Outbursts

10 second tirades:

Why ethnically innovative and gender-neutral casting of period pieces and classics is controversial only to bigots:  History is bunk.  It happened wrong and we've got to fix it.  

Why we are doomed:  Because only money gets to talk and money is an idiot.

Those who have corporate structured jobs (which include government and healthcare and media and law firms in addition to corporations) lie to themselves about how their lives reflect the reality of America.  The word mainstream sounds like that’s where most of the stream is, but it’s just a name for the thin band of stream that we’re allowed to listen to and see on our tvs and whatnot which is by for and about the people in that stream.

Lately when I feel nostalgic for some era I am sometimes troubled by the question of whether that era was as golden as it was solely because it was stealing from this one?

Space used to be exciting but now that it's gone commercial it's just another disappointment.  Mars exploration is just another show.  I can barely participate in the excitement and elation about it.  It looks like groundbreaking for a mall, a mall that’s going to die anyway (thank goodness) so let’s cut out the middle man and kill it now.

I have nothing against the unborn.  As long as they stay that way.*

I don’t dislike Burt Lancaster movies per se.  I definitely hold 50s and 60s adult mainstream middle brow melodrama in much lower esteem than I used to as a naïve child in the 60s.  But that doesn't mean I won’t watch it.  It gives my eyeball rolling muscles a good workout.  The best part about it is I can play with my phone with much higher concentration and no guilt.  That’s a good thing in my view since I am extremely addicted to my phone. It’s just hard to convey how literally, seriously and non-ironically ok I am with that genre of movie for exactly this reason.

First Elon Musk completely takes away my freedom as a non-user to scroll Twitter without joining up.  Then he changes the name of the site to X.  X my ass, Elon Musk.

Given how top heavy the leadership of the neoliberal order is with old people who will not let go of power, with nothing else happening in the way of socialist revolution, how can it be wrong to root for attrition?

Corporate Democrats are weak tea oomphless nothings who make sure they never lose financially or careerwise, but when it comes to politics never win.  Whenever they do manage to win, in spite of their belief that it’s only because they succeeded at pretending to be cool and correct Republicans, it escapes their notice that it’s really only because they lucked into being not Republicans for the 5 minutes that people who actually vote thought it mattered somehow that Republicans were not good. 

When it comes to money and getting theirs, liberal neoliberals (third way dems; elder hippie boomers and anyone of any age who emulates them) will drop their protest signs and solidarity in a minute. When it comes to sympathy and solidarity with the financially unfortunate, it’s no longer "kumbayah" and "we shall overcome", but rather "sucks to be you."  

If there is to be any hope for the planet and its inhabitants we need to cooperate now on a solution but we hate each other too much for that to ever happen.  What's more, some people are very pleased at how much hate there is preventing the implementation of effective solutions  (because this means their heads can remain attached to their necks.)  

Or am I just being a grumpy ol’ silly billy?

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* It's a joke.

Futility Belt

When Cornel West announced on Russell Brand's podcast his intention to enter the presidential race on the People's Party ticket (the phantom contrarian internet political branding championed by Jimmy Dore and some other questionable losers) an ostensible Green Party member of my acquaintance expressed the opinion that the move demonstrated the ultimate futility of electoral politics for the left.  His tune mellowed a bit a few days later when Dr West was publicly convinced by his friend journalist Chris Hedges to switch to the Green Party, but my friend's commitment to the Green Party is tenuous at best inspired as it was by essentially well-placed if inchoate rancor at the Democratic Party dating back to 2016 at least.  He tells me he will vote Green if he's in a voting booth election day, and somewhat more enthusiastically if the candidate is Cornel West, but his disillusionment with the political process is deep -- and who can blame him*?

No one running is ideal.  The only ideal candidate is not running.   And yet if Bernie had something in 2016 and 2020, and I believe he did, why couldn’t someone else in 2024?  Marianne Williamson is no Bernie for sure, but she’s a hell of a lot better than Biden. (And getting better every day.) Honestly she is trying to do what Bernie did—she’s trying to make the conversation more intelligent and relevant to people’s lives.  Somebody has to try because Biden (if he retains enough marbles to carry the standard for November 2024) may not win it this time.  And that does mean Trump or DeSantis unfortunately, and not Cornel West.†  

DeSantis to me makes Trump look like Biden.  My problem with sitting it out is, DeSantis wins and most of us are fine—we just complain at the tv and keep duking it out with each other on the internet and meanwhile non-citizens are rounded up, police kill black people indiscriminately, children go to work in meat packing plants, and trans people are not just denied healthcare, but killed.  And if you get sick and can’t pay for it too bad. And books are banned and ideas are banned and people are banned.  And pregnant people are forced to give birth coast to coast.  (Yes, pregnant people, because you think they’re going to let someone get an abortion because he says he’s a man?)   And the planet dies.   I mean the part of this I really hate is how DeSantis wins and most of us are ok.  We’re unified in our disgust, but meanwhile we’re living in Nazi Germany.  That’s what they want—they don’t let themselves think or say out loud that it’s what they want but it’s what they are actively working for.  And what Biden is working for is lame as shit but it is less evil.  That’s my main pickle. 

For my part, I wish it were enough to say electoral politics are futile for the left, or at least I wish it were enough for me.  It would be simpler that way.  I have after all never really gotten what I wanted at the polls in 40 + years of voting (except when I did in 2008, but we see how well that turned out).  But I’m personally too afraid of taking my powerless hand off the non-functional rudder to give it up to those who are eager for my disillusionment to get the best of me.  It’s a hang-up I can at least admit to myself.  I think what’s missing for me is a convincing alternative to just letting the wolves have everything.  If I could be persuaded that the answer was just, “Hey it doesn’t matter anyway.” I might feel somewhat differently.  But the answer from the electorally nihilistic left seems to be, “It obviously matters, but there’s nothing you can do about it so just lie back, relax and <insert politically incorrect joke punchline here >”   

Or am I deluded?  Is it like the AI thing, where the AI progenitors just want everyone to think AI is going to spell doom for humanity unless we give the AI progenitors our full trust to neuter AI so that it won’t destroy us, but actually AI is lame-o and they just don’t want you to realize it’s just code designed to look pretty clever but it’s the lame-osity that masquerades very well as genius that we need to be afraid of, because we’re too credulous to distinguish between fraudulent cleverness and actual super human intelligence?  In other words,  is the utter dominance of the right over every aspect of government nothing to worry about (fraudulent cleverness); or is it something to shit your pants over (super human intelligence)?  I don’t think it’s super human intelligence, but it has real destructive impact, right?   I don’t think we have any control over it and I don’t think a vote is anything other than therapy. 

In other words, re left participation in the American political system, is the wised-up money saying don’t participate, just let the chips fall where they may?  I.e., no alternative but also so what, kind of? I'm not judging, just trying to try the position of political nihilism as I understand it on for size. 

I was hoping my erstwhile Green party friend had an alternative to the politics that impacts our lives where one who wanted some results could better spend their energy.§  Getting a bit frustrated with my persistence at taking the question seriously, he suggested that leftist efforts might better be spent on legislative and local races.  While I 100% agree, try getting Jane and Joe Sixpack to care about congressional races in their own district let alone across the USA.  If only our system were unbroken enough (while we’re waiting for sortition to kick in) that it were possible for people’s preferences to nominate a Bernie-like candidate in the primary who would bring along a wave of sympathetic new blood to congress and statehouses and governor’s mansions across the country in her wake as she roars into victory in November. People forget what primaries are supposed to do.  They think they’re merely rehearsal for November.

Given our fucked up political system, there are really only two reasons to vote.  In the primary, your duty is to vote for what you really want, to at a minimum try to put a bit of terror into the hearts of those who money wants (and usually succeeds in helping) to win.  To this point in the 2024 cycle, for a person like me it is really a no brainer who carries the standard for the things I want.  (Marianne Williamson for those needing help).  In the general election, when those with their hands on the reins are chosen, you vote to prevent the worst of money's two candidates from winning.

I readily admit my position on electoral politics-- essentially fake it till you make it-- is as effective as my nihilistic friend's.  The main difference is that my position temporarily relieves anxiety, sometimes.  I mean with Bernie it actually instilled hope and I, unlike almost every other leftist I listen to who begrudges Bernie for giving hope and then not winning, I say, Not him, us dammit!  He tried and we fucked up -- and give Bernie a life-time pass.  

So in the absence of an alternative, my position in the primaries is by default, "My vote doesn’t count, so who gives a fuck if I vote?"  I’m going to vote because for a second I feel I did my part even though fewer and fewer people who agree with me about where the country needs to go join me in it.  Making my vote even less countable.  ^_^  Thanks a lot leftists!  (I’m not debating damn it.  I’m internally debating and hoping  I may accidentally overhear where the fuck I’m screwing up and can straighten myself out.)

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* He's not a complete nihilist.  Like me he believes that the only true answer for politics-- the only hope for actual democracy-- is sortition.  Like me he is realistic about the odds of sortition replacing our current system in our lifetimes.  Unlike me he has decided pretty much it's sortition or nothing.

† I think it would be interesting if Cornel West and Marianne Williamson kind of tag-teamed the other losers in the race.  I like the idea of MW from the “inside” showing how Dems in an ideal-ish world ought to be doing it and hopefully giving Joe Biden et al a shit ton of trouble in the process—I aim to do my part in facilitating that-- and CW telling it like it is from the outside-- and I’m not opposed to giving some assistance in that regard.  Indeed, after the primaries assuming the likeliest outcome, since I live in a state that is safe for Biden (or whomever the money prefers the dem candidate to be), where my vote counts even less, I may yet pull the lever for Cornel West.

§ Vivek Chibber thinks the alternative to electoral politics is workplace politics.  He thinks union action Is where it’s at.  He’s got a real point, doesn’t he?   Fat lot of good that does me. 

The spiral

Nothing tastes as good as it did 50 years ago. Nothing.  Not corn chips, not chocolate chip cookies, not cola, not m&m's, not coffee, not milk, not bread, not cheese, not orange juice. Not oranges!  Not tomatoes!  Not greens!  Not eggs!  Not beef!   Not apples!  Unless you grow your own food and are careful to use methods that are designed around food, the food you eat is shit.  You just don't know it is because you have been slowly accustomed to it by the monopolies that bring it to your table via the supermarkets where you procure it.  Those monopolies are not in the business of pleasing your palate while providing the maximum nutrition with every bite, they are about pleasing the accountants of their stockholders.  In the interest of this, they have invested years and dollars on developing ways to cut every corner on the production of your food that they can find.  If it's not manufactured but grown, they have developed technologies to alter the genetics of it to serve not dinner but commerce, flavor and quality and nutrition to the consumer be damned.

The reason you don't know what you eat is shit is that you don't have the good stuff to compare it to. Neither do I, but I have been paying attention to the trajectory of quality of goods and services in my lifetime.  There is an arc to it.  A product is introduced and advertised as an improvement on whatever already exists, and for its brief moment in the sun, it may appear to be.  But as soon as the edge it has managed to carve for itself in the market of like products has dulled, the process of minimizing its quality while maximizing its profitability begins and in its next and each subsequent iteration, it becomes more and more profitable and less and less good.  The curves of these 2 properties of any product in the capitalist marketplace are inverse, and since the pressure is for an upswing of profitability the entire arc of quality for every product in the marketplace is on the downslope.

We have nothing to compare it to.  We can't buy from the primeval forest collective.  Our coops and communes and kibbutzim do the best they can to buck this trend but they do not even try to compete with the marketplace.  And the marketplace cheats for the sake of its shareholders' profit.   So for the vast majority of us shit is what we eat because shit is what we can buy in the marketplace.

This goes for more than food of course.  This also goes for our homes, our clothes, our electronics, our cars.   Every now and then, we learn of a revolution.  When talk of electric cars threatened to dampen the future of petroleum extraction, treasuries were spent on killing the electric car.  But as the effects of decades of  petrobusiness as usual and the ubiquity of gasoline powered transportation on our planet, our environment, our climate have been exposed in a way that fewer can ignore, electric transportation has been allowed a niche.  But the cycle of capitalism in this financialized, computerized world has shrunk to the point that barely a decade into the electric car explosion the counterpart ravages of electric car production have already been exposed and already cry for mitigation (that is already being ignored).  It's not transportation that's the problem it's commodification.

To this point, labor has played a major part in the ability of capitalists to create wealth from nothing of their own.  It did come at the cost of worker wages-- the barest minimum that the capitalist's have to pay in order to keep their workforce alive and productive and reproductive.  The final frontier for capital is the downgrading of labor via the incalculably cheaper "Artificial Intelligence".  Until now, AI has been merely a threat used to wring the last remnants of compliance from humans in accession to their own exploitation for the profit of their bosses.  If labor could be programmed to be performed by machines the only expense to capital would be the replacement cost of the artificial workforce.    The dirty secret that capital did not want us to know is that if this were remotely possible it would have already been done.  In truth, the force behind what capital has wished us to think of as artificial intelligence has been the genuine human intelligence that has filled in the gaping gaps in machine learning, the human intelligence of unseen workers exploited, preyed upon, plagiarized and presented as the product of AI.  

It's not that AI technology has been idle all this while.   Everywhere are loud stirrings of an immanent revolution in AI evident in spectacular demonstrations of advances in AI generated art, computer generated deep fakes that are increasingly (but not yet completely) undetectable by humans, and the debut of freakily capable-esque  AI programs like ChatGPT in  creating instant human-like reports and art-like output in reponse to verbal input. The pace has been so furious that for 15 minutes a while back we were enticed to contemplate dire warnings about the impending AI future uttered by the very names we  associate with AI.  A moment of guerilla PR for the very projects they are all working so hard to bring to fruition masquerading as concern for what their own technology has in store for us.

It's instructive to contemplate the possibility of actual threat to workers from AI in light of the current struggle now on of  the writers and actors behind our favorite entertainment  as they join forces with each other for the first time since 1960 in strike against producers.  Along with demands to restructure residuals from streaming platforms and shorter seasons which have eroded the ability of the vast majority of writers and actors to make a living from their work, the strikers are demanding -- reasonably in spite of the poormouthing of obscenely overpaid studio executives-- to place limits on the ability of producers to create footage generated via AI from the images of non-compensated actors in the production of motion pictures and television.  In confronting the issue head-on in their current strike, actors and writers are taking a stand for all workers.  

Is there cause for alarm?  Will robots replace us?  Will AI art replace human art?  Without limits in place it is hard to see how capital could resist taking AI as far as it can in cutting the human costs of producing entertainment  product for television, theaters and streaming services.  Left to their own devices, this would be the future of entertainment we would be certain to face.  The tragedy of it would be even deeper than we know.  Producers and the big tech companies developing the "AI" that would enable it would like us to believe that artificial intelligence might as well be intelligence.  But it is no more intelligence than the plastic that has replaced the materials that formerly built the world our parents used to know is the same as what it substitutes for or than GMO food is food. You can see it in the shoddy eye pollution of CGI already disfiguring our entertainment.  Not content to merely trim production costs from movies and television, you can be sure that producers' ultimate goal is development of ersatz creativity to all but eliminate the burdensome costs of human creativity as practiced by writers and actors-- and eventually all of us.  It will be good enough for the producers and for the stockholders of the studios and streaming services.  For the rest of us, it will be GMO Spaghettios.

As the "new and improved" Rice Krispies are the downgraded version of our paltry menu of available breakfast foodstuffs, AI is the degeneration of human creativity that the owners want to cram down our throats.  They  think they will succeed.  But let's stand with the workers and be ready for them this time.

The Mask of Anarchy

The Mask of Anarchy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, was written in response to the Peterloo Massacre at St Peter's Field in Manchester, England on  August 16, 1819 in which 80 were killed and hundreds wounded when British Cavalry forces charged into a crowd of 60,000 protesting for universal male suffrage.  At the time only 11% of British males (landowners) could vote at all, but less than five thousand in a population of over two million could vote for Parliament.  

Shelley was in Italy when word of the massacre reached him.  He submitted the poem to The Examiner, the leading political and cultural weekly of the time, whose editor demurred on the presumption that his audience might not be ready for its impassioned message of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience.  Before the poem could find a publisher, Shelley died swimming in the Mediterranean in July 8, 1822.  His body washed ashore close to Viareggio in  Tuscany and was cremated in accordance with Italian law.  The Mask of Anarchy was finally published in 1832.   

The last quatrain (88 in some editions, 91 in others) especially bears memorizing:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Universal male suffrage was not enacted in the UK until February 6, 1918.  Full universal suffrage for all adult men and women regardless of ownership of property came ten years later when the Equal Franchise act was passed on July 2, 1928.*

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* The next landmark in democratic representation in case Britain has lost track: universal sortition.