Was Hitler Inevitable?

According to German historian Marcel Bois in a 2015 article in Jacobin Magazine, No. So how did it happen?

Beyond the official proceedings, significant historical questions remain unresolved, raising important discussions on human nature, the role of the Left, and whether progressive movements can overcome racism and other oppressions to fight together. The dominant question, of course, is how something so awful could happen in the first place. How was it possible that the most horrific crime in human history could occur in Germany, the “land of poets and thinkers?”

Several factors contributed.  Among the economic factors, the 1929 Stock Market crash had global implications, but its effects were suffered particularly acutely in Germany .  The Weimar Republic under Hindenberg, head of the center right party that came to ascendency following Germany's defeat in World War I, began taking autocratic measures to stem the chaos.  Germany's recovery was heavily financed by American banks, and their failure spelled disaster for the German middle class which sank like a stone due to rampant bankruptcy.  The Weimar response was austerity which was felt unevenly by a middle class falling into poverty and a peasantry reeling from cratering food prices.  Unemployment grew from 1.3 million in 1929 to 6.3 million in 1933.  Rising in response to the turmoil, the Nazi party portion of the popular vote grew from 2.8% in 1928 to approach nearly 40 percent of the vote in 1930.   As Bois put it, "National Socialist demagoguery, directed against both finance capital and the labor movement, proved particularly appealing to members of the middle class."

Meanwhile, on the left, mutual antipathy festered between the extremes.  The ruling Social Democratic party (SPD) answered increasing challenges to its status from 1928 to 1930 from a steadily growing Communist party (KPD) and a mushrooming Nazi Party (NSDAP) with a bold stance of timidity, placing their support in 1932 (along with what was left of Germany's trade unions) behind the authoritarian Hindenburg as the evil lesser than Hitler, a strategy that as Bois points out "ran counter to the party’s political program, not to mention the material interests of its supporters."  But the move proved decisive:  it was Hindenberg after all who ultimately slighted his more mainstream supporters by appointing Hitler as Chancellor in 1932--  with only 2 elected Nazis in the Reichstag at the time.

The Social Democrats, possessed of an "anti-Communist fervor" equated Bolshevism and Fascism as 2 sides of the same brutish coin.  For their part Communists (KPD) were suspicious of Social Democrats as "social fascists" for their collaboration with Hindenburg.

The Central Committee overused the phrase “fascism” to the point of meaninglessness. As far as they were concerned, the German state had become fascist in 1930 when Hindenburg’s presidential cabinet took over. Indeed, the KPD leadership considered all other parliamentary parties to be variants of fascism, telling its members that “fighting fascism means fighting the SPD just as much as it means fighting Hitler and the parties of Brüning.”

The German Communist Party preferred to rival with leftists to the right of them by throwing strategic support behind certain Nazi initiatives (specifically against the Social Democratic platform in that party's stronghold, Prussia).  For their tolerance in times of crisis, the Communists were rewarded when the Nazis ultimately seized power by being outlawed, and by seeing the suspension of collective bargaining and unions.

Bois summarizes the situation prior to 1932, quoting Trotsky (observing from his exile from the Soviet Union on the Turkish island of Büyükada) in 1931:

If you place a ball on top of a pyramid the slightest impact can cause it to roll down either to the left or to the right. That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces who would like the ball to roll down towards the Right and break the back of the working class. There are forces who would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the Left and to break the back of capitalism.

Trotsky was exiled in the upheaval following Lenin's death in 1924 both from the Soviet Union and from the predominant thinking of the Communist leadership in Weimar Germany, who were more aligned with Stalinist views in 1932.

The KPD took its position from Moscow, basing itself on the theory of “social fascism” that fascism and Social Democracy were not opposed but in fact functioned like “twin brothers,” as Stalin had once argued. In the context of deep capitalist crisis, it was Social Democracy —  holding back the workers from fighting capitalism — that constituted the “main enemy.”

Only later heeding the call of Trotsky and others to "March separately, but strike unitedly!", the Social Democrats and Communists eventually began working together in a United Front against the Nazis.  It was too late to prevent Hitler's assumption of power and the many years of terror, horror and destruction that ensued, but not to keep the flame of opposition alive.

America is hardly a "land of poets and thinkers".  With an unduly powerful elite where few see the irony of a citizenry obediently goose-stepping to the corporate beat of the collective different drummer, if anything it is and has always been a bit of a fascist catastrophe waiting to happen.  Nevertheless, the Social Democratic caution to a fault should sound familiar to anyone who has hoped to place their eggs in the Democratic basket in US elections.  Similarly there is a leftist strain that would do well to learn from Germany's history and try to learn to keep from repeating the mistake.

Hitler’s rise to power was by no means inevitable, but rather the outcome of both specific historical conditions as well as the actions (and inactions) of various social forces. While many conventional histories paint Nazism as a kind of collective German project, what Hitler’s rise to power really illustrates are the very real consequences that socialist strategy can have in a society wracked by economic depression and political polarization.

Feeding Fugue

Rizzo-like cat  [Tokuhiro Kawai - Captor (2005)]

I have been feeding Rizzo and Blanche for a while now.  They both like a bit of wet food twice a day to supplement the dry.  They expect variety and can be off a flavor for a while if it shows up too frequently in their bowls.  The dry can contain chicken, but for some reason, the wet cannot be an animal that walks on land.

Rizzo is male, older, considerably larger.  I've been feeding him longer.  He likes a half can at every meal.  Blanche is younger, female, much smaller, and has been here a shorter while.  Wet food was new to her when I started her on a quarter can, and she never outgrew it-- she frequently contents herself with just licking the wet, so I don't foresee a day when she'll catch up to Rizzo in portion size.  What this means is that along with the dry food, I dole out 3/4 of a can of wet food twice a day.

I never gave much thought to what that meant mathematically at first.  I suppose when Blanche started eating wet, a part of me initially mourned the elegant simplicity of 1/2 can at each meal, but I was mostly too interested in whether she would take to the change in her diet to notice the complexity of patterns right off the bat.  After a while, I couldn't fail to notice the obvious consequences of this odd distribution. At some meals, when Rizzo got room temperature fish out of a new can, so did Blanche; other times, she would get the last cold quarter of an already opened can out of the fridge and Rizzo would get half of a brand new can.  Still other times, both would get the perfect 3/4 left in the can taken out of the fridge, and still others, Rizzo's half would be cold and Blanche's quarter would be new.  Some meals, only one cold can would be involved.  Some meals, only 1 new. On others, both the remains of a cold can and the start of a new would be used.

I knew mathematically that 3 was somehow a magic number underlying this setup, and also 4, but I'll admit figuring out the mathematics of it remained a future dream until this morning.  Yesterday I was inspired to work it out,  so I made a quick stab at documenting the process but with only a small amount of time at my disposal, I got quickly frustrated by differences between the spreadsheet program on my home computer and the one I use at work.  Today, the inspiration revisited me tenfold and I had no choice but to give myself time to figure it out.  This is what I came up with.

Click to enlarge

I do mix up the flavors the best I can, but I don't follow the regimented order shown in the diagram.*  The flavors are provided for illustrative purposes only. 

Having a chart to study, it quickly became apparent to me how 3/4 can per meal translated to 3 cans every 4 meals (i.e., 3 cans every 2 days).  I was somewhat dismayed by the simplicity and evenness of it, especially given that it was the 'mystery' of it that forced me into laboring out the details.  But there were a few surprises to reward my effort.  For instance, it hadn't occurred to me that each cat had a different sequence of meals.  If A stands for Fresh out of a new can and B stands for Leftovers from a cold can, Rizzo's pattern is two meals of Fresh halves, followed by two meals of Leftover halves, and then the cycle repeats:

AABBAABB

whereas Blanche's is alternating Fresh quarters and Leftover quarters repeating:

ABABABAB  

That is while Blanche has fresh for breakfast and leftovers for dinner each day, Rizzo has a day of fresh followed by a day of leftovers.  To add a dimension, let's make A, B, C, D, E and F portions of 6 particular flavors fresh out of newly opened cans, and a, b, c, d, e and f leftover portions of those same flavors out of the fridge.  Then, if Rizzo's pattern were:

ABbcDEef

Blanche's corresponding pattern would be:

AaCcDdFf

Notice that Rizzo repeats a flavor only twice in his sequence of 8 meals (only B and E are repeated), whereas Blanche repeats a flavor every other meal -- twice as frequently as Rizzo.  A startling revelation: Blanche would not even see flavors B and E unless the order were somewhat scrambled in the second round.  The whole sequence of 8 days including scrambling would look like the below (note that the alternating cases below correspond to the AABB and ABAB patterns of new versus old in the feeding sequence irrespective of flavor):

ABbcDEef  BAacEDdf 

AaCcDdFf  BbCcEeFf

I don't regret the time spent sorting through this problem.  For starters, I've never felt more comfortable with the spreadsheet program on my home computer. For another, if by stumbling across this post accidentally one day this work inspires even one future Nobel Prize winner in the solution of a difficult problem, it will have been worth it.  On the other hand, trying to wrap my head around the complexities, I think I'll stick with mixing it up for Blanche and Rizzo purely on the basis of whatever can grabs me at the spur of the moment at feeding time.  

Blanche facsimile [actually the work of Margaret Munz-Losch - Black Cat (2012)]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Thinking about keeping a sequence of flavors straight on a schedule, I’m reminded of a sign on the entrance to an iHOP near my daughter’s college that reads, "Snickers the Clown - Every other Wednesday!"   Every other Wednesday?!  Sometimes a month has 4 Wednesdays; sometimes a month has 5 Wednesdays.  Even some Februaries have 5 Wednesdays!  How are people in the town supposed to remember which Wednesday is Snickers day?  Do they mark it on their calendars?  Do they have reminders set on their phones?  The difficulty of the problem leaves only one possible solution: Don’t eat at this iHOP on Wednesdays.

Party of One

https://news.gallup.com/poll/201638/independent-political-lowest-six-years.aspx

In case you hadn't already heard, another US election is coming up -- a mid-term -- and with it a brand new opportunity if one is an American of voting age to re-think one's positions and political affiliations in hopes of settling on a slot for oneself in the great perpetual national project of making a better union, thereby forging the path forward for the country, for the world, and if there's anything left over at the end of it, for the self.  It's time to dream big and hope with abandon.  There will be plenty of time for disappointment in December.

After 20 + years as an independent, I was inspired in 2016 by the presidential campaign of Mr Bernard Sanders of Vermont to register as a Democrat in order to vote in the primaries.  He was gathering momentum at the time; and, seeing a way to do more than root from the sidelines, I switched.   So although none of the candidates I voted for in either the primary or the election of 2016 won, let it not be said that the democrats did not benefit from Bernie's campaign.  Nevertheless, it's time now to rethink my strategy, so please stand by as I contemplate my options.

Republicans are wildly successful but are objectively dishonest in a very peculiar way.  They tell you to your face they are going to steal the country away from you, which is true, but they count on you to think that's good for you.   They represent "the owners" and their minions the managers and the constabulary, and many of them are "the owners", but they aren't plentiful enough to win on their own, so they welcome the abundant warm bodies of narrow,  irrelevant, hateful or counterproductive interests-- the simple, the frightened and the gullible; wealth buffs; daddy minding order worshippers; the adamantly anachronistically religious; and the truly deplorable (the xenophobic, the misogynistic, the racially bigoted, the white-identity obsessive and otherwise nasty spirited ideologues of whatever proclivities)* -- and actively promote their agendas.  They cloak ambitions of limitless profit for themselves through global exploitation by force in Patriotism, and wrap civic meanness in The Flag.  What do "the owners" care if your health is not ensured, if abortion is illegal for your daughters where you live, if the last remaining public funds are squandered on a border wall, if your unarmed brother is shot by police in front of his kids, if you're broke when you can no longer work, if you even have a job, or if your public schools teach creation science in crumbling classrooms? For that matter what difference does it make to them whether humanity and any other life on the planet survives them?  They need your vote, not necessarily to your benefit.  They have had a tremendous amount of success with open hostility to the hoi polloi who make up the electorate including their constituency.  I admire the brazen balls that takes but it's just not for me.

Democrats are often conflated with the double dealing corporate ass kissers who run the party.  This is "sew unfahr".  The rank and file Democrats are people I have sympathy for because they vote Democratic for social justice, to advance the welfare of the least among us, to help protect workers and the planet from corporate malfeasance and to increase peace and understanding in a shrinking world.  I think the Democratic constituency represents the true soul and spirit of the American republic in their diversity, wisdom, sense of fairness, and numbers.†  Unfortunately, thanks to the professional class of technocrats who run things in the party, it's the double dealing corporate ass kissers who get elected.

Independents-- my own happy designation until recently-- used to be the home of the uncommitted and disaffiliated.  But for some reason, candidates who run as Independents rarely represent my end of the spectrum; and now, with an out and proud pedophilic, misogynistic, incel nazi running for Congress as one in Virginia, the deal is broken.

Libertarians exhibit some overlap with my views, particularly when it comes to social issues and personal freedoms, living and letting live, and skepticism about militaristic adventures, but seem overly concerned with the chimera of private property to an unhealthy degree, worship above all the myth of the free market, and are calcified in their rejection of the public good. So no.

Setting aside the disagreeable disgruntledness of so many of the Greens one encounters online, the numbers tell the story.  Their Presidential Candidates get most of the headlines, but perpetually lose and, it could be argued simply on that basis that they succeed mostly in spoiling elections.  No Greens have in fact ever held office at the Federal level in the US.  Only one Green is currently holding a state office, and due to term limits, his incumbency will end this year. The remaining elected officials, less than 200 in 19 states, serve in various local capacities.  California has the most of these, a whopping 68 according to the Green Party website.  Sixty eight should be the number of elected Greens in New Hampshire.  Given the environmental appeal of their platform and the current global emergency, Greens should be killing it in local elections across the country, or at least in the hearts and minds of those eligible or soon to be eligible to vote, but they remain irrelevant.  The platform of the Greens is badly served by its most visible candidates and by the party.  The best that can be said for them is that to date their shit is not yet together.  Judging by the attitude of most Greens toward voters for both major party candidates in the last national election, they are fine with waiting.  I am not.

Communist - Can't quite yet get over the rumors of CIA infiltration.  Pass for now.

Socialists are technically the closest to my own political beliefs.  Like the Greens they are underrepresented at all levels, but unlike the Greens they are gaining ground and have had successes at state and federal levels (up and down ticket).  Socialism-- the worldview that had been succeeding wildly across the planet for much of the middle part of the 20th century until it hit the corporately funded, PR and think tank induced skids in post-Vietnam years-  is the true opposition to the corporate, anti-people agendas of Republicans and to their pale emulators the Democratic neo-liberals, and as such they are fighting uphill battles against money and propaganda machines of the 1% and the reflexive stigma against them obediently observed by the media and by the well-trained masses.   But they are winning the old fashioned way: by reaching voters, as Bernie Sanders' strong primary challenge in the last election and continuing popularity, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's upset victory over Democratic stalwart Joe Crowley in New York have recently demonstrated.  Perhaps it's not a losing strategy to court Democratic voters with Democratic principles.

This is all great, but the problem for me, when you get right down to it, is that I am not a joiner.  Yet while I may not be suited for Socialism, there is an ideology that does fit me: Anti-socialism. The party of one-- not against Socialism, but against Affiliation with other people.  The appeal of this philosophy is immediately apparent (to me).  Self-funded.  No corporate money.  No conventions.  No nomination process.  No campaigns.

My platform (which passes because I am the only one voting on it) is to make the world the kind of place where I can basically be left alone to pursue my solitary pursuits with few interruptions.  It seems to me that given the state of constant disturbance I find myself in under the current regime, this calls for a different world; for the kind of world where people are happy, free to move to where they want or need to be, where they are taken care of when they need to be, where police don't protect and serve the people by shooting them unarmed, where there is a future to believe in, where ignorance is not celebrated, but instead deemed a challenge to be overcome by knowledge, where people quietly get along the world over and violators of the peace are dealt with justly.  Anti-socialism can and does exist in a world in which the worst human impulses of only the few who can afford to lord it are making life difficult for everyone else, but it does not thrive in such a world.  A world where no one is busy oppressing or exploiting others seems like the kind of world where an Anti-Socialist has the best chance of success.

So Anti-Socialism it is.  Because there is not now nor will there ever be a candidate affiliated as Anti-Socialist, I am free to vote for, to contribute to and even to work for candidates of any affiliation who advance my cause. Other parties' campaign strategists: take note.

~~~~~~~~~~
* And okay, some decent, well-meaning and sincere folks acting in what they hope are the best interests of the country and the planet.  I think they're misguided.

† This is not to say that there are no registered Democrats exhibiting even the most deplorable of the characteristics enumerated in the preceding paragraph; but I think it's fair to say that if your political agenda is deplorable (e.g., you want to build a border wall, you want to enshrine a gender test for marriage, or you want to require IDs for voting), then in 2018 you are probably not pursuing it with a great deal of success if you're a Democrat.

Midsummer Interpretive Dance Jam

The DJ will play some selections until the band arrives. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Jarina de Marco - STFU

Damian Draghici & Brothers - Inel, Inel de Aur (Ring, Ring of Gold)

Regina Spektor - Scarecrow and Fungus (warning: fan video contains moments of gratuitous creepiness, which should not deter you from availing yourself of it or its musical inspiration's singular charms.)

The Swingle Singers - Bach Fugue in D Minor (Contrapunctus No. 9 from 'The Art of the Fugue')

Confidence Man - Better Sit Down Boy

Deerhunter - Back to the Middle

Zsuzsa Varga - A lányok másra várnak (The girls wait for another)

Spiritual Sky - Écouter et Répéter

Parno Graszt - Rávágok A Zongorára (Hit the Piano) - danced by Varidance Dance Ensemble of Budapest

Cherry Glazerr - Told You I'd be with the Guys

Deee-lite - Heart Be Still (overlooked masterpiece)

The Meters - Cissy Strut

Anna Burch - Yeah You Know

Philip Glass - An Hour With Einstein  - Knee Play No. 3 from Einstein on the Beach

Menahan Street Band - Make the Road by Walking

Yana Kremneva - Shemakha Bayadère (The Temple Dancer from Şamaxı)

Moon Hooch - Ewi

The band arrives: Grup Subaylar (Roman Havası - Anatolian Romani Music) - Sedef Anakonda:

Step away from the keyboard

It seems to be a law that any YouTube video featuring anyone who was a star before 1980 will get a comment about how much better (cleaner, classier, sexier) things were back then.  Sometimes the sentiment is not even phrased as a comparative, as though somehow in the intervening years quality itself has been expunged from existence.  Singers were actually talented! Comedians were actually funny!  And they didn’t need 4 letter words to do it!  (Has anyone noticed whether it's the same person writing these every time?  I haven't been paying that close attention to it.  Let's assume for the sake of argument that it's not.)

It's kind of an odd statement to make; clearly an opinion, but stated as fact.  But it's probably framed as fact to conceal that it's an opinion, because, let's face it: it's the kind of opinion only an old person would have.  (Entertainment wasn't sexier, classier or cleaner back then; you were.)  It doesn't really follow from the proposition that Entertainer A is Good and Entertainer A is from the Past, that Therefore Everything from Today sucks.  I have been to the past.  Entertainer A is an anomaly, just as Entertainer Z who's a genius from today is an anomaly.  Everything since the dawn of time has mostly sucked.  Thank goodness for Entertainers A and Z and others who broke out of the mould of mold.

To anyone who feels compelled to express their love for an artist or piece of art from their youth by taking a dump on the making of entertainment today, may I suggest a different perspective?  Couldn't it be that both have something to offer; that quality may not be a zero-sum game and that therefore the relative goodness of one era of entertainment does not imply the general suckiness of the other.

For me a great part of the attraction of good entertainment from the past is its age.  There's no denying it.  Enjoying classic art is a way of seeing through those eyes again (or anew for those encountering it for the first time.)  It's good to break out of your current perspective from time to time-- perhaps especially when the perspective you get is of yourself from the outside.  If art is good, that's part of what it's doing regardless of when it was created.

Art from the past was "cleaner" because it was straitjacketed by codes, subject to censorship and in some cases illegal for it to be anything else.  Art today is not "cleansed" because it no longer must be in most forums.  Change is not always bad.

There's an implied question mark after the titles of these collections.

Monkey see Monkey do

America's influence is growing, as evidenced by this exchange between Hungary's Trump, Viktor Orbán and a reporter from the still independent and critical news site Index.hu:



Listen closely for Orbán's use of the English phrase "fake news" in his dismissal of the reporter.  America's Orbán, Trump would approve.

Klout Out

You're wasting time as usual, surfing online, reading an article here, following the thread of a comment war there, trying to pick a side in a controversy.  Sometimes it's easy but sometimes it's not entirely obvious if this asshole has a point or if that troll is the jackass you should be listening to.  Or perhaps you sense the tide turning in favor of someone you know to be an ass clown merely because he's dive bombed in on unsuspecting noobs with a killer burn.  How could they defend themselves against that when the context of the rest of his online persona is missing?  But what if he carried that context with him?  What if next to his stupid avatar was a number that told the story of his worthlessness?  What if you could rate people the way you can rate a dog grooming service?

Enter Klout, the online service and app introduced in 2008 that used social metrics and analytics to rate the influence of not just subscribers and members but potentially of anyone with an online presence -- including you-- or at least that was the assumed and aspired to trajectory of its founders Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran.  But Klout users' ratings of each other and of others was only part of the equation.  The rest of the recipe for a Klout score was inferred from metrics of users of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.  To what purpose would a commercial entity provide a framework for proffering unsolicited judgment of anyone and everyone other than to piss people off?  The founders and fans of it saw many uses, mostly benefiting commercial enterprises.   Some were so keen on the concept that they offered services and goods as enticement to people for participating in Klout.  Some human resources departments went as far as using Klout ratings in their hiring evaluations.   An app that crowdsources ratings of people whether they volunteer to be ranked or not -- and that does so for profit and without transparency about the algorithm?  What could go wrong?

As an example:

First there were some embarrassing missteps, like the time Klout Scores indicated Justin Bieber was more influential than the Dalai Lama and the president of the United States. (Klout’s response: Well, maybe he is.) Over time, the ridicule gave way to fretting and groaning—fear, for instance, that the same algorithm bestowing political and spiritual primacy upon Justin Bieber would be used to evaluate job candidates. At that point, pretty much anyone who didn’t have a three-album deal with Island Records was rooting for Klout’s failure.

Ten years after its start, those Klout skeptics got their wish.

Klout is an idea that its founders should have entertained for 5 minutes and then forgotten.

In their 2013 book Surfaces and Essences, Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander posit that analogy is not merely a feature of thought, but it is the whole of thought.  Human conversation is frequently a series of linked analogies, as person A's anecdote reminds person B of a moment from their own experience to and from which parallels can be drawn.  Problems are often (if not exclusively) solved by analogy with even remotely reminscent circumstances.   Think of Einstein's gedankenexperiments through which he was able to relate travel on a train to what happens at the speed of light.  The scale of the process can be cosmic or atomic.  Hofstadter and Sander argue that an individual bird for instance is analogous to the word or concept  of ‘bird.’  Imagine the ability to analogize as a module of the brain, something like the machine language upon which thought is built. Analogies are the manner by which a working model of the universe can be crammed into a single mind within the span of an individual's development.  As new experiences or objects are encountered, inferences are drawn based on similarities or differences to what has come before.   Some are deep but most may fly over the surface of ideas like a murmuration of birds over a field at dusk, flocking in one direction before changing momentum forces the flow back on itself in new emerging patterns.  In this way, thought need not entail herculean physiological feats of retrieval of specific bits of data from within unlimited biological reserves of knowledge, but rather a highly adaptive capacity for formulating meaningful connections from elements of cognition.

I like the idea.  I'm also fond of an exercise introduced by Hofstadter in talks about the book, namely to identify terms that are as densely packed with meaning as possible, as an illustration of how compact an analogy can be.  The example he gives is “supermarket checkout soap opera tabloid”.   To twenty first century Americans it may be readily thought of as an impulse purchase at the grocery store, but imagine explaining that to an early human.  To be fully understood the concept has to pass through the existence of large buildings stocked with food and goods that people collect what they need of in rolling baskets that at the end of their accumulation they must bring through stands stationed at the exits at which their selection is accounted for and for which credits are exchanged, and that at these stands are located additional goods such as readable materials painted onto the surface of folded pressed wood pulp and that some of these are collections of information about serialized spectacles of entertainment whose popularity is used as an opportunity for marketers to entice the followers of these spectacles to exchange monetary credits for soap. 

Related to this exercise is the concept of categories, which can be covered by a single word (such as "supermarket", "checkout", "soap", "opera" or "tabloid"), by a phrase ("soap opera", "supermarket checkout soap opera tabloid") or that may exist without words or phrases but merely as a string of ideas in one's head.  To exemplify this last group, consider these notions offered as illustration by Hofstadter and Sander:

People who were once household names but who’ve been largely forgotten, and about whom, when one reads they have just died, one thinks, “Oh, hadn’t so-and-so died long ago?”; things one could swipe from a friend’s house without feeling in the least guilty (e.g., a paper clip or a rubber band); the “cousin” category of things that one could borrow from a friend’s house without asking permission, intending to return them very soon (e.g., a pen or a pair of scissors); the last item in the bowl (e.g., the poor little cherry tomato that everybody is eyeing but that nobody dares to take); people who, when they take the train, always want to have a seat facing forward; items that are in themselves cheap but whose auxiliary items are devilishly expensive (printers, certain kinds of coffee machines, cell phones, razors with replaceable blades); one’s former romantic partners with whom one is still friends; people whom one might have married; the children one might have had with such potential mates; the clothes one wears when one is feeling thin; items in one’s house that have been passed down from generation to generation; dishes that taste better reheated than when originally fixed; friends whom one thinks of as family members; those very old friends with whom one no longer has the least thing in common; friends’ children whom one watched as they grew from babyhood, and who are now all grown up; once brand-new technologies that have been rendered obsolete by recent advances (e.g., floppy disks, photographic film, audio cassettes, tape recorders, fax machines, etc.); our great personal plans that have not yet been carried out; the things one almost never remembers to purchase when one goes to the grocery store (salt, flour, toothpaste, shaving cream, etc.); people who made a major career switch in mid-life; main courses that one can eat with one’s fingers without being frowned at (French fries, chicken drumsticks, slices of pizza); rich people who live in a very modest fashion; people who have the same first and last names as a celebrity; people whose last names are also common first names; occasions where someone says to you “I’ll be right back” and then takes ages…

 I find this concept of the "non-lexical" category a particularly potent and useful way to think about thought.  I've added a few of my own to the list.  A lot of them are musical: The great song buried on an otherwise unremarkable album;  the phenomenal original song by an amazing unknown singer songwriter that you stumble across just messing around on YouTube and can't get enough of for a while and then can't find again when you remember it years later; the song you really hate on first listen but on repeated listenings gets under your skin to the point where one day you suddenly realize that you get it and that you've fallen in love with it.  One of my favorites (because it applies to me) is the topic of this post: "At the mercy of inspiration".  We can't all be Shelleys swimming with thoughts of Ozymandias, or Burgesses brimming with Clockwork Oranges.  Most of us are lucky to be sometime Chapins with an occasional Cat in the Cradle.  The geniuses are just as at the mercy of inspiration as the rest of us-- do they get better inspirations or are they better at resisting the bad ones?

Moreover, sometimes the muses endow us with ideas that are too good to be true.  Klout was just such an idea.  Stamping everyone with the human counterpart to a Facebook like is such a high concept idea that it's not hard to understand how it could have excited its discoverers, but if you have to wonder whether something is morally acceptable, it's probably not.