Possession

I think a lot about an interview I once saw with Jim Henson.

Of course, Kermit the Frog was sitting on Henson’s knee.

As the interviewer spoke to Henson, Kermit would occasionally comment. And I became fascinated by how throughout the interview, even when Henson was clearly thinking intently or fully engaged in speaking, Kermit looked back and forth between Henson and the interviewer, his face changing expression as he reacted to what he was hearing. This is impressive enough a demonstration of Henson's practiced hand at performing Kermit … but then something astonishing happened. Kermit interrupted Henson and Henson was obviously surprised by what Kermit had said. They had a little discussion between the two of them — as I recall, they disagreed with each other — then they returned to replying to the interviewer.

I wish I could find a clip of this half-remembered interview. It stands out in my mind because that exchange between Henson and Kermit was unmistakably, uncannily real, not merely a performance for our benefit.

(I have another example of Kermit inspiring existential terror, though this one is more intentional.)

This comes to mind because I just read a little story about Mel Blanc which is very Relevant To My Interests.

Back in 1988, I was lying in bed listening to Mel Blanc (you know, the voice of just about every well-known cartoon character, famously Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Barney Rubble … I could go on) being interviewed by the local station as part of his book tour, his autobiography That’s NOT All, Folks!. He told Robin and Maynard a tale I was too young to hear as a lad, the story of his car wreck in early 1961 that left him very near death in a coma.

Here’s the weird. Mel told the story that his doctor came by every day and ask, “Mr. Blanc, how are you?” to see if he could elicit a response. Every day, nothing. Finally, Mel said, the doctor tried a different tack; he asked, “How’s he doing in there, Bugs?” To the shock of both the doctor and Blanc's son, also in the room, Bug's voice came out, saying weakly, “Ah, he’ll be alright, Doc.”

I always loved that story. Even when I found out it was wrong, since it was wrong in a way that said so much about the nature of our brains and how we perceive the world and us within it.

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You see, Blanc’s Doc Louis Conway didn’t ask Bugs Bunny how Mel was doing. As both he and Mel’s son Noel Blanc witnessed, the doctor asked Bugs how he was doing, as in “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?” And rather than attest to Mel’s well-being, Blanc said in Bugs’ voice, “Nyeah, What’s up Doc?”

Doctor Conway then went down a list, asking for Porky, Tweety, Foghorn … and each answered in their respective voice. Finally, after a string of six or so characters emerging, Blanc himself came out of the coma, asking about what happened and where he was.

And that’s weird; not that Blanc answered in the characters he so ably brought to life, but decades later that he would mis-remember this story on his Seattle radio interview (and, one would assume, others as well), placing these personas deep within him as guardian angels, not as shattered fragments, distinct individuals buried deep within his conscious but yet whole, sometimes whole enough to take over his body and communicate when he himself was too broken to answer.

Son Noel gives credence to this idea of the characters being a part of Blanc, noting that watching his dad, he sometimes turned down the volume from the recording studio, but could still tell which character his dad was voicing just by the posture, the demeanor Blanc assumed. “So, I think they were part of him, basically,” Noel notes in the Radiolab piece. He even evaded the question of why his father responded first to Bugs’ summons, not to dad, or father, or Mel.

The fact that Blanc did not recall what Bugs had said reminded me of a more profound manifestation of how we appear to be built to do this kind of thing. There’s a good description of it in Michael Ventura’s essay Hear That Long Snake Moan about (among other things) Voodoo, which I happen to have handy:

Spurred by the holy drums, deep in the meditation of the dance, one is literally entered by a god or a goddess. Goddesses may enter men, and gods may enter women. Westerners call this “possession.” That’s too crude a concept for this, though good writers describing the phenomenon have been forced to use it; we have no other word or concept that comes close. But instead of possession, it seems more accurate to think of “a flowing through.” The one flows through the other. They flow through each other. As Maya Deren put it in her study of Haitian Voodoo, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti: “The loa [spirit], then, partakes of the head that bears it. The principle is modified by the person.” (Deren’s italics.) The body, literally, becomes the crossroads. Human and divine are united within it — and it can happen to anyone.

What a frightening, utterly terrifying concept to our Western minds. Far from inflating the ego, the experience demolishes it while the state lasts. People who’ve been in this state commonly can’t remember what they’ve said or done, and part of the function of the ceremony is to have witnesses who will later tell them what the god said through them. In the West we are so frightened of such states that we assume, when we see them in isolated cases, that they are symptoms of psychosis, if we are charitable; if we are not, we assume — as the first Westerners to see such things assumed — that this is possession by the Devil, and that anything, anything at all, is justified in blotting it out. It is no wonder we tend not to “go south” for our philosophy.

[⋯]

The god is seen as the rider, the person is seen as the horse, and they come together in the dance. When the god speaks through the person about that person, almost every sentence is prefaced with the phrase, “Tell my horse … ” — because the “horse” will have no memory of the “ride” when it is over, and will have to learn of it from others. The morality implicit in this is stated best in Maya Deren’s favorite Haitian proverb: great gods cannot ride little horses.

“There’s a whole language of possession,” Thompson says, “a different expression and stance for each god.” All the accounts are clear that a god is instantly recognizable by its movements, and the movements are different for each. So if the ceremony is to honor Ghede, their equivalent of Hermes, perhaps Erzulie, their Aphrodite, shows up uninvited. But she is recognizable whether she rides a man or a woman because of her distinctive movements and behavior. This suggests a psychic suppleness that has to be staggering to any Westerner. Staggering, and frightening, if we are honest with ourselves. We may speak of a new model of the psyche, we may even be learning to experience life in a way that is more true to the way our many-faced psyches are structured — which is to say, the way they were created to live — but here are people who can dance it!

Here are people who can, to use Jungian terminology, embody an archetype — any single Voodoo worshiper may embody many during a lifetime of ceremonies. They will dance it, speak it, make love through it, manifest it in every possible way, entering and leaving the experience without psychosis, without “mind-expanding” drugs, and while having the support and help of their community, for all of this is integral with their daily lives.

I don’t mean to diminish possessory work by reducing it to sock puppetry; on the contrary, I want to ennoble what Henson and Blanc did by saying that their creativity is a manifestation of the same capacity that permits us contact with the gods so intimate that they can live within us as processes independent of what we ordinarily think of as our “self”. Here’s Alan Moore in an interview describing his relationship with a god who is very literally a sock puppet.

Do I believe I can raise the dead and talk to them? Yes, I do. Not in any physical sense because that would smell. I don’t see any point in that. You don’t want a maggot bag walking around your living room. But could I re-animate the idea of a person in the useful sense and be able to communicate with that person – or, at least, to believe that I was communicating with that person to such an extent that the information I received was as good as if that person was talking to me? Yes, I do. Most of the effects described in classical magical tradition I believe I can duplicate with art, possibly drugs – or some other means of integrating myself more deeply with that sort of reality, that sort of consciousness – I believe I could do most of the things that are described in traditional magic. This opens up wider possibilities. It also enables me to understand myself on a deeper level. By accepting the idea of endless pantheons of gods, I somehow accept these creatures as being distinct and separate from me, and not as being, to some degree, higher functions of me. Iain Sinclair was asking me about this: he asked me ‘do you think they are inside you, or outside you?’ The only answer I could come up with was, the more I think about it the inside is the outside. That the objective world and the non-objective world are the same thing, to some degree. Ideaspace and this space are the same space. Just different ends of the scale. That’s not a very good explanation, but the best I can come up with so far. All of these things are exploratory, they are exploring me, exploring the world of ideas, attempting to contact what I believe may be potent forms of energy. Like for example, I might do a work to put me in contact with the god Mercury. If the information I get from that is valuable to me, and new enough, it doesn’t really matter whether the god Mercury is there at all, does it? There is a channel that I have called the god Mercury, some sort of information source I have named.

I can understand that on an abstract level. If the information provided is useful, why question the actual existence of whatever is providing that information. But on a personal level, if you were receiving information that you couldn’t immediately attribute to as coming from yourself, wouldn’t you feel absolute terror?

In my own experience – and this is where we get into the complete madness here – I have only met about four gods, a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation – that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last twenty-five years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me to be a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once – it is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is late Roman snake god, called Glycon, he was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there.

Anyway, the False Prophet Alexander is a Moon and Serpent hero, a saint if you like. He was running what seemed to be a travelling Seleni medicine show, he would do a performance of the mysteries of the goddess Soi. The only reference to him is in the works of Lucien, who calls him a complete charlatan and fraud. At some point, Alexander the False Prophet said he was going to preside over the second coming of the god Aeschepylus, the serpent god of medicine. He said this is going to happen at noon tomorrow, in the marketplace. So everyone said ‘sounds good’ and they all went down there. After a little while, they said “come on, False Prophet Alexander, where is the second coming of Aeschepylus?” At which point, The False Prophet Alexander bent down, reached into a puddle at his feet, pulled up an egg, split it with his thumbnail, and there was a tiny snake inside, and said “Behold, the new Aeschepylus”, took it home with him, where over a week it apparently grew to a prodigious size until it was taller than a man, and had the head and features of a man. It had long blonde hair, ears, eyelids, a nose. At this point he started to exhibit it in his temple, providing religious meeting with this incarnate god. At which point Lucian said, it was obvious, I could have done that. Lucian is another James Randi, you know, I could have done that, he got the snake’s head under his arm, speaking tube over his shoulder, child’s play. And he’s probably right, that’s probably how he did it. If I’m going to adopt a god, I’d rather know starting out that it was a glove puppet. To me it’s a real god, there’s nothing that precludes a glove puppet from being a real god. How else would you explain the cult of Sooty? But a god is the idea of a god. The idea of a god is a god. The idea of Glycon is Glycon, if I can enhance that idea with an anaconda and a speaking tube, fair enough. I am unlikely to start believing that this glove puppet created the universe. It’s a fiction, all gods are fiction. It’s just that I happen to think that fiction’s real. Or that it has its own reality, that is just as valid as ours. I happen to believe that most of the important things in the material world start out as fiction. That everything around us was once fiction – before there was the table there was the idea of a table, and the idea of a table before tables was fiction. This is the most important world, the world of fictional things. That’s the world where all this starts. So I had an experience which seems to be an experience of this made-up, Basil-Brush type entity. It was devastating.

This was the pivotal experience. You were forty when you had this occult Road to Damascus.

Yes. On the day I was forty, I decided I was going to become a magician. That was on November 18th. On January 7th the following year, that was when all of a sudden the lightning bolt hit. It all got a bit strange. For a couple of months after that, I was – looking back – probably in some borderline schizophrenic state. I was very spaced out – godstruck, you babble for a while. It’s a natural response. Babble like an idiot. I’m surprised that – when I look back at what I was saying – that so much of it at least makes a fragment of sense because I was in some divine haze. “I see it all now”, you know, I must have been unbearable for two or three months. I’ve integrated that now into the rest of my life. Now I can deal with functionality on a practical level. And I still have this relationship with this imaginary snake. My imaginary pal. If I’m going to be dealing in totally imaginary territory, it struck me that it would be useful to have a native as a guide. So I can have my imaginary conversations with my imaginary snake, and maybe it gives me information I already knew in part of myself, and maybe I just needed to make up an imaginary snake to tell me it.

Do you have a ritual during which these various conversations take place?

Increasingly, with that particular god, it becomes more casual. It will be talking to the giant imaginary snake god much in the same way you talked to God when you were six, in the quiet silence of bed. If I wanted a full-scale manifestation, one that was apparent to other people, then I would do a ritual. I have displayed the snake god to other people. Or I have consciously hypnotised them into accepting my psychotic belief system, given them drugs, and made them think they are having the experience I have. Whatever you want. I’m not fussed.

The human brain is a palace with chambers set aside where the gods may dwell.

Chartjunk

A simple example on how to make your graphs less terrible from MKite on Reddit:

Conservative projection

Doug Muder's blog The Weekly Sift is my favorite lefty news roundup. This week he offered a particularly clarifying piece about conservative projection, a phenomenon much noted by lefty commentators, providing a crisp description of the psychology.

People of all religions and philosophies find it hard to “see ourselves as others see us”, but most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we should. On the Religious Right, though, it’s not just hard to look at your faith from the outside, it’s wrong. (Something similar happens on the political Right with “American exceptionalism”; it’s not just difficult for Americans to see the United States as a nation among other nations, it’s a mistake that should be rejected out of hand.)

This dogmatic quirk has a predictable result: Religious Right speakers and authors have a profound lack of self-awareness.

....

People who lack self-awareness are prone to what psychologists call projection — their repressed self-criticism doesn’t just evaporate, it comes out as criticism of others. Projection is why liars don’t trust anybody and gossips believe everyone is talking about them. Projection is why puritans imagine that everyone else is obsessed with sex, and ideologues see themselves beset by everyone else’s ideology.

Of course, savvy conservatives accuse liberals of projection ... a kind of meta-projection ....

Economic policy

Ganked entire from Brad DeLong's website: The Seven Cardinal Virtues of Equitable Growth

1. Manage the macroeconomy to match aggregate demand to potential supply. Take the dual mandate seriously: maintaining full employment is as important a central bank goal as low and stable inflation--and much more important than preserving healthy margins for the banking sector. Run large deficits--run up the national debt--in times of war, depression, or other national emergency calling for government action. Pay down the debt in other times.
2. Invest. Invest in ideas, in equipment capital, in structures capital, in education: we need more of all forms of investment. Boost public and private investment: we need both kinds.
3. Over the past generation, America has shifted enormous resources into value-substracting industries: health-care administration, prisons, finance, carbon energy. We need to reverse those shifts, and focus the American economy on the value-creating sectors rather than the value-subtracting ones.
4. We ought to have had a carbon tax 20 years ago. We still need one.
5. We need more immigration. It is much easier, worldwide, to move the people to where the institutions are already good than to make good institutions where the people are. More immigration produces a richer country for those already here. More immigration is a mitzvah for immigrants. More immigration is, to a a lesser degree, a mitzvah for those in poor countries outside who see less population pressure on resources. And a U.S. in 2070 that has 600 million people is more of an international superpower than a U.S. in 2070 that has only 400 million people.
6. We need more equality. If we want to have equality of opportunity 50 years from now, we need substantial equality of result right now.
7. We are going to need a bigger and better government. The private unregulated market does not do well at health-care finance, at pensions, or at education finance. The private unregulated market does not do well at research and early-stage development. The private unregulated market does not do well with commodities that are non-rival. We are moving into a twenty-first century in which these sectors will all be larger slices of what we do, and so a well-functioning economy will need a larger government relative to the private economy than the twentieth century did.

I'm still on the lookout for radical, soixante-huitard alternatives to growth and capitalism (do let me know if you have a solution to that which isn't stupid) but in the meantime, this will do nicely as an agenda.

Objectification

Webcomic Shortpacked offers a comment on objectification of women in comic books which is incisive even if you don't care about comics at all. That last panel is so very, very good.

Carpetbaggers

I vividly remember during the First Web Boom, when San Francisco had an influx of ’99ers, that I resisted grumbling about the folks coming to San Francisco to seek their fortunes.

I moved to the Bay Area in 1992. I met plenty of people who had a kind of chauvinism about the Bay Area, who would talk about how the real San Franciscans were only the people who had moved to SF before they did, the day they did, or the day after, and everyone else was just a newcomer and not the real thing. It's a thing you hear in any place, organization, and subculture — you should have been here in the old days — and I didn't want to be one of those folks.

So I held my tongue for a good long time, thinking that resentment of the influx of people from the Boom was more of the same. The tone of the City changed, but hey, things change. I tried to appreciate the weird excitement it brought.

Still, it bothered me, and I tried to resist letting it get under my skin ... until I figured out why.

I was doing some consulting for a doomed startup with a nonsense business plan to IPO as quickly as possible so everyone could cash out. The founder told me about his first drive down 101 to talk to the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto; he described how he felt he was “treading on hallowed ground”. I felt a surge of disgust: there was nothing holy about this guy's business plan.

The San Francisco I loved was raffish and queer and weird, and it attracted people like me who didn't quite fit anywhere else. But ’99ers weren't moving to San Francisco because it was San Francisco. They were moving here to get rich. And they resented that San Francisco was weird; they wanted it to be like anyplace else and they did their level best to make it that way.

The First Boom crashed out after just a few years. In that brief time, it seriously damaged the San Francisco ecosystem but didn't quite kill it.

And now we have a Second Boom. And for a while it wasn't so bad; the young hipsters drawn by the Boom weren't exactly San Francisco weird but a lot of them had an appreciation for it, and more than a few joined the ranks of Freak Nation after living here for a while. But this boom has lasted longer ... which also means that the phase of assholes drawn to SF wanting to get rich is lasting longer. The tone of the City is changing more, and with the double shock of two booms in a row it seems to be changing more fundamentally and permanently.

Yeah, I know that I'm middle aged now, which is a risk factor for irrational nostalgia for the the world as it was when I was young. I don't think it's only that.

There are plenty of places for assholes who want to get rich. We only have the one San Francisco. And it's getting to the point where I'm tempted to say we only had the one San Francisco.

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Update: Heather Gold comments wisely on Twitter. Chris Tacy says something very similar to my own thoughts, even more harshly.

Glenn Beck on hunting down progressives

Glenn Beck interviewed by the New York Times:

Can we stop dividing ourselves? Do racists exist? Yes. Do bigots exist? Yes. But most of us are not. Most Americans just want to get along. Why can’t we do that? What has happened to us?

But you said you were going to hunt down progressives like an Israeli Nazi hunter.

Oh, I will. I think these guys are the biggest danger in the world. It’s the people like Mao, people that believe that big government is the answer, it always leads to millions dead — always.

Sometimes when you give a speech, you hold up a napkin stained with Hitler’s blood. Why?

It could be Hitler’s, I don’t know. It was from somebody present during the July assassination attempt. The point of it is: pay attention when the trouble is small. If you don’t pay attention to people who want to regulate every aspect of your life, it spirals out of control.

How does he reconcile the contradiction between All Americans Getting Along and hunting down progressives? It's simple: he doesn't recognize progressives as “Americans”. Only the conservative tribe are real Americans. The left are all evil, and must be fought ruthlessly to save the real America.

This is called “eliminationism”, and David Neiwert explains it in detail.

The mind has a hard time accepting that folks like Beck really mean what they say. But they do. We should believe them when they say what they will do with power.

So I agree with him on one thing: pay attention when the trouble is small.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Over on the Facebooks a friend posted a link to Roberto Orci saying that critics of Star Trek: Into Darkness don't appreciate what an awesome screenwriter he is. So I spat out this rant.

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Y'know, I enjoyed JJ's first Star Trek movie.

It had almost none of the Spirit Of Star Trek. It was thoroughly nonsensical. But it was fun and it was full of little winks to Trek fans and I felt like we could use a space opera franchise and since Trek was kind of lounging around not doing anything, so why not use it for this?

But Into Darkness was gawdawful, not just as Trek but as a movie, period. The blame belongs entirely to Orci's cheap, dishonest screenwriting. I know I don't have the chops to be a professional screenwriter, but I could scribble out something better than Darkness in an afternoon while fighting a head cold.

What really offends me, that few commentators have noted, is there's a moment in the second act where it seems like we're going to get a smart movie full of intrigue. What's Harrison's plan? How are the Klingons involved? What's with the torpedoes? What's Carol Marcus' angle? What isn't Admiral Robocop telling us? Who sabotaged the warp drive, and why?

Kirk hates mysteries, they give him a bellyache; he must have had a beauty right about then. But I love ’em.

But that was all bullshit meant to make the movie seem smart. None of that stuff was gonna pay off. Harrison eventually demonstrates that he doesn't really have a coherent plan. The Klingons aren't involved; there was no reason to go to the Klingon homeworld. The torpedos do have a secret; it's just one that makes no sense. Carol Marcus is just there to have cool hair and strip down to her skivvies for a moment. Admiral Robocop does have a secret, but it doesn't make sense either. And I'm still not quite sure who sabotaged the warp drive, or why.

By the end of the movie, we're in Lost territory: anything can happen, so nothing matters.

Yes, when Spock died in Wrath he eventually got better. But there were consequences. It took an entire movie full of sacrifice to get him back, and no one emerged unscathed.

Into Darkness made me feel dirty and it made me feel angry. That it toyed with my love of Trek is part of my rage at it, but not even close to being the biggest part.

That Orci is smug about being a good writer having produced that monstrosity is disgusting.

Denial

The New York Times reports that Rochus Misch, Hitler's bodyguard and the last surviving eyewitness of the bunker where Hitler spent his last days, has died. Through that, I discover an interview with Salon done back in 2005.

At one point, he proposes that there should be a monument to Goebbels’ children, who died in the bunker at their parents’ hands. This becomes an opening to talk about the Nazi movement, and we see his profound denial.

Um, the murder of the children was terrible, but for every one of them, 1 million Jews were killed with less reason, to say nothing of the many, many others who died at the hands of the Nazis.

That may be. But I ask you, if Hitler really did all the terrible things people now say he did, how could he have been our Führer? How is it possible?

The million-dollar question. But I do think you’ll admit that if there were a memorial to the Goebbels children, it would become a magnet for neo-Nazis.

Ach, “neo-Nazi.” No such thing. What does “neo-Nazi” mean? New Nazi, right? There aren’t any. That’s just a buzzword. What you have are nationally conscious people, people who say, “my fatherland, right or wrong.” My fatherland, nothing more, am I right? You British say it, the Swiss say it, the Israelis say it — “My country,” they say. And I’ll fight for it. The Israelis are nationalistic people, they defend their region, they defend their people. They have as much right as anyone.

The whole Iraq war isn’t about Saddam Hussein, it’s about Israel. Israel can’t exist on avocados and oranges! A nation lives from business. They have to have money. And the Americans always pay in. This is just my opinion, but why did they occupy Iraq? Supposedly because of atomic bombs? [Laughs.] In my opinion, Iraq is a wealthy oil region, and with this money they can support Israel. They can’t keep pumping their own money in forever.

Nationalism, Jewish conspiracies, and a denial of Hitler's crimes.

Still a Nazi.

Cobb's Slice

Michael David Cobb Bowen is an old friend. He is an idiosyncratic Black conservative; I am an idiosyncratic White progressive. We disagree about damned near everything, but I often find that I profit more from thinking about my disagreements with him than from many people with whom I nominally disagree.

He and I both belong to what I sometimes call the technocratic class, which in his “Peasant Theory” he calls The Slice. (He summarizes his Peasant Theory particularly well in the last section of his post Three Types Of Class.)

His short description of The Slice is

the talented segment of society who, by their work, keep actual rich people rich

If that's a little chilling, well, it should be.

I find this longer meditation on The Slice intriguing:

My Middle Class is one that I think will emerge on a moral and ethical front. Mine is the lower upper middle class of America. We are the people who use a combination of meritocratic systems and social powers to establish and maintain our status and affluence. We know things that matter and we know how to do things that matter. We are a working class, and this is somewhat unique to an America that provides a great deal more to the common man than England did in the 1930s. For what we have in America is not only automobiles but several manufacturers of automobiles, and in this and other industries, products and services are provided in such a way as to make a larger permanent set of competencies. If England faced socialism because the permanent unemployment of coal miners (due to a small monoculture of capitalist investors), America would not because of it larger, more diverse class of capitalist investors. This, in turn establishes a social momentum that keeps a larger literate class — the upper middle class, and among them, the most capable segement I call The Slice.

I think of The Slice, however as the only substantial meritocracy, and I think of it in feudal terms. They are the people who work directly for the Powers That Be. Yet the upper middle class, which is (I estimate) 3 or 4 times larger than The Slice itself, knows exactly what The Slice should be doing, and is always vying for those positions. It is this large and competent upper middle class that define American culture and society, as everyone in the middle class and below aspire to their affluence and freedom, and the small numbers of the Ruling Class make them ineffective at controlling their creativity. In America, my wild guess is that the upper middle class numbers between 20-35 million, which is about 6-12 percent of our population. More accurately, in 2011, about 38 million households had income of 75-200k per year. The substantial point is that I see this as the proof of the establishment of a class system far beyond the conceptualizations of the early socialists such as Orwell.

America has more than a million millionaires, and that is a divergent enough class of capitalists to establish a continuity of capital that can be robust, even anti-fragile against the sorts of stagnated, narrow investments and under-investments that created permanent unemployment. The interests of the moneyed class and the talents of the upper middle class are both now so substantial that they can support much greater numbers of the needs and desires of the common man. Furthermore, the universiality of this global upper class, is the fascinating phenomenon that is transforming the world. This is the new jet set and we know what time it is UTC.

This American upper middle class is accustomed to and aware of the way it works for global capital. It lives in international cities like Los Angeles. It eats a variety of cuisines. It speaks a variety of languages. It has a style and a substance that is evidence of civilization. Where you see its garbage of empty Starbucks cups, and Perrier water bottles, you know that you are in a high rent neighborhood. What I want to suggest re-establishes the thesis — the loyalties of this class is a bit more diverse than that of The Slice. The Slice works directly for the Powers that Be, the upper middle stands in reserve and sometimes creates its own Alternative Slice in anticipation of a future seduction of new Rulers to new rules. The man who is not working for Intel today but finds a way to design tommorows computer chips in a superior way seeks to improve on the current regime. This is a ‘bottom up’ solution searching for the right investors, and the investor class is well aware of such upstarts. But what of nationalism?

I want to assert in brief that America has maintained liberty through the production of domestic products and services aimed towards the fulfillment of desires of choice above and beyond desires of need for the common man. These are, in many ways, the fundamental interests of the US — to protect the supply lines and trade arrangements that keep global capital invested here. The provide the infrastructure that keeps our international cities attractive to The Slice and to provide such a home for investors who would keep our economy fluid and strong. To provide for the broad open society that encourages the advancement of individuals and families into upward social mobility for the common man, and to maintain the infrastucture of domestic tranquility. This is constrained into nationalism out of tradition and law, but in matters of war and peace the preponderant interests of the upper middle class is unclear. There is too little of the nation's economy, unlike in the days preceding the World Wars, that stands to benefit from war production.

However, the interests of the upper middle class, are very much like the interests of the Western ruling class in that it cannot afford to operate in pre-industrial conditions. And those who threaten the infrastructure of the West are thus intolerable. That is not necessarily a national interest, but neither is it something dictated or constrained by international law, per se. It is not international law that makes Singapore attractive to the upper middle class. It is not nationalism that motivates traitors like Edward Snowden. It is the fundamental usefulness their talents provide to the Ruling Class and the high rewards that make their social standing — not only in one country, but universally.

My class is the global upper middle class. We may be nationalists only of convenience. We will not be seduced by socialism because our existence is as permanent as the global supply chain of oil, steel and data. The common man still looks up to us — as we are the common man, improved. Our native land is civil liberty.

I am a lot less sanguine than he is about the resiliency of the the economy that the aristocratic class is creating. And I am a touch more sanguine about technocrats favoring “socialism” than he is; I know a great many technocrats who favor social democracy, and I suspect that the kind of education necessary to produce effective technocrats also produces the capacity for critique of the social order. But he hints elsewhere in that essay that China proves me wrong, and I fear he is right, because the “feudal” conception of society which he regards as realistic strikes me as nightmarish.

US Civil War

A friend reports ranting in response to a smug ignoramus asserting that the United States Civil War was “not about slavery”:

You just don't understand how fucking wrong you are. The war was about the balance of power vis-à-vis slavery, except for the massive number of things that weren't, and all of those things were about the economic organization of slave states. So, it was about slavery, except for when it wasn't; and when it wasn't, it was.

Guaranteed minimum income

It turns out that in the 1970s, the Canadian government performed an experiment in guaranteed minimum income in a small town. It ran for four years, they gathered a mountain of data about the effects ... and only started analyzing the data very recently. The results shouldn't be surprising

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

It turns out they did.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated.

Still, too expensive, right? Oh, wait.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

It's not hard to see why, says Forget.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government ^$4 billion annually, by her calculations. And ^$4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Still, it's socialism, so we should set this out of our minds.

Social class and social justice

An acquaintance recently observed that there's a certain kind of White guy Social Justice Warrior who sometimes starts ranting about how It's All Really About Social Class. They liked it when I made this observation:

The invisibility of class in totalizing identity politics is a big problem. But the classic Marxist dismissal of all social justice questions as just devolving to class is even more corrosive. And if you're coming from a totalizing identity politics framework where the only ground of authenticity is to claim that you speak from the experience of oppression, it's appealing to claim that the oppression you experience is the only one that counts.

Talking about social justice in good faith

Right after I assembled a long Storify about the challenges to good faith disagreement about social justice questions in a world full of harassment, abuse, and threats, I came across another force which poisons the discourse: irrational social justice skeptics who see any disagreement as a bigoted attack on their privileged position.

Do you see what happened there? When I try to start providing data that is directly relevant to the conversation, he blocks me, as – presumably – someone attacking him on race and/or gender.

Apparently because I’m providing data he doesn’t like. That’s what it looks like from here, anyway.

Nazis

“Nazis! I hate these guys!” This should be handy to have handy.

River Tam

Via Jim Henley, I learn of Why I Hate River Tam.

Mostly, what I think I don’t like about River Tam is what the rampant adoration of her signifies. The thing is, she is not a good character — and by good, I mean very specifically: a character with emotional consistency, with depth, with the sense that she is the product of a lifetime of experience and is complete with wants and needs and thoughts and opinions. She’s not a whole character; she’s defined wholly by her craziness (“craziness” here being just a bunch of signifiers for actual disordered mentality) and her ability to kick things and that she’s pretty, and none of those things are actual character traits.

What she is is an old-fashioned, super-misogynist 18^th century caricature of a woman — beautiful, delicate, basically a moron — that we’re forgiven for loving because she has the power to kick things. And of course she’s the most beloved female character from Firefly, despite the fact that every other woman on that show is more interesting, more developed, more complex, and above all, more worth our admiration.

That’s the problem that I have; the popularity of a character like River Tam exposes an undercurrent of archaism, of backwards-thinking, that obviates all the work that Whedon does with his shows. That he’s given us some pretty great characters on Firefly, and who’s the one that everyone loves?

The one that is plainly, explicitly designed to be drooled over.

The point is well-taken, and we should rightly be discomforted by the analysis. I'm a bit more forgiving of River as a character, perhaps in part because I don't have that reaction of having the hots for her.

I do think the last sentence there misses some things about what Whedon's design intentions were. From an earlier post of mine, I note that he has said:

She is the monster. She is the damsel. She is the action hero.

So no, I don't think River is designed to be “drooled over”. Or at least not only that. Not even primarily that.

But yes, it's there. Now we are awash in Action Girls in part because of how Buffy demonstrated the sexiness of that cocktail. But that's not all Whedon was going for; with River and Buffy and many of his other characters he was trying to challenge and change some of the ways we experience female characters.

And he succeeded. Having too many Action Girls is a problem, but it's a problem in large part because Whedon and others have changed our perceptions. (James Cameron, I'm looking at you.) Which probably means it's time to move on.

Schwyzer

Having watched Hugo Schwyzer's Twitter meltdown in real time yesterday, I finally got around to reviewing the critiques of him closely. Grace at Are Women Human has the essential one, On Hugo Schwyzer: Accountability, not silencing dissent, which focuses on the significance of his ongoing deceit.

Hugo Schwyzer lied for several years about his attempt to kill a woman - on one occasion, falsely describing his attempt to kill his girlfriend and himself as a only a suicide attempt that “accidentally” endangered her. On the record, preserved in on Internet Archive here, “suicide attempt,” and here, “I came close to accidentally taking the life of my girlfriend.” This was long after he was self-identifying as a “male feminist” who was “recovering” and being “redeemed” from his past behavior.

And just in the past two months, since the backlash against him, Schwyzer has edited his past posts to conceal the fact that he repeatedly lied about his history . There are no disclaimers or notes on these posts to indicate that they’ve been edited in any way. For example, the post that once claimed that he accidentally endangered his girlfriend now reads:

As I’ve written before, my last episode of drinking and drug use ended on June 27, 1998; my body filled with massive amounts of alcohol and prescription pills, I blew out the pilot lights on the stove in my old apartment and turned on the gas, trying to kill myself and my girlfriend. Miraculously, we both survived.

This post is rather perversely titled “A very long post on how to rebuild trust.” Well, here’s a hint: it doesn’t involve lying about what you’ve done and then trying to cover up that lie.

I wish I had read when I first heard about the controversies around Schwyzer a few years back.

Above Top Secret

Kevin Drum has a long quote from Daniel Ellsberg explaining to a young Henry Kissinger about access to government secrets above Top Secret.

I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn't previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

The effects are not good.

Cultural appropriation

I want sharper tools for thinking about cultural appropriation. Here are some commentaries I find helpful.

Kids, Kimonos, and Cultural Appropriation

There is no right or wrong way to appropriate or appreciate a culture because a culture is never truly static. You cannot respect a culture, but you can respect people. But know that you will inevitably find yourself having to choose between two rightful heirs to a tradition, one who holds out a hand in invitation and another who holds up their hand to deny you, and you cannot respect one without disrespecting the other. You cannot but choose a side.

Is Culture Something We Have or Something We Do?

Theoretical and rhetorical tools from anthropology

Descriptive essentialist culture	Dynamic constructivist culture
Culture is something one has	Culture is something one does
Culture is fixed and can be delimited	Culture is created in open interaction
Common values for everyone in the group	Different values for different members
People are governed by culture	People negotiate culture
Culture (values, rules, norms, etc.) can explain why people act as they do	Other factors (status, context, power, etc.) can explain why people act as they do
People’s actions can be predicted	People’s actions cannot be predicted

From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation

Based on the range of literature addressing the topic, I identified four categories of cultural appropriation (adapted from Wallis & Malm, 1984; additional influences from Bakhtin, 1975/1981; Clifford, 1988; Goodwin & Gore, 1990; Ziff & Rao, 1997). Based on the assumptions identified above, these four categories can best be understood as naming the conditions (historical, social, political, cultural, and economic) under which acts of appropriation occur. After briefly defining each of the four types of appropriation, I discuss, illustrate, and evaluate each in depth.

1. Cultural exchange: the reciprocal exchange of symbols, artifacts, rituals, genres, and/or technologies between cultures with roughly equal levels of power.
2. Cultural dominance: the use of elements of a dominant culture by members of a subordinated culture in a context in which the dominant culture has been imposed onto the subordinated culture, including appropriations that enact resistance.
3. Cultural exploitation: the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation.
4. Transculturation: cultural elements created from and/or by multiple cultures, such that identification of a single originating culture is problematic, for example, multiple cultural appropriations structured in the dynamics of globalization and transnational capitalism creating hybrid forms.

Cultural exchange operates in the literature as an implied baseline for clarifying the inequalities involved in the other conditions of appropriation and is generally assumed to be a nonexistent ideal. Cultural domination, in contrast, highlights the asymmetries under which acts of appropriation occur. Although many approaches to this set of conditions emphasize the power of the dominant to impose its culture on subordinated peoples, cultural dominance as a condition nevertheless requires attention to how the targets of cultural imposition negotiate their relationship to the dominant culture through a variety of appropriative tactics. Extending this implication, cultural resistance, a form of appropriation that occurs under the conditions of cultural dominance, highlights the agency and inventiveness of subordinated peoples by examining how they appropriate dominant cultural elements for resistive ends.

Resistance through appropriation, however, demonstrates the “impurity” of acts of resistance and of culture itself. Cultural exploitation focuses on the commodification and incorporation of elements of subordinated cultures. However, in defending the rights of subordinated peoples to protect the integrity of their culture and to control its use, most of the discourse of cultural exploitation operates from a model of culture as clearly bounded and distinct, as singular and organic. Such a model of culture is not only empirically questionable but also complicit in the subordination of “primitive” cultures. Transculturation further questions the validity of an essentialist model of distinct cultures that merely engage in appropriation, highlighting appropriation and hybridity as constitutive of culture, reconceptualized as an intersectional phenomenon. Although the literature on transculturation is grounded in the conditions of globalization and transnational capitalism, the implications of transculturation question the assumptions of the previous three categories in both contemporary and historical contexts.

Introduction to Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture

A long, provocative, idiosyncratic comment on the question. A delicious little taste:

hip-hop culture and the hip-hop marketplace, like a quantum paradox, provides space to all Black ideologies, from the most anti-white to the most pro-capitalist, without ever having to account for the contradiction

A brief meditation on white twerking

Imagine you own the only restaurant in a small mostly-segregated town where whites are generally richer than blacks. A black family opens a new restaurant in the black part of town, but it doesn’t affect your business much because white people don’t want to go there and blacks don’t have enough money to eat out much anyway.

But they do have one fabulous dish that’s like nothing on your menu. You go there and try it, and it’s every bit as good as you’ve heard. And you immediately have a bunch of motives to imitate it. First, just as a lover of food and a creative chef you can’t help thinking: “I could do this! It would be great!” Second, as a businessman you think: “My customers would love this!”

There’s nothing wrong with either of those motives. [⋯] But as it stands you’ll get those customers just by being white.

So what you’d be doing by imitating the dish is lowering the cost of racism. Without your imitation, your racist customers would have to do without something they want.

And while you might argue you’re providing your white customers a bridge to black culture, it would be a toll bridge, and you’d be collecting the tolls.

Academic folklorist Dr. Jeff Tolbert comments

Rescued from Twitter

The other day I read part of an intro to a popular collection of stories with the “folk” qualifier attached. I had to stop because the author made sweeping claims about folklore being part of “our” heritage, connected to a misty, mystical past.

Who is that “our” referring to? What monolithic group of people exists that experiences an unbroken continuity with “the past”? There isn’t one, is the thing. Tradition purports to be a connection to the past, but all traditions are invented.

Being “invented” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad.” But it does mean that people pick & choose elements to bring forward. Or, when there’s nothing there to bring forward, they create something new. We should never assume that old stories connect to “our” pasts in a deep, real way.

Because again, who is that “our” referencing? If “we” are labeling that “folk” material as “ours,” we’re setting up boundaries. We’re creating an implicit “them,” always the necessary corollary of “us.” This isn’t inherently bad, but it can quickly become so.

It’s especially problematic when “we” are imagined in connection to a particular place or region. The extreme of that way of thinking is fascism. There’s a reason the Third Reich invoked the idea of “blood and soil” in promulgating their false narratives of Aryan identity.

On the other hand, if “we” are all people, then we’re eliding cultural difference. We’re doing violence to the vastly different histories of different groups at different times / places. Creating universalizing narratives is another way of imposing hegemonic ideas on others.

Popular writers: Please stop doing these things. Please stop imagining “folklore” to be fixed, unchanging, mystical links to the past. Please stop tying it in a rigid way to “our heritage.”

If you find traditional narratives that you like, by all means, engage with them. Think about them. Write with them. Do cool new things with them. But do not frame them as tying us to a misty, magical past. Uncouple them from ideas about “heritage.”

For instance, medieval Irish literary tales about Cú Chulainn are great & stirring & deserve to be read & told & retold. But to imagine that they have a meaningful connection to the lives of all the people who happen to live in Ireland today is to make a big mistake.

I found this out firsthand during graduate fieldwork in Ireland. I was in Dingle trying to understand what “Celtic” culture meant to Irish people, & met a young Irish woman interested in my work. I ended up telling her the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows, which she’d never heard.

The point here is that folklore is ordinary, everyday culture. That’s it. Full stop. You are “doing” it in your own life every day. The old stories that seem “mystical” seem that way because they originated in different cultural contexts and at very different historical moments.

Don’t assume that things like contemporary national identity imply unbroken continuity with those past cultures/moments. If you like something, celebrate it. Enjoy it. But don’t make it into a magical token of cultural identity, or a Jungian symbol that ignores difference.

Folkloresque engagements with the idea of folklore are cool. I write about the folkloresque in part because I like a lot of this stuff. I like retellings of things. I like mishmashes of monsters and gods and demons from different times / places.

I don’t like it when writers claim that folklore is old stuff that, although irrelevant today, is still “ours” & somehow helps to define our present-day identities. Opening a dusty book of stories you’ve never read / heard before is not a window onto “your” past, or your present.

If those old stories form a part of your ordinary cultural experience, then they’re part of your life. But you can’t claim that for everyone. That young lady in Dingle who’d never heard of Deirdre didn’t have any inherent claims on the Ulster Cycle just because she was Irish.

So please, writers & other creative types, keep using folkloric stuff to do new stuff. Tradition always changes, always gets adapted to new forms and new media. That’s all good. But stop making old stories that most of “us” have never heard of into magical symbols of “us.”

From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation

Academic paper which rhymes with the things I am trying to get at in my own taxonomy below

Cultural appropriation is often mentioned but undertheorized in critical rhetorical and media studies. Defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into 4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Although each of these types can be understood as relevant to particular contexts or eras, transculturation questions the bounded and proprietary view of culture embedded in other types of appropriation. Transculturation posits culture as a relational phenomenon constituted by acts of appropriation, not an entity that merely participates in appropriation. Tensions exist between the need to challenge essentialism and the use of essentialist notions such as ownership and degradation to criticize the exploitation of colonized cultures.

A model from me

Excerpted from a long essay of mine about cultural appropriation in esoteric practices

I have my own way of thinking about the base principles behind the movement to combat cultural appropriation.

One can understand it as emerging from an ambivalence about both the modern understanding and postmodern understandings of Authenticity and Identity. Postmodern sensibilities see these through a lens of multiplicity & fragmentation. There is no universal subject with an objective understanding of all culture to retreat to. Social justice advocates rightly reject modernist universalism with its colonialist / Western chauvinist / etc implications. But at the same time, oppressed people compelled to inhabit an identity which subjects them to injustices yearn to ground that identity in some kind of authenticity, pushing back a vulgar postmodernism which rejects any stability there. “Culture, Authenticity, and Identity are not slippery mush!” they say, and so turn to the response, “This thing is real and belongs to these people who can be clearly identified!”

But as [described earlier in the essay], countering colonialist modernist universalism with claims like “the chakras belong to South Asian people” still accepts modernist conceptions of property rights and crisply distinct “peoples”. That can act as a convenient shorthand, but does not hold water on close examination.

This frustration with some of the sloppy thinking behind common manifestations of the movement against cultural appropriation does not mean that I reject the entire framework and its project of resistance. There are at least three distinct modes of cultural appropriation which I think can be clearly identified and combatted.

• Colonialism when people in a privileged position employ their power to deny oppressed people who have a cultural and historical link to a thing access to it, while they exercise or exploit that same thing from their base of privilege. So for example, when white people in a posh neighborhood open an “authentic” taqueria where Mexican immigrants could not.
• Minstrelsy when people in a position of power engage in misrepresentation of an oppressed people and their culture, for the benefit of the privileged, sometimes even claiming credibity for their twisted version by pointing to its supposedly authentic roots. As the name indicates, the minstrel show is the classic example, but there are plenty of esoteric examples of inventing of bogus ancient foreign lineages and cribbing poorly understood elements of “exotic” traditions, as in the case of qabalah.
• Deracination when the privileged exercise some cultural elements of the oppressed, stripping them of their context and full meaning. For example, white people with arbitrary bindi marks because they look cool.

Because the objection to cultural appropriation emerges from and serves a social justice politics, we need to apply an awareness of privilege & oppression to understand the stakes. Avoiding at least these three forms of cultural appropriation is righteous in the name of the basic politeness which the privileged owe the oppressed in recognition of the power relationship in which they operate ... that politeness is only one face of a necessary bigger project of correcting injustices.

This too shall pass

Written for an old friend.

---

The one thing you can count on is that time moves forward one day per day, and all of this will be replaced with something else.

I read an interview with Bonnie Raitt. She said something close to: “I used to write these songs about ‘without you I will die’. But then I went through that, and I felt that way, and it turned out that I didn't die. In fact, I went on to a better life. It just wasn't true.”

This is the advantage of middle age. You've been in some tough scrapes. You've had your heart broken. You've been in despair. And you've come out the other side.

In fact, you've done this stuff enough times that you don't even remember all the details. There are some of those dark passages you don't even remember at all.

You forget because you don't need to remember. The only thing you need is the knowledge that as a result of those tests you have all the resources you need, that you've become a smarter, stronger person than you could have imagined possible when you were younger.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fake letters and numbers in Unicode

I must remember not to use this power for evil.

Tattoos

I have long had an impish desire for a tattoo:

וְשֶׂרֶט לָנֶפֶשׁ לֹא תִתְּנוּ בִּבְשַׂרְכֶם וּכְתֹבֶת קַעֲקַע לֹא תִתְּנוּ בָּכֶם

Do not cut your flesh for the dead, or make marks on your body

It seems other people have had the same idea.

Leviticus 19:28

Leviticus 19:28

Leviticus 19:28

Medicare For All

One of the enduring mysteries of American politics is why Obama, among many others, did not propose a three-word alternative to the system we call “Obamacare”: Medicare for all.

It polls through the roof. Studies show that it would do more and save money.

Upgrading the nation’s Medicare program and expanding it to cover people of all ages would yield more than a half-trillion dollars in efficiency savings in its first year of operation, enough to pay for high-quality, comprehensive health benefits for all residents of the United States at a lower cost to most individuals, families and businesses.

....

Friedman said the savings would come from slashing the administrative waste associated with today’s private health insurance industry (^$476 billion) and using the new, public system’s bargaining muscle to negotiate pharmaceutical drug prices down to European levels (^$116 billion).

So why didn't Obama push for it?

Think about it.

Head crash

Neal Stephenson's satirical first novel The Big U is rightly obscure. It's not very good. But there are moments where you can see the writer he will become.

The terminal went blank. From just behind them came a violent scream, like a buzzsaw wrenching to a stop in a concrete block. They knew it though they had never heard it before; it was the sound of a disc unit dying, the sound made when the power was cut off and the automatic readers (similar to the tone-arms of phonographs) sank into, and shredded, the hysterically spinning magnetic discs. It was to them what the snapping of a horse's leg is to a jockey, and when they spun around they were astonished and horrified to see a curtain of water pouring onto the floor from the circular walkway overhead. Not more than a dozen feet from the base of the Janus 64, the ring was spreading inward.

“Hey, Fred ’n’ Con!” someone yelled. At one end of the room, at the window that looked out into the Terminal Room, an overweight blond-bearded hacker squinted at them. “What's going on? System problems? Oh, Jeeeezus!”

He turned to his comrades in the Terminal Room, screaming, “Head crash! Head crash! Water on the brain!” Soon two dozen hackers had vaulted through the window into the Center and were sprinting down the aisles as fast as their atrophied legs could carry them, the men stripping off their shirts as they ran. Another disc drive shorted out and sizzled to destruction. Abruptly Fred Fine spun and grabbed the Operator's Key-chain, then ran through the circular waterfall toward another wall of the Center, shouting for people to follow him.

In seconds he had snapped open the door to the storage room, where tons of accordion-fold computer paper were stored in boxes. As some of the hackers did their best to sweep water away from the base of the Janus 64, the rest formed a line from the storage room to the central circle. The boxes were passed down the line as quickly as possible, slit open with Fred Fine's authentic Civil War bayonet and their contents dumped out as big green-and-white cubes inside the deadly water-ring. Though it did not entirely stem the flow, the paper absorbed what it did not dam. Soon all space between the waterfall and the CPU was covered with at least two feet of soggy computer paper. Meanwhile, Consuela had shut down all the disc drives.

The danger was past. Fred Fine, still palpitating, noticed a small waterfall in the corner of the storage room. Flicking on the lights for the first time, he clambered over the stacked boxes to check it out. In the corner, three pipes about ten inches in diameter ran from floor to ceiling. One was swathed in the insulation used for hot water pipes. Water was running down one of the bare pipes; higher up. above the ceiling, it must be leaking heavily. Fred Fine put his hand on the third pipe and found that it was neither hot nor cool, and did not seem to be carrying a current. A firehose supply pipe? No, they were supposed to be bright red. He puzzled over it, rubbing his hand over the long thin whiskers that straggled down his cheeks when he had been computing for a week or more.

As he watched, the hiss of running water lowered and died away and a few seconds later the leak from above was stemmed. There was the KLONK of an air hammer in a pipe. Fred Fine put his hand on the mystery pipe, and began to feel the gentle vibration of running water underneath, and a sensation of coolness spreading out from the interior.

The hackers saw him wandering slowly toward the Janus, which rose like an ancient glyph from the tumbled, sodden blocks of paper. He had a distant look, and was consumed in thought.

“These are the End Times,” he was heard to say. “The Age draws to a close.”

He was no weirder than they were, so they ignored him.

Lenin facepalm

This is funny and I feel confident that I will have a use for it some day.

In case you haven't seen it around, it's a reference to this classic Internet meme:

A friend uses the image to create a meme:

Numerous other variants become obvious ....

Revolutionaries

It would be naïve to call these guys representative of a force for good or a force for evil. They are better understood as a force with its own agenda. And they're getting stronger.

For the uninitiated, that's

• Richard “ ‘free software’ as in ‘free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’ ” Stallman
• Edward “NSA leaker” Snowden
• Julian “Wikileaks” Assange

Image via Bruce Sterling, prophet of the age, who has a link behind it to a UK Guardian piece: XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’.

---

Chairman Bruce follows up with a long, glorious rant with this as the punchline:

They have the beatific look of righteousness rewarded. Che Guevara in his starred beret had more self-doubt than these guys. They are thrilled with themselves.

People, you couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be exposed at all costs.

And yet the three of them together, they look just amazing. They are fantastic figures, like the promise of otherworldly aid from a superhero comic. They are visibly stronger than they’ve ever been before. They have the initiative in a world afflicted with comprehensive helplessness.

And there’s more coming. Lots, lots more.

The American social contract

Clearing his throat on the way to reviewing Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, Freddie deBoer provides a spot-on summation of the social crisis precipitated by the structural changes we are seeing in the economy.

What becomes of America when the social contract can no longer be fulfilled? Generations of parents taught their children about deals that they thought were immutable aspects of the American condition; they now watch their adult children struggle in a society where those deals are not honored. The current employment crisis in the U.S. can be understood only in light of this basic social contract, the central theme of the American myth, the moral of our national fable: If you work, you will survive. Not only will you survive but you will prosper. All our propaganda begins here. Young Americans are promised that work will translate to an ever-improving lot in life, within and across generations — a bigger house when you’re 40, and your children in a bigger house than they were raised in. You might say that this is a lot to ask of any social order. But then, it wasn’t my idea.

A country that has made its self-definition utterly dependent on the ubiquity of paying work now has an insufficient number of jobs. This is not short-term economic cyclicality; labor-force participation has dropped, fairly steadily, for decades. Capital-biased technological change contracts industry after industry. The most powerful, most profitable companies now employ a tiny fraction of the workers that similarly sized enterprises once did. The biggest employers, like Wal-Mart, provide insufficient wages and hours to give employees access to middle-class existence. The problem is not merely those who are entirely unemployed but also those who need more hours or higher wages and can’t get them. And all these people desperate to work or for more work undermine the bargaining power of those currently employed. Who asks for a raise when there are 50,000 young graduates who will do your job for two-thirds of what you make now? Who complains about discrimination, harassment, and other workplace immiseration when relief for employers is a round of pink slips away? This is what an employment crisis means. The unemployed suffer, and their suffering causes the employed to suffer. Each person’s precarity is instrumental in another’s.

It is hard to overstate: This country, in its current condition, has no other option but something close to full employment. Our pathetic social safety net, even absent the contracting effect of austerity measures, can’t fill in the gaps caused by the demise of ubiquitous employment. Even the counterrevolution has no other idiom; the most common epithet directed toward Occupy protests, after all, was “Get a job!” That the near impossibility of getting a job was the point for many who were protesting was too destabilizing a notion to be understood. In the short term, I have no doubt that the unemployment rate will fall. The question is the long-term structural dependability of a social contract built on mass employment.

***

For argument’s sake, let’s consider America’s employment crisis not as a failure of conservatism, market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, nor austerity. Let’s suppose that the problem is proceduralism.

A proceduralist views society not in terms of a necessary goal (say, happiness and opportunity for all its members) but instead as a set of rules that it must follow—because they are natural, because they stem from the Western tradition, because they comport with human behavior, because they follow God’s law, depending on whoever is justifying the current procedure. If these rules are followed, no injustice needs to be redressed. Rules can be discarded or changed if their intent is found to be problematic, but outcomes can be good or bad without issue. Problems arise only if the rules are broken.

Proceduralism tends to be popular among those who wrote the procedures; it’s a discourse of power. From Wall Street to the NSA, “we were following the rules” is a cynical but effective defense, undertaken by people who know that those same rules will save them from the consequences of their destructive yet superficially lawful behavior.

But what happens when established procedures lead to unsustainable or immoral consequences, such as widespread and persistent unemployment? The employment crisis reveals a conflict between the procedures of democratic capitalism, which ensure certain rights but promise nothing else, and the logic of the American social contract, which justifies the social order by assuring citizens that they can trade work for material security.

Talk of social contracts is passé in an America obsessed with technocapitalist visions of a prosperous future. The yen for “disruption,” an empty term for empty minds in empty people, makes traditional obstacles like social contracts suspect or downright pernicious. This has led to an embrace of proceduralism by those true believers who want an app economy to be the engine of capitalism. And such people rule the world.

The problem for proceduralists is that social contracts exist for a reason. It turns out that there are, actually, certain outcomes that society must ensure if it is to go on functioning. The really essential function of the social contract is to prevent the people from burning everything down. There are too many of us to be held down by force. The average person must agree to be governed for anything resembling civilization to endure. If the average citizen finds that their agreement with society has been broken, then civil unrest will result, as it has in Egypt, and in Greece, and in Turkey, and in Brazil. Trust me: it is not the cops that keep people from invading your home and stealing your stuff. Proceduralists may generally rule, but eventually, their bodies end up stacked in the village square.

Reactionaries of various stripes respond that something, somehow, will come along, despite the fact that recent Stanford graduates, pockets stuffed with Silicon Valley cash, are creatively disrupting the jobs out from under hundreds of thousands of Americans. The economy will correct itself, jobs will spontaneously will themselves into being, just as the finance industry will become spontaneously, magically self-regulating.We just need everybody to buy into the rules, to accept the procedure..

For the rest of uswho have lost faith in these rules, the question is what else is to be done. Can full employment be brought back by force? Can something else be built in its place? These are uncomfortable questions in a proceduralist country populated by a teleological people.

Abortion and contraception

Here's yet another study demonstrating the obvious.

Providing free, reliable birth control to women could prevent between 41 percent and 71 percent of abortions in the United States

If “pro-life” advocates were interested in reducing the number of abortions performed, as they say they are, they would be advocates for free contraception. But they aren't.

How puzzling.

Cookie Monster

A little magic on Twitter today from a great American poet:

Zimmerman's certainty

I’ve been reading commentaries (and commenting myself) on George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin, and I've discovered folks who believe that that Martin reversed on Zimmerman and attacked him. They make much of a bit of court testimony from Chris Serino, lead investigator for the police on the case.

He also testified that he believed Zimmerman was telling the truth, especially after Serino bluffed that Martin's cell phone may have captured video of the incident.

“I believe [Zimmerman’s] words were, ‘Thank God, I was hoping somebody would videotape it,’” said Serino.

I can see how that could seem very convincing … if you take Zimmerman as fundamentally credible. But I find it very easy to reconcile this statement with the possibility that it was Zimmerman who confronted, even assaulted, Martin.

Let us suppose that Zimmerman is hotheaded, bigoted, self-righteous, and stupid. I’m not saying he is these things, mind you; I’m just a guy who reads the news, so I don’t know. But he could be. The evidence in the public record is at least consistent with the possibility, and there are things which hint that he is.

Let us imagine him that way for a minute.

It’s easy to imagine that guy going chasing after Martin. Because he’d feel justified in doing it; he’s the hero of his own little action movie in his head. It’s easy to imagine that guy going up to Martin and confronting him provocatively and seeing Martin’s angry response through bigot-o-vision as an unprovoked threat. It’s easy to imagine that guy grabbing Martin’s arm when Martin tried to walk away — which legally means Zimmerman assaulting Martin — and feeling justified in that. It’s easy to imagine that turning into a pushing-and-shoving scuffle from Martin just trying to get away which could put Martin’s elbow in Zimmerman’s face, costing Zimmerman his footing so he falls and hits his head. It’s easy to imagine Zimmerman on the ground and Martin yelling, Zimmerman dazed and panicked and fearing what he perceives as a scary Black thug attacking him. That Zimmerman could have drawn his gun and shot Martin and felt himself completely justified, thinking that his life had depended on it.

That is, it’s easy to imagine that Zimmerman confronted Martin, attacked him, escalated the fight, then shot Martin when things didn’t go the way he wanted — and thought that he was entirely justified in the eyes of the law, even though under Florida law, having assaulted Martin first he would have been guilty of at least manslaughter for shooting Martin in this hypothetical, even if he had sincerely feared for his life.

Given how little we can confirm about what happened that night, I cannot claim to know that any of this happened. But it’s plausible that it did. Which makes it easy for to imagine Zimmerman being guilty but believing that he was acting reasonably and within his rights. He could have sincerely believed that video evidence would vindicate him, as Serino says, when in fact it would do the opposite.

The point here is not the question of Zimmerman per se. Again: I cannot know about him.

The point is that whether or not Zimmerman is the person I described, that guy does exist out there. And we have just demonstrated vividly that the criminal justice system will support him. So even if Zimmerman was right and justice was served in his case, on a broader scale this trial has demonstrated systemic racism and injustice.

Later updates

Jury instructions (September 2013)

A reflection on the conduct of Zimmerman’s trial and what his jury was and was not told about how to decide his case.

A properly instructed jury should have heard the complete law of self-defense in Florida, not just the portions that helped Zimmerman. Had the jury been instructed about the initial aggressor exception, it might have concluded that Zimmerman’s following of Martin, though itself not criminal, was reasonably apprehended by Martin as a “threat of force.” Put another way, the jury might have concluded that Martin was the one acting in self-defense during the physical confrontation that preceded the gunshot, making Zimmerman the aggressor.

Josh Marshall (November 2013)

I have a commentary from Josh Marshall, Sick To My Stomach, which says exactly what I'm thinking about what we have learned about Zimmerman since I originally wrote this piece.

Now we have him allegedly pointing a loaded weapon at his new girlfriend and apparently barricading himself in the house after police arrived on the scene. Add to this the earlier history of violent incidents including violently resisting arrest in 2005 and the real world verdict is now beyond a reasonable doubt as to this point: Zimmerman is a liar and a habitually violent and frequently out of control man who should never have been allowed to possess a gun.

Given all we know now about Zimmerman and all the additional evidence he's provided us with post-acquittal, there's simply no reason to doubt the worst case scenario of how Trayvon Martin died. The only real question is whether Zimmerman shot him in cold blood or killed him during the confrontation he himself forced to happen.

These revelations make my speculation that his shooting of Trayvon Martin may have come from panic, stupidity, irresponsibility, and semiconscious bigotry not the least generous plausible reading of Zimmerman, but actually the kindest. (Another update: evidence of Zimmerman's character keeps piling up.)

That makes me want to talk about how this post originally came to be. I wrote it as a response to conservatives on an online forum who insisted that Zimmerman’s reply to Officer Serino was part of a great pile of evidence which demonstrated that we could be certain that Zimmerman was rightfully defending himself against a fierce, unprovoked attack by Martin. These people were smug about how they were looking at the facts and bravely following them where they led, unclouded by a political agenda.

It is hard not to scent racist bigotry in people who find that absurd image of Martin randomly attacking a stranger not just plausible, not just likely, but certain.

In turn, while I phrased my original post cautiously as a speculation of what might have happened, I imagine that it’s obvious that it reflects my intuition about what really did happen. My framing my description as merely a speculation wasn’t just in the name of rhetoric in a debate, though; I don’t have any special knowledge, and need to be wary of overestimating my knowledge at a distance.

But it is interesting that my intuition is now strongly supported by later evidence, is it not? Why, in this case, was my intuition better than those conservatives’?

This question of intuitions is important. What do we find plausible? Who do we find credible? I don’t want a system of justice that simply accepts intuition — not even my own — but the question of intuition matters.

So let me confess where I got my image of Zimmerman. I got it from this softball interview with him on Fox News:

Watching that, to my eye, it’s obvious what kind of person Zimmerman is. I know that guy. He has no self-doubt. He could have done what I described and rationalized himself as being in the right, no sweat. And aside from recognizing that guy as as “hotheaded, bigoted, self-righteous, and stupid [⋯] the hero of his own little action movie in his head”, there’s one other thing I know about that guy: conservatives are dead suckers for him.

I first learned this watching Oliver North testify in the Iran/Contra hearings, when I was quite young. His earnest self-righteousness gave me the heebie-jeebies but conservatives lapped it up. They always do, when it’s a member of their tribe.

I’ve commented before about how differing responses to earnestness are part of the liberal-conservative culture divide in America. Liberals have a deep-rooted skepticism about it, because we think that one needs self-doubt to check one’s self. Cultural liberals’ attitude is not entirely a good thing — earnest sincerity can be beautiful and powerful. But conservatives are far too credulous about it, which makes them too supportive of the smug and self-righteous. And they never seem to learn.

This is a culture gap that literally kills.

Domestic abuser (January 2015)

A commentary reports …

George Zimmerman was arrested on Friday for aggravated assault and domestic violence with a weapon, marking the third time in as many years that he’s been arrested after an alleged domestic violence incident.

… and explores the legal logic which keeps guns in his hands despite this.

Still that guy (March 2015)

Smugly certain that he could not possibly have done anything wrong:

“I believe God has his plans, and for me to second-guess them would be hypocritical, almost blasphemous,” he said when asked if the encounter that ended Martin’s life would have turned out differently.

Was he always a neo-Confederate? (August 2015)

He made this for a fundraiser:

The caption, “the 2^nd protects the first’ is a double entendre. The first flag I painted on this canvas was an American Flag, but decided to repaint over it with the Confederate Flag when I heard Andy was getting sued by CAIR. The 2^nd flag I painted was the Battle Flag — which we need in America in order to protect the first.

He also does these:

Transparently racist and smug (August 2015)

Bragging about escalating to deadly force.

We all know how it ended for the last moron that hit me.

Stalking

Credibly accused by a private investigator who asked for a restraining order for cyber-stalking.

Law & custom

On the implications of our environment of lots of hotheads, guns, and rationalizations to escalate to deadly force: Kyle Rittenhouse’s Defense Was Strong — It’s also a threat to the rule of law.

As Shaila Dewan notes in the New York Times, “legally kill or legally be killed” scenarios are just one of several pathological consequences of America’s lax gun regulations, and permissive police use of force and/or self-defense laws. In much of the country, Americans have a legal right to openly carry weapons of mass murder. And yet all it takes is one suspicious bystander, a phone call to the police, and the arrival of a trigger-happy cop for the legal act of carrying an AR-15 — or a toy gun — to become a legal basis for one’s summary execution.

If America’s permissive self-defense laws and abundant guns open up a vast zone of permissible killing, the precise borders of that territory are shaped by white supremacy. In a 2013 study of U.S. homicides, the Urban Institute found that killings involving “a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim.”

A legal environment that favors the armed in their confrontations with the unarmed, police in their confrontations with suspects, and whites in their confrontations with Blacks is antithetical to social peace, let alone social justice. It is, however, quite favorable to the American far right.

A word from bell hooks

White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action. Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. Viewers are encouraged to feel sympathy for the white male home owner who made a mistake. The fact that this mistake led to the violent death of an innocent young man does not register; the narrative is worded in a manner that encourages viewers to identify with the one who made the mistake by doing what we are led to feel we might all do to “protect our property at all costs from any sense of perceived threat.” This is what the worship of death looks like.

Segments of this passage from hooks’ book All About Love: New Visions (2001) have made the rounds as inspired by Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin; obviously it actually predates that, but it is nonetheless about the incident, as the commentary where I found it underlines.