not too comfortable. I do not let this discomfort poison my relationship to my fellows or to the common man. Instead, I look at history and world events and try to figure out what's keeping me out of war, and prison. The answer is 'plenty' and that plenty is what I look to. What keeps the buildings standing? Why does water keep flowing? Who keeps the electricity on? The Constitution and the infrastructure of this nation are simple enough to understand, as are our basic needs as people. It shouldn't be so hard to keep all that alive, so long as too many people don't take too much for granted.

All of us are subject to wishful thinking. No matter what actually happens in our lives, we project ourselves into other people's situations, or what we perceive them to be. Of course there are limits. There are certain people with whom we cannot identify at all. We say that we could not possibly be like that. I cannot identify with people who eat dogs, or practice female genital mutilation. They are the Other. All this is personal and psychological. I have come to recognize how much of our politics has abandoned the rational and calm and been hijacked by the personal and psychological, but I think this is to be expected under certain circumstances. I view this particular phenomenon largely as a consequence of the Culture Wars which has undermined that which we used to call 'E Pluribus Unum'. Whatever the reason we have moved from pluralism to populism, the consequence is the same. It's winner take all with no real sympathy for those perceived to be the Other. But we have even gone beyond that, to even project whom our political opponents cast as the Other. So people believe that somewhere they are hated and repudiated and all of those Others are voting for the Other Candidate. This is the characteristic of what we have just witnessed, and for those who were surprised at the victory of Trump, they simply presume that there were more Others out there in America than they ever suspected.

I should go on to say in particular that I find it so perverse and strange that people found it not only comfortable but compelling to argue that all of the racists and sexists were siding with Trump, and this was the defining element of his campaign. So it stands to reason that they were, in the spirit of a winner take all populist contest, dismissive of these opponents and considered them to be part of the great unwashed Other Americans. But that was the personal and psychological wishful thinking of people who were not interested in pluralism. How would they build a compromise on a zero-tolerance policy for dog-eaters and genital mutilators? But the actual terms and conditions of 'racism' and 'sexism' of America's Other voters was never defined, no more than anyone accurately measured into a moderated focus gun-grabbing, police-shooting, influence-peddling, weed-smoking, email-smuggling, muslim-hating, crotch-grabbing, or bible-thumping. It became an all or nothing wish to banish such Others into shameful oblivion. These were the terms of the American presidential election with the aim of destroying the opposition with aggregated majorities. What was surprising was how differently these majorities came together outside of the lines of both parties.

The energy and force of the Democrats was contained in the personna and campaign of Bernie Sanders. Whichever kind of socialist he was or is (I think grossly uninformed, narrow-minded but principled) his stripe of populist rhetoric carved out a new set of partisans from the Democrats. That which Bill Clinton, the most charismatic and clever politician of our era, had solidified, Sanders dislodged with aplomb. Neither Obama or Bill Clinton, even with the assistance of George H. W. Bush could elevate Hillary Clinton in the eyes of the general public. Sanders won the hearts and minds of the newly energized Left and the Democrat machine stabbed him in the back.

The career-long calculations and aspirations of Ted Cruz came to a rude and abrupt halt in Indiana. More than any of the hundreds of twists and turns of the election season, the crude disrespect of the crowd of Hoosiers telling Cruz to shutup and leave is the marker for me. Democrats must have been utterly confounded by Cruz' failure, as they have been focused on him as the apotheosis of social Christian Conservatism, that thing they believe to be the very heartbeat of the Republican soul. I think Cruz parading his Stepford family was too clever by half and that someone between him and Huckabee might have tapped that vein more properly. But I am a great deal more sensitive to the rudderless ramshackle that is the GOP as it struggles between its desire for power and its need for principle. Trump took all of its oxygen. Trump vacuumed all of the crumbs of the Tea Party and then moved them to orbital speeds, escaping the grip of gravitas of the Republican Party over the American Right. Trump is the ultimate RINO Conservatives have always feared, and now they will have to face the fact that Conservative principles will, from this moment forward, be a permanent minority of public opinion. Here is the clear failing record of three presidential elections they could not triangulate, and they've been trounced by a reality-show bounder.

All of that emotional investment has produced a litany of gut rumbles, weeping and wailing that I was able to ignore, with some patience. I have developed a strong stomach for the democracy of the masses, and it is not the mood of the people or even the subjects of their psychological obsessions that I measure. America is its traditions and its infrastructure, both of which are in jeopardy owing to its inability to transmit the energy and dynamism of its actual champions into the corridors of public service. The government we have cannot be hotrodded, its wheelbase is too long. People will have to get out and walk to freedom, come back and build a new chassis. Trump is not that builder. He is the madman who will chop the top and do donuts, orange hair blowing in the wind. America will not move forward, it will spin in place and knock over a lot of cones and maybe a bollard or two. At the end of four years, we will choose a sober mechanic, and perhaps we won't be so afraid of the blowtorching we need.

In that long walk to freedom, America will discover its legs. That is my expectation. There are no free rides. There is no comfortable backseat.

Caught Up In The Struggle

Not long ago I reconnected with a childhood friend whose formative years were rugged, but TC transformed and survived. Better than that he thrived.When he left my neighborhood, he got  'caught up' with Crips in Compton. The turning point came, as he tells the story, when an older kid about to do an armed robbery put a gun to TC's head and told him to go home. The person who did it was a killer gangbanger who didn't see himself replicated in young TC. Or perhaps he did, and decided to break the cycle in a moment of clarity. 

This past Independence Day weekend, I found myself in Gardena at a party that reminded me of my old neighborhood, which sheltered myself and TC from the worse parts of the ghetto, but still retained elements of influence. We knew Crips by sight and by name; they recruited us. We resisted. Yet these were people who listened to Marvin Gaye and Cameo like the rest of us. They chased the same girls, played (cheating) ball on the same courts and ate the same BBQ ribs. They whistled at the same cars, and with the exception of an identifying bandana or hat, wore the same clothes. But we were miles apart in character. 

Last fall, I learned a lot about how the Los Angeles office of the FBI deals with gang members in cooperation with Homeboy Industries and Father Greg Boyle. It came as something of a surprise to understand how the FBI's was a social initiative rather than a crime fighting mission. But there was no mistaking the psychological dynamics of gang attachment, the necessary alienation from civility that is central to the identity of the youth who attaches to badness. 

People like to pretend that character doesn't count and that in interactions with the larger society, nobody can tell the difference between those of us on the outside of gangs and those of us on the inside because of the Venn of 'hood life and gang life. It's not the shoes and it's not the slang. I do understand that there is a definition of 'black man' that has very little to do with what it meant 30 years ago, but is an extension of a radicalized political hostility embodied in the lyrics of the rap group "Public Enemy". We really don't have to go far to understand the basic meaning of 'Public Enemy' and "Niggas With Attitude". Is it so subtle? Can we tell the difference between Richard Pryor and the highschool kid who quotes Richard Pryor? In kids, it's generally a matter of our faith in their character. Sometimes it takes a gun to the head for the consequences to me made clear and for a permanent choice to be made. Sometimes the gun isn't friendly.

Doc takes advantage of his badge and lets his perpetrators know. He makes it clear to them that you have about seven strikes before you are consigned to the wastebin of prison culture. "You fucked up today son, I hope I don't see you again, but you chose to be here. Choose better. Live better." The attitude alone will not get you there, but cops will be around if you keep showing up on the wrong side of civility. Is it enough that attitude puts one on the wrong side of civility? To be sure, the matters of character will degrade in ways no political class is truly interested in discerning, but processing through the System takes time, energy and persistence, just as does the discipline attached to the conventions of success. Recovering Christian backsliders, alcoholics, gangbangers, gamblers and whores all have long roads. Every day there are choices to be made. Every day there is positive purpose to be fulfilled or abandoned. A lot of that gets buried in the loose bonds of colloquial black identity. A lot of people get caught up.

The political consensus is lazy and prefers not to split up that black identity. It suits certain political agendas that a convenient racial aggregation can be assumed. I saw this over a decade ago and determined to poke a hole in that circus' big top. Black Republican! The very existence forced people to consider values, to consider the character of citizenship, to consider economics and religion and lots of other distinctions that disrupt the diet of racial and cultural conformity.  

It doesn't surprise me that today's Americans suffer from the calculations of hegemonic identity politics. The game is populism and the game is not being gamed. It exploits logical lacunas that might even make Orwell retch. Everybody is supposed to be in favor of 'diversity' which requires a stultifying conformity of opinion. To agitate against a particular nation is 'racist'. I needn't belabor the point to those who read and think. Those who read and think, well their company is not sufficient, and like police, their skill and authority cannot resist an onslaught of incivility in a nation of millions. The attitude of the masses keeps landing them on the wrong side of civility, and the hegemonic players keep thinking they can sustain their powers through it all. We are not only cruising for a bruising we are dashing towards a smashing bashing. 

I want my cosmopolitain life but I'm not sanguine. I tend to feel very much like Bruce Wayne in Gotham City, or the Omega Man in zombified Los Angeles. Not that I am any such hero, but at least I know what heroism requires. We play chess in our own living rooms, but outside is the antagonist who only sees purification by fire. Chess is a fair fight and life is not chess. I stay on the lookout for men who would pledge their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, amongst crowds who believe such things cannot be respected. We are failing to respect the common law for the common man, and we stand on the margins of parades of power as they design uncommon laws for those who sweep the streets before them. I say it all started in the Counterculture, and now we stand on the brink of delivering the Presidency to one such Boomer, again. I am hoping that I can distinguish myself. Not that anyone in particular asks me. A capable man must watch his back. 

I don't want to get caught up in the struggle for survival. I know what a decent life, even a good life requires, and I aim to pursue happiness with vigor. Sometimes a wise coward is better than a brave fool. I explain more than people want to listen. I make distinctions more than people care to discriminate. Yet I know I am splitting the proper differences, but we are all contorted away from speaking the simple truth, avoiding the streetsweepers as we must. I've never read Anne Frank yet. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Islamic Terrorism in America

It's awfully strange how difficult it must be for a genuine Islamicist to defend acts of terror on American citizens. They're either straight crazy or are playing a longer game than anyone considers possible. But let us presume that both are true. That means that the violence has both short term and long term meanings and they are both the same, that only Islamisicsts have the courage of their convictions, against all odds, to prevail against the infidels. 

The structure that supports the short term goal is the death cult of indoctrinated militants. The structure that supports the long term goal is one particularly strategic version (or perversion if you must) of jihad. The reward for both is the establishment of Islamic Court standard of justice in the world. I think we have seen enough to know that these cults can be maintained here in the US as we add Orlando to San Bernardino in the lexicon or our recent tragic experiences. But what has to come apart in the US for Islamic justice to become preferable to the system we have in place? Perhaps not as much as we think, precisely because we don't often think about America's justice system. Isn't it interesting how certain American politics takes the shape of jihad in defending nominal Islam against the American system of justice?

I think there is very little understanding in our country about any process of judicial review. As far as the populous is concerned, we vote for President in order for them to appoint ideological justices to the Supreme Court. Other than that, nada. I would suggest to my fellow defenders of the first few amendments to the Constitution, that we spend a bit more time tracking this process down and writing about it. We can't wait for every gross miscarriage of sexual assault cases to get us ready to remove and disbar, but that's what it seems to take considering Duke and now Stanford Universities. 

I cannot help but chuckle with sadness at the level of frustration people who are completely invested in the post-industrial sections of our economy. For them, the inevitably hypocrisy inherent in the inflation of narratives must be horribly taxing on their sense of fairness. When you actually believe that free speech is everything, and in fact the only thing, diversity presents a mind-blowing challenge. At some point one must admit that hate speech must be allowed because no arbitration of speech can really allowed. Everybody's history must be revealed, and you cannot weasel out of cultural appropriation and you cannot deny history. These contradictions of political correctness are now more clearly manifest than ever, so what to do? Well, their simplistic evasion of logic abuses logic by using half logic. If the modern world is capable of making manifest the actions inherent in the conflict of narratives, and yet every narrative must have free reign, how do we keep from violent conflict? Their answer is to destroy that capability in the modern world. Let the Muslims hate the West, and although we stand against it, let the West hate the Muslims. Now all we need is to destroy both of their capacities to act on those hatreds. I think these post-modernists will attempt that until it comes to war, only during war finally recognizing their (some other word than fascist) requirement for monopolization of the use of force. 

I am reminded of the three tools of coercion. Seduction, negotiation and force. The matrix works something like this. Seduction means you can convince someone to work in your interests against their own interests. I like the word fraud equally well, but fraud is a false negotiation revealed after the fact which might be overturned. With seduction it is always too late. Negotiation has both parties aware of what they stand to gain and what they stand to lose in an honest brokerage of interests. They come to a mutually agreeable settlement. Force is what it is. In both force and seduction, the dominant party wins and the losing party is humiliated. So they are zero-sum and we pay the most attention to them. But a negotiated contract, that's a hard bargain and it requires mutual coercion whether it entails the best of two bad worlds, or the worst of two good worlds. 

Coercion is necessary for the co-existence of all narratives. PC represents something between the two extremes of bad and good negotiated worlds. The problem is that the settlement is not holding and the stakes are too high. So we are moving into the realms of seduction and force. This is what happens when speech defines. If we lived in an industrial economy where nobody cares about the words spoken in the factory where the car was made, the stakes would not be so high. If the value were most found in the structural integrity of a bridge, instead of the famous photographs and words spoken in protest on one particular day in the life of that bridge, the stakes would not be so high. If the post-industrialists actually believed that actions spoke louder than words, we could be a lot more free with our words, but we can't. We are cowards and not men of actions. We are men of emotions and emotional outbursts. We must be this way in a post-industrial world. 

I think I can best exemplify this requirement for coercion in the idea that for whatever human problem exists, "there is an app for that". The process of developing software is to put our best abstractions of a human activity, and/or all knowledge associated with that activity, into a computer simulation. This requires extraordinary brains, cooperation, discipline and a whole other boatload of virtuous qualities. It is a making of an interactive map, through which we might navigate the world of problems while looking at our cellphones, sitting at our armchair computers. If you didn't take a moment to think about it before, let me assure you that it's a programmer's world and you just live in it. All of the roads, alleys, walls and doors of software mazes are planned before you rats move through it. That includes the drama of the narrative. You are totally constrained. Or as Golding says, language fits experience like a strait jacket. What chance do the larger markets of miseducated have to second guess the virtual world frameworks of post-modern debate and politics? I think only blood and pain crash the apps like cellphones dashed to the pavement. In the meantime, the ceiling of disbelief remains suspended. In the PC world the false pillars of racism, capitalism and patriarchy are said to hold that ceiling up, and so the peasantry content themselves to live among the grass roots, never to climb. 

--

What the post-industrialists understand is that their leadership depends upon masses paying attention. So in order to maintain their power, they must sustain those systems of belief that are the talking points of their narrative. Most importantly, they must keep talking and they must be consistent in their talk such that they can project backwards and forwards, constantly revising their seductions about the past and about the future as well. Whereas the man who makes a horseshoe or a pair of pliers can prove the physics of the universe serve his purposeful work without uttering a word or sharing a selfie. 

This Islamists bring the pain. As sure as there are avenues for every conceivable narrative and contradictory fantasy in the post-modern West, there are but a few allowed for the devout Islamist. The alternative is death. And when death and dismemberment cannot be brought directly to the American infidel, then it is brought streaming into his interwebz. Even this content defies the PC narratives and thus challenges the self-righteous ingenues of our Hollywood frameworks. So this is the new soft terrorism. The narrative Producers must amp up their portrayals of blood and death in order to bring 'realism' to the screens. They abuse the myths of superheroes, ennobling them only as proxies of central committees. All superheroes will become Hulk over time. Mark my words. The thoughtful individual heroes will be crushed by disillusion as they approach the Enemy. Because it is an axiom of PC faith that the Western man suffers a complex of irredeemable original sins. He is white. He is male. His fortunes come from free markets. He applies individual logic and justice against the poor Muslim from a Western point of view. The pain brought by the jihadi is our just dessert, for an uncountable number of reasons which can be recalled on demand from any liberal American university study.

-- 

In America there are men who wrench their own automobiles, who know the fields from which came the cotton in their shirts. There are those who understand that their shoes are leather and are not swayed by narratives against the use of animals or the consumption of wheat. There are men who wear single function devices on their off hands, recognizing that time is precious and not to be divided amongst the multiple distractions of multitasking apps. Such men keep precious thoughts born by hard won experience in their heads. They will never compete with the cacophony of the Cathedral. The knowledge and force of such men cannot be integrated into the power structures of democracy. It requires, as does all decentralized authority, its own rites of initiation and channels of communication. The farmer must mind his own hedgerows. So let him be a hedgehog. Let him know what he knows best and let his heart and his family and his virtues stand on their own with his select interdependencies. He will turn off the broadcasts of his own accord. He has better things to do with his time. And when the Islamicist comes to these islands in America, he will be met with unblinking eyes, but only if our Judiciary has not abdicated its responsibility to Constitutional justice. 

All depends upon us understanding and experiencing the relevance of our jurisprudence in our lives and culture. No post-modern creations can bring us there, neither of economic or humanitarian design. We must align ourselves to our extraordinarily slow pace of evolution and trust our human instincts armed with the insights of our own founding history, even as we use the tools of modernity. We must settle ourselves within a world where water is precious, where physical labor reminds us of our duty to our born bodies, where courage requires that experience against the firebombing of propaganda razing our cities into markets of fantasy and cant. If AI can replace you, you are already surplus. Your mind is not to be led by the Marauder's Map. Your experience is something to be initiated by your courageous virtue, not purchased from the app store. I understand what C.S. Lewis said about magic; ignore that too, because post-modern wizards struggle every day to advance their technology to be indistinguishable from it, and they will never reveal where the minds are that make it. Focus instead on justice. We have had it in our lives, and we should never forget its blindness, especially as the screaming media and interwebz attempt to coerce what we see. 

 

A Provocation on Gentrification

What is a community? I think this is a (New York) city dynamic that resonates far less elsewhere. I remember when I moved to Prospect Heights from LA, I was supposed to have an opinion about Crown Heights and that kind of crap means something only to people who live near Crown Heights. So I'm looking at apartments strictly in terms of price and amenities, and people keep telling me, what side of Vanderbilt I should live on or the chances of me fitting in in Boerum Hill vs Cobble Hill. So I basically call tribal bullshit on 'gentrification'. This tribal bullshit is real, for me, in LA. In LA different neighborhoods *mean* something. I "could never live out there in" Corona or West Covina. And I'm sure that means absolutely zip to a New Yorker.

 

I think Americans have this fixation with the social power of real-estate agents, a class of people I generally find quite distasteful in just about every way. But their necessity comes with urban territory. It is always the argot of these negotiators that set up the expectations of people moving from place to place. We have become accustomed to living in the urban matrix, and these are the agents who inform our vocabulary of locality. There is nothing at all organic about the city or about the urban neighborhood. It's always a market. It's always a commodity. This is a consequence of our desire to have no restrictive covenants. Freedom of association is a corporate, communitarian value. Residents are fungible.  I think relatively few people these days consider at length that context of urban alienation which was discussed a lot more in the 50s and 60s when 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit' was a metaphor for the collectivist conformist demands of corporate employment and city life vs individual needs of family and home.

The film, like the novel on which it was based, became hugely popular. Historian Robert Schultz argues that the film and the novel are cultural representations of what Adlai Stevenson had described in 1955 as a "crisis in the western world", "collectivism colliding with individualism," the collective demands of corporate organizations against traditional roles of spouse and parent.^[4] That increased corporate organization of society, Schultz notes, reduced white-collar workers' (represented by Tom Rath and the other gray-suited "yes men") control over what they did and how they did it as they adapted to the "organized system" described and critiqued by contemporary social critics such as Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and William H. Whyte, Jr.^[5] 

Thus 'gentrification' is unsolvable. It is part and parcel of the larger problem of living on property you don't own (and owning a brownstone on the Upper East Side gives you about zero latitude with respect to what it means to be living on the Upper East Side) and society you don't control. You fit in. You must. You have no choice. If you really wanted that choice you wouldn't live in the city. So I think there's a false sense of freedom that invites people to justify their feelings of violation. But when you live in the city, you should expect to be violated. In fact you should welcome it. That's the skill of being cosmopolitan. You go to the city spots expecting to be invigorated by the random encounter with something slightly alien to your ordinary experience. You wear clothes in an outdoor cafe that will attract a certain attention to you as you observe others observing you. But it is this hope of finding something comfortably strange, an amusement, a diversion, that is part of the risky joy of city life. 

 

I perceive this through the lens of those structures, architectures of thought, if you will, that sustain certain ideas and starve others out. What is it about the 'social geography' or 'cultural geography' of a place that makes it more or less friendly to certain expectations? I think Foucault went batshit in this direction. But I believe that concept that we have no idea of whom we might be sexually compatible with because we only hunt for partners in a very small geographical area. So we actually sexualize neighborhoods and they take on more personal meaning to us than they deserve.

 

Which is why I used to tell my girlfriend "Pretend we're in Cancun" whenever she made side-eyes at my apartment's relative sloth. Me. I'm immune to Cancun. It's just another place.

The Proof Machine

Back in 1980, when the world was turning to morning in America, and I first began to understand what inflation was and why I couldn't afford an apartment in Los Angeles, there was a small
miracle called MICR. 

MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) is a technology used to verify the legitimacy or originality of paper documents, especially checks. Special ink, which is sensitive to magnetic fields, is used in the printing of certain characters on the original documents.

What I learned in the anti-fraud part of my teller training was that banks used to leave MICR machines out in the lobby for their customers' use. If you forgot your deposit slip, you could take a blank one from the kiosk and use the MICR machine to put your account number on it. The teller would take your deposit and all would be sunny. Except for the time when some clever cad pre-stamped all of the blank deposit slips with his own account number and left a pile of them at the kiosk. No more MICR machines in the lobby. 

Nevertheless, checks still have your account number on them. What they don't have is the amount of the check you write. So it was somebody's job at the bank to eyeball every check amount and MICR that bad boy so it could be processed. It was an interesting period in our time, when paperwork of a certain type ultimately ended up in a computer database that did tallying. Tally is a word you don't hear much any longer. This was the job of the Proofer. In my rounds of bank operations between 80 and 82, I excelled most at TCDs. It got me a desk. But I also had to do customer service and proof. If I were to be an operations manager, I had to know all aspects including teller, vault teller, and wire transfer. I never got to do wire transfer and when it came to proof, I stank. Even though I had my ten key skills, (by touch), I could not compete with that thin Eastern European girl who was the regular. 

While I'm reminiscing, I might as well name names. The branch was Pershing Square and the branch manager was Tom Caballero. The operations manager was Tom Hamilton and the assistant manager was a lively Mexican girl with wavy mid-length hair. I want to say that her name was Gonzales, but it doesn't seem quite right. She was the backup for the proof girl. The vault teller was a severe and gorgeous black girl and her best friend was head teller. She was slim and had a nasally voice. The senior teller was Anna Mena who later moved out to a branch in Van Nuys. The kid I hated was an emancipated minor whose Beverly Hills parents couldn't get rid of him fast enough. He actually knew the French lyrics to Blondie's Rapture song. I had something of a crush on Sarah Farren, but she was already married to Bob. The wire transfer girl was Marnita Jackson. She had her own apartment in Hollywood and didn't trust me for jack. There were a couple of loan officers down on the first floor including Piccolini who drove a Mercedes 280 but didn't get a lot of respect in the bank. The SVP, Ken Allen, offered me a spot in the management trainee program so I could learn credit. I told him I really wanted to do computers. The macher of the joint was Marvin Schwartz who looked like an evil Dr. Katz. His word was law. Every Christmas all of the businessmen who owed him money brought large cans of gourmet popcorn. 

--

People say that they are afraid of AI. Some people probably should be, but they are the same people who don't get the respect of the big bosses of the world anyway. If I decide to replace you with a machine, what exactly am I doing? Well, in the case of City National Bank, you are saving me the headache of being a modern day Bartleby. Me working proof would have been a nightmare for all parties concerned. We want labor saving devices. Some of that, obviously, is a consequence of us being peasants living in the fictional, idiot proof city. We have bullshit jobs because we actually don't know how to live any other way, and necessity isn't quite the mother it needs to be to reduce our body fat ratios. It's rather sad how far our society has gone to sexualize our relationships one to the other, but if there's any comfort in that perversion, at least AIs won't be sexual. Except in the movies where they are. 

I expect and hold out eternal hope that people, being people, will ultimately desire to be around and work honestly with people. That is the satisfaction core to our being as social animals and we won't evolve out of that necessity. But technology will march on while there is money to be made in it, and so every once in a while slim East European women's' daughters will invent something better than proof machines in memory of their mothers' toil. MICR be damned, we now have ATMs that read checks, but debit cards first existed around 1995. That didn't take very long. 

I think there is something magical about cooking with friends. I've never had the job, but I've done enough barbecues and enough banking piecework to meld the two together in my mind. So what Wendy's is proposing, kiosks instead of cashiers, might work out well. After all, how hard is it to order up a supersized #4 with Sprite? I tell you this, it's a no brainer to build a fast food ordering app. It's already done. I say it's just a matter of time until all fast food restaurants take on a new profile where it's all about the kitchen. And the security staff in the dining part. But the esprit de corps of the fast food joint is something I don't quite have my finger on. A diner, on the other hand, is something we all remember.

 

Hasn't it always been about saving money?

The Black Power Bogard & Why Race Is

The simple fact of the matter is that during the 1950s and 60s, angry black Americans, especially those men who served in WW2, were just about fed up with foot-dragging on the Civil Rights front. And even though things were better outside the South, a lot of us had family there and we weren't going to put up with it. The threat of violent revolt in America's cities were a clear and present danger. So when black Americans negotiated Affirmative Action with Nixon, it was the kind of politics that nobody wanted to rehash.

In other words, America's most powerfully dangerous minority made it race and ethnicity because we said so. But it wasn't about race and ethnicity, it was about us and what we wanted. Because the NAACP is not about 'people of color' it's about black Americans. And we won. And we dictated the terms of how people talk about race and ethnicity in America. And it's going to continue to be that way until nobody (meaning black Americans) cares any longer, about halfway through the next black President's term.

Somewhere around the mid 80s, 'the Black Community' began to disintegrate as a singly focused political force. Black America itself became too large and diverse to sustain the myth of unified leadership. I would say the very end came with the deaths of the Congressional Black Caucus and of Ron Brown. But that doesn't change the fact that a new generation has tried to use the same tactics with 'multiculturalism' as blacks did with Black Power. Except, really who's going to burn down Detroit for 'diversity', the cast of Glee?

So basically we are living in the mediocre shadow of the political dynamic of a once unified black America that was so powerful that it redrew Congressional districts in every state. That power is gone, but some of the half-baked ideas and rhetoric about race and ethnicity remain. Some people worry about backlash, but just like with the actual end of Black Power, a significant enough number of black Americans really rose in competence and genuine social power, picking up the mantle of the best America we all want. And so (as we say) just like other ethnics, our struggles into the mainstream has strengthened and changed America for the better. But, you know... how the sausage was made ain't all MLK speeches, peaches and cream.

Don't expect that you can reinvent the blues or the Baptist Church or race relations just because it has been explained. We did that. It's done.

American Socialism = Progressive Neoliberalism

Socialism isn't bad, but America is already socialist enough.

The original socialist impetus was moral as was made clear to me in my reading of George Orwell. His excellent book 'The Road to Wigan Pier' made the case for socialism in Britain. Essentially in those days before the advent of the supermarket, when more people farmed with oxen than tractors, a few oligarchs could conspire to restrain their investment in an industry and actually starve people. This was proven in England's coal mining industry. The plan for socialism was generally simple which was to gain control of such industries and compel investment so towns like Manchester would not be devastated. The demand for socialism included things we take for granted today, like standardized hours, overtime pay, educational stipends, investment matching and workman's compensation insurance for injuries on the job. In other words 'benefits'. But the larger idea was of 'scientific socialism', ie a vision of how technology could benefit the working class.

Today we have benefits and we have a larger number of capitalists and corporations than ever. It cannot be said that a half dozen privately owned companies control entire industries such that a collusion between them to go golf instead of invest in job creation will actually starve whole cities. Markets have become more global and open. If American capitalists don't find steel an attractive investment, Indian capitalists will buy the mills at a discount. In short, the deprivations of capitalism are not as deadly as they once were before WW2 when the average worker didn't have electricity.

Today 'socialism' in America means neoliberalism. It used to be fashionable for employees to own their companies here in the states, but benefits have advanced so much and unions have declined in influence that 'the people owning the means of production' is not considered to be a deciding factor in whether or not employees are well cared for. Neoliberalism takes the socialist model and essentially applies it to people on the fringes of society, and from all big businesses and the public through taxation. So now that the average workers have benefits and social welfare from the average employer, Leftists seek to extend benefits to the unemployed. For example, candidate Bernie Sanders wants to tax businesses and the public to pay for free college education. This has nothing to do with the moral case for socialism which was to put bread on the table and a chicken in every pot, this is more like a lobster dinner for people who have declared themselves gluten intolerant.

This critical difference between providing basic social services for the infrastructure of society and not working people to death in sweatshops and unsafe factories, and looking at the whole of GDP and raising taxes so that the government gives out more esoteric benefits to workers and non-workers alike, to citizens and non-citizens alike is the moral difference between true socialism and neoliberalism.

The essential problem with Progressive's neoliberal agenda is that it is unsustainable. It seeks an ever higher standard of living on the basis of 'inequality' and to flatten society. That goes beyond the reasonableness of socialism towards collectivism and communism, and yet it is soft-peddled as 'socialism' or 'democratic socialism'. The American standard of living has already met the moral requirements of proper socialism. What we are now witnessing is nothing more than the greed of the activist Left.

Neoliberalism has a good chance in America because they can always claim underdog status. They cannot be held responsible for the bankruptcy of their ideas because they are too clever in their manipulations of regulatory and tax law. They will bleed that which is profitable to fund that which is wasteful without ever actually taking charge. They can always claim that 'too many' people are homeless and corporations and the public are 'not doing enough' to justify their policies. But they will never use their own money and power to solve the problem. They merely push and push in the same direction with other people's money using the force of new laws they are always pursuing. If the policy fails, they claim there was never enough commitment and money. If the policy succeeds, they move on to expand their influence in another area. But you'll find no original private models - everything gets dumped to the responsibility of government.

So in direct answer, American 'socialism' is neoliberalism, which taxes everyone as much as politically possible and tries to turn government into a benefits factory in every direction. This is exactly what contributes to making politicians only responsive to money. It is not so much steal from the rich and give to the poor as make government the broker for more and more of American life, by stealing the moral argument of socialism when what is actually happening leans more towards state control. And in that way American trying to vote themselves rich is the road to serfdom as it will put more power and money in government hands and out of the hands of the people.

No Judgment: The Three Legged Stool of Opinion Equality

Opinions are all of equal value when you have:

• No understanding of the game.
• No skin in the game.
• No agency in the game.

Only when you have a rational investment in the outcome and understand something about the process and reason to believe it works for you, does the value of the opinions you hold and your take on the opinions of others take shape and become firm.

Scenario A. Understanding
Imagine that I know nothing at all about professional sports in America. I'm sitting in a bar and the person at my right might say that the Dallas Cowboys are the best football team this season. The person to my left might say that the Atlanata Hawks are the best football team this season. I'd have to say both opinions are about equal even though the Hawks are a basketball team. The Hawks fan could go on and tell me that the Hawks won each of their games by an average of 12 points, whereas Dallas only won by 3 points. I'm in a totally ridiculous conversation and I don't even know why. I may even come to support the person on the left after the person on the right says "You're an idiot!" and walks away.

Now I'm supporting an opinion I have no idea about, while forming another opinion. "Dallas Cowboy fans are assholes." based on this one particular encounter.

The more you know about something, the less tolerance you tend to have for people who don't. But lots of people who never develop any expertise, or skin in the game, adopt opinions on specious premises. We live in a consumer society in which information and opinions are marketed and people adopt them based upon context rather than content. This is a well-understood psychological phenomenon called (something I can't remember) in which the consumer falsely assumes what's inside the box is well-represented by the illustrations on the outside of the box, or the conditions under which the box was presented. The other standard logical fallacies apply.

Scenario B: Investment
My personal opinion is that all gambling in Vegas is the same and is for losers. Now I actually know that one has a better chance at winning at Blackjack or Texas Hold 'Em and that there are professionals who can legitimately beat the odds. But I don't care because I never waste my money gambling in Vegas or anywhere. I've already divided the world into two kinds of people, those who don't gamble at all and idiots.

Imagine that I was an atheist. I have reasons to believe that Islam and Christianity are equally dubious. Since I have no reason to invest any hope or trust in their various institutional manifestations, I'm likely to come to regard the defensive of Islam and of Christianity about the same. Basically, both have no value to me. I don't need to care because, as Childish Gambino might say "I ain't lovin' those fake hoes." So while I have some understanding, I can still be dismissive of informed opinions and not bother to weigh the differences between them. 

Scenario C: Agency
This one is especially interesting. It is the tragedy against knowledge and interest which is resignation. Imagine that I were a voter in a democracy and I understood the process. Not only do I understand the process, but I have a particular stake in the process. I want my party to win. But I live in a jurisdiction where the other party dominates. Say I live in Los Angeles and I want a Republican mayor. Or I live in Texas and I want gun control. Or I live in the ghetto and I want them to build a Nordstrom's. I know that pretty much no matter how much time and energy, knowledge I possess, what one guy like me can do against the system amounts to butkis. So I judge that everybody's opinion, not just mine, basically doesn't matter. What's gonna happen is gonna happen so yes I'll agree, I'll play along, but I really don't see the point in giving one opinion any more credibility than another.

--

When I was a kid at camp, we were organized into Adventure Groups. One boys cabin, one girls cabin, our two respective counselors and one staff member. These groups would get together on a daily basis and do our craft projects as a team. My group called itself The Mighty Flaming Armadillos. Already we were into Monty Python. We adopted purple as one of our banner colors, I do remember that. There was one group whose name I remember like it was yesterday. They were IIWI, pronounced Double I Double U I. It stood for "I don't know. I don't care. What's the difference? Incorporated". No matter what the project, half of them didn't show up and the other half did half-ass work. They refused to take anything seriously but they must assuredly said that their group was as good as any other group. Their banner was the four letters in plain black magic marker on a white cardboard picket sign, sans serif. 

There is logic to apathy and non-judgment. It's not hopeful or energetic, but there's logic to it. 

 

100 Reasons to Hate The Reawakened Force

Of course I'm not going to list them, and quite frankly I think anyone capable of hating this film has got to be too dainty to sustain any of my well-considered backhands. But there were people who found Indiana Jones shooting the man with the sword anything but funny. They are the Worst Critics Ever, and it looks like there's some fraction of an army forming to pile on the latest Star Wars film. We know why, because some people see a barrel and they immediately go fishing with their shotgun, not realizing that it's a barrel of monkeys. I am as disgusted by such triumphal screeds as I would be at monkey meat. Let's face facts, Star Wars is a Disney PG13 movie, a merchandizing vehicle for kids toys and a bit of nerd fun. We should all be a little bit embarrassed that anyone bothers to criticize the movies as if they were films. I am, which is why I don't think I can do much more that heave all of my snide regard at this guy, which is the only review I have ever read about the latest installment. It's probably the only one I ever will read, because really, I do know how to think about Star Wars. Trust me.

There's only so much criticism Star Wars can bear. And then when you think about it, Star Wars was *always* just a Disney PG13 movie. And guess what? The books are better than the movies. So I was hoping that I might hear something comparing the actual Star Wars literature to the arc of the story because there is no way any story with this much inherent death and destruction can be done in a PG13 vehicle. Guess, what? A bunch of fascists just destroyed a planet and four moons. Gosh. What'll we do now? This is the only way a PG13 movie can handle genocide. If we accepted it with Alderaan, we should accept it now. So if there ever was an enjoyable Star Wars movie, then they all are by the standards of Star Wars, which are by definition, nerd fun fanboy standards. Yes FTL travel is possible and explosions make sounds in space. No matter what kind of unobtanium and extreme chemicals are used, when they explode it will all be the color and speed of gasoline explosions, OK? If you can get past that, please don't bore us with your insights about gender roles and father son relationships. Disney, remember? 

Star Wars is not a guilty pleasure, it's a simple pleasure, and it's something that we ought to have on the regular. There's no reason there shouldn't be as many Star Wars movies as Bond films, and if the producers at Disney don't understand that, then they are even dumber than George Lucas, who actually thought he was smart enough to control his comic book universe. Hello, Marvel took 60 years to figure that out, and they didn't need as much help as George did. 

There is something to be said about the kind of heroes we find heroic, because there is always something interesting to be said about the way power is used for moral or immoral ends. That's the only real stuff of criticism I can bear for this particular universe, and it's true that in the films, all too much nuance is only implied by plot and never fleshed out in the acting. But I speak as someone engaged in the the universe of games and fiction-lore along with the films. Sith vs Jedi is actually interesting once you get to know them. There remains , I think, excellent elements in Episode VII that could segue very nicely into interesting expositions in VIII. So let us explore a few things to anticipate cynically...

A. Kylo Ren as Aimless Emo Brat
I really like the idea that Kylo Ren is not a fearsome warrior out to control the Galaxy. He's a great analogy for the Millenial Occupiers having all the attention and the merest of talent, their whiney desires and sloppy indiscipline leaving them full of self-doubt when it comes to their destiny. So they must debauche themselves to prove themselves truly 'real', and it is only from that most ugly hunger can they become truly the empty uncaring loathsome creatures that deserve to be called evil. The character Fernando Vera in Mr. Robot, the psycho drug dealer is that evil. Kylo Ren has no spirit, only hunger. When he finally possesses the hunger rather than the hunger possessing him, we will have a crackerjack soulless badass. He will always be a wildcard, a madman who ultimately believes his own luck. 

B. Rey as Hardnosed Heroine
There's a couple places to go with Rey. She either becomes Ripley or she becomes Wonder Woman. I think it will be the latter because if I'm reading her right, she's got the skill for visions and mind control already without any Force training. She's terribly self-possessed but needs to have something more specific to love than BB8 and Finn. Otherwise she will run away from all the fighting, like any sensible person would. I say she finds the courage that Luke Skywalker did not. But of course the big question is who are her parents and why did they leave her on Jakku. If she becomes Ripley, then you can expect some Darth Maul skills emerging. Dual saber, coming next. She's a loner. 

C. Finn as Improbable Commando
It's nice to have an actor in the middle of all this rabble. He makes the simple lines sparkle like nobody ever quite has in the entire series. And oh by the way, it's time for Chewbacca to die. Finn is pure headstrong bravery without being overly stupid or clumsy; he's the natural quarterback ready for any bootleg play. This augers for him to get into ridiculously impossible situations and come out with better luck than Han Solo. That's a new kind of good guy in the series, genuine heartfelt heroics, with honest skin-saving practicality. It could get deliciously Lovecraftian with a guy like Finn around. 

D. Destroyed Wiser Luke
A man with a lifetime of regret will take the news of Han Solo's death right smack on the chin. If he hasn't felt the disturbance in the Force already, it makes for a chance for him to go Dark. It's actually what I wanted to see in Episode VII, Luke taking up the mantle of the Sith discipline having denied himself the use of his emotions for so long. But that would be too much to ask from Disney. But if this world were mine, Luke might take it upon himself to destroy all of the Force users because clearly he must come to regret his self-imposed exile. On the other hand, Yoda said something like this would happen back on Dagoba. If Luke doesn't go Dark, he needs to go Dead. Yeah Kylo Ren needs to take him out - first lucky break.

E. The Screaming Fascists of the First Order
Why did it take everybody so long to have Stormtroopers act like Stormtropers? We needed to hear them enthusiastically clomp their boots down the streets of cities everywhere in the Republic. Let's have more of that, shall we? Let's have them get away with murder in the Outer Rim, because they can. Let's have a whole league of minor tyrants of the First Order bringing scofflaws to heel all over the Galaxy. Who needs super weapons when you have enough police dogs? BTW, the right beasts on a leash will provide just the right touch to Stormtrooper patrols. 

F. A Force McGuffin
Both sides need to have a Crystal Skull or some kind of Rosetta Stone that will make Jedi in a Jar, or Instant Sith. Call it a Force Multiplier, the point is both sides need to get it, and getting close to it makes both sides do unpredictable despicables. 

G. The Alien Galaxy. 
Why can't this galaxy introduce us to a few more choice ecospheres? OK we've seen desert planets, ice planets, a cave planet, asteroid fields, a water planet, a lava planet. We need some kind of freaking anomoly Gamma Quadrant where time runs sideways and all the animals have three legs - someplace where the Force doesn't work or is actually controlled by creatures on the other side of a wormhole. 

Some fraction of this will never happen, but that's the fun part of watching nerd fun movies like James Bond; anybody can write 'em. 

Plus Ca Change

Tonight's lessons at the FBI Academy were pretty interesting. One of them is that one must keep a sense of humor when dealing with maniacs, because the world is full of them. The second is that the world is no more full of them than it ever was.

One of my friends quoted the Atlantic Magazine today whose article asked the question of whether or not the West is slip sliding away. Well, let's presume that's the bet. Where will the rich and powerful end up if the West tanks? Where do the rich and powerful go now? East? South? Somehow I get the feeling that if we lost America, Dubai would not suffice. A subtitle of my barbell theory is that Stoics party with Epicureans, at least this one does, sometimes like its 1999. 

I think I get it. People are always all the same. Throughout history are those who hustle because they can, and those who hustle because they must. But their desires are in a small arc, power, fear, glory. I'm going to read Thomas Aquinas and tell you what I get out of it. I'm going to reconcile it with Henry Kissinger's idealism. I sense a new rebirth in me a couple years down the road. This is the first inkling. That there is nothing left but to do good and expect triumph. And perhaps I will stop being lazy and expecting to be grandfathered into something. Or maybe not, who knows? The point is that history should teach us that there are a simple finite number of human experiences. Context may matter to get some precision in understanding, but the motivations are all the same. The ethics are all the same. The big questions are all the same. 

The only thing that's different is how many people think they know, and how many people are actually on the planet. I'm sure there are some interesting consequences in all that, but all the intrigues are similar. 

The other thing I think I remember, specifically, was that for all of the mass shootings between 2000 and 2013 there were about 460 dead. Now I might be wrong, that might be the one for just this year. Hold on, I can find out real quick. OK the correct number is 486 killed over 13 years in 160 incidents. Let us keep in mind that annually there are 15000 murders in the US. And so now people who think they are political activists are now motivated to think they can change the law for 300 million people. It's not going to happen unless it's in the interests of some powerful class of people running the show. Not going to happen. So I stop worrying. 

A History of Diversity

Q: Why does the term diversity in American culture almost always refer to people who look different and almost never refer to people who think different?

A: Because 'diversity' is newspeak for Affirmative Action. 

The history is simple. In the 1960s there were several social movements. Two key ones were Civil Rights and Black Power. The Black Power Movement was comprised of separatists who basically wanted more than the Civil Rights delivered. They were strident in their demands. An equal vote was not sufficient for Black Power. Dispensing with matters of causality in ways now familiar to us all, a failure in parity meant a racist agenda. Charges that wouldn't stand up in court were thus laid in the court of public opinion. In the beginning there was greatness and talent. Over time, every dude with a grievance was given a mic. Nevertheless the stark racial lines of the 60s were sufficiently incriminating so that more than mere tokenism was required. Thus the terms and conditions for Affirmative Action were broadly accepted and implemented via an executive order from the hands of Richard Nixon, whose previous policy was called 'benign neglect'. 

The broad outline which characterized the 1970s was that separatism was over and integration was the new regime. Black Power melted away in substance if not in rhetoric and American institutions did their damnedest, some harder than others, to get blacks employees in and up the ranks. Crossover culture was born, blacks got into Ivy Leagues in record numbers, Richard Pryor became a superstar talking about black & white, and by 1980 we had Lando Calrissian and Lionel Ritchie. Integration and Affirmative Action were the 70s peaceful response to the riotous 60s rebellion. Of course there were overproductions and errors. But when *I* grew up, the accepted standard was that assigned in the landmark case Bakke vs UC Regents, that said race can be taken into consideration as a factor in admissions. Most specifically Bakke was interpreted as race is something, but it is not everything, and you cannot use racial quotas (which essentially makes race everything). 

The political consensus emerged that so long as you don't use quotas, everybody might not be perfectly pleased with racial integration but society is so much better off that the benefits outweigh the costs. As well, people understood generally in the Bakke era, that Affirmative Action wouldn't last forever. Mathematically and socially society would run out of the cream of the crop to be integrated and like with Civil Rights and Black Power, things would go from excellent to mediocre to incompetent to worse. So long as race was not the single consideration, everything was cool.

 

Always and everywhere edge conditions of Affirmative Actions were being challenged and tested. Some for principled and others for selfish reasons. Some noted that graduate admission and professional certifications should be colorblind. Others noted that white women were getting more traction than black men when it came to promotions in Corporate America. By the late 80s, the peace and calm of the 70s was beat down, and people wanted to renegotiate. Within black America the idea of the cultural monolithic 'The Black Community' was being destroyed. In 1988 Black America included The Cosby Show and Public Enemy. As they say in Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other. The entire African American people could not be dealt with in one political negotiation.

And then there came Rodney King and OJ Simpson. Then one fateful day 'The Bell Curve' was published in a rather hasty and unsavory fashion. Essentially in the 90s, the instabilities of the 80s exploded and nobody could stomach 'Affirmative Action'. Further incremental mincing around the issue of racial integration found their way into the national dialog with more Supreme Court decisions like Hopwood. Corporations had already made their financial calculations to split the difference in hiring using the term 'diversity' rather in the same way that 'personnel' became 'human resources'. 

Somewhere around the early 2000s with Grutter and Gratz being the notable SC decisions, I personally, given my own history, gave up on the premise that entrenched sides could negotiate with the sort of necessary discipline that characterized the clear-eyed hardball reality based decisions made in the Nixon Era when people had fresh experiences of cities burning. Rodney King LA Riots notwithstanding, all of black America and white America were not dealing with such weighty matters as the wholesale denial of public accommodations that characterized the conditions that generated the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the middle of the 20th Century the majority of  American Negroes were poor. Whatever could be said about the polarizations of Rodney King and OJ, their situations did not accurately reflect what the non-monolithic 'Black Community' was experiencing. Aside from that it everything isn't just black and white. In the 21st Century, the majority of African Americans are middle class.

'Diversity'  is the only thing nebulous enough to encompass the ambitions of 'people of color and women'. 

These days people saying 'thats racist' or 'thats sexist' is a kind of pathetic echo of what was real 50 years ago. I am writing this answer from a community where my father could not live. In fact here's the little short story which was that my parents marched against racially restrictive covenants and my pregnant mother had to dodge a brick thrown at her from the hostile crowd. I live in that neighborhood now. My wife was head of the PTA. My daughter was student body president at the elementary school. My other daughter was head cheerleader at the high school. My son was captain of the marching band at the high school, and they all did 3.5s or better. And yet still people will tell me how racist it is over here because the neighborhood is about 1.5% black. 

Still, the idea about is that  'diversity' really means 'thinking different' is bullshit. 'Diversity' means that you can show enough faces to prove your Affirmative Action program is working. 

Now aside from the craptastic evasion and inflation of victimhood that the presence of 'diversity' demonstrates, the real grotesque irony is that 'diversity of opinion' is a self-defeating feature. Imagine you were on the global summit board of scientists presenting a paper on global warming, and yet suddenly you find that your demographics were not diverse enough. (Presuming there is some standard for diversity). What if you added the right mix and found that now your conclusions were not actually convergent? What if there were black science and female science and they were divergent from white male science? In other words, what is the responsibility of someone from a divergent ethnic, religious or gender background (identity) to have divergent opinions?

In short, what champions of 'social justice' really want to achieve in 'diversity' is for their special classes of people to get exactly what they presume that white males get according to some negotiated standard of identity representation. That is nothing more or less than Affirmative Action without saying 'Affirmative Action'. To say Affirmative Action instead of diversity forces champions of diversity to deal with the factual history of Affirmative Action which includes the participation of old farts like me who are old enough to remember what harsh reality racism was, even at the time of integration. Because when you include people like me, then you include my understanding of my own struggles, my parents struggles and my grandparents' struggles. And those realities reveal the utter triviality of what passes for 'racism' and 'sexism' these days. But moreover it requires a recognition of the fact that real Black Power separatists put down their radicalisms to integrate and crossover in real unity of purpose, rather than emphasize the self-serving, self-righteous, self-segregating identity politics of today. 

To the extent that 'diversity' is not the deception that I describe. It's merely nice. It's pleasant. It's a new kind of first world privilege amongst the American bourgeoisie. You'll never hear any member country of the UN General Assembly stop what they're doing to hear out complaints by Americans about a lack of diversity or Affirmative Action. We're just playing with ourselves. 

The Problem of Escalation: Social Justice Activism vs Organic Communities

In the news is that the 'brownshirt' Oath Keepers have come to the physical defense of gay marriage scofflaw Kim Davis. I thin this was inevitable, and there's more to come. My friend Miniver is wary of men with guns defending Davis saying:

I am wary of people who want to pick up guns to subvert the workings of liberal democratic institutions

To which I replied:
I am wary of people who feel entitled to legislate morality, which I see as overburdening and over extending the legitimate aegis of democratic institutions. This case perhaps exemplifies the consequences of zero-tolerance. Suddenly people want the entire apparatus of police state powers to crush the lawbreaker. It's religious fervor. So there are consequences.

And furthermore...
From the beginning of my following of the gay marriage issue, I have said that this has been overplayed with regard to both sides using government to state their absolutist positions. I have always said that the appropriate course was through the court system, in which advocates for gay marriage were winning every case. I have also always throught that this was a public and social accomodation that required social evolution that could not be enforced by law. When it escalated to state constitutional amendments and at large referenda I saw it get out of hand. I never expected a fundamental change in the definition of marriage to have no coercive impact on canon law. And I don't expect the Kim Davis thing to be the last conflict. I expect it will get worse before it gets better. I am pleased that the escalation in this dimension makes clear the weight and complications of such 'social justice' matters, but I say so with the proviso that the record of these 'brownshirts' in Ferguson is good. 

My current bias is that I am convinced that we in America have over politicized every aspect of our public life and that we seek government solutions to matters that should be solved socially. We are losing our ability to be social (as anyone can see that most social media is not so very civilized - aka 'dont read the comments') and yet we are escalating our ability to put people into positions of great political power (or ruin people in such positions) strictly based upon these social criteria. 

I hope I understand, and I do respect your position with regard to your affinity for and association with many things 'alternative'. There is nothing so moribund and soul killing as a society of conformists and the energy provided by the destruction of social convention is the spark humanity needs on a constant basis. We all need to be able to clearly peer into the arcane corners of human life without fear or favor. I find you consistently clear-eyed as I try to be as well. 

I cannot reconcile social justice political activism with the idea of organic community. As you say, social justice attempt to address the systemic. So it refuses to be local, rather it seeks to be viral. But such action is at odds with diversity itself and cannot be sustained in all real communities at once. California is not Kentucky. What happens in Kentucky is organic to Kentucky, and moreso in Rowan County, currently in flames. What I see here is an attempt to use Leviathan force to make over the law in this county of 23,000 people.  

Rowan County will never ever be the Castro. It can't be and it shouldn't be. To force it to be subverts the workings of liberal democratic institutions. So as long as people are using network tools to assemble political will against small hierarchical municipalities, it will be bullying. So it won't surprise me that such situations will result in violence. (insert Machiavellian quote here).

So that's what I said on Facebook. 

Social justice political activism is the hipster gentrification of small town politics.

It is entirely fair to say that the Oath Keepers have no more business in Rowan County than they did in Ferguson. Their headman, Stewart Rhodes, is brandishing big sticks but not speaking as softly as he should. There is an area of weirdness in the 'earned valor' arena that is often difficult to differentiate from legitimate concern. My purpose here, however is not to endorse or support the Oath Keepers but to remind people that the bottom line is always force. The actual less force OK uses, the better. They could be the Guardian Angels of these days and they will face the same problem as all such groups, which is a failure to administratively discipline their membership in any way that gives substance to their principles, no matter how right minded. The sworn officers will always win, and those who jump the gun with guns always lose, as it should be. 

Hipsters and gentrifiers pretend they have no power. It's a lie. 

Stoic Thought of the Day

It's actually very useful for the Stoic to think of how power is abused. Thinking about the promise of American liberty and the usefulness of a Constitution such as ours would be severely tested in the populist era of an Obama presidency followed by a Trump presidency. So I've come to the following conclusion:

Our hegemonic subjugations must be exceedingly sophisticated such that the most intelligent and capable among us interpret their most excellent achievements as liberating. Thus we sustain the moral propriety of liberty as meritocratic. So we will be fortunate if the most powerful men are not self-loathing or that when they are, that they will destroy with purpose. For to know that the most powerful men are not free would doom us all to chaos and the ambition of ruination.

So the other side of the coin is accepting the possibility that liberty is simply not sustainable in a meritocracy. That's what I'm imagining. 

How Many Killers?

People have been asking about the proper means test for national gun registration. I've been thinking about panoptics a bit lately. It's part of the subject of my novel. So this is what strikes me today. First a couple headlines:

Phoenix

A woman’s decapitated body and two mutilated dogs were found by police Saturday morning at an apartment building in Phoenix, Arizona — along with the suspect who police say severed his own arm and took out one of his eyeballs.

Atlanta

The 30-year-old man found dead outside a Rockdale County apartment likely died playing Russian roulette, police said Friday. Robert Thomas pulled out a revolver, removed the rounds, reloaded one round, spun the chamber and told the three men he was with they were going to play the game, according to Capt. Jackie Dunn with Conyers police.

Seattle

Two men in their 20s were killed in a drive-by shooting early Saturday on Interstate 5 in Mount Vernon, according to the Washington State Patrol. Troopers were called to the area near the College Way, Exit 227, where they found the driver and front-seat passenger dead inside a black Mercedes just after 3 a.m.

That took all of five minutes to discover, but I already know that there are somewhere between 15-17,000 murders every year here in the US, as well as 30,000 odd suicides. So my question is, if you could have a standard set of quizzes and evaluations put on every American, how many of them would show up to be these kinds of sociopaths? Ultimately, that's the question. What do you do with the knowledge that your society has sociopaths and psychopaths? 

Now I stand against those with a zero tolerance attitude towards crime not because I have some special tolerance for crime or criminals, but because of the cost to ordinary Americans. The problem with American society, as I see it, is that we have abandoned a set of personal judgments between each other and looked away. Call it liberalization if you must. But our live and let live era has gone from the margins to the center and what was called crazy and worth of suppression 40 years ago has become manifest in the mainstream. Our natural inclination to persecute (yes), has now shifted to other weird things that don't deserve scrutiny because of our unwillingness to persecute what we instinctually and traditionally know to be hinky and wrong. The result is a mob social media following a set of narratives that don't make for common sense, but are accepted as the conventional wisdom. That and mindless aggregation as well as our democratic impulse trigger us to believe that there are new solutions to chronic problems and we need some kind of new shock to our system to right the wrongs. Does that make sense to you? Are you following me here?

Sin and crime are as old as humanity. We know them when we see them. But why should we institutionalize panoptics when everyone knows what crazy looks like? Because we are living in a society of cowardice, a nation of stooges, who prefer the institutionalization of common sense to direct action by individuals. 

Oddly enough, I've been listening to and falling back in love with the music of Billy Joel. The lyrics of his song Pressure, are the poetry missing in my post:

You used to call me paranoid
Pressure
But even you cannot avoid
Pressure
You turned the tap dance into your crusade
Now here you are with your faith
And your Peter Pan advice
You have no scars on your face
And you cannot handle
Pressure

All grown up and no place to go
Psych 1, Psych 2
What do you know?
All your life is channel 13
Sesame Street
What does it mean?

Those with no scars on their faces organize frightened mobs to vote for the police state institutionalization of society from living in fear of any tool that could become a weapon. Because Confederate Battle Flags. Everyone with a scar will be searched because they disobeyed the 11th Commandment: Don't try this at home. 

Keep America Safe from Stranger Danger! Register your psychological profile today! Vote for me and I'll set you free!

How to Beat the Trolls

Right now I'm sitting in my comfortable leather chair listening to the new Bad Plus + Joshua Redmond album on my Jambox. The music is good, really good. I know it's good because I have good taste in music, and I'm bored of music that doesn't have such melodic density and rhythmic sophistication. I don't need Reddit to tell me that it would be good, but I might have found out if I went there. I know enough Jazz to be a decent critic, and if there were 50000 ranked jazz critics in America I'd be in that number. If you wanted to get the consensus of the top 100 jazz critics on this particular album, you'll never find it on Reddit.

How do you rank a jazz critic? 

Well one thing you don't do is rank them by novelty or popularity. You have to read them and listen to the music they listen to and engage in a decent discussion with them. It's something that can be done on the internet, but it is not the kind of process that is supported by the lame, one-dimensional chat systems that are the majority of webchat systems that exist. 

If you've ever graded term papers, you have an idea of how that process works. Let's call it peer review. I don't consider myself an expert or formally familiar with academic peer review processes, but I do know something about decision making systems. I've been involved with building such systems for nearly 30 years now. I do know that you won't get the 100 top jazz critics on Reddit doing peer review because those rare jazz critics, experts as they would be, would not have the stomach for dealing with trolls. In short, trolls are not the peers of experts, and most every webchat forum on the internet assumes that we all are peers or that we want to be peers. 

This wasn't always the case. Once upon a time on the internet there was a phenomenon called blogging. You may have heard of it. The best blogs were group blogs and the best individual blogs had blogrolls or belonged to blog leagues. We called it the blogosphere and we had a great system called 'trackback' that allowed us, for moments of insight to attach our ideas and remarks to other blogs which might be outside of our designated blogrolls or blog leagues. The most important thing about how these blogs worked was that we allowed authors to choose their own peers. The second important thing about the blogosphere was that authors retained the right to ban commenters. These are controls that were vital to maintaining the willingness of people who knew what they were talking about to engage with the anonymous public.

If you were a commenter at Little Green Footballs, you would never bother to try to comment at Fire Dog Lake, and vice versa. There were Red and Blue blogospheres and each kept the other in mind, yet stayed out of each other's hair. As apart as they remained, they easily found a way to stick to the same range of topics. 

Now we know that blogs have failed to retain popularity in the wake of the signing of major bloggers to larger, more mainstream publications as well as the creation of megasites like Huffington Post. Surely Facebook has taken a lot of comment traffic away from traditional blog/salons like Cafe Utne. Surely Reddit has eaten away at Salon's readership. Slate gave up on comments altogether, so it seems. All of these places have their own character and temperament. Authors, editors and commenters all have their levels of patience with each other. So it comes as no surprise that megasites that have aggregated all of the previously more well-situated commenters and their eyeballs into their virtual streets are going to have more muggings in their virtual alleys. So long as the people who run these sites refuse to use their panoptic powers to block miscreants, they will suffer.

If you ask me, it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that a site with 50,000 members is stifling free speech by getting rid of 1000 trolls. It's not as if the internet is suddenly going to miss an argument about any subject when there are literally hundreds of online publications and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Yet today we hear that 'the trolls are winning'.

Now I know that some fraction of America wants to know, since I'm standing up on my hind legs and saying so, that I would probably still be on USENET's Soc.Culture.African.American if the blogosphere hadn't emerged and given me the control I need as an author to kill trolls dead. I say so as black American blogger who has won the award for best black blog, and as a host at Cafe Utne, a well known commenter at Slate and Salon, and as a member of the legendary online community the WELL. I've dealt with trolls from day one.

Here's how to get rid of them in one word: Discriminate.

One. Personna Non Grata.
If you give people the opportunity to boot people they don't like, then those people will be booted. Simple. A community is not a community if membership means nothing. Good fences make good neighbors, and since we're human beings, sometimes we have to call the cops. The best cops are the people themselves. Let commenters vote other commenters off the site. Make it a topic. Let people vote.  

Two. Charge money. 
I have yet to see any website that asks for everybody's two cents in the comment sections do so much as charge two cents. I can use a credit card or Apple Pay or PayPal  to buy an order of french fries at McDonalds, and McDonald's believe it or not gets billions of french fries sold. If I can troll people for free and lose no money for doing so, why not?

Three. Scribbling
Losing money is easy. Some people will actually find it worth it to pay a membership fee if they get to troll at will, get kicked off and troll again. So erase the content of the troll. Poof. Online graffiti should be erased.  

Four. Houses.
If your webchat is big enough to have a wide enough diversity of opinion such that people will get on each other's nerves. Let people self-select themselves into houses of like-minds and temperaments. If people want, therefore, to be in the Nazi house, then let them have that house which is read-write for members and read-only for non-members. Nozi comments stay in the Nazi house which can be ignored by anybody who chooses. The Nazi house can have it's own standards and can PNG anyone who isn't pure Arayan. 

You cannot wish for a better public. They're going to be who they are. Let people say what they will say and make a real community, not some unpoliced anarchic 'public square'. It's awfully presumptuous to think that discrimination against trolls results in the suppression of the free flow of ideas in an open society. All you have to ask yourself is one thing, is a troll your peer?

Judging Cosby

I was born and raised in the modern world. In the 20th Century, before the panopticon of the NSA and global social media, we used to not know a great deal about people we didn't actually talk to. We simply assumed that they might very well be 'decent God fearing people', meaning that they dealt with temptation to immorality and sin with some seriousness.

We judged people back then. Each of us. We didn't say 'who am I to judge' and then wait for some university study, or big data algorithm, or special session of Congress or Office for the Prevention of Discrimination and Harassment to do the judging for us. Back then, our own individual opinion mattered, so we worked on them and didn't just toss around accusations willy-nilly. That's because the accusations were our own, gotten by our own eyes and our own deductive skills. They were about people we knew, people who mattered to us, people whose actions directly affected our lives. 

Today, we listen intently, (I use the term 'we' quite loosely, because most of the time, I don't give a rat's) to what various media outlets have to say about people we've watched perform over various media outlets. And sometimes we take all of that a bit too seriously, but that's how the post-modern world works. 

I've had exactly two heroes in my life, my father and Batman. By the time I was 11 years old I understood good and well that neither of them were coming to my rescue. I didn't have a particularly rough childhood, but I did have one in which I came to grips early on with my own responsibility for my fate in all matters, even the disposition of my eternal soul. It was *me* that had to decide on whether or not to make Jesus my personal savior. It was *me* who decided whether or not I was going to punch Diana White in the face. It was *me* who had to decide how much of my allowance I was going to save or spend. I built my character from lessons presented to me in real life. 

After all that I decided to be some kind of scientist. I realized that you don't judge scientists by their ability to play football, just the same way you don't judge stock car racers by their ability to articulate emotions. The modern world I lived in worked because you let teachers teach children. You let gardeners tend gardens. You judged them by the quality of their work by what they decided to do for their living. 

Bill Cosby is not Batman. He never was. He never even came close to Bruce Lee. 

So how do we judge Cosby? I'm talking about Bill Cosby because my friend JCP found something of a hero in Cos, a man he knew personally. Listening to my friend's judgment affects me. While I found Cosby's book Fatherhood to be as amusing as the rest of the nation back in the 80s, I never had to look up to him as a father, nor as a professional. It's important that I consider the judgment of somebody who did. For me, Cosby was just another person out there who, like millions of other black Americans, defied the ghetto stereotype and exemplified a class of Americans relatively unknown at the time. He stepped into the shoes once placed at the feet of Sidney Poitier, although we knew then as we know now that Sidney was a classier dude. I've had various dogs in the fights over black class, specifically that about class identity over racial identity. In that regard, I've found reasons to agree with things I've heard that Cosby has said. But it's not like he's the only one with those ideas, he's just the only one major media pay attention to.   

Cosby's fall from grace is a middle class morality tale whose application is limited. It is impossible for me to believe that Cosby was not a rock star. From my perspective, the moral bandwidth of the ethics of Hollywood & entertainment stardom is rather narrow. To be specific, nobody wants to talk about how many other media stars are maintained in fictional relationships in order to sustain a window of social credibility. In other words, how many gay leading men kiss leading women in movies for box office reasons. In other words, how many drugs are financed by record labels for rock bands. In other words, how many pathological behaviors are overlooked and suppressed by sports teams. 

If more people were living in the modern world, rather than the post-modern world, such characters as Cosby would not become general purpose heroes. They would be actors. They would be musicians. They would be comics. And if some part of their lives were obtusely faulty, we could perhaps overlook their failures. That is, if they weren't crimes. But many of us are living in a post-modern world in which the symbolic greatness of individuals become industries in and of themselves. One's job is not just a job at a company, the company becomes 'family', the job becomes a 'mission', dedication becomes 'a passion'. In the post-modern world, you can buy shoes and it means you are 'relieving hunger in Africa'. You can buy a car and you are 'saving the planet'. For Cosby it meant you could write a book on fatherhood and become 'America's Dad'. 

This is where Cypher offers Neo a drink and says:

Jesus what a mind-job.
So you're here to save the world.

I think we live in an atmosphere where the post-modern eclipses the modern, and it will be to devastating effect. When crime becomes something other than what the law says, but what media can convince us that it is. In my modern world, if Cosby is accused of a crime, then he is tried in court. And if for any reason evidence is insufficient to support the charge, then the suspect walks. Suspects walk every day. We don't want the law to be as panoptic as society. We don't want children ratting out their parents' thoughtcrimes. We don't want to criminalize offense, especially these days in which post-modern thinkers find so much of life to be offensive, even their faulty interpretations of history effects the way they see people they are only dimly aware of because the internet says so. 

Cosby was not sent here to save the world, but to entertain. I judge him as an entertainer, and I hope that which doesn't stand legal muster will not have him judged an outlaw. What must be said in all of this is that those accusers who failed to judge him at the time suffer doubly for their faith in the post-modern world that made Cosby more than just an actor. He got away with being a rock star because people believed in heroes, and in the post-modern world, rock stars *are* heroes. Until they aren't. Not ironically for the same shallow reasons.

Benzon on Authentic Eulogies

(artlessly stolen whole cloth)

Dear Glenn and John, if I may,

I’ve been thinking about your most interesting conversation about Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and it led me to thinking about Duke Ellington who, in a sense, figured out how to perform blackness during a four-year gig at the Cotton Club. That, of course, is a very different kind of performance undertaken in very different circumstances and for a very different reason. But it was every bit a steeped in artifice as Obama’s eulogy/sermon and every bit as ‘authentic’ – an all but useless word.

 In thinking about this I watched Obama’s eulogy for Beau Biden, which of course, was quite different, though delivered within weeks of the Pinckney eulogy. The mood and content were different, as was the style. That funeral was essentially a private event that was in the public eye because of the people involved. That sermon did not draw on the traditions of black vernacular sermonizing that were so very prominent in the Pinckney eulogy.

 I also looked at bits and pieces of his 2004 keynote at the Democratic Convention. That was a very pubic kind of speech, in the way the Biden eulogy was not. It was also a real stem-winder. But was not in the black sermonizing tradition.

 Those were both superb performances. Performance at that level is necessarily artifice. You aren’t born to it. You learn it through deliberate practice. I have no idea whether or not Obama practiced either of those speeches. He might have. But if not, well, there was surely a time in the past when he did practice public speaking – perhaps he talks about in his autobiography, which I’ve not read.

 So, if it’s artifice and practice we’re talking about, how’s the Pinckney eulogy special? Well, as you discussed, he wasn’t born to that oratorical tradition. Not in the way that, say, MLK was. I’m sure he practiced as well, probably had some coaching in seminary. But he was practicing an art that he experienced in church from whenever in his life he started going to church.

 As you say, Obama didn’t have that background. He had to acquire that oratorical tradition as an adult. He certainly would have heard many sermons in Chicago and, I assume, elsewhere. So he had live examples to work from. But, as you’ve discussed, he also had to practice.

I have little sense of the range of his speechifying. If this was the first time he spoke that way in public, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Nor would I be particularly surprised to learn that he’d spoken this way on some other occasion. Either way, though, he would have had to practice the style in order to get the delivery down.

 Three things struck me about the eulogy. In the first place, it really was a sermon, complete with an opening bit of scripture from which to evolve the subsequent commentary. Second, as such, he had to talk of God. And third, he concluded by singing “Amazing Grace.”

 There was real risk in that last. It could have fallen flat. Not so much because Obama is only a good, but by no means a superb, singer. But rather, if people hadn’t joined in he’d have been hanging there – like the cartoon character who’s walked off a cliff and hasn’t yet looked down. But of course people did join it, because that’s how things work in church and Obama knew it. And the response he got during his preaching, including the organ punctuations here and there, told him he’d get a response at the end.

 As for the talk of God. Obviously you can’t preach a sermon without it. And that’s what was so extraordinary. I have no idea about Obama’s religious belief, but his political life has imposed at least the appearance of belief on him. But how many other recent (God-fearing) Presidents have referenced God so often in a speech as Obama did in that one? Any of them? I don’t think so. Well, maybe Jimmy Carter, but does anyone remember him?

 The country is founded on the separation of church and state, and that makes Presidential religion a tricky business. It’s one thing to receive Bill Graham in the Whitehouse. It’s quite something else entirely to preach a sermon.

 But there was a time not so long ago when rulers were regarded as divinely mandated. And it seems to me that Obama was stepping into that aura, if you will, for this occasion. That’s a very bold move to take. And, as you remarked on, Glenn, he did by assuming the mantle of a black preacher. But in a way it seems to me that that was something he could do as President that he could not do as a private individual. The Presidency has a ceremonial dimension to it that gives the occupant a certain license, and license that not much used (but think of the WH Correspondent’s dinner), but that is real. That’s what he was calling on. And that’s what gives his explicit adoption of black vernacular style real symbolic force.

 I bet any Martian anthropologists who were watching this had lots to report home about.

 And then there’s Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club. He was born to black middle-class parents in Washington DC. He started his band while still in DC but it wasn’t until he got the Cotton Club gig that he came into his style. The thing about the Cotton Club, though, is that the audience was exclusively white. This was a common arrangement in those days, black performers, white audience.

 So Ellington’s ‘authentic’ black style, his so-called ‘jungle style’, was created to please the tastes of wealthy white folks who had a taste for the sepia style. How could the music born of such a situation, one that had Ellington providing music for ridiculous jungle-bunny stage shows that appealed to the prurient tastes of the audience, possibly be ‘authentic’? Yet it was.

 Ellington was playing HIS music the way HE wanted to play it and rich white folks were paying for it.

 As for Ellington himself, he was smooth as glass. I only every heard his band once, and what I remember was a magnificent tenor solo by Paul Gonsalves. But I’ve seen plenty of clips of his band from way back and, of course, have listened to a lot of the music.

 More to my present purpose, I’ve read his autobiography. he wrote it and, stylistically, it’s slick slick slick. Not a peep at the private man anywhere. Very different from the self-penned autobiographies Louis Armstrong produced. There’s nothing particularly black about that prose. It’s more like advertising copy and autobiography.

 But the thing is, Ellington at the Cotton Club paved the way for Obama in the White House. I mean that in the sense that I do not regard African-American music as an epiphenomenal gloss on the social and political life of this country. It has had a causal force in events. What does it mean that at every juncture that music has moved upstanding white people to protest and oppose its existence? There have been record burnings in the past.

 And so for and so on. I could go on and on about this as it is of central interest to me. But I’ll stop here.

 Thanks for your attention. I’ve transcribed a bit of your discussion and I’ve appended that below my signature.

 Best,

 Bill Benzon

 

* * *

(from mcwhorter & loury) 

JM: You have to wonder how authentic the President’s rootedness in this kind of thing is.

 GL: Oooo! Oooo! You raised a deep question.

 JM: I mean this is a tough one. We’ll never know. We don’t know him. He wasn’t raised in this, at all. In terms of his history we know that even by the time he was in his early twenties, he was not that. He was kind of an interesting mutt. Even the black speech patterns, (as) I think about it, he didn’t grow up with those, he learned them later. And after the age when most people are good at learning new ways to talk. And the black church, he had to be told, he had to be told when he was being a black politician in Chicago that if you’re really gonna’ make you way in the black community, you have to belong to a church. He didn’t belong to one already; he didn’t join one as soon as he hit the city. He had to be told. And now here he is, and he seems to be a man in full as far as this goes.

 GL: Oh, John...

 JM: But it’s interesting, he’s a, he’s a very, I don’t wanna’ call him fake, but he’s a very . good . performer. I don’t know if I’ve ever known any body

 GL: Ah, John...

JM: who came into this sort of thing so late, and does it so convincingly.

 GL: That’s so, that’s so interesting, what you’re saying. I do know, I know what you’re saying. [Explains that McWhorter is a man who worries about his presentation and how some people will receive him as too ‘white’ and who thus] understands the problem that a Barack Obama, having been raised in Hawaii and Indonesia by white people, by white people, would face when he has to make a transition at a certain point in his life, he’s written about this in Dreams from My Father, but it’s artifice. We have to assume it’s all artifice. I don’t mean

JM: In the technical sense of the term

 GL: Exactly. I don’t mean insincerity. I’m not going to the heart of the man. I’m saying, exactly. A mask, a face has to be made. A way of being has to be fashioned. It’s gotta be practiced. You could see him standing in front of the mirror. John, we should write the novel John. […]

 48:34 It just resonates in my mind so deeply. Because what does it mean for a people, I speak now of black Americans 30-40 million, to have the embodiment of their generational hopes, personified by a person who must adopt artifice, and manufacture, in order to present himself as being of them. What does it say of such a people.

 No no no. I think this is historic profound. Excuse me if I, you know, I mean I’m just saying, here we are. Because think about it, think about it, OK, the stigma of race, slavery, OK, Orlando Patterson just brilliantly analyzes this, I think. Slavery has to be, you’re putting the slave down. The slave must be a dishonored person. OK so honor, honor becomes central to the whole quest for equality.

 And having the Chief Executive of State, be of you, or at the very least, be a person who when in a position of choice, chose to be of you, is countering the dishonor in a very deep way. But perhaps the only way that the state’s symbolic power could be married to your quest for honor is through the President of someone who wasn’t quite fully of you. Your stigma still resonates even in the workings of history, that are intended to elevate you.

  

Bill Benzon

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/

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The Logarithmic Shadow Revisited

"Never trust a man whose shoes cost more than you make in one day." -- Cobb's Rule #7

I have been puzzling for some time over the matter I call the 'Logarithmic Shadow'. It is the observed phenomenon that people an order of magnitude more capable than you, generally don't condescend to compete in your arena and steal all your goods and glory. In peacetime.

It should seem rather obvious to many of my readers why this is somewhat puzzling even though we understand the converse prejudice. It's obvious why we pikers don't want to play in the big leagues. We don't want to get our asses handed to us. On the other hand, there are many things that the slightly above average Joe can do that will rank among the best. That is when it comes to consumption.

So this morning I discover that the boots I've been wearing for the past two years have spontaneously and literally become unglued. I thought Johnston & Murphy boots were some of the best that could be bought. It turns out they don't even sew the sole to the bottom of the last. Glue! I'm rather disappointed and pissed. So I've started looking about for a new boot vendor. 

I started with Keen and then as I read the reviews, ended up at Carhartt. My latest Keens are not as nice and comfy as my old ones, and I still have an appetite for tactical cools. But really I want to replace the nice J&Ms. So the commenters at GQ Magazine remind me of Church's wingtips. I crawl through a few other clickbait top 10 boots and discover somebody called John Lobb. So I check out this English shoe manufa.. wait what? 1800 bucks for what? Oh no. 

Does anybody on the planet know the difference between $500 shoes and $2000 shoes? Evidently so, but I ain't going there. Neither are you. Common sense, right? Yes, exactly that. Common sense does not demand extraordinary quality. Most of the time it cannot discriminate at that level. OK that's our side of the Shadow.

This resonates with some survey I read here or there regarding the outlook of countries like Vietnam. Even though they run under a nominal communist government, the economy is capitalist, and 95% of Vietnamese think things will be better for their children than for them. If you want to hear some awesome anti-communist rants, listen to Hanoi. 

But were the shoes in America better in the good old days of wingtips? Or did we just spend more money on good shoes? If we think our kids are not going to be better off than we are, by what standards are we judging? Maybe they don't want the $500 shoes we take for granted, or cars with > 200 horsepower. Maybe kids who can't throw a football 60 yards still enjoy the game. Maybe common sense and a decent life is all anybody needs and our habits of trying to be a better than average Joe with our fascination with 'Top 10' whatever clickholes is just a little bit aberrant. 

I'm thinking about my next vacation. Perhaps I should go to Delhi. But what kind of shoes should I wear?

Drunks of New Orleans

I hate crowds. 

I suffer them in silence, for the most part. When I must go, I troll through them with a heightened sense of awareness, always looking for wolves & sheepdogs. Whenever I go into a bar, I try to find the bad guy and the good guy that would get my back if a fight broke out. In crowds, it's like that too. These are my basic instincts gradually being educated. 

Recently, I attended my third JazzFest in New Orleans. And on that Saturday during the Elton John concert, I was in the biggest crowd I can ever remember. It was packed. Took me 20 minutes to move 100 yards in the 80 degree sun. 

When you are in a crowd at a concert of an artist that you never heard of or are not particularly fond of, it gives you an opportunity to witness first hand what it is like to be in a foreign culture. The strangers there will dress in clothes that you don't find particularly appealing. They will chant lyrics to songs you simply don't know. They will dance and gesture in unison to strange rhythms. The odd thing about this particular experience for me was that I actually do know a lot of Elton John songs, more than I remembered before hearing them, but they simply didn't resonate in me with the same level of enthusiasm. No big deal, it's all just a party. The same thing can be said for New Orleans itself. It's a city, a crowd, and I am surrounded not only by people who respond to different rhythms, but different ideas about place and most importantly different laws.   

Like Las Vegas, Daytona Beach and Orlando, New Orleans is one of those uniquely American towns that is largely defined by the kinds of celebrations it hosts for people who come to visit. We all understand that there are things you do in these places is out of joint with your normal life. In New Orleans, like no other place I know, you can order an alcoholic drink in a bar on one block, take it outside and finish it in the street or in another bar across town. While the rest of us have a set of dangerous thoughts associated with 'open container', in New Orleans that's what all containers are supposed to be. All the time. Laissez les bon temps rouler. So you're likely to see a bunch of drunks stumbling and sometimes even crawling through the streets. 

My brother Doc, LAPD officer who works LA's Skid Row, gave me two indicators on homeless folks with regard to their state of relative desperation. The first thing to identify are the shoes. If they are barefoot or wearing shoes in complete disrepair, chances are that they are very poorly off. Good shoes make a big difference. Next, check the face. A man that doesn't wash his face has given up hope. These were things I noticed in New Orleans streets, but also that almost none of them carried signs advertising their fate and soliciting aid. If you're a bum in New Orleans, people pretty much expect that you're just a bum. No cares given. 

It has been about as impossible for me as for anyone to keep the national fracas over policing out of my ears recently. What strikes me about policing is the extent to which cops are the Krell to the public will, whether or not the public states it's will publicly. Police in any city express the id and superego of those who get elected. There's really no way around it. People get the police department they demand. If they want people who drink in public, piss in public, panhandle in public, sex in public, smoke in public or whatever to be molested or unmolested, the cops will respond accordingly. If you want crackheads or methheads busted, that will happen. If you want gangs taken down, that will happen. If you want green cross dispensaries left alone, that will happen. One thing I've noticed about cops is that they are machines in service of department policy. They can't give a crap about public opinion on the law. They enforce it at the direction of their sergeants and captains all rolling downhill from the chief. 

Anybody who has walked the streets of Salt Lake City, Detroit, Boston, Brooklyn, Houston, New Orleans, knows that street wisdom in different neighborhoods is different. What works in Park Slope Brooklyn does not work in Brownsville Brooklyn. People's expectations of public behavior is very different. What provokes people to call 911 is very different. Around the corner from me is Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach. Back to back bars as tightly packed and overflowing as any block of Bourbon Street. But I'll never see tits flashed or public barfing on Pier Avenue. We allow a different level of drunkenness here at the California Beach than down off the Old Man River. On the other hand, I'll never hear live roadhouse blues or straight ahead jazz of any quality in Hermosa that compares with that in New Orleans.  The McDonalds on Pacific Coast Highway and Diamond in my neighborhood is packed full of retirees reading newspapers, some craftsmen with their crews off for lunch, moms with strollers and a gaggle of high schoolers. The McDonalds on Canal Street & Roosevelt in New Orleans has more people hanging on the sidewalk than inside. They're selling smoke paraphernalia there. I recall when I lived Uptown. The McDonalds there was all about how much you could get into an argument with the staff. Every night was an almost fight.

If there's a point to all of this observation, then it goes hand in hand with what I hope we Americans understand with greater respect. Communities form themselves unequally, and they diverge. That's what we want, and we need to stop enabling people who would pressure us otherwise. What reasonable people hate is monopoly and monoculture. Sure if you're a frequent flyer like I used to be, you want Starbucks and Marriott Courtyards to be the same wherever you go in the country, but in other things you want inequality, divergence. Not to assert any notions of superiority, but to get in where you feel like fitting in that week or at that point in your life. There's nothing worse than the set of fools who seek to homogenize American life to their comfort zone. Liberty and justice for all does not imply conformity in the social domain. That's why there is no social justice, only justice.

I want to get out of the crowd. I want to listen to my own music in my own neighborhood. I don't want America to be just one big crowd that says 'ho' when the man on stage tells them to. I want multiple stages where I don't have to hear the music from one, and I can walk across the field to another group when I feel like it. I don't want to hear that the rules for Baltimore apply to Detroit or that the cops in Seattle are the same as those in Miami. If McDonalds can be different, why can't we all?

Conspicuous Food Consumption

J-Dub is one of my alter-egos, another existential partner although he may not know it. If I were ten years younger I would have taken computers a great deal more seriously. It would have given me more social cover to be an outer geek rather than just an inner geek. And of course if I were a white dude instead of a black dude, I would have a great deal more invested in the logic of organicism. Although I'm not quite sure on that last score because I *am* organic in a new and interesting way, certainly my relationship with being organic would have gone through a different sort of rationale. Nevertheless, J-Dub is a vegetarian and I am not. Nevertheless, I think we share an organic connection with regards to food and other things which needs some fleshing out.

Let me start with the provocation that gets me here and work through its logic and see where it leads. You see it's often difficult for folks I converse with, especially in larger groups, to finish off what may sound like an offhanded comment spewing out of my piehole, when in fact it's just the beginning of a conversation. These are conversations often never completed, and so I sound like more of an asshole than I actually am. Being non-apologetic doesn't help. On the other hand, if you can't continue the conversation, I'm not likely to take you seriously or view you as deserving of the long answer. Thus this blog and its 13 year history.

The ethical difference between store-bought GMO food and store-bought non-GMO food is negligible.

From an organic POV, if you're not growing your own food, you're a beggar trying to be choosy. From that same perspective, the guy shopping at Whole Foods for natural products is just another consumer infusing his consumption with conspicuous social signaling. This is especially hypocritical for those who aren't using their bodies to social effect. Now that's a mouthful, but let me handle the last part of it because that's particularly where I'm coming from lately.

As some readers may know, I'm in the midst of my martial education. This year I am focusing on my own body and diet. It's working very well and I am rather stunningly pleased with the results so far. It's changing the way I live, but there's a lot of detail below that thread. At a higher level, the point of me doing my body conditioning is to put me into a position of providing some social service with my body as a junior sheepdog. These days that doesn't amount to much more than playing bodyguard around friends and family when walking through sketchy turf, but that means a lot to me. I very much like the idea of improving my physique in service of the safety of others. I am broadening the capability of my impulse to be a big brother and a protector of ladies and gentlemen in the context of the decreased sociability of the urban world today. My intent is to make that clear distinction from that and general badassery for which my cool pose might be mistaken. But the point is that I am moral muscle. I intent to bridge the gap between foolish chivalry and 'protect and serve' on the real. My diet serves that purpose. Not just to make me look sexy.

You've perhaps heard the joke, how can you tell which person at the table is a vegan. Don't worry, they'll let you know. That's a cruel joke if applied to someone with peanut or shellfish allergies. The moral distinction is clear. If you serve the wrong food to an allergic, they become poisoned, if you serve the wrong food to a vegan they become offended. The distinction between an insult and an assault should be self-evident. I am always trying to not be rude, but I am not above mocking a vegan who tries to make the political case that serving meat is an assault or worse. 

I think it is reasonable for Monsanto and other food producers to resist labeling of GMO products.  I think it is also reasonable for consumers to expect GMO products to be labeled. But to demand it now, in the context of stark ignorance of what GMO is, augurs in favor of the producers. One is harder pressed to demonstrate the perfidy of producers than the paranoia of consumers. This is one area in which I would like to see more responsibility of scientists and other experts, but in these days, such things are difficult to expect. Consider the retirement of Harold Lewis. Nevertheless, my food expert is Michael Pollan. 

It has been a long time since I conferred with Pollan on any matter, but I like his approach. His simplest advice is to eat food, mostly plants and not too much. On the matter of what is food we get a simple admonishment. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, it's probably not food. I join this advice with that of Nassim Taleb who asserts the primacy of recipes handed down through generations. Of all the experimenting mankind has done with every possible thing there is to eat on the planet, it should be no surprise that bread baking has survived. Fifty generations of baking rather outweigh your sudden aversion to gluten. I tie that finally with our very evolution of incisors and large intestines. If God didn't want us to eat meat we would have teeth like horses or stomachs like cows. Nor do humans eat much insect flesh. These are not random circumstances subject to social engineering.

However agriculture is subject to engineering. Given that, one must ask the fundamental question of how agriculture has evolved at all. Or more specifically, what do chicken farmers know about breeding fowl that genetic engineers don't? What stands out in my memory is that all of those fifty generations of farming and breeding was done in almost total ignorance of genetics. What crops and commodities are today is little more than the eugenics of style, or as Pollan puts it, the botany of desire. Nobody raising corn, cabbage or cows knew if there would vitamins and minerals. Figuring out the calories is an entirely new idea, and counting them doesn't help the way we have been sold. Your grandmother doesn't know how many calories are in the tomatoes she grew in the backyard and made into spaghetti sauce. So why should you care? Because you buy it from the supermarket and that's all you know. Food in a box. Trust the label because for everything else, you are unable. Now what's a GMO label? Just another piece of consumer information to be entered into your iPhone app. 

I have two problems with GMO but both are economic in nature, not ethical in nature. The first is the simple matter of monoculture. If GMO methods prove superior to traditional method of hit and miss, then we are possibly depending upon market forces to develop the most efficient crop. That means the overwhelming variety of potatoes might be engineered for french fries, rather than for stews. Not good. Secondly, there is the legitimate question of oligopoly of agribusiness seed stock. 

Neither of these are the sort of matters that can be solved by selective consuming. It's like saying that if I only spend my lifetime purchasing red BMWs, then the car manufacturers of the world will respond. And I certainly do not expect any democratic process or social movement to work in any disciplined way. What I can do however is be a smart shopper and a microproducer, and I can give ethical ends to the means of consuming food. Those ethical ends outweigh the means of production. 

It's in the microproducer angle that I find myself in complete enthusiastic agreement withJ-Dub as regards his intent to get with the growing veggies program. Aside from the fact that I know he thought his way into vegetarianism and does not in any way get self-aggrandizing in his choices, we gel on the ziggurat of skill. We both move from consumer to gearhead, to hacker to maker when it comes to food skills. And it is in this way we share the ethos that pulls us away from the shallow morality of consumerism to the virtue of study and practical mastery in production. 

I don't know if or how I will ever sympathize with the consumer who chooses particular diets. I am rather convinced that people are merely being picky eaters, expressing privileged preferences. Moreover I sense that many people have elevated such preferences to fetishes and are really developing social intolerances and taboos. I don't have any problem with the privileged preferences, and not much with the food snobbishness - but food consumption doesn't weigh much with me morally. I hesitate to, but must make the parellel to sexual appetites, so you can see how this could resonate into another 1500 words. 

I don't much care what people eat, but I don't like the moral pretenses of the politics of consumption. Producer know, consumers guess.

Related articles

Michael Pollan in Conversation

Is Genetically Engineered Food A Fraud?

The Limits of Moral Proxies

Is it ever proper for the law to support capital punishment? The short answer is yes, but I've got a nuance I've been thinking about. It is found in the recourse for suicide.

The death penalty is an institutionalized form of revenge. From my perspective, the question boils down to whether or not society, through its institutions has the moral imperative to take life. The simple answer is yes.

The reason is simple, which is that human beings in and of themselves have the moral imperative to take life. It is relatively simple to illustrate this moral imperative: kill or be killed. It is morally right to kill in defense of your own life. Very specifically, it is morally right for a human being to use violence in order to defend his peace, given that violence is proportional to the threat against his peace. If the threat is absolute, then the violent defense can also be absolute. Now if you have a problem with this principle, just hold on. I think I’ve got you covered. Read on.

It's easy to see for the individual, but for society things are not so clear. Now in looking at the moral justification, there is a difference between self-defense and justice. Justice is the application of defense or retribution by an institutional third party, so let’s talk about police and the justice system.

I think this justification should bear a bit more scrutiny. In one way, society and its institutions rightly inherit this proxy of the individual. This is, after all, the social contract of our society. We proxy our defense to police and to soldiers but the way we have done so over time has changed. Originally constituted to ‘provide for the common defense’ militias and police forces have evolved their role in our protection and the social contract is viewed now similar to the way, if we are children, our parents defend us. We are assumed to be incapable of our own self-defense, but this assumed incapacity is new. We all draw some measure of defense against our persons and our property via this social contract, but some of us (especially those vocally critical of the Second Amendment) assume that the taking of life should be in all cases off the table as a moral right.

For such people, there must be a different sort of proxy in mind. I think this different sort of proxy is, in fact, irrelevant and actually should be, but let’s get down to cases, shall we?

First let’s dispatch with the simple case. Most people are familiar with the argument militating against capital punishment owing to the corruption of the institution. The institution that carries out justice can become flawed to the extent that it does not serve the public trust in its execution of the law.  Wrong suspects can be convicted.  Executions can be cruel and unusual. Clemency can be granted to the guilty. All undermine public trust.

But I see more than one asymmetry here.  Because what one finds morally acceptable for the proxied institution depends upon what one generally finds morally acceptable. So let's get busy with examples, but first to the ground rule. We will stipulate that in all three of these examples, that the attacker is of a particular stripe, namely that he is evil, relentless and implacable. He will kill, for immoral purposes, cannot be dissuaded, and cannot be stopped without being killed. Let us remember one more thing which is in fact the general law states that police should not lose in violent encounters, so they are trained and authorized to bring to bear one greater level of force than any attacker. In short, police bring guns to knife fights. 

All of these example people, being in America, are part of the social contract. But they proxy different levels of moral authority to the government and police on their behalf.

Let’s call the first person Miss Jane. She is old and feeble, but made of stern stuff and takes no guff. She will give you the stink eye if you even curse in her presence and is the very picture of dignity. However, when faced with the attacker, she stands no chance of defending herself. So she proxies her moral authority to the police. She has no choice and basically wants no choice.  

The second person, is the one closest to my position. Let’s call him Malcolm, who says ‘an eye for an eye’. Like Miss Jane, he insists on his full dignity, but is actually capable of defending himself. Whatever violence you might try upon Malcolm, he’ll do right back to you. In fact, Malcolm might even pre-empt your attempt. He’s vigilant and standing in the window looking for the trouble that’s looking for him. Malcolm would train himself to be like the police officer, ready to bring a gun against a knife raised against his person or property. But Malcolm knows he can’t be alert everywhere all the time. So he proxies his moral authority to the police as well, albeit with some reluctance.

The third man declares himself non-violent. Like Malcolm, he is capable of asserting ‘an eye for an eye’ but instead chooses to ‘turn the other cheek’ instead. Let’s call this man Martin. If someone is out to hit Martin with a baseball bat, Martin personally would turn the other cheek. However Martin would have no problem with police using the necessary violent force to strike that batter out. On the other hand, Martin’s philosophy would have him take a bullet, than he allow some police officer take the life of the attacker. He reluctantly proxies his moral imperative to police officers who would violently intervene but withdraws it at the point of taking a life. Similarly, he would not support capital punishment by the state if our attacker murdered his child. For him, all killing is equally wrong.

Now of course we have all sorts of people in America who fit these three examples and others. But we have to face the question of equality.  No matter what your personal philosophy, the principle of equal protection under the law compels our justice system to accept the full moral proxy. In particular, this principle asserts that it is in the full interest of society to defend all lives equally whether or not they value their own lives equally. The police therefore have to go out, fully armed, fully prepared to accept the full moral proxy of any citizen at any time. The justice system must be fully prepared to accept the proportionate response to absolute destruction of life with absolute destruction of life.

So now we bring to mind what objections are raised in the public sphere over police homicides. In particular, I have heard it argued that in the case of the homeless and /or mentally ill, that police should be disarmed when intervening against attackers when they fit that profile.

I see the problem with that. Do you? We cannot have special police dispensing special justice for special groups. No matter how special your moral code, you must concede to the prerogatives of your state’s constitutional mandate to defend the general welfare. To do otherwise is to undermine the social contract and the principle of equal protection under the law.

Still, there is no recourse for suicide.

The Cost of the Answer

If you want to know what I believe, it is that the answer is out there. You just don't want to figure it out.

I had an interesting experience the other day over at Quora. Quora is a general question and answer forum that uses some decently new technology that helps their interface evolve. It's a kind a combination between an interactive Wikipedia,  a dumbed down StackOverflow, and a polite Reddit. It can be both fascinating and unnerving. I spend about an hour a day answering some decent questions that are posed and several more minutes gaping incredulously at the vapidity of the rest.

Anyway I decided to ask a question pointing to something specific about the statistical juju behind all of the silly 'What kind of X are you?' surveys that I get from time to time. How do they correlate your answers to 10 questions into a prescription that says 'Aries' or 'Libertarian'? I guess that it's something related to cluster analysis, but I wanted pointers to code or whatever real statisticians call it. In case you're wondering, I want to get started building the Lorite Interrogator. Well the memorable answer that I got was something to the effect of "Well I could give you an answer but before I do I need to know if you're capable of understanding it. Please give me your background."  That was an intriguing response, but somewhat nervy too. But I wanted to know badly enough to respond in full. In the end, the person who asked for my vitae just gave a thumbs up to that response, but never answered the question. So I was basically stuck with nothing better than Wikipedia. Quora fail.

The failure gave me something to think about - which was that by describing my own qualifications to understand a sophisticated response, I has essentially proven to myself that I have no excuses not to take a graduate level course. After all, I wanted a pointer to a book and/or an algorithm in the first place. I want to know about statistics what experts know. As the idea has been on my mind of late, I wandered over to the UCLA Extension online. It turns out that the books required for their $700 course costs about $400. 

It's going to cost me $1100 and three months to know what I really want to know. Now that I'm aware of the costs, I'm not sure I want to know that badly. Actually, I do want to know that badly, I just don't have the time or the cash at the moment. 

What I believe is that everybody makes economic decisions like this all of the time, particularly about how much they believe they need to know. Most of the time, I think people are lazy, and laziness can be a virtue. One wants to follow an 80/20 rule - that's certainly why I asked at Quora in the first place, considering that I have the email of Emanual Derman. 

The implications of this, to me, are clear. Most people would rather ask their way up a presumed chain of knowledge for free. The free ask is 'just above my head' or 'just enough knowledge to be dangerous'. In other words, there is a presumption that there is a cheat, a cheap and easy epiphany, just a question or two away, and this assumption,  exacerbated by the ease of using the Internet, makes the cost of a complete answer, ie real education, seem higher than it actually is. People can and will use socialized 'uncommon' knowledge more readily than they will pay for expert and complete knowledge.

There's the fundament. Where is the tipping point when colleges are already too expensive? 

But I Can Afford It

I just skimmed through a story about bluefin tuna. Apparently, we are about to run out. But yet it's everywhere. It makes me think about what might be a fatal flaw in our form of capitalism, and raises the following question.

What if supply and demand is a function of capacity but capacity is not a function of supply and demand?

Or think of it this way, what if you built a water well powered by a machine that was driven by a huge flywheel that took you 2 years to spin up. As you start pumping the water you deliver more and more to your thirsty customers who drink their fill. After two years, you are pumping as fast as the machine can go, and at this point your business is mature. Supply and demand are now pretty much about in balance. Basically, you have exploited the economy of scale of your massive machine. You serve a million people five million gallons a day and your pricing is low because of the sunk costs you've already paid for. Now you are in a prime capitalist position. Price the water as you please, but mostly to increase demand, pump out profits and keep your customers loyal. You sell subscriptions, you give discounts, you offer trials for new customers. It's all about marketing now. I would basically say this point is the maturity of the overwhelming majority of markets for consumer goods and commodities. They are machines.

Then you notice that the water supply is getting lower, in fact, you have about one year of actual supply left. If you slow down the flywheel, you'll have to lay off people, and that kind of disruption will start to kill your economies of scale. Your unit production costs will go up and you'll kill your margins. So what do you do?

I am guessing that in most industries, businesses keep up the demand pricing rather than supply pricing, and then figure out an exit strategy with fungible cash. Which is to say, you sell sell sell your product until the well runs dry. Then you crash the business and cash out. In other words, you are captive to the 'will' of the machine you have created which doesn't care about whether or not its resource is limited. It's job is to produce, not to conserve. When you run the mining equipment, or the farming equipment at anything less than full capacity, you're wasting money and will lose your customers.

In the case of a global shortage, this is dangerous. You will run at full capacity until you hit the wall, because it's too difficult to downscale the business, raise the prices, and retain the appropriate market share.

What if it's chocolate? What would people not pay for chocolate? The price elasticity for chocolate (whoops, now I'm going to make technical mistakes - beware) is negative. It might even be a Giffen good. In other words, you want it so badly that no matter what Hershey's charges, you're going to pay. With regard to the supply going tits up, Starbucks coffee drinkers will drink all of South America's coffee plants bare. There will never be a point at which gasoline costs too much for us to not empty all the wells. We will eat all of the bluefin tuna sushi until there is no more in the sea, and the businesses between us and the raw materials of the earth will spin their flywheels until the whole enterprise crumbles. In other words, people will watch Robin Williams tell jokes until the day he dies, even if show business is killing him. And the day before his last show, there will be no indication by the price of the ticket that it is the very last ticket. 

Consumers won't know, because whatever it is, they can afford it. And then it's a ghost town.

A Third is Given

The reason kids don't decide is that they know that whatever they decide, there will be a community for them. They are swayed in and out of things and places. It's where you're at, dude.

We live in a society where the meta is part of the discussion and we have decided that certain matters are unresolvable. This is the land of the non-excluded middle. Everything is true, everything is false, everything is true and false. What this means is that bullies rule, but are always subverted.

--

Godbey thinks I might have been the one who put some of this in mind, but it wasn't me directly, I don't think. Still I do think about the possibility of determining the truth of things. Yet I know that people will decide without going the last mile to find out the truth or falsity of things because we are demonstrably not in the land of great men who pass judgment. I ask people 'Who is your Leviathan' and they don't even bother trying to find out. Everything just sloshes around and people who put things in buckets are ignorable nerds. So nobody goes to Buddha to ask if things are true or false, and Buddha doesn't have to come up with catuskoti answers. Buddha doesn't exist in our society, Google does. And Google just tells you what the most popular answers are.

Over at Quora, a lot of people ask what's it like to be somebody who is somebody. There is the somebody who is the somebody and everybody else cheats and cheeses in the games that somebody invented, because rules are just power controls which are disposable as soon as the somebody is deposed. In the meantime, suck ass. 

To the core:

Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed ‘the Obscure’). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s own arguments are somewhat tortured – to put it mildly – and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle’s intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?"

I think I remember something about Hegel's metaphysics. My essential take is that truth forms cannot become ossified, because as we say 'the journey is the destination'. In other words, nothing remains true simply by declaration, nor does anything remain false by declaration. To Hegel, you do not come upon knowledge in a pure form of truth or falsity, but through revelation through the work of discovery. Key word here is *work*. It takes energy to see what is true or false, and you only see when you are expending this energy. The answer is not '42'. '42' is an abstraction of the work of the greatest calculating mind, and the only way to know the truth of that answer is to actually do that work, which is of course impossible for everyon who is not that machine. But if you want an answer without doing the work and appealing to authority, it may as well be 42, which is as good as any other. Since Google is free, we are free to use and discard the results. So nothing at all is true or false, or mostly true or mostly false or both true and false, it is all in the process of being comprehended within Goedelian limits, and so it is all of that. 

In this way the kids of today have it right.  And yet in the end, somebody has to be authoritarian. Here's the scary part. The authority is energy. 

So we get back to the relativism of the hated Foucault who gives us the 'regimes of truth' concept. He's right about that. What's true is determined, not according to some Platonic form, but by the state of the masses' conventional wisdom, which is in turn shaped, if not determined, by the influence of the powers that be. 

But here's the thing. Human beings in their thinking machinery have no halting problem. Life cannot afford not to accept contradictions, otherwise we would be very poor at adapting to mind-blowing change. Our heads do not literally explode, we make some rationalizations and some abstractions and convenient bias confirmations and strategic forgetting in the retelling of our narratives. And we adapt. So what was true yesterday is not true today. But if you want a flat answer from the Buddha, he would have to tell you that this thing is true and false, because he must account for human possibilities of dealing with it throughout time.

I like how Aeon describes a function and a relationship in the bridge between mathematics and philosophy. 

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.

We are chockablock with dysfunctional relationships. But they are indeed relationships, and we make lots of them, whether or not they have a function. It doesn't matter does it? We are related and we're all relatives. Call it relativism. Everything is true. Everything is false. Everything is relative until you get all functional. 

But when you apply enough force and power into something it has to behave in more deterministic ways, neh? Scary. 

That's all I have.

 

 

That Old House

I can't remember where I read it, but it's rich people's houses that make the difference. Ultimately, I'm pretty sure I agree about that. Castle doctrine. I just saw the tweet  " when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism"

A couple observations.

West Chop
A couple dozen summers ago, I used to go to Martha's Vineyard for the last big party. Labor Day weekend it was. And when I thought I was hot stuff in my Black American Prince years, I managed to hobnob with pretty much anyone I pleased. Until one day when I was writing poetry out by the West Chop lighthouse I happened across a couple of stunning lovelies whom I immediately attempted to charm. I made some bit of headway but discovered that they were coy about their lodgings. But I did managed to learn enough that they were heirs of the Vanderbilts. Somebody's grandparents were butlers and such butlers and their offspring were very well taken care of by the Vanderbilts. But it was the coyness and its accompanying rules that revealed themselves to be most interesting. You see they were quite clear that they were to have no male company after dark in their apartments, wherever they were. I attempted then to make a dinner date, but I could tell that I couldn't be so forward. I was taken aback a bit, considering the tone of entertainment that took place on the Avenue that evening. And as I grumbled to myself about how crass it all was, I couldn't help but obsess over those two and their restrictions - the sort my daughter now resides under at her sorority house in San Jose. 

South Pas
Just this weekend, on my way to visit some snow in the San Gabriel Mountains, I drove through one of my favorite neighborhoods on the planet, the swanky woody end of Pasadena on the east side cliffs over the Arroyo. I remember living there before 9/11 and my disgust at the one house that was my absolute favorite in every way except one. It had a giant banner in support of candidate Bush. Now I understand. Then, I absolutely could not. On this excursion, now much wiser, I felt a kind of saddened condescention for the prisoners of those august homes. I know what it is like to have everything I need at home and I know the feeling of girding my loins to make any trips anywhere away. I have clothing for every occassion and a choice of automobiles. 

Why leave home? Whom do you invite into your home? 

If you were resplendently wealthy and could afford the sort of home that is luxurious and large by any standard, I think that home would be some sort of anchor away from the public. Think about your dreams as a kid. Almost every fantasy mega-mansion includes a bowling alley. Who bowls alone at home? Well, if you had a comfortable library with all the books you wanted, or a stocked refrigerator with all your favorite food, or the complete collection of recordings from your favorite musical groups why would you go anywhere? More to the point, that as one rises in society, one finds the ability to 'do this at home'. I have quite surprised myself with the emergent quality of my own home cooking - to the point at which I'd put my Caesar salads and martinis against those of any fancy restaurant I've been to, which is quite a few. And if my lazy mediocrity can set a table that rivals the top 10%, imagine what I could do if I could hire the chefs and bartenders I know today.  At the very least, here in Southern California, the quality of home in-ground pools far outshines that of any public plunge. Ick. 

A home is a museum and a redoubt and a prison and a library and all that and more when it is of significant size and alive. This was in my final estimation of Bleak House the central organizing principle of Western society. The Big House. Propriety and Property all in one. That thing that shelters you and your children and your ideas and your comforts and prejudices. It is your retreat. And why shouldn't it be? Who can retreat in public except one who purposefully goes incognito to blend in with the crowd? 

These days it seems as if the public fears for no good reason. I have made it an axiom of my Peasant Theory that the masses are a force of nature to be reckoned with. You cannot change it, nor can you predict it with much accuracy, but you can certainly understand when its dangers are imminent and soon to be upon you. Weathering any storm requires a few well understood preparations. 

The upper class must surely understand these preparations. Wealth can prepare one for class simply through the social evolution inherent in retaining ones own house. I've not often congitated on the difference between old money and smart money, but surely old money must have some smarts, if only to get along with itself. Understatement in public would be a clear winner in my old money rulebook, and relaxation at home (or at some private club, if certain sanctities were observed about the home) would be a second rule. Of the sanctities, there have got to be some fairly hard and fast guidelines about whom one allows into the home. After all, butlers, security cams and guard dogs all serve similar purposes and we all kind of want those don't we?

At this point I'd like to take a tangent to observe how much of what we think about the upper class and of wealthy people in general is informed by, to be brief, Downton Abbey. It is our general understanding about English and European nobility, cast in our dramas and literature that gives us all these notions. I'm looking to get a more interesting picture of this from personal experience over the next few years as I begin to purposefully wander around the privileged classes of Americans. If I don't make my own million, I'm determined to observe other people's millions because I'd really like to know what is worth preserving, if I can sniff it out, in our current aristocracy's culture. After all, if we Americans are destined to become the likes of Lindsay Lohan when we all get rich (which we already are, mostly) then we may as well turn more things over to Sharia. Sharia has something very powerful going for it, which is that it makes the forces of the nature of the Masses, very predictable and controllable indeed. We have yet to see how good we are at corrupting our own democracy and liberties, but let us not forget Tytler's threshold has already been crossed. 

In times of trouble there must be clear tipping points. And yet some things are preserved. I'm now thinking of some of the extroardinary mansions just off the east end of Detroit. Grosse Pointe. Some of it is cheap, I think, if I can afford what was once upper class. The bricks still stand straight and hold in the warmth of woodburning fireplaces evoking home and hearth of a wealthy white Christmas.  In my own family there have been those that once possessed a building with servants' quarters. I slept there in comfort, though the wifi needed some work. But with the wifi and the fully stocked bar in the fabulously remodeled kitchen and the rarely used formal dining room, I couldn't be bothered to go out for pizza. We grumbled about the tourists who eyeballed the Frank Lloyd Wright across the wide tree-lined street. 

If America is fine, which parts are certainly world-class and robustly healthy, then that will be preserved like the image of Santa Claus. And whether or not one believes in the exceptional myths, they can and will be enshrined evoking the best of us during the best of times.

While Malvos will snipe and Wilsons derail
The best of our betters will somehow prevail
Because life is survival at all costs so know
That some will survive and never lay low
Or go quietly into that eternal sleep.
A home is a castle and castles will keep.

What's good is what prospers so long as we choose
To be good and reward a failure to lose
To the dark side while darkness will never be gone
We linger, the stinger of death we will gone.
And yet in our castles we find in our hearts
longing company and company's seductive arts
still do charm and disarm our armory's guncarts.