So From OP's Perspective, Democracy Is Perfectly Compatible With A Class Society That Enables Unelected

Perhaps it's time to resurrect the tradition of Soviet jokes, but retooled for modern cyber-capitalism.

"We pretend to pay them and they pretend to make us happy."

People make bones about the USSR’s project of creating a “new Soviet man” - how quaint! - without appreciating that the American-led development of the 20th century “demand economy,” culminating in (but by no means limited to) the creation of the “postwar middle class,” represented a human-engineering project of no less ambition and infinitely greater sophistication than the Soviet one. The new Soviet man is a joke, a failure; we are the new capitalist man. And we don’t even realise it!

What is the new capitalist man? It is a person that desires infinite houses quantities of things they cannot use. It’s a person constitutionally incapable of stopping to say “I have enough, I’m happy.” Can you imagine how threatening a contented mindset is to ever-expanding commodity circulation (in other words, to national GDP growth)? Can you conceive of the vast resources, private and public, that were and are being poured into permanently eliminating every hint of that mindset from the American psyche?

This is the essence of the advertising industry, the raison d'etre of Madison Avenue and its (historically overlooked) collaboration with the U.S. government: the manufacturing of demand to meet supply, and the manufacturing of an indefinitely increasing demand to meet a supply of comparable dimensions. It is, as a necessary stepping stone to the manufacturing of this demand, the wholesale reshaping of what it means to be a human being: not into a selfless, musclebound Superman, as the Soviets would have had it (and say of that what you will), but into a spiritually impoverished and pathetic wretch, a meat-vehicle for a ceaseless material appetite.

It’s not that it’s not commented on. Many people have observed the way that interfaces like YouTube and Facebook keep us trapped in miserable little cycles of consuming, clicking, consuming, clicking (and to what end, financially? Serving us advertisements! Yet more psychological conditioning!). But too often this is understood as something sui generis, a unique malady of Internet capitalism, rather than as an elaboration of and refinement upon a single, vast project that has been in the works for longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been alive. The “loops” and tiny dopamine spurts of social media and video games are in fact just one more chisel in the hand of those sculptors attempting to fashion, from the soft stone of the human psyche, the type of person that can sustain global capitalism.

Is it cybernetic? Automatic and self-perpetuating? Certainly, to a degree. But it was planned, once. And for every clearly pathological and immiserating behavioral pattern that is discovered through new technology, there is a person whose job is to find out how to get more people to behave that way and use it to move product.

Pretty sure that the massive industrialization experienced largely by the North, and the development of a complex state apparatus suited to the demands of the century is what allowed the US to become a world power. I doubt that agrarian landowners, many of whose activities actually disrupted peaceful economic and social reconstruction (such as the Klan and assassinating the president who had, all things considered, treated them with a decent amount of mercy) were in any way responsible for healing the divide post-Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln wasn’t the greatest US President because he led the nation through civil war, he’s the greatest because he lead the nation through civil war and then managed to completely prevent the numerous atrocities that oftentimes follow civil wars where the winning side proceeds to utterly annihilate the losers through systematic persecution/extermination.

Abraham Lincoln’s vision of unconditional forgiveness for the South (which admittedly took some time to enact and didn’t truly come to fruition until the Grant administration and the end of Reconstruction) is what enabled America to quickly recover from the war and go on to become a major world power by the turn of the century.

Aiming for the impossible

It seems like most of the leftist writing I see, from publications like Current Affairs or Jacobin to everyday posts on tumblr, abandon any attempts to imagine what a socialist society would look like in favor of arguing for a better welfare state, higher wages, unionizing, and so on. I understand that abolishing property may not be politically feasible in the immediate future, but fuck, why should we be afraid to openly call for the core of our political philosophy? Abolishing private property is literally the first and foremost (if not the singular) demand of Communists, and yet so many leftists apparently fall into the trap of arguing against income inequality/the market mechanism rather than against the fundamental injustice of private property itself. Fighting libertarians over income inequality is useful, to be sure, but what if income disparities in some circumstances are actually due to individual choice/outside factors unrelated to discrimination, and the market is working as fairly/efficiently as it could? Imagine if your only criticisms of feudalism focus on the actions of evil kings and exceptionally cruel farming conditions, rather than the roots of the system itself.

I chalk this tendency up to Freddie deBoer’s observation that most leftists “want to lose” and would rather live a safe, predictable life of endless struggle against capitalism rather than doing the hard, boring, unsexy work of envisioning and campaigning for alternatives. And I get it, change is hard and growth is painful, especially when it weakens your identity/self-perception. But fuck that, I want my kids to see snow days. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “Aim for the impossible and you’ll get everything that is possible thrown in. Aim for the possible and you’ll get neither.”

This tendency always fascinated me. There's a guy in my neighborhood with a big sign on his fence claiming that Obama passed a certain law making propaganda legal, as though Obama (or any ruler) would want to make sure his naked seizure of power was legalized prior to doing it? Such a strange mix of total paranoia combined with a childish belief in the law as inviolable.

i’ve been thinking about a bit in a recent Shaun video, where he has a short clip taken from a terf or anti-vax or wayfair truther rally, i don’t remember which (sort of the point, these groups all bleed into each other), where someone was claiming that the mRNA vaccine was a plot by transhumanists to alter people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be human anymore and thus, under the law, they would no longer have human rights.

and, like, the major takeaway here is just “oh, these people are crazy crazy,” but i can’t help but be kind of astounded at the logic regardless. like, the existence of legal rights predates the discovery of DNA. your rights as a person do not at all depend on your genome. nevermind that the casual conflation of DNA with the true essence of a living organism is a fundamental misreading of science; if you could magically remove all the DNA from someone’s body, they would still (in the brief interval before they died horribly) have human rights! no court anywhere on Earth would entertain the argument that someone’s legal status as a person is dependent on a DNA test.

and obviously there are much more salient objections to this whole line of reasoning, which is purely emotive “technology bad” nonsense rhetoric, but like… do they think that if they trick someone into standing next to a strong gamma-ray source, they have the legal right to murder them??

[epistemic status: a bunch of semi-related thoughts I am trying to work out aloud] It has been noted countless times that reactionary politics rely on a feeling of threat: our enemies are strong and we are weak (but we are virtuous and they are not, which is why they’re our enemies!); we must defend ourselves, we must not be afraid of doing what needs to be done; we must not shie away from power generally, and violence specifically.

And there are lots of contexts–like when talking about the appeal of reactionary politics in the US before and at the beginning of Trump’s rise to prominence, or when talking about hard-on-crime policies that are a springboard to police militarization, or (the central example of all this in the 21st century) the post 9/11 PATRIOT-act terrorism paranoia that was a boon to authoritarians everywhere, and spurred a massive expansion of both control and surveillance in everyday life–where critics of reactionary rhetoric are chastised for their failure to appeal to the other side, because they come off as callous towards their concerns and their real fears and anxieties.

And while this might not be strategically correct, frankly, I think there’s a sense in which it is justified to be callous towards those concerns. Because those concerns are lies. They may be lies borne out of a seed of real experience (9/11 did happen, of course), but the way that seed is cultivated by focused paranoia, by contempt toward cultivating any sense of proportionality or any honest comparison of risk, the way it is dragooned into the service of completely orthogonal political goals (”the CIA/NSA/FBI must be able to monitor all private communications everywhere in the world, just in case it might prevent another 9/11″) chokes off any possible sympathy I might otherwise feel. American paranoia about another couple thousand lives being lost in a 9/11 like event resulted in a number of deaths literally multiple orders of magnitude larger in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the former, some years Iraq was suffering the equivalent of six or seven 9/11s a year.

So, any fear-driven policy must not (for example) say “to prevent disaster X happening again, we’re going to make it happen 270 times over to someone else.” That’s not reasonable. And “fear is a bad basis for crafting policy” is not exactly a revolutionary observation. There’s that probably-apocryphal story of a Chinese professor responding to Blackstone’s Ratio–you know, “better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer”–with “better for whom?” Which is supposed to be this trenchant and penetrating question that makes you reexamine your assumptions. But it’s always struck me as idiotic. Better for society! For everyone! Because the law only functions well if it is seen as a source of order and justice, not as an authoritarian cudgel; because a society in which anxiety drives policymaking and legal responses to social ills is one that is in the process of actively devouring itself; because flooding the public discourse with language that dehumanizes criminals and makes it easy to separate the individual from universal principles like civil rights is an acid that destroys the social fabric.

Fear as a germ of reactionary politics manifests itself in lots of ways outside of both historical examples, like fascism, or more recent examples, like US foreign policy during the war on terror. Fear and its link to purity-attitudes, with a low level of scientific literacy in general, drives stuff like the organized anti-vaccine movement. In the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of political tendencies, I’d argue it’s a big factor in the wellness-to-Qanon track. It’s a big part of tough-on-crime rhetoric, which in the American instance in particular also draws on an especially racialized form (cf. the “Willie Horton” ad). Fear and purity and anti-contamination anxieties are even big in opposition to nuclear power, because most of the public just has a really bad sense of what the comparative dangers of nuclear vs fossil fuel are; and because the former has been culturally salient since 1945 in a way the latter hasn’t, nuclear contamination feels much more threatening than fossil fuel waste, despite by any measurable harm the latter causing far worse problems, even before you factor in any risks from climate change.

I would like to argue in particular that true crime as an entertainment genre, and wellness culture, and fears about child abuse all contribute to reactionary politics–they are in themselves major reactionary political currents–in a way that cuts across the political spectrum because they are not strongly marked for political factionalism. A lot of the rhetoric both from and around true crime entertainment promotes the idea that violent crime exists, or at least can flourish, because of an insufficiently punitive attitude toward crime; one that can only be fixed by centering victims’ desire (or putative desire) for retribution in the legal process, by eroding the civil rights of the accused, and by giving the police and prosecutors more power. Obviously, this is just 80s and 90s tough on crime rhetoric repackaged for millennials; it centers individual experience a bit more and deemphasizes the racial component that made the “Willie Horton” ad so successful, but it posits that there is only one cause for crime, a spontaneous choice by criminals that has no causal relationship with the rest of the world, and only one solution, which is authoritarianism.

Wellness culture leverages purity concerns and scientific illiteracy in ways which are so grifty and so transparently stupid that it’s by far the least interesting thing on this list to me; its most direct harm is in giving an environment for the anti-vaccine movement to flourish, and I’m always incredibly annoyed when people talk about how the medical establishment needs to do more to reassure the public about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Again, strategically, this may be correct; people dying of preventable disease is really bad. But doctors as a body didn’t promote Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense; doctors as a body didn’t run breathless article after breathless article about vaccines maybe causing autism; doctors as a body didn’t scare the bejezus out of folks in the 90s and then act all surprised when preventable childhood diseases started breaking out all over the place.

Although outside the whole anti-vax thing, I think there are lots of other harms that wellness culture creates. It tends to be fairly antiscientific; in order to sell people nonsense (because as a subculture it exists almost exclusively to sell people things) it has to discredit anything that might point out that it is selling nonsense. Whether the anti-intellectualism that flourishes in these quarters is a result of intentional deceit or just a kind of natural rhetorical evolution probably varies. But it is an important component of wellness culture to be able to play a shell game between “big pharma doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” “you don’t need your anti-depressants,” and “laetrile cures cancer.”

The way in which fears of child abuse are turned into a reactionary political cudgel probably actually annoys me the most; whether it’s Wayfair conspiracy theories, conservatives trying to turn “groomer” into an anti-queer slur, or just antis on tumblr, the portrayal of sadistic sexual threat aimed at children from an outside malevolent force is compelling only because the vast majority of child abuse and CSA comes from within families and within culturally privileged structures of authority like churches, and this fact makes everyone really uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk about it. I remember getting really annoyed during the Obama years when the White House wanted to talk about bullying and anti-LGBT bullying in particular, while studiously avoiding blaming parents and teachers in any way for it, despite the fact that all the coming out horror stories I know are from people’s parents turning on them.

Now, very conservative politics have always opposed dilution of a kind of privilege for the family structure; they envision a family structure which is patriarchal, and so dilution of this privilege is dilution of the status of patriarch. Very insular communities which cannot survive their members having many options or alternative viewpoints available to them, including controlling religions but also just abusive parents who want to retain control over their kids, also bristle at the idea of any kind of general society-wide capacity for people to notice how parents treat their children. But beyond that, I think our society still treats parents as having a right of possession over their children and their children’s identities, especially when they’re young, and bolsters that idea with an idea that the purity of children is constantly under threat from the outside world, and it is the parents’ job to safeguard that purity. The result is the nuclear family as a kind of sacred structure which the rest of society has no right to observe or pry open; and this is a massive engine of enabling the abuse of children. To no other relationship in our society do we apply this idea, that it should be free from “interference” (read: basic accountability) from the rest of society.

Moreover, the idea of childhood as a time of purity and innocence, which not only must be protected from but during which children must be actively lied to about major aspects of how the world works, is one of the last ways remaining to an increasingly secular culture to justify censorious and puritanical Victorian morality. It is hard to advocate for censorship to protect the Morals of the Christian Public, when nobody believes in the Morals of the Christian Public anymore; but “think of the children!” still works as a rallying cry, because of this nagging sense we have that age-appropriate conversations with children about adult topics will cause them to melt or explode.

In many ways, these anxieties on behalf of theoretical children are the ones I am most contemptuous of. Not because child abuse isn’t a serious problem–it is–but because the vector imagined for it is almost entirely opposite the one it actually tends to occur along. People who pretend that the primary danger to children is from strangers are usually woefully misinformed; people who pretend it is from media are either idiots or liars seeking a cover for their craving for censorship.

In conclusion: while it’s not possible to exorcise all our neuroses from our politics, anymore than we will ever exercise all our neuroses from our aesthetics, there are some we should be especially on guard against. A sense of threat, and anxieties which tie into concerns about purity and fears of contamination, are two big ones. These produce policies that are not only badly correlated with the outcomes they ostensibly want, but actually and severely destructive to them, in the same way that invading Iraq was actively destructive to any notion of preventing terrorism, saving American or Iraqi lives, or promoting political stability in the Middle East. And we should hold in healthy suspicion anybody whose politics seem to be driven by similar neuroses. Some merely believe very harmful things. Some are actually actively deceptive. None will achieve any of the higher aims they claim as justification for their beliefs.

Idea: Resolve this problem by giving workers the power to fire colleagues that they deem lazy or dangerously incompetent. Terminated workers have the right to defend themselves in a court-like environment, with consideration given to the importance/inherent danger of their job and the consequences of letting them stay or forcing them out. Terminated workers are compensated with unemployment benefits and recieve assistance from local government in finding a new occupation.

Laws against feeding the homeless remind me of a recent conversation I had about the "Nordic model" of prostitution where Johns/customers are arrested but the prostitutes are left unpenalized: it's breathtakingly hypocritical, and the moral contradictions within bourgeois liberalism are evident. Apparently lawmakers believe that a woman is not oppressed when she is forced by circumstance to sell herself on the street to pay for rent and groceries, but only when the proper individual oppressor (a man) buys her services. (What about woman who hire female prostitutes, or male-on-male sex work?) Similarly, a person is not oppressed by homelesness, exposure to the elements, or the likely accompanying drug addiction, mental illness, and despair, but God forbid we violate any hygiene laws while feeding them!

You know what makes me mad? I used to work at Pizza hut and everyday we would have to throw away perfectly good pizza or potato wedges or garlic bread in the bin because it was the wrong order or the customer had changed their mind. They made us bin the whole thing. We weren’t allowed to put it aside to eat from or take it home (we all earned minimum wage so it’s not like we culd afford pizza that expensive a lot). But what makes me even madder is that they could easily give that to the homeless or poor. Like, if a homeless person came into the store, we could have easily given him one of the 20 or so pizzas that we would be binning every single day anyway. Imagine all the pizza hut stores in the world. Imagine each and every one throwing away on average 20 pizzas a day. Imagine how many people that would feed. Fuck corporations man.

calling human rights and liberties “bourgeois liberties” doesn’t actually devalue them.

These are reasonable complaints; it sucks when people

1. Fail to interpret you correctly and act reasonably 2. Act polite to such an extreme that it comes off as passive-aggressive, sarcastic, or even threatening (a big man staring resentfully at a small woman for "making" him side-step is probably threatening to the woman, especially alone and/or at night 3. Treat you like a fragile object or an antagonist rather than someone who's entitled to basic civility.

I just had three guys consecutively stop dead in their tracks and side step me. One of them even said, “excuse me, mam!” I want to puke.

I’ve been out shopping a lot lately and this is the new hot trend and I may start screaming soon

The last paragraph is the worst part. It's chilling that anyone would be impressed by-and offer a job to-someone so manipulative and deceptive.

Welcome to the tech industry, where cruelty, dishonesty, and callousness are rewarded as long as they're innovative enough.

The Tinder Hacker

When I asked Sean about his hobbies, I wasn’t prepared for what he said.

tl:dr: Guy writes a script to connect two men together on a dating app, both of whom think they are talking to a beautiful women. Many seem to like a woman as sexually forward as they are, some are confused, more still are thrown off by the not-so-great pronoun-switching part of the script.

He turns it off before things go too far. We learn some things about men (maybe), and about online dating.

Thoughts?