Cobb

Woke Capitalism

"We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism."

Imagine that you are less than perfect and when it comes to the issues of the day, you have to guess about mechanics. I'm like that. I think it's a bit weird that we call ourselves a democracy but when it comes to decision making, we do a lot more shopping than we do voting. Shopping is voting in a way. You vote for the products and brands you like, want and need by purchasing them. You put your money where your mouth is. This happens pretty much every day. We make $100 decisions all the time and the result is a shopping cart full of groceries, or a fancy paper bag with a fancy article. In the parlance of the interwebz, the answer to "Consume much?" is Hells yes.

Voting for politicians is something we do a lot less frequently. When we do so, we're stuck with our decisions. We can't return defective selections and get a refund or a substitution. The polling place closes for 6 months or a year or 4. In fact, the difference between voting and shopping is almost exactly backwards. When we shop, we go and buy first and we pick the item first hand, and then use it first hand. Then we talk about our experience with it after our investment. In politics, we talk first and evaluate the talk, and then make our selection through intermediaries. To be fair, voting for politicians is rather more like buying a car. We talk about it a lot before we do it. We finally come up with a decision that we believe we can live with for several years. Sometimes we get bilked.

It is reasonable that people make better decisions when they are solely responsible and make the decisions often enough to get good. Americans are very good at shopping. We are not so good at voting. We don't do it often enough. We don't recall our decisions enough. We fail to evaluate the consequences properly, and we don't know all the rules. We could do better. Today we are dealing with our own lack of confidence in the whole process. One bad apple seems to have ruined the whole supermarket chain. Things we never questioned changing seem to scream out for change. We are antsy and our trust has been compromised. It doesn't matter if Trump did it or Clinton did it, if Bush did it or if Obama did it. Something stinks to us and we're mad at the whole thing. We're mad at ourselves for letting this happen. We're mad at the other guys for letting this happen. Everybody loves America but hates what it seems to be becoming.

• Senses - Mind (self)
• Money - Products (commerce)
• Votes - Policy (government)
• Prayers - Liturgy (religion)

Here's my little chart. It illustrates inputs and outputs in four different systems. Can you see it? In the self, your senses, what you smell, see, taste, feel and hear, immediately impacts your mind. You are instantly responsive to your perception of things around you. That's why you inherently trust yourself. This is happening all the time. In commerce, the input is money, and the outputs are products and services. You might do this every day. It's obviously less responsive. But over time, the flow of money determines what products and services win and which lose. It can happen really fast, like a hit song, or a new shoe, or a great football draft. Every day the market produces something new.  When it comes to government, you don't have a lot of chances to vote as you do with money, but you do pay attention and you make changes with your vote. That cycles every two years or so and the results take time to evaluate. Finally, religions change very slowly.

So it comes as no surprise that the fast cycle of commerce is being more responsive than the slow cycle of government. Let's focus on that. Can we expect that in order to satisfy a hyped desire for change that we could shortcut the slow cycles of government? We admit we have a justice system in our government, but it's not a social justice system.

We want recognition of our senses, which are immediately changing our minds, to be reflected in policy. We see and hear about some unarmed black man being shot. Our senses immediately affect our minds. How long will this change be in isolation? Social media gives us an outlet. That same day I can call, video, write, text, and otherwise Insta-something my state of mind and get Insta-something feedback. That has become a marketplace. A very fast marketplace, and that is captivating. It's responsive. We've never had that before from media. Wow. Companies are getting faster by using the Insta vectors of social media and online. TV shows used to get produced only in one season. Remember that? Now media production is much faster and more responsive. So products and services move faster. On the fastest edge, online gaming and Twitter get us engaging our senses in realtime. This may be unprecedented in the history of commerce. If one day Twitter charges you per tweet, it will be as fast as online poker.

Young people who grew up and went to college in the age of Netflix have expectations that politics should be as fast as commerce. After all, Barack Obama raised more money for his campaign from the Internet than any previous politician. Politics too, it seems can be viral. Certainly hashtag activism is more responsive and immediate than voting. This is where the conversation of democracy is shifting - away from hidebound institutions like the Electoral College and arcane procedures like clotures and filibusters. Isn't that what we want?

Wouldn't it be crazy if you could get everybody on Facebook and Twitter to cast a vote on Roe vs Wade and stop screwing around with Congressional testimony and Supreme Court appointment grandstanding? Where's the email that proves everything we want to know? Let's just find out now! Let's settle this at internet speed, right?

The business of creating products and services, let us not forget with the input of money, is more responsive than government with the input of the popular vote. So people who want answers now are going to be more receptive that fast cycle. So you can wait for the EPA to make higher standards for air pollution or you can go out and buy a Prius or a Tesla and do your part today. The latter is more immediately gratifying. You could go to church and pray for God to bring down lightning on Big Coal, but you're probably going to get results faster by electing Bernie Sanders. Capitalism is moving faster than government. It always has, but now it's moving faster than ever. It is changing our expectations of how fast change can occur. Neoliberal politics is bent to the direction of supporting that capitalism for its social aims. So if you are impatient with the status quo, capitalism is supporting markets that with the look and feel of politics.

That look and feel is seductive, and I'm here to say that it's wrong. Woke capitalism has one major flaw and that flaw is the lack of deliberation and compromise. The market doesn't deliberate, it sets prices. All of the pros and cons are boiled down to one item, the price of the ticket. If you want X you're going to pay for it more if you want it now. You're going to have to pay more if you want it good. That's the golden triangle. Cheap, Fast, Good. Pick two.  Why do we hate lobbyists and backroom deals? Because we know the money eliminates deliberation and compromise, and we want our say to matter. We want our piece of how the pizza gets sliced. We want to be in the room where it happens. Well money eliminates all that.

There are permanent and very good reasons for keeping the four realms separate. Each should have influence over the other but not control. The self should not be controlled by business. Business should not be controlled by government. Government should not be controlled by religion. They operate at very different paces for very good reasons. Expecting one to do the job of the other is a mistake. Justice can never be a market phenomenon.

Thoughts on Income Inequality

The problem of income inequality is mostly a problem of crowding out working class and middle class people. In other words, it's a cultural idea with economic consequences. The primary problem with the cultural idea is that we have adopted the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" as the appropriate arc for the common man.

Look how everyone wants their phone to be smarter and AIs to deliver them from hard work. How they expect words to be as worthwhile as deeds. What America needs to do is to culturally reject the life of bling, and replace that with a work ethic that includes much respect.

Eating the rich is poking a hornet's nest. It cannot work without a revolution. I repeat. It cannot work without a revolution. Americans are going to have to accept that it's not just the Koch Brothers, but Beyonce, Tom Hanks, Bruno Mars, Drew Brees and LeBron James that they'd have to eat.

What people also need is the focus of attention for their basic needs. That means high quality items need to last. It means I should be able to buy a $400 refrigerator that lasts 10 years. Rugged dependable basic durable goods. It means that I should have no problem whatsoever finding a safe neighborhood if I can only afford $600/mo rent for a 1BR.

I grew up in an era where people regularly said "We were poor but we didn't know we were poor." That's cultural. It's because we had arcs of our lives that didn't depend on the ultra-rich. Those people did not control the things we needed and wanted in life. Then again we didn't expect ski trips to Colorado, or $300 wristwatches. But we also didn't have the monopolies that we have today.

I say the biggest problem is that Americans are oriented towards the blingiest and the blingiest is owned by monopolists. Look at something as simple as eyeglasses. It will scare the pants off you.

I think there is also an impoverishment of thought that gives us the idea that our problem is income inequality and the solution is wealth transfer. Look at what I select as priorities for the Cobb Left, and maybe you can catch my drift.

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It is reasonable for people to question curiosity, because curiosity is just another avenue for monetization. I think we need to look at the beast we created with the MBA, the concept that any single-minded hustler can take any idea whatsoever, from pet rock to college coed rating service and turn it into a million or a billion dollars. As long as we keep alive the idea that you can follow your passion and will be economically rewarded, we give license to the common man to abandon the discipline of the practical, and approval for Shark Tank overlords to dangle dollars just above our heads. These are not free markets, these are lottery mechanisms. And yes we have lotteries too.

Our culture has promulgated the illusion that wealth, in and of itself, is evidence of an immoral scam. That is because of an unwillingness to remove the idea of profit from the realm of vice. Too many people believe that profit is prima facie evidence of coercion, that wealth and the abuse of power always go hand in hand. This is what justifies the idea that tearing down all the wealthy to benefit the poor is always a good idea. But not only is it fighting fire with fire, it undermines the cause of structuring society's working classes to attain a moral profit. That is what gets dictatorial powers to those who will lynch capitalists, merely because they are capitalists, and destroys the ability to raise new moral capitalists in the mainstream.

Putting oneself in the shoes of the poor does not mean that suddenly I should hate the wealthy or the talented. We cannot ever afford to steal the profits of people who are not themselves thieves. There is but one morality and it has to do with fairness, in never doing to others what you would not have done to you.

When society believes that wealth and profit are always immoral, we make the talented who attain wealth through profit fear the revenge of society, even as society benefits from their productivity. This is evident in what we lament as income inequality. The rich want to live away from the rest. They are seen as a different kind of human. Whose responsibility is it to teach otherwise? It is everyone's responsibility. Because when a society decides to steal on behalf of the 'noble' desires of the poor to live like the rich, well I think Hayek best called it the road to serfdom.

There is one good life for all men. It is determined by liberty. Liberty cannot be bought with cash. It must be a common value in all of society. Liberty does not abide theft. So let us bring thieves to heel. The presence of wealth is not evidence of a crime.

The Psychology of WEIRDos

This particularly struck me today:

This is one of the most important topics, right?  Well, here is a new and quite thorough paper by Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich.  Here is the abstract:

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

So I was talking to my daughter about, now that I think about it, the 8th End of My Blackness. In this telling, she was relating, her sense of friction she gets for speaking proper English and a host of other upper-middle-class markers that, to her critics, mark her has 'white'. I repeated my normal 'haters gonna hate', but also added that all she needs to do is actually visit Africa in order to shut most of them up. It's an expensive trip for a stupid reasons, but is one that ultimately such haters must acknowledge. The reason I have observed has primarily to do with what those poor souls lack in cranking up the significance of 'their culture', which is an actually researched family tree. The less coherent family you have the more likely you are to adhere to cultural institutions, ethnic myths and racial unity. That's what I see.

When I was talking to Richard Peete the other night - there's no way we could catch up on 7 years in one evening - we did brush across the same subject. I told him about the time when some Hoteps at City College, back in my school days, reduced some freshman girls to tears. They were some of the first in their families to attend college and were informed in no uncertain terms that they had no idea what their real roots were, and would not be complete or authentic black women unless and until they went back to visit the slave castles and the pyramids. Guess who was organizing such trips, for a not so small fee?

While I am ready to accept the premise of WEIRD psychology, and it certainly makes sense to me, I wonder if the gap between the rule of law and of honor codes, viz Pinker, is so deeply broad. What I mean to ask is how long into a Catholic marriage does it take for kinship circles to fade into obscurity? How many generations out of the 'hood with all your play cousins does it take for one to psychologically adapt to Corporate America's bowling leagues and pizza overtime? I'll be keeping this in mind, as it relates directly to Peasant Theory and the applicability of personality to political narratives.

Oh. Have I not talked about that? Probably not. Here's the gist. If and when America comes apart and delivers government of the quality of Ferguson, MO, then people will abandon democratic institutions and adopt tribal and kinship associations. This is likely in most rank and file cases, to result in honor culture lawlessness and radical autonomy of the sort we love to watch in zombie and other post-apocalyptic dramas. Only in this village scenario with the individual start to matter again, as the individual is being squeezed by a bipolar political conformity that grows more shrill by the year. Hard to say what will correct it. But I am very curious as to how personality works when it comes to the fundamentals of civilized community outside of kinship and tribe.

The thing is, ironically, that most American tribes are voluntary 'civic organizations'. Like the skateboarders, the volunteer firemen, the book of the month club, and the stoners at the liquor store.

Reality TV and the Public Interest

This morning I read part of an article in which Jordan Peterson is reported to be caught off-guard in a equivalency test between the principle of selling gays wedding cakes and serving blacks wedding cakes. I cranked through this a bit as I lay in bed and the conversation and logic that I found myself in when a little something like this.

I put myself in Peterson's shoes and estimated why he stumbled and I think it might have been something of an overreach on his part, but also because of the strange ubiquity of the gay cake argument. Firstly I qualified myself as Peterson saying I'm not an oracle and I can only muster my own train of logic in the context that I conclude what I do and from that point I became me, myself.

In the end, I speculated out loud why it is that a comedian, as brilliant as they can be searching for the ironies of human life, can represent the public interest in thumping a public intellectual. This gets to the crux of my problem and the title of this essay. But let us consider the equivalence, if there is any, in the reasons for which someone might choose to discriminate against blacks and/or gays in the first place. Why is this of public interest?

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision to cure the anti-gay baker I note that the substance of the case turned on a technicality that fell afoul of one of the minor cogs of anti-discrimination law - something about the punishment being inappropriately harsh given the balance of harm at principle. I also note that given all of the skin in the game, how have we come to represent the public interest in something as insignificant as a $100 cake? Would we consider wedding cakes a public accommodation? In other words, in the great scheme of things, does this matter? I wondered how in the public mind something like this would even catch our attention in a world absent television. How on earth did homosexuality survive without such panoptic scraping activism? How indeed did black life persist or interracial love exist before the Loving decision? Do we really need this level of attention in order to have justice?

I conclude, for the sake of this argument that there was homosexual love long before Stonewall. But I also just recently watched 'Easy Rider' and I know that the road trip ends in murder and that this murder characterized the threat faced by the counter-culture. Well the counter-culture won, and as far as I know, there were only a few murders they suffered, even at Chicago in 1968. By the Bicentennial, there was only cursing. Long hair was no longer a threat. We have become as permissive a society as anyone might desire while still remaining a civilization, but that's not where are heads are at. Our emotions are animated by the memories of segregated water fountains, and fire hoses, and Michael Brown. Our emotions are animated by Matthew Shepherd and Harvey Milk, and by defiance in the streets. Our emotions are subject to react to the drama that characterizes the stories that persist, but not to the way people survive every day. We look to the moment where all hope was lost and the law and the state could not rescue the innocent victim.

Whenever I make my arguments, I do so in order to reveal the way I think about things with the hope that someone else can replicate my logic and see the sense in it. People have a hard time understanding this. If you're a programmer, you understand that you can represent any logical construction, and if you open source your programs, you are making an argument for the program's approach, not so much the end product of the program. There is beauty and power in the use of language itself. But there is always the limited experience of the programmer to solve problems and keep those solutions running in production. No programmer, no matter how clever, can have all the experience to solve all of the problems programs are capable of solving. No philosopher or shaman or priest solves all human problems. No public intellectual or comedian does either. But we might still use their arguments and algorithms. As I look towards the 95 Billion dead of humanity, I use today's logic languages, with an understanding that life, in a Jurassic Park metaphor, finds a way - even ineffably with proprietary logic and coding way may never know. Homosexuals did find love before Stonewall. Blacks and whites did find accommodation in their lives before 1955. We are not the last programmers, we just have the biggest compute networks ever.

And it is in that power that I propose an abundance of caution, and I do so in a way that should resonate with all those in favor of civil liberty, although having done so sounds awfully conservative to many ears. If we have the power (yes we do) to get the disposition of a water fountain used by Miss Jane Pittman or of the address of the restaurant who denied service to a political partisan, then how do we as citizens moderate that power? This is the power of media, of its overstepping into the bounds of society, replacing our powers of individuation with their editorial stances.

I am often asked very simplistic questions, and today I think I have a very simple answer that gets at the heart of the questions I raise. How can we take the narrative out of combined media and give a more accurate accounting of what justice actually is? How can we put the dramatic story in context? How can we bring forth the details in which the devil hides?

The public and society have conventions that do and should change. We ought to be able to navigate these changes and initiate them appropriately. That requires that we have the give and take which is prerogative of society but is not the ratchet of law. I see that we have politicized the personal and we agitate to enact the political to give it the force of law. We do so like machine gunners popping our heads out of foxholes every four years. Death to the other side. We have clearly destroyed all coherence in the administration and regulation of health care, and I think we are likely to do so in anti-discrimination law on our current frenzied path. That is because we are not engaged socially, but politically and at the mercy of very sophisticated implementations of mass communications. Our minds are being hacked because democracy. It's what we expect - we expect to listen to people who coherently represent the masses and we enable their abstractions. We pull the lever of consent and let loose the political beasts who will do as they please until the next time we vote. Then we go to sleep with the TV on thinking all of it's connected. Yet we know it's a news cycle of outrage. We let this influence who we befriend and defriend. It's sick. Or as Gordon Bennett said, it's counter-human.

If I were the owner of CBS, I would petition Congress to change one rule. That rule would be the presence of video in courtrooms.

If I were the CEO of Amazon, I would petition Congress to have access to all of that video and put machine learning algorithms to it all.

If I were a citizen, I would stop watching reality TV and watch court cases. Not just dramatizations, but actual court cases.

I would hope that this combination of situations would help us all to understand with more examples, the kinds of duties we might have if we spent more time on juries following individual cases resulting in a collaborative decision making process of delivering a verdict and less time in chat rooms following national sensations generated by editorial boards. It's just that simple. If people would avoid social media courts of public opinion the way they avoid jury duty, this might become a more civil society. If they moved toward jury duty, I think we'd get more actual justice. Ask any attorney how jammed up the dockets are and how much citizens give up by not following the courts more closely.

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In the other minutes of my morning reverie I thought about what it is we signify about ourselves in our permissive society. I would probably like to deal with that more closely in the future. But I am thinking about uniformity and formality with an aim to bust up the 'salad' of multiculturalism and grind out more 'soup' of pluralism. And this is where I may be making the same mistake at Peterson. It is because I think that sexual intimacy is inherently complex, private and important. That means it is much more individuated than racial identity and it is, I think, inevitably more close to the way a person sees themselves. The implication here is that the more you must identify one's sexual nature through the uniform of citizenship, the more you corrupt the democratic process. In other words, by declaring what is most intimate about you as a public marker, you destroy your own privacy by giving license to third parties to characterize you, not by your actual values and principles, but by your personal identity. To sow 'as a black lesbian, I feel..' reaps 'as a black lesbian, you must..'.  It is because of this exchange that I cannot, nor should anyone, offer up equivalences along the 'multicultural' dimensions of human attributes. We only need act as citizens in the public interest, and therefore the public should only require us to follow orders applying to the uniform.

The uniform of citizenship allows us to be called to public duty without prejudice. The uniform of citizenship allows us to remain private individuals beyond public scrutiny.

 

Memorial Day 2018

It didn't begin well.

Alexa awoke me from a deep sleep that began somewhere around 1:30 AM. It was only 5 1/2 hours later, and I sweated through my blankets. That feels ok underneath them, but when you pull them off you, the chill is annoying and gross. I didn't have on either watch or fitbit. My voice was too croaked and dry for Alexa to reckocgnize me ask for the time. By the time I managed to keep warm and dry off and get out of bed, 27 minutes had elapsed. The shower water was still cold 5 minutes later and Doc was due by at 8. Or maybe he meant to meet me in Westwood at that time.

The 405 Northbound was mostly empty. A few speeding convertible Mustangs zoomed past on my right. Doing 70 mph right at LAX made me think more about my novel that I have begun again in earnest. That 405, 50 years in the future will be this empty for the reasons of collapse. I'm thinking about whether or not I should have the bridges across them crushed to the pavement, or still standing, walled off to through traffic. I'll figure it out. Doc is waiting in Westwood at Gayley and Kinross. Or at least that was his text 15 minutes ago. I had to get gas and Red Bull.

There is only one entrance to the Los Angeles National Cemetery. I had driven by it hundreds of times, and now it was time for me to go in. I didn't realize there was only one so if it looked like I was getting out of the long line of cars on the right only to merge ahead of them from the opposite direction, I didn't mind them thinking so. After all, my brother Doc was waiting and I felt late. I made some negotiations with the man waving traffic. As I drove into the 117 acre facility with its 88,000 plots I think of how easy it would have been for all of my brothers and I to have joined up. Pops was USMC. We lived that life of discipline and purpose at home. We were drilled. We all have that deep within us. I say 'we all' as if my other two dead brothers were here today. What are the chances that four boys make it alive? I parked the truck in the second queue of parked cars, behind the Challengers of the Challengers club. I step out of the door and collapsed sobbing.

It took about 100 yards of a slow walk to finish crying. I'm still not finished, but at least now I am breathing normally and these are only somber tears. These are the tears of recognition, the tears of pity for the sadness of humanity. I want to finish my weekend with a clean bedroom, but I remain melancholy, and only the need to share a personal reflections takes me away from the bitter muse of my dystopian future. I need a stinger to start, and the book I'm now reading reminded me of 9/11. So the paragraph came, finally thinking of the end of all things.

Collapse comes quickly and slowly at the same time. Nobody is prepared for it because they’ve survived all the near misses, but everybody sees it coming. Everybody gets used to being frightened for a time, bleating all of their emotions out to everyone for two or three weeks and being sensitive for a year. Finally, nobody in your family gets H1N1. Nobody in your town suffers a school shooting. You move on ready to be outraged at the next outrage, sure you know which political partisans, ethnic minorities or religious fundamentalists were behind the conspiracy. All near misses are like two semi trucks speeding in opposite directions on a dark desert highway in the middle of the night. They allow you to survive and curse the idiot on the other side. You tell the story of rage in the next roadside rest. People give you comfort. Disaster is just matter of inches this way or that. Nobody survives the head on collision and nobody knows to look until the next day. Collapse is when everybody dies on the highway between towns, and then the towns go dark. Sometimes a stranger happens to cross an intersection full of bones, blood and twisted metal. He picks through the wreckage to find out what happened. Sometimes the stranger just escaped another wreck and keeps on stumbling forward without a second glance. After the plague and collapse of 2037 it took years to sift through the carnage of humanity. People who lost everyone and everything tried to keep walking forward, but they always looked backward over their shoulder.

That ought to hold your monkey ass, you bitter muse.

Doc and I bore up during the 200 minute procession of speeches and gratitude and heartfelt applause. It was the most strange incongruity to see a crowd of hundreds in a city of millions to pay tribute to several thousands. We were all a tiny minority trying desperately not to cry and get choked up. Trying not to sound too pretentious or obsequious. There was only one standing ovation given, to the two dozen diplomats from Argentina to Korea to Turkey who showed up today with wreathes to this, the second largest military cemetery in America, the third largest in the world.

We looked for our uncle Phil Thomas who we were pretty sure went to Korea. We found a Phillip Thomas who was in spot 319, but couldn't find the plaque. There is a kind of self-serving conceit to these kinds of tributes. It ought to be common sense and common practice, and when you discover yourself outnumbered by indifference and BBQ ribs, you feel so very out of place. Yeah I was there. So what? The dead were really there. But it could have been me. It could have been you, forgotten and taken for granted like so many lives are. When the trucks don't collide, it's just another headache for beer. And yet there they were, that special contingent from Korea, and the 100 year old veteran who translated for the American diplomats for the signing on the USS Missouri on September 2, 1946. There may or may not be a Korea Summit, but the Koreans were here in force today, more than any other foreign contingent. We may just miss. We may just hang on. We might look over a crowd of a few hundred Americans when we are 100 years old, when everybody we know is dead, and these are the remembering remnants.

So those in charge of reminding us to remember pulled very gently at our better angels. One surgeon talked about being the youngest doctor around when the Scud missile landed. One veteran talked about what it's like to deliver the folded flag. So we all bore up under the sun and the clear blue empty sky with our silent tears, remembering what nobody wants to remember even though we often ought to, compelled by those who testified that they can never forget, even if they wanted to. It's never graceful to stumble forward. It's never comforting to look backward over our shoulders, even when we see nothing. And when it came time for the man in the denim shirt and white beard to sing Lee Greenwood's song, the PA system broke down and he belted it out a capella. Sometimes you don't get accompanied. You just hope somebody stands up next to you.

The horn from taps sounded far away. The flyover was nowhere in sight. The cannon fired off the salute and it felt almost like closure. We walked past a hundred graves to our cars and the grass was thick, impeding us from speeding on our way. The small flags stood and the carnations lay flat parallel to the bottom edges of each marker. An army private from Oklahoma. A man named Alvarez who died in 1973. Nothing about the order and symmetry of the marble straightens out the road of memory. It goes from history to a personal thought to an assessment of a nation's sins and sorrows. They say war destroys the things it is fought to preserve. Peace also destroys the memory of what it costs to achieve. So we stand between a clumsy earnest desire for order and the fact that chaos inevitably leads us back into the tragic circle. And we'll always be prepared, and we'll never be ready.

I returned to my truck and the planes flew by. An ancient roar.

The Cobb Left Party

Recently I got into a debate about what I believe in the context of the disbelief of others that I am anything other than a subtle shill for conservatism. What I ended up doing is mentioning what I think Democrats ought to be doing.

The Cobb Left Party Platform

The Cobb Left Party (CLP) is dedicated to the working family. We believe that America is the best home for children and families of modest means, and our goal is to support them as our core constituency. We are the mom and dad party. We are a labor party. We are an anti-trust party. We are a general interest party.

The Home
We believe that children should have two parents and that the two parent household is the best environment for children. We also think that an elder relative in the same household adds an even greater environment for children. Adoption will be made easier. Elder relatives and adopted children shall each qualify as double dependents for tax exemption purposes.

Special federal training will be made available for social workers and police officers. Families with domestic violence complaints will be given priorities and repeat offenders will be removed at once through an accelerated process. Six month subsidies will be made available for victims of convicted abusers.

Representation
The establishment of the CLP as a viable third party in America is a precedent which we feel should not be underestimated. In all ways the division of power has served America well giving multiple avenues of representation and redress for citizens. The CLP will develop a comprehensive set of parliamentary strategies to disrupt the pattern of bipartisan coercion and gridlock in the Congress as well as in the Statehouse.

The CLP will work diligently to reduce the number of ballot initiatives which we feel are an irresponsible method of governance and a bad source of law. In all cases we prefer bills authored by named representatives and sponsored by party majorities.

The CLP will assure that unfunded mandates will not have the force of law as this leads to selective enforcement at the arbitrary whim of executive branches. The CLP will oppose circumvention of parliamentary powers by the judiciary and executive branches and will use its powers to always consider the impact on working families.

Anti-Trust
The CLP seeks to establish a broader set of business options for working families especially in matters of personal finance. The CLP will establish federal regulations for utility banking, microlending and advanced payments systems. We will re-establish the savings & loan industry and restrict the operation of mortgage brokers from designated family housing, a new category. We will prohibit large multinational banks from operating in the home and consumer lending sector.

Corporations with > 50% of their global revenues taxed outside of the US will face regulatory hurdles in their domestic M&A activity. No such company will be allowed oligopoly status in the US consumer market. This is directed primarily at banking, insurance, and telecommunications.

The CLP supports 5G net neutrality, and opens satellite bandwidth for non-neutral communications.

The CLP supports municipal ownership and leasing of last mile fiber optics to be shared by content providers and ISPs similar to the industry sponsored clearinghouse of cell towers and traffic.

Income Inequality
The CLP will support a means-tested taxation rate for the employment of exempt, non-exempt and 1099 employment. Tax incentives will be applied to companies who train and promote non-skilled labor.

The CLP will support labor membership in the boards of directors of public corporations. No less than 25% of board seats must be held by employee elected representatives in all public corporations employing more than 500 employees, having a market capitalization > $1 Billion, or executive compensation packages exceeding $1 million per year. At least one board seat for compensation must be held by such an employee representative.

Labor
The CLP will support unionization of all retail customer facing jobs, in malls, banks,  supermarkets, restaurants, hospitality and convenience stores chains.

The CLP supports unionization of e-commerce delivery, warehousing & logistics.

Immigrant Labor
The CLP will simplify guest worker permissions and establish highly regulated industrial zones in which international labor standards will be applied to a maximum of 2.5% of the US workforce. These guest workers will be racheted into standard American union scale jobs and excluded from such international industrial work after a period of 3 years. The three year period will grant a fast track pathway to green cards. The CLP will leverage and depend on unions to insure compliance. All US companies wishing to employ such immigrant labor must be closed union shops. Heavy fines and criminal charges for human trafficking will made against non-compliant businesses.

Healthcare
The CLP will establish a consumer outpatient category and provide standardized care for all citizens and families with children up to age 26. Included are the majority of outpatient services including all immunizations and checkups required for enrollment in public schools, basic pediatric care, low cost contraception for voting age adults.  The CLP will support retail dentistry, optometry, mental health counseling and sex clinics.

Education
The CLP stresses vocational certification. We support public trade schools, vocational classes in high school and junior colleges. We are particularly attendant to the reintegration of veterans into the workplace. The CLP encourages schools to provide classes that teach students to actually repair and care for campus facilities.

The CLP supports dischargeable student loans and will work to hold universities responsible for co-signing student debt.

The CLP supports the staffing of sports and fitness coaches for municipal public parks.

Homelessness & Gentrification
The CLP aims to redirect federal funds away from large cities and towards smaller and midsize MSAs as well as rural areas where the cost of living is more appropriate to a lower skilled, lower educated workforce. Affordable housing is easier to build in affordable cities. Our aim is to make these new standards of retail healthcare and unionized labor appropriate to the median income American in a broader set of municipalities.

We don't want a service economy of poor people becoming baristas to the rich. We want a working economy of people who can repair their own cars and homes, build their own furniture and grow their own vegetables, chickens and eggs.

Federal Works
The CLP supports large and small infrastructure projects at the state and local level, and will sponsor a nationwide database of street, bridge,  sidewalk repairs and civil engineering projects. We will create mobile applications to inform the public of open jobs wherever government money is spent.

---

That's not everything, but it's all I can think of right now. I would look at the Democrat and Republican planks, but these are the foremost issues I think a people's party should be about.

 

Twelve Simple Words to Destroy White Privilege

The term ‘white privilege’ is so powerful and consequently so pathetically useless and subversively dangerous, because it is so stupefyingly broad.

It would be much more useful and accurate to say, ‘trustworthy, experienced, educated, attractive, overachieving, affluent, confident, intelligent, social, conscientious, tall, healthy privilege’ and then everybody would say, duh that’s obvious. Instead, you just use a racial stereotype and say well all that is what ‘white’ means, (and 'black' means the opposite). Then it would be completely and totally clear that the use of the term ‘white privilege’ is based on a theory of race. That’s the racial profile.

Those listed are some of the virtues of our society. They are what we want to be. Of course people who demonstrate such virtues are privileged in our society. That’s the whole point of having a society. Society gives human experience value and meaning. And of course racists want race to have value and meaning, which is why they want you to say ‘white’ and ‘black’ instead of talking about virtue and vice.

If you believe in individualism, then you must judge individual character and you must discriminate based on the virtues and vices individuals demonstrate. The more you use racial concepts and stereotypes, the more you empower racists to define value and meaning in our society towards race and away from individual character.

 

Bring Blogs Back

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn't working the way we thought it would. 

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let's look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don't own your own words. When you live on Facebook's property, you don't own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don't mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets. 

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. They serve everybody without much discrimination, but their facilities often stink. Sometimes you wonder who came in here to write what you see on the walls, and you cringe. No matter how many bots or attendants you apply to a roadside rest stop, it will never become a town hall. That's something you design from the ground up. Social media needs a redesign.

However, there was a moment of glory in the past in which the level of discourse broadly available to the internet public was better than it is now. That was the age of the blogosphere. As MySpace was dying and Google experimented with something called Orcut, which became very popular in Brazil, the American scene was beginning to get a taste of blogs and bloggers. It was a feast of alternative information written by individuals or edited contributions of blog leagues that set the American political world on fire. It was a place for writers, and it still is. 

As a veteran of early internet sites like The Well and Cafe Utne among others, I have been fortunate to have met some of the most exciting and informative writers anywhere. My history goes back to bitnet, Fido and Compuserv. Since there has been an online, I have been there. And so I have witnessed the temptations presented to bloggers to become more mainstream as previously paper only media publications moved online. Who would not, having become influential on their own, want to become even more influential as a syndicated columnist? And so many of the best bloggers moved on out of self-publication to sponsored work. I cannot say whether or not that affected the quality of their writing or if they have been edited into corners. But it did violate one of the key aspects of the blogosphere itself, which was full individual control. 

A blogger has many responsibilities aside from writing, one of which is to police their comment sections. One needs to decide whether or not to accept paid advertising. One has to decide which other blogs to link to using the novel idea of the trackback process. One has to periodically update the design, and of course one has to pay for their blog to be hosted. I've been paying 15 dollars a month for over 15 years. In 2007, there was a such thing as the Black Blogger of the Year Award dedicated to the late blogger Aaron Hawkins. I won that year owing to my extensive coverage of candidate Barack Obama and the insightful conversations I was able to host at my blog. These days I have about 900 friends on Facebook. Those days I had 1500 hits a day. The greatest responsibility to my mind was to foster the proper environment for conversations that would live on the blog. To welcome the right kind of interlocutors and to push trolls away, to steer debate towards productive an insightful conversation, to entertain tangents that are useful and yet keep the related ideas corralled. It was work. Creative, rewarding work. It required skin in the game, not some disingenuous promise to promote free speech contingent on the arbitrary goodwill of advertisers and marketing networks. 

Today I engage with many of the same writers I've known for 20 years online at Facebook. Many of us are getting tired and have enjoined a litany of complaint. Fake news, censorship, filter bubbles, defriending and the ever present trolling and flame wars are on our frustrated minds. But I think the most egregious problem in social media is its abbreviation.

I don't speak Emoji. And unlike the editors of The New York Post, I can't very often come up with a catchy headline to tweet out. I may be verbose even for an essayist, but the things I find of interest require more than two or three sentences to say. I think that is true of all of human affairs. People should not be forced into abbreviated descriptions of their ideas and their selves by the constraints of social media. I want to be responsible for the claims I make, so having them disappear after I post them serves no good purpose. Abbreviation of time is unacceptable. It's not as if the world doesn't have enough disk space in the cloud to handle all of our words, or even all of our digital video. So why should I have less than everything I want to say be referenceable in an opus of compositions over the years? Why should I not have every objection or agreement from everyone who wants to react to my compositions as well? I get that with my blog. I do not get that with Reddit or WhatsApp. The complexity of human affairs requires more space and time than social media adequately facilitates. It's no wonder that people are so frustrated.

When Google killed Google Reader, the use of RSS syndication of blogs and other online periodical publications fell to a variety of inferior tools. But now an outfit called Feedly handles it well. I still follow a selection of excellent writers in what remains of the blogosphere. Medium.com has also become a popular place for writers in all sorts of subjects. But the domination of social media over the average person's internet reading is beginning to grate on everyone's nerves. I hope to remind people that there are still cultured and informative places of respite from the oligopoly of the mainstream social media, and it is worthy and capable of supporting us all. 

I call on developers to revisit the innovations of the blogosphere and to move forward in their further development. I give props to Typepad and the other blog ecosystems for the steady platforms they have provided for years of reliable operation. I encourage writers new and old to get into blogging and recreate and renew what we know the medium of blogging can do to inform and delight. I call on devotees of the well crafted word and visual arts to put your best work forward. I call on editors in the mainstream to spend time outside of the world of compromise for wealthy producers and nurture and support organic writers in this decentralized medium. 

We must own our own words. We must resist censorship. We must facilitate real informative debate. We must not be policed by bots and algorithms. 

We have done better. We can do better again. Bring blogs back. 

 

 

JBP To The Rescue

Jordan B Peterson has been on my radar about six months. Now I'm reading his book. The first time I saw him was when I was regularly watching Joe Rogan's Experience program and he was on with the professor who was harangued out of Evergreen State College. I'm not sure if that was contemporary with the moment but it served as a good milestone. I have since backed off a little bit in pointing at SJWs but weighed in a little bit more about the failure of Humanities and the permissive society. But Peterson has evidently been knocking it out of the park for some time now, and he's really square in the middle of it. All this is to say that not since I read American Mythologies have I come across someone who gets something so profoundly right about where we are.

I hesitated about reading Peterson, not knowing what to expect. There's little to indicate that a clinical psychologist would have so much to say as Meg Meeker did for me years ago, but I was wrong about that. He has put things very well in perspective. In his discussion with Camille Paglia, I am reassured that there are some people outside of the hard sciences that actually know what they're talking about. It gives me a reason to go a bit further towards where I have just started to go which into art history and serious cinema. Right now all I have is a small collection of pictures in Pinterest called Strange Beauty. The food thing remains, but I may be able to back out of some of the sadder aspects of stoicism if I get enough beauty. Beauty is certainly what's missing. Inspiration from a literary source is very hard to come by, but let me not dwell on that. The discovery of Peterson is a turning point.

The African American Term

(from the archives July 2014)

Q: Is it offensive to refer to black people as "black" and/or "African American"? White people seem like they're walking on eggshells, and they say "African American" a lot (when people might be neither African nor American).

A: I'm actually surprised that nobody remembers how the change originally occurred. In the late 80s when professors like Skip Gates was making a big splash at Harvard and Toni Morrison was the toast of the planet, a monumental book was published called the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Anyone who was paying attention would know and recognize that a new generation of scholars were getting a foothold in the better class of universities around the country, and Black Studies Departments were in the intellectual conundrum of only having a couple decades of history to justify their existence. The newer, younger, smarter black scholars in English for example would be quick to point out to people who didn't get it, that authors like Frederick Douglass didn't call himself 'black' nor did Jean Toomer. The expanse of interest in the 'black experience' had to be put in a more appropriate context. So the academic world rightly adjusted its terminology. To talk about the corpus of literature, music, dance etc of blacks in America, you couldn't just overuse Black America - so the term African American was used as a blanket term which was more academically proper, demographically equivalent and politically neutral. Americans of African descent thus became this in the abstract for the purposes of more accuracy - you could then put slaves, ex-slaves, free persons of color, Coloreds, Negroes and Black Americans all in the larger category and use fewer asterisks, anachronisms and other such malaprops.

Around the same time, a charismatic dude named Molefi Asante wrote a 50 page book called 'Afrocentrism' which kicked off yet another chapter in the  African American history of mobility in identity. (See? I used it correctly there.) This could be thought of as a second, or third if you want to count Garvey, attempt at a Pan-African unity in identity. For a short time, I myself identified with an international jet-set of 'New World Africans' while living in Brooklyn partying with Spike and dating cute Francophone chicks from Senegal. I almost got into the kinte cloth business. But that was then.

I would gather that there are still a number of folks who are fascinated by the cultural dynamism of that international jet-set including the likes of Zadie Smith and Cornel West and all those who did Bring the Noise/Funk in those glorious early 90s, but Janet Jackson blew up and bifurcated the dreads from the crinkles and as far as I know, the twain never rejoined. By the time John Legend and Common went back to short hair, I think the whole Afrocentric thing was over, but I can't say with any accuracy because I went into the suburban daddy business.  Suffice it to say, the whole African angle lost currency, especially for those who don't even read 50 page books.

I think it came as some surprise to some that we went through a period of Bone Thugs & Harmony after all highbrow folks went through, which is part of the reason Lauren Hill was such an incredible surprise, but I digress with these cultural touchstones to point out that your basic 'black culture' goes through many shades and degrees within the spectrum of African American history. I have made my peace with the fact that it's under no direction or control but rather a manifestation of who's following whom, a very personal choice.

I can't account for why people focus on race, when culture is so much more nuanced and interesting, then again, the politics of race in America is pretty much the same stagnant story, and like I said, a lot of people can't be bothered to read.

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.

 

Dignity on the Cheap

 

"Ain't no man or woman, no beast alive that can beat me, cause I was born to fight" -- Tracy Chapman

There are few phrases that manage to connect with my synapse loop and cascade my eyeballs into a backwards roll like 'self-esteem'. When I grew up in the 1970s it was called 'ego' even though it was more like monsters from the id. We called it the 'bogard', but that's a long story. Actually, it's not. You see as young men we were raised to be good sports and to compete. Compete HARD. And if you weren't competing against your toughest rivals, then you weren't actually competing. We called that 'chickenshit'.

Sometimes I wonder, but only in the past couple of months when I have been compared to Morgan Freeman by several waiters and strangers, if I am in the first generation of African American men to reach maturity without possessing a sense of utter defeat. It's nowhere in me, I assure you. And I've always known what it looked like by looking to my parents and family elders. Although when the song 'Sister Rosa' became very popular, I didn't get excited about revisiting her heroism and myth. I already knew a grandmother who would not take guff from anyone, white or black, much less some cracker ass bus driver. In short, I have managed to keep my balls in place, and yes I take it for granted.

My dignity has come at a price, a price I was willing to pay and take pride in. I have often said that I have never been anybody's 'fair-haired boy', by which I mean in my life I've only gotten one or two scholarships. Never more than $10,000 worth. I've never had a financial sponsor. I worked for everything I got. How American is that? And I've paid more back taxes and legal fees than a little. But I've never had to wrestle for my self-esteem, and I certainly never came to expect that I would get it from movies or television. I always had books and my own imagination working with the power of ideas.

So this afternoon, I saw a headline saying 'Marvel's Black Panther Marks a Major Milestone', and it almost sounded like the ghost of T. Coates when I read:

Those of us who are not white have considerably more trouble not only finding representation of ourselves in mass media and other arenas of public life, but also finding representation that indicates that our humanity is multi­faceted. Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood, but also for others who need to see and understand us. When it doesn’t happen, we are all the poorer for it.

Aww. I used to think that it was a waste of money for any television producer to tell the stories of the Brady Bunch. You see I had black authors to choose from. All of them in fact. All of literature from Mark Twain to Arthur C Clarke to Richard Wright to Jean Toomer. I read The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (a little) and Danny Dunn without shame. I knew the little world of my neighborhood. I was destined to compete with everyone in the whole world. I wasn't chickenshit. So I read everybody's playbooks. After all, they were free. I had my library card. I would go to the Baldwin Hills Public Library on La Brea and check out the books with the rockets and the cars of the future. I just knew I was going to get a Fierbird III when I grew up. And why wouldn't I? I was going to grow up.

Somewhere around 1990 just before I turned 30 I was painfully reminded that everybody wasn't ready to fight for things that made sense. There were people standing in 'a cipher' bobbing their heads to Public Enemy thinking that the story of an ex-con was the light at the end of a dark tunnel of black life underground in America that had yet to see the sun. And I pitied the man who didn't know his father or found nothing to respect in his own family or neighborhood. I felt sorry for the man who felt an obligation to kill for his block, but was afraid to look for a job where he might face rejection. I listened with hard eyes to the man who wept in sympathy for the debilitating anger of Chester Himes. Every time I think of Chester Himes, I think of a drunk man throwing empty gin bottles out of the window of his tenement window hoping to hit the policeman, but ducking behind the curtains in case he actually does. I was reminded that everybody doesn't know the sound of the righteous drum, and maybe they heard it but stood up against the wall anyway, afraid to dance. Never learned to swim. Can't catch the rhythm of the stroke.

I was unleashed. I did all the things. And I moved to the Big Apple and stood in the shadows of the Colossus, and I was humbled. New York humbles men. But then I realized the NYC didn't understand what was going on in LA. Not at all. The New York Times blasted this congressman named Bruce Hershensohn as if he were running the state of California. So I started reading the Observer. I went another way, unashamed of my path. And I watched all the kids wear their X hats backwards waiting for Spike Lee to once again Do the Only Thing, because the Jews couldn't do it, and a black man needed a black movie made by a black man to truly be a black man. But I was already there and I didn't need the movie. I already read the book seven years before.

And I realized that the man on the street needed those television producers to tell the stories of the Brady Bunch. Because if my name was Joe Smith and I looked like an ordinary whiteboy, who actually gave a shit about me? I'd have to prove myself against all the other whiteboys, because there is nothing that matters less to a whiteboy than another whiteboy. James Baldwin wrote that. Who made Holden Caufield into somebody? A bunch of anonymous chickenshit whiteboys and their sorry parents, that's who. And Bill Clinton got elected because he went on TV, like he was dancing at the Cotton Club. Looky looky who has got soul! And I realized I had to get out of the street. I raised a family in the suburbs. Some in the South. Most on the West Coast. And I've watched the generation watch me watch TV and I wasn't taking it seriously. But now the expectation is that everybody has to have their own blockbuster movie superhero.

There's something strange about needing superheros and watching superhero movies in peacetime. The President said that America should have a big ass military parade. I thought about it, and it occurred to me that it's about time we stopped looking at Russell Crowe and Bruce Willis and bushy faced actors portraying Navy SEALS getting shot. Could we actually face the faces that march for once? The actual soldiers? Could we stop producing Brady Bunch stories and stop merchandising snapback ballcaps for once? Could we just for a moment or a generation if it's not asking too much, stop depending on millionaire producers to tell the stories we so desperately need for our self-esteem? Or is it too late for that?

I used to get 1000 hits a day on this blog. A decade ago it was poppin' off. I don't need the hits. I'm happy to have self-published. All of this blog never cost more than $2,500 to produce, and it's all still here. Comments and every word. Free. But now people speak in emojis. It's never to late for people who were born to fight. So these words are for you. You're not alone. And I'll go watch Black Panther and be entertained, but I won't need the fulfillment, and I won't need to wait for the next superhero story.

So let this be my black history story. Look at all of the heroes in the Tracy Chapman video. They didn't need an injection of multicultural vitamin M administered to them in their safe spaces. They didn't need warning labels on their food. They didn't express themselves with cardboard and Sharpies. They didn't beg you to like them or say something comforting in the comment section. They weren't chickenshit. They didn't squabble over slights and insults. They had dignity because they grew it in themselves, and they proved it every day to everybody. They competed HARD. That's a history worth remembering and replicating. It takes character. It takes you understanding the price of dignity.

 

The Effective Racist

As I was saying in 'Dumbing Down Racism':

The direction in the US is to make even more and more insults, slights, harassments and petty outrages to be included in 'racism'. This has taken the form of 'triggers' and 'microaggressions' whose remedies are politically correct speech and 'safe spaces'. The aim is to sensitize individuals to this and then come up with 'solutions'. These solutions will deliver attention, influence, money and votes to their originators who are the Multiculturalists. The redefinition of racism to ever more sensitive levels and calls for a 'national discussion' satisfies the fetishes of 'experts' who would rescue victims of this 'abuse'.

Since I have this bad habit of being an expert and a writer, I have yet to rid myself of the compulsion I have to write answers to questions I'd rather not be asked. But there it is. I keep thinking that if I explain things one more way, then it will be impossible for people not to come to better understanding. But I think most Americans think that it is racially impossible to think about race outside of what their racial identity dictates, or at least they behave as if that's the case for everyone except their saintly Aunt Betsy and the dead martyrs.

So everything is racist. But is it six pounds of racism? So I've come up with a two dimensional chart that you are smart enough to figure out yourself. So there's that. Here's the other thing by the way, that Charlottesville thing was 6 months ago. Since then there have been about 50 ordinary murders per day in this great country of ours.

So are the racists doing their jobs? Well that rather depends upon whether you are a minimum wage, entry-level non-skilled racist or a successful hedge-fund billionaire racist in the 1%. But, hey it's late on a Sunday night and I really don't want to engage in any more extended metaphors. What does a top-notch effective racist actually want?

Firstly. A racist is absolutely sold on the premise of racialism. That there is purity in races and something very close to speciation in homo sapiens. That people can be bred for lower or higher intelligence and a host of other things. Needless to say this hokum of the most specious psuedo-scientific bodewash, but hey, so is most of the miracle products sold on QVC. It doesn't stop that economy. Secondly, the racist believes something must be done about it. IE, the races are different therefore there must be consequences, and if there are no consequences then somebody ought to get busy creating some.

• Racial identification at all times
• Separation of the races
• No interracial marriage or sex
• No racial integration in schools
• Separate types of citizenship by race
• Separate kinds of punishments for crimes by race

Most important they want this to be all legal and all unoffensive.

Protection From Words

Despite the fact that feebleminded nitwits are accorded one vote in this great nation, they have proven incapable of staging the kind of revolution among their fatuous fraternity required to overturn the First Amendment rights of the rest of us. While we are mindful that a number of dubious ‘institutions of higher learning’ as well as many dainty lily-livered website editors have been cowed by the shrill whinging of the moronic meddlers, these are but farts in the wind: offensive, boorish, putrid and largely imperceptible by those who dealt it, yet soon to be dispersed but not forgotten.

The greater threat are those duplicitous criminal facilitators who have been made wealthy through the aggregation of the nickels and dimes of idiot attention, the purveyors of ‘reality’ in the media and legal professions always looking to cash in on the lowest common denominator. In league with the humorless screechy drama queens who interrupt sensible society with their obsessions, there is a cadre of cads, ever present and primed to overturn the works of more thoughtful and reflective citizens of the republic. These creepy comrades have managed to twist legitimate universities into Mobius contortions of civility and discourse which only appear to be two-sided.

The grownups out here are vigilant as well, and so we will not be intimidated by these mental midgets and their sinister sidekicks. Their machinations will fail under the instability of their Jenga practice of hollowing out institutions by pulling planks of common sense. Oh they will claim to be building a better America by attacking its Founders and foundation, but they are only toppling their own Babels with their psychobabble, as those of us with sweet simple reason have moved out of the shadows of their Mordor. So when their dark towers fall, we will be at a safe distance, and ultimately help the poor suffering dolts pick up the pieces.

Snowflakes will not prevail.

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.

They Said It Couldn't Be Done

I'm listening to the grinding sound of FUD over cryptocurrencies. It's annoying me to no end. I'd just like to review a few things I've heard in the past from the technically illiterate in consideration of the future of information technology. 

They said software would always and only be used by scientists for science, or by engineers for engineering but that business managers would never have computers on their desks. They said that only businesses would never use UNIX and that IBM would put all of those other guys out of business. They said that TCP/IP was never going to replace Banyan Vines in businesses. They said that AS/400 was an unbeatable operating system for business and that peer to peer networking wasn't necessary. They said that Token Ring was superior to Ethernet and would win in the marketplace.

They said that Triple DES was as secure as cryptography could get and that anything more secure than that could never be in the public domain. They said that MP3s and file sharing was only for piracy. They said the music industry would never go along with something like MP3s. They said that the taxes applied to the sales of blank CDs would satisfy the artists and labels to makeup for money lost to piracy. They said that the addition of digital music would shrink the entire market. They said podcasts wouldn't matter and could never compete with content on broadcast TV.

They said that AOL / TimeWarner would be the industry leader and determine the future of content delivery on the internet. They said the Steve Case was the most brilliant businessman who understood IT. They said that nobody would be able to solve the last mile problem of fiber to the home. They said broadcast TV would last forever. They said nobody in the mainstream would ever buy $2500 computers. They said nobody would sell personal computers to the public on credit. They said Scientific Atlanta was the only company that could win the settop box wars. They said there could be no possible business model that would satisfy the major studios and convince them to put their best properties online.

They said ecommerce was doomed because nobody would trust putting their credit card information online. They said that travel agents were here to stay because websites could never be sophisticated enough to handle airlines, hotels or car rental agencies. They said money lost in the dot com bubble proved bricks would always beat clicks. They said all of Silicon Valley was like Pets.com. 

They said that the digital divide was permanent and there was actually no good reason for black Americans to go online. They said that nobody would get news from online and that online advertising was not enough to sustain any real business model. They said bloggers could never influence real opinion. They said that Presidential campaigns didn't need to pay attention to 'netroots'. They said people who sat in front of terminals to write onto the internet couldn't be taken seriously, that it was all virtual and had no impact on real life. 

They said nobody would buy books online. Then they said nobody would buy shoes online. Then they said nobody would buy clothes online. Then they said nobody would buy groceries online. They said nobody would file their taxes online. They said nobody would pay bills online. They said nobody would buy cars online. They said nobody would rent apartments online. They said nobody would buy and sell securities online. They said nobody would contribute to charities online. 

They said Blockbuster was not threatened by online upstarts. They said Microsoft couldn't build a gaming console. They said the Blackberry was the business phone. They said Nokia could never be threatened by Apple. They said people would never watch video and movies on their phones. They said there was no use for wireless internet connectivity. They said wifi was only for the elite, not ordinary people. They said there would never be wifi on commercial airliners. They said a free operating system could not beat Microsoft Windows. They said separating the browser from Windows would kill Microsoft. They said applications run on browsers would never replace fat clients. 

They said open source software could not beat proprietary software. They said databases on mainframes would never be threatened by decentralized databases. They said no serious business could be run without a bricks address. They said ordinary people would not need or want 64bit computers. They said videogames could never make as much money as movies. They said tablets were ridiculous and nobody would have a tablet and a phone. They said Facebook was just for teens. They said Twitter was just for teens. They said online dating was just a fad. They said proprietary software was more secure than open source software. 

Today they are saying Bitcoin is worthless. 

So is a single bitcoin worth $500,000, $5,000, $500 or $0? I’m inclined to say $0, especially if bitcoin’s value depends on it being adopted as a global digital currency to replace dollars. There is no chance whatsoever that bitcoin can displace the dollar, for the simple reason that it is badly designed. Bitcoin can handle a pathetically small number of transactions, and uses an inordinate amount of electricity to do so, making it entirely unsuitable to replace ordinary money.

Even if bitcoin worked better, it is in a Catch-22 because of Gresham’s law, the nostrum that bad money drives out good. Given the choice of spending inflationary government-issued money or something which holds its value, everyone would spend the bad paper stuff and hoard the bitcoin. You wouldn’t want to be the person who spent 10,000 bitcoins on two pizzas in 2010, when a bitcoin was worth a fraction of a cent. Those bitcoins are now worth $40 million. But if no one spends bitcoin, it will never get established as a currency.

Bitcoin's value depends upon the genius of its invention and the conviction of those engineers and investors who understand that and their willingness to build upon its technology. Same as any other invention. The world will make room for it because it works better than the alternatives. The genie is out of the bottle. It will be adapted and perfected. It is inevitable. Why? Because the idea is entirely too massive to be ignored, just like open source software. Except digital currency is even bigger. It's bigger than junk bonds in the 80s. It's bigger than rural electrification in the 30s. It's about as big as double entry accounting. That's how deep this is going to go. I guarantee you. 

But there's basically one conspiracy, and that is to keep Coinbase as the only exchange in the US with access to a bank account. I can't imagine there will be no other bank to take on that challenge, but I can imagine people at the SEC being whispered to. 

American Wag Moves Forward

We're starting to get a tempo and a pace for our new video blog. 'Vlog' sounds so much like a morloch alien species I can see Spock raising one eyebrow. I am incrementally and unimpressively advancing my iMovie skills. So I should have music and titles in the new ones. I still don't know how to fade the music. We've changed the position of the camera and our voices are definitely coming out more clearly. Switching the format to shorter 15 to 20 minute segments works. So we'll cruise at this altitude and see how well it works. 

We're trying to get something that's controversial between us, and I don't think it takes much. We'll perceive things differently and that's what we're beginning to flesh out in these episodes.  

One of the interesting perspectives we have on our democracy is the roles of becoming. I think that for a lot of people it is somewhat misplaced. Without having guarantees or even something as ephemeral as a social consensus, I think young and/or undereducated folks have a very difficult time managing the confidence to develop skills and acumen. Too much of our social interaction is anti-meritocratic and self- and other-deprecating without much humor. That's the skillset for ladies and gentlemen in a society that seems unwilling to acknowledge anything but the suit. And of course the presumption against 'suits' is that they are douchebags. And those who are not are either sweaties or bastards, or worse, sweaty bastards. It is those presumptions about human nature that are screwing up our politics and our society, and I think that within the upper middle class, aka, the Slice, we are overwhelmingly tempted to become sweaty bastards with a lot of class apprehensions, less we lose the attention of the ruling class. We are too much our work and our politics and not enough ourselves. Having that kind of unity seems to be the exception rather than the rule. We look for life hacks. 

I feel like I'm getting better and seeing how people's view of society affects what they desire from politics and how economic insecurity drives up the desire for political necessity and stridency. But it's also what people expect to have to do and sacrifice to be employed which really is important. I think the fact that so few of us understand economics is what misguides our deportment. And there's too damned much signal that is actually noise. That's why we don't understand labor. That's why we don't understand character. But I think it's primarily because of the character corruption of the ruling class which doesn't actually know a lot of stuff. Which brings us to questions of power. Ick. 

 

I don't know how much the virtual post-industrial economy can sustain mankind. We really have to assume a lot, much of which Amazon is building (and yes I tend to ignore Microsoft and IBM) to be the infrastructure of future economies. Just as we needed roads and trucking to be the logistics of the material economy, the digital economy needs better standards than it has been able to establish. So we really don't know what equivalent cars are going to be yet. They won't be flying cars, but they will have cupholders and airbags. None of the postwar carmakers could envision what's on our roads today. We really can't envision what kinds of bits will be flying 40 years from now. But I daresay more of people's life experiences will be conducted through digital pathways and the tolls we negotiate will be the basis of that economy. What's really interesting is to try to figure out what will be the future digital Lincoln Center.

 

And yeah. Motorcycles!

A Straight Line

What has gotten me most upset over the past few days in the time I've spent chatting with my fellows in the Chatting Class is the temptation towards vigilantism by proxy. I am annoyed by their indications that they want to influence the progress of the law and law enforcement towards a specific sensitivity. They want the President to say something extra hostile to white supremacists, racists, Nazis, neo-confederates and other anti-semitic rabble who have infested the streets of Charlottesville. I don't need him to. I'm not sure that I want him to. So I wrote:

Some people are puzzled that I have no need for Trump to issue comforting platitudes, and that I was never impressed by those of the prior President. Perhaps this video will help you understand my perspective.

Today I have found too many people asking for things they should understand cannot be guaranteed, especially by the system which has put them in the embarrassing position of not being satisfied by political rhetoric, and yet demanding more political rhetoric. Politically correct rhetoric.

Somebody told me that Barack Obama got one million retweets today. Like that's going to help. 

I happen to drill into the simple statement by the President that there are bad actors on all sides. That is because I want the President to mete out appropriate punishment according to the law, without regard to the animus of any side against the perpetrators of civil unrest and criminal acts. In other words if anti-Nazi protesters are arrested and charged with assault and Nazis are arrested and charged with assault, they are equally wrong. My expression of this idea has been called 'moral equivalence' and I sense this objection as well as some political partisanship at work. But my rationale comes from a different place, a place relatively devoid of fear. 

When I saw the tapes of the violent rally at Berkeley earlier this year I was fascinated. There is something instinctual within me asking me exactly what I would do if I were in that situation. Because I know if that were my neighborhood, I would have to be there. I certainly would not go there from here, nor would I go to Ferguson or any other place on the map where I don't actually live. But if it came to me, how would I handle it? I ask because it is something of a foregone conclusion. I know myself. I know my instincts. I would fight. 

I don't want to. I want to talk myself out of it. I want to rationalize a kind of pacifism. But I know better. I can handle violence, I can dispense violence. I'm stronger than most and I'm better prepared than most. I know that I could make a difference and I feel a strong obligation to protect the innocent. I've done it before, and I'm likely to do it again. I would insert myself in between aggressors and innocents and I would be aggressive towards attackers. It's not my job. It's not my desire, but it is within my capacity. 

I don't have the fear that I would be helpless against aggressors. That is because I have studied what I have in the past four years. It has rearranged my sense of responsibility and civic duty. But here's one simple rule that makes even more sense than ever. Don't go to stupid places where stupid people are doing stupid things. That describes Charlottesville and Ferguson and anywhere that people have gone feral out in the streets wanting to clash and burn. I understand what it means to calculate the amount of force necessary to subdue. You don't enter into such decisions lightly. Ever. This is what it feels like to think like I think, as someone with guns and training. And even without fear, one understands that on any day at any moment a simple mistake or oversight in a confrontation can mean the end of your health, even the end of your life. As they say in college, you go big or you go home. That's easy. I'm going home. 

There's a great scene from a corny movie in which Dr. David Banner who is also The Incredible Hulk reveals his secret. In the comic book world, everyone knows that the good doctor is a mild mannered genius who, when angered, becomes a phenomenally indestructible beast. The angrier he gets, the more terrifyingly huge he becomes, and in his rage he is capable of leveling skyscrapers. As the monstrous enemy approaches Banner and his fellow Avengers, Captain America says that it's about time for Banner to get angry. He replies "That's my secret, I'm always angry". The transformation from Banner to Hulk is part of all of us. As Banner reveals that he is always angry we are shocked to know that his Hulk powers were always under his control, that he was never a madman, but that he possesses the explicit knowledge of self that channels his fury into a righteous direction. He's not passive aggressive. He's simply smarter and more powerful than anyone else and he allows the myth to remain. David Banner is heroic. 

The heroic is timeless, there is an arrow of dedication and effort in that direction. Some just look that way, some walk that way, some run. I'm a late jogger who quickly tires. But I am on the path. So I'm particularly vulnerable. I might make a stupid sacrifice. But I know why the existence of white supremacists, Nazis and other violators of the peace don't concern me to the point at which I am demanding that words from the bully pulpit calm my nerves. I recognize my brothers on that path. I know those employed in law enforcement and sworn to duty are ready to make the proper decision. They too are always angry at bad actors, and they too need no words of reassurance. 

But the most important thing about those who are sworn to protect and serve is that they understand on the daily how important it is to serve consistently. For them, a violation of the law is a violation of the law without regard to person. They are a key element in our justice system because they do not have the privilege of arresting people for evil thoughts. They don't have the need to hear specific denouncements of impassioned righteous citizens standing up for what they believe in. They don't need flags. They themselves are Banners. Now look at the picture. Here's my caption. "Whatever dude. Just don't cross the line."

I don't expect everybody to have the self-possession of peace officers, but I do expect them to hold off on thinking about changing the law. There is nothing in our system that is ill-prepared to handle the conflicts of the meatheads in Charlottesville. I question the sensibleness of those who set off to travel to that stupid place on that stupid day, and those who are calling for magic words. And I seek to confront, with this essay, the instinct to go tribal and ask for extraordinary law. Heroes aren't triggered.  

The problem with today's multiculturalism is that it is different than pluralism. Pluralism is the proper ethos for America, multiculturalism is not. The difference can be explained simply by assuming Americans can be divided into two tribes:

Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc..

Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color, sexual preference, etc.

Some might think that the presence of Nazis makes this a different kind of situation, that there is something that requires special regard for the violators of protected classes. That is the kind of distinction that is best resolved by the deliberations of judges and juries. In the streets, there is simply law and lawlessness. Cross the line and you are arrested. You might expect that the character of the counter demonstrations to matter. Let me say that it does, but let me also say, and this is important, that when I claim to be Sheepdog, that this is a tribal association. If I have any claim to the warrior mystique or the heroic path or the ways of the wise, all of that is tribal. So maybe I'm Ideological Tribe A, but I'm also in that Sheepdog tribe.

All of those tribal associations must remain subordinate to the rule of law.

The more we tinker with the rule of law from our tribal perspectives, the less applicable that rule of law becomes. When it becomes easy to defy the rule of law, when it becomes easy to mock police officer's dedication and service. So yes, when my Jewish friend says nothing is going to stop him from traveling to that stupid place to confront those stupid Nazis, I respect his tribe. I respect his motivation. But I don't respect his demand for the President to speak in defense of his tribe and specifically against another tribe. That's not how the rule of law is maintained. The rule of law does not have multicultural and tribal voodoo words sprinkled in with it. A moment's consideration reveals that is precisely what certain partisan Americans are screaming about now, the allegation that the President doesn't want to alienate white nationalists. 

That of course is a call to come up with a special policy in the law to presume the guilt of white nationalists and to jump the gun accordingly when they are found in stupid places doing stupid things. Pre-emption. Predisposition. Precrime. The existence of a Nazi, they say,  is like a man holding a sword above the head of another. Simply arrest him before he swings it. The existence of a swastika is hate speech which should be taken as incitement to a violent act. This is the blurring of the line that I cannot tolerate, not because Nazis don't deserve it, not because nobody deserves it, but because we cannot provide a system smart enough and consistent enough to have that standard as law. 

You are going to have to step out of your house and put on your suit of armor and be prepared to clash in the streets, representing your tribe in defiance of the rule of law if you want to punch Nazis. With contempt for police officers, sheepdogs, and the rule of law, you are going to have to descend to the level of Nazis who stand in contempt of American society. When America's disgust with Nazis is not sufficient for you, get out of line and go bust some heads. Do it. Cross the line. 

With regards to Ferguson I wrote:

Ferguson burning is a good thing. 

They say that good fences make good neighbors. I say that anger and frustration are just like farts in the wind. Nothing political really matters until people are ready to burn things down. It makes for good dividing lines. The Ferguson mob is a lynch mob, there's no question about that. If they could get their hands on The Man, they would stone him. That's good news. It has clarity. It shows that people actually have the courage of their convictions, they are putting their money where their mouths are. We, at long last, have a proper mob.

Go ahead and join a proper mob. If Antifa is your mob, represent. Just don't expect support from citizens who desire the rule of law. If Occupy is your mob, get out there son. Show 'em what you're made of. But understand with clarity that you have decided to abandon your faith in democratic processes and institutions. Of course they are not perfect. Of course they need maintenance and reform. Don't pretend that your chants and fists and flags are instruments of democracy and law.

Charlottesville has a bunch of tribes attempting to overthrow the authority of the courts now deliberating a lawsuit on the proper location of certain Civil War statues, a gift of artifacts of history. I hardly compare but, I consider my blog a gift of historical artifacts. Look at the picture again. My website now hosts a confederate flag, plain as day. Do I get scrubbed? I'm going to take a chance and see if Facebook can handle this kind of free speech. Maybe it can, maybe it cant. We'll see. 

In conclusion, I recognize all sorts of American tribes. Ideological tribes. All of which participate in our system of elections and are subordinate to the rule of law. That law should make no exceptions and be no respecter of persons or tribes. I oppose the idea that the Executive Branch make any exceptions or call out specific partisan enemies for any reason, that it treats all Americans equally with respect to their standing or what stupidity they profess or enact in public. They are either law upholders or law breakers. There is no social justice, there is society and all its tribes and the American justice system which stands in place for those who break the law. It's a simple and straight line. Know which side you're on and stop trying to bend it. Yeah yeah yeah I've heard your arguments before. Whatever dude. Just don't cross the line. 

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. 

 

Obligatory Seriousness on the Google Manifesto

I haven't read it. I'm probably not going to. That's because my interest in gender balance in the computer industry is low. I care about the software, not the people. Ironically (or perhaps not), this is what makes me a computer geek, and I can testify that for most of my life it has cost me socially. Everybody knows the stereotype of computer geeks. If you don't, then watch the video. The point I'm making is just that small and it should come as no surprise to anyone. Except for that fragment of the population who has extraordinary admiration and hopes for Google as a model of our society, which I happen to think is one weird fragment kissing another weird fragment's butt. 

In the news this morning, I read that Rockwell, which is now called Rockwell Collins (since when?), is the object of a takeover bid of around $20 billion. A lot of us keep forgetting about those big businesses that don't listen to our every word, and sell ourselves back to ourselves. In Google news, the GoogleManifesto, some essay written by a dude named James Damore, is all over the place. Evidently it went viral within the company and then I read about it first on Quillette and tweeted it out Monday. I'm generally attracted to articles that get actual scientists to comment, which is rare all over the net. Quillette is the bomb anyway and on my RSS. Right now Quillette is either getting DDOSed or slashdotted. Good for them. Fortunately, I have my own Evernote copy of the article in question.

So my basic and abiding interest is how computer systems add or detract from the ability of humans to make decisions. In fact, that's my career. So I find it rather disturbing that systems can be abused, then again, some people are just poor decision makers no matter what facts may lay at their feet. So my new favorite quote, from Game of Thrones, is "I trust an honest man's eyes more than I trust what everybody knows." And here, Damore is vindicated by Quillette's experts. 

This is the core of my support of Quillette's article:

Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:

• The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
• The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed.

Since I've tweeted out soundbites, I need to be here to catch flack downwind of the hot air spewing right now. Let's see what happens.

If this is an Affirmative Action discussion, then the simple fact is this: 18% of computer science degrees go to women. If Google wants 'parity', then 18% should be their target. If Google wants 'equality' then they're going to have to make some controversial discriminations. I am convinced that there is a demand within the non-bell curve of Silicon-Valley-Americans that far outstrips the supply of qualified women. So the mechanics of creating equality is bound to create a very bumpy playing field, despite all rhetoric to the contrary. Balanced workforce does not produce the kind of tokens people want. Well it very well may create outsized tokens, but that's not what I see as a proper pursuit. Either way, the office politics of such companies I find to be rather twisted. You and I both know that people would figuratively kill to land a job at Google. So I cannot imagine that they don't figuratively kill for promotions inside Google. 

I tend to believe that too many people have bullshit jobs, and that of the responsible industries, IT has done less than it should in insuring that productivity goes up. There has been and continues to be more bullshit, which is now often embedded in bullshit processes abetted by bullshit software. But I'm just a cranky old bastard who has been programming since 1974. What do I know? I know I very rarely work with female peers. But my cranky gripe has more to do with what millennials get away with in startups and the thrash that causes. On the whole and in the long run, more than half the industry is still running Windows. See? We're not all getting better software. The industry is generating masturbatory systems. But I'm sure that's not the tangent people embroiled in this controversy wish to discuss. Well, let them come here and discuss it. I can't guess.  

My point is that Google itself (not Alphabet) crowdsources all of its value. Google is valuable to the masses because it caters to the masses. When it comes to evolutionary biology, the masses don't get it. They don't care to get it, and they want what they want despite what the experts say. If Google is decidedly democratic (or wishes to present such an image) then it must pretend to aspire for a democratic definition of equality in its workforce, because that is what the masses will want to hear. Thus the dilemma. I think Damore will sue. I think Damore will win. I think there will be more pussy hat parades of disgust. 

PBR vs Cosmo

Fareed Zakaria is somebody I don't like. In many ways, he represents to me the wrongheadedness of Pinker's assertion that mankind's societies have evolved beyond war on the scale of the 20th Century. And so people like FZ have a kind of smug satisfaction that their occasional stupidity and arrogance will never be met by a punch in the nose. I don't think they have any idea how many people work out at the UFC gyms. Be that as it may, I don't like the way people are using the term 'cosmopolitan' to describe such part-time snowflakes. As I have expressed my ire about the dainty elements of the chatting classes, this should come as no surprise to regular Cobb readers. However I do use the term cosmopolitan. Here's how.

An old saying of my abut NYC is that at any moment there are 10,000 people doing exactly what you're doing and half of them don't speak English. As much as I appreciate how any successful life in the big city gets compressed to a handful of efficient options in any endeavor, the big city does avail itself to providing any observer with that mind-boggling number of different humans using their own schemes to achieve. And in this, whether the ambition is naked or not, one is bound to find something odd and unfamiliar ore even shocking about the modus operandi. Therefore one who is cosmopolitan accustoms oneself to this variety. One who is cosmopolitan adapts to the wider set of actions that can be expected when all sorts of human diversity is at play.

This bears directly on a matter of character. It is a matter of character I expect from people who have a direct interest in interacting with a large number of individuals of all sorts, which is something opposite to the pig farmer who has less incentive to develop certain social skills. Speaking another language is the very first that I think of. In fact endeavoring to speak a standardized version of one's native language should reflect in the cosmopolitan mind not so much a social signaling as an ability to employ a standard. Without going into a lot of exemplifications, this is what I mean - the understanding that the use of standards, conformities, etiquette and chivalry is the gateway to a more catholic ability with larger numbers of humanity. 

It is not, on the other hand, a substitution for morality, and this is where I think people might confuse my meaning. I simply mean that the cosmopolite does not get confused or disoriented by human variety because they have a reason to invest in the skill of communication across provincial lines. So to me, cosmopolitan is the 'opposite' of provincial. If your local pub only sells beer in cans, you are not likely to drink a cosmo martini. There is nothing superior or inferior about Pabst Blue Ribbon. It's an alcoholic beverage. One should not confuse aestetics with ethics. How often will we draw inferential patterns that are incorrect? Well, our computers will tell us. In the meantime, let us also not presume some level of intelligence (or g, as it were) tied to cosmopolitan skills. Pig farmers are smart too. They know what you don't, and they make money doing so. 

The cosmopolite is often forced by big city circumstances to grow an understanding between the Spanish of Dominicans and that of Puerto Ricans. Coming from LA to NYC, I thought those were Mexican restaurants. For me, Spanish = Mexican. When I moved to Boston, I was surprised to see janitorial staffs made of Eastern Europeans. My cosmopolitanism was actually local to Los Angeles. New Yorkers on the other hand are hard pressed to tell Thais from Japanese from Pilipino. In this way, cosmopolitan ways have their limits as well, although we assume that the step to globalism is a short one. I think we're playing percentages and doing so incorrectly. If you can make it there, doesn't mean you can make it anywhere, even if you're in the top 20%. 

I find myself very impressed with the clever, and not so much with the inventive. That's just where my head is at these days, and I think that has some bearing on my take on the provincial and the cosmopolitan. In a certain way, the cosmopolitan relies more on conventional wisdom - the intersection of common sense and popular sentiment. In some way that is not seriously tested in our open society. But the bohunk must know what he knows. He doesn't have a market to sell that which isn't proven. That makes him, from the point of view of risk management (and Incerto) more likely to succeed being called out. 

The other thought to add to this regards the possibilities of escalating civil conflicts. I think it requires the thinking free man consider chivalry.

Race Credits

I've stumbled upon a new way to confound and mock wishful thinkers. This in the dimension of race. It began with a stab at the definition of 'white privilege' which I consider to be presumptuous, ill-defined and mostly insignificant. 

In an attempt to monetize the benefits of inherited white privilege, someone suggested that the average income differential by race was indicative of the historical boon. An average white woman, by dint of this boon would therefore realize an annual salary of 22,000 whereas the average black woman would only receive an annual salary of 20,000. Therefor the white woman owes the black woman 1,000 if equality were to be achieved. 

However it is also part of this conventional wisdom that poor Muslim immigrants are now denied the opportunity to participate in the American economy by dint of a racist policy. Well, then let's let them in, goes the rationale. The effect however would be that these penniless people would be lumped in with the blacks and then reduce their annual salaries by another 1,000. Doesn't that increase white privilege? 

This mind teaser would force someone as bound to logic such as I am to investigate other conundrums of white privilege and racism as defined by those seeking a way out. Those seeking a way out? Don't I mean Whites? Well, I guess I do. Part of the engagement with the dilemma of white privilege involves some way of Whites weaseling their way out of it. Of course they do so by the basic presumption that they are indeed White and what they do as Whites matters. So they try to figure something out. Something that can finally allow the White race to sleep at night. Something must be found to purify the evil historical deeds of the Whites. What Whites need now, more than ever, is White purity.

Do you hear me chuckling?

Well, despite the fact that I have recently picked up a new commenter who believes it is his sacred black duty to make sure that I do not pollute myself with the agendas of the alt-right and various forces of white supremacy, I have decided to go ahead and speak up again on the tedious subject of race. I mean, it was a slam dunk. And to that end, I offer the following syllogism straight outta Facebook. The subject was two Asian stars of Hawaii-50, the rebooted TV show, quit for not getting paid. Predictably this is now a 'teachable moment' for the devotees of white privilege. 

What if Asians were actually such people who didn't need to watch TV? What if Whites were such a people who did need to watch TV? Then the presence of Asians on TV would be beneficial to Whites. The absence of Asians on TV would be detrimental to Whites.

Therefore it would be in the White interest to have Asians on TV.

The question therefore becomes whether or not Asians find it in their own interests to serve the White interests in consuming Asians on TV. And that depends upon whether the Asians on TV are portrayed as Asians serving the interests of Asians.

Thus if Asian and White interests are generally mutually exclusive, then the sole benefit of Asians on TV to Asians would be Asians serving Asian interests. Let's say that interest is teaching Asian language. Since that would be a mutually exclusive interest, it has to be measured against the White interest of having Asians on TV, meaning basically Asians on TV doing all things only a few of which actually serve Asian interests.

Thus an equilibrium is created in which the benefits to Whites is significant in that Whites can additionally claim to serve Asian interests (subservient to the White interest in TV). In other words, on the whole it's good TV which serves the White interest.

If on the other hand Whites and Asians both have the same interests in TV, then it doesn't matter how Whites are portrayed and it doesn't matter how Asians are portrayed. All that matters are the interests of TV, which means getting paid. In which case it doesn't matter the race of people who are getting rewards or those who are getting screwed.

Moral of the story. Don't fight the house.
__

However, if you choose to represent racial interests in any area of endeavor and choose to suggest that whatever happens to one member of a race is of significance to that race, then you have a great deal of accounting to do of interest by race.

I would suggest that this interest has been generated in Whites who desire to signify their morality as Whites to others who are not White. In other words, Whites are making themselves Whiter by investing in a new theory of race. Like carbon credits, this is a new economy of race credits. It has far less accountability than Jim Crow. And yet it is more pervasive. And it is generating a raft of strange new behaviors as Whites think up different methods to signal to each other that they are more racially sensitive than ever before in the history of mankind. Something they perceive to be actually simple, given the racial theory of historical White behavior.

It's all rather pathetic.

 

We're in a race bubble. Everybody seems to be an expert on what is and what is not racist. Which means of course that nobody really knows for sure, but they're trying. Well, you can't be mad at people for trying. But you'd think they'd be a little bit smarter about it. Actually more robust about it, or simply less fragile about it. Their accounting is completely random and nobody is really keeping an objective score, which is why so many charlatan claims are taken seriously. I'll keep my eyes on the math. As usual, when I bother to care.

But here's the serious question. What is at the end of white privilege? Is it a war that goes on forever? Does the white race get destroyed? When it drops below a measurable level do people continue being white? I ask this question as someone for whom the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were successful. All the major hurdles were beaten. If they weren't, then the fight for gays wouldn't have happened. Asian interests would not have been considered. It would still be 1968. There would still be no blacks on McDonald's commercials, stars in the mainstream or homeowners in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Black Americans would still be constrained to the same colleges and universities, still have their own sports leagues and barred from professional associations like the Bar or AMA. In other words, my generation had goalposts. For people I grew up with, it was the integration of Corporate America. For a lot of older folks I recall, it was the integration of the civil service. For others it was the integration of colleges and universities or suburban neighborhoods. Which is to say for most of us, it was some sort of integration. The elimination of white privilege, as it's defined, as something inherent to the white race, essentially means the elimination of the white race. But of course 'Whites' will decide how much white privilege is eliminated or purified. Everybody else who wants to speak up on behalf of a non-white race can complain forever. Then again that's the definition of race. You're either superior or sniveling. 

The Immorality of Infinite Regress

I want you to imagine that all the cotton ever produced in the USA was produced by slave labor. Imagine further that every bit of cotton clothing in the USA came from this domestic product. That would mean that everyone who buys cotton clothing is funding the industry based on slave labor, and there is no way out of it. So who wears cotton?

This dilemma requires a choice between infinite regress vs fungibility. And the answer is fungibility. Society cannot function without fungibility, and this should be fairly obvious given a little thought. I don’t have the patience to explain, I think this example with Bitcoin(!) does an excellent job.

 

Instead of currency, think of what some people are trying to do in judging the action of every criminal and racist in American history and trying to recast the moral integrity of every person living today according to infinite regress of sins or victim status of their ancestors. That is what a lot of foolish Americans are trying to do. Every day.

But we have something called the Fifth Amendment. It goes a little something like this:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

We also have something called the Bible. In the book of Ezekiel, it goes a little something like this:

But suppose he has a child who sees all the sins that his father committed. He becomes alarmed and doesn’t do them. 15 He doesn’t eat on the mountains or pay attention to the idols of the house of Israel. He doesn’t defile his neighbor’s wife.16 He doesn’t cheat anyone, either by seizing collateral for loans or committing robbery. He gives his food to the hungry and clothes to the naked. 17 He refrains from oppressing the poor by taking neither interest nor profit. He observes my case laws and follows my regulations. He won’t die because of his father’s guilt. He will surely live. 18 As for his father: If he exploited the weak or committed robbery, or did anything else that wasn’t good for the people, he will die because of his own guilt.

19 You will say, “Why doesn’t the child bear his parent’s guilt?” The child has acted justly and responsibly. The child kept all my regulations and observed them. The child will surely live. 20 Only the one who sins will die. A child won’t bear a parent’s guilt, and a parent won’t bear a child’s guilt. Those who do right will be declared innocent, and the wicked will be declared guilty.

So I have given you three different ways of understanding that sin, crime, immoral behavior does not pass down from generation to generation, from individual to individual, from group to group. No society would work if complaints not only had no statute of limitations but could be arbitrarily placed on the head of someone who didn’t perpetrate the offense. But you and I know, every day people are trying to establish exactly that condition.

Infinite regress is infinite injustice.

American Wag 002 - The Affirmative Action Show

For the time being, Cobb will serve as the host for American Wag, which is an upcoming podcast and series of discussions between myself and Marc Danziger. It will be a vehicle for most of my discussions of current events and other distractions from my own production and leisure, and at some point it should become productive itself. Both of us bring a lot of experience if not wisdom. Our attitude is that we are a couple of unfiltered gentlemen who aren't afraid to literally call bullshit on what is. However we both share a deep sense of compassion for our fellows and only hesitantly retreat from society. Our aim is to leave no stone unturned and to provide a map to practical living in an era that finds trust difficult to attain. You'll know it when you see it. 

A couple notes on this discussion. It is, as Marc says, a discussion that started on Facebook and that we took into our own dimensions. Interestingly enough, I had no idea who Cringleow was, in terms of age, politics or ethnicity. I'm probably spelling his name wrong, but that can be corrected. I was looking for a number of posts on Affirmative Action but I didn't find the one I was looking for at all. Considering how many times I've discussed it here and at Vision Circle over the past 14 years, you'd think I'd do a better job. But it's a rather old discussion. What's odd is that I may have done my best summarization over at Quora. Speaking of which, I do speak out at Quora and a little bit at Medium and Facebook. Cobb is always home. Jumping back, I did add a couple qualifying responses to the first reactions over in Facebook to the video. I put one below. 

My rule #1 about black people is this: "Don't second-guess black people." That goes for everyone, including black people. So I am inclined in all things, to take what anybody says about black people with a grain of salt. Or more properly, I take attitudes by and about black people as nothing more or less than politics. Outside of that, it's just you talking about your relationships with the black people you know, and [stuff] you hear on the interwebz and TV.

However I do pay attention to history, and by that I mean world history. If somebody tells me they are oppressed, I want to test their oppression against the oppressions of every people around the world. It gives me a lot of comfort to do so, because the overwhelming majority of Americans may be fit to be tied, but not ready to kill.

Recently I got into a discussion about racist police in Oakland. And my interlocutors essentially kept poking me until I said it was a singularly large problem. In the end, like with Ferguson, I'm saying well of course they are racist cops. Who would ever want to live in Oakland? Well, everybody who does. This is rather like conversations with women who don't want your solution, they want your patient attention to their talking about the problem. I get that. But I also get that my interpretation of what liberation was all about had everything to do with race not defining your interests or concerns, ambitions or desires. So I pay particular attention to what gets defined as a 'black' problem and how people are compelled to have a 'black' opinion about it. I alluded to that in my talk about Lewis Hamilton vs Michael Brown. As I write I think about the busses that used to stop at Crenshaw and Santa Barbara Avenue before it became King Blvd in Los Angeles. There was always one special bus that went to the horse track going southbound and another that went to the city jail going northbound. In all of my life I never took either of those buses out of desire or necessity. Both of them were filled with black Americans that weren't me, as mysterious a crowd as any. Yet there we were all living in that same 'black community' of which I only played my part.

These discussions therefore become more and more difficult because I have 1000 reasons to respect black diversity, and dismiss theories of race. But also because I've studied race for my own purposes, I've developed an ear for when people are speaking of their own experience vs when they are taking interpretations about black life. In the end I have decided that race is poison in every shape, and varyingly real in most American lives. It is darkness, nothing more. It is an absence of light.

Somebody told me that if the only war you ever study is WW2, then your definition of evil begins and ends with Hitler. Barlow's Law thus applies. And so it goes with the study of America's Negro Problem.

Yet with all problems there needs to be, as I mentioned, healing and curing. As tedious as the litanies of complaint are likely to be, our humanity compels us to pay attention to suffering. I have been healed. I have been cured. The formula that attaches us to race: "In order for me to do X, race Y must do Z" has been expunged from my social calculations. I remember the names of all of my dogs in that fight, but I have set them free from the pit. And maybe that has put me at a distance that makes my opinion irrelevant, or maybe it makes mine the exact kind of opinion worth hearing out. I haven't decided.

Civic Wikipedia

I have many many ideas about how our information world can be improved. I need to be a bit more forward in advancing those ideas. How about this?

Civic data backed by reputation management systems can bridge the gap between short news cycles and university training by generating longitudinal interest across groups with different levels of expertise. The technology exists today, but neither private companies nor municipalities are effective. This needs a philanthropic push.

I have been informed by a reader that Jeff Bezos is interested in thinking of ways to make some philanthropic good happen. My big ideas, XRepublic and Box Tag are part of this arena. Certainly XRepublic is, but I figured I can make money with Box Tag. Either way, some of the ideas of XRepublic can be used under the heading of longitudinal data journalism. So I've put together this mashup video with the specific intent of getting the attention of the folks who work with Bezos. 

Again, the point here is to emphasize the simple fact that very little or none of our social media generated by big media players provide tools that facilitate collaboration for civic purposes. It's a huge and obvious hole into which not enough thought has gone. 

I said 'blockchain' at the end of this to emphasize what Clay Shirky has made clear. There is a lot of surplus cognitive ability in humanity that can be 'monetized'. The point is not to monetize so much as to understand that even though there are no business models today that we understand could underpin the development of these systems, that in the future there can be. I am not aware of who funds non-profit organizations who would provide data to serve the public in this way. Meanwhile data markets are conceivably funded by 'initial coin offerings'. I am not comfortable wading in those speculative waters. I'd rather follow a coherent vision, and I'm not sure that can be crowdfunded or run by VCs.  

As I think of parallel and complimentary ideas, I will update this post. 

• Data Journalism
• How to Beat the Trolls
• Xrepublic and Digital Democracy

The Althais Aka Archive

Readers of Cobb know that I had a black nationalist upbringing as a child. As such I was, among other things, participant in the very first celebration of Kwanzaa. Among the family, friends and associates of the day were more than a handful of interesting characters with stories to tell. I am fortunate to have received a number of correspondences handed over personally from Althais Aka a family friend and a favorite 'aunt' of mine.  

I cannot say what I know of Althais, because I don't know. She was an extraordinarily attractive young woman, with the perfect afro and a very snazzy home in Leimert Park. One of the first art shows put on by my father's Institute for Black Studies took place at her house, and here I have a picture. That's my mother on the left. I helped construct those pegboards, but I must say that's about all I recall besides the pride of being involved. Althais was certainly associated, as we all were, with Father Hannibal's church. I was a bit young to remember much of that place. What I do remember of her was that she was fearless. There was nothing conventional about her; she 'went there'.  As you read what she has written you can make up your own mind. 

At any rate, she has turned these over to me with the expectation that I share them with you, the public. And so I have and shall.  Find them Here:

http://mdcbowen.org/p2/bp/

Included are letters to and from Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Julian Bond, Harry Belafonte, TD Jakes, Maya Angelou, Antonio Villaraigosa, Maxine Waters and others interesting. 

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.

 

Opinion Based Politics in the Age of the Idiot Proof City. And Dogs.

It is to be expected that opinions are sufficient to express one’s self interest. If the aims of American politics were limited to matters of self-interest to the ends of self-determination as conceived of by the Founders, then such opinions would be completely sufficient. However there are two compelling features of our contemporary situation which require more.

The first is that the barriers to suffrage as originally intended required a measure of propriety not required today of the voting citizen. The measure of civics would not be an abstract concept to be taught in a free public high school, it would be borne of experience in the conduct of a man of property. These were facts belonging to the people. The government need not notice or regulate.

The second is that the powers of government were not so extensive or intrusive into the everyday affairs of the common man. People were on their own to eat, for example, with no FDA to put labels on cans of food in supermarket shelves. These were facts belonging to the people. The government need not notice or regulate.

Today we are a society of hundreds of millions, few of whom could understand the complications of their own urban surroundings. As such we are unsustainably leveraged without a government in command of facts, rather like an un-aerodynamic fighter jet whose pilot could not hope to fly it without the aid of a computer system in command of facts.

What I am suggesting is that our society is too complex and unsustainable and requires simplification at the cost of comfort - that facts need to belong to the people. Those who seek to further automate our lives and provide complex comforts require government to be an ever more sophisticated computer to fly the fighter jet of society. This undermines our own independence, it in fact invites us to give up the acquisition of the skill required to navigate our own lives through society.

What therefore is Donald Trump? He is a man who has without question navigated his way through society to an extraordinarily successful degree. What is even more significant is that as a politician, he has navigated to the very pinnacle of electoral politics without the assistance or even permission of the computer minds of Washington DC, Hollywood, Madison Avenue or Silicon Valley. He has turned off the stability control, the anti-lock brakes, ripped out the airbags and burned rubber through a fast and furious drift around the gawking Prius owners. He has hot rodded the product of staid engineers. That frightens people who want government to engineer safety and comfort into the vehicle of society. The baby in the car seat is wailing.

As for dogs, there are at least two kinds of voters in America. Those who want to give a perfect loving home to a previously sheltered animal, who dress it up in designer sweaters and are willing to spend $600 for a visit to the vet to give treatments for its arthritic hip. They want an extensively regulated environment for the health and well-being of doggies, and they will keep pushing Congress until there are sufficiently funded dog parks, publicly available pooper scoopers, and that every coffee shop, nay every employer in every city is appropriately dog friendly. And there are those who just want their own puppy.

It should come as no surprise that the first voter tends to prefer frail toy breeds.

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. 

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.

Random Thoughts on Trump

The Overview
Watching people react to Trump is an exercise in people watching. Sometimes it's instructive to be in alien observation mode. Mostly it reminds the grown up in me exactly how petty people can be with their complaints. In other words, follow a complaint about Trump and you'll find a worldview of fear and distrust.  I simply see it as remarkable how difficult it is for the general public comments I've see to be specific. IE here is an individual that I cannot understand or relate to, maybe he's a witch. 

The Mordor of New York
Suddenly I thought of Leona Helmsley, because I'm reminded in all the hatred of Trump how blase he must be about it considering how much New Yorkers loved to hate him. New Yorkers love to hate everybody. In fact, if you try to Google 'Most loved New Yorkers' you won't find anyone other than Derek Jeter. But most hated New Yorkers.. as they say.. do you want the whole list or just the top 50? New Yorkers are over-caffienated and over-opinionated, which was one of the reasons I loved the place. Never boring. I still think it's stunning how survivable Trump is going to be amidst the flack and drubbing he gets.

The Fuck You Money
Trump is military academy man. Construction boss man. Scrap with the NY Press man. Reality TV man. Divorce man. Billionaire man.

I still think he's the walking personification of fuck you money, that thing that so many Americans wish they had.

But the real question is why Americans feel that they need fuck you money. I think that has everything to do with an actual lack of highbrow culture in America's upper class. And when I bring that context in, I think of exactly what it is that new money brings to American culture, and the answer is 'snapchat'.

In other words, the issue misdiagnosed as 'income inequality' is more accurately 'cultural distance'. And in my book, cultural distance is all about the death of jazz, literature, fine art and all the edifying oats of Western Civ in favor of 'degenerate art' and relativism that has young people screaming about the 'cultural appropriation' of their ethnic charms.

It would be instructive to me to understand how the wealthy tribes of NYC decide whom to invite to their soirees and the agendas of such. Do they really all just talk about money and movies and their pleasure craft? Is that all their is? In other words what is, in fact, the difference between Hillary Clinton and Liddy Dole? Or am I just too far out of social proximity to properly interpret the social pecking order of the ruling class? Or, are they all , as some folks prefer to say, just rich white people? Or as consumers of the conspiratorial press say, all gangsters and bullshit artists who get away with it?

Bushisms Again
OK this one is actually somewhat political. One of the things I didn't like about Obama was his inability to create heroes. There was no example in his administration of somebody more worthy of attention because of an opportunity that Obama gave them to shine in service to their country. Concurrently, there was no issue beneath the attention of that President. He injected his personality into what I considered to be small-minded matters. So the connection that I make is that his eloquence and specificity served to be, well, self-serving. Somebody that delegates responsibility doesn't need to be so very specific. When I tell you to clean up your room, son, it is implied that I mean for you to make the bed, and that means to put the pillows in the right place. Trump has been called, literally, on mispronouncing the city of his ancestor's birth in Europe over the weekend 'controversy' about Sweden's problems with immigration. 

Trump, like Bush, is having the experience of mincing people parse his verbiage, and seeking rhetorical patronage in their own tweedy dialects. That's not going to happen. He's not going to be an actor up there like Reagan. His proclamations are not going to be eloquent. He'll leave that to others. Like Bush, Trump has appointed some heavyweights, who will articulate details. 

Si Se Puede
Can America find, round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants, breaking up and splintering their families and livelihoods? Well, yes. But will they? Well, probably. What is criminal? I think we're going to find out. If it were me, I'd start with the convicts. Here's the thing. It's easier to burn an American flag than to burn your citizenship papers, except we don't have citizenship papers. If it were me, we would. A national ID that preserves anonymity is doable. 

What I Wish Trump Would Say
"The American people remain incapable of sustaining a national independent third party without the requisites of today which are billion dollar campaigns funded by cabals of millionaires, ancient think tanks, crafty lobbyists and giant corporations. There is no such thing as grass roots, there are only Democrats and Republicans. All I need to care about are 538 powerful Americans."

Dissatisfaction of the Peasantry

It has been a while since I've had a reason to consider my own Peasant Theory, but some of my best ideas come when washing dishes. I am thinking about how it is that the quality of our economy, as brilliant and robust as it is, affects the conduct and opinion-making of the masses. Why indeed do Americans need to follow the news at all? Because we are not under any obligation to inform our opinions. We feel good if our guy wins. We feel bad if our guy loses. And there is this sense of entitlements, call it 'middle class morality' that allows us a fair amount of leeway and signalling in our lives. A better word for this falls into the framework of 'lifestyle', because we can all afford lifestyles and talk about all the subtle social clues we have in our lives for our lifestyles. That is how, after about 70 years, an entire nation can pull opinions out of the idiot box. 

If I were a dishwasher for a living, I would not bother to chit chat with the chatting class in the main dining room. Not because I'm less intelligent, but because I know as a dishwasher, it doesn't much matter if my opinion is charming, brilliant, quaint of buffoonish. Such labels don't stick to us in the manual labor departments. So I don't seek them. Small talk is not on my resume. A dishwasher is one of those people who knows his job. We assume, we in the chatting classes, that he also knows his place. But in our expansive economy of bullshit work and opinions informed by television, and the interwebz, there are lots of places for everyone. So knowing one's place is not so constricting as it once was when only 20 million of us had careers of the sort where 'charming, brilliant, quaint or buffoonish' might mark us permanently. In the land of shallow economic opportunity and social mobility, one sticks to one's knitting; there isn't room in a tighter economy to put on airs, whether you are up high or down low. 

That is not our case. We have freedom to be impossibly wrong and never get called on it. We can generate not only shallow opinions but we can change them at will according to the fashion. We have no skin in the game, because the game never ends. There is no margin call. In the sprawling economy you can afford to be wrong all year long. In fact, we play that game in our electoral politics, and for the supporters of Trump, orange is the new black. See you in 2020.

The video serves to remind us that we are all very aware about the appeal of having something attractive in our lifestyle. We all know what a burnout is. It's a cool thing you do with a sports car. The appeal is universal, and the failures are predictable.  What we all know is that there is car insurance. And so in fact, these failures are not only predictable but profitable. You might even be one of those who cluck disapprovingly at people who are drawn to the lifestyle of fast, flashy cars. Among your friends are no such fools. One man's flash is another man's folly, and who's to judge, eh? We're all humans. 

We're all humans in an economy that is so rich that we can buy and sell and trade opinions in an open market. A fair candidacy is what the electorate will bear. A fair cause is what the crowd will chant for. This is the market society and it has a pricing problem. 

The American middle class has a great deal of disposable income and disposable time to absorb disposable information. Today it is dissatisfied with the political shopping habits of its next door neighbors. And of course there are knots of us whose social bubbles don't even include people with the nerve to value other notions. We clearly don't shop the same aisles. But I daresay very few of us know who is right, and it's getting more difficult than ever to find them out. There are still those same 20 million whose opinions matter, and perhaps they are getting bubbled away too. 

When I look at the car wrecks, I'm sad. Sports cars are such beautiful and magnificent engineering achievements. I'm so very glad that there are those dedicated to continue building them and maintaining them and restoring them. Human beings will always deserve the best, and will always chose the exciting over the dull. But they will always wreck. The trick is to know, if you're going to be a spectator, which side of the road to stand on when they do. 

I am drawn, as ever, to those activities which define our lives with purpose. I know that there are disciplines that are ever rewarding. These lead to lives of satisfaction, not lifestyles filled with schadenfruede and complaint. 

The Triumph of Market Culture

There used to be a thing call hiphop. There used to be a Grand Old Opry. There used to be folk music before there were such things as 'singer-songwriters'. There used to be organic politics and grass roots movements. But a generation has been seduced, and a market culture has been produced. The Producers rule. No longer will Americans, in the foreseeable future, search for anyone like Huey P. Newton or Angela Davis. They will wait for the movie, the clothing line, the soundbite, the cultural signal. That will work until the shooting begins, and then it will have to be solved through anonymously located podcasters. That is the gut of my insight this evening. Everybody is going to have to wait for the movie. 

It's not an income gap so much as it is a literacy gap. The ability to articulate a working class common sense is going to have to wait for the right stand up comedian, somebody who is in the right place at the right time and who gets paid to write and speak his own mind to the masses. Right now, comedians are who we trust. Not preachers so much. Not poets at all. Not politicians so much. Not police so much. So clearly there's a chance for poets, even if they are Tupac. 

Americans don't want to lock themselves away. But they will, and they will homeschool. The death of the cosmopolite is on the verge of becoming real, and the American oligarchs won't be able to resurrect a proper, trusted, upper middle class. That would require pushing down more responsibility than I think they're willing to give up. 

Liberty will survive. I'm just not sure that so many will experience and recognize it through the fog of the semiotic swamp. Reality TV hasn't helped. 

 

Update:
Black History Month Nikes

Trump Is the Third Party, For Now

Ian Welsh just wrote the best thing I ever read from him. How long has it been since I said in old bloggian, Read The Whole Thing.

Then, in 2008, Obama won. He took some of our help, but he didn’t buy it. Unlike the Democrats in 2006, many of whom had pretended to agree with us and had been willing to work with us, Obama did not work with the Netroots. During the entire campaign, the only time he reached out to us was during a period of a few weeks when he was losing to McCain in the polls, and even that was pro-forma.

Obama built his own grassroots organization, and he didn’t go through the blog gatekeepers (there were exceptions, one A-list blog of the time was the favored dumping ground for Obama oppo research). Instead, Obama’s supporters, and very likely operatives, flooded the comments and diaries. Obama got the support of Netroots supporters without having to give anything to the Netroots organizers.

The Netroots failed to elect anyone of their own people to Congress. So all they did was create the echo chamber of pro-Democrat rhetoric they were correctly accused of. Critics of Obama's neoliberalism recognized almost immediately that Obama exploited that liberal bias in the mainstream media that was abetted and supported by the likes of JournoList, FireDogLake and MoveOn. Now those bloggers have moved on to traditional left journals, like Mother Jones, but what have they actually moved in politics? Nothing but words.

Meanwhile Tea Partiers did rallies and actually elected people. The Netroots mistook their filterbubbles for thoughtful America, and their inclination is to defriend and doubledown, as well as to make politics a horse race rather than a horse trade.

The solution is to empower, really empower, a Constitutional Libertarianism. That means elect them to Congress. Everybody should understand by now that the GOP and the Democrats are all about grabbing the brass ring of government power we have refused to decrease in size and scope. That means that Trump should be applauded for stripping federal agencies of power if and when he does so (and also prove that mediocrities can preside over such agencies without drastic consequences for Americans).

This is not about waiting for the next Bernie Sanders. It's about standing for election now. Progressives have demonstrated their ability to paint the Democrats into a corner too far to the left to satisfy the majority of Americans, and a discombobulated GOP won because of that, building on the real world results of the same Tea Party candidates they refused to dignify years ago.

So there is the hope that Trump muddles on in his predictable mediocrity. There is nothing so drastic in his agenda as the panic it creates in people who thought they owned all morality and have decided Trump is fascist. Today, the Trump Administration signed up for Obama's LGBT policy, while activists still react to the new White House out of fear. The Federal government is still a big fat plum, and everybody wants only their teethmarks. A third party should dry it up a bit, because prunes are better for your digestion. 

I cannot imagine how a candidate like Bernie Sanders could have gotten destroyed so thoroughly by the Democrats who still lost if a real third party, Socialist or otherwise existed in America and got candidates into Congress. 

Seven Non-Grata

Mr. Trump on Friday signed an executive order that suspends entry into the U.S. of anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for at least 90 days. The rule affects the seven Muslim-majority nations with a total population of 130 million. - WSJ

I have a surly presumption against those bird dogging Donald Trump. I think the symbolism of their political impotence is more important to them than their actual humanitarian disappointment. So I ask the following rude questions. Imagine that in one year it will be impossible for people from the banned seven countries to get into the USA under any condition. What then do those opposed to the ban, presumably for the benefit of those countries actually propose to do to X where X is the most important thing we Americans did for those people in those countries as of one month ago?

The first problem is that for Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Sudan and Syria most people cannot come up with a reasonable X. I think that is less true of those on Trump's side, but we've already heard about the Axis of Evil before. That counts off two. Libya, the former domain of Kadaffi has never been held in high esteem by Americans. I can't think of anyone who sympathized with the government of Sudan's ethnic cleansing of its Christians. Surely people recognize that South Sudan now exists (whose official language is English, by the way). Yemen. Well, I really don't understand why we are so late in recognizing the hostility of Yemen so many years after the Stark, nevertheless I've not heard many voices championing them against the Saudis such that American boots were ever considered. Syria is a complete mess, in the midst of a civil war. So there's that. 

Now I happen to be involved with a non-profit organization that aims to inform folks about the plight of women, children and gays in that among other deprived corners of the world. So in fact I'm aiming to learn exactly what it is that thoughtful and sympathetic Americans plan to do and facilitate that. But I can't imagine that such people cannot see anything other than immigration and naturalization as a defense of freedom. So that is the rude question. So let's dress it up in rude clothing as well, because I need to draw out some real reasons. 

Are you just saying that the only way for people to be free is for them to come to America? Really? How 1914. 

So what are the other strategies? Who are your point people on the ground? How dangerous does this make the situation for those denied entry? What numbers of people did you expect to come? Is it more or less than the 175 per day estimated?

What begs this rude question is the presumption that by having open borders for these specific seven countries, unlike any other, that the previous administration was demonstrating something other than symbolic sentiments. And this is the presumption that makes opposition to Trump sound to my ears a lot less humanitarian than partisan. But I'll leave it at that. What are your plans for Somalia?

Libsplaining Trump

I think it's going to take a while for people to get ready for the new normal, and that really nobody who voted against Trump wants to understand him or those who voted for him. I was really surprised, I guess, by editorials about his first hours in office. But yeah people are going to nitpick for weeks and months.

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?

At some point somebody (presumably of the current coastal pundit class) is going to have to point out this obvious thing - that Trump's responsiveness to the Americans who elected him is not an actual catastrophe, but a slap in the face of those who didn't. The problem will be getting activist partisans to stop amping their predictions of catastrophe. (As if they predicted anything yet). Or to torture a soundbite 'libsplaining' Trump to Americans.

People understand that Obama destroyed his competition by using social media and outflanking traditional means of stumping. But for the longest time, the traditional media had to play along the historical significance of the fist black American President. Some would say it put them in the tank for Obama. I said it. But the greater point is that Obama didn't need them so much as they needed him. He reached who he wanted and needed to reach. So did Trump. 

Either of these sub-electorates is large and dynamic enough to defy categorization. I think that if I were in the campaign consulting business, I would be very quiet right about now. And so I think those people are. I haven't heard Carville or Matlin describe what went disastrously wrong with Clinton, not that I've been listening. But there is clearly no broad consensus among the 'experts' except the general assessment that half of America is curled into a ball rocking in the corner.  

At today's magnificent Women's March in Los Angeles, there was what can only be described as a very very divergent set of opinions about what to say. i could talk about the march at length and I may do so, but I am reminded of the old psychological adage that people don't have weaknesses so much as they overuse their strengths. There were at least a dozen identifiable interest groups if they could be identified by their slogans. But those who bothered to characterize Trump specifically as the object of their scorn did so in predictable ways. I'm not particularly moved or motivated by this type of ad hominem, but it reminded me of the vehemence reserved for Dick Cheney in another era. Whereas Cheney was seen as the evil eminence behind a vapid Bush, Trump is the embodiment himself. The orange target is clear. I expect the ire will continue and I hope it doesn't rub off on Trump's people, only three of which so far I find independently admirable (Mattis, Tillerson & Kushner). 

For me the only question worth considering at length is the extent to which Trump is or is not like Obama with regard to stepping aside for expertise. My impression and probably my greatest disappointment with Obama's White House was that given his weaknesses in foreign policy, he strove to reverse Bush in a relatively reactionary manner. And when he crossed the military part of that, he tended to throw expertise under the bus. I look at the Obama administration as a mediocre one with only Obama left standing intact. He hollowed out the Democrats and only the unsullied profile of Obama survived to his supporters, a subset of the American public that were completely T-boned by the phenomenon of Bernie Sanders. But my point is that non-partisan experts refused to work with Obama who determined he had to be the smartest guy in the room. So will Trump be that way? If so, then we will have another great mediocrity on top of the first, which will sink our capabilities even further below sea level. And of course whatever, outside of the control of the Federal government, goes wrong will probably get worse before the right people address it smartly. It is beyond my capacity to hope that citizens may take these burdens on at the state and local levels. So many seem dependent on the Feds. But the possibility exists. 

The electorate has nothing better to do but continue their griping in the shape of the rhetoric of the campaigns. The media may snap out of their daze and give some deeper context, or they may milk those duds.  I'll be on the lookout for references to FDR as a cue that reporting is still diseased. If the political shape of policy nuances between Obama's Interior and Trump's Interior must harken back two generations, for example, then we're getting nowhere fast. I expect media complacency, sadly, of the sort that requires reality show drama to break through. And this will serve the interests of Gramcian narrative. Ick. 

What's weird, now that I think of it, is I know very little about what Obama might do in his new spare time but play spoiler. Does he really like golf?

Sweeping Political Change

Happy with revolution? You shouldn't be. 

If there’s a gripe I have with political activists, it’s that they think they can will people into submission with the sheer brilliance of their ideas and persistence of outspoken opinions. Not so.

I say there are no authentic mass markets. Especially when it comes to how people actually live. In order to understand, you need to come to grips with a fundamental economic fact. Rents and mortgages are always the biggest part of people’s budgets. So the most important and personal decisions people make is where they are going to live. Most of the people who have a choice think deeply about making a move to a new community. That’s where they put down their money and roots.

We are greatly fortunate in America where we respect community values first, and only under extraordinary circumstances do we allow outside influences dictate how we live in our homes, what our children study in our schools, how our religious services must be conducted. There is nothing more dangerous to liberty then allowing any political movement to steamroll over our community values. It is the fundamental erosion of self-rule. We cannot allow that to happen. Ever.

So everybody with a manifesto has to stop, count hands in agreement, and then agree to settle down in a place where you can do it your way. That means leave your hands off everybody who disagrees. Let them go to another place where they can do it their way. It’s a big country. It’s a free country.

You cannot turn Austin TX into Plano TX. You cannot turn Darien CT into Grand Rapids MI. You cannot turn the Crenshaw District in LA into the Castro District in SF. People live where they want to live how they want to live for reasons beyond your control. So think about how much you deserve to control, and what happens when you start talking about taking control of other people’s lives.

I hope that Americans are learning (quickly) the limits of ‘sweeping’ political change, and starting to appreciate how important their society is to them. Your society begins at home. Appreciate your home. Take pride in your home. Clean up your home. Sweeping begins at home. Most of the time it’s best when it ends at home.

 

The Option of the Absurd

My daughter walked into the room while I was looking up the Young Marquis in response to a Facebook friend's survey of favorite music albums of our teenaged years. Somebody reminded me of Rhino Records. So while she sat, remembering our younger family classics from "Constitutional Peasant" and "The Saga Begins" we fell upon Monty Python's Spam and Freddie Blassie's 'Pencil Neck Geek'. But the song to beat all songs and the weirdest of the weird, beyond Doctor Demento and Firesign Theater was Barnes & Barnes 'Fish Heads'. It turns out that not only did they cut the record, but they made a video. 

 

Something about this video reminded me of the absurdity of the 70s Me Generation and that particular flavor of autonomy that contributed to the California lifestyle. You can't watch this without recalling that era of films like Repo Man and Eating Raoul. Not six months ago, the growing panic in American society of having a President Trump found some comfort in the idea of a planned resurrection of musical collaboration between Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy. But I wonder if the artistic response of Americans eager to weigh in a more creative dissent will be as well constructed. I tend to think it will test new limits of absurdity. I foresee artistic absurdity as a political weapon. After all, not everyone can be Banksy.

There's a phrase in the Fish Heads song that goes.. "Roly-poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women". In the 70s when I first heard that as a teenager it had a very high weird quotient to me. Of course they put that very lyric into the music to make you think of the absurdity of it all. But now in the Trump Era one would have to amp up the transgressiveness of a situation to make it adequately absurd enough to explode Trumpian heads. So that is what I expect in some kind of conventional way we are all familiar with. Something like "Muslim Syrian refugees are never seen walking casually through American malls, shaking hands with transgender security guards in wheelchairs".  

So I'm curious to see what kind of boundaries transgressive 'arts' and expressionism will generate. After all, we've got as much Obama as it is possible to have. Clearly it was the Obamatude that elected him, not the Democratitude. And if all of those transgressive batteries have been charged after eight years delivering the triumphs of gay marriage, health insurance and legalization of marijuana, surely they must be primed in the face of the oncoming Trump to rage themselves into a new burst of freedom at the slightest hint of repression. I think the reaction will be absurd. 

But will it be creatively absurd? Can it beat Fish Heads?

 

 

Aside from a Green Day's American Idiot, which I found brilliant. This video by Refused, 'The New Noise' is real art. Which is to say that I dig it.

Data Journalism

 

What we need for government transparency and accountability is the ability to focus on systems of data, not just splashy stories.
There is no such thing as data journalism, except that a select few people are already doing it. Let's have more. 

• Complier LA

Advising Europeans on How to Think about Trump & America

#1. Everybody who was afraid of Reagan was wrong, except the Russians. I can remember all of the same accusations of stupidity hurled at Reagan and Bush, but none at Clinton. Look who turned out to be the rapist. Obama was a decent and principled man, but he turned America inward on itself because he was truly ignorant of the world and geopolitics. So what you now see is the result of 8 years of Americans judging each other and ignoring the rest of the world.

#2. I hardly expect anyone from a country that elected Berlusconi to talk about corrupt American politics. If Berlusconi's corruption makes Italy become fascist again and ready to collaborate with Nazis, then you can be afraid of Trump making America what..? Save Europe again?

#3 What Europeans need to understand about American Conservatives is this - if you learn nothing else. American Conservatives think Americans are fat and lazy the exact same way that Europeans do. And so they are dedicated to keep socialist government pork away from fat and lazy Americans, so that we can be lean and hungry and appreciate the fight for liberty. Meryl Streep is not lean or hungry.

#4 America, like Italy, can survive mediocrity in politics. It can survive corruption. And the character of Americans has not changed. The character of American NEWS reporting has changed primarily because it's threatened by the Internet and the ability for people to talk to each other.

#5 Trump = Brexit. Same thing. Nobody wants their government run by distant dictatorial bureaucrats. Trump is not a Conservative. He is not an idealist. He is not a formalist. He is totally unexpected. He is a crass, brazen, transparent pragmatist who will try anything once, and then negotiate his way into a good deal. The only people who should worry about America under Trump are people who believe a single individual can and should have dictatorial powers AND they believe such an individual can completely overwhelm the checks and balances of American government.

Guess who those people are? The people who elected Obama to be their own personal savior. In other words, if you really are afraid of Trump, it's because you want a Pope, and you think Trump is going to be Pope. No, he's going to be President.

#6. Trump does not control Republicans the way Obama controlled Democrats. I've heard a lot of people complaining that Trump is trying to hire military generals to run large government bureaucracies and the CEO of a multinational corporation to run the State Department. I actually like the idea. Besides that, who did Obama let get any glory in his administration besides himself? Nobody. Obama had one ultra-competent Democrat operator I respected. That was Rahm Emanuel; he lasted 18 months.

The Disinterested, Disconnected White House

"An honest public servant can't become rich in politics." - Harry Truman

So I asked a rhetorical question several years ago about the perfect President. The matter surrounded the perfection of intellectual and social attractiveness of a candidacy as contrasted with the functions of the official position they hold. Now I apply that premise towards the realm of 'conflict of interest' surrounding America's richest President-elect.

How much conflict of interest is conflict of interest, and how indeed can anyone avoid it? It seems to me that it is something of an artificial construct or one which is entirely subjective. Let us presume that what's good for domestic policy is good in an objective moral way. If the government decides to reward that good, won't people of superior moral standing benefit even more? For example, if we determine that it is morally good to feed homeless people and we decide to monetize and incentivize that, won't that disproportionately benefit homeless shelters? Or for cancer research? Or for green business practices? Or for manufacturing offshore? So the man who owns business that run homeless shelters, aid cancer research, decreases the use of lead, and ships jobs overseas would get a huge lift from policy. Why not?

More generally speaking, is the aim of policy to punish or to reward, and whom is not invested heavily in something that may be touched by national policy? It stands to reason that the person with their fingers in the most pots is the most heavily affected by changes in policy. How can it be reasonably expected that those changes are in any way, for any individual of great influence and means, to be evenhanded?  Moreover, how can one expect progress, if the person with great experience in being successful does not allow that experience to influence policy? 

Imagine, for example, that the CEO of Apple Computer became President. Surely he would know that his company's policy to use a particularly green formulation of glass in its product has a supply chain of several years depth. Why would he not reduce tariffs on those materials he knew would be in demand over time based on his company's leadership in that area? Why is it a conflict of interest to have more glass use the greener ingredient that his company pioneered if it lowers the cost for every American computer manufacturer? Why should the CEO of Apple be forced to liquidate his interests in Apple Computer and put its proceeds in a blind trust simply based on the fact that he knows what's good for Apple and the computer industry?

It is in this way that I think a blind trust is something of a moral figleaf. To the extent that any individual or group capable of running Apple or a casino and resort can take advantage of policy changes emanating out of Washington DC, the only real sin, is having advance knowledge. And that is little more than what we well understand to be 'insider trading'. We do not force investors to not hold any assets in businesses in which they have inside information. We simply know them to be insiders and watch their trades conspicuously, something it seems to me we could do trivially for the one President of the US. 

Of course this idea cuts both ways. If any individual could run Apple or Trump Properties, than any blind trust would be as good as any other, and the devil may care what policy the White House advocates. But I think in the trade for moral acceptability, we expect a sacrifice on principle. We say that the job of President is so important that the merest appearance of improper insider trading is unacceptable. Here we don't trust, and then with the blind trust, we also don't verify. 

We merely blind. 

I don't think that Donald Trump or George Soros for that matter is anywhere near as capable as the likes of dictators in other nations, to take their inside knowledge to the extreme ends of corruption under the American system of government. One must certainly accept that Vladimir Putin is rich beyond the wildest inversions of Marxism. Is this matter of conflict of interest really the single gate holding back greedy fingers at the White House? Is this really what keeps hands clean? I'm sure its some part of the puzzle, but I doubt that it is the cornerstone. 

What's Happened to American Business Culture?

Sheila Bair is my guidepost, along with Zingales through all of the subprime mess. Bair correctly notes that banking has become outsized in the economy as a percentage of revenue of GDP. I think that's about to change, depending upon a few things.. What people are about to discover, just like with Hollywood, a lot of this banking work isn't that difficult, and the monster companies make it too complicated. Smaller specialty financial organizations will arise.

 

I have mixed opinions about venture capital. On the one hand, it is so obvious to me that it's rich men dangling dollars over poor men's heads and making them jump like dogs for scooby snacks. On the other hand entrepreneurs never had it so good. And these new businesses are the vitality and dynamism of the economy, drawing out fabulous ideas. On the other hand who in their right mind over 40 wants to work with these lifeless sweaties and their free Odwalla and ping pong tables? (God, I'm going to the Amazon conference this week in Vegas, pray for me.) If I hear somebody say 'disrupt' again I'm going to puke. Then again, shit needs disruption, and at least people are throwing money rather than sitting on it.

 

But really Im on about culture, and I don't like the impermanence of these fast-lane companies. I much prefer the structure and deep knowledge that comes from evolutionary mastery of subjects, not just making a new winky-blinky. The new standards of software development don't approach industrial craftsmanship.

 

That's where David Graeber comes in and says that most people have 'bullshit jobs'. And I think he's right. The whole soul-crushing dystopia of corporate life becomes immediately transparent in his analysis. It's why I left Xerox and became a consultant. In many industries only the hired guns and top execs have the real, meaningful work and everything else is Dilbert. But it's not just the top brass that gets away with incompetence, the whole divisions and departments are full of people who are 'empowered' but don't make the call. White collar work is not as brutally competitive as sports, and where it gets brutal is in its politics, over bullshit. Which is why Americans who live that life very much appreciate somebody who cuts through the bullshit.

 

30 years ago that personality was represented by Sandy Sigiloff and by Lee Iacocca. More recently it was 'Neutron' Jack Welch. Americans instinctively understand that a lot of government bureaucracy is *powerful* bullshit, and they want somebody to go in there and clear out all the deadwood. It's like the old joke. The new Cabinet Sec'y of the Interior is transitioning in. He asks the old boss, "How many people work in this government agency?" The old boss replies, "About half."

--

 

America is in the pit of a successful alternative culture war. The 'Protestant work ethic' has been defeated at the polls. People don't save, they buy on credit. People don't value sobriety, they vote to smoke weed. Americans have normalized not only non-conformity, but the bizarre and perverse. I believe alt-America doesn't want to work in a traditionally profitable line of work, and that more importantly, they are losing the culture of doing so. This has gone way beyond casual Friday. And yes I'll sound partisan when I call it 'the culture of entitlement', but yeah. We have lost that way of doing business where you stay in one company for 30 years and you get really really good at something, and it's worth it to put on the hard black shoes every day. We have kids who learn that they can't learn math, so after high school they never try. They learn that history is boring and so they never try to find meaning in it. 

 

 

A Brief Retrospective on the Conservative Brotherhood

The Conservative Brotherhood lasted a good 4 or 5 years I guess. I started my blog 'Cobb' in '02 having retired from another project called Vision Circle. Vision Circle was my last attempt at advancing a Progressive anti-racist black partisan discussion on the web. It was good while it lasted and is archived nice and neat. As Lester Spence headed to big time academia, he had to scrub some of his provocations, and we never got the late lamented Prometheus Six to join up. But like I said, Vision Circle was a success.

 

Three nights, which I will meld into one, three things occurred to me.

 

1. Dr. Lou, an old family friend, gave me an updated 'by any means necessary' speech that said that the US respects the Japanese because the Japanese were ready to kill and die by the millions, and Japanese culture has *nothing* to do with that respect. It was Japanese blood and all of Japan's money in war. Black Americans consequently are absolute fools to think cultural nationalism could produce better results. The powers that be in America respect power. Black Americans were not, are not, and never will be ready for war. 

 

2. Black Americans have politically put all of their eggs into one basket of political aims, despite the fact that real class differences (and economic, and cultural) exist among 30 odd million black Americans in 2003. Some fraction of those need to be working the other side of the aisle.

 

3. Black American patriots who wave the American flag were booed at the Sydney Olympics. If black Americans want to be and do become the best in the world, why are they hated, and when they are, who is going to defend them? There was, and is, a fundamental problem black Americans have with patriotism.

 

So my aim was to put a stake in the ground and assert two things.

 

• The Civil Rights Movement is done, and won, and never going back.
• Black Americans are not going to be a race forever and their class distinctions will matter more. They need to be getting baksheesh from the American Right, not just welfare and pity from the American Left.

 

So I took Cobb, the most conservative sounding part of my name, registered Republican and started blogging about what the black Right was, is and should be. In the beginning, I started going to local Republican functions and discovering all of my stereotypes etc. I made efforts to understand the American Right and distinguish its various parts and pieces. I was very surprised at the diversity of black opinion on the Right. I never expected pure Christian social conservatives. I never expected pure Pro-Life advocates. I expected a lot of buppies and people like Vernon Jordan. I was wrong. Since my blog was fairly popular, I was able to meet with and invite all of the major black bloggers on the right. They all signed up. But some left after a short period, notably LaShawn Barber and Ambra Benjamin. 

 

My aim was to identify and name the Old School black politics, culture and values that I had always heard had a 'natural' affiliation with the American Right. So I came up with some words that I figured a broad cross section of black Americans could deal with. My own insight and research kept telling me, some fraction of black Americans were always comfortable voting for local Republican candidates, and basically their biggest problem was the racism of the GOP and the Southern Strategy. So I'm like, OK let's be black and proud conservatives with no racism and see what happens. A lot happened.  Thus the Old School Core Values:

The Conservative Brotherhood is a group of African American writers whose politics are on the right hand side of the political spectrum. Expanding the dialog beyond traditional boundaries, they seek to contribute to a greater understanding of African Americans and America itself through advocacy and commentary.

Old School Core Values:

Pride
We are African Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. We are proud of our heritage, and respect the lives, triumphs and tribulations of our forebears in this country and beyond. We aim to represent their greatest hopes for us and honor their memory.

Patriotism
The United States of America is our home, not simply by default but by choice. We take our duty to our home seriously and we defend it. We seek to improve it by our work and values and leave it better than we found it.

Family
We are extended families and we put family first. It is the primary organization to which our lives are dedicated. We fight for the proper upbringing of our children. We demand respect and consideration of our elders. We love and support our brothers and sisters.

Industry
We work twice as hard and sometimes get half as far, but we work with dignity and we expect and enjoy our rewards. We are not materialistic but we know the value of a dollar. We seek self-improvement through creativity, dedication and effort in our jobs, businesses and partnerships.

Piety
We have abiding faith in God and the principles of righteousness. We strive to be true to transcendent values and take the long view of our purpose on Earth. We conduct ourselves as vessels of spirit and we guard our own souls and the souls of others from corruption.

Liberty
We believe in the rule of law and rights of people to be free and to determine their own fate. We fight tyranny and oppression of all kinds keeping in mind the battles of those who struggled and died that we might be free.

Pluralism
We believe in a tolerant and open society, and we welcome all people to enjoy its benefits and responsibilities.

 

Even as I look at these values today, they are not far from my heart. But I learned a lot just by the act of putting them together and challenging people to deal with the fact of our creation.
 

In the middle, I made a clear discovery that 'be' seemed to be more important than 'do'. So the very act of saying "I am a black Republican" or "I am a black Conservative" got in the way of doing what those values instructed. Whereas it was very comfortable for us to say what we believed unapologetically, we always had to deal with haters. For a while it was good sport to fight back from this alternative perspective, but after a time my head started ringing from the sound of people's heads exploding. You probably wouldn't be surprised at how deeply ingrained it is in people's heads to associate everything evil in America with the perceived acts and ideas of the Republican Party. 

 

In the end, I found that America became obsessed with 'be' and just assumed 'do' could not, or would not happen. The blog league was a success, I maintained a core site for some time but it ultimately got hacked. I wasn't interested in doing anything for money or getting involved with parceling out funds from the site. It wasn't as if I didn't have a day job. And while I got some notoriety from appearances on TVOne, in various blogging and journalistic venues and as a regular on NPR, I wasn't really hungry to make a media star out of myself, much less deal with the possibility that I could be seen as a shill. Again, I took no money and accepted no ads on my blog with the exception of normal blog syndication. I never made enough money from that to pay the 15 bucks a month it cost me to host Cobb. 

 

In 2006 I killed the blog and took a hiatus. In 07 I went balls to the wall over the Obama nomination and won best black blogger that year. When Obama was elected in '08, people were shocked that I didn't bend over for his platform which I found domestically mendacious and internationally naive. As well, in the broader fight for civil liberties, I recognized that identity politics had won, just as the hardest multiculturalists dreamed, and those values I talked about above meant nothing in the abstract unless I, the Conservative Brotherhood and everybody else could find a way to reconcile our false blackness with the real blackness. It was like I was in a rap battle with DMX about realness.  Despite the fact that it happened while we in the Brotherhood were taking slings and arrows, a real black man became the real head of the real Republican Party, a victory nobody wants to admit happened. 

 

It's funny when I think about it now. For two years, 2009-2011 the Republican Party was run by a black man, and the disrespect from the Left was so profoundly cold that you couldn't cut it with a blowtorch. It was like Krell metal. And now all those years of devolution and confusion has landed us here, where all people know is Trump and have no idea of how complicit they were in his election. 

 

The Conservative Brotherhood faded away like an old soldier and people went their separate ways. I see folks from time to time, especially Joseph C. Phillips and a lot of us remain friends on Facebook, but I have basically lost all interest in domestic politics as any sort of activist. I see how entirely new networks of trust have to be built over the ashes of our currently barely functioning democratic institutions. It will happen, and I know what the content will have to be, but I have absolutely no interest in the daily bitching points.

 

More recently I have been interested in understanding what will happen before that rebirth occurs. That makes me something of a prepper. But I understand how many people are entranced by wishful thinking and magical realism and the unbearable lightness of their narrative playlists. You'd think Russians hacking the DNC would do it, but that's not enough either. I mean not when people don't even talk about Georgia, Ukraine, the Crimea and Syria. It's rather stupendous to watch Baby Boomers still in power acting as if Russia went away like Fukuyama said. 

 

I have always survived and moved forward by being a couple steps ahead, but I'm just lucky that I don't shy away from the ugly and my own life is satisfactory enough for me to invest spare time in learning. But I am always pleased that there are always some people who get it right and don't waste too much time on what is not. So, The Conservative Brotherhood served its purpose and I am very proud of what we did. But I've moved on from political writing. There's not much of a future in that for people as subtle as I am. So I'm digging history instead. And programming languages, of course.  

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.

Ku Klux Kops: Statistical Morality Again

Vanity Fair published a whole bunch of statistics about blacks and police. So people think they are doing a lot of thinking about the subject. So here is my simple question. Can you identify racial bias?

I don't want to be too clever here, because I see a very simple way out of this descent into statistical madness, which is to avoid statistical morality in the first place. But when we think about 'racist white cops' and 'unarmed black men' we've already stepped into a pile.

Here's the problem put as simply as I can put it. The racism of 'racist white cops' is not the same as the racism of the KKK. Furthermore the 'profile' of black males is not the same across America. This is a logical assertion that cannot be proven or disproven by statistics, and that is because nobody really disambiguates the racial culpability of the victims, nor of the virulence of the racism of the perpetrators. So the inherent problem is that 'racial bias' could be criminal, or it could be offensive. 

Why are black women not the target of racist white cops? If white racist cops were really out to get black people, wouldn't there be a lot more accusations like those made by Al Sharpton similar to that about Tawana Brawley? Is our press missing that, or is the racism of 'racist white cops' only directed at a certain specific kind of black male?  What about the culpability of black males? If Barack Obama says 'I am Trayvon Martin', does he become that?  Well if you were a KKK member, it wouldn't really matter what Barack Obama says, he's the same as any other black, male or female, ie worthy of being lynched. 

Here's where Roland Fryer gets into trouble. He says

This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officerinvolved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

His critic, Justin Feldman makes an excellent point that both criticizes Fryer and ultimately, everybody else:

Economic theory aside, there is an even more fundamental problem with the Houston police shooting analysis. In a typical study, a researcher will start with a previously defined population where each individual is at risk of a particular outcome. For instance, a population of drivers stopped by police can have one of two outcomes: they can be arrested, or they can be sent on their way. Instead of following this standard approach, Fryer constructs a fictitious population of people who are shot by police and people who are arrested. The problem here is that these two groups (those shot and those arrested) are, in all likelihood, systematically different from one another in ways that cannot be controlled for statistically (UPenn Professor Uri Simonsohn expands on this point here). Fryer acknowledges this limitation in a brief footnote, but understates just how problematic it is. Properly interpreted, the actual result from Fryer’s analysis is that the racial disparity in arrest rates is larger than the racial disparity in police shootings. This is an unsurprising finding, and proves neither a lack of bias nor a lack of systematic discrimination.

Yes, but what about the people who are black Americans who are neither arrested, nor shot? In this case, the entire fiction is that race is the proximate cause for all these matters and that the race of black Americans has a problem. Sure, if you find those who arrested and shot and young and black and male and numbering about 500 deaths per year to be representative of black America. The contradiction makes itself patently obvious when it is argued, in support of the rhetorical call that 'Black Lives Matter', that 'black on black crime' cannot be considered in the same context. There is no such thing as 'black on black crime', which is not some denial of the racial identity of perpetrators and victims, but a firm assertion that outside of those immediately responsible, this is not a satisfactory representation of black America. And of course it is not. Black America is not under threat from 'black on black crime'. But they are even less under threat from 'white racist cops'.

So does racial bias exist? Of course it does. Is it all of our concern? No. And that is what nobody wants to admit. We have decided that 'racist white cops' represent. We have decided that 'unarmed black men' represent. This is the state of race relations today in America. You and I know it's pathetic and wrong. Oh, by the way, same thing with Muslims. I lay blame at the foot of multiculturalists because this representational slight of hand only serves their agenda to have a balkanized American identity drive so much of our discussions about society. 

 

Thinking about 9/11 Fifteen Years Later

My initial thoughts were 'This is the end of the nation-state as we know it'. When Colin Powell argued against that position, saying that rogue actors make nation-states even more important than ever, I held that initial thought in abeyance. As I became a geopolitical necon, I truly believed that a proper nationalism could right things. But what I didn't realize is how small the old hierarchies are, and now I realize their ability to monopolize talent is very weak. The decentralized cat is out of the bag. The Man is now just an old man, and he cannot even. In the argot of the young 'cannot even' doesn't require an object. A universal placeholder is elided. The Man cannot even X, where X can be basically everything with the exception of 'be The Man', who doesn't matter any longer. The Man doesn't matter any longer because the The Man lost institutional touch with the common man in places where society was once solid, and never bothered with the common man elsewhere. And so now men grow up everywhere in a kind of social anarchy that doesn't discipline them to be the men their fathers strove to be. Nations and patriarchies are broken and the wildlings are inside the gates. 

The irony of course is that we need some kind of compromise. We need to be a society of laws rather than a society of men, but a society of laws that does not allow men to be men is everything wrong with the extreme abstraction of today's post-modern communications. Men in fact do cobble together frameworks of autonomous authorities into which people become entirely dependent with no recourse to the men who did the cobbling. The dons of the EU are our examples of homo frameworkus, and those frames will work us out of our autonomy. It seems that very few men can be trusted with liberty. Those who once had it treated it like lyrics to a Sting song, loved it and set it free, thinking perhaps now that they never deserved it. 

And now I cannot get that idea out of my head. We don't trust ourselves. We don't trust ourselves with liberty. So we just give up, let it go and hope it will come back and establish itself on its own. 

I just finished watching the television show that has more deftly illustrated the nomadic Noman that is todays American post-nationalist. He is a man at war with himself unable to conquer his inner demons, believe in God, our country or anything beyond the suffering of the common man against his own pain and suffering. He believes he can change the world be eliminating all the confidence and trust anyone has in anything beyond their own shadow. He is Mr. Robot, the man that cannot belong.

When you cannot belong to humanity all you can do is outsmart them and sell your soul to those you think have. It is the temptation of any arrogant mind. I myself have the frustration. But what I know that Mr. Robot doesn't is that anonymous power is the most corruptible kind. What I know that the EU bureaucrats and UN functionaries don't is that your name has to be out there and you have to answer to your critics. And you have to fail in public. You have to pledge allegiance in public. It is the only thing that can save you from the force of nature that is the public. Sometimes. But that is the risk you have to take. At least it will be the case until there are no more knights who swear oaths to be the long arms of the law in defense of justice. Or until such men can never ever find you. 

So what we must learn from 9/11 is that there is a limit to every conspiracy and you cannot hide. But we are in a world where men have lost faith in national identity and the public spirit, in which the rule of law is seen as some sort of contingency because there are always more clever rogue actors. One day, we will be a nation of laws, liberty and free men again. The idea will never die. And when it comes to fruition, then we will stand together under colors and necessary laws in unity and respect. Let us crawl towards that day. 

For the moment I am under the influence of Martin Cruz Smith's fiction. His Arkady Renko is my latest Lovecraftian hero. Smith has made me feel the slow dripping rusting melancholy of the Russians who thought they were Soviets. It is achingly pathetic, and I feel it. I feel it as I drive north and south down Hooper Avenue in Los Angeles which is not so much a boulevard of broken dreams but one where only the simplest might be entertained in the first place. These are common men dwarfed by the mechanisms of influence, whose economies of desire are never funded, who can be persuaded or pushed off a cliff. I don't see it. I don't see liberty in the city. The cosmopolitain fiction's melody runs in 7/4 time and the people just want to dance a two step. 

Can we crawl? Can we two step? Can we just move naturally and keep liberty? I hope nothing has to burn. I hope I don't go from stoic to cynic. I hope somebody can teach me how. 

 

Civil Rights Overreach

Q. What was the most significant tactical error committed by the civil rights activists, and why?
Clearly, the problem of racism remains despite the tremendous efforts made by the civil rights activists. What are some of the things that the activists could have done better to neutralize the global system of racism? What lessons can we learn from them to apply in the struggle today?

A. The greatest error of all civil rights leaders in the US was the extent to which they failed to inculcate proper economic realism into their political base. The result is that no sound economic measures were ever included in people’s understanding or assessment of racial bias. The result is that the tactics of the civil rights era have been repeated time and time again, ie political activism of the non-violent social protest type which expects results delivered in the form of government policy. To the extent that the civil rights movement, specifically MLK and A. Philip Randolph did speak upon economic matters, their actions were narrowly focused on organized labor and the tactics of strikes and boycotts.

Notice that this was something that Malcolm X, whom I would consider *outside* of the civil rights movement, did not cosign. Malcolm was a religious conservative whose tactics did not coincide with the agendas of the NAACP, SCLC, or CORE.

This is not to say that the civil rights movement was wrong. It’s approach and results were substantially correct, but to the extent that a civil rights agenda is perceived to be racial, or ‘in the interests of black people’, those interests were only very narrowly drawn. They are political issues that we can all recite without thought, ‘equal access to education, health care, employment’, to which the government properly responded with anti-discrimination legislation. And when it became self-evident that a level playing field was not sufficient to deliver parity in short order, Affirmative Action became the political solution. I think this is something that Malcolm X and the later Black Power Movement activists saw clearly. However Malcolm had other fish to fry, and quite frankly the Black Power folks, including the Panthers, US, Carmichael’s SNCC and subsequent radicals simply didn’t possess the vision or brainpower to sustain.

More black Americans allied themselves, consequently with ideas like changing to African names, protest in solidarity with convicts, counter-culturalist movements, international socialism and revolutionary rhetoric rather than economic awareness, business acumen or real community development. So profound was this ‘civil rights’ brainwashing that black Americans were more suspicious of their own inherited English language skills, churches, family ties and capitalism that they became convinced by and large, that none of this would work for them. In other words, the post-civil rights era produced a kind of radical separatism that was in fact at odds with the mainstreaming inclusionary vision of civil rights integration.

Since all of this was couched in (false) racial terms, the relatively large black American population easily split into different ideological and class camps yet there remained the idea that only a racial unity and racial agendas could raise the fortunes of the race. Consequently anything that depressed the fortunes of the race, in part or in aggregate, was attributed to racism. But it’s obvious that any group that is economically ignorant, spouts revolutionary rhetoric, allies itself with socialist radicals, asserts phony ties with Africa (not specific to any country or regime, or even ‘Kmet’, ancient Africa), disowns the Christian Church, etc is not going to be as successful in America as a group that does none of these things.

Quite simply, MLK’s dream was based on the American Dream, the Black Nationalists were anti-American. MLK did not call himself Black in that way. The failure of the civil rights movement was that they, and all who inherited their ‘race raising’ ideas became too responsible for the fate of black America and outlived their usefulness. Now it falls to this catch-all of racism being responsible for black America’s fate.

In other words, a few political activists, ‘the civil rights establishment’ morphed into the figurative leaders of an entire race of people, something they were never capable of being. And their particular narrow tactics ‘against racism’ suddenly became what all black Americans were suppose to be responsive to and responsible for. But in fact, nothing about success in America works that way. That’s a socialist trickle-down fantasy.

All one has to do is consider the path of men like Vernon Jordan, Lee Archer, David L. Brewer III, Stan O’Neal, Ed Brooke III, Guy Bluford or Colin Powell to understand how success comes to black Americans without adhering to some narrow political tactics of so-called black leaders.

It is a fiction that racism is the Devil and that civil rights, or ‘black leaders’ are prophets. The brief, successful, civil rights movement correctly brought anti-discrimination policy to be the law of the land. That’s as far as it ever had to go. The greatest mistake of civil rights activists and those who followed them was to believe there was more to gain from that formula, specifically economic power.

Also, there is no global system of racism. See here.