We’re not all in this together, especially not with Wall Street.

 July 29, 2022

We are not all in this together. 

It's late on a Friday, but I can't let this one go without comment. Someone leaked an internal memo from Bank of America's investment arm to the press. The Intercept revealed that Bank of America is secretly angling for there to be fewer job openings in the economy relative to unemployed workers. 

We're far from living in an economy where people genuinely all think "we're all in this together" or some other such propagandistic claptrap. If the big banks can make money on people not being able to find a job, they will, unless they're stopped. 

I really don't give a hoot if they're actually banking on the overall numbers in some way - the problem is that they can't separate "the numbers" overall from the fact that sending out these sneaky reports urging their billionaire/bank readers to manipulate the economy so that the economy has fewer job openings for people is transgressing from "fun with economic numbers" to direct economic terrorism on everyday folks' job prospects. To a certain and not-insignificant extent, they also were the ones that bent over backwards for our previous President to do "fraud with numbers" to drive up the stock markets by any means necessary, and now when it is revealed that they created a bubble, the big banks have decided to take the difference for their misadventure out of the pockets of the working class. I'm surprised none of these guys went to prison after the housing bubble crash, but this one is outright fraud.

The only thing more unethical than making bets on the success or failure of a harvest is making "bets on the labor market" like it is now clear that Wall Street is doing, and has been doing. You should show to any discerning observer, that the Wall Street economy was based on, and is still continuing on the market evolution of, the slave trade of African and Native Americans. 

An American worker's job should be sacrosanct relative to him, or her. But to these Wall Street slave traders, nothing is sacrosanct, not even human well-being.

Process Stories in the green energy transition

 July 29, 2022

Every now and then something called a "process story" pops up. This usually means that the Powers That Be have been able to convince enough of the people in high office and positions of power that there is a bottleneck in the supply of something we need to achieve our goals, and they can sneak a bit of profiteering and bad intentions into the process of getting to an otherwise laudable goal, like, say, fighting climate change by switching to a green energy economy. 

I've already mentioned this, but it's worth mentioning again in this explicitly "process story" - type angle. A green-energy, high-tech economy is still going to have to take in raw materials to make some of the infrastructure - and in that economy it's going to be "critical mineral resources" that are basic fuel for the economy, especially lithium and certain rare earth minerals to make lithium-ion batteries and high-tech components for computing devices. It's also important to note that this period of acquiring and creating the infrastructure necessary for a green energy-based economy won't last forever, but rather is going to happen on the time scale of a construction project rather than permanent maintenance, so these bad faith efforts are mostly wasted.

Note here that "capitalism", overall, does not play by what we might suppose to be its own rules when it comes to acquiring these critical materials. If the big capitalists played by the rules of capitalism that they devolve upon us as gospel, you'd assume that they'd be trying to develop positive trade relations with countries like Bolivia, which has large and proven lithium reserves, the largest in the world. But they're not. Not too long ago, the democratically elected and popular, working-class president of Bolivia was deposed in a far-right coup with the covert backing of the U.S. intelligence and military "community". The coup didn't end up succeeding; President Morales returned to power shortly, but the attempted right-wing coup on Evo Morales was an open and blatant attempt to "secure" Bolivian lithium deposits for U.S. industry. This, mind you, happened before the U.S. establishment was really taking the goal of "securing a green energy future" (which is a militarist talking point) seriously, and the coup attempt on President Evo was perhaps tooblatant. Now, you can see clips of U.S. Southcomm officers doing press on Latin American natural resources, in a very pacifying tone as if trying to quash our understanding that they've transparently been pillaging in that region for ages, and they are gearing up to do it some more - not for Venezuelan oil this time but for Bolivian lithium. Look, I'm no Bolivarist, but they've got a right to run their own affairs. Sure, Bolivar demobilized most of the region after independence, but they've got the right to remobilize if they choose to without U.S. covert or overt interference. No MILF-y Southcomm commander at the Aspen Security Forum is going to convince anyone who knows even just a little bit of modern history that we've got some kind of stellar track record in Latin America or that U.S. capitalism deserves all of the resources of Latin America. The history of U.S. "involvement" in Latin American is a history of corrupt U.S. capitalism, whether it be carbon capitalism or this new Big Tech-driven technofeudalism, using the military wing of capitalism to acquire raw materials while disregarding the "rules" of capitalism that they keep preaching to us, on the side. 

So we've got on the one hand U.S. Southcomm trying to ensure favorable prices for lithium at the point of a sword, and on the other hand, Congress running "hearings" on "security in the Sahel" which is short for trying to "secure" the resources in the general area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo - the DRC, Uganda, Burundi and so on. The DRC is the largest source of refugees to the US by a large margin, but that doesn't mean we should pack up and try to take over that country. I don't care how they plan to get Africomm to shoot that apple off someone's head, because any objective observation will tell you that deploying the military to serve capitalist interests in the Sahel would be an utter boondoggle. You'd almost have to make Conrad's Heart of Darkness a "banned book" to keep U.S. soldiers from far too quickly realizing that "war is a racket" vis-a-vis deploying the "military wing of capitalism" to Africa. 

What should we be doing, and why are the U.S. capitalist classes doing this instead? First of all, it's important to note that the ruling class does these interventions to make profits for themselves. They're not capable of jacking up the final prices of goods on us enough to profit on, but they can cut costs for themselves by short-circuiting U.S. military aims. 

What we should be doing is clear. We should be developing fair and productive trade relations with countries that have these "critical mineral resources" on the governmental level, and on the personal level we should support when those countries in our own produce genuine working class movements for liberation and social equality. There are no shortcuts here. We should consult our memory and realize that every "quick fix" in the resource markets, through manipulating military aims or other routes, has always actually been about making a quick profit for no one but the billionaires.

The four-year-long Trump filibuster is over

July 29, 2022 

The four-year long Trump filibuster is over. 

This has to be said, you know? And I'm not insensible to why it happened, electorally, although me and the rest of the liberal New World Order (etc. etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) didn't expect the hissy fit to be quite so all-encompassing enough to win the Electoral College, to be honest. I didn't expect Trump to win but I got why he was popular. 

I mean, let's remove all pretense about it, shall we? We had, for eight years, a black president. A very smart, possibly genius, black president of the USA, with a beautiful wife, great kids, no scandals, and, like, very smart - eloquent, handsome, witty, and his wife too; very smart. His kids: probably geniuses too, the whole nine yards. 

The fact that he was black rubbed a lot of people wrong. I'll admit that. We've got a lot of racism to exorcise from our national culture, but our former president Barack Obama glided, practically floated, over all of that during his eight years in office. No scandals, no footholds for the racists to dig in. There was that thing with his pastor and he put that to rest fast. He was an individual with his own opinions and character, very young, very handsome, and very emblematic of a generation's hopes and aspirations - and he was black, and never the twain shall meet, in the eyes of those racists. The presidency of Barack Obama put a large portion of racist conservative whiteness into deep and abiding crisis, paranoia, and insanity. This is true; unavoidable. It was like Camelot without the assassination (Kennedy's Camelot, to be clear). 

The racists were a vocal part of Trump's base in 2016; this can't be denied. But the bigger "problem" from the conservative reactionary perspective, was that he was so smart, as well as so clean, so uncorrupt, so elegant, did things so effortlessly. People could very nearly find no reason to hate the federal government while he was at the helm of it. And that was the deeper motivation for the backlash that led to the four-year Trump filibuster in response to "no drama Obama". Remember that lack of drama? That was nice. Not so bad. Less of this panicky chatter that makes up our national soundscape now, still. But regardless, the actual backlash against Obama, once the racist vitriol had been spewed and gone away, was that he was so goddamn smart, and made a lot of white men - and admittedly this betrays some of their racial animus too - feel inadequate, lose confidence and feel emasculated. 

Mr. Trump's opponents say he did nothing of consequence and his proponents say he did a mighty fine job, but basically he did an average middling job as President. He put the federal government on autopilot, which is what all Republicans do anyway, and he did the two things he had to deliver for his actual base, which was the billionaires. He passed a big tax cut and he put social conservative judges on the bench. As a Republican, that's all he was ever obliged to do to keep his donors and his base, who are the same people, happy. He spent the rest of his time in office trying to undo the effect that Mr. Obama had had on Republicans, which is way less than responsibility called for him to do, but it's not like Republicans were going to hold his feet to the fire to get him to do anything else, like any work. 

But what Mr. Trump was really trying to undo wasn't really - or should I say wasn't only - the effect on his constituents of Mr. Obama being black; what he was really fighting against was the fact that Mr. Obama was smart, and that the country had gotten used to having a smart and eloquent President. Mr. Trump did his level best to get everyone to stop paying attention to politics and go back to some kind of 80's-type, Reagan-era apolitical body politick, betting that perhaps people hadn't actually "gotten into politics" but were just turned on by having a black president. The biggest fear of Trump and the social conservative/billionaire interest group he represented wasn't that we had had a black President so much as that our black, smart President had inspired interest from the public in smart, multiracial working class politics led by figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There's a strain of American politics and culture that emphasizes that we can have some distance from politics when we want to (mostly through religion and so on), but the fact remains that in history, whenever there has been a lot of work to do, Americans have gotten very political. 

To sum up, it's impossible not to reasonably evaluate the Trump presidency as one long four-year filibuster, not against only Mr. Obama's race, but also against the fact that he was a smart guy, who presided over one of the largest political youth awakenings in American history. Mr. Trump was not only a racist, but more functionally, as a Republican, he tried above all to get as many of these newly-awakened young people to tune out and not care or turn out in the next election - and for those who stayed tuned in, to try to poison their ears with as much bullshit as possible. 

It's a game for which there was no winning. I went to ground, and others tried to weather the bullshit. I cried frustrated tears when Mr. Cavanaugh got put on the bench - that fuckin' shitshow - and then threw up my hands in despair when Ms. Amy Coney Barrett snuck in there under the bell. That and more tax cuts and our international reputation tarnished in ways the State Department is still trying to clean up - what else happened of note? Mostly filibustering about how "not everyone is as smart as Mr. Obama, OK?"

What I really think this four-year-long idle-talk filibuster exposed was the tragedy that a lot of young people politically awakened by Mr. Obama didn't have a lot of meaningful (perhaps even unionized) work yet to get into while waiting for the next election. A lot of them were still in school or like me, just out of school, and not really in the groove yet of meaningful work. This is, and remains what concerns me most about the Trump filibuster years. The presidency of Mr. Trump was shitty performance art, but these young people had to endure it, endure being shouted at, mostly, before they'd gotten really into the workplace. And it's these scars that I hope President Biden can heal to the best of his ability.

The Northwest Passage fantasy-delusion and the climate "moment"

July 28, 2022 

It is, however weird, a geopolitical fact that the Russia-Ukraine conflict has brought to our attention the old and fabled Northwest Passage. The reason we suddenly "care" - not that we didn't before, but the pile-on now - has a lot to do with the subject of Russia and its interest in Arctic shipping. 

Russia would be glad to just get Murmansk and Arkhangel operational for more of the year because of climate change. But the "real" issue that the shipping magnates are hoping can become enough of a trend that they can figure out how to profit off of it, is a New World issue. 

The Northwest Passage has always been sort of a glorious fantasy for traders, but also something of a delusion too. The French explorers and fur traders were trying to find it, but it turns out it is further north than they thought it was, to the extent that it is usually iced out most of the year, precluding using it as a shipping route. The actual Northwest Passage is along the northern coast of Canada and Alaska: too cold for exploration except for climate change. As the globe warmed, the actual Northwest Passage has opened up. 

The modern-day explorers want to try it out for the experience. Some guy is trying to do it on a paddle board and another group of three is trying to do it on kayaks. For the 'gram, as they say. This year, the global temperatures are high enough to probably be able to do it. 

Of course, the zest for adventure is probably dulling the pain and consequence that the melting of that sea ice will cause, for two reasons: First, being the simple consequence of an Arctic no longer anchored by sea ice. Compare it to the southern latitudes at the roughly equivalent point: the open ocean around Tierra del Fuego is known for hosting some of the most violent storms in the world, powered by the rotation of the Earth and the open waters. If there is an open Northwest Passage, it will be one of the most treacherous sea routes known to man - steer your ship through those storms and around all those islands? No thank you. The second reason is the likely consequence of all that melting sea ice on the ocean ecosystem. Normally, ocean ecosystems are refreshed by "overturning currents" that bring up deeper waters into the shallower layers of the ocean. I had an Oceanography professor in college who talked about the consequence of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) being shut down because of melting polar ice: the consequence would be more "dead zones", ocean food webs shut down, no fish to eat. The same will happen anywhere. (The reason is, that meltwater is fresh water, and it sits "on top" of the salty layers of ocean water, preventing the standard overturning current action from happening; it doesn't easily "mix" either.) The likely outlook for an unfrozen Northwest Passage? Heavy storms, treacherous navigation requirements, no fish to eat. 

The capitalists, especially those close to Canada (like Sen. Angus King) think they can make some noise about this, because, apparently, you can get a ship from Asia to Europe 15 days ahead of schedule through an unfrozen Northwest Passage, vs., say, Panama. That's not taking into account the treacherous conditions though, and proponents of this old old shipping fantasy/delusion are way overestimating the potential beneficial impact of developing that shipping route. 

So, is it mostly a joke? It's not all that serious of a policy proposal, to be sure; it's about as serious as other policies about preventing the U.S. from conquering Canada, let's say. Now, I think we could take 'em and in pretty short order too, but I don't think it's a big enough priority for the U.S. geopolitically that we need to spend all this effort building economic ties with Canada to ensure perpetual peace. 

I have little to no excitement about sending sailors into a treacherous unfrozen Northwest Passage, 15-day time savings or not, and I'm not sure that policy is even worth any more to the economy than some highly-specialized shipping, and a handful of jobs. 

The real story here for serious men to note, is that the Arctic sea ice is melting enough that even this old familiar delusion is resurfacing. 

We're being regaled with a lot of stories these days that are trying to make climate change "real" to the doubters and deniers. It's been such a long time since Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, and those who took the science seriously since then, are now supposed to do what? Say "I told you so?" Well, we were right. 

Climate change is not going to be an adventure. "This adventure brought to you by humanity's inability to switch to green energy," leaves you feeling pretty empty. And we're not going to play judo with the planet. We're not going to fight the planet and win. We're going to have to play some judo with our current economy though. There's nothing that intrinsically connects our economy to carbon capitalism. If we decouple our economy from fossil fuels things will get better. Notice for instance all the perspectives from people during the pandemic realizing how much better their immediate environment was when the fossil fuel infrastructure was shut off: seeing clean canals in Venice, with dolphins in them, and clear skies in major Chinese polluting cities, had a noticeable effect on people worldwide. Shutting off the fossil fuel infrastructure has been shown to better people's lives and the environment. The other side of the equation - replacing people's energy needs with green energy - is a simple bet on the ingenuity and work ethic of people, when they're set free from oppressive structures like carbon capitalism, to do the work necessary to live: and I'll take that bet any day.

Chomsky’s Promethean theory

July 28, 2022

 I am in search of a brief article by Noam Chomsky where he argues for the Promethean theory of language. 

Language could only reasonable have originated from some individual who had an inner capacity for organizing thought into some form that it could be expressed outwardly. When this inner and inherent capacity for language was turned on or acquired by some individual, then language could be outwardly expressed - although there is no absolute equality between what this inner capacity for language is and what its outer expression is like. But it must be, because language is unique only to human bings among all the other animals, even the smart ones, and it is such a unique state of mind that leads to the production of language in speech, that it must be an even more complex state of cognition that leads to language, and, most importantly of all, it must have been some revolutionary development in human thought that led to language. And since it is so unique of a cognitive state, and so revolutionary a development that must have occurred to lead to that cognitive state, it stands to reason that it must have happened only in one individual at first. 

The details can't be hashed out because it happened so long ago, before civilization and collective memory: because these were things that language created. But reason shows that it must have happened that way, and hence, Prometheus and the Promethean theory of language. 

Parts of this may have been in Why Only Us? (2016) but I'm looking for a very short article maybe for private distribution, that disappeared from the Internet shortly after 2019 or so...

The sort of future that should be... What does a carbon-free energy paradigm mean

 July 28, 2022

This is the sort of weather today, where I am in the palm of Michigan, that almost allows one to relax one's guard enough to dream about the future that should be, regardless of the present day that is.

A lot of talk has been set in stone about how this generation wants a carbon-free energy paradigm, - which is true - , but not so much about why, or what that means for the intellectual imagination, about what would constitute a future good enough to call a practical ideal. 

And I think it is simply this, insofar as a reason goes. To imagine a creative society, of intellectuals, accessible to each other remotely through the internet, but with no coercion by the structure of the built environment or energy paradigm to interact with each other in society - but to be convinced only by the quality of each other's company and intellectual creations to indulge in unforced pro-social proclivities - this is nearly perfect among the practical possibilities of human organization.

When did the Supreme Court begin to be so completely out of touch?

July 27, 2022

When did the Supreme Court begin to be so completely out of touch?

Let me just point something out about Citizen's United v. FEC. When you crack open this Byzantine SCOTUS ruling that has aged like wine turning into vinegar, the first thing you notice is that the case was ostensibly about campaign finance reform laws, and for reasons beyond understanding, the Supreme Court turned it into a free speech case. 

When I was 18, I volunteered for an insurgent congressional campaign that made campaign finance one of its ethical stances. The campaign didn't take any corporate donations and took a hard line against fundraising improprieties by opponents. I ended up writing the press releases for the campaign and doing other press work. I mention that only for the reason that the late Senator Paul Wellstone was a totemic figure for the campaign. That campaign was a significant part of my civic education. So I'm going to speak from that personal history and that personal perspective, and now you know. 

What strikes me immediately upon reading Citizen's United is how confused the decision is about the circumstances that led to the case being considered by the Court. If someone is looking for the moment when it became clear that the Supreme Court was "out of touch" with the world outside its hallowed halls, look to Citizen's United first. But the reason this is the best example of the Supreme Court beginning to be completely "out of touch" is not in the decision itself being wrong, nor even that the reasoning is wrong, although it is suspect, but simply because it doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of the facts behind the case. 

The background to the Citizen's United case is that, 1) Congress had been haggling over a bipartisan campaign finance reform bill, and 2) this bill had been considered to be necessary due to the advent of the internet. To briefly explain why this would matter, and how it's related to Citizen's United v. FEC, just consider this: it's not as expensive to buy an Internet political ad as it is to buy a TV political ad. And political entities have already been spending large amounts of money on political ads on broadcast media. Unless we were for some reason looking forward to turning the Internet into a hellhole of political advertising, we had to, in the words of Sen. Wellstone, "get the money out of politics". 

It would also be a welcome opportunity to scrub out some of the remaining corruption in the campaign finance system. The late great Senator Paul Wellstone also attached an amendment, the Wellstone amendment, to the campaign finance reform bill, preventing certain campaign ad buys from non-profit entities too - not only corporate entities - indicating that the late great Senator considered this a matter of principle and not of partisan advantage. 

But the Citizen's United decision takes none of this into account seriously - and in fact seems genuinely confused about the issues involved in the campaign finance reform effort. It nearly trips over itself at the mention of the Wellstone Amendment, and believe it or not, after making a perfunctory effort to acknowledge the campaign finance reform legislation it proceeds as if despite "all that", the Court has prejudged the case, because they like the TV. They like watchin' the toob. Or they like that people watch da toob. They decided a complex case about changing technological paradigms and political corruption in favor of, what? -they like watching television? Honestly, there is nothing closer to the plot of the movie "Idiocracy" than the "reasoning" in this decision. 

What concerns me very deeply is this "there is no alternative" attitude the Court took toward broadcast media in this case. 

I mean, not only did they provide no help toward the campaign finance reform effort, and no help toward addressing the needs of a nascent internet age, they actively made the problem worse. 

Just keep in mind in future, that the abbreviation "money is speech" for this Citizen's Unitedcase is a mockery of the Court's reasoning. They took a case that was actually about money - campaign finance - and though some alchemical bullshit made it about speech. What they really decided was that corporations could spend huge amounts of money on advertising. And, several years later, we see that amount only increasing. Is advertising speech? I don't see that we have to go out of our way to protect it. Corporations are doing fine; they have lots of power. Don't you have to pay huge amounts of money to get your speech out there? Not anymore; not with the Internet. And that's the point Sen. Wellstone and others were making, that went right over the heads of the Supreme Court, apparently. 

The nightmare this has dropped us into is almost beyond comprehension. Just ask my friend Simon, who used to run the Michigan Campaign Finance Network: everything is money in politics these days. It's almost a better predictor than polls for where the political system is going to go. And let me just ask you this, if analysis of where the money is going can predict political trends, doesn't that show that Citizens's United ushered in a new era of political corruption?

Where’s wind and solar energy in our minds?

July 27, 2022

Where’s wind and solar energy in our minds?

 Someone, somehow needs to explain this issue about NPR (and others, but mostly NPR) being funded by first Enbridge Energy, a Canadian oil company with a shady past, and then also, now, DTE, which has concurrently been exposed if not busted for running dark money operations.  To a certain extent NPR needs to keep the lights on.  But on top of this there is this joke-that-is-not-only-a-joke among writers about the radio and spoken word information streams as being like "energy", as in gasoline, and energy stocks, and so on and so forth.  But it could be alternative energy, wind and solar. Big LOL's there, and this is only relevant in so far as it's a writer joke and a standard writer gripe about how there's not a lot that's worth listening to, and when are you supposed to listen to hear it - (because advertising and PR and so on only publicize media stuff that's very mainstream and not really that juicy and/or interesting to me or to writers generally, etc. etc.)

Hilariously I feel like I'm ordering at a restaurant the kind of "energy" I'd like to hear...and hear about.  Give me more of that good good wind energy, and solar power...

Where's wind and solar energy in our minds?  The parallel structure in the economy, of wind and solar energy on one side, with oil and gas stocks on the other side, is just as untenable as the parallel structure in the media, with traditional media forms getting dirtier and dirtier, and further and further behind the alternative media on the 'net.

Why can’t we get our rhetorical footing back?

 July 26, 2022

Why can't we get our rhetorical footing back?

The subject of the primary elections here in Michigan occasioned me to remember the case of Mallory McMorrow, who is a Michigan State Senator who earlier this year gave a much-publicized speech about being attacked by arch-conservative State Senator Lana Theis.

The attack email on Ms. Sen. McMorrow was clumsy, completely typo-ed in the most critical section, and demonstrably false. It was the standard hysteria from conservatives, especially those conservative moms and aunties out there, about "what are they teaching our kids these days?"

I won't dignify the belligerent email with much of a summary. But I will be very honest about what the motivation behind this conservative parental interventionism really is. The "problem" that these conservative parents really have inside with what their kids are doing in school, is, by and large, that the teachers are doing too good a job and the kids are doing too good a job as students, learning what they should be learning. The conservative parents, and by and large they are conservative parents who are complaining in this endless pile-on of grievances, are upset because compared to their kids, they no longer look educated or sophisticated in any way. Lana Theis and her belligerent email full of critical typographical errors is only channeling this tired old horse of parental ignorance and stupid, stupid grievances. 

Parents trying to delete parts of their child's education is the biggest problem in education today. Parents have a role in educating their children - my own parents added a lot of education to my schooling years, but they added it on as an addendum to what I learned in school; they didn't come in with an eraser trying to get rid of my education I got in the classroom. When they couldn't help me with my homework they told me flat-out that they couldn't and they told me that they were proud of me for getting to that point. And to this day I am proud of them for telling me when I was studying something so new and advanced that they weren't quite sure. 

The Lana Theis-type hysteria about kids "learning" about social issues "in school", is on its face absurd, because those kids are learning about those things from peers and the internet, and bringing those questions into school - because it's totally natural for a kid not to want to talk to their parents about this. 

Some of the civic education that kids are getting that is pissing off the parents is about social issues, but those are, first of all, about critical issues in social studies that also are making it easier to teach the kids who were for one reason or another "not getting it" before, and, secondly, these issues that students are getting from the curriculum are the minority of these social issues the hysterical suburban mom caucus is shouting and blaming and causing a ruckus about. Most of those social issues that are troubling the parents "about school" are coming from the kids themselves. That's how it was when I was in school too. That's how it always has been. These insane, hysterical, Republican women with tunnel vision on how their kid is affecting them more than how their kid is actually doing, as a human being in themselves; - they piss me of, and these Lana Theis types should piss you off too. 

The deserved response to these hysterical Republican types by the Mallory McMorrow types, who are by the way also moms, has been far too milquetoast than the situation has deserved. Lana Theis deserved far worse of a condemnation than she got from Ms. McMorrow. 

The deeper and more appropriate retribution for the Republican attack on Ms. McMorrow and schools, was to highlight what I see as the actual problem here. The problem is toxic masculinity. I see far too much of it in our public discourse. These Proud Boys motherfuckers posting their fucking signs around town, and these weak and clumsy, but also insane boys doing "training drills" in a field for the Patriot something-or-other "militia". Look, the American male is in the midst of a crisis of insecurity; this can't be denied. It's the same problem that was highlighted when it was revealed that the wives of middle-aged white men who went to Trump rallies like it when they got back from the rallies because Trump made them angry and horny and they could be like "it's like it was when we were dating!" and so on.

But among the younger crowd, it's a slightly different story. Sure, maybe they're in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Maybe. Maybe they were picked on as kids and never did anything about it, and since then they've wanted to get into a fight. Like, you know, "Now that I'm ready and trained for it, now I want to get into that fight." Kids don't fight it out these days when they're small and mostly harmless, even when they should. 

Now, now - I get that we should reduce bullying and violence in schools, but that repressed frustrated rage of the hormonal growing male is not best served by repressing it more. And sometimes a bully needs to get whooped and sometimes to get whooped twice. But let's not go about addressing this problem of toxic masculinity by treating all men like they really should be in the army. The toxic masculinity we're seeing right now is the confluence of two factors. The first is about how a lot of young men these days never got in a fight as kids when they should have but now hold onto some resentment about something as kids that they now want to have got into that fight about. The second is the effect of these exact people trying to structure social organization into something that makes them feel tough, even though they harbor that resentment about someone they wished they fought way back when but didn't, and they have a a deep insecurity about their masculinity as a consequence. 

Lana Theis's fundraising email is an extortion of those insecure conservative middle-aged white men who have a fight in their past that they didn't fight, who are deeply insecure about their masculinity as a consequence. And she's not alone in extorting insecure conservative men for money by exploiting their insecurity at not having stood up for themselves in the schoolyard as kids when they should have. These Tom Barrett and Madison Cawthorn-type motherfuckers know that extorting white middle-aged conservative male weakness for money and political donations is their bread and butter. 

Regardless of if Lana Theis's husband continues to be a conservative fundraiser (yep, I think he is right now) the fact remains that Ms. Theis continues to profit off of the insecurity of conservative audiences about their own masculinity, a social fact the rest of us think is kinda really gross. And if the crisis of confidence in the American male is something we actually care about, Lana Theis and her ilk is trash we should toss out.

Raging about data leaks, even at SCOTUS, misses the point

July 26, 2022

 Weird headline today: Chief Justice John Roberts, if I didn't find this hard to believe from our nation's top judicial officer, almost complaining? - to the public? about the leak of the draft Dobbs decision, and how the leak impacted his internal politicking on the Supreme Court to get someone else to support upholding the Roe v. Wade decision.

This is weird, because as far as the leak of the draft decision goes, it's not like the Supreme Court was robbed like Mitt Romney of his tax returns. It was an internal leak. 

And all I can say from my own personal experience is that when I was leading organizations - clubs and so on - when something like this happened I was very careful not to offload that responsibility and/or blame on the public who received that breach of information security and so on. 

At the end of the day, it was somebody at the Supreme Court who had access to the draft decision who decided to leak the draft, because of their own moral compunction - and that is an internal matter from the perspective of Chief Justice Roberts, or at least it should be. 

In fact, this comment can be generalized. Raging about data leaks misses the point. Take this Assange case too, for example, ostensibly also about leaked documents. In both these cases, no one is focusing enough attention on the fact that there were employees of these institutions on the inside that were disgusted enough over the actions of the institutions at which they worked that they made a choice to expose that which they saw as wrongdoing. We can distinguish this from data hacks and data theft. The most important consideration for me when I see that an institution or organization experienced a data leak, is, what are they doing to fix themselves internally, not even in terms of data security, but in terms of morale. If I could give Chief Justice Roberts any advice here, I would say to him to consider that a human being under SCOTUS's employ made a choice to leak this draft decision, and he should consider, to the degree of his responsibility, what that says about morale at the Court vis-a-vis its decisions. Blaming the public or just raging about it is not the way.

The surveillance state in the era of Dirty Computer

July 25, 2022

"Eyes on", someone says, and the group passing the doobie shuffles out of sight of the surveillance camera. This is from a TV show, a "black mirror" to our present moment. But it's not like a fantasy, or a premonition. Groups planning civil disobedience? - cell phones in the box, put the box away, then talk... Is this paranoia or reality? In a certain philosophical sense, - who cares?

Ms. Janelle Monae's "Dirty Computer" book talks about this, too. How did this surveillance paradigm come about? She says:

We ushered ourselves into the darkness - so many of us having grown too cool with the civic officials and techpreneurs who believed we should, we could, be an all-seeing people. And with so many so long fatigued from warring in our homes and abroad, so scared of unforeseen bullet showers and continental storms of smoke, we accepted their offer that an eye in the sky might protect us from...ourselves, our world. We already believed in an infinite web, so why not hardwire an eye to each of its strands? A camera on your home. A camera on a badge. A camera on a drone. And so on. (IX)

The unspoken scourge of the present moment, our present public culture, is this mounting dominance of surveillance. Cameras on every street corner in some public places. Behavior and public conduct is strictly maintained within norms - some completely arbitrary - not by the traditional threat of flesh-and-blood social approbation, but by a new threat, of the "eye in the sky" managed by Big Tech. 

This has unforeseen and undesirable consequences. Not only for the folks carrying on civil disobedience for the improvement of society and betterment of those social norms. 

But also, because the equilibrium has shifted, toward a tendency for people that want to change society for the better being less comfortable experimenting with presenting those ideas to the public, and, rather, are more likely to indulge the proclivity for covert, and clandestine activity, out of the sight of the public and out of the reach of the law - and even moral deliberations as a whole. 

Why is that? Because, of the simple fact that when a camera is trained upon you, the fundamental instinct is to act more like you are acting, in a play - less improvisation, a lack of naturalism. And a lack of new ideas results, for several reasons: lack of people with those ideas on the scene, and lack of people being willing to voice those ideas. 

It's hard not to see these cameras except as a threat. For decades, video evidence, after all, has been the nail in the coffin for the opposing side - and/or "the smoking gun" for the police. That completely dispositive piece of evidence that could put someone away or not... For the rest of the citizenry, what a pressure on us on how to do perfectly normal things in living your life. 

What should you or anyone else do, to avoid putting themselves in a situation where their actions might be taken "out of context" by the "eye in the sky" and its human operator... especially when the omnipresent camera conditions us to live life in the public as an act - except to avoid the context where your conduct might be videotaped? 

Everything we do in front of surveillance camera has become, because of how our society and legal system has now conditioned us to see surveillance footage, could become part of some 11th round knockout that proves some wrongdoing we might later be accused of... you can imagine how someone could see this new surveillance society as actually being structured that way. 

Video footage is often that slam-dunk in a court case where it is used...and it thinkably could be precluding people from taking advantage of their rights and taking their case to court, even just to a lawyer, if video is used in the police action against them. 

Ms. Monae hits on this hard kernel of truth when she writes: 

"You're not a police state, but you're sure as fuck letting the executioner lead your investigation." (147)

Is enough of our actual lives, including our occasional counter-conducts that may be productive for our society, getting to a place of reasoned deliberation?  Dirty Computer; it's all around us. With our current regime of a "surveillance state", I think too much of our ability to deliberately consider these new issues in human behavior is being siphoned away because the surveillance-based police state is siphoning these issues away from public and institutional view: it gets you coming and going.

A brief note on war crimes.

 July 25, 2022

A brief note on war crimes.

I wouldn't classify this issue vis-à-vis Ukraine as a major American policy consideration, but I do want to make note of this continuing hypocrisy of war, that is only lightly changed form in this Ukraine-Russia war.

Has anyone else also noticed that in recent years, roughly in the post World War II through the War on Terror period, the "dirty trick" played by rival armies on each other was to repeatedly say they were "not actually attacking medical facilities and hospitals", but actually in fact attacking medical facilities and hospitals? When, for example they wanted to deliver a "shock and awe" moment? Bosnia, Kosovo, and Fallujah all provide examples of that, from all sorts of belligerents. That which is denied at the outset, but is done under the cover of the fog of war…

The football lineman that tells you that "yeah, eye gouging and facemask-ing is a foul, and everyone does it"? You've heard that, you know, and you don't deny it.

What I want to note about this kind of war crime, is that in the midst of this Russia–Ukraine war, it is slightly changing its character. Pretty recently, Russia has been "caught" attacking grain supplies, and have started denying that they attack grain supplies. In this milieu, shall we say, whatever belligerents deny that they do at the outset, they absolutely, assuredly, will do.

I wouldn't classify this as a major problem for American public policy, because we are systematically structured as a self-sufficient society when it comes to food supply. That gets back to our physiocratic roots in economic policy, all the way back to our beginning. The little bit of food we import is mostly novelty or specialty, and nothing that is an essential staple in any quantity. However, all the talk about how the Russian – Ukrainian war is going to affect the global grain supply is about how it will affect our European allies. 

The idea of the united European economic zone with its own currency produced a problem where now the whole of Europe is in some way unified into one "farm", where there are very unclear boundaries, for where grain can flow freely, and where there should be export and import controls. Basically, this means that Europe has had to embrace mercantilism with little recourse to physiocracy to support their farmers and the rest of their economic base. And the effect of this has been that Europe is very reliant on Ukrainian grain and grain sources from the rest of their "periphery". It's not unlike the problem of the late Roman Empire, that was hugely reliant on grain supplies from Scythia (Central Asia). 

Europe embraced mercantilism and undermined any hope of physiocracy, and they'll reap the rewards, or lack thereof, from that. 

But for Americans, we should at least preserve the caution that we shouldn't follow along with the European delusion, as we have for far too many years during the War on Terror period.

The "Dirty Computer" of Ms. Janelle Monae's "Memory Librarian" does not disappoint.

July 25, 2022

 I've been talking about Dirty Computer without having read Janelle Monáe's "The Memory Librarian: and other stories of Dirty Computer," but I did read it over the weekend, in my estimation of her genius has not changed. She does an estimable job of describing where our "future history, of the mind" is right now. Her lyricism does not disappoint; the book is filled with sparkling gems, glittering phraseology, and poignant bars of written music.

The key to understanding what Dirty Computer means, for Ms. Monae, just as I also thought it was, is that dirty computer as a philosophical term is about neither "dirtiness" nor "the computer", but something intimately describing the nature of the nexus of power and democracy in "these times we live in" – a new era of literate culture inseparable from technology and the Internet. The technological paradigm is not the culture, but the literate culture must move through the milieu, and/or paradigm, of the technology of our literate transmission.

Ms. Monae's book is above all, quotable, and it takes the dryness and technical jargon out of the science-fiction paradigm that is in so many real ways are lived reality; fills it again with all the trans-ness, blackness, queer stories – but also, the sex and sexiness, the drugs, booze and surveillance that makes it real, relevant, and human again, without keeping it so dry and clinical that it is removed from the messiness of life. "Her eyes speak love and incandescent anger," Ms. Monet writes of a character who is extraordinarily renditioned.  And in a way, so does her book.

I've certainly had enough of Peter Thiel's resentment in this post-Gawker world

 July 22, 2022

If there's an elephant in the room we probably shouldn't just sit tight and hope it goes away. Yes, Peter Thiel, aspiring tech overlord currently trying to "steal $1 billion from the Pentagon", is the same guy that bankrolled the lawsuit against Gawker by the former '80s pro wrestler Hulk Hogan.

A strange sensational case full of stupid people.

The Artist Formerly Known as Hulk Hogan got videotaped having sex with someone else's wife who was, I gather, a swinger in the first place. The tape got out, and was posted on the blog gawker.com. I haven't gotten into the sordid details of the factual background of the case because, to be honest, I'm not all that interested in seeing or reading about The Artist Formally Known as Hulk Hogan having fun: especially not about him having fun and then whining about it.

But yes, Gawker got a hold of the video of their liaison, which happened at her house. So, who recorded it? Probably her or her husband. I don't know or care at this point.

What is interesting and what was talked about in my circles, was that line of questioning that follows from the ask "what could've possessed Gawker to post the video?"

Now, this case is well and over, too fast for me to analyze it, but it's influence has lingered on. I'm not a lawyer and I didn't work on this case etc.; and I'm not all that interested in The Artist Formerly Known as Hulk Hogan, and his fame. But I am interested in the underlying free speech issues and what vampire spylord Peter Thiel had to do with it.  (Thiel, by the way, is responsible for Palantir, one of the spyware programs used by the US intelligence community and its effort to spy on everyone, including US citizens.)

I don't know if Gawker made the case for why it was newsworthy, but they had an argument for it, at least. They got got on a charge of invasion of privacy, which is at the very least, slightly weird because it's not like the woman The Artist Formerly Known as Hulk Hogan slept with, or her erstwhile husband, were charged. It's not like Gawker was in her house with the camera. But OK, they were charged. And it is a weird kind of revenge porn situation, but, you know, revenge on the artist formerly known as Hulk Hogan for taking advantage, in apparently his own admission, of the woman's open relationship. Sordid indeed.

Who know if Gawker made this case, but if we're being totally honest, pro wrestling has always been, shall we say, not unsexual in its portrayal of people fighting it out over televised feuds. And there have been some whispers and rumors of late about sexual improprieties behind the scenes of pro wrestling, or shall we say, behind behind the scenes, including at least suspicions of harassment and abuse, etc. and this is not a new problem arguably, just a newly-identified problem. It's not unlikely it's one of those elements motivating the kind of "kayfabe" manipulation of the plot about the characters on the screen. So The Artist Formerly Known as Hulk Hogan comes out of this environment and it's not unreasonable to wonder, as a layperson, if he is going to continue to act as his villainous character did once he gets out of that bubble. 

It's not an airtight case, of course, but I wonder if we can understand Gawker, from that perspective. Some amateur or semi-amateur journalist sees that, and says to theyself "oh, well that confirms my suspicions on that," and posts it.

Now, the part that I am explicitly interested in, is, given that backlog of problematic nonsense and/or salacious detail, it's not like pro wrestling is about to give its full-throated support to The Artist Formerly Known as Hulk Hogan. But who steps in with the cash to fund a lawsuit, not against the videographer, whoever that may be, but against Gawker? Peter Thiel, who already had a grudge against Gawker. 

So let's talk about Peter Thiel's grudge. Some other semi-amateur journalist at Gawker, he says, outed him as gay. It was another one of those partially-defensible but overall understandable things. The article in question from 2007 was basically a sort-of clumsy but to me not-malicious-seeming attempt to answer the question that goes something like "why is Peter Thiel being ostracized in investment circles?" with the answer voiced as a question "is it because he's gay?" I think Peter Thiel might have won that case. I don't know; he certainly has been very litigious, against Gawker, and, you know, generally. Ironically I think he financed eight lawsuits filed by Harvey Weinstein accusers too.

The whole thing was framed as invasion of privacy and not about free speech, but you know and I know it was the weird revenge porn angle that made it so titillating and kept the grudges underlying what actually happened under the radar.

Is it fair to out someone as gay? Nah. But what exactly that means is not so clear. People can have shame, and we should respect it to a degree. But you can't be coming back for seconds on the resentment over being outed as gay. That's not fair either. And that's what Peter Thiel's been doing, pretty much - and now to the extent that all of us, all of American society, are bearing the brunt of his resentment? What a fuckin' nightmare.

Ironically the tone of that 2007 article seemed to me, at least, to be saying to Mr. Thiel "own it, accept it, be you" which to my understanding is the healthy way to do it. That's my understanding. Just me. I'm definitely not here to teach anybody how to be gay...

Mr. Thiel has certainly parlayed this pity into a lot of attacks on free-speech and Free Press, mostly tangential issues that have a lot of sensationalism to them.  It has contributed overall to an atmosphere where we all are enduring a sense of being criticized for public participation on the Internet. And who doesn't want that nightmare to end? I certainly want that fuckin' nightmare to end.

Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt teamin’ up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon

 July 22, 2022

Let's talk about Peter Thiel, aspiring tech overlord, and Eric "Don't be Evil" Schmidt's tech startup to "prevent Chinese Ideology from dominating the world", which I believe was also recently called by someone in the realm of journalism "teaming up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon".

The ridiculous slide into techno-dystopia continues apace, it seems.

It's not really clear what our most hated vampire spylord Peter Thiel is actually planning on doing with this money, but nonetheless the CIA-aligned hedge fund In-Q-Tel gave him a big chunk of money when he and former Google techno-robber-baron Eric Schmidt proposed to them to do some sneaky spy stuff in China.  This absolute filibustering, by the way, apropos of nothing, brought to you by two members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee. Now, of course, to be fair, I'm a proponent of the quote from some cartoon or other that, "most conspiracy theories are actually just capitalism." It's just that this seems to be exactly the sort of conspiracy theory that is, in fact, capitalism.

Practically, yes, the US and intelligence community is having a Dickens of a time actually figuring out what's going on in China. This has a lot to do in fact with the simple problem that the Chinese written language is pretty hard to read and write, perhaps the hardest, and the CIA can't use most of its traditional bag of sneaky tricks to subvert the Chinese state with the power of language.  The poor guys sitting in the basement with a pad and a pen may never recover.  

The fact of the matter, unfortunately, is that we can't effectively continue our intelligence gathering operations in China based purely on orality.  I mean, the cab drivers in China have got that strategy figured out.  I rode in a couple cabs in North China about eight years ago while I was working a summer job at the US Consulate, and you can see in those cabs the cab drivers using dictation to text each other back-and-forth. In Chinese that is. It's already become part of the background noise. Continuing to have most of our intelligence gathering activities with respect to China based on not enough literate intelligence and diplomatic personnel who can write Chinese is, in fact, putting us in a bad spot. 

So Peter Thiel does make the impression that he is trying to address a need. And by lugging Eric Schmidt along he's got the impression that he's got power on his side because he's got "tech". But let's assume that he was actually trying to solve the problem seriously. He would absolutely be going about it the wrong way. Trying to brute-force the "answer" to "Chinese ideology" out of India, Japan, and Australia using "tech power", is really far from serving the US national interest in the most efficient way.

"Chinese ideology" if you want to call it that, is, really, based on the Chinese written language to an inseparable extent. If you want to figure out the "Chinese mind", you have to go through the Chinese written language to get there. But that is, you have to admit, ridiculously assuming that "the Chinese mind" is some monolithic thing. We have allies in the Chinese-speaking world and instead of grappling with that, Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt would rather waste themselves on some stupid kamikaze strategy running right at China with no context.

Not to mention, they are trying to do this with "tech" only. Look – to be honest, they are going to break through pretty quickly into something more or less equivalent to the highly-policed Chinese social media sites like Weibo, and quickly start putting out useless and confused intel from there.  We've been there. It's not a serious endeavor for national security. It is, actually, nothing more than Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt teaming up to steal $1 billion from the Pentagon.

It's not serious because they're not going at the problem of our intel deficit at the level of language. We need to seriously address the language deficit in this relationship of semi – competition with China, and to do that, we need the help of our allies in Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia too.

The latest hijinks from Peter Thiel, in "stealing $1 billion from the Pentagon", is, looking more and more not like hijinks but the evidence of the nascent kleptocracy of our techno-dystopian robber barons.
If we seriously want to address the intel deficit vis-à-vis China, let's do that, seriously. But this Peter Thiel-led money grab is not the way. All they're going to do after stealing their $1 billion from the Pentagon is to "not do the job and say we did." What a waste of a billion dollars.  

If you want to follow along with "Peter and Eric go to White Castle", feel free. But Chinese social media is not that good.

Optimism is the conspiracy of the oil and gas sector. Let's be clear, about that.

 July 22, 2022

Optimism is the conspiracy of the oil and gas sector. Let's be clear, about that.

There's a fairly recent report about this. Employment in the Texas oil and gas sector has been sharply decreasing in the past year, and has "declined over the last two boom and bust cycles for oil prices".

Meanwhile, Texas non-farm employment, and alternative energy employment has increased. The Texas fuel sector was the only sector that lost jobs over the year 2021.

Of course, let's apply some common sense to this beyond the charts and graphs in the cognitive dissonance associated with this issue. What's really going on in this sector has a lot more to do with stuff you might've heard of, more than complex economic analysis. For a long time, they've been trying to develop "fracking" techniques. To "unconventionally" extract what they are calling "tight oil" and so on, has proved to be not cost-effective, and it comes with all sorts of collateral damage to the environment.

So to put this in common terms, they set up all these fracking operations, quite a few on private land, and farmers and ranchers included, and basically not been able to make a profit on it. This is so funny, that they've got the East Coast bankers involved, because there's nothing that East Coast investment community loves more than quixotic operations that are hemorrhaging money all over the place. The farmers, are of course OK for now because they're being paid through property leases and so on for the most part, but it's too often happens, the grift of this fracking scheme as a whole is that the farmers will take the final and most brutal blow when the industry just can't make it work and closes off the drilling wells, in one way or another. The fact that farmers are accepting the risk of contamination to their lands just makes this all the more macabre.

All this is not to mention that the fracked gas infrastructure is not safe. Gas pipelines are known to explode and catch fire, as one in Texas recently actually dead. Firefighters spent two hours trying to put out the fire, and couldn't put it out until the flow gas was shut off.

The wide view of this situation is that most of the easily-accessible oil and gas reserves have already been exploited and the only action left in the market are these hard-to-get oil and gas resources. They're having the same problems making a profit on tar sands oil. Most of the operators in tar sands and in fracking are accepting debt to continue operating, essentially betting on the hapless scientists and engineers they've got to "get it together" and tell them how to profitably extract the tar sands oil and fracked gas. The oil and gas industry has had to desperately assure those East Coast investment guys breathing down their necks that they're "keenly focused on driving down their unit costs," which is what people in a market often say, rather than admit that they just got a hold of a bad idea. Those who are "doing OK" in that part of the oil and gas sector are shielded in some way by complex financial instruments. 

The long view is accessible by common sense if you care to know. Of course, oil and gas is a finite resource. Those in the employ, or under the influence of, the oil and gas sector who say they'll extract every drop of oil and every whiff of gas from the earth and oil and gas will be around forever are just exposing the delusional optimism that undergirds the oil and gas sector. This is a conspiracy of short-term memory loss. Let's just be honest about it: the oil and gas sector couldn't go on making a profit unless they constantly project an aura of optimism. If they didn't say on and on, over and over again, that they are optimistic about "the next one", whatever that "one" is, they'd be over.

It's just harder and harder to believe that. The next time I put out my solar panel, I'll be thinking about this, probably a little. But I'll level with you, it's hard to get into the habit of using one of those solar panels, because oil and gas is the habit we have. It's worth it to get into new ones. ¯\(ツ)/¯

The problem of online publishing is a real problem

July 21, 2022 

The problem of online publishing is a real problem.

There are two separate but not completely immiscible problems within it.

I'm not even talking about profitability alone, but if places like Substack have turned out to be based on some very problematic culture war paradigms - where is it that smart writers are supposed to take their work? Back to social media, with its own platform–based problems, and work for donations from their Amazon wish list? I think that would debase the craft that I love.

But the two separate but not completely immiscible problems are these: 

One. For the one thing, the Internet is great for readers but really not great for writers. I could go on and on about this but even the readers will have noticed this in recent years, that the quality of writing on the Internet has gone down - and now, perhaps, it just "frustrates you "to "keep up with what's going on"? The traditional clearing houses for writing are "barely hanging on" by all accounts because, not the quality of writing, but the attention of the readership, went down. The problem came about because the dominant narrative in the Internet publishing space has become "own your niche" and "be a specialist in one small thing". The problem with this paradigm is that it is outdated. Niche knowledge is not what people know or care about these days. It's not what is good about the people who are either really writing now or should be writing right now. So the problem that exists now started on the demand side. The publishers adapting to the Internet were told to demand a niche specialty from the writers they hired (also abbreviated to "personal experience") and that didn't align with the actual demand from readers. And this has continuously squeezed out the good writers. And this has bled over into traditional publishing, where there are just more and more and too many "books about the Internet" which are of very limited interest to digital natives. So what is left? I read very little these days except for occasionally re-reading parts of classics that are relevant; and, the Internet bores me. Some of us digital natives are still spicing up some niche topics about this or that, but we're really at the tail end of the culture wars. Who knows when the news cycle will get it: not for a while, at this rate. 

Two. Readers, in search of writing that is actually interesting to them, have started to read widely, and by the way have exposed that the traditional institutions that are supposed to craft and channel the work of writers to readers are not up to the task of doing that. And of course, we only once supposed that they were doing that in the first place, but that may have been never their object. So these pipelines don't work how we need them to, and likely they were never supposed to bring us what we need. Writers have very little trust in these traditional media pipelines, and part of this widespread mistrust is so widespread because more writers have become aware of this bullshit game. The media companies sometimes still blame this on "social media undermining everything" or other media: the radio blames the TV, the TV blames Twitter, and the paper publishing companies blame the Internet, and the Internet publishing companies blame Reddit, "video" social media like TikTok, and social media. So then writers hip to the game take their work to social media and then they can even more easily get marginalized by the system, by algorithms and crowd-based social engineering. The scariest thing to the modern system of government is an uncaptured and practiced hand with a pen, sure. But does it not make sense, given all this, that some people, both smart and knowledgeable, find most freedom and even power, in the Anonymous and WikiLeaks-esque paradigm of privacy and secrecy politics? 

What else is new? This is how it always has been, translated onto the Internet. But, maintaining the status quo when there is so much more power given the Internet paradigm we live in would require that the state apparatus reserve so much of a new reserves of power to itself, that we would be heading very quickly to a totalitarian state.

States have always maintained control with the power of the purse and the power of the pen. But totalitarian states are distinct because they have a monopoly on the power of the pen. That's why America has a first amendment in the Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and press, assembly and petition.

But imagine the situation we're in right now, sort of arguing whether the state or "some other thing", which we can see right now in America is totally messed up should have total control over all of this power of the pen. OK: Solomon and "dividing up the baby" – that famous story. That is sort of where we are at as a country, trying to decide where this new capacity for the power of the pen should go. He was renowned for his skill of judgment as shown in that story… But here's what I think: that poor baby. Anyone else ever thought about that? The poor baby. 

So I return to some of my public policy training here too. In that story everyone's immediate perspective has Othered the baby whose life can casually be sacrificed to determine where he or she belongs - or to whom the baby belongs. The human life of the innocent child has been subsumed to considerations about property, and property - of a human life no less - has been determined to be a more appropriate area of moral debate than the baby's life. How has that happened? Because in the perspective, somehow, of everyone in that room, the baby was Othered. Considered to be Other than the rest of the human life in the room. 

What's the analogy? The baby here are these new young writers connected to the Internet representing the new capacity for the power of the pen, and somehow, beyond understanding, the question has been put to someone, or some singular entity, whether that new capacity for power of the pen should be put entirely into the province either of the state or of "civil society."

This is completely absurd but it is not an idle analogy. It shouldn't be solved this way because it is no solution; it is based on faulty premises. The new power of the pen, or more precisely the new capacity in the power of the pen, is not one entity, and no one entity should choose where it "goes"; but we are societally treating this problem this way, and I have experienced it, and I think this is very dangerous.